| After the the Anti-Japanese War drew to the end in August 1945, the KMT and CCP forces launched several military conflicts to capture the the Japanese occupied area in the northern part of Jiangsu(also known as Subei). On January 10,1946, the KMT and the CPC signed a truce whose actual effect remained futile to end the the military conflicts in northern Jiangsu. After the spring of 1947, the National Government reoccupied northern Jiangsu, thus the chaos came to a temporary close. The civil war forced hundreds of millions of people to flee their homes as refugees in northern Jiangsu. In order to fight for the control of the northern Jiangsu, KMT and CCP adopted different policies about the issue of Subei refugees, and the refugees also endeavored to make use of these policies for relief and home-returning. In this case, Subei refugees, KMT and CCP had formed a trilateral and interactive mode of relationship.Based on the civil war and guided by a chronological line, this article aims to reveal the fate of Subei refugees from September 1945 to the spring of 1947 and analyzes the gain and loss of both the KMT and CCP parties in solving the problems of Subei refugees, hence achiving a rational reflection on the civil war. This article is divided into five chapters:Chapter One analyzes the causes of the Subei refugee problem from three aspects: military conflicts, the famine and political movements. Military conflicts between KMT and CCP forces caused great casualties and property losses in northern Jiangsu, and a lot of people fled their homes to escape the warfares. Furthermore, the disastrous famine occurred in the northern Jiangsu in the spring of 1946 worsened the the living conditions of the people, causing more refugees to join the fleeing crowds. Meanwhile, in leading the anti-traitor action and land reform in liberated areas of northern Jiangsu, the Communist Party leadership was influenced by a "Left" deviation. With more and more people turning into the target for struggle, a large amount of victims became refugees.Chapter Two starts with a demographic angle and categorizes Subei refugees into different groups, considering the aspects as the distribution and the number of the refugees, age and gender, and occupation and education level. Influenced by ideological discourse, Chinese scholars in the past tended to classify Subei refugees generally as "traitors", "landlords" and "bullies". In fact, the refugee group was not formed by a single component part. Though among the refugees illegal recruiters did exist, ordinary peasants, intellectuals, young students, artisans and other small groups still accounted for the vast majority. It can be stated that Subei refugee groups were featured by a large number, the wide distribution, the large span of class and age and dire conditions. Such features reflect the brutality of the civil war and its profound impact on ordinary people.Chapter Three mainly discusses the relief policies adopted by the National Government, whose efforts concentrated on negative relief while provided positive relief as subsidiary policies. Negative relief included improving refugee shelters, organizing relief services to offer food and clothing, providing medical services and health care, salvaging youth groups, repatriating refugees to return home, etc. Positive relief included granting small loans, organizing work-relief, and promoting employment of the refugees. However, due to the lack of relevant and appropriate institutional and regulatory measures, various problems blocked the way for relief work, among which corruption was the most staggering factor. These problems had, to some extent, weakened the effect of the relief work. In addition, though Subei refugees were directly caused by the civil war, the National Government still insisted its idea of "combining relief work with the war" and ignored to eliminate the source of the problem. With the outbreak of civil war, once again the refugees in northern Jiangsu were pushed into the abyss of war, and the previous efforts of relief work. quickly vanished.Chapter Four introduces the home-returning process of the Subei refugees, and further argues on the policies and practices from both the KMT and CCP. In order to achieve their purpose, Subei refugees and the National Government jointly launched a campaign to return home. With the support from the National Government, Subei refugees on one hand continued to whip up public opinions to criticize the policies of Chinese Communist Party in the liberated areas, on the other hand they formed home-returning corps to actively cooperate with the National Government to counterattack northern Jiangsu. Facing the passive situation, the CPC had amended the previous struggle policy, warned the refugees to evade being taken advantage of by the National Government, and appealed to them to return home in a peaceful way. After the corps returned to northern Jiangsu, the National Government took the stance of acquiescence or even connivance, which intensified the social disorder in Subei areas. In this case, Subei people gradually lost confidence in the National Government, and their centrifugal tendency increasingly appeared.Chapter Five concludes the whole article. By tracing back to the the fate of Subei refugees in the history, the writer intends to achieve the conclusion that the policies adopted by the National Goverment in dealing with Subei refugees turn to be an overall failure. Subjectively the National Government did not want to help Subei refugees to get rid of their dire situation, but attempted to use these people to achieve the purpose of counter-offensive in northern Jiangsu. After the gorvenment helped the refugees to return home, it made no efforts to establish a new order in the local area, but acted with the acquiescent stance and turned a blind eye to the local social chaos. As a corollary, the National Government gradually lost the support of the people in Subei area. And this historical process is likely to become an epitome of the failure of the National Government in the civil war. |
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