by Philip Short
Mao's attitude, Barrett reported, was ‘recalcitrant in the extreme’, and several times he flew into a violent rage. ‘He kept shouting, over and over again, “We will not yield any further!”, “That bastard, Chiang!”, and “If [he] were here I would curse him to his face!” … Zhou Enlai backed up in calm, cold language everything that Chairman Mao said. I left the interview feeling I had talked in vain to two clever, ruthless and determined leaders who felt absolutely sure of the strength of their position.’
That was certainly the impression Mao's histrionics were intended to convey. But Barrett's conclusion did the communists too much credit. At the end of 1944, they had nearly 900,000 troops and controlled territory with a population of 90 million. Chiang Kai-shek had 1.5 million troops, and controlled 200 million people. The Guomindang's forces were ‘still formidable’, Mao warned a few months later, and the Red Army would underestimate them at its peril.153
Against this background, General Hurley's peace-making, hamhanded though it was, did Mao an enormous service. It locked Chiang into discussions which further legitimized the communist cause, and which he could not break off without antagonising both his American ally and all those Chinese who supported him on patriotic rather than political grounds.
US mediation also gave Mao an opportunity to finesse the communists’ image abroad by persuading the foreigners who flocked to Yan'an following the Dixie Mission's arrival that the CCP was a moderate party, made up essentially of agrarian reformers, communist in little more than name. That particular hare had been started by Stalin, who, ever since the beginning of the war, had been encouraging him to put ‘communism’ on the back-burner in order to maximise popular support for the united front against Japan.154 Now the Soviet leader told the US Ambassador, Averill Harriman, that Mao and his colleagues were good patriots but ‘margarine communists’, implying that they were not real Marxist-Leninists (a view which not only fitted well with his efforts to further a CCP–GMD peace accord, but also reflected real doubts about Mao's doctrinal orthodoxy).155 It was consonant, too, with Mao's ‘New Democracy’ platform, which stated that the CCP's immediate goal was not Soviet-style communism, but a mixed economy. After the Hurley exchanges, this ‘campaign of moderation’ went into high gear, and took on a strongly pro-American slant. Mao wondered aloud whether ‘it might be more appropriate to call ourselves a Democratic Party’, dropping the word ‘communist’ altogether. He opined that the United States was ‘the most suitable country’ to aid China's modernisation, and startled an American reporter by asking if he thought Sears Roebuck would like to extend its mail order business to China.156
All this was wholly disingenuous. But it made effective propaganda. By January 1945, the communists were making secret overtures to the State Department, proposing that Mao and Zhou visit Washington for talks with Roosevelt.157 Chiang's claim to be the only Chinese leader any self-respecting Western government could support suddenly began to look frayed. Mao allowed himself to hope that the United States might perhaps stay neutral in the communist-nationalist conflict which, following the failure of Hurley's mission, he was convinced must eventually resume.
A month later the Yalta summit muddied the waters again.VI
Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to treat Chiang's regime as a buffer, separating a US-dominated Pacific from a Soviet-dominated North East Asia. Russia would recover the Kurile islands and southern Sakhalin. The United States and Britain acknowledged that Russia had special though not exclusive privileges in Manchuria, and promised not to oppose the ‘independence’ of Outer Mongolia, which would make that country, over which China still claimed sovereignty, to all intents and purposes a Soviet satellite. In return, Stalin undertook to declare war on Japan within ninety days of the end of hostilities in Europe, and not to support the CCP against the nationalist government.
Having settled the future shape of Asia to their mutual satisfaction, Washington and Moscow began pressing their respective Chinese clients to accept some form of coalition government.158
Mao apeared to acquiesce, setting out a comprehensive strategy for an alternative, peaceful route to power in his report to the Seventh Congress. But his scepticism was all too apparent. In a whimsical, off-the-cuff speech to delegates later the same day, he likened Chiang – whom he described as a ‘hooligan’ – to a man with a dirty face. ‘Our policy has been and still is’, he declared, ‘to invite him to wash his face [in other words, to reform] and not to cut off his head … [But] the older one gets, the less willing and likely one is to change one's ways. [So] we say, “if you wash, we can marry, for we still love each other dearly” … But we must keep up our defences. When attacked … we must resolutely, quickly, thoroughly and completely eliminate the enemy.’159
To that end, the Congress called for the expansion of the Red Army to one million men; preparations for urban insurrections; and increased emphasis on mobile warfare, rather than guerrilla tactics. In coded cables to the military commanders, Mao warned that renewed civil war was inevitable. They must use the time remaining to make the necessary dispositions.160
As far as it went, this made sense. But Mao, like Chiang Kai-shek, unaware that America would use the atom bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had misjudged the speed of the Japanese collapse. Well into the summer of 1945, he continued to believe that Japan's defeat was at least a year away. The plan to switch from guerrilla to conventional warfare was too little, too late.
Much worse was to follow.
On August 9, the Soviet army, as Stalin had promised, invaded Manchuria (the Soviet leader having brought things forward lest Japan surrender too quickly and Russia no longer have a reason to declare war). At Yan'an the news was received rapturously. The following day, Zhu De told communist troops to start accepting the surrender of Japanese units. However, Chiang then issued a counter-order to Japanese commanders to surrender only to nationalist forces. Mao cabled Stalin for support. Four days later the Soviet leader dropped his bombshell. On August 14 in Moscow, only hours before Japan's capitulation, Chiang's Foreign Minister, Wang Shijie, and Vyacheslav Molotov signed a treaty of friendship and alliance. Chiang had been forced to accept the concessions on Manchuria and Outer Mongolia which Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed in his absence at Yalta. In return, the Soviet Union affirmed Chinese sovereignty in the north-east and in Xinjiang; promised that areas liberated by Soviet troops would be handed over to nationalist, not communist, forces; and, most important of all, recognised the nationalists’ claim to be China's sole legitimate national government.161
The same day Chiang Kai-shek sent a telegram to Mao, inviting him to ‘honour [us] with your presence for mutual discussions’ following ‘the surrender of the [Japanese] dwarf pirates’.162 When the CCP Central Committee set conditions which it knew Chiang would not accept, Stalin intervened again, impressing on Mao, in telegrams on August 20 and 22 that a civil war at this stage would be disastrous.VII The Russians, he said, could do nothing to help their Chinese comrades because their hands were tied by their treaty obligations (which, he added, they had to honour lest the related parts of the Yalta agreement, dealing with Outer Mongolia, Sakhalin and the Kuriles, also be called into question). Negotiation was therefore the only possible course.163
To Mao, it was a repetition of Stalin's perfidy in 1936, when he had demanded that the Chinese communists obtain a peaceful resolution of the Xian Incident, and of the pressure the Russians had exerted to preserve the united front after the South Anhui incident. But this time it was even more flagrant. The Soviet leader had sold the CCP down the river for Russia's national interests without even bothering to pretend that there was any larger justification.164 Mao had known that the Russians and the GMD were talking since June. But he had been kept in the dark about the understanding Stalin had reached at Yalta. Now, finally, it all became clear: if civil war did break out, the CCP would be on its own.
Communist policy changed overnight. All criticism of the Guomindang, and of the United States, stopp
ed. Plans for urban insurrections were put on hold. Red Army units were told to co-operate with US forces in China in disarming Japanese formations. On August 28, Mao set out for Chongqing aboard a US air force plane, accompanied by General Hurley, for peace negotiations, leaving Liu Shaoqi in charge of the Party in his absence. Pyotr Vlasov, the Comintern agent who had replaced Otto Braun and had stayed on in Yan'an after the organisation's dissolution, said afterwards that Mao looked like a man going to his own crucifixion.165
He was in an unenviable position. Chiang's relations with the United States had improved markedly over the previous nine months. Roosevelt had died, to be succeeded by Harry Truman, and the nationalists now enjoyed the Soviet Union's benevolent neutrality. As long as the talks lasted, the GMD armies, with American support, could move to repossess Japanese-held areas while the Red Army was kept at arm's length. If they broke down, Chiang could blame communist intransigence and opt for a military solution.
The balance of forces was not entirely one-sided. By agreeing, under American pressure, to negotiate face to face, Chiang had been forced to concede, as Mao put it, ‘a pattern of equality’ between the two parties, which the communists saw as a significant gain. The two men had last met in Canton, when Mao had headed the GMD's Peasant Training Institute, nineteen years before. Nothing had happened since to facilitate a meeting of minds. Their personalities were utterly different: contemporary photographs showed Mao in a baggy blue suit with a round Sun Yat-sen collar and an incongruous, light-grey pith helmet over his long, unkempt hair, while Generalissimo Chiang, immaculately groomed, wore a crisply pressed military uniform.166 Their politics were diametrically opposed. And, for good measure, they detested each other. Mao, Chiang fumed, was a traitor: if such people went unpunished, no one would obey the government.167
During the six weeks the talks lasted, the two men met four times; approved a memorandum of understanding, in which they both promised ‘resolutely to avoid civil war’; and Chiang undertook to convene an all-party Political Consultative Conference to discuss a new constitution. Wider agreement was blocked, as in earlier negotiations, by Chiang's insistence, and Mao's refusal, that the CCP place its army and the local governments it led under GMD control as a precondition to an overall settlement.168
Meanwhile the international context was changing yet again.
In August, when the Chongqing talks began, the US and the Soviet Union were both officially committed to non-intervention in Chinese affairs. By October, when they ended, their relations were fraying. Fifty thousand US marines had started landing on the North China coast, ostensibly to help disarm the Japanese but actually to occupy Beijing, Tianjin and other major cities on the Guomindang's behalf, in order to forestall a Russian move south; while Soviet troops were discreetly conniving in a Chinese communist take-over of Manchuria. Eight months after Yalta, the idea of a neutral China, buffering Soviet and US ambitions, had begun to lose its meaning. The Cold War, conceived in Europe, was rapidly spreading east.
Manchuria became the flashpoint of these new rivalries.
On November 14, nationalist troops, transported to the north by US warships, attacked communist units defending Shanhaiguan, the strategic chokepoint at the end of the Great Wall which controls the main land-route north. Six days later, Lin Biao reported that the town was lost and could not be recaptured. The situation was back where it had been in the summer. Both sides were moving inexorably towards full-scale civil war.
Stalin blew hot and cold. On the one hand, he had serious doubts about the Chinese communists’ ability to defeat Chiang militarily (just as Truman, in an eerie symmetry, believed that Chiang could not defeat the communists). On the other, they gave him leverage against the nationalist regime. In October he had authorised his commanders to provide Lin's troops with Japanese weapons and limited Soviet supplies. But the following month, concerned that tensions with the Americans were getting out of hand, he ordered them to tell the Chinese communists to withdraw from all major cities and communications routes within a week and regroup in the rural areas. ‘If you do not leave,’ one Soviet general warned the north China leader, Peng Zhen, ‘we will use tanks to drive you out.’ Communist sappers, who were sabotaging the railway lines to slow the nationalist advance, were told to desist or be forcibly disarmed. Peng, normally the most unemotional of men, exploded: ‘The army of one Communist Party using tanks to drive out the army of another! Things like this have never happened before.’ Yet there was nothing the Chinese Party could do about it. As in August, they had to acquiesce.
Mao played little part in these events. His neurasthenia was back.169
For the first time since 1924, when he had retreated in despair to Shaoshan, Mao's political touch had deserted him. He could not see how to go forward.
Having that summer achieved total power and almost godlike status in a Party which was freer than ever of Soviet control, he suddenly found that he was, after all, impotent – bound hand and foot by the overriding interests of the Great Powers. Stalin's treaty with Chiang in August had prevented him from launching the full-scale civil war, for which, psychologically, he had been preparing, and it had left him politically naked, to face the Generalissimo in Chongqing. The communist leaders were condemned to watch helplessly as Chiang tightened his grip on larger and larger areas of China and the combined pressure of Moscow and Washington prevented them from doing anything effective to stop him. In the summer of 1945, the nationalists had controlled less than 15 per cent of China's territory. A year later they had almost 80 per cent.170
While Mao languished in the grip of depression, Liu Shaoqi continued to stand in for him as acting head of the Central Committee. Visitors were told he was suffering from exhaustion.171 ‘All through November,’ his interpreter, Shi Zhe, remembered, ‘we saw him, day after day, prostrate on his bed, his body trembling. His hands and legs twitched convulsively, and he was bathed in a cold sweat … He asked us for cold towels to put on his forehead, but it didn't help. The doctors could do nothing.’172
In the end, it was President Truman who got Mao out of his black hole.
Anxieties had been growing in the US Congress over the spectacle of American marines being sucked into a foreign civil war. On November 27, Hurley resigned in a huff after a Congressional resolution urged a US withdrawal. Truman made clear he had no intention of allowing US troops to fight on the nationalist side and announced the appointment of General George C. Marshall, the architect of the lend-lease programme for Europe, to take Hurley's place. The new policy Marshall was to follow had two cardinal objectives: a truce between the nationalists and the communists, leading to a political settlement; and getting the Russians out of Manchuria.173
When the news reached Yan'an, Mao saw for the first time in months a glimmer of hope. If the Americans wanted peace in China, they would have to pressure Chiang into halting his offensive against communist positions.174
Marshall arrived in Chongqing on December 21. Within ten days, he had persuaded both sides to table truce proposals. Zhou Enlai, on Mao's instructions, accepted the nationalists’ principal condition: freedom of movement for government troops to take over Soviet-held areas in Manchuria and to disarm Japanese forces in the south. On January 10, 1946, a ceasefire was signed, which took effect three days later. Meanwhile, in a further gesture to Marshall, Chiang Kai-shek summoned the Political Consultative Conference (PCC), which he had agreed to set up the previous October but had not yet permitted to meet. He intended it as a fig-leaf, to give the government an aura of democratic legitimacy. Instead, an unlikely coalition of communists, third-party figures and GMD moderates took matters out of Chiang's hands, and, building on the momentum generated by the ceasefire accord, approved resolutions calling for, among other things, an elected national assembly and communist participation in a coalition government, in which the GMD would not be permitted to hold more than half of the ministerial posts.175
Mao was ecstatic. His instincts about the Marshall mission had turne
d out to be correct. The pendulum had swung back from war to political struggle. ‘Our Party will soon join the government,’ he proclaimed, in a directive at the beginning of February 1946. ‘Generally speaking’, the armed struggle was over. The major task now, Mao asserted, was to overcome closed-doorism, which led ‘some comrades’ to doubt that ‘a new era of peace and democracy has arrived’.176
That night, he gave a banquet for a visiting American journalist, John Roderick of the Associated Press, the first foreign reporter he had seen for several months. It was a festive occasion, and Mao was full of praise for Truman, whose initiative, he said, had made a major contribution to Chinese–American friendship. Roderick was struck by the way he dominated his surroundings, carrying himself with ‘an air of self-confidence and authority just short of arrogance’. He was the kind of man, Roderick thought, who would stand out in a crowded room anywhere, exuding an aura of leadership like that ‘which must have emanated from men like Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Lenin’.177
Sadly for this heroic image, the closed-doorists proved correct. Chiang Kai-shek was not ready to carry out the PCC resolutions, and the United States was not ready to force him to do so. Mao had made a massive misjudgement.
For a few weeks more, the impetus Marshall had created kept the negotiations moving forward. In late February, the two sides astonished themselves by reaching agreement on the integration of communist forces into a new, non-partisan national army – an issue which, even at the height of the wartime united front, had proved intractable.178
