The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  Aides partook of a similarly ecumenical social scene. Nationalist circles were most congenial, full of English speakers in Western suits. But booze was most abundant at Russian parties—local beer, Argentine gin, Ukrainian brandy. Communist gatherings meant repeated toasts of baijiu, a potent grain alcohol. Americans continued to wonder at the fraternizing between enemies. At one party, “right-wing KMT who had always thought of the Communists as something from a nightmare suddenly met and some found they were related, others had gone to school together.” At another, Communist officers jocularly pinned down a Nationalist official and forced liquor on him.

  Still, intrigue was never far from the surface. Chongqing remained “a city of rumors,” a playground for merchants of information and disinformation, for agents and double agents. Marshall was warned of a “lack of secrecy in all discussions,” and officials were on the lookout for frauds, worrying that, say, a Communist contact was actually a Nationalist stooge. Servants used false names, some for Americans’ ease (Wong was popular), some for murkier reasons. “We have to assume all our Chinese employees report to someone else,” Melby cautioned. Jeeps left on the street sometimes disappeared. So did a bundle of Marshall’s clothes, allegedly taken by a “houseboy.” When Americans toasted with baijiu at CCP parties, they did not know that, beneath them, secret tunnels ran to the river, used to spirit agents in and out. Zhou himself was as adept at espionage as diplomacy. With long experience creating covert cells, he had planted scores of moles in the upper ranks of the Nationalist government and military. At one point, he had even gotten hold of Chiang’s codebook.

  Marshall also knew this game well. As army chief of staff, he had been among the few Americans aware of the complete penetration of German and Japanese communications during the war. After a few weeks in Chongqing, he realized he needed to step up intelligence efforts there as well. He asked Eisenhower for military surveillance of key locations, including Yenan and Beijing. He requested more, and more immediate, global intelligence, including “Top Secret code reports” on “world matters as they affect China, Manchuria in particular.” A cryptographer was sent and quickly cracked Nationalist codes, providing access to high-level messages. The Communists proved more challenging.

  Marshall was as focused on protecting his own communications as he was on penetrating those of others. The cryptographer brought a SIGABA cipher machine, and its encrypted messages went through War Department channels to Marshall’s personal representative in Washington, who delivered hard copies to the president and secretary of state. Marshall appended frequent reminders to destroy after reading. “The security of this must be guarded with every precaution,” he prodded. “There must be no slip.” The State Department was infamously indiscreet, and even the White House was as secure, said Dean Acheson, “as a sieve”; at a certain point, Truman’s chief of staff, William Leahy, was denied access to Marshall’s messages.

  Marshall drilled discretion into aides—no gossip, no chatter, nothing of the “tactlessness” and “outrageous talking” that were, in his eyes, Stilwell’s great sin. When an underling sent a dispatch to the State Department without clearing it, Marshall delivered a reprimand. “I am carefully refraining from giving Washington such details to avoid destructive leaks in the press,” he snapped. “Your channel is to me direct and probably for my eyes only.” When a State Department spokesman issued an unwisely expansive statement, Marshall sent a note demanding that nothing at all be said about China without his explicit approval. He even decreed that no updates on his mission appear in intelligence reports, given the “frequent leaks and the disastrous effect they might have here on the delicate business in which I am engaged.” He began holding off-the-record sessions for a few trusted reporters, mostly to check rumors; anyone who broke the ground rules was never invited back.

  “He tells nobody nothing as to what goes on in his mind,” said Melby, after Marshall had been in China for weeks, and it remained “baffling” to many. But after watching closely, Melby was starting to see the point: “Marshall seems to have them all bluffed.”

  “Now the ancient battle of words can get started on the political questions. This one can go on forever.”

  It was Melby’s line, but also Washington’s rough plan. Truman had directed Marshall “to persuade the Chinese Government to call a national conference of representatives of the major political elements to bring about the unification of China.” There was already agreement about this Political Consultative Conference in principle, but only after Marshall’s arrival was a date for it set. On January 10, after announcing the truce before PCC representatives, Chiang went on to speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, of ratifying political parties and releasing political prisoners. “If we remember those few essentials, our country will be on the road to democratic reconstruction,” he proclaimed. Zhou followed with a pledge to “acknowledge Chiang’s leadership.” And with that, the thirty-eight members of the PCC were off, “going full blast using all the epithets in everyone’s vocabulary,” in Melby’s description, to shape the coming Chinese democracy.

  The discourse thrilled Washington, even if China was by most measures more failing state than rising democratic power. A century of internal rebellion, imperial aggression, and social breakdown had brought heightened landlord exploitation and warlord domination in much of the country. Japanese invasion had left behind starvation and disease, driven inflation into triple digits, and destroyed more than 90 percent of the railways. Perhaps one-fifth of the population could read. Three-quarters worked in the fields. Life expectancy for males was under 40.

  Then there was the question of whether Chiang and his party were plausible champions, capable of leading China out of devastation and onto that “road of democratic reconstruction.” The familiarity of much of the Nationalist elite made it easy for Westerners to assume they were. Missionaries regarded the Bible-quoting Chiangs and concluded, “We can thank God that these two and other Christians in the Chinese Government cast in their lot with the free nations and have so turned the scales for democracy and Christian liberty.” Life reasoned that Chiang, given his martial ways, must be more of an Old Testament Christian.

  Other Americans took their faith from figures like T. V. Soong. Chiang’s chief economic policymaker, sometime premier and foreign minister, and brother-in-law, Soong had not just a degree from Harvard, but also a background in New York banking, and three American-educated daughters, Laurette, Mary-Jane, and Katherine. (“Foreigner,” some Nationalists spat.) With slick hair, horn-rimmed glasses, tailored suits, and an imperious strut, he was called China’s J. P. Morgan. “I have never associated with a group of foreigners whose speech and thought seemed so much like those of a similar group at home,” a prominent New York lawyer, Paul Cravath, said after a visit. When Teddy White, a young Time reporter, organized a Harvard Club of China, he joked that half the government could join.

  As ever, ample cause for disenchantment lay just below the surface. Chiang’s power rested on a balance of factions, some made up of Western-trained liberals or high-minded Confucians, many of a different cast. The brothers Chen Li-fu and Chen Kuo-fu, namesakes of the conservative CC Clique, were said to have a “a monopoly of one of the Generalissimo’s ears” and to promote “a kind of Chinese fascism.” Nationalist “blue shirts” modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Blackshirts. The secret police was run by a man known as “the Himmler of China,” gold-toothed Tai Li, whom Chiang would reportedly “receive at any time, any place.” Wedemeyer decried Tai’s brutality, and Melby charged, hyperbolically, that Tai’s “Chinese Gestapo behaves in a way and with methods that would make the Nazis look like schoolboys.” Such figures pervaded Chiang’s party, and the party controlled the government and military.

  More prosaic shortcomings were also damning. Chiang’s ranks, Wedemeyer lamented, included “literally thousands of incompetents who are parasites living off an impoverished country.” Quotidian corruption, “squeeze,” was a staple of
life, but Nationalist officials presented flagrant examples. The head of Chiang’s military council, a U.S. embassy report detailed, had one son who was a major opium producer, another who ran a network of brothels, and a third who operated gambling halls. (A fourth was in school in the United States.) Stories of Soong family chicanery were legion. In rural areas, Chiang’s power depended on landowners, some of whom were prone to such practices as seizing crops, animals, or daughters when rent went unpaid. “One is faced with the hard fact of a central government which is a coalition of landlords and militarists with tremendous vested interests in the status quo,” said an embassy analysis.

  The Nationalists were once “the flaming revolutionaries of the Orient,” Melby reflected. “Now they are sleek, polished, well-fed, worldly, cynical, reactionary.” It was, in his view, “the saddest and most depressing thing in Chongqing.”

  Chiang could see it too. He condemned his party as “weak and rotten,” obsessed with “ease and pleasure,” regarded with “hatred and repugnance.” He attributed Communist success to “the inefficiency and corruption of our government machine.” He warned of the implications: “If we do not weed the present body of corruption, bribery, perfunctoriness, and ignorance, and establish instead a clean and efficient administration, the day will soon come when the revolution will be started against us.”

  That warning was in 1936. Chiang could see the decay but not reverse it. If his power rested on a balance, he upset it at his own risk. “The most astute politician of the twentieth century,” Stilwell called him, in something like a compliment. “He must be or he wouldn’t be alive.” Chiang sidelined effective generals or governors who grew too strong, and protected venal or incompetent ones. He made deals with warlords. He tolerated conspicuous corruption, though few observers thought him personally corrupt—his love of power, one said, did not extend to its trappings. He ignored abuses by supportive landlords, despite recognizing the need for land reform as “the most fundamental problem of China.” He prized loyalty, trusted few, stayed always suspicious. Before World War II, an envoy from Nazi Germany had registered Chiang’s interest in “how our party leadership succeeds to maintain such strict discipline among its followers and takes harsh measures against dissidents or opponents.”

  Wedemeyer, a defender, wrote an assessment before Marshall’s arrival. Although he judged Chiang’s commitment to unity and democratization “sincere,” his finding was bleak: “Considering his background, training and experience as warlord, politician and his oriental philosophy, his approach to problems presented would probably be inefficient, incomprehensible and unethical by American standards.” Anyway, Wedemeyer added, “The task is beyond the capabilities of one man.”

  A political solution, the hope went, would help correct or offset those shortcomings. During the war, some American officials—not just Stilwell—had wanted to “pull the plug and let the whole Chinese government go down the drain.” But the United States was not then in the habit of engineering the overthrow of difficult partners. So the challenge was to make Chiang the figure Washington thought he must be in order to survive. To that end, democracy might be tonic; some healthy political competition might check his and his party’s worst tendencies. After all, Chiang himself had blamed Nationalist failure for Communist success. Bringing the CCP into a coalition and then “moving ahead with American support in the job of rehabilitation and reconstruction,” reasoned the State Department’s John Carter Vincent, would “cut the ground from under the Communists, even though they were in the Government.”

  Vincent and others thought Chiang could prevail in a long-term political contest. “If the Nationalist Party showed as much zeal for bringing good government to China as it was showing for eliminating opposition,” Vincent argued, “there would be no question that it could ‘out-compete’ the Communists in gaining the support of the Chinese people.” But when Melby talked to CCP contacts, he was struck by their assurance. “The Communists of course prefer political war to military since they are quite confident they can win that in time, and I think rightly so,” he wrote.

  In Melby’s view, other American diplomats were struggling to face reality: “So far they only admit who loses, but do not commit themselves as to who wins.”

  Marshall was hardly immune to the great American faith in the curative power of his country’s form of government and persuasive power of his country’s example. He sometimes preached in meetings about “the fundamental requirements of democracy”—“free speech and freedom of peaceable assembly and a governmental structure that permits a genuine will of the people to be given effect.” He held forth on the value of a political opposition and unruly press, “the most powerful thing in the world.” He not only quoted Benjamin Franklin’s speeches—his demand for reading material had turned up a volume printed for American troops—he also had them translated into Chinese for distribution. He reflected on the power of nationalism and self-determination, “the awakening of backward and colonial peoples.”

  As political negotiations got under way, Marshall did not see much he could do to help. He confessed he was “completely confused by the debates” in the Political Consultative Conference. Still, he had been pestering aides for facts and background and political analysis, mapping the lay of an unfamiliar land. “Marshall needs help that he did not need before,” Melby grumbled, which meant “a hell of a lot of scrounging around in odd corners for information and too many Chinese meals which my still aching guts can ill afford.”

  On January 22, the day the PCC was set to unveil an agreement, Marshall went to see Chiang. The talks, it turned out, were stuck, and Chiang wanted help bringing the Communists around. After nearly two weeks of holding back, Marshall was prepared for much more. Anticipating an impasse, watching from afar and seeing rhapsodic speechmaking but few real proposals, he had been working on his own. He handed Chiang a draft bill of rights, a procedure for devising a constitution, and a plan for an interim coalition government—a rough design for Chinese democracy.

  “Even the Communists would never dare to make this proposal,” Chiang raged in his diary that night. “He is too tolerant of the Communists, and very ignorant of my state affairs.”

  The following afternoon, pale sunshine had cleared the fog, and Marshall returned to hear Chiang’s response. The Communists, Chiang argued, would take advantage of any opening. But to Marshall, fears of Communist malevolence only strengthened the case for moving quickly toward democratic unity—especially since the United States, he noted pointedly, could not keep 100,000 troops in China forever.

  As for the bill of rights, it was “a dose of American medicine.” Marshall thought Chiang found the line amusing. In fact, Chiang was fuming. The “tragedy of the Stilwell era,” he feared, was happening all over again.

  Chiang nonetheless took some of Marshall’s democratic ideas, repackaged them to conceal their origin, and introduced them into the ongoing PCC debates. He implored Marshall to keep this secret, and Marshall understood why—“to preserve ‘face.’ ” When informing Truman, the message stamped EYES ONLY, Marshall nagged yet again, “Please destroy the record of this radio, for a leak in the press would be disastrous to my mission.” (Truman evidently did not comply.)

  “I interfered with a meat ax,” Marshall would joke in private. The interference seemed warranted, however, because so much else depended on political unification. “You may state, in connection with the Chinese desire for credits, technical assistance in the economic field, and military assistance,” Truman had instructed, “that a China disunited and torn by civil strife could not be considered realistically as a proper place for American assistance along the lines enumerated.” Marshall had expedited some aid since coming—railroad supplies, transport ships, ammunition—but the promise of a large-scale package was held in reserve as an incentive for both sides to cooperate. Even Mao had told his comrades that China needed a “huge amount of capital” and that the United States was the only country that could prov
ide it.

  For Chiang there was also the promise of long-term military support. In the five months since Japan’s surrender, U.S. aid had continued flowing to his armies under the auspices of unfulfilled Lend-Lease commitments—more than half a billion dollars’ worth, on top of the benefits of American troops guarding ports and mines and railways. But Lend-Lease could not continue indefinitely (China already had a special extension). Nor could a large-scale troop presence. Marshall wanted to start laying the groundwork for sustainable military assistance sooner rather than later.

  In the midst of political negotiations, he made a quick visit to Shanghai to sketch out the future U.S. military role with Wedemeyer. The bulk of American troops were likely to go home in the spring. But Marshall was considering holding some Marines back to keep peace in trouble spots. He would also need officers to staff the Executive Headquarters, pilots and engineers to build China’s air force, and several hundred personnel for a new Military Advisory Group.

  Shanghai offered a change in atmosphere after Marshall’s month in the interior. While Americans in Chongqing complained about the weather and smells and court politics, life in Shanghai was good for officers, enlisted men, and diplomats alike. The highbrow had Stravinsky at the Lyceum or the “Moonlight Sonata” at La Ballet Russe; the high-living, every strain of debauchery and vice. “One part is slick with too much money, elegance, and callousness,” Melby wrote. “Another side is sordid with horrible slums, starvation, corruption, opium, and more streetwalkers than I have ever seen anywhere.” Or in Hart Caughey’s words: “Shanghai is treacherously Westernized and it is wicked.”

  One Sunday afternoon in late January, Caughey was panicked. He had been preparing for the arrival of a distinguished visitor on January 28. But it was January 27, and a call had come through: Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, had landed at the airfield outside Chongqing, and no one was there to meet him. Caughey needed to intercept Harriman and get him to Chiang’s country estate. He jumped in a jeep and raced along roads slick with mud.