The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  Truce teams were operating in remote, rugged places—Americans said that going from urban to rural China was like going a thousand years back in time—and Marshall could see it was “a rough and thankless business.” Food supplies were uncertain, clean water scarce, illness frequent, support minimal. (Marshall chided Byroade, now head of operations, for not taking good enough care of men in the field.) Communications back to headquarters were fitful at best; even getting messages from Chongqing to Beijing could be a struggle. Each team carried a letter: “From evaluation of reports carefully considered by this Headquarters, it appears that the forces of your command are carrying on offensive action. You are specifically directed to cease action and movements.” But there were intransigent and hostile commanders on both sides, along with warlords, bandits, and puppet armies of indeterminate loyalty. “When I went into the lines,” an American colonel recounted, “I looked down the Nationalist rifle barrels, and when I came back, I looked at the Communist rifle barrels.”

  Marshall took an almost paternal pride in the work of the trios—“an amazing task,” he glowed, “a great service for China and for American prestige.” He noted to Washington that each American “with communications almost nonexistent will have to dominate a region larger than Pennsylvania and bring factions who have been at war for 18 years to a peaceful understanding.” One officer stoutly assured him, “The biggest problem we have got here is how to break down the feeling of distrust that has existed in the past between the Communists and the Nationalists. And, General, we can do it.”

  Traversing North China, the Committee of Three became well acquainted with the difficulties. (Zhou had suggested continuing into Manchuria, but Marshall demurred, worrying it would give Moscow “a new opportunity for conjecture and possible propaganda lines.”) There were commanders who had heard nothing from their leaders in months and knew little of the agreements struck in Chongqing. There were florid accounts of blockades and sabotage. “The team meets, holds its temper, and talks amicably, but is unable to take action,” one American officer said.

  The Committee attacked each problem directly. Marshall lectured inflamed local commanders about “the much larger issues at stake.” Zhou and Chang reprimanded unruly underlings. They invariably departed with promises of harmony ringing in their ears. “If reiteration after reiteration of intention to cooperate in every way means anything,” Marshall concluded, “I think we are on the way to immediate clearing up of conditions through North China.”

  Four days into the journey, after a turbulent flight over desolate terrain, there was a stop so contentious that even the Committee of Three lost its cool. The CCP member of the truce team deployed there had gone missing for twelve days; his partners were paralyzed under the consensus-based rules of operation, while Communist forces toppled telegraph lines, ripped up track, and kept the city under virtual siege. Chang said he needed “4 glasses of water to quell my temper.” He and Zhou argued heatedly. Marshall, however, kept pressing. They skipped dinner. They stayed overnight. And in the morning, after more discussion, they settled on a solution. “Marshall made best speech of the trip!” Gillem wrote in his diary. “Outlined plan and told them they had better perform—or else!”

  That afternoon, the C-54 took off for Yenan, cradle of revolution.

  In Yenan, the Communists were ready. They had been preparing, intent on making the right impression. The band had been rehearsing, the honor guard drilling. A work team had built a bridge across the icy Yen River for easy travel between party headquarters and the Dixie Mission. A women’s group had stitched a five-star flag.

  The Americans posted to Yenan were equally intent on a successful visit, and they knew what Marshall wanted. “He likes things to click,” said Ivan Yeaton, the Dixie Mission’s commanding officer, “and nobody can make a Chinaman go fast on his own.” He urged the Communists to create a “war room,” with maps on the walls, so Marshall would take them seriously. The Americans even helped build it.

  “Things locally have reached an all-time high, due of course to the masterful manner in which General Marshall has handled the situation to date,” Yeaton had reported. The Communists drew a distinction between American imperialists and American progressives; Marshall, many believed, was a progressive. Zhou compared him to Stilwell.

  Yeaton mentioned one particularly good sign of local spirits: the Chairman was showing up at dances again. For most of the winter, Mao had been withdrawn, said to be sick. It was what a rival had once mocked as a “diplomatic illness.” In trying times, his strength depleted and the way forward unclear, Mao would retreat into isolation. From watchful convalescence, he could let a situation clarify before making his next moves. While Zhou was navigating the tricky currents in Chongqing, Mao was lying in bed, cold towels on his forehead.

  In his twenties, Mao had made a list of his flaws: he was vain, emotional, arrogant, and quick to blame others. Worst of all, he was weak-willed, and this he resolved to overcome. He scrawled notes in the margins of a book of German philosophy: “Why should you obey God rather than yourself? You are God.” He pondered what it meant to be a great man: “His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one’s lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped. All obstacles dissolve before him.” In his first publication, “A Study of Physical Education,” he declared, “The will is the antecedent of a man’s career.” He swam in freezing rivers and climbed mountains. He studied biographies—Napoleon, Montesquieu, Rousseau. He admired Theodore Roosevelt and wrote of George Washington, “We need great people like these.”

  Born in a village in Hunan in 1893, Mao was 17 before he heard of America, 19 before he saw a map of the world. But from an early age, he knew humiliation and anger. He clashed violently with his on-the-make father. He seethed at the smugness of well-to-do classmates. He loved books and study but hated school and its authorities. By the time he could connect his own humiliation to country and class, he was also coming to understand the force of his rage, and the rage of those he sought to lead. He called forth all “who were formerly despised and kicked into the gutter by the gentry, who had no social standing, and who were completely deprived of the right to speak.” One of his first organizational efforts was an Avenge the Shame Society.

  When it came to power, Mao was ruthless. If nothing eclipsed the will of a great man, nothing would constrain him. But at first many comrades were skeptical. Although he was present at the creation of the CCP, in 1921, it took him many years to build his position. Only with the Long March a decade and a half later—a 6,000-mile flight from Chiang’s “extermination campaigns,” which nearly 100,000 Communists started and fewer than 10,000 finished—did he emerge as the party’s clear leader.

  From there, he solidified his power, honing his shrewdness, revolutionary vision, and apparatus of control. A new disciplinary code specified all manner of counterrevolutionary sins, many punishable by death. An ambitious sadist named Kang Sheng, trained in cruelty by Stalin’s greatest practitioner, became his head of security and led an inquisition, a “rectification campaign,” to eliminate dissent. Rivals confessed transgressions, under torture when torture was necessary. “Leniency has a limit,” Kang told already brutalized victims.

  Now, in Yenan, Mao had not just power, but supremacy. He laid down doctrine, writing essays and poems on coarse yellow grass-paper and storing them in Standard Oil drums. (The Rockefellers had sunk wells nearby three decades earlier.) He cultivated earthy charisma, unbuckling his pants in public to search for lice, like a peasant. With acolytes, he held forth, bestowing the idiosyncratic insights of an autodidact and the enigmatic slogans of a visionary. With young female idealists, he took full advantage. One was a Bohemian actress known for playing Nora in a Shanghai production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Kang Sheng had brought her into the party and introduced her to Mao, who renamed her Jiang Qing and made her his fourth wife. Once Madame Mao, she raged against the �
��shameless hussies” and “dance-hall bitches” he continued to consort with. Throughout, Mao held up the Communists as champions of women’s liberation.

  It was hardly his only instance of philosophical flexibility. Tactical agility was central to his approach. “Dogma is less useful than excrement,” he said. “We see that dog excrement can fertilize the fields and man’s can feed the dog. And dogmas?” (Among the less conceptual examples of flexibility: while denouncing Nationalist corruption, the CCP traded profitably in “special product,” its codename for opium.) Mao quoted an old maxim: seek truth from facts. It meant responding to circumstances pragmatically without forsaking ultimate goals—or going, as he did, from bloodthirsty revolutionary to advocate of peace and back again, sincere, in his way, at every step.

  Late in the afternoon of March 4, the preparations in place, Mao waited on Yenan’s airstrip. That morning, Emancipation Daily had set out the party line on Marshall: “His effort has achieved glorious success. The Chinese people will cooperate with him, because his endeavor is in accordance with the fundamental interests of the Chinese people and world peace.” As in all things, Mao insisted on discipline in diplomacy, with messages and postures uniform across the party. “Diplomatic attitudes should be cautious and open,” an earlier directive had instructed. “Hospitality should be simple but warm.”

  Marshall’s C-54 was approaching over the forbidding landscape of intersecting ravines, its pilot searching for Yenan’s pagoda, eager to land before dark. In the cabin, Gillem looked out the window and reflected that it was bad country for a parachute drop. “It’s easy to see why the capital is out here,” he wrote in his diary as the pilot searched. “Words inadequate to describe how isolated this eroded impassible area.” They began to see terraced fields planted on otherwise barren hilltops and arched doorways cut into slopes, entrances to caves where residents lived. When the pilot at last spotted the destination, the drop into the valley was abrupt.

  Mao stood on the rocky airstrip, winged by American and Communist officers, crowds massed behind him, band and honor guard ready. Marshall came down the plane’s ladder alone, hat and leather gloves on, double-breasted tan coat buttoned to its fur collar against the cold. He and Mao shook hands for the first time.

  Many Americans met Mao and came away perplexed. No longer the “gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure” journalists encountered after the Long March, he was getting pudgy and losing his hair. His voice was soft and handshake weak. Where was the charisma, the command?

  Some met him and understood. The Mao of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China was a figure of myth, the ubermensch Mao willed himself to be: “a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration,” “a deep student of philosophy and history,” “a military and political strategist of considerable genius.” He was even “quite free from symptoms of megalomania,” Snow waxed. There were others less taken yet still capable of seeing what Snow called the “force of destiny” in Mao. The marine who co-opted gung ho spoke of his “uncanny faculty of piercing through the heart of a problem.” A diplomat first struck by the fact that Mao was “plump” went on to perceive his “incandescence” and “immense, smooth calm and sureness.”

  After reviewing the guard with Zhou and Chang, Mao and military chief Zhu De a step behind, Marshall climbed into a Dixie Mission jeep. Standing in the front, he greeted crowds that lined dirt streets decorated as if for a holiday. A banner welcomed the members of the Committee of Three, but there were only two flags flying above it: the Stars and Stripes and the Hammer and Sickle.

  The buildings were mud and brick with white-washed walls. Most cadres lived in the hillside caves. So did many leaders, including Mao for a time. (Dignitaries had two-room rather than one-room caves, lit by kerosene lanterns rather than cotton wicks soaked in bean oil.) Even inside it was cold. Heat came from charcoal braziers—there was little wood anywhere nearby.

  Marshall kept his coat on and his hands in his pockets when he entered CCP headquarters. He lowered himself onto a small couch, alongside Gillem and Robertson, before a table crowded with tea and snacks, beneath pictures of Communist luminaries. Mao sat in a chair, gripping the armrests, and looked at his guests as if across a distance. But he was gracious. He thanked Marshall for his efforts and pledged to adhere to the three agreements, under the guidance of the United States and the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Marshall was gracious in turn. He wanted to convey the importance of Mao’s role in building a peacefully unified China, and of a peacefully unified China’s role in the world.

  Marshall praised Zhou, blamed friction on “irreconcilable elements,” and agreed that it was important to get truce teams to Manchuria soon. He stressed he was there not to meddle, but as a friend. He noted that American troops could not stay in China for long, and that American assistance would be possible on the scale needed only if China was stable. He appealed for differences to be set aside, common good embraced. As long as he was in China, he said, he would do all he could to help.

  As Marshall spoke, his host’s face revealed little. But at dinner afterward, Mao toasted Marshall’s “selfless dedication to the firm establishment of a peaceful, democratic, and unified China,” as Marshall, coat still on, lifted a teacup. Over a simple meal, seated side-by-side on battered wooden chairs, they spoke of China’s peaceful future. (A Communist who had attended the University of Michigan interpreted.) Afterward, they went to a larger hall for folk dances and skits.

  Marshall spent the night on a straw mattress at the Dixie Mission. For all the controversy it had generated, the mission itself was nothing more than a low-slung stone building of eight small rooms, a covered timber porch in front. Luxurious by local standards—there was a generator and a movie projector, and the Maos sometimes came for screenings—for Americans it still had a romantically spartan air. At night, the howls of wolves echoed among the hills, and lights bobbed up the slopes, as locals returned to their caves. The next morning, there was strong coffee, eggs, and pancakes; the Americans had fashioned a griddle from the wreckage of a downed fighter plane.

  By 10 a.m., Marshall was back at the airstrip, the dignitaries and crowds back to see him off. In the shadow of the C-54, he said good-bye to a smiling Madame Mao. He posed for a photograph with Mao, Zhou, and Zhu De. He and Mao had a parting conversation, positive and hopeful and vague. Mao, cap askew, face relaxed, said his party would work hard to sustain peace. They shook hands, and Marshall looked back over the crowd and barren hills and boarded his plane.

  “We completely agree with General Marshall’s view of China’s future,” Emancipation Daily summed up afterward. Marshall thought the visit had done what it needed to do. He was unsatisfied, however, on one count. A famously assured judge of men, he conceded that Mao remained a mystery.

  “A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” Winston Churchill said a few hours later, Truman onstage with him in Fulton, Missouri. “Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies.”

  While hosting Marshall, the Communists had been tracking Churchill’s visit to the United States. Churchill said little about Asia; his “iron curtain” was falling across Europe. But to them, the message seemed clear enough: the world was splitting in two.

  In Yenan the next day, Mao received other visitors, a pair of doctors sent by Stalin to look after his health—physical and political, an American officer quipped. With Marshall gone, Mao invited the doctors into his bedroom to chat. The symbolism was intended: the Americans got the public fanfare, the Soviets access to the inner chamber.

  In Washington, Truman, back from Missouri, received a note from Marshall, a muted but triumphant account of his journey. “I had a long talk with Mao Zedong at Yenan and I was frank to an extreme,” he wrote. “He showed no resentment and gave me every assurance of cooperation.” Marshall said he was ready
to come to Washington, to secure support for the “strong, united, and democratic China” he had been sent to help build.

  Truman replied promptly. He suggested Marshall rush if possible. Churchill hoped to see him before heading home.

  “If things continue going as favorably as they are going now,” said Truman, “I believe we can have all our forces out of China before the year is out.” For him, it was very good news. He had again and again reminded Marshall, Chiang, and pleading spouses and parents of his “anxiety to get American armed forces out of China just as soon as they are no longer essential to implement our policy.”

  In the weeks after Japan’s surrender, some 60,000 troops in the China combat theater as part of the global war effort were joined by more than 50,000 additional Marines. Their mission started to creep almost immediately. Rather than disarming Japanese troops—which Chiang wanted to keep armed and in place to block Communists, disease of the skin being preferable to disease of the heart—most Americans found themselves holding a port, bridge, or stretch of track in aid of the Nationalists. Policymakers in Washington repeated: no support of fratricidal warfare. Officers in China repeated back: how are we supposed to help Chiang without supporting fratricidal warfare? Or as one marine cracked, “Colonel, who are we neutral against?”

  In Marshall’s view, the troop presence was big enough to get Americans in trouble but too small to do much else over the long run. He had seen occupation before, in the Philippines. Enlisted men, a “rough, tough, hard-drinking” crowd, would get restless, rowdy, and destructive. Anti-American resentment would mount. Chinese students were already shouting in the streets, “Why don’t you go home?”