China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  The question Hurley didn’t want to face was why Stalin would take a different approach to China than he had to Poland or Romania. Stalin’s forces were on the verge of occupying several Chinese provinces contiguous to the provinces where the CCP had established networks behind enemy lines. As Davies had warned, it was wishful thinking to believe that the Soviets would, if they had a choice in the matter, turn those territories over to a government its controlled press was denouncing as “reactionary” rather than to the Communists, whom the same press was describing as “democratic.”

  To be fair, most American officials who saw through Stalin’s posturing, like Davies and Kennan, believed the dire situation made a KMT-CCP deal in China all the more imperative. It was the only way to lock Mao into an arrangement by which he recognized the authority of the existing Chinese government, and in this they supported Hurley’s effort. Except for the China hands whom Hurley had purged, there was almost nobody who appreciated the fact that such a deal was extremely unlikely. But Hurley was convinced that Stalin and Molotov were ready to abandon the Chinese Communists for the sake of good state-to-state relations with Chungking, which gave Stalin the semi-colonial privileges in Manchuria that Roosevelt had promised him at Yalta. In Hurley’s view, Stalin would make a deal with the KMT because Stalin knew what Hurley knew, which is that, contrary to the alarmist predictions of the China hands, the Communists were much too weak to take power. In July, Hurley wrote to the State Department about what he termed a triple “exaggeration” of Communist strength. Their military strength, the amount of territory under their control, and the degree of popular support they enjoyed were all overstated, he argued, giving no evidence for these incorrect conclusions. Once Stalin had signed an agreement with Chiang, he further believed, Mao would understand how isolated he was and would quickly come to terms. “Without the support of the Soviet [Union], the CCP will eventually participate as a political party in the National Government,” Hurley wrote.

  The Truman administration believed this also—or, if some senior members of the administration didn’t quite believe it, they still felt that a deal between the central government and the Chinese Communists provided the best hope of a good future, and one way to get that deal would be for the Soviets explicitly and unambiguously to recognize the Chiang government as the only legitimate government of China. But the Americans had already agreed at Yalta to give the Russians certain privileges in China. This embarrassing fact had been kept a secret from Chiang, the leader it would most affect, but now the prospect of the end of the war meant the secret couldn’t be kept any longer. In July, Truman met with T. V. Soong in Washington and outlined the terms that Roosevelt had agreed to at Yalta.

  This was, of course, extremely bad news for Chiang. It was a national disgrace, a sellout, an abandonment of the solemnly avowed promise to restore full sovereignty to China. But despite all the tiptoeing and whispering about Yalta, Chiang and Soong most likely already knew about it anyway, and they also understood they had no choice but to accept it—mainly because if they didn’t accept it, the Russians might do more to support the Communists, who would. More fundamentally, Chiang understood that he couldn’t stay in power in all of China without Soviet consent. So he dispatched Soong to Moscow with instructions to essentially agree to all of the Yalta provisions. He abandoned China’s historical claims to Outer Mongolia, which Stalin wanted to turn into a puppet state. Stalin, for whom anti-imperialism was a pillar of the faith, admitted that these concessions on China’s part would be equivalent to a new, unequal treaty of the sort that China signed with the western powers in the nineteenth century, but he justified his demands—for example, control over the ports in Dalian and Port Arthur and of the Manchurian railways—as necessities not just for Soviet security but for China’s as well. Japan, he told Soong, will be back as a major power in another couple of decades, and China and the Soviet Union needed a treaty to deter its ambitions. “One should keep Japan vulnerable from all sides … then she will keep quiet,” he said. “[The] whole plan of our relations with China is based on this.”

  There was no ideology in this argument, no yearning to sponsor global revolution, and this must have been somewhat reassuring to Chiang. Moreover, Stalin assured him that the Soviets would turn over all of the territory they had seized in Manchuria to him and only to him when the Russian troops left, which, he promised, would happen within three months. Chiang, more realistic than Hurley, knew the risk of making a deal with Stalin, trading away chunks of Chinese sovereignty in exchange for promises that he knew perfectly well Stalin might break. At the final negotiating sessions between Stalin and Soong in Moscow, Stalin exploited Chiang’s greatest fear when he hinted that if the Chinese didn’t sign an agreement on his terms and sign it right away, the result might be massive Soviet aid to the Communists. Even with the new agreement, Moscow might well help the Communists by turning Manchuria over to them rather than to the central government, so Chiang was in the awkward position of yielding to avoid a consequence that might be imposed on him anyway. It was a gamble, but he felt that the deal with Stalin gave him his best chance of keeping the Russians neutral in the looming Chinese internal struggle.

  On August 14, the day that Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, the new Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed. It gave Stalin everything he wanted—control of Dalian, a naval base at Port Arthur, management of the Manchurian railways, and recognition of the independent status of Outer Mongolia; in exchange he promised exclusive recognition of Chiang’s government, the transfer of Manchuria to Chiang’s forces, and no help to the CCP, all promises he could violate with impunity if he chose to do so.

  One truckload of the 1.5 million Soviet troops who invaded Manchuria in the waning days of the war, being greeted by Chinese civilians in the city of Mukden, September 28, 1945. (illustration credit 9)

  If Chiang was nervous about this, Hurley was joyful and unsuspecting, because for him “Russia has pledged her entire material and moral support to the Chungking movement, thus depriving the hostile Communist regime of Yenan of what might have been its strongest foreign ally.” Hurley was not the only one infected by this optimism. “This kicked the props out from under the Chinese Communists,” Time declared, “who without hope of future help from their Soviet comrades … might well be forced to surrender their separate army and administration and take their place as one of several political minorities in a united China.” The New York Times reported a bit more cautiously but along the same lines, concluding that the deal with Moscow had “minimized, at least for the time being, the danger of a disastrous civil war in China.”

  The proof, as Hurley and others saw it, was that after refusing for weeks to resume the talks with Chiang, Mao in late August accepted an invitation from Chiang to go to Chungking for a sort of Chinese summit. Negotiations would resume, Hurley believed, because the Communists were weak, isolated, and without other options.

  Years later, speaking of Stalin’s demand that he go to Chungking to resume the talks under Hurley’s auspices, Mao would talk bitterly of Stalin’s “treachery”; he would call Stalin a “hypocritical foreign devil.” He would also say that he had been “compelled to go because Stalin insisted,” and this seems to have been true. Unlike the Soviet leader, Mao veered toward what Lenin had called left-adventurism, the impulse to take radical action, specifically attempting to seize full power before the situation was ripe for it. The Japanese war had enabled him to expand his armies into a large and powerful force by Chinese standards and to control the population in some eighteen “liberated areas,” mostly in rural districts in the north, but some in the east and south as well. Now Mao felt ready to try to capture some of the country’s major cities.

  The very day after the huge Soviet armies crossed into Manchuria, Mao sent a telegram to the New Fourth Army, his main force in the east, ordering it to “concentrate main forces to occupy major cities and key strategic points.” The Communist
s sent emissaries to Japanese commanders in Shanghai, who were waiting for a chance to surrender formally and then to be repatriated, and to some members of the Chinese puppet regime, hoping to enlist their cooperation in an insurrection there. The Kuomintang secret police noted this maneuvering and succeeded in assassinating two top officials of the puppet regime. Mao, undeterred and contrary to the advice of the senior underground Communist official in Shanghai, ordered the New Fourth Army, which held a ring of territory about ten miles from the city, to infiltrate three thousand troops into Shanghai to foment a pro-Communist uprising.

  It was a bold plan, reminiscent in its way of the Communists’ attempt to seize Shanghai in 1926 and 1927, when, under orthodox Soviet tutelage, they put their effort into organizing among the city’s factory workers. Now, in the days after the Japanese surrender, the Communist “Red workers” seized control of more than ten factories, where they faced off with the pro-KMT “Yellow workers.” The city’s students were eager to go on strike. But on August 15, General MacArthur, the commander of American forces in Asia, issued Order Number One, which instructed the Japanese units in China to surrender only to the Nationalist authorities. Mao would have no authority to send his troops into Shanghai to take control there. At the same time, Chiang sent a message to General Okamura, authorizing him to use force to resist any attempt by the Communists to disarm him; the strongly anti-Communist Okamura would surely have resisted a CCP takeover in Shanghai. But it was the ever prudent Stalin who stopped Mao from his foolish plan, which, in Stalin’s view, would have provoked an immediate civil war for which neither he nor the CCP was ready. On August 21, he sent two telegrams to Yenan telling Mao to desist, and, as always in such situations, Mao did.

  Stalin also ordered Mao to go to Chungking, and Mao did that too, though, contrary to what Hurley believed, not out of a sense of weakness or abandonment by the Soviet Union. We’ve seen his confident speeches at the seventh CCP congress about Soviet help coming, even if that help couldn’t be overt for the moment. Stalin’s endorsement of the Sino-Soviet treaty raised some worries in Mao’s mind, but fundamentally he was willing to see it as a tactical move, a piece of necessary deception.

  At worst, Mao was frustrated by Stalin’s caution. According to his Russian interpreter, Shi Zhe, he was “very distressed and even angry” about the order to go to Chungking, but he also understood its source in the Soviet leader’s eagerness not to provoke the nuclear-armed Americans into active opposition to Soviet and Chinese Communist aims in China. A year later Mao argued in an interview with the left-wing journalist Anna Louise Strong that, unlike Stalin, he had never been worried about an atomic bomb attack on China, confident as he was in the ability of the ideologically awakened masses to defeat even a technologically superior foe. It was then, in 1946, that Mao began using the term “paper tiger” to refer to American strength, a term he would continue to use for decades.

  But that was later. At the time of the Sino-Soviet treaty in 1945, Mao had plenty of reasons to feel things were going his way. For one thing, Stalin, as he usually did when he embarked on a policy that was not to Mao’s liking, provided a back-channel assurance to the CCP that his move was in their long-term interest. Even as Stalin was cabling Mao with instructions to go to Chungking, he was telling Mao’s official number two in the Chinese Communist movement, Liu Shaoqi, who was in Moscow with another senior Communist, Gao Gang, that the talks between Chiang and Mao were just a tactic. Meanwhile, he told them, as two scholars have written of this episode, that “the talks would buy time for the Chinese Communists to regroup and mobilize their armies for the coming battles.”

  In any case, for Mao the event of historic significance was not the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance but the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Four days after the Soviet troops crossed the border into Chinese territory, he was writing, accurately, that the “political implication” of that move was “beyond any measurement”; it was more important than “the two bombs”—the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the atomic bombs were so powerful, Mao asked, why did the United States ask the Russians to come into the war against Japan? In fact, he continued, establishing a “fact” of Chinese historiography that has endured ever since, the belief held by many that the war was ended by the atomic bomb was false. It was a product of “bourgeois influence” coming “from bourgeois education, from bourgeois press and news agencies.” The truth, as Mao saw it, was that the entry of the Soviet Red Army into the war led Japan to finally give up.

  Mao felt that, if all went well, the massive entry of the Soviet army into the eastern front would have the same result as its entry into Poland, where Stalin had engineered a Communist takeover using methods that would be replicated, more or less, in China. John Davies agreed. “If the Red Army enters North China,” he wrote, “it should not be surprising if those sympathetic to the U.S. were liquidated and American aid and cooperation effectively obstructed or eliminated.” Wherever the Red Army has gone, he noted, “Russian political domination has followed.” In Poland, Stalin had agreed at Yalta for the eventual holding of free elections; in the meantime, a provisional coalition government representing all major Polish political factions would be established. One such faction was the non-Communist government-in-exile, which, though based in London, contributed tens of thousands of troops to Allied military operations in Western Europe. The other main faction was the pro-Soviet Polish Committee of National Liberation, which Stalin had set up in Lublin, the first city in eastern Poland that Russian troops seized from the retreating Germans. As Soviet troops moved across the country, pushing the retreating Germans ahead of them, the Lublin group was allowed to take over the administration of the country and the non-Communist members of the coalition were pushed aside, ignored, or imprisoned. In March 1945, under the pretext of holding a meeting on Poland’s political arrangements, the Soviets lured sixteen non-Communist Poles to Lublin, where they were arrested, brought to Moscow for trial, and sent to prison in Siberia. Stalin’s clever and ruthless strategy resulted in the replacement of the Nazi dictatorship by a Polish puppet state subservient to Moscow that lasted for the next four and a half decades.

  Poland was not China, one big difference being that Chiang Kai-shek stayed in China for the whole war and never headed a government-in-exile. In addition, unlike Poland, China had never been an invasion route to Russia. Still, there were eerie similarities between the situations. The Chinese Communists were like the Lublin group, confident that Stalin would find ways for it to extend the areas it controlled. Chiang was akin to the non-Communist Poles, ostensibly recognized by the Russians but undermined by them at the same time. In Poland, Stalin captured territory, and turned it over to his Polish proxies; now he had 1.5 million troops in Manchuria, and the question was, would he find ways, despite his recognition of Chiang’s government and his promise to turn the land he controlled over to China’s central government, to give real power to the Communists?

  Years later, after Stalin’s death and the opening of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao was to denounce just about every aspect of Soviet policy, but in 1945, he approved of everything Stalin did, completely and without reservation, including the outcome in Poland. To him, the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile was the “reactionary” representative of “Old Poland,” the Poland of landlords and capitalists, while the pro-Moscow Lublin group responded to the “unanimous demand of the Polish people”; it marked “an upsurge of the new democratic movement in liberated Eastern Europe.”

  That word “liberated” is noteworthy. In the West, the imposition of puppet regimes in Eastern Europe without elections or any other procedure for popular consent was properly seen as an act of political domination, but for Mao it was a thrilling step toward revolutionary fulfillment. His own eventual rise to power in China would be another such step, and he fully expected the Soviets to support him in making it.

  On August 27, Hurley, bringing with him two cases of Scotch, flew in an American p
lane from Chungking to Yenan, and the next day he escorted Mao on the Communist leader’s first-ever airplane ride to the temporary capital of his sworn enemy. Observers on the scene at the Yenan airport said that Mao looked nervous, like a man “going to his own execution,” Time reported. Just before he boarded Hurley’s plane, he did something that he had never done before and that he would never do again, which was to kiss his wife, Jiang Qing, in public. Mao was worried that he would be kidnapped in Chungking or perhaps even murdered, so perhaps the gesture was meant as a sort of good-bye, just in case. But Hurley had guaranteed his safety, as had Stalin, and so he was off, the bandit in the hills going to meet the sheriff who had been trying unsuccessfully to kill or capture him for years. Before they took off, Hurley leaned out of the door of the plane and produced what one Chinese Communist on the scene described as a “weird, loud scream as if a predator has gotten its prey”—the Choctaw war whoop.