China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  The press was on the scene at the airport in Chungking when the party arrived. Someone asked Mao what he thought of the airplane and he replied, “Very efficient.” While Hurley didn’t let loose another Choctaw whoop, he shouted out what sounded to some observers on the scene like “Olive oil! Olive oil!” as he and Mao drove off in the embassy’s black Cadillac. There was a welcoming banquet that night at which Chiang raised a glass of rice wine and said he hoped “we can have the cordial atmosphere of 1924.” The reference was to the short-lived period of harmony of the first United Front when Mao was an organizer for the Kuomintang and Zhou Enlai was Chiang’s political commissar at the Whampoa Military Academy. There was a mood of optimism in the air. American journalists had reported on the shift in Communist propaganda since the Sino-Soviet treaty was signed—the CCP’s newspapers were calling Chiang “president” rather than the leader of the “reactionary clique.” The Central News Agency, the official source of information of the national government, for its part cited “well-informed observers” to the effect that a “comprehensive settlement” between the two parties was “inevitable.”

  Both leaders played the roles assigned to them, Chiang the perfect host, Mao the respectful guest, referring to Chiang as “President Chiang Kai-shek” and pledging his support. At a banquet early on in his stay, he raised a glass of mao-tai and proclaimed “ten thousand years to President Chiang.” It was the toast normally given to China’s emperors, and it would be the slogan joyfully shouted to Mao once he had become the ruler of all of mainland China.

  Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, accompanied by American ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, arriving in Chungking in August 1945 for talks with the Nationalists. (illustration credit 10)

  Chiang and Mao held nine private meetings. They walked side by side in Chiang’s private garden in Chungking. The two men wore similar clothing, the high-collared tunic popularized years earlier by Sun Yat-sen; Chiang’s was crisp and sleek, Mao’s had a more homespun quality to it. Contrary to the usual pattern in China, there were no leaks on their talks until, after five weeks or so, Ta Gong Bao published a scoop announcing that they had been successful. The very next day, Mao, “smiling and confident,” according to the Time reporter present, held a press conference at which he said, “I am confident of the outcome of the negotiations.… The Chinese Communist Party will persist in a policy of avoiding civil war.” The Soviets also fanned the embers of hope, Radio Moscow broadcasting joyfully at the end of September that the two sides in China had agreed that “a complete central unified government will be created for the whole of China.” The broadcast concluded, “Unity in China has been established.” Meanwhile, in a gesture that the Hurleys of the world greeted with great satisfaction, the Soviet commander in Manchuria, Rodion Malinovsky, was reported to have refused to allow the Communists’ Eighth Route Army to occupy the cities of northeast China. Theodore White reported in Time, in an article headlined “Bright with Hope,” that the Soviet Union had given the “back of its hand” to the Chinese Communists in Manchuria, surely a sign that Stalin was living up to his treaty commitments to Chiang.

  Encouraging this confidently optimistic mood, Chiang and the Kuomintang announced a series of measures that seemed to fulfill the three demands that Zhou Enlai had made earlier in the year and that at the time, because they were new demands, were deemed a serious obstacle to a settlement. The government pledged to release political prisoners, to end censorship and ensure the rights of free speech and assembly, and to curb the activities of the secret police. All political parties would be legalized as well. The central issue in the talks was the degree of separate control the CCP would be allowed in the provinces where it already had base areas. The Communist delegation, led by Zhou Enlai, wanted forty-eight divisions and five provinces in the north to be controlled by the CCP. Chiang rejected that as a de facto division of the country, but, abandoning his insistence on what he called “one country, one army,” he did consent to the Communists’ keeping command of twelve divisions, which would have been something over one hundred thousand men.

  On September 18, after four weeks of talks, Mao seized the occasion of a cordial tea party to announce, “We must stop [the] civil war and all parties must unite under the leadership of Chairman Chiang to build modern China.” On his last night in Chungking, Chiang went to Mao’s headquarters and the two men talked until late in the evening. Chiang later asked himself in his diary whether his appeal for peace had “touched the Chairman’s heart.” The next morning was the anniversary of the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. In all China’s big cities, huge numbers of people came into the streets to celebrate the country’s national day, the first since the defeat of Japan. Chiang and Mao had breakfast together while their aides drafted a vague agreement. The two sides promised to establish a political democracy, to convene a national political consultative conference that would establish the rules for elections to a new national assembly, and to unite their armed forces under Chiang’s command.

  Hurley took some pride in urging the two sides to keep the conversation going but offering no “details” about a solution, making no specific proposals; he has been justly criticized for this by later historians. A specific American plan is exactly what was needed, a plan that would have recognized the balance of forces in China as they were, followed by maximum, relentless American pressure on both sides to accept reality, something along the lines of Zhou’s forty-eight divisions in control of eight northern provinces, while the rest of China remained in the hands of Chiang and the KMT. This would have been a de facto division of the country, though ideally elections for a constituent assembly would have followed, the beginnings of democracy, perhaps avoiding civil war.

  It was not to happen, of course, and it does not seem likely, even if Hurley had managed to press the two sides for a clearer, detailed division of power and territory, that it could have happened. Chiang is likely to have been too fearful that a coalition government would lead to his ejection from power. And as for Mao, as soon as he got back to Yenan, he assured his closest colleagues that the deal that was struck in Chungking was “only words on paper” that were “not equivalent to reality.” His visit to Chungking had served its purpose. He mollified the Americans, whom he was anxious to keep on the sidelines. He conveyed the image of a reasonable man seeking peace.

  But what he was really illustrating was a strategy summed up in a four-word phrase attributed to Zhou Enlai: da da tan tan, or “fight fight talk talk.” The purpose of negotiations in his eyes was not to reach a compromise agreement, but to buy time, to deter aggressive action by your enemy even as you exploit opportunities to enhance your power as well as your reputation as a peacemaker. Then, when conditions are ripe, you abandon negotiations, blaming your adversary for their breakdown, and go all out for military victory. The real battle in China was not going to be fought around a conference table in Chungking. It would be waged in the cities and countryside of Manchuria, where the Soviets were now in control. What counted was what in a later conflict in another place came to be called “facts on the ground,” and there Mao set out aggressively to ensure that the facts favored him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Facts on the Ground

  On August 16, one day after the formal Japanese surrender, a note from Communist headquarters in Yenan arrived at the embassies of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in Chungking. It started out by listing the wartime achievements of the Chinese Communists. The Communist armies, it said, had recovered “vast lost areas abandoned by the Kuomintang Government, with more than 100 million people.” This army now consisted of one million regular troops and 2,200,000 members of local militias in nineteen “liberated areas.” The note made the precise numerical assertion that 69 percent of the Japanese troops invading China (not including Manchuria) and 95 percent of the troops of the pro-Japanese Chinese puppet government “were opposed and encircled by our forces” during the recently concluded war, all of this whil
e the Kuomintang “adopted a policy of watching with folded arms and waiting for victory.”

  These achievements, the note continued, getting to its main point, had earned for the Communists the authority “to accept the surrender of the Japanese and puppet armies surrounded by them, to take over their arms, material and resources.” It was signed by Zhu De, who identified himself as commander in chief, anti-Japanese Forces in the Liberated Areas. “Our troops,” a Yenan radio broadcast of the same time said, making this same argument in less diplomatic terms, “have the right to enter and occupy any city, town or communication center occupied by the enemy or the puppets.… Those who oppose or obstruct such actions will be treated as traitors.”

  Zhu De’s message signaled a new stage in the relationship between the Chinese Communist movement and the United States. Ostensibly about a single issue, the taking of the Japanese surrender, it had enormous implications because the party that took the surrender of the Japanese troops got their weapons and the territory they controlled, both of which translated into strength in the looming civil conflict in China.

  The subtext of Zhu’s message made clear the Communists’ view of themselves, which they had now chosen to broadcast. They were not simply an armed party, as Hurley liked to call them. They were a legitimate alternative government of China, the government of about one-quarter of the country’s total population, even if the countries to which they made this claim, including the Soviet Union, were treaty-bound to support only the central government, still temporarily ensconced in Chungking, as the sole government of China. The Communists had earned their authority by fighting harder and more bravely than the recognized government, which had, in the Communist view, abdicated, fled, or stood by as thousands of villages fell to the hated invader.

  Zhu De’s note threw down a challenge to the outside powers, especially the United States, because it was saying that anyone whose presence in China impeded the Communists in their effort to expand their power would be deemed an enemy. Moreover, the Communists were doing a lot more than sending diplomatic notes to foreign emissaries, more than stating theoretical rights to participate in the Japanese surrender. In the hours after the Japanese surrender, and even before, they were on the move, sending their lightly armed, heavily indoctrinated guerrillas into areas that were going to be contested by them and the central government, getting their boots on the ground, as the common later phrase for introducing ground forces into an area would have it. The Nationalists, for their part, were trying to do the same thing, though the Communists had a clear geographical advantage. In other words, the news of Hirohito’s surrender was still ringing in the ears of a joyful China while the country’s next brutal conflict was starting.

  Quick decisions had to be made by a United States most of whose soldiers, diplomats, and spies were caught entirely by surprise by the atom bomb and the war’s quick ending. First, how to respond to Zhu De’s demand? One option, of course, was to acknowledge the facts as Zhu saw them and to remain neutral in the postwar struggle for territory. This was essentially what the professional China hands, John Davies and the others, had recommended in the fall and winter of 1944. They accepted that such a policy would quickly lead to the division of China into two zones, a Communist one north of the Yellow River, including Manchuria, and a KMT zone south of it. Such a course, Davies and his like-minded colleagues believed, would also keep the United States from backing the eventual loser in the civil war. It might also, in their view, enable the Chinese Communists to avoid falling into the Soviet orbit. As Davies put it in a memo of June 1945: “It is debatable whether Moscow could have counted on Yenan’s unquestioning obedience had the American government last autumn and winter (while the Soviet Union was still unprepared to act in Asia) accepted the fact of a divided China and realistically and vigorously sought to develop the nationalistic tendencies of Communist China.”

  Hurley, of course, didn’t agree. Shown Zhu De’s letter, he fired off a cable to Washington warning that the cost of acceding to Zhu’s demand would be an immediate civil war in China, because the Communists would quickly abandon the talks with Chiang and the two sides would have no choice but to fight. Hurley continued to believe in the assurances he’d gotten from Stalin and Molotov in Moscow in April, to the effect that the Soviets supported American policy in China and did not deem the Chinese Communists to be real Communists. He was convinced that the Soviets had sold out the Chinese Communists, who, weak and isolated, had no choice but to make a deal with the KMT, which he would use his good offices to bring about. He put his trust in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, to which Soong and Stalin had affixed their signatures the day before Zhu’s letter arrived in Chungking. The whole point of that treaty, as Hurley understood it, was for China to give away some of its sovereignty in Manchuria in exchange for a Soviet pledge, as the treaty clearly specified, “to render to China moral support and aid in military supplies and other material resources, such support and aid to be entirely given to the National Government as the central government of China.” That document, Hurley assured Washington, “has demonstrated conclusively that the Soviet Government supports the National Government of China, and also that the two governments are in agreement regarding Manchuria”—meaning that the Soviets would expedite the transfer of the three northeastern provinces to central government control in speedy fashion.

  A reply was dutifully sent to Zhu. It rejected the right he claimed to take the Japanese surrender, reminded him of the famous agreements, and, in the spirit of goodwill, asked him and the Communists for their cooperation. The Americans had refused to arm the Communists during the war; now they were excluding the Communists from the division of spoils.

  While Hurley was talking abstract principle and practicing wishful thinking, Zhu was stating reality. The Communists effectively controlled large sections of North China, the fruit of their wartime efforts to create “liberated areas” behind enemy lines. They had set up parallel governments in them and created peasant organizations. They also had those million or so men under arms, plus even larger militia organizations, and many of these troops were installed in areas ostensibly controlled by the Japanese and the Chinese puppet regime—as those American fliers found out when they were led to safety by the Balus, the Eighth Route Army men.

  In some respects Zhu did exaggerate—as in those precise percentages of Japanese and puppet troops “surrounded,” and in his contention that the Communists had been fighting while the KMT folded its arms. The Communists were extremely successful in propagating the notion that they had struggled bitterly, bravely, and continuously against the invader, but their million-man army had engaged in only small-scale hit-and-run attacks and not a single major military operation since the Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940. Like the KMT, they had preserved their forces for the postwar showdown with the rival party. “The Eighth Route Army,” Vladimirov, the TASS correspondent, noted contemptuously, limits itself “to sluggish defensive fighting of local importance. Whenever fighting starts on the enemy’s initiative, the Eighth Route Army rolls back to the mountains avoiding clashes.” After a fellow TASS correspondent visited one of the liberated areas behind enemy lines, he reported back to Vladimirov: “Like everywhere in the Special Area, meetings are the only form of work carried on in the army units. In the summer this is supplemented to some extent with the laying in of farm produce.”

  But the Communists were in place in strategic areas, especially Shaanxi, Hebei, and Shandong provinces, at a time when American intelligence estimated the central government’s military presence in those places to be negligible. This was a crucial fact. For a time, the only force available to prevent the Communists from taking over in those areas was the very Japanese army that was supposed to surrender. That is why Chiang sent out his near-desperate directive to Japan to surrender only to the central government and, meanwhile, to keep the peace in the areas they occupied. The Japanese did this, becoming allies of the government they had be
en trying to annihilate for eight years. For weeks, the Japanese fought off Communist attempts to disarm them, and they patrolled the all-important rail lines of North China. While this use of the Japanese divisions was a necessary expedient, it was also a sign of weakness on the part of the central government, an indication of its lack of preparedness to take control of the territory the international agreements assigned to it.

  The facts on the ground included an almost absurd anomaly: that the group authorized to take the Japanese surrender had no capacity to do so, while the group that had the capacity was denied the authority. This problem could presumably be overcome by moving government troops into position. But there was no overcoming what was the most portentous fact on the ground in the weeks and months after the end of the war in the Pacific: the presence of those 1.5 million seasoned Soviet troops in Manchuria, which bordered the areas where the Chinese Communists were strongest. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this fact, though Hurley seems almost completely to have ignored it.

  The Soviet occupation of the vast territory of Manchuria marked a turning point in Asia. It made impossible the arrangement that the United States desired in postwar Asia by which China, the largest country and potentially the wealthiest and the most powerful, would be united under a central government that would be both democratic and friendly to the United States. The Russian troops had taken up their positions on Chinese territory just as the alliance of convenience of World War II was breaking up and the world was entering the Cold War stage, in which Washington and Moscow would confront each other throughout the world in an existential contest for global power.

  Even before the end of the war in Asia, the Soviet goal of dominating Eastern Europe was becoming crystal clear to the Truman administration, which made some fleeting and belated efforts to forestall a similar effort in Asia. In July, during the conference at Potsdam among Stalin, Truman, and Clement Attlee (who replaced Churchill as British prime minster during the meeting), the American secretary of state, James Byrnes, was moving away from the idea that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would be necessary for a quick end to the war against Japan. Byrnes, a close aide recalled, wanted to “outmaneuver Stalin on China.” The atomic bomb was a secret, but an ultimatum was issued to Japan at Potsdam to surrender or face annihilation, and Byrnes hoped that an early Japanese surrender would preempt the agreement made at Yalta by which the Soviets would send their divisions into China.