China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Wedemeyer’s reports from China provided very little cause for optimism. Chiang, he told Marshall, was “completely unprepared for occupation of Manchuria against Communist opposition.” Even his recovery of North China between the Yangzi River and the Great Wall was uncertain. “The area is vast, communication limited, and loyalties of population doubtful,” Wedemeyer told Marshall. “Communist guerrillas and saboteurs can and probably will … harass and restrict movements of Central Government forces.”

  Wedemeyer was entirely realistic about the Soviet Union, saying it maintained an “outward show of cooperation with Chiang’s representatives” but it “definitely appears to be creating favorable conditions for the acquisition by the Chinese Communists of key areas in North China and Manchuria.” In Wedemeyer’s view, Chiang’s problem was not mainly military. He liked Chiang. He found him “sincere” and “selfless” but surrounded by “unscrupulous men who are interested primarily in their self-aggrandizement.” The Chinese politician, Wedemeyer said, sounding like a member of the dissenting Chinese intelligentsia, “operates with the object of enriching himself through chicanery and machination,” and the Gimo is “bewildered and impotent” in the face of this corrosive problem.

  The best way out, Wedemeyer now advised Marshall, seeming to forget his concern with giving the Communists a great “victory,” would be to get out altogether, and thus “remove any chance of involvement in the internal affairs of China.” Perhaps, Wedemeyer offered, a protectorate over Manchuria exercised by the newly created United Nations would be the solution, while the central government concentrated on getting back control of North China, though even that, Wedemeyer predicted, would take months or perhaps years of hard effort. Either way, Wedemeyer made clear, the United States faced a basic choice: either withdraw or become deeply involved in China’s unremitting civil strife with all the risks attendant on that involvement, including the possibility of a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union.

  For the first time in its relations with Asia, the United States faced what was to become a familiar dilemma. It felt that to refuse help to a friendly government was unacceptable, but so were the potential costs of providing that help. As in later, similar situations, every suggestion gave rise to its own countersuggestion. Send in more marines? The head of the Asia desk at the State Department, John Carter Vincent, worried that that might give the Soviets an excuse not to withdraw from Manchuria, which it was now promising to do by the beginning of December. (In the end, the Russians didn’t pull their troops out until April 1946.) Withdraw the marines and withdraw from China? One of the chief goals of the United States in the war in Asia was to bring about a friendly, united, independent China. It had made a tremendous investment in lives and money in pursuit of this objective. To withdraw now would be to throw all that away.

  The most eloquent appeal to stay the course might have been expected at this point from the American ambassador to China, Hurley. Instead it was left to one of the Foreign Service officers on the China desk (most of whom Hurley believed to be plotting against him), Everett Drumright, another Oklahoman and a hardworking professional diplomat who’d been consul in Xian during much of the war but was now back at State as the chief of the division of Chinese affairs. During the war, he’d been deemed by his colleagues to be more politically conservative than most of the China hands. That had not stopped him in the past from joining the professionals’ consensus, which was that the United States should pressure Chiang to undertake political reforms, that it shouldn’t bind itself to him no matter what, and that it should cooperate with the Communists in case of military necessity.

  Now things were different. Chiang’s survival was threatened not by the Japanese but by the Communists and their Soviet supporters, and this, Drumright felt, was intolerable. He wrote a paper that reverberates with a kind of moral outrage, a deep anxiety that a lack of American resolve might now cede half of China to a Communist dictatorship and that such a result would not just be inimical to the interests and values of the United States, it would be shameful as well. The Chinese Communists, Drumright wrote, were making a “supreme effort to assert control over North China” and a “strong bid to seize control of Manchuria, and they are being “aided and abetted by the Soviet Union” in these attempts, by such means as its prohibition on the landing of government troops at Dalian on the flimsy pretext that it was a free port. How the United States faced these blatant treaty violations, Drumright wrote, “[would] have a momentous bearing on the future of China, of the Far East, and of the world.” Chinese Communist control of North China and Manchuria would mean “foreign intervention” in Chinese affairs, namely Soviet intervention, and the possible consequences of this, Drumright averred, would be nothing short of a “third world war.”

  The danger was that the endgame in the Asia Pacific would be the replacement of one unacceptable outcome, a China controlled by Japan, with another, “a Soviet-dominated China,” which would mean that “the war of resistance against Japan has been fought in vain.” Preventing a permanently divided China, or perhaps the whole country controlled by an unfriendly dictatorship beholden to the Soviet Union, was the paramount interest of the United States, ahead of such other interests as political reform or avoiding “fratricidal warfare.” The United States had the option of simply withdrawing, but if it did that, or if it offered only “half-hearted assistance to China,” it will “destroy what we seek to achieve.” The United States needed, Drumright concluded, to “move resolutely and effectively to assist the national government of China to effect restoration of the recovered area of China, including Manchuria.”

  It was an eloquent statement, and it anticipated such future statements about being resolute and effective in other countries in Asia, ready, as John F. Kennedy said in 1961, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the success and the survival of liberty.” Vincent, Drumright’s boss, passed his statement on to Byrnes, but there were arguments being made on the other side, notably by Vincent himself.

  Drumright’s analysis was grounded in a sense of the practical American interest. It would be bad for America if a threatening, messianic dictatorship like the Soviet Union were to dominate China. The underlying issue, however, was what kind of world Americans wanted to live in. The American conviction, going back to the Revolution, was that progress toward liberal democracy is the supreme American interest, because it is good in itself, a beacon to oppressed peoples, and because the most peaceful and secure world would be one in which democracy predominated. Drumright’s memo rang of the stirring idealism of Kennedy’s later inaugural address. It had that Wilsonian streak so appealing to Americans of standing for the good in world affairs, and in light of what happened in China later—millions dead of starvation, the demonic madness of the Cultural Revolution, the suppression of basic freedoms, and all the rest—Drumright’s call for a preventive stand gains retrospective appeal. The choice, however, in China was not at all clear at the time. The Nationalists under Chiang were deeply flawed; it was the Communists who were posing as the champions of democracy and civil rights, and not only in China, but also in the United States and Western Europe, which is one reason so many people who labeled themselves progressive were drawn to them. If China under the KMT had been a true democracy, the issue would have been far clearer. But can there be any doubt from the standpoint of a later time that the KMT would have been a better alternative for China?

  Vincent felt that a great deal was missing from Drumright’s manifesto, especially a close examination of its cost and its likelihood of success. It’s all well and good to wax eloquent about the struggle for freedom, but policymakers need to assess whether grand idealistic goals can be achieved. As John Davies put this later:

  Drumright’s stance … was typical of much policy thinking in the American government then and later. The power realities of a situation, even when understood, tended to be subordinated to what “ought
to be done,” what should be done because of precedents, commitments, moral compulsions, sentiment, and that great catchall, “national security.” The factor of cost of a policy was thus often slighted.

  Vincent, in partial reaction to Drumright, made the fundamental point that desired action is not always effective action. He laid down three options on China: one, withdraw; two, continue the existing policy; or three, enlarge the mission. While he didn’t say so directly, he seemed to favor the first of these, because, as he put it, there was at best a “small likelihood that Chiang Kai-shek, even with our assistance, can by military methods bring about stability in North China and Manchuria of a lasting character,” and there was no point in expending American lives, resources, and reputation on what was already a lost cause.

  The next day, Byrnes read Vincent’s memo aloud at a meeting with Robert Patterson and James Forrestal, respectively the secretary of war and the secretary of the navy. Patterson in particular was in favor of ignoring it, and ignoring Wedemeyer as well. Patterson, as Davies described him, was a “gung-ho” type. He was the one who’d dismissed the Communist attacks on the marines as “comic-opera” affairs. He was convinced that the reports of Communist strength were “exaggerated.” He said at this meeting with Forrestal that he’d just spoken to Henry Luce, who had published a strong, pro-Chiang editorial in Life, one in which he’d argued basically that the United States had a moral obligation to give the Gimo its full backing, and Luce had gotten what he called a good response to it.

  Forrestal was not thinking so much of the obstacles to American aims on the ground in Asia; he was thinking of the mood on the home front, the wish for American soldiers to be brought home and not sent on a costly mission on behalf of a government that was itself corrupt and undemocratic. Demonstrators brandishing placards saying “Bring the Troops Home” were on the march. Editorials across the country were demanding the same thing. Luce’s reply was “We have to recognize the interdependence between China’s fate and our own.”

  Drumright had said to ignore such niceties as the heavy-handed policies of the Chinese Nationalists, but the public didn’t ignore them. It was actually deeply divided about them. Here is where the slow deterioration of Chiang’s reputation and the more romantic view of the Communists came into play. “It is somewhat confusing that this Chinese agrarian reform movement is called ‘Communism,’ ” Edgar Snow, the most famous proponent of Mao the democrat, wrote in May in the Saturday Evening Post. “Communism in China is a watered-down thing.” In a new book called The Solution in Asia, the China expert Owen Lattimore, who had once been a political adviser to Chiang, wrote, “The political structure under the Communists is more nearly democratic than under the Kuomintang.” Chiang, he continued, was a “coalition figure” who “need not fear losing his authority in a Government in which party differences with the Communists could be reconciled by democratic processes.”

  These were the attitudes that Luce was determined to fight, and part of the battle was to refurbish the reputation of his tarnished Chinese hero. In September, he had put Chiang on the cover of Time. The week before, Churchill had been on the cover. Luce’s unspoken message was that these were the two great victors in the war and the two great men of the future in Europe and Asia. The cover on Chiang showed him looking handsome in a simple uniform with no decorations, staring ahead with large, destiny-filled eyes, his demeanor firm but softened by a trace of a wise smile. “At 57, Chiang Kai-shek stood at one of the pinnacles of his own and his nation’s history,” the accompanying article rhapsodized. “As the war ended, the great fact was clear: the Generalissimo had justified those who had long held that his government was firmly embedded in popular support, and that given peace, it could establish an effective administration in China.”

  This article was meant to justify Luce’s portrayal of Chiang as a wise and beloved figure. But his determination to do this put Time’s editor at odds with his own star reporter in China. Theodore White had refused to write the worshipful cover story on Chiang that Luce wanted. White complained in a cable to Time’s headquarters in New York that the story Luce wanted would be full of the “customary panegyrics” and that it would “legitimize China’s somber tyrant yet once again.”

  Directed at Luce, those were fighting words, the result of which was White’s recall home and his dismissal from Time. Disagreement over China had ruined what had been a father-son relationship between the indomitable Luce and the brilliant, scrappy White, who had once put a sign outside his office in Chungking saying that any similarity between what he wrote and what appeared in the magazine was purely coincidental. White had opposed even the American airlift of central government troops, arguing with American military officers in China that they would be surrounded by Communist guerrillas and that their dispatch would involve the United States in an Asian civil war, which would, in turn, push the CCP into the arms of the Russians.

  China evoked family quarrels. Every person saw in China a different beast. True, we’re “disillusioned about China because of its constant civil wars,” Luce wrote in Life. We ask ourselves, “Is there now a going concern called China with which … America can and should deal?” Luce’s answer to his own question was a resounding yes. “Most Americans grossly underestimate the significance in China of this simple fact: that the legal government of China maintained itself on Chinese soil (not in exile) as the only government over at least half the land of China, and held the allegiance of the great majority in the other half.”

  The policymakers were not in disagreement with Luce’s argument. The day before their meeting with Byrnes, November 26, Patterson and Forrestal wrote a memo in which they parted company with Wede-meyer’s pessimism regarding the national government’s chances of getting North China and Manchuria under its control. Patterson and Forrestal weren’t willing to give up yet. There was no detailed examination of Wedemeyer’s conclusion. The secretary of state and the secretary of war brought no technical military expertise to bear on the relative strengths of the government on one side and the Soviet-supported Communists on the other. There was no talk of domestic Chinese disillusionment with Chiang, or of the possibility that, in the Chinese tradition, the mandate of heaven was passing from one imperial figure to another. They didn’t discuss just what it would take in the way of troops and supplies to ensure that Chiang prevailed in his contest with the Communists. Forrestal and Patterson simply didn’t like the idea that the United States might, as the later expression had it, “cut and run” where a long-standing ally was concerned. It “appears undesirable … to retreat from any of the stated objectives without the most careful consideration,” they wrote to Byrnes. If America changed its policy of support for Chiang Kai-shek, the two cabinet members wrote, “we will appear to world opinion to have deserted an ally.”

  That very day, Wedemeyer sent off another cable to Marshall, reiterating his “considered opinion” that Chiang would be unable to gain control of North China and Manchuria without “further U.S. and/or allied assistance” and, in the case of Manchuria, without “the wholehearted cooperation of the Soviet Russians.” In his talks with Chiang, Wedemeyer said, the Chinese leader had agreed to “temporarily forgo reoccupation of Manchuria” and to concentrate on North China instead. But even that, Wedemeyer said, might be too much for him. The lines were too long and “Communist depredations” too damaging. Wedemeyer was not saying that the United States should “cut and run,” but merely making it clear that if the United States opted to help the central government, that help was going to have to be substantial and sustained over a long period of time. “Also,” Wedemeyer warned, “it’s impossible for me to carry out orders to help Central Government forces and to carry out [the] order to avoid participation in fratricidal warfare.”

  Byrnes started the meeting of the next day by reading aloud the Patterson-Forrestal letter. After that, Forrestal expressed his opposition to “yanking the marines out of North China now.” He offered a solution to the likely
opposition by the public to any long military commitment in China: America should talk to the Russians and “get the UN into the picture,” he said. But what, Byrnes asked, would the United States actually ask the Russians to do? Stay in Manchuria beyond the date they had promised to withdraw, December 2, which was less than a week later?

  Forrestal: “No, but we can ask them to support the Chiang Kai-shek government.”

  Byrnes: Well, the Russians are already treaty-bound to support only the national government, so it’s “difficult to know just how we should approach the Soviet government on the subject.”

  Byrnes repeated what he had been told by the Chinese ambassador to Washington: that the Soviets had promised not to permit any armed Communists to enter Manchuria.