China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  While Byrnes saw the pointlessness of asking the Soviets to do what they insisted they were doing already, though Byrnes knew they weren’t, he had little new to offer to solve the crisis in China. Instead, he went back to the same formula that previous American officials had proposed in their relations with Chiang. “Taking everything into account,” he said, “perhaps the wise course would be to try to force the Chinese Government and the Chinese Communists to get together on a compromise basis, perhaps telling Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that we will stop the aid to his government unless he goes along with this.” He recommended that Ambassador Hurley be sent back to China right away to give this message to the Chinese leader again. It was decided that the marines would stay on in China for the time being; exactly how long nobody seemed to know. Meanwhile, the United States would press ever harder for the Communists and the Nationalists to come to an agreement and stop their fighting.

  This was how the United States found itself more deeply involved in China’s civil war, neglecting Drumright’s warning against doing it “half-heartedly” and Wedemeyer’s warning that it would require a big and long commitment or it wouldn’t work. The policy emerged as a sort of in-between measure, since the two main alternatives, of abandoning an ally and coming in heavily with substantial American forces, were both impossible. Byrnes’s “wise course” does not even examine what the United States should do if the KMT and the CCP refused to go along with it. All of this illustrated the tendency of a democracy, when in a period of befuddlement, to do a little here and a little there, to try to satisfy opposing constituencies without making any clear or burdensome commitments, and at the same time, to nurture the hope, however forlorn, that the whole problem might go away if the two sides to the conflict would settle their differences through an American-mediated negotiation.

  Forrestal, though he seems to have said nothing at the meeting with Byrnes, noted the almost casual way in which the decision was made to delay the marines’ departure from China and to press for a negotiated settlement of the CCP-KMT conflict. It showed, he noted in his diary, “the symptoms of that ‘on-the-one-hand—on-the-other-hand’ disease which was to blight so many documents on Chinese policy in the ensuing years.”

  This time Hurley refused to cooperate. On the 26th, the day before the Forrestal-Patterson meeting, he’d told Byrnes that he didn’t want to go back to China. He was thinking of resigning, he said. Byrnes persuaded him to stay on. His country needed him, Byrnes said. Chiang insisted he be ambassador. On November 27, the very day of the Byrnes-Forrestal-Patterson meeting, Hurley visited at the White House with Truman, who told him the situation in China was looking grave and that he needed to get back right away, preferably by leaving the next day.

  Truman, thinking that Hurley had agreed, then went to a lunch with his cabinet. During the meal, he got an unexpected message: Hurley had issued a statement to the press that he was resigning after all. Without the courtesy of letting the president or the secretary of state know of this decision in advance, Hurley, headstrong and erratic to the end, had allowed his accumulated fury to overcome his better judgment.

  In a letter given to the press, Hurley addressed what he regarded as the root of America’s China problem: not Soviet machinations, or Communist aggressiveness, or the popular disillusionment with Chiang, but, he said, the professional American diplomats who, despite his efforts to relieve them of their posts, remained in positions of power and responsibility. At a press conference and in his written statement Hurley named no names, mentioning only “the professional foreign service men [who] sided with the Chinese Communist armed party and the imperialist bloc of nations whose policy it was to keep China divided against herself,” but of course he meant the China experts in Chungking and Washington who had questioned his judgment: John Service, who after being exonerated in the Amerasia case had been reassigned to Tokyo as an adviser to MacArthur, accompanied there by John Emmerson and George Atcheson, the latter the formal author of the letter to the State Department of a few months earlier that had called Hurley’s reporting on China “incomplete and non-objective;” John Davies, a particular bête noire of Hurley, who was now a valued aide to George Kennan in Moscow; and John Carter Vincent, head of the East Asia desk at State, where, Hurley complained in his letter, he was one of “my superiors.”

  This was sensational news, the big story of the moment. The New York Times reprinted Hurley’s statement in full, describing it in a separate page-one article as a “blistering denunciation of the administration of foreign policy by professional career diplomats.” In an editorial, the Times solemnly advised the Truman administration to look into the charges and “give some assurance to the country … that policy adopted at the top is actually followed faithfully down the line.” And Hurley wasn’t done.

  At the American embassy in Chungking, the news created “an uproar, with all barriers down and all tongues wagging with what they have wanted to say for a long time,” John Melby, the Soviet specialist, noted in his diary. Hurley’s accusations had now exposed “the internal controversy over what we should do here and the deep bitterness between opposing points of view.” The Nationalists were dismayed, but the Communists were delighted. Radio Yenan, which had been denouncing Hurley as the chief representative of “American imperialist elements,” said, “China’s civil war instigators in Chungking regret his resignation, [but the] Chinese people regard it as a victory for American people.”

  A few days later, Hurley, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, did name names—Atcheson’s and Service’s in particular, as the men who had worked so hard to subvert American policy and turn China over to the Communists. Then he was off to the Senate where in two days of testimony he again accused Atcheson and Service of conspiring to bring about Chiang’s fall. “Pat Hurley came out with a roar, both fists swinging,” Time recounted of this appearance. “His white mustache bristled, his black-ribboned pince-nez wobbled on his nose. He pounded away on his main theme.” In reply, James Byrnes, the secretary of state, was forced formally to investigate these grave charges to determine if they were unwarranted, thereby unintentionally adding to their visibility. American Foreign Service officers had reported their views and analyses in the way they were supposed to—nothing disloyal about that, he said. But Hurley’s sensational accusations had for the first time put the charge of disloyalty and double-dealing on China into the public arena, and it was to remain there in its poisonous and prosecutorial way for decades.

  Truman, mightily annoyed at Hurley’s abrupt departure, needed another ambassador right away, and he knew who he wanted. That night, he called George Marshall, who had just arrived at his home in Leesburg, Virginia, looking forward to a restful retirement after his busy career as a soldier and chief of staff. Marshall’s wife was halfway up the stairs to have a brief rest before their first dinner at home when the phone rang. “General, I want you to go to China for me,” Truman said. Marshall, who wanted to wait until after dinner to break the news to his wife, said, “Yes, Mr. President,” and hung up. An hour later the radio news announced Marshall’s new appointment. “I couldn’t bear to tell you until you had had your rest,” Marshall told his wife. What is not clear is whether Marshall himself understood the full import of that very brief conversation with Truman, that he would not only be ambassador to China but that the task of reconciling the two armed parties of China and bringing a halt to the nascent civil war would now fall on his shoulders.

  Meanwhile, the situation had turned modestly for the better. In mid-November, tired of Soviet trickery and intent on calling international attention to it, Chiang ordered the negotiating team to leave Changchun. The initial reaction of the Soviets was to step up harassment. A member of the Communist-controlled police force was killed, and immediately posters appeared all over the city blaming the KMT and demanding the expulsion of the government delegation, ignoring the fact that the delegation had been ordered to leave by the country’s president. The headquar
ters were “haunted by the sound of the wind and the cry of the cranes,” Chang Kia-ngau, the economist on the Chinese government team, wrote in his diary, sounding like a Tang dynasty poet. The water supply and telephone service were cut off. “The feeling is that a great catastrophe is about to occur.”

  That day, one hundred sixty members of the KMT delegation left Changchun by airplane for Beijing, and almost immediately the Soviet tone changed. Until then, Stalin’s main tactical instruction to the CCP was that it could “act” in Manchuria by moving its own troops and blocking those of the government, but it could not “speak out”; it could not openly declare its intention of taking over Manchuria. All along Stalin had maintained the show of normal, exclusive relations with Chiang, keeping his embassy in Chungking and having no official contact with Yenan. Stalin’s communications with Mao took place informally and in secret through his representatives in Yenan and via the radio transmitter that had been provided by the Comintern years before.

  Two days after the withdrawal of the KMT team from Changchun, Stalin sent a note to Chiang saying that he would “eradicate all mob action” in Manchuria, and proposing that the Soviet Red Army postpone its departure in order to help in this endeavor. A few days later, the Russians told Chiang that they would guarantee the landing of government troops in the major cities of Manchuria, Mukden and Changchun. Meanwhile, Stalin told the Communists to get their own troops out of those cities and not to fight government forces in those areas—even as the Soviets stepped up their supplies of arms to the Communists from the arsenals in Dalian and North Korea.

  In Changchun, a Soviet officer called in local newspaper reporters and told them that opposition to the national government was to be banned. Almost from one minute to the next, the posters criticizing the KMT disappeared and were replaced by others supporting it and praising international cooperation. Malinovsky vowed to prohibit Communist activities in areas where the central government established its authority. He banned the issuing of banknotes by the Communist army, and he expressed the hope that the KMT delegation would return to Changchun.

  The Russians were following their usual flexible policy, helping the Communists while avoiding anything to provoke stepped-up American involvement, and Mao, though impatient and annoyed at this caution, understood this. On November 20, Yenan sent new instructions to its bureau in Manchuria, informing it that instead of trying to occupy Manchuria’s big cities, the Communists’ main force should take “middle and small cities and minor railways as the focal points, and backed against the Soviet Union, Korea, Outer Mongolia, and Jehol, create powerful base areas.” Naturally, many of the Communist rank and file, the thousands who had migrated to the “liberated areas” during the war, were unhappy with this policy. They were told to “look at the whole situation,” and engage Mei-Chiang, a newly minted pejorative shorthand for the supposed alliance between America and Chiang Kai-shek. The contest between the KMT and the Chinese revolutionaries was a mirror of the looming, larger global struggle between Russia and America, between the “New Democracy” and the capitalist reactionaries, but as a tactical matter, to avoid American interference, the Soviet Union had to “separate itself in appearance from the CCP.” The Chinese Communists had, likewise, to “pretend that the CCP has no connection with the Soviet Union,” even as it should “try to neutralize the United States.”

  There were other improvements in the situation. Government troops, helped by the United States, made progress in Manchuria by forcing the Eighth Route Army to retreat from the area around Qinwangdao. Student demonstrations took place in some big cities, and for a change, rather than target the central government, they protested the Communists’ closeness to the Russians. On December 16, 1945, Chiang visited Beijing. It was the first time the recognized leader of China had been to the city since the full-scale war broke out in 1937; for that entire length of time, China’s glorious former imperial capital had been in the hands of the Japanese invaders. One hundred thousand students were on hand to greet the Gimo at Tiananmen Square before the entrance to China’s grandest imperial relic, the Forbidden City, and they gave him what Chiang’s biographer Jay Taylor has called “a thunderous greeting.” Thousands of people rushed forward to touch him or simply to stare. A huge portrait of him, showing him in his stern, authoritarian persona rather than in his avuncular scholar’s pose, was put up over the wumen, or Meridian Gate.

  From Beijing, Chiang flew to Nanjing, his own former capital, to take up full-time residence in the military academy compound there, where he thanked “Our Heavenly Father” for “glorious victory” and surveyed the throngs of citizens lined up along his route to cheer him.

  On the main strategic question, namely the role of the Soviet Union, Chiang no doubt understood the Communists’ two-sided policy, but he was nonetheless happy with the Soviets’ apparent change in attitude. His Russian-speaking son, who had carried out negotiations with Malinovsky in Changchun, told him in early December that the Soviets had “agreed to almost all the Government’s proposals, including abolishment of all non-government armed forces.”

  Is it possible that the leaders of China’s central government believed this, especially when the Russians were simultaneously adding to the Communists’ arsenal? Chiang had always hoped that by appearing strong and demonstrating that the CCP had no chance of overthrowing him he could induce Moscow to keep its distance from Mao. Consequently, Chiang decided not to protest the wholesale removal of billions of dollars’ worth of former Japanese industrial plants from Manchuria. He made no effort to reduce the neocolonialist advantages the Soviets had gotten in Dalian and Port Arthur and on the Manchurian railways. He hoped that he could satisfy Moscow, persuade the Russians that their interest lay in supporting him rather than Mao. It was a reasonable calculation at the time, but as events would soon show, it was entirely wrong.

  The American diplomatic reporting on the situation in China became notably more optimistic. The military attaché’s report in early December noted that a government plane had been dispatched to Yenan to bring Zhou Enlai to Chungking for more talks on convening the elusive Political Consultative Conference and that the editorials in the Communist press “indicate a more positive attitude toward discussion of compromise measures.” The Communist opposition has been “weakened,” the attaché concluded, and now it seemed “unlikely that the Chinese Communists can hold long against well-equipped and trained Central Government forces now being moved in.”

  By early December, seven government armies were embarked on a large-scale three-pronged move to take over the north. One column was moving to capture Kalgan, which was north of Beijing and controlled the main overland route to Manchuria. A second column was advancing along the Beijing–Gubeigou Railway to capture the passes in the region of the Great Wall. A third prong, consisting of troops that the Communist press had earlier declared to be wiped out, was thirty miles from Mukden, where a major battle was shaping up. These government troops were the best in the national army.

  By the middle of December, American intelligence believed that the Communists would decline to defend Mukden. The attaché’s report said that the Communists were facing “more serious threats to their domination,” as the government’s forces moved closer to Kalgan and into Jehol province. The government’s Eighth Army meanwhile had landed, with American help, in Qingdao and was moving to chase the Communists from the ports they controlled in Shandong, most importantly Chefoo, where they had earlier prevented the marines from landing.

  By the third week in December, Zhou was back in Chungking and the convening of the PCC seemed “certain.” The tide was turning in favor of the government, and the timing was perfect because the new ambassador to China was about to arrive at his post and the United States to embark on another concerted effort to broker a deal between the Communists and the government that would lead to a unified and democratic China. And George C. Marshall, a figure of impeccable manners, reputation, and credentials, the architect of military v
ictory on two continents, a man whose stature and reputation dwarfed those of the mercurial Hurley, was sure that while American diplomatic efforts in China had failed in the past, this time they were bound to succeed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Marshall Comes Close

  Everybody is waiting for Marshall and too much is being expected of him,” John Melby told his diary two days before the arrival of Truman’s distinguished new emissary and the man who was going to avert a Chinese civil war, if anybody could.

  Everybody scurries around here doing not much of anything … and all scared to death over the impending arrival of the great man himself.… It begins to have the earmarks of an anti-climax, and I have a growing feeling that the whole thing was dreamed up under pressure and panic. Many here now regret it, but don’t know what can be done, except to go through with it. Most are agreed that it cannot help but impair the great reputation.

  Melby doesn’t say why many were regretting the formation of the Marshall mission, but most likely the regret came from a worry over the United States expending its resources and putting its prestige at stake in a highly visible pursuit of the impossible. There was a divide between the Americans inside China with their realistic sense of the bitter irreconcilability of the two sides in the conflict and the Americans back home in the United States with their abiding faith in political compromise and institutionalized nonviolent struggle for power, both of which were entirely absent from China’s tradition. But perhaps overriding it all was the commanding figure of Marshall himself, his stature, his record so entirely unmarked by failure. “He is a modest man and completely without vanity,” one of his senior aides wrote home after his first glimpse of Marshall. He was the kind of man who refused to accept any awards or decorations during the war, feeling that to do so while soldiers were dying in the field would be unseemly. “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime,” Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, told Marshall at a ceremony marking his retirement as chief of staff, “and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known.”