China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  To be sure, the Soviets, as George Kennan in Moscow wrote to Byrnes early in January, would not make any overt effort to wreck Marshall’s mission. The USSR in Kennan’s view was “an expansionist force,” propelled in this “by revolutionary tradition, by nationalist ambition, and by kinetic nature.” Moscow, Kennan added, would not want a neutral China, “because to Kremlin minds, ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ ” Kennan also warned about Stalin’s chronic deceitfulness. The Soviet system, with its theoretical division between the government and the Communist Party, allowed the party to pursue policies that were “piously foresworn” by the government—just as Stalin had done with Byrnes in saying that the Soviet government had given no help to the Communists; what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did was another matter. Revolutionary tradition, as Kennan called it, would lead the Kremlin to want the Chinese Communists to succeed in China, but if they were too weak, a submissive Kuomintang-controlled China would be an acceptable outcome also. The Soviets would thus maintain a confusing both-sides-of-the-fence policy in order to have a compliant Chinese regime.

  This was Mao’s estimate also. He knew that Stalin would help the CCP, and that he was helping it establish its strength in Manchuria, but that at least for the time being, in obedience to the Sino-Soviet treaty, the Soviets would continue to make a show of supporting the national government in its program of reestablishing control in Manchuria. Even if Mao wanted to defy the Soviet leader’s cautionary advice, the military balance didn’t allow it. By the end of 1945 the Nationalist government had deployed some of its best American-trained and -equipped troops—its so-called Alpha forces—between Huludao and Mukden, and they were advancing on Communist strongholds in Chengde, Jehol, and Kalgan. “The position of the Communists [is] deteriorating as [the] Central Government moves toward Jehol and masses troops in Henan and Jiangsu,” the American military attaché reported on January 5. The Communists were experiencing “supply difficulties, heavy casualties, extremely cold weather, and lack of sufficient artillery.”

  Under the circumstances, the Marshall mission was an opportunity for the Communists to go on the political offensive. The burden would be on Chiang to allow them a share of national power because, the Communists knew, that was what the Americans would demand. It was also what Chinese public opinion wanted. The Communists knew Marshall would want them to give up their separate army, but they would temporize on that demand, play for time, and meanwhile increase their strength by recruiting new conscripts. At the same time, like the Kuomintang, the Communists would fight when it was in their interest to do so, even as their peerless emissary Zhou Enlai faithfully participated in the Marshall mission. It was, in other words, the perfect moment for fighting and talking simultaneously.

  No sooner had he gotten settled into a house in Chungking than Marshall opened a series of intensive talks with the KMT and CCP representatives. Chiang’s man at these conferences was Chang Chun, an army general who had known the Gimo since both were teenagers. Zhou represented the Communists. The three men held several lengthy sessions in conditions of intense urgency. Both sides, it seemed, wanted to put a halt to the civil war that had broken out in several regions of China, and Marshall proved to be the perfect mediator—patient, businesslike, attentive to detail, and able to appear fair to both sides.

  The question that divided the two Chinese sides wasn’t whether to agree to a ceasefire. Both wanted to stop fighting, at least for a while, especially in the areas where the other party had the advantage. The difficult question was what troop movements would be allowed after the fighting stopped, so that neither side would be able to use the cessation of hostilities to gain an advantage for future hostilities. In general, it was agreed that there should be very few troop movements. The units that were engaged in the fighting should keep to their positions until there could be a later agreement by which all Chinese armed forces would be integrated into a single national army—an idea that both sides also accepted in principle.

  The central government would accept no deal that did not allow it to take over the northeastern provinces of Manchuria that made up the former Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, and they therefore needed to move troops there, with American help. That was what they were allowed to do as the legitimate government of China. Even the Soviet Union was pledged by the terms of the Sino-Soviet treaty to help the central government, and only the central government, to do that. But the former Manchukuo is exactly where the Communists were strong, having infiltrated troops there and taken possession of Japanese stores of arms. But showing a remarkable eagerness for compromise, the Communists accepted what the negotiators called an “exception” to the non-movement of troops in Manchuria after the ceasefire. The government would be allowed to send its forces toward Manchuria and move them inside Manchuria so as to reestablish Chinese sovereignty as the Soviets withdrew. The Chinese Communists would be required to keep their troops where they were.

  Even with that agreement, attained after several marathon sessions over several days, things almost fell apart. There was a disagreement about two towns, Zhifeng, in what is now central Liaoning province, and Duolun, about 125 miles west. Both were in what was then known as Jehol province north and northeast of Beijing; since then it has been divided between Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. The Nationalists claimed they had an agreement with the Soviets to take over both towns, which were rail junctions, after the Soviets withdrew. Zhou insisted that the Soviets had already left both places and that both had been occupied by the Eighth Route Army. Nationalist troops were heading toward them, he said, which made a clash almost inevitable, and since there was eventually going to be a consolidation of military forces, there was no reason for the government to be “hastening to take over these places at the present time by force.” We’ve agreed to the exception for Manchuria, Zhou said, as the argument continued the next day, January 9, “but we can’t agree to this one.”

  It came down to the wire. The next day was to be the first meeting of the long-delayed and long-anticipated Political Consultative Conference (PCC). There would be thirty-eight delegates there representing all the parties—eight delegates for the KMT, seven for the Communists, nine for the Democratic League, five for the Youth Party, and nine for non-party individuals. Suddenly this group, which had been proposed years before but had never met, was to be given the task of determining the shape of China’s political future. But the PCC was unlikely to succeed if civil war was still raging. “It would be a tragedy,” Marshall said, calling an end to the January 9 meeting because to continue it would have been pointless, “to have this conference fail at the last moment.”

  That night, as he later reported it to Truman, Marshall went to see Chiang at home. When he met Chang and Zhou the next morning, he told them there had been a breakthrough. The Gimo, he said, had “generously agreed to the issuance of the order for the cessation of hostilities without reference to Zhifeng and Duolun.” Problem solved. The three announced the ceasefire agreement literally minutes before the opening session of the PCC.

  Marshall was pleased. The Chinese parties had proven to be far more accommodating than all those pessimists predicting failure could have expected. On January 13, Chiang and Mao sent orders to their troops to stop fighting and to stay in place, both recognizing the “exception” for central government troops in Manchuria. Chiang then made a speech to the PCC that gladdened the hearts of the Americans. For years, the United States had urged him to make political reforms, loosen his control, and legalize rival parties and allow them real participation in the government. The Americans had railed against the central government for its repressiveness, its press censorship, the free hand it gave to Tai Li and his secret police to intimidate, torture, and imprison those with dissenting views. “I’ve tried to tell Chiang Kai-shek to liberalize, and that suppression will send intellectuals, small businessmen and students to affiliate themselves with the opposition,” Wedemeyer told Marshall.

  Now Chiang wa
s formally proclaiming that he would do what the Americans wanted of him. This was an important moment, a major gesture. For the first time in China’s history, liberal democratic ideals were being advanced as state policy. Chiang promised that within ten days all civil liberties in China would be assured, press censorship ended, political parties made lawful, and, within a mere seven days, every political prisoner released—except for pro-Japanese traitors. At the same time, with the inauguration of the People’s Consultative Conference on January 10, China was taking another unprecedented step. Never before in the country’s history had an assembly of freely competing political parties been convened, nor, as things turned out, would such an assembly ever be convened in the future.

  The PCC has been little noticed in the intervening years because its life was very short and it had no lasting effect, but for the moment it had real power and real prestige. It was to create a framework for a coalition government, including the multiparty makeup of a new State Council, the rough equivalent of a cabinet, in which the Kuomintang would have just half the seats. Later, a National Assembly would be convened to draw up a new constitution, and the expectation was that the document would be modeled on the American example, with a system of checks and balances and limits placed on executive power. The PCC, in short, was to create a plan by which the KMT would give up its monopoly on power, a very big change for a country that had been ruled by all-powerful emperors for thousands of years.

  It is worth noting that this is the formula that the United States promoted universally in the world in those years, a system of freely competing political parties bolstered by a free press and the rule of law, which meant in practice curbs on the power of the police. No such proposals would have come from the Soviet Union, which dismissed the idea of freely competing political parties. No doubt it was in part because of the promised democratic nature of the PCC’s announced program that it was greeted with euphoria in China, with Marshall being given a great deal of the credit. Where Hurley had failed, he had succeeded, or so it seemed.

  Both sides in China expressed their gratitude, the Communists in particular. On January 12, two days after the ceasefire announcement and the opening of the PCC, the Liberation Daily proclaimed, “The rejoicing with which the Chinese people have received the KMT-CCP cease-fire order is not less than that which greeted the Jap surrender announcement.…It marks the beginning of a phase of peaceful development, peaceful reform, and peaceful reconstruction unique in the modern history of China.” Zhou now assured Marshall that the Communists were ready to “cooperate with the purposes of the US government.” Socialism is our goal, Zhou said, repeating what he’d told David Barrett on the plane ride more than a year earlier. The Chinese Communists were really Communists, he said, but China is decades away from the possibility of socialism, and, in the meantime, “the democracy to be initiated in China should follow the American pattern.… We mean to acquire U.S. democracy and science … free enterprise and the development of individuality.”

  Zhou made a quick trip to Yenan to get approval from the CCP Central Committee for the Chungking decisions, and on his return to Chungking, Zhou hand-delivered a letter that Mao had written to Marshall. “The door to democracy is now pushed open, regardless of how narrow the opening still is,” the Chairman wrote. Zhou said he wanted to convey an anecdote to Marshall that would reveal the Communists’ attitude. There were rumors in Yenan that Mao would soon visit Moscow, Zhou said. Mao laughed at that. He said that he wasn’t planning on taking a furlough even though it would be good for his health if he did. Anyway, if he went anyplace, Mao said, he’d rather that it be to the United States where he was sure he’d have a great deal to learn.

  Within hours of the signing of the agreement, the Executive Headquarters, which would oversee the ceasefire, was set up in Beijing, with, Marshall reported to Truman, 125 officers and 350 men equipped with radios, planes, jeeps, and trucks, all of which had to be flown in on American transport planes. “The distances are great,” Marshall said, outlining the logistical difficulties of the truce inspection effort, “the area tremendous, and the communications miserable, or completely lacking.” Walter Robertson, the former chargé in Chungking, was dispatched to Beijing to be the American high commissioner. Colonel Byroade, the thirty-two-year-old West Point graduate from Indiana who had been with the Marshall mission from its inception, would be chief of staff. “We literally had a team in there the next day,” Byroade recalled later. The Americans flew the Nationalist and the Communist teams to Beijing, where they were put up in separate hotels. The headquarters itself was installed in the Beijing Union Medical College, which had been founded by American missionaries in 1906 and was mostly paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. The college, with its twenty stately brick buildings, had been largely abandoned during the Japanese occupation.

  Zhou Enlai signs the ceasefire agreement of January 23, 1946, as the Nationalist negotiator, Chang Chun, and George C. Marshall, President Truman’s special envoy to China, look on. (illustration credit 13)

  Almost immediately, both sides were complaining about truce violations by the other side. Zhou, talking to Marshall in Chungking on January 14, the day after the ceasefire proclamations, complained that government forces were marching on Zhifeng despite Chiang’s vow to leave the status of that city for later talks. Marshall replied that he’d had a personal assurance from Chiang that the government would abide by the ceasefire agreement and that Chiang would be in an “impossible situation” if he failed to do that. Most likely, Marshall said, the ongoing hostilities were “minor actions on a low level and could be straightened out by the Executive Headquarters.”

  Marshall cabled Byroade, who met in Beijing with Ye Jianying, a Long March veteran who was the Communist commissioner. There were a couple of tense days. The commissioners agreed to drop leaflets on the area the next day announcing the ceasefire. Byroade sent an American plane to Zhifeng to see if a truce team could land at the airport, which was reported badly damaged, but the plane failed to return and there had been no contact with the pilot, Lieutenant Estele I. Sims. The next day, another plane was sent, and that plane was able to make radio contact with Sims, who reported that he had been detained by the Russians and his plane interned because he did not have proper identification and no written orders describing his mission. It was the price of doing things so quickly without any past experience to serve as a guide.

  Byroade wanted to send a truce team to Zhifeng immediately, but Ye resisted, saying the Communist members of the team had not arrived yet. On January 16, an American plane was sent to Kalgan, which was in Communist hands, to transport the CCP truce team members to Beijing, where both the American and the government staff were waiting, but when the plane returned with fourteen Communists aboard, they turned out to be not truce team members but one general and thirteen bodyguards for Ye. The Communists, to the Americans’ irritation, also brought a cargo of propaganda brochures to be distributed to the population in Beijing. “It is obvious that General Ye does not want teams sent either to Zhifeng or Kalgan,” Robertson and Byroade reported to Marshall on the 17th, and they speculated that this was because the Communists were strong in both places. “All delays so far have been due to General Ye’s failure to furnish representatives.”

  But within days, the mechanism was up and running. Daily “trusums,” truce summaries, were being sent out by Byroade, who told Marshall, “Both sides are greatly exaggerating their claims of violations.” On January 21, two American journalists were able to get to Zhifeng, riding on the truce team plane. It was the first time American reporters had gotten into any place in Manchuria since the Soviet invasion five months before. Henry A. Lieberman of The New York Times gave a favorable description of the “weathered mud huts of a sprawling pastoral city,” occupied by friendly Russian soldiers in sheepskin coats, wool-trimmed hats, and felt boots. He quoted the Soviet commander saying he couldn’t wait to go home. Around the same time, Zhou in Chungking told interviewers
that the fighting was dying down.

  The mood was good. Madame Chiang showed up in Changchun, the Soviet occupation headquarters, bearing thirty thousand boxes of candy to give to Soviet troops as an expression of gratitude for their part in the defeat of Japan. “The fighting did stop,” Byroade said years later. “Goods and medicine started moving. A lot of sieges were lifted.” The three-man truce-monitoring teams were getting into the field. American newspapers quoted an official of the Executive Headquarters saying, “There is no longer any doubt that both parties want peace and will do everything within their power to attain it.”

  “Affairs are progressing rather favorably,” Marshall wrote to Truman on February 4, summarizing the developments of the previous few weeks.

  Early in March, Marshall took a three-thousand-mile trip through northern China to see the country’s disputed terrain for himself, the terrain now being roamed by three-man truce-monitoring teams, each of them headed by an American military officer. The high point of the trip was Yenan, where other American officials—including Service, Davies, Hurley, and Barrett—had preceded him, and where there was a face-to-face meeting with Mao. “Thousands stormed the field to get a glimpse of the five star ambassador whom the Communists regard as the leading personality in the present China peace,” Radio Yenan reported. “I was frank to an extreme,” Marshall wrote to Truman about his meeting with Mao, meaning that the Communists could have real American cooperation, including arms and training for their armed forces, but only if the Communists were sincere about following a peaceful path. Mao, Marshall said, “showed no resentment and gave me every assurance of cooperation.”

  Wherever Marshall went in Communist-controlled territory, he reported, his reception “was enthusiastic and in cities tumultuous.” And no wonder. Here was a great hero of the victory over Japan traveling to the remote headquarters that had been considered a bandit lair only a few months before. The greatest living American, as Truman had put it, was giving formal recognition to Yenan as a kind of capital, a seat of power that had to be taken into account. His visit to Yenan was an affirmation of the Communists’ new stature. They were participating in the PCC; they were full members of the Executive Headquarters and of the truce-monitoring teams that were spreading out on American airplanes all over China’s vast northeast. The American officers on these teams, Marshall noted to Truman, “have performed an amazing task,” which was “to dominate a region larger than Pennsylvania and bring factions who have been at war for 18 years to a peaceful understanding.”