China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  In February, after more marathon sessions of the Marshall mission, the two Chinese sides agreed to reduce the size of their armies, with the balance of forces heavily in favor of the national government. In all, there would be ninety KMT divisions (a full division was almost fourteen thousand officers and men) to only eighteen for the Communists. Starting in about eighteen months, the forces of the two sides would be combined into a single command. Both sides would give up their political commissars, so the armies would for the first time be nonpolitical, under the control of a government rather than a political party. Most remarkable perhaps—all of these provisions seemed remarkable—the Communists agreed to reduce their forces in Manchuria to a single army, compared to the thirty they had there at the time of the Marshall talks. Six armies would be allowed to the Nationalists.

  This was all too good to be true. The Communists appeared to have done what they had always maintained would be suicidal for them to do: allow government troops to move into areas where they were strong and give up control of their own armed forces. In fact, the evidence is strong that they never intended to do these things. On February 12, while the Marshall talks were heading into the home stretch, Mao told a meeting of the Politburo that “the United States and Chiang Kai-shek intend to eliminate us by way of nationwide military unification,” a comment indicating that Mao still saw military unification as surrender. “We want unification, but we do not want to be eliminated,” he continued. “In principle, we have to advocate national military unification; but, how we shall go about it should be decided according to the concrete circumstances of the time.”

  The statement was vague, but Mao appears to have wanted to reassure his colleagues in the Politburo that the military talks were mainly for show. Like his “scrap of paper” comment after his meetings with Chiang in the fall of 1945, he felt the actual agreement meant very little, because implementing it would be up to him. In Changchun, Chang Kia-ngau, Chiang’s representative in the economic talks taking place with the Soviets, was looking at the announced details of the ceasefire and the military integration agreements, and his reaction was prophetically skeptical. “The National Government evidently presumes that because the Northeast is an ‘exception,’ it can send troops to recover our sovereignty,” he wrote in his diary. But what the central government didn’t seem to know was that “owing to secret support from the Soviets, for a long time Chinese Communist armed forces there have grown in strength day by day.” Moreover, Chang observed, the Chinese Communists could easily get aid given Manchuria’s long border with Soviet Russia; the government’s lines were long and depended on a single rail line and two small ports. “I shudder,” Chang wrote, “as I view and ponder the future.”

  But that was a rare dark thought and a private thought at that. For the moment, the mood was buoyant. On February 9, three days before he told the Politburo that the military agreement was, in effect, another scrap of paper, Mao was singing a different tune to an American reporter. “Generally speaking,” he said, “China has stepped into a stage of democracy. Marshall’s effort to bring an end to the civil war, to facilitate peace, unity, and democracy is undeniably outstanding.”

  In March, Marshall went to Washington to report to Truman, who greeted him like the hero he was. The Chinese leaders “are succeeding in terminating the hostilities of the past twenty years,” Marshall said at a press conference. The two Chinese sides, he said, “are now engaged in the business of demobilizing vast military forces and integrating and unifying the remaining forces into a Central Army.”

  Marshall’s sincerity is not to be disputed. He was an honest man and a straight-talker, not given to glossing over difficulties. Mao was justly famous for his statement that power comes out of the barrel of a gun—his pithy argument for the Communist Party to have its own army and never to trust only in peaceful political struggle. But Marshall evidently really believed that the Communists would give up their independent military if they could be assured of a truly democratic system. “It was very remarkable,” he declared in his press conference, “how quickly we could straighten out what seemingly were impossible conditions and which had their tragic effect on the Chinese people.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  From Hope to Antagonism

  In March, while George Marshall was in the United States, things began to fall apart in China. He got back to Chungking in April and within a few weeks his reports to Truman were stripped of their earlier optimism. “The outlook is not promising,” he told the president in a letter of April 6. “I have found a complete break between the government and the Communists on the Manchurian question with hostilities increasing in intensity and threatening to spread south into China proper.”

  The Nationalists had embarked on an effort to defeat the Communists by sending their armies into Manchuria, and despite some initial success, in Marshall’s very expert opinion they were now in “a seriously weak and dangerous military position of which the Communists were fully aware and seized the advantage accordingly.” Marshall remembered the decision made at that White House meeting in December to continue to support Chiang even if his actions caused the peace talks to break down, but that did not lessen his dismay over the failure of the ceasefire to hold. Equally demoralizing, as the Communists got stronger they became more hostile to the United States. An American intelligence analysis in July concluded that between Marshall’s arrival at the end of 1945 and the outbreak of new hostilities in the spring, the CCP’s attitude toward the United States changed from “one of restrained hope to open antagonism.” Barring an increasingly unlikely “compromise arrangement,” Marshall said, there will be “utter chaos in North China to which the fighting will inevitably spread.”

  What went wrong?

  Initially Marshall believed that the fault lay with the central government and the faction that he called “the irreconcilables,” a group of generals who didn’t want to lose their privileged positions, and the group inside the KMT known as the CC clique, named after the brothers Chen Li-fu and Chen Kuo-fu, whom Chiang had known since before the revolution of 1911. Many of Chiang’s most important allies—his chief of staff, Ho Ying-chin, and Tai Li, his secret police chief—had been students at the Whampoa Military Academy in the early 1920s when Chiang was the school commandant. But Chen Li-fu and Chen Kuo-fu came from an even earlier time in Chiang’s life, when, shortly before the revolution of 1911, he returned to China from a military academy in Japan and joined the revolutionary forces that were striving to overthrow the Qing dynasty. The local revolutionary leader and military governor of Shanghai, Chen Chi-mei, became a patron of Chiang. The Chen brothers were Chen Chi-mei’s teenage nephews, who rose in the KMT’s ranks under Chiang’s tutelage until, years later, they became the powerful and undisputed leaders of the party’s vehemently anti-Communist right wing.

  Marshall believed that Chiang himself was both incorruptible and committed to the political liberalization that was being set into motion by the PCC, but that he was unable to control the far-right factions inside the KMT that were determined to sabotage it. There was plenty of evidence to substantiate this view. While the PCC was taking place, the Democratic League organized large meetings, with up to two thousand people attending, to discuss the events of the day, showing an admirable democratic fermentation taking place. But the meetings were disrupted by what an American diplomat reporting to Washington on these events called “organized hoodlums,” put up to the job by the Chen brothers—or at least that is what was suspected, though no proof was offered. There were ugly scenes, anonymous thugs pushing their way into peaceful discussions where they beat up prominent liberals. In late January, the Democratic League announced it would boycott future sessions of the PCC after the secret police searched the home of one of its delegates, though as things turned out, it didn’t follow through on that threat.

  In the annals of illiberal gangsterism, these incidents were relatively minor, but they left their mark. The historical record indica
tes two assassinations taking place during those months, which was two too many, though not a number corresponding to a generalized reign of terror. Not even the Communist press, always ready to publicize right-wing malfeasance, reported new political arrests in that spring of 1946 as the PCC did its work.

  Still, the antidemocratic actions of right-wing enforcers came at a delicate time when many political actors of the moment were looking for signs of sincerity on Chiang’s part. Many people remembered the white terror of the 1920s and 1930s, enforced by Tai Li’s Blue Shirts, when many opponents of Chiang’s regime were executed or jailed. The fact that much more systematic antiliberal brutality took place in other countries did not enhance the KMT’s reputation for trustworthiness at a time when trust was most needed. The incidents gave an opportunity to anti-KMT propagandists to portray the central government as “fascist,” a word that the Communist press began to use frequently.

  In late December, John K. Fairbank, who had been the head of the Office of War Information, was warning the State Department that “the most striking change” of the previous two years was the “final desertion of the Generalissimo” by the very American-educated Chinese whom the United States should most want to cultivate. “Liberals say they see no hope in his regime,” Fairbank said, and so the attempts to intimidate these same people in February and March could only have intensified that feeling.

  Perhaps more telling, as weeks went by after Chiang’s speech at the PCC, the promised release of political prisoners didn’t occur, or, at least, many opponents of the regime claimed that it didn’t occur. Radio Yenan complained bitterly and repeatedly about this. In January, the pro-Communist writer Guo Morou was beaten by police. In Chungking, anti-Soviet rallies were organized, American diplomats believed, by the CC clique and the offices of the pro-Communist New China Daily and the Democratic League’s Democratic Daily were ransacked. These acts of hooliganism prompted furious propaganda attacks by the Communists. “There are growing signs of violence,” Melby noted in his diary.

  Every night since the start of the PCC there have been big mass meetings to discuss the issues publicly. And at each one, groups of Tai Li police have heckled and thrown stones a little more than at the preceding one. The subject of political prisoners is getting particularly hot. Last Monday, the government promised to release them all in seven days, but there are repeated stories that many are being killed. Malaria, of which there is plenty here, is given as the cause of death.

  “Marshall,” Melby noted, “was becoming a very angry man—and perhaps a little discouraged” by these actions of the irreconcilables.

  The repression and right-wing hooliganism that took place in these early months of 1946 have been cited as milestones in the decline of Chiang’s domestic standing. But not all of these events, and certainly not the biggest of them, the anti-Soviet demonstrations taking place in cities across China, were hooliganism. These appear, on the contrary, to have been patriotic reactions to Soviet behavior in Manchuria. The Soviets had promised to evacuate China’s northeast on February 1, but they did not do so. On February 11, on the one-year anniversary of the Yalta talks, the world’s newspapers revealed the details of the secret agreement between Stalin and Roosevelt by which the Soviets had obtained special neocolonialist privileges in Manchuria. This was no doubt galling to many Chinese who had come to believe that the era when foreign countries robbed China of its sovereign pride was over. Thirty-one years earlier, in 1915, furious, patriotically aroused Chinese students had held massive demonstrations to protest the list of twenty-one demands that Japan had made on the country. Those demands included things like control of the South Manchurian Railroad and extended leases on the ports of Dalian and Port Arthur—virtually identical to the privileges given the Soviets at Yalta. The Twenty-One Demands included a phrase establishing Japan’s “predominant position” in Manchuria; at Yalta, the Soviets’ “preeminent interests” were assured. It is not surprising, especially given this comparison, that the non-Communist Chinese reaction was strong and unfavorable.

  “Now that China has paid the price,” an editorial in the independent Ta Kung Pao declared, referring to the price China was expected to pay in Manchuria, “we hope that she will not be required to pay any more.” The New York Times reported from Chungking that every newspaper in the city, except for the Communist New China Daily, “including many which sympathized with the Communists in the past, have joined not only in sharp criticism of Russian policy but also in a campaign to compel the Chinese government to draw back the curtain behind which events in Manchuria have been hidden.” On February 22, ten thousand students in Chungking took to the streets in a mass demonstration. There were simultaneous demonstrations in Hankou, Beijing, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Qingdao. Perhaps, as some suspected, it was the CC clique that called them to action, but there is no more reason to doubt the sincerity of the marchers than there is to doubt the patriotism of the demonstrators of 1915. The students in Chungking carried slogans like “The USSR = Germany + Japan,” and “Stalin = Hitler + Hirohito.” In Shanghai students massed in front of the Soviet consulate shouting “Get out of Manchuria.” At least one demonstrator carried a large portrait of Stalin with the Chinese character for “snake” drawn across it. It was during these demonstrations that the offices of the New China Daily and Democracy Daily were ransacked.

  The Communists blamed the KMT secret police for the attacks on the newspapers and on liberal intellectuals, but Liberation Daily and Radio Yenan showed no sympathy for the student demands that the Soviets get out of Manchuria or that they desist from stripping the region of its industries and power plants. While the students were marching, the New China Daily denied that the Communists had gotten any help from the Soviets, claiming that Communist “underground fighters” had been active in Manchuria for fourteen years. Chang Kia-ngau in Changchun wrote in his diary of a visit he made to Kangde Palace, the edifice where the Japanese had installed the last emperor of China, Henry Pu-yi, as the puppet emperor of Manchukuo—Kangde being the reign name he was given. The palace had been raided by the Soviet Red Army and stripped by the Russian soldiers of just about everything, even its lightbulbs. The library, Chang wrote, was “littered with crates for books and paintings.… The looters had taken away scrolls and paintings and calligraphy” after tearing off the cylindrical pieces of wood fixed to the bottom of Chinese scrolls so they can be properly weighted for hanging.

  Around the same time as Chang’s visit to the former emperor’s home, a Chinese technocrat named Chang Hsing-fu, the deputy head of the Bureau of Industry and Mines of the central government, made a trip to the coal mines near the city of Fushun. His purpose was to reestablish Chinese ownership of the mines, and he traveled in the company of a Soviet counterpart, along with seven Chinese engineers and a contingent of railway police to take control. When the party arrived, the Soviets disarmed the railway police. They told Chang Hsing-fu that his delegation would not be allowed to take over the mines and that they should leave Fushun immediately. The Chinese accordingly boarded a train to return to Changchun. A platoon of Soviet guards rode in a different car. When the train reached the station at Li-shih-chai, twenty-five kilometers from Fushun, Eighth Route Army soldiers boarded it, dragged off Chang and the seven engineers accompanying him, stripped them of their clothing, and bayoneted them to death.

  When word of these murders reached the Chinese government, the Chinese vice chief of staff complained to the Soviet general in charge of the Changchun area, Lieutenant General Yefim Trotsenko, who replied that the incident was the fault of the Chinese side because it had failed to notify the Soviet army general headquarters of Chang Hsing-fu’s impending trip. The Chinese officer, evidently astonished at this parry of his complaint, noted that Chang had been traveling in the company of a Soviet official and that the platoon of Soviet guards riding the train at the time of the attack did nothing to prevent it. General Trotsenko’s reply was not recorded, but Chang Kia-ngai was certain of the meanin
g of the incident. It demonstrated that the Soviets would not allow China to restore sovereignty over the Fushun mines before “the question of economic cooperation has been settled.” And by “economic cooperation,” Chang meant China’s acquiescence in the Soviet demand that virtually all large-scale industries in Manchuria be run jointly by the Soviets and the Chinese. The thuggery taking place in Chungking on behalf of the KMT was more than matched by the collaborative thuggery of the Chinese Communists and their Russian sponsors, but it seems to have been less noted.

  It is perhaps not surprising that the Chinese Communists declined to protest the Soviets’ presence in Manchuria, their economic demands, the further, unexplained delay in the withdrawal of their troops, or even the theft of paintings and calligraphy from the Kangde Palace. Mao did not want to offend Stalin. Instead, the Communists focused their ire on Chiang, on the KMT right wing, and eventually on the American “imperialists” for their aid to the central government—never mind that the United States had given up its extraterritorial rights in China in 1943 and that, along with the British recapture of Hong Kong, the most conspicuous “imperialist” behavior in China was that of the Soviet Union.