China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  It will always be a matter of speculation whether in agreeing to a truce at just the moment when his forces seemed to have taken the initiative Chiang lost the best chance he ever had to defeat the Communists once and for all on the battlefield. Marshall didn’t think so, and the weight of the argument seems to be on his side. The Communists were outgunned by the American-equipped government armies, but time nonetheless favored them if it came to a long campaign, as it always had in the past. The Communists enjoyed their long border with the Soviet Union through which Stalin could have provided Mao both with refuge if necessary and with a supply of arms. The government’s forces, as Marshall put it, were overextended and dispersed, their supply lines endlessly long and subject to harassment by the Communist guerrillas in Shaanxi and Hebei provinces. Moreover, as the government attacked in Manchuria, the Communists were able to press for more gains south of the wall, notably in Shandong, where their troops were on the outskirts of Qingdao.

  Chiang had seemed to have the Communists in his hands so many times. He forced them into the Long March after his “bandit extermination” campaigns in Jiangxi province in the early 1930s. Then, in 1936, he seemed to be on the verge of wiping out the ragged remnants of the Long March, but he was stopped by the Japanese invasion and the demand of the Chinese nation that he ally himself with his mortal domestic foe in order to defend the country against the non-Chinese one. And now, once again, victory over Mao would elude him.

  The United States would help him to a considerable extent with both money and arms, but that help was never unlimited. Following the temporary loss of Changchun in April, Chiang asked the United States to transport two more Chinese armies to the Manchurian battlefield. Marshall refused, explaining to Truman that the Americans had already transported 228,000 government troops and that to move more “would be tantamount to supporting under the existing circumstances, a civil war.” Marshall didn’t want, as he put it, “to leave [the Chinese government] in the lurch,” but he also didn’t want to encourage Chiang in an all-out effort to conquer Manchuria, which he believed to be a losing proposition. At the same time, Marshall detailed his plans to reduce the marine detachments in several northern ports and Beijing from a total of 55,000 men to 28,000 by the summer, even though the marines were needed to provide transportation and safety to the Executive Headquarters in Beijing and to the truce-monitoring teams it continued to send to numerous places in North China. Marshall also had talks with Zhou Enlai about the American training of Communist troops, which was supposed to take place once the military reorganization plan went into effect.

  In short, Marshall persisted in an effort to maintain some degree of evenhandedness in the Chinese civil war, a kind of biased neutrality by which the United States fulfilled its obligations to China’s central government without writing what Chiang’s American critics termed a blank check. The talks went on, but mainly as a device with which the Chinese sides strove to appear to be the parties of peace even as war once again engulfed their country. Blame can be put on both sides, but it was the Communist attack on Changchun that made the civil war in China unstoppable. It is a matter of speculation whether Chiang would have been amenable to a political settlement even if that attack had not taken place; but once it did, he no longer had any reason to believe that anything other than force would resolve China’s divisions.

  Meanwhile, Communist propaganda can be used to trace the decision by the Communists to drop the pretense of friendly intentions toward the United States and to identify America as China’s enemy number one.

  This came very rapidly. In February 1946 Radio Yenan was broadcasting heartwarming accounts of Sino-American cooperation, as in a report from Weixian in Shandong province about a memorial service for an American airman who had died the previous May when his plane was shot down by Japanese antiaircraft fire. The radio painted a touching picture of wreaths decorating the site of the memorial and of messages sent “by various circles of the liberated areas.” The magistrate of Weixian conducted the service, the radio reported, “and made [a] speech hoping that Chinese-American friendship will last forever.”

  In early March, just before Marshall’s visit to Yenan, the Liberation Daily praised his “brilliant achievements,” saying that his “warm welcome by the Chinese people lies in the fact that the direction of his efforts accords with the basic interests of the Chinese people and the basic interests of the American people and world peace.” Then, of course, there were Mao’s well-publicized words of appreciation, his vow “wholeheartedly to abide by all the agreements,” his references to “the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,” and to “American friends.”

  Four weeks later came the renewal of verbal attacks on the United States, and with them the renewal of a tone of grievance and obfuscation that was to be a feature of Communist propaganda thereafter—“renewal” because in many respects these new attacks mirrored the Communists’ strenuous objections to the arrival of the marines in North China the previous fall. On April 4, 1946, the CCP newspapers carried angry reports that American warplanes had strafed Communist positions in Szepingkai, an important railroad junction south of Changchun. One of these planes was shot down, and, the Communist press reported, an American pilot was found in the wreckage, which proved that “American planes and officers have openly participated in the unscrupulous acts of KMT troops.” Marshall ordered an investigation of these charges and found that no American airplanes had been in the vicinity of Szepingkai, ever. When Zhou Enlai was presented with this finding, the Communist press printed a retraction, admitting that the dead pilot was a Chinese wearing an American uniform, and his features had been mangled so badly that his identity was mistaken.

  Still, the Communists’ initial accusation that the United States was taking part in military action against the Communists was telling, and, in any case, the critical drumbeat continued. The Communist press published repeated reports on intellectuals affiliated with China’s various democratic parties calling on the United States to stop transporting government troops and opposing proposed American loans to the Chinese government, on the grounds that they would “bring disaster to the Chinese people.” In May, the Yenan broadcasts included a different argument: that American aid to the government was undermining Marshall’s role as an impartial mediator, which may in its way have been true, but American aid to the government was allowed in the agreements that Mao had vowed “wholeheartedly” to follow. With fighting picking up, Radio Yenan argued, “it is an undeniable fact that American aid is one of the important factors aggravating the Manchurian civil war today.” The radio made no mention of Soviet aid to the Communists or the possibility that such aid made Mao less likely to come to a political agreement with the KMT.

  Radio Yenan, June 5:

  American forces also organized air and naval forces for these Chinese civil war instigators. They supplied them with a vast number of planes, war vessels, bazookas, artillery, tanks, gasoline and all the necessary war materials … it is only too obvious that without such vast aid, the Chinese reactionary clique would never have been able to carry on large-scale civil war.… Such military intervention by the US is not devoid of imperialistic designs. The day may even dawn when the [Kuomintang reactionaries] might find America demanding military bases and political and economic rights from China, thereby degrading China as a protectorate or colony of America.

  Never mind that the advantages the imperialist Americans would hypothetically demand were precisely the same as the advantages that the Soviets had actually seized for themselves, without Chinese Communist objections, in Manchuria.

  Also in June, Marshall, who had been exempt from Communist criticism, came under personal attack, a trend that resulted later in the use of the boilerplate expression “the Truman-Marshall clique” to refer to the supposed reactionary faction within the United States that wanted to establish imperialist rule in China. Marshall, the press reported, could have stopped the government from moving new troops into th
e battle for Manchuria, but he didn’t. In fact, as we’ve seen, Marshall had rejected Chiang’s request for more government troops to be moved to Manchuria, and he was ordering a reduction in the size of the marine deployment.

  On June 7, in Liberation Daily: “Never in the past hundred years of the history of China has imperialistic intervention in Chinese internal affairs, and the naked suppression of the Chinese movement to attain freedom and democracy, reached its present scale.”

  That statement is striking in its degree of hyperbole. In a century that included the Opium War, the Anglo-French Expedition of the mid-nineteenth century, the turn-of-the-century suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, the resulting indemnity imposed on China, then the seizure of Taiwan and Manchuria by Japan, followed by the full-scale Japanese invasion of 1937, it was ridiculous to present American military assistance to the internationally recognized government of China as the worst-ever imperialist intervention in Chinese affairs. Most important from the American point of view at the time, the intensifying tone of anger illustrated the Communists’ turn to an unremitting anti-American hostility that the United States could do little to change. In August, the propaganda blamed Marshall one more time for failing to stop what Radio Yenan called “the aggravation of China’s civil war,” when, as Marshall pointed out, the Communists were making their contribution to that aggravation, including their seizure of Changchun in March and an offensive they mounted in Shandong in June. When toward the end of the year Marshall began suggesting to Truman that there was no longer any reason for his mediation effort to continue, he cited the “vicious Communist propaganda of misrepresentation and bitter attacks” as a principal reason.

  Marshall understood that these expressions of aggrieved animosity, “full of inaccurate statements” as they were, marked the definitive end of Communist good faith in the effort to avert a civil war. For reasons of public relations, they would keep talking, but they would also keep fighting. They knew that the civil war they pretended not to want was already under way and was going to be fought to a finish. Their public animosity toward the United States and their portrayal of the central government as the “lackey” of an imperialist foreign power were integral parts of the strategy by which they intended to achieve victory.

  On July 29 at a place called Anping, on the road between Tianjin and Beijing, an incident took place that fully exposed the Communist strategy. There, Communist forces ambushed a convoy carrying supplies for the Executive Headquarters, the group that continued in its heroically futile way to monitor compliance with KMT-CCP agreements, as well as for the United Nations Relief and Recovery Administration (UNRRA), which had begun its humanitarian mission in China. Like all such convoys, this one was guarded by a platoon of American marines, and when shots rang out from behind the trees and farmhouses along the side of the Beijing–Tianjin road, three of them were killed and twelve were wounded. According to Marshall’s later account of this incident, the Communists “privately admitted” that their forces had carried out the assault, but in public, they furiously blamed the central government, accusing it of killing the marines in order to frame the Communists and further their insidious plan to engulf the country in civil war.

  When Marshall informed Zhou Enlai of the attack, Zhou’s response was to ask for an investigation, and Marshall agreed, though from a reading of the American military’s reports, he felt there was no question about what had occurred. The Communists had resumed sniping at American troops in an effort to induce them to withdraw. When the investigation began, Marshall said, the Communist member of the team obstructed it with procedural demands, angry speeches lasting hours, refusals to allow witnesses to testify, then further procedural demands when the old ones had been satisfied, and, when all else failed, simply not showing up at scheduled meetings.

  “It was a repetition of the familiar Communist pattern of seizing upon some incident, justifiably or otherwise, and embroidering thereon without regard to truth and accuracy to form the basis for an almost hysterical campaign of vituperation,” Marshall concluded wearily.

  The Anping incident was a rather small one in the long history of warfare and slaughter in East Asia, but it was telling nonetheless. The Communists had mounted an attack and then used it in a propaganda campaign, utterly unhinged from the truth, whose purpose was to portray the United States as an imperialist enemy. This was to be the pattern for the next twenty-six years, during which tens of thousands of Chinese and American young men were killed in wars that needn’t have taken place.

  EPILOGUE

  The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution

  When the police came in the middle of the night, Mei Zhi and her husband, China’s most famous literary critic, Hu Feng, couldn’t bear to tell their three children they were about to be arrested. They said instead that guests had arrived; they put their two boys and a girl to bed and kissed them good night. Then they were taken away.

  Mei, a writer of essays, poems, and children’s stories, was released from prison six years later, and even then she was given a “rightist hat,” as the Chinese expression had it, meaning that she was infected with thoughts associated with the capitalist class, and she was forced to undergo political reeducation to have it removed. Hu Feng, a founding member of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in the early 1930s and a leader of the anti-Japanese patriotic movement, was buried in the Chinese prison system for almost all of the next twenty-five years, during which he refused to confess to his “crimes,” on the grounds, he said later, that he hadn’t committed any. Hu’s offense was to have written and circulated a long, instantly notorious essay in which he criticized China’s new rulers for imposing restrictions on art and culture. This offense led Mao Zedong to declare him the leader of a “counterrevolutionary clique,” and Mao had decreed that “counterrevolutionaries are trash; they are vermin.” In 1979, three years after Mao’s death, Hu was released from prison, and three years after that, he was officially exonerated. But he had been destroyed physically and mentally. He sank into a tortured madness and died in 1985.

  Hu was one of several of the prominent Chinese scholars, writers, and academics whom we have referenced in these pages, examples of Chinese intellectuals whose public disillusionment with Chiang and the KMT helped to turn the tide of public opinion against them and in favor of the lesser-known Communists. They were of different persuasions. Some, like Hu, were convinced Marxists; others were western-educated liberals. All of them, like other intellectuals the world over, fell under the sway of Communism, with its satisfying certainties and its claim to embody the progressive yearnings of all humankind, except the capitalist/imperialist enemy. In China, as elsewhere, from Cuba to Czechoslovakia, the appeal was enhanced by the corruption, nastiness, and ineffectiveness of the central government. Without much knowledge of the workings of Communism in practice, many Chinese intellectuals enthusiastically welcomed Mao and his armies when they came to power in 1949.

  It was risky to do what they did. To belong to a pro-Communist organization, like the League of Left-Wing Writers, or simply to criticize Chiang and the KMT was to risk imprisonment and torture. Nonetheless, except for a few among them who did suffer grieviously and, in some cases, mortally for their beliefs, most of the anti-KMT dissidents were able to keep their jobs and to do their work, publishing stories, poems, and essays, teaching, and, as we’ve seen in the case of Ma Yinchu, expressing their views in public meetings.

  Then, after the Communist Party took power in mainland China in 1949, virtually all of these men and women who had looked to Mao for China’s new beginning were savagely persecuted, punished for demonstrating the very in-dependence of mind that had led them to favor the Communists years before. In some instances, like those of Mei Zhi and Hu Feng, their lives were utterly destroyed. Others endured long periods of criticism and public humiliation but were eventually able to restore some semblance of normal life. Their treatment illustrated one of the chief features of Mao’s twenty-seven years of rule:
the compulsion of the man known as the Great Helmsman to track down and eradicate enemies within. In a grim imitation of Joseph Stalin, Mao and his loyal lieutenants, most important of them Kang Sheng, now head of the powerful Public Security Bureau, purged former comrades-in-arms, determined now to have been counter-revolutionaries all along. For more ordinary people, writers, poets, professors, people who had studied in the United States, people to whom the imprecise sobriquet “bourgeois” could be applied, they elaborated a system of ideological purification, complete with its own sprawling gulag and its own methods of physical and psychological torture and intimidation. The methods used during the Rectification Campaign of 1942–44, which was already Stalinism with a Chinese flavor, were reemployed in the new persecutions: total isolation, the separation of the prisoner from family and friends and from any source of emotional support or legal help, and the mobilization of all the tools of the totalitarian state—the press, the propaganda apparatus, the howling mobs—to persecute the defenseless ideological victim.

  The Chinese literary critic Hu Feng and his wife, Mei Zhi. Hu was a prominent Marxist critic of the Chinese Nationalists during the war and among the first victims of a Maoist purge after the Communists took power.