On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  From V-J Day to the time that I arrived in Yenan, apart from the latest transfer of surplus war matériel, the United States had provided the Nationalist government with more than $800 million in military aid under the 1941 Lend-Lease Act. This included funds for the transport in September 1945 by the U.S. Air Force of three Nationalist armies to cities in East and North China to take the surrender of the Japanese forces. At that time, the Nationalists possessed an estimated five-to-one superiority over the Communists in combat troops, a practical monopoly of modern heavy equipment and transport, as well as an unopposed air force. The bulk of Japanese military equipment, enough to arm forty divisions, had fallen to the Nationalists in the regions below the Great Wall. By the end of December 1945, under Lend-Lease, the United States was completing delivery of equipment for thirty-nine army divisions and twenty-five air force squadrons. Although the war against the Japanese had been fought based on the concept of a United Front of the Nationalists and Communists, Chiang had vetoed American plans to provide aid to Mao Zedong’s forces. The Communists were scheduled to receive equipment for the training of ten divisions as part of the creation of a new national army of sixty divisions, but the Generalissimo refused to allow the delivery of any of this equipment prior to the integration of the Communist troops into his own forces. As a consequence, the Communists never received any aid from the United States. As noted in the State Department’s White Paper on China: “With respect to the United States military aid programs, General Marshall was placed in the untenable position of mediating on the one hand between the two Chinese groups while on the other hand the United States government was continuing to supply arms and ammunition to one of the groups, namely the Nationalist Government.”

  Prior to the November collapse of the Marshall negotiations in Chungking, the Communists had high hopes for some kind of understanding and material aid from the United States. Mao saw the Marshall mission as the insurer of his party’s interests in any coalition arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek. In February, in an interview in Yenan granted John Roderick of the Associated Press, Mao had praised President Truman, saying that he had made a major contribution to Sino-American friendship. In his book Covering China, Roderick quoted Mao as having said that he stood ready to form a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek and to demonstrate goodwill he would hold his own socialist program in abeyance. He said that China must have a long period of peace in which to rebuild its war-torn economy and during that time there could be controlled capitalism and socialist democracy in order to create the economic and financial base for socialism. By professing this moderate approach, Mao obviously was reaching out to Truman in much the same way that he had sought an accommodation with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt who had put an end to the isolation of the Yenan government. Acting on a recommendation of John Paton Davies, a Foreign Service officer at General Stillwell’s headquarters, Roosevelt in February 1944 messaged the Generalissimo stating that he wished to send an observer group to the Communist areas to facilitate the flow of intelligence information about Japanese operations in North China and Manchuria. The Generalissimo reluctantly gave his qualified assent, and on July 22, 1944, the U.S. Army Observer Group, commanded by Colonel David D. Barrett, and comprising both military personnel and State Department officers, landed in Yenan. Arrival of the Observer Group was a historic event in that it opened Mao’s blockaded headquarters to international contacts, a succession of journalists, and any other visitors he saw fit to invite. The only prior official American contact had been that of Captain Evans Carlson, the famed U.S. Marine leader in Burma of Carlson’s Raiders, who in 1938 had dodged Japanese troops to make an arduous overland trip to Yenan. The Observer Group collected and transmitted intelligence on Japanese operations and reported on Communist military and political activities. Relations were close with Mao and other Communist leaders who occasionally visited the Observer quarters to be entertained by American movies. Films starring Charlie Chaplin and the Laurel and Hardy comic twosome were favorites. Huang Hua served initially as Mao’s liaison to the group.

  In January 1945, Mao used the Observer Group to make his first direct approach to Washington. He had resisted suggestions by Stalin that he oust the Americans from Yenan. In early January, Colonel Barrett was reassigned to the China Combat Command in Kunming, and his subordinate, Major Ray Cromley, an air force intelligence officer, became the acting chief of the Observer Group. On January 10, at the request of Zhou Enlai, Cromley sent a message to General Albert C. Wedemeyer, commander of the China Theater Headquarters in Chungking, for relay to Washington. It proposed a visit to Washington by a Communist mission. Cromley’s message stated: “Mao and Zhou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at the White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.” If no invitation was forthcoming, Mao asked that the proposal remain secret. In proposing the visit to Washington, Mao intended to put forward the Communist position as regards his negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek. He was also seeking military and economic aid in the war against the Japanese.

  In talks with John Service of the State Department and other members of the Observer Group, Mao had not hidden his political agenda. He was willing to enter into a coalition government with Chiang’s Kuomintang, as long as he retained a measure of military and economic autonomy in the provinces he presently controlled. It was his undisguised conviction that eventually his party would become the sovereign power based on “the will of the people.” Mao may have thought that he had an opening to the president. When Roosevelt was reelected in November 1944, Mao sent him a congratulatory message. Roosevelt replied that he looked forward to “vigorous cooperation with all the Chinese forces” against the common enemy, Japan. Mao was fascinated by American technological achievements and economic power, and Cromley had the impression he was thinking of the possibility of negotiating a long-term trade and technical assistance arrangement for the regions under his control. Mao, like Liu Shaoqi and later Zhou Enlai, the latter two in conversations with me, dwelled on the theme that China and the United States were natural economic partners, indicating that the Chinese had no desire to be solely dependent on aid from the Soviet Union. A Washington visit would have been Mao’s first trip abroad.

  In April 1946, the Observer Group was reduced in size, and Cromley departed puzzled by the lack of a reply to Mao’s message. There was still no reply when I arrived in Yenan and was told about Mao’s overture. Cromley, who eventually returned to his prewar job as a Pentagon reporter for the Wall Street Journal, did not get an explanation until 1972. Barbara Tuchman, the distinguished American historian, after learning from members of the Observer Group about the secret Mao message to Roosevelt, located the pertinent memoranda in official American files, had the papers declassified, and wrote an article about the exchanges in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations. She found that in the absence of General Wedemeyer, who was on a visit to Burma, the Mao message had gone directly to the American ambassador in Chungking, Patrick J. Hurley, an Oklahoma businessman appointed by Roosevelt. The ambassador was new to Chinese politics and had quarreled with Mao in a fumbled attempt to negotiate with the Communist leader on a coalition government. The ambassador also by chance saw a message on the following day from Zhou Enlai asking Wedemeyer not to reveal Mao’s message to Hurley, since he did not “trust his discretion.” Hurley, an ardent support of Chiang Kai-shek, had held up the Mao message. He accused the members of the Observer Group, particularly Colonel Barrett and John Service, of plotting on behalf of the Communists behind his back to the detriment of the Nationalist government. Apart from the secretive transmission of Mao’s message, the ambassador cited in particular a contact with the Communists made by Colonel Barrett. On instructions of Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, General Robert B. McClure, Barrett had approached the Communists to ask their cooperation in a projected American milit
ary operation. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a paratroop division was to be sent to China to take part in an attack on the Japanese islands. The operation involved the establishment by the parachute division of a northeastern beachhead on the China coast in Shantung Province which was under the control of the Communist general Chen Yi. The Communists were asked to provide the initial logistic support when the paratroopers landed. Barrett was assured by the Communists that they would cooperate, although the colonel came away from the exploratory talks not sure that the Communists had the logistical capability to fully support such an operation involving twenty-eight thousand American troops. The Barrett approach to the Communists had not been cleared with Hurley, although the colonel had been assured by McClure this had been done. When I met Barrett years later, he was still bitter about Hurley’s complaint, which had also led to quashing his projected promotion to brigadier general.

  Roosevelt became aware on January 14, 1944, of the Mao proposal but only vaguely in the context of a message from Hurley in which the ambassador strongly advised the president against military cooperation with the Communists, which he said would be destructive of the Nationalist government and American policy in China. Seeking a solution to the China deadlock and acting on Hurley’s advice, rather than inviting Mao, Roosevelt decided to attempt to persuade Stalin to lend his support to the Nationalist government, believing this would pressure the Communists to enter a coalition government with Chiang. At the Yalta Conference, which opened on February 4, Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill entered into a secret agreement with Stalin under which he would sign a Treaty of Alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Stalin received in return concessions in Manchuria and, in disregard of traditional Chinese territorial claims, recognition of the so-called independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic (Outer Mongolia, formerly a part of the Chinese empire, whose government, established in 1924, was subservient to the Kremlin). It was the first move by the Soviet dictator in a double game for expansion of Soviet power in Asia which dismayed not only Chiang Kai-shek but also Mao. In March, Mao and Zhou were still expressing to members of the Observer Group their desire for cooperation with the United States, but the channel closed with Roosevelt’s death the next month. Truman made no effort to follow up, despite Mao’s fulsome praise of him as a friend of China. At Hurley’s instigation, the China specialists of the embassy staff and those attached to Wedemeyer’s military command, who had differed with the ambassador on policy, were sent home. At a critical juncture in the formulation of China policy, the U.S. government was thus deprived of the advice of its most experienced State Department officers, experts such as John Service and John Paton Davies. Hurley effectively closed the sole channel of communication between Mao and Washington.

  Barbara Tuchman contended that, if the channel had not been closed and had Roosevelt extended an invitation to Mao and reached an understanding with him, the Chinese Civil War might have been ended at once. She also concluded:

  If, in the absence of ill feeling, we had established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and suspicion of us to make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have been no Korean War. From that war rose the twin specters of an expansionist Chinese Communism and an indivisible Sino-Soviet partnership. Without those two concepts to addle statesmen and nourish demagogues, our history, and our present and our future, would have been different. We might have never come to Vietnam.

  I concur with Tuchman in her thesis that a Korean War might have been averted, or at least that Mao might not have undertaken the massive Chinese military intervention so destructive to General Douglas MacArthur’s forces. The approach to Roosevelt presented one of several opportunities to open a channel between the Communists and Washington, which, if materialized, could have resulted in an exchange that would have had a bearing on the course and duration of the Indochina wars, given the influence that Mao was able to exert as the principal foreign supporter and donor of military aid to the Indochinese Communists. In 1949, I reported from Communist-occupied Nanking on the last such opportunity, which was never exploited, prior to the Nixon visit to China in 1972. At the time of the visit, the United States was still locked with China in the costly decades-long military stalemate in Korea and the Nixon administration had decided to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in keeping with the policy of “Vietnamization,” the turning over of all combat ground operations to the South Vietnamese army.

  Several days after my dinner with the Communist leadership, Liu Shaoqi granted me a lengthy interview at the Wangchiap’ing military compound on the floor of the valley, which housed party and army offices. We met at a rough, long table on wooden saws about which were seated other members of the Central Committee. They were lean men dressed in black caps and loosely fitted cotton tunics, deeply bronzed by years in the field resisting the Japanese and battling the Nationalists. Liu, a gaunt gray-haired man, about forty-seven years old—his precise age was never made public—smoked his Great Wall cigarettes continually during my interview, and his frequent cough was indicative of his tubercular condition. Regarded as the most likely successor to Mao, Liu was second only to Mao as the leading theoretician of the party. He was the author of the core text How to Be a Good Communist, based on a series of lectures he had given in Yenan in 1939. He had studied earlier in Moscow at the University of the Toilers of the East.

  Speaking through a translator, Liu told me that China must pass through a stage of “New Democracy” on the road to socialism and Communism. He said socialism was still something for the “rather far future.” Perhaps it was for the American ear, but he professed to be an admirer of the revolutionary changes carried out by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, adding that China was learning from their experience. To build an economic and social foundation for the attainment of socialism, he said, the Communist Party was reaching out to all sectors of Chinese society and democratic groups. He said the aim was to “unite China under correct leadership into an independent, democratic, peaceful, and prosperous nation.” In the new China envisioned by Liu, obviously the “correct leadership” would be that of the Communist Party.

  In his comments Liu was borrowing from Mao’s essays in On New Democracy, published in 1940, and On Coalition Government, a further elaboration of the concept of New Democracy, which was published in 1945. I was presented with a copy of the latter, issued in coarse grass paper, in which Mao said the “New Democracy” he envisioned would be valid for “several dozens of years.” In fact, twenty years later, reporting from Hong Kong on the Cultural Revolution, I detailed how Mao had abandoned the concept of embracing diverse sectors of Chinese society including democratic groups and turned to the rigid Stalinist strategy of eliminating any potential opposition through class struggle.

  When in Yenan I was told that the “New Democracy” was already being practiced in the principal Communist base territory, the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region, of which Yenan was the capital. In the land reform program, landlords with small landholdings who were deemed enlightened and cooperative were tolerated as well as so-called middle peasants, the comparatively well-off farmers who tilled their own land. However, I learned later that with the intensification of the Civil War, the Central Committee had embarked on a more radical agrarian policy. To secure its hold on contested rural regions, the Central Committee had in May 1944 issued a decree that sanctioned more extensive redistribution of landlord holdings to gain the more active support of poorer peasants, who made up the majority of the rural population. In subsequent travel in regions occupied by the Communists, I came upon cases where local Communist cadres had gone beyond the license of the May mandate and were violently disenfranchising landlords of their land and other possessions. The poor peasants, in gratitude for the gifts of the confiscated land, repaid the PLA with army recruits, provision of supplies often deli
vered on their backs, and other support in military operations.

  At the interview in the Wangchiap’ing compound, I asked Liu Shaoqi if he would be looking to the Soviet Union for large-scale aid and diplomatic backing. Around the table there were quick exchanges of glances and secretive smiles and only ambiguous replies. Manifest was their discomfort about the extraordinary double game that Stalin was playing out in Manchuria. This ambiguity in relations would escalate in the next years to violent confrontation.

  Stalin’s power play began on August 9, 1945, in the last days of World War II, when he declared war on Japan. His troops invaded Manchuria and accepted the surrender of the Kwangtung Army, consisting of 400,000 Japanese troops and 275,000 Chinese puppet troops of the satellite Manchukuo state established by the Japanese in 1932. On August 14, in keeping with the secret agreement at Yalta, Stalin concluded a Treaty of Alliance with Chiang Kai-shek recognizing his regime as the sole legitimate government of China. Truman had strongly urged the Nationalists to sign such a treaty, as the president recounted in his memoirs, because he felt it essential to bring the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, a move he thought, by shortening the war, would spare the lives of thousands of American soldiers. In return for signing the treaty with the Chiang Kai-shek government and entry into the war against Japan, Stalin gained control in Manchuria of the commercial port of Dairen; use of Port Arthur, known in Chinese as Lüshun, as a naval base; and joint control of the key Eastern and South Manchurian railways. Alarmed by the Soviet treaty with the Nationalist government, a Communist delegation headed by Liu Shaoqi traveled to Moscow to plead for renewal of Stalin’s support. The Soviet Union was seen as the only possible source of support to balance what Washington was providing Chiang Kai-shek. The Soviet dictator, fulfilling his trade-off with Chiang Kai-shek, advised Liu to pursue a political strategy akin to that of the European Communist parties. He urged Liu to enter into a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek but also suggested that compromise would give the Communists time to consolidate their forces for any future contention with the Nationalists. Pressured by Stalin, Mao reluctantly went to Chungking on August 28, 1945, to negotiate with Chiang. He returned ailing and exhausted to Yenan on October 11 after the negotiations with Chiang deadlocked.