China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (50 page)

Mao felt that, if all went well, the massive entry of the Soviet army into the eastern front would have the same result as its entry into
Poland, where Stalin had engineered a Communist takeover using methods that would be replicated, more or less, in
China. John Davies agreed. “If the Red Army enters North China,” he wrote, “
it should not be surprising if those sympathetic to the U.S. were liquidated and American aid and cooperation effectively obstructed or eliminated.” Wherever the Red Army has gone, he noted, “Russian political domination has followed.” In Poland, Stalin had agreed at
Yalta for the eventual holding of free elections; in the meantime, a provisional coalition government representing all major Polish political factions would be established. One such faction was the non-Communist government-in-exile, which,
though based in London, contributed tens of thousands of troops to Allied military operations in Western Europe. The other main faction was the pro-Soviet Polish Committee of National Liberation, which Stalin had set up in Lublin, the first city in eastern Poland that Russian troops seized from the retreating Germans. As Soviet troops moved across the country, pushing the retreating Germans ahead of them, the Lublin group was allowed to take over the administration of the country and the non-Communist members of the coalition were pushed aside, ignored, or imprisoned. In March 1945, under the pretext of holding a meeting on Poland’s political arrangements, the Soviets lured sixteen non-Communist Poles to Lublin, where they were arrested, brought to Moscow for trial, and sent to prison in Siberia. Stalin’s clever and ruthless strategy resulted in the replacement of the Nazi dictatorship by a Polish puppet state subservient to Moscow that lasted for the next four and a half decades.

Poland was not China, one big difference being that Chiang Kai-shek stayed in China for the whole war and never headed a government-in-exile. In addition, unlike Poland, China had never been an invasion route to Russia. Still, there were eerie similarities between the situations. The Chinese Communists were like the Lublin group, confident that Stalin would find ways for it to extend the areas it controlled. Chiang was akin to the non-Communist Poles, ostensibly recognized by the Russians but undermined by them at the same time. In Poland, Stalin captured territory, and turned it over to his Polish proxies; now he had 1.5 million troops in Manchuria, and the question was, would he find ways, despite his recognition of Chiang’s government and his promise to turn the land he controlled over to China’s central government, to give real power to the Communists?

Years later, after Stalin’s death and the opening of the Sino-Soviet split, Mao was to denounce just about every aspect of Soviet policy, but in 1945, he approved of everything Stalin did, completely and without reservation, including the outcome in Poland. To him, the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile was the “reactionary” representative of “Old Poland,” the Poland of landlords and capitalists, while the pro-Moscow Lublin group responded to the “
unanimous demand of the Polish people”; it marked “an upsurge of the new democratic movement in liberated Eastern Europe.”

That word “liberated” is noteworthy. In the West, the imposition
of puppet regimes in Eastern Europe without elections or any other procedure for popular consent was properly seen as an act of political domination, but for Mao it was a thrilling step toward revolutionary fulfillment. His own eventual rise to power in China would be another such step, and he fully expected the Soviets to support him in making it.

On August 27
,
Hurley, bringing with him two cases of Scotch, flew in an American plane from Chungking to Yenan, and the next day he escorted Mao on the Communist leader’s first-ever airplane ride to the temporary capital of his sworn enemy. Observers on the scene at the Yenan airport said that Mao looked nervous, like a man “
going to his own execution,”
Time
reported. Just before he boarded Hurley’s plane, he did something that he had never done before and that he would never do again, which was to kiss his wife,
Jiang Qing, in public. Mao was worried that he would be kidnapped in Chungking or perhaps even murdered, so perhaps the gesture was meant as a sort of good-bye, just in case. But Hurley had guaranteed his safety, as had Stalin, and so he was off, the bandit in the hills going to meet the sheriff who had been trying unsuccessfully to kill or capture him for years. Before they took off, Hurley leaned out of the door of the plane and produced what one Chinese Communist on the scene described as a “
weird, loud scream as if a predator has gotten its prey”—the Choctaw war whoop.

The press was on the scene at the airport in Chungking when the party arrived. Someone asked Mao what he thought of the airplane and he replied, “Very efficient.” While Hurley didn’t let loose another Choctaw whoop, he shouted out what sounded to some observers on the scene like “
Olive oil! Olive oil!” as he and Mao drove off in the embassy’s black Cadillac. There was a welcoming banquet that night at which Chiang raised a glass of rice wine and said he hoped “we can have
the cordial atmosphere of 1924.” The reference was to the short-lived period of harmony of the first United Front when Mao was an organizer for the Kuomintang and Zhou Enlai was Chiang’s political commissar at the
Whampoa Military Academy. There was a mood of optimism in the air. American journalists had reported on the shift in Communist propaganda since the Sino-Soviet treaty was signed—the CCP’s newspapers were calling Chiang “president” rather than the leader of the “reactionary clique.” The Central News Agency, the official source of
information of the national government, for its part cited “
well-informed observers” to the effect that a “comprehensive settlement” between the two parties was “inevitable.”

Both leaders played the roles assigned to them, Chiang the perfect host, Mao the respectful guest, referring to Chiang as “President Chiang Kai-shek” and pledging his support. At a banquet early on in his stay, he raised a glass of mao-tai and proclaimed “
ten thousand years to President Chiang.” It was the toast normally given to China’s emperors, and it would be the slogan joyfully shouted to Mao once he had become the ruler of all of mainland China.

Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, accompanied by American ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, arriving in Chungking in August 1945 for talks with the Nationalists.
(illustration credit 10)

Chiang and Mao held nine private meetings. They walked side by side in Chiang’s private garden in Chungking. The two men wore similar clothing, the high-collared tunic popularized years earlier by
Sun Yat-sen; Chiang’s was crisp and sleek, Mao’s had a more homespun quality to it. Contrary to the usual pattern in China, there were no leaks on their talks until, after five weeks or so,
Ta Gong Bao
published a scoop announcing that they had been successful. The very next day, Mao, “smiling and confident,” according to the
Time
reporter present, held a press conference at which he said, “
I am confident of the outcome of the negotiations.… The Chinese Communist Party will persist in a policy of avoiding civil war.” The Soviets also fanned the embers of hope, Radio Moscow broadcasting joyfully at the end of September that the two sides in China had agreed that “a complete central unified government will be created for the whole of China.” The broadcast concluded, “Unity in China has been established.” Meanwhile, in a gesture that the Hurleys of the world greeted with great satisfaction, the
Soviet commander
in Manchuria,
Rodion Malinovsky, was reported to have refused to allow the Communists’ Eighth Route Army to occupy the cities of northeast China. Theodore White reported in
Time,
in an article headlined “Bright with Hope,” that the Soviet Union had given the “
back of its hand” to the Chinese Communists in Manchuria, surely a sign that Stalin was living up to his treaty commitments to Chiang.

Encouraging this confidently optimistic mood, Chiang and the Kuomintang announced a series of measures that seemed to fulfill the three demands that Zhou Enlai had made earlier in the year and that at the time, because they were new demands, were deemed a serious obstacle to a settlement. The government pledged to release political prisoners, to end censorship and ensure the rights of free speech and assembly, and to curb the activities of the secret police. All political parties would be legalized as well. The central issue in the talks was the degree of separate control the CCP would be allowed in the provinces where it already had base areas. The Communist delegation, led by Zhou Enlai, wanted forty-eight divisions and five provinces in the north to be controlled by the CCP. Chiang rejected that as a de facto division of the country, but, abandoning his insistence on what he called “one country, one army,” he did consent to the Communists’ keeping command of twelve divisions, which would have been something over one hundred thousand men.

On September 18, after four weeks of talks, Mao seized the occasion of a cordial tea party to announce, “
We must stop [the] civil war and all parties must unite under the leadership of Chairman Chiang to build modern China.” On his last night in Chungking, Chiang went to Mao’s headquarters and the two men talked until late in the evening. Chiang later asked himself in his diary whether his appeal for peace had “
touched the Chairman’s heart.” The next morning was the anniversary of the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. In all China’s big cities, huge numbers of people came into the streets to celebrate the country’s national day, the first since the defeat of Japan. Chiang and Mao had breakfast together while their aides drafted a vague agreement.
The two sides promised to establish a political democracy, to convene a national political consultative conference that would establish the rules for elections to a new national assembly, and to unite their armed forces under Chiang’s command.

Hurley took some pride in urging the two sides to keep the conversation going but offering no “details” about a solution, making no specific
proposals;
he has been justly criticized for this by later historians. A specific American plan is exactly what was needed, a plan that would have recognized the balance of forces in China as they were, followed by maximum, relentless American pressure on both sides to accept reality, something along the lines of Zhou’s forty-eight divisions in control of eight northern provinces, while the rest of China remained in the hands of Chiang and the KMT. This would have been a de facto division of the country, though ideally elections for a constituent assembly would have followed, the beginnings of democracy, perhaps avoiding civil war.

It was not to happen, of course, and it does not seem likely, even if Hurley had managed to press the two sides for a clearer, detailed division of power and territory, that it could have happened. Chiang is likely to have been too fearful that a coalition government would lead to his ejection from power. And as for Mao, as soon as he got back to Yenan, he assured his closest colleagues that the deal that was struck in Chungking was “
only words on paper” that were “not equivalent to reality.” His visit to Chungking had served its purpose. He mollified the Americans, whom he was anxious to keep on the sidelines. He conveyed the image of a reasonable man seeking peace.

But what he was really illustrating was a strategy summed up in a four-word phrase attributed to Zhou Enlai:
da da tan tan,
or “fight fight talk talk.” The purpose of negotiations in his eyes was not to reach a compromise agreement, but to buy time, to deter aggressive action by your enemy even as you exploit opportunities to enhance your power as well as your reputation as a peacemaker. Then, when conditions are ripe, you abandon negotiations, blaming your adversary for their breakdown, and go all out for military victory. The real battle in China was not going to be fought around a conference table in Chungking. It would be waged in the cities and countryside of Manchuria, where the Soviets were now in control. What counted was what in a later conflict in another place came to be called “facts on the ground,” and there Mao set out aggressively to ensure that the facts favored him.