China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (51 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Facts on the Ground

O
n August 16, one day after the formal
Japanese surrender, a note from Communist headquarters in Yenan arrived at the embassies of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in Chungking. It started out by listing the wartime achievements of the Chinese Communists. The Communist armies, it said, had recovered “
vast lost areas abandoned by the Kuomintang Government, with more than 100 million people.” This army now consisted of one million regular troops and 2,200,000 members of local militias in nineteen “liberated areas.” The note made the precise numerical assertion that 69 percent of the Japanese troops invading China (not including Manchuria) and 95 percent of the troops of the pro-Japanese Chinese puppet government “were opposed and encircled by our forces” during the recently concluded war, all of this while the Kuomintang “adopted a policy of watching with folded arms and waiting for victory.”

These achievements, the note continued, getting to its main point, had earned for the Communists the authority “to accept the surrender of the Japanese and puppet armies surrounded by them, to take over their arms, material and resources.” It was signed by Zhu De, who identified himself as commander in chief, anti-Japanese Forces in the Liberated Areas. “Our troops,” a Yenan radio broadcast of the same time said, making this same argument in less diplomatic terms, “
have the right to enter and occupy any city, town or communication center occupied by the enemy or the puppets.… Those who oppose or obstruct such actions will be treated as traitors.”

Zhu De’s message signaled a new stage in the relationship between the Chinese Communist movement and the United States. Ostensibly about a single issue, the taking of the Japanese surrender, it had enormous
implications because the party that took the surrender of the Japanese troops got their weapons and the territory they controlled, both of which translated into strength in the looming civil conflict in China.

The subtext of Zhu’s message made clear the Communists’ view of themselves, which they had now chosen to broadcast. They were not
simply an armed party, as Hurley liked to call them. They were a legitimate alternative government of China,
the
government of about one-quarter of the country’s total population, even if the countries to which they made this claim, including the Soviet Union, were
treaty-bound to support only the central government, still temporarily ensconced in Chungking, as the sole government of China. The Communists had earned their authority by fighting harder and more bravely than the recognized government, which had, in the Communist view, abdicated, fled, or stood by as thousands of villages fell to the hated invader.

Zhu De’s note threw down a challenge to the outside powers, especially the United States, because it was saying that anyone whose presence in China impeded the Communists in their effort to expand their power would be deemed an enemy. Moreover, the Communists were doing a lot more than sending diplomatic notes to foreign emissaries, more than stating theoretical rights to participate in the Japanese surrender. In the hours after the Japanese surrender, and even before, they were on the move, sending their lightly armed, heavily indoctrinated guerrillas into areas that were going to be contested by them and the central government, getting their boots on the ground, as the common later phrase for introducing ground forces into an area would have it. The Nationalists, for their part, were trying to do the same thing, though the Communists had a clear geographical advantage. In other words, the news of Hirohito’s surrender was still ringing in the ears of a joyful China while the country’s next brutal conflict was starting.

Quick decisions
had to be made by a United States most of whose soldiers, diplomats, and spies were caught entirely by surprise by the
atom bomb and the war’s quick ending. First, how to respond to Zhu De’s demand? One option, of course, was to acknowledge the facts as Zhu saw them and to remain neutral in the postwar struggle for territory. This was essentially what the professional China hands, John Davies and the others, had recommended in the fall and winter of 1944. They accepted that such a policy would quickly lead to the division of China into two zones, a Communist one north of the Yellow River, including Manchuria, and a
KMT zone south of it. Such a course, Davies and his like-minded colleagues believed, would also keep the United States from backing the eventual loser in the civil war. It might also, in their view, enable the Chinese Communists to avoid falling into the Soviet
orbit. As Davies put it in a memo of June 1945: “
It is debatable whether Moscow could have counted on Yenan’s unquestioning obedience had the American government last autumn and winter (while the Soviet Union was still unprepared to act in Asia) accepted the fact of a divided China and realistically and vigorously sought to develop the nationalistic tendencies of Communist China.”

Hurley, of course, didn’t agree. Shown Zhu De’s letter, he fired off a cable to Washington warning that the cost of acceding to Zhu’s demand would be an immediate civil war in China, because the Communists would quickly abandon the talks with Chiang and the two sides would have no choice but to fight. Hurley continued to believe in the assurances he’d gotten from
Stalin and Molotov in Moscow in April, to the effect that the Soviets supported American policy in China and did not deem the Chinese Communists to be real Communists. He was convinced that the Soviets had sold out the Chinese Communists, who, weak and isolated, had no choice but to make a deal with the
KMT, which he would use his good offices to bring about. He put his trust in the
Sino-Soviet
Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, to which Soong and Stalin had affixed their signatures the day before Zhu’s letter arrived in Chungking. The whole point of that treaty, as Hurley understood it, was for China to give away some of its sovereignty in Manchuria in exchange for a Soviet pledge, as the treaty clearly specified, “
to render to China moral support and aid in military supplies and other material resources, such support and aid to be entirely given to the National Government as the central government of China.” That document, Hurley assured Washington, “has demonstrated conclusively that the Soviet Government supports the National Government of China, and also that the two governments are in agreement regarding Manchuria”—meaning that the Soviets would expedite the transfer of the three northeastern provinces to central government control in speedy fashion.

A reply was dutifully sent to Zhu. It rejected the right he claimed to take the Japanese surrender, reminded him of the famous agreements, and, in the spirit of goodwill, asked him and the Communists for their cooperation. The Americans had refused to arm the Communists during the war; now they were excluding the Communists from the division of spoils.

While Hurley was talking abstract principle and practicing wishful thinking, Zhu was stating reality. The Communists effectively controlled
large sections of North China, the fruit of their wartime efforts to create “liberated areas” behind enemy lines. They had set up parallel governments in them and created peasant organizations. They also had those million or so men under arms, plus even larger militia organizations, and many of these troops were installed in areas ostensibly controlled by the Japanese and the Chinese puppet regime—as those American fliers found out when they were led to safety by the
Balu
s,
the Eighth Route Army men.

In some respects Zhu did exaggerate—as in those precise percentages of Japanese and puppet troops “surrounded,” and in his contention that the Communists had been fighting while the KMT folded its arms. The Communists were extremely successful in propagating the notion that they had struggled bitterly, bravely, and continuously against the invader, but their million-man army had engaged in only small-scale hit-and-run attacks and not a single major military operation since the
Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940. Like the KMT, they had preserved their forces for the postwar showdown with the rival party. “The Eighth Route Army,” Vladimirov, the TASS correspondent, noted contemptuously, limits itself “to sluggish defensive fighting of local importance. Whenever fighting starts on the enemy’s initiative, the Eighth Route Army rolls back to the mountains avoiding clashes.” After a fellow TASS correspondent visited one of the liberated areas behind enemy lines, he reported back to Vladimirov: “
Like everywhere in the Special Area, meetings are the only form of work carried on in the army units. In the summer this is supplemented to some extent with the laying in of farm produce.”

But the Communists were in place in strategic areas, especially Shaanxi, Hebei, and Shandong provinces, at a time when American intelligence estimated the central government’s military presence in those places to be negligible. This was a crucial fact. For a time, the only force available to prevent the Communists from taking over in those areas was the very Japanese army that was supposed to surrender. That is why Chiang sent out his near-desperate directive to Japan to surrender only to the central government and, meanwhile, to keep the peace in the areas they occupied. The Japanese did this, becoming allies of the government they had been trying to annihilate for eight years. For weeks, the Japanese fought off Communist attempts to disarm them, and they patrolled the all-important rail lines of North China. While this use of the Japanese divisions was a necessary expedient, it
was also a sign of weakness on the part of the central government, an indication of its lack of preparedness to take control of the territory the international agreements assigned to it.

The facts on the ground included an almost absurd anomaly: that the group authorized to take the Japanese surrender had no capacity to do so, while the group that had the capacity was denied the authority. This problem could presumably be overcome by moving government troops into position. But there was no overcoming what was the most portentous fact on the ground in the weeks and months after the end of the war in the Pacific: the presence of those 1.5 million seasoned
Soviet troops in
Manchuria, which bordered the areas where the Chinese Communists were strongest. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this fact, though Hurley seems almost completely to have ignored it.