China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (57 page)

And so the charade continued. Malinovsky’s next helpful suggestion was for the central government to airlift troops into the cities of Mukden and Changchun, and dilatory negotiations proceeded in November on the execution of this plan. But by this time, Chiang Kai-shek was growing pessimistic about the whole Manchurian matter, uncertain that he could prevail if he forced the issue and worried that any steps toward civil war would incur the anger of the population. This was easy to understand. China’s revitalized press was full of ardent expressions of hope for civil war to be avoided. At the end of October, ten liberal professors in Kunming, still the location of several of the universities displaced during the war, sent an open letter to Mao and Chiang urging the end of China’s “one-party dictatorship” and the convocation of a
political council composed of representatives of all parties and factions. Noting the growth of this sentiment, the American embassy cautioned that “
these professors are distressed at what they described as the ‘new American policy toward China.’ They’re at a loss to understand the ‘all-out support’ given to the Central Government by the U.S., which they believe merely increases the determination of Gen Chiang Kai-shek not to establish a genuine coalition government in China and not to surrender any real power now held by the KMT.”

The Communists, cleverly aligning themselves with this growing trend in public opinion, were making the same complaint about the KMT’s one-party dictatorship and the same demand for a coalition government. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek had announced plans to hold a political consultative conference in Chungking in November, a gathering of all the political factions in China that would decide on the means for later elections to a national assembly. Chiang seemed in this to be responding to the clamor among the intelligentsia and to pressure from the United States to move toward democracy, and, indeed, he had taken some steps in that direction. In the spring, even as the CCP was holding its ceremonial glorification of Mao at its Seventh Congress, Chiang presided over the
Sixth Kuomintang Conference, the first since 1938.
Among its resolutions was one calling for a general national conference for later in the year that would make arrangements for a multiparty election for a new national assembly. Chiang also ended the system of stationing political commissars with every major army unit, a move, urged on him by his American advisers, that aimed at moving away from party control of the armed forces—a move that the Communists have not made to this day. When the war ended, Chiang also took steps toward political reform, notably ending press censorship and releasing political prisoners. Was this pure window-dressing, as the Communists and many later historians have assumed? The Chinese government under Chiang was still a one-party dictatorship, but public criticism was taking place and being tolerated; there was ferment in the air. The announcement of a political consultative conference was an element of this ferment, and at the end of the talks in Chungking, Mao agreed to it in principle, though, as we will see, the Communists never really gave it much of a chance in practice.

Mao’s own sincerity is deeply questionable. In Yenan after his negotiation with Chiang ended, Mao oversaw the CCP’s propaganda, which advertised the CCP as the party of peace, and he continued to move
his troops as fast as possible into Manchuria. The Eighth Route Army had blocked all the ports except for
Qinwangdao. In mid-November,
Lin Biao occupied
Changchun, one of the cities that the Soviets had designated as an airlift destination for government forces. The Soviets, always eager, they said, not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, did nothing to stop this from happening. Chiang Kai-shek was reduced to hoping that if he could maintain good relations with the Russians, proving to them that he would cause them no trouble in Manchuria, they could still be persuaded not to help the Communists. And so the
plans for an airlift were dropped.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

What to Do?

I
n Washington during October and November the mood turned gloomy as reports of Communist advances and national government troubles flowed in from the American diplomatic posts in
China. In early October, the message from the American consulate in Xian was that the Communists were becoming “increasingly active” north of the Yellow River. The vision that took hold of the minds of American policymakers was of an inexorable infiltration of Communist forces into North China. The new chargé d’affaires in Chungking, Walter Robertson, who had arrived after Hurley’s purge of the embassy, told Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that the Communists already controlled most of the triangle of territory formed by Kalgan, Beijing, and Tatung, a strategic, heavily populated area—Kalgan the gateway to Mongolia, Tatung on one of the Great Wall passes into Manchuria, Beijing not only a big city but, as the former imperial capital, a place of great symbolic significance. The Communists were, moreover, showing “
extreme antipathy toward the United States,” Robertson said, and they were growing ever closer to the Soviet Union, which was seizing former Japanese arms depots and “handing over much of the booty to the Communists,” despite their treaty commitment to aid only China’s central government.

Robertson’s experience in government before his arrival in China had been as director of Lend-Lease in Australia. Later, after the Korean War, he would become assistant secretary of state for Asia, and in that position he was known as a diehard supporter of Chiang Kai-shek. But during his time as chargé in China, he was very unlike Hurley. He was polite, reasonable, “
not an extremist,” as one colleague later put it; “the soul of courtesy,” said another. There is no question that later he hated
the Communists and liked the KMT, but his reporting in 1945 on the machinations of Mao and the Soviets seems undogmatic and factual. Unlike Hurley, Robertson wrote reports that largely corresponded with those of others, both military personnel and civilians in the field.

There was some good news in October. Robertson reported that the marines helped the central government take the surrender of the Japanese garrison in Beijing, which had the effect, Robertson said, of “reducing [the] Communist menace which has been growing steadily since [the] war ended.” But as the weeks went by, most of the news from China was alarming. Robertson passed along weekly reports from the American military attaché, which amounted to a steady chronicle of Communist advances and Soviet trickery. At the beginning of November, the attaché reported that the New Fourth Army was retreating from the central provinces of Kiangsu and Chekiang and that this would “
augment [the] strength of Communist forces in [the] North.” The next week the attaché announced the gloomy news that “the threat of large-scale
civil war in China seems to be growing.” The Communists were attacking railroads and vowing to continue doing so unless the KMT ceased its troop movements. Meanwhile, the optimism of October about an imminent breakthrough in the KMT-CCP negotiations was fading. “
It appears at present almost hopeless that any permanently satisfactory solution can be reached,” Robertson said.

Faced with a deteriorating situation, Chiang pressed General Wedemeyer for American ships to transport two more Chinese armies to the north, via Tianjin. Wedemeyer turned him down, replying that the United States had already transported enough troops for the government to handle the Japanese surrender, and he was not authorized to do anything more. “
Dissident elements,” Wedemeyer cabled to Marshall, meaning the Communists, “and not Japanese are the cause of the present serious trouble and therefore the movement of additional troops is not within the scope of our mission.” In addition, Wedemeyer said, he wanted to withdraw the marines by the middle of November, and moving more troops north, where Chiang already had five armies, would mean prolonging the marines’ deployment in China.

A few days later, Wedemeyer again reported to Marshall that he was under “
heavy pressure” from Chiang to move Chinese troops to Manchuria, but, Wedemeyer said, unconvincingly given Moscow’s behavior, “The policy has always been that this was a China-Soviet matter.”

By the middle of November the military attaché’s reports were
ever more alarming and pessimistic. “
Impasse seems to have reached a critical stage … as no progress was made toward a solution.” The “conflict was increasing on all fronts [such that] large areas of China [are] already in a state of civil war.” The Communists were attacking Taiyuan, there was “fierce fighting” at the Hebei-Shaanxi border, and the Eighth Route Army was continuing to destroy rail lines in the northeast in its effort to prevent a move there by the government’s armies. Around the same time, the consul in Tianjin informed Washington that ordinary rail service in North China was “practically non-existent,” as the Communists were “
looting trains, planting mines, removing rails, burning sleepers, and destroying roadbeds on a big scale.” The attaché’s report for November 18 concluded that the civil war in north and central China had “reached a new high.” The week after that, he wrote, despite some government success in pushing the Communists out of Shanhaiguan, the coastal gateway between Hebei province and Manchuria, the Communists were moving into areas vacated by the withdrawing Russians, and they now seemed “
well-entrenched” with an estimated one hundred thousand troops in place. The final hope of the American diplomats in China was that
Chiang’s scheduling of the People’s Consultative Conference for the beginning of December, when the Communists said they would attend, might at least lead to a hiatus in the fighting. But then the Communists announced that they wouldn’t attend the conference after all, and it was canceled. The cancellation, the attaché said, was “
the darkest aspect of a gloomy week.”

Wedemeyer was the go- to guy in China, much more so than Robertson or anybody else, the man that Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, and the secretary of war turned to for advice, and Wedemeyer was in a state of pessimistic agitation. Months before in Washington, he had, like Hurley, dismissed the Communist danger, saying it could be disposed of with relative ease. Now he was worried both about the central government’s weakness and about the unreality of American policy. The State Department position on the matter was that, yes, American help to the central government would, as it was commonly put, result in “collateral aid or prestige” to Chiang, but that didn’t amount to interference in China’s affairs. Wedemeyer, in a lengthy cable to Marshall on November 23, the same day that Chiang reiterated his “urgent appeal” for more American help, saw the sophistry of this argument. He didn’t question the need for the marines to be in China. To withdraw them, he wrote, would hand the Communists “
a complete victory for their
invidious propaganda campaign and acts of intimidation.” But support of the national government “will definitely involve American forces in fratricidal warfare. There can be no mistake about this.… We need to be clear of this consequence if it is U.S. policy to help with unification of China and Manchuria under National Government.”

Wedemeyer’s reports from China provided very little cause for optimism. Chiang, he told Marshall, was “
completely unprepared for occupation of Manchuria against Communist opposition.” Even his recovery of North China between the Yangzi River and the Great Wall was uncertain. “The area is vast, communication limited, and loyalties of population doubtful,” Wedemeyer told Marshall. “Communist guerrillas and saboteurs can and probably will … harass and restrict movements of Central Government forces.”

Wedemeyer was entirely realistic about the Soviet Union, saying it maintained an “outward show of cooperation with Chiang’s representatives” but it “definitely appears to be creating favorable conditions for the acquisition by the Chinese Communists of key areas in North China and Manchuria.” In Wedemeyer’s view, Chiang’s problem was not mainly military. He liked Chiang. He found him “sincere” and “selfless” but surrounded by “unscrupulous men who are interested primarily in their self-aggrandizement.” The Chinese politician, Wedemeyer said, sounding like a member of the dissenting Chinese intelligentsia, “operates with the object of enriching himself through chicanery and machination,” and the Gimo is “bewildered and impotent” in the face of
this corrosive problem.