China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (64 page)

Marshall believed that Chiang himself was both incorruptible and committed to the political liberalization that was being set into motion by the PCC, but that he was unable to control the far-right factions inside the KMT that were determined to sabotage it. There was plenty of evidence to substantiate this view. While the PCC was taking place, the
Democratic League organized large meetings, with up to two thousand people attending, to discuss the events of the day, showing an admirable democratic fermentation taking place. But the meetings were disrupted by what an American diplomat reporting to Washington on these events called “organized hoodlums,” put up to the job by the Chen brothers—or at least that is what was suspected, though no proof was offered. There were ugly scenes, anonymous thugs pushing their way into peaceful discussions where they beat up prominent liberals. In late January, the Democratic League announced it would boycott future sessions of the PCC after the secret police searched the home of one of its delegates, though as things turned out, it didn’t follow through on that threat.

In the annals of illiberal gangsterism, these incidents were relatively minor, but they left their mark. The historical record indicates two assassinations taking place during those months, which was two too many, though not a number corresponding to a generalized reign of terror. Not even the Communist press, always ready to publicize right-wing
malfeasance, reported new political arrests in that spring of 1946 as the PCC did its work.

Still, the antidemocratic actions of right-wing enforcers came at a delicate time when many political actors of the moment were looking for signs of sincerity on Chiang’s part. Many people remembered the white terror of the 1920s and 1930s, enforced by
Tai Li’s
Blue Shirts, when many opponents of Chiang’s regime were executed or jailed. The fact that much more systematic antiliberal brutality took place in other countries did not enhance the KMT’s reputation for trustworthiness at a time when trust was most needed. The incidents gave an opportunity to anti-KMT propagandists to portray the central government as “fascist,” a word that the Communist press began to use frequently.

In late December, John K. Fairbank, who had been the head of the Office of War Information, was warning the State Department that “
the most striking change” of the previous two years was the “final desertion of the Generalissimo” by the very American-educated Chinese whom the United States should most want to cultivate. “Liberals say they see no hope in his regime,” Fairbank said, and so the attempts to intimidate these same people in February and March could only have intensified that feeling.

Perhaps more telling, as weeks went by after Chiang’s speech at the PCC, the promised release of political prisoners didn’t occur, or, at least, many opponents of the regime claimed that it didn’t occur. Radio Yenan complained bitterly and repeatedly about this. In January, the pro-Communist writer
Guo Morou was beaten by police. In Chungking, anti-Soviet rallies were organized, American diplomats believed, by the CC clique and the offices of the pro-Communist
New China Daily
and the Democratic League’s
Democratic Daily
were ransacked. These acts of hooliganism prompted furious propaganda attacks by the Communists. “There are growing signs of violence,” Melby noted in his diary.

“Marshall,” Melby noted, “was becoming a very angry man—and perhaps a little discouraged” by these actions of the irreconcilables.

The repression and right-wing hooliganism that took place in these early months of 1946 have been cited as milestones in the decline of Chiang’s domestic standing. But not all of these events, and certainly not the biggest of them, the anti-Soviet demonstrations taking place in cities across China, were hooliganism. These appear, on the contrary, to have been patriotic reactions to Soviet behavior in
Manchuria. The Soviets had promised to evacuate China’s northeast on February 1, but they did not do so. On February 11, on the one-year anniversary of the
Yalta talks, the world’s newspapers revealed the details of the secret
agreement between Stalin and Roosevelt by which the Soviets had obtained special neocolonialist privileges in Manchuria. This was no doubt galling to many Chinese who had come to believe that the era when foreign countries robbed China of its sovereign pride was over. Thirty-one years earlier, in 1915, furious, patriotically aroused Chinese students had held massive demonstrations to protest the list of twenty-one demands that Japan had made on the country. Those demands included things like control of the South Manchurian Railroad and extended leases on the ports of
Dalian and
Port Arthur—virtually identical to the privileges given the Soviets at Yalta. The Twenty-One Demands included a phrase establishing Japan’s “predominant position” in Manchuria; at Yalta, the Soviets’ “preeminent interests” were assured. It is not surprising, especially given this comparison, that the non-Communist Chinese reaction was strong and unfavorable.

“
Now that China has paid the price,” an editorial in the independent
Ta Kung Pao
declared, referring to the price China was expected to pay in Manchuria, “we hope that she will not be required to pay any more.”
The New York Times
reported from Chungking that every newspaper in the city, except for the Communist
New China Daily,
“including many which sympathized with the Communists in the past, have joined not only in
sharp criticism of Russian policy but also in a campaign to compel the Chinese government to draw back the curtain behind which events in Manchuria have been hidden.” On February 22, ten thousand students in Chungking took to the streets in a mass demonstration. There were simultaneous demonstrations in Hankou,
Beijing, Chengdu, Nanjing, and Qingdao. Perhaps, as some suspected, it was the
CC clique that called them to action, but there is no more reason to doubt the sincerity of the marchers than there is to doubt the patriotism of the demonstrators of 1915. The students in Chungking
carried slogans like “The USSR = Germany + Japan,” and “Stalin = Hitler + Hirohito.” In Shanghai students massed in front of the Soviet consulate shouting “Get out of Manchuria.” At least one demonstrator carried a large portrait of Stalin with the Chinese character for “snake” drawn across it. It was during these demonstrations that the offices of the
New China Daily
and
Democracy Daily
were ransacked.

The Communists blamed the KMT secret police for the attacks on the newspapers and on liberal intellectuals, but
Liberation Daily
and Radio Yenan showed no sympathy for the student demands that the Soviets get out of Manchuria or that they desist from stripping the region of its industries and power plants. While the students were marching, the
New China Daily
denied that the Communists had gotten any help from the Soviets, claiming that Communist “underground fighters” had been active
in Manchuria for fourteen years.
Chang Kia-ngau in Changchun wrote in his diary of a visit he made to
Kangde Palace, the edifice where the Japanese had installed the last emperor of China,
Henry Pu-yi, as the puppet emperor of Manchukuo—Kangde being the reign name he was given. The palace had been raided by the Soviet Red Army and stripped by the Russian soldiers of just about everything, even its lightbulbs. The library, Chang wrote, was “
littered with crates for books and paintings.… The looters had taken away scrolls and paintings and calligraphy” after tearing off the cylindrical pieces of wood fixed to the bottom of Chinese scrolls so they can be properly weighted for hanging.

Around the same time as Chang’s visit to the former emperor’s home, a Chinese technocrat named
Chang Hsing-fu, the deputy head of the Bureau of Industry and Mines of the central government, made a trip to the coal mines near the city of Fushun. His purpose was to reestablish Chinese ownership of the mines, and he traveled in the company of a Soviet counterpart, along with seven Chinese engineers and a contingent of railway police to take control. When the party arrived, the Soviets disarmed the railway police. They told Chang Hsing-fu that his delegation would not be allowed to take over the mines and that they should leave Fushun immediately. The Chinese accordingly boarded a train to return to Changchun. A platoon of Soviet guards
rode in a different car.
When the train reached the station at Li-shih-chai, twenty-five kilometers from Fushun, Eighth Route Army soldiers boarded it, dragged off Chang and the seven engineers accompanying him, stripped them of their clothing, and bayoneted them to death.

When word of these murders reached the Chinese government, the Chinese vice chief of staff complained to the Soviet general in charge of the Changchun area, Lieutenant General
Yefim Trotsenko, who replied that the incident was the fault of the Chinese side because it had failed to notify the Soviet army general headquarters of Chang Hsing-fu’s impending trip. The Chinese officer, evidently astonished at this parry of his complaint, noted that Chang had been traveling in the company of a Soviet official and that the platoon of Soviet guards riding the train at the time of the attack did nothing to prevent it. General Trotsenko’s reply was not recorded, but Chang Kia-ngai was certain of the meaning of the incident. It demonstrated that the Soviets would not allow China to restore sovereignty over the Fushun mines before “
the question of economic cooperation has been settled.” And by “economic cooperation,” Chang meant China’s acquiescence in the Soviet demand that virtually all large-scale industries
in Manchuria be run jointly by the Soviets and the Chinese. The thuggery taking place in Chungking on behalf of the KMT was more than matched by the collaborative thuggery of the Chinese Communists and their Russian sponsors, but it seems to have been less noted.

It is perhaps not surprising
that the Chinese Communists declined to protest the Soviets’ presence in Manchuria, their economic demands, the further, unexplained delay in the withdrawal of their troops, or even the theft of paintings and calligraphy from the
Kangde Palace. Mao did not want to offend Stalin. Instead, the Communists focused their ire on Chiang, on the KMT right wing, and eventually on the American “imperialists” for their aid to the central government—never mind that the United States had given up its extraterritorial rights in China in 1943 and that, along with the British recapture of Hong Kong, the most conspicuous “imperialist” behavior in China was that of the Soviet Union.

But, as we know, Mao was operating in a larger context. February 1946 may have been the high point of the Marshall mediation in China, but it was also the time when the Cold War was taking shape and the conflict between the Soviets and the West was explicitly recognized. On
February 11, Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, identifying the “iron curtain” that had descended in Europe. Stalin, replying, made his own speech in which he declared that war between the Soviet Union and the West was “inevitable.” Later that same month, George
Kennan, still at the American embassy in Moscow, sent his famous “long telegram” to the State Department laying the foundations for what was to become the containment policy.

In March, Moscow let the CCP’s leaders know that it was going to withdraw from several of Manchuria’s big cities, telling them that, in accordance with the Sino-Soviet treaty, they would have to turn these places over to government forces, but that the Chinese Communists should get ready for action. And so the Eighth Route Army advanced into southern Manchuria, taking a number of small and medium-sized towns there.

It was at this same time that American diplomats in China began noticing a change in the attitude of the Communists. In a long memo to
Marshall, Raymond Ludden, who had traveled in Communist territories as a member of the Dixie Mission in 1944 and reported on their local popularity, said that the CCP was cleaving ever closer to the Soviet line. Their newspapers, for example, had been repeating the Soviet official position that it had been the Russians who were mainly responsible for the World War II victories in both Europe and Asia, while the American and British contributions were no longer even mentioned. The CCP, he continued, had begun to
use the word “fascist” in its propaganda, “fascist in a completely Russian sense—that is, anyone who is in opposition to Russian, and now likewise Chinese Communist wishes.” Ludden wondered whether these verbal gestures were signs that the Chinese Communists were no longer primarily “nationalist reformers” but had become “a satellite force of Russian expansion in Asia.”

Ludden was too close to the changing situation for his suspicions to harden into established fact, but subsequent historians, notably
Michael M. Sheng, have found that by March 20 a new CCP strategy had emerged. It was to seek to divide Manchuria into north and south zones, with the city of
Changchun as the dividing point. “
Our party’s policy is to use all our strength to control Changchun, Harbin, and the whole Changchun Railway,” Mao said. “No matter how much sacrifice that may take [we must] prevent Chiang’s troops from occupying these two cities and the railway.”

Meanwhile, Zhou Enlai continued to complain bitterly to Lieutenant
General
Alvan C. Gillem, who was in charge of the mediation mission while Marshall was in Washington, of American help to the central government. On March 30, he warned that if “
the U.S. Forces Headquarters shall continue to move Government troops into Manchuria, we would deem such action as a change of U.S. Policy toward China, and a lack of faith on the part of the Government to implement a real truce in Manchuria.” Zhou made this threat despite the indisputable fact that the ceasefire agreement with which he was intimately familiar specifically allowed the central government to move troops “toward and into Manchuria” and that these troops would be transported by the United States. By infiltrating their own forces into southern Manchuria, it was the CCP that was violating the accord.