Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  Commenting on this note as he forwarded it, Wedemeyer warned Washington that civil war was rapidly approaching and quick action was necessary. Still hoping to handle the matter politically, the State Department sent Yenan a mutual statement from all three powers that Chiang was the recognized head of the state and Yenan’s attitude was only obstructing China’s unity. The Department harked back to the coalition plan, and Hurley even went to Yenan to talk it over. He came back, as usual, full of hope. But what must have mattered far more to Chiang than Hurley’s report was that Wedemeyer was supplying speedy transport for his troops to North China.

  The American general mobilized the air forces already based in the country, as well as the transport planes that had flown the Hump so many times. Great numbers of troops were moved in this way. Soon Chungking forces occupied Nanking, Shanghai, and Peking. Others were carried to Tientsin by sea. Fifty thousand American marines were landed at Tsingtao, Tientsin, Peking, and Chinwangtao to facilitate the evacuation of the Japanese. Though it was clearly understood by Chiang that since the war was over this American aid could not last forever, he was at least able to feel secure of his own strength in most places south of the Yangtze and isolated points north of it. North China as a whole, however, was swarming with Communists, and the policy that America must not mix in with domestic disturbances became less and less tenable as Wedemeyer brought in Kuomintang troops. From the American point of view they were there to accept the surrender of the Japanese, but each new shipment called forth more protests from Yenan. Soon the Reds reacted with more than protests. There was the affair of Chefoo, a port not far from Dairen. When the American cruiser U.S.S. Louisville and several destroyers approached Chefoo with intent to land some marines there and take it over, Chu Teh informed Wedemeyer that the Eighth Route Army was already in control of the area, and that a landing of Americans would be interfering in Chinese affairs. The Americans asked the Communists to get out. Chu Teh refused: Chefoo was close to his friends in the Russian zone, and very useful. If the Americans persisted in landing, he said, any resulting trouble would be their responsibility.

  The two American officers in command of the little fleet, an admiral and a general, talked it over and decided that since there were no Japanese in the vicinity there was no military reason for landing their men. They were right according to the code; they had no justification for calling the Communist bluff. But the decision did nothing to clear up the situation, and similar incidents soon crowded in upon other of Wedemeyer’s men.

  The war was over and America expected soon to see all the welcome signs of this termination—the boys marching home and a swift decline in United States expenditure. On the subject of demobilization there was no argument. Even experienced generals watched with equanimity as American forces were disbanded as quickly as possible, almost before the Japanese were sent home.

  Wedemeyer thought that the China theater could be “deactivated” by December 15, as far as the Army was concerned, and the marines in the seaports could go home even earlier, possibly from November 15. By that time, he was sure, the Japanese would have been disarmed and repatriated.

  Wedemeyer’s duty, however, was not fulfilled with the straightforward task of settling Japanese affairs; it developed that he had somehow inherited the responsibility of carrying out, or of persuading the American Government to carry out, a promise made by Roosevelt at Cairo. Chiang said Roosevelt had assured him of America’s intention to help build up China after the war. And it was undeniable that the country was in a very bad way after eight grueling years. Food supplies had been disrupted, cities devastated, factories dismantled; and there were other pressing questions, particularly that of education, on which he needed help. There was also the matter of future defense, against neighbors who were unnamed. There was the Communist threat as well: it was out of fashion to talk plainly of the Red danger, but Chiang did talk of it.

  Even in the glad rush to get home the Americans admitted the necessity of helping with China’s rehabilitation. There were various methods of going at the job; loans and training of the National Army and Air Force. Lend-Lease was supposed to stop with the signing of the peace treaty, but a lot of equipment was still on the way to China or earmarked in the States for the hostilities that now would not eventuate. This equipment, it was thought, with much of the surplus material already in China, could be used to outfit a small army and air force cheaply and efficiently. Thirty-nine divisions were talked of: Chiang, however, wanted at least ninety. Truman told T. V. Soong that a small, well-equipped army on modern lines would be far better than a large, loosely organized, badly fed one. He also reminded the Chinese that the Generalissimo had promised to settle China’s political difficulties politically: the military assistance furnished by the U. S. was not to be “diverted for use in fratricidal warfare or to support undemocratic administration.” If Chiang took these words to heart he must have been sadly puzzled as to their exact meaning. Why keep an army if it is never in any circumstances to be used? In a fuzzy way, of course, Truman must have meant what Americans always did mean: hurry up with the coalition. But it takes at least two to coalesce.

  One thing at least was becoming clear on the muddled scene of Manchuria. No matter what contemptuous remarks Stalin and Molotov may have made in the past about Chinese Communists, they seemed more than willing now to forget such ruderies and greet these social climbers as brothers. The Chinese Reds and the Russians were in constant communication, joyfully settling into Manchuria as if there had never been any talk of Nationalist sovereignty. Washington had already faced the fact that a rebellion in Sinkiang which had been worrying them was not genuinely settled, although on the surface the rebels there were willing to wait to discuss their independence and the Soviet Union—equally on the surface—was doing its part to keep them calm and quiet. But the Manchurian problem was nearer to the West and even more disturbing.

  According to the agreement of August the Russian forces were to be completely withdrawn from Manchuria, except for stipulated places such as Dairen and Port Arthur and railway points, within three months after the cessation of hostilities. In fact they gave few signs of beginning the withdrawal as they had promised. Nor did they accept Japan’s declaration of surrender; detached bodies of Russians continued to attack Japanese until an appeal was made to MacArthur in Tokyo to put a stop to the Russian offensive.

  On the other hand, Chiang made his arrangements as they had been laid down in the agreement of August. Following the plan that Nationalist troops should be shipped in as Russians were shipped out, an expedition of Chinese were dispatched by sea in American ships, early in October, and the Russian General Malinovsky, commander of the Soviet forces in Manchuria, was advised that they would be arriving at Dairen. Then the trouble started. Russia objected to the landing of troops at Dairen on the grounds that it was a commercial port, and that allowing soldiers to come in would be a violation of the treaty.

  America had bowed out; it was a matter to be settled purely between China and Soviet Russia, and the Chinese could do nothing. The U.S.A. was involved only insofar as American ships were carrying the Chinese. Stratemeyer, temporarily in charge of affairs while Wedemeyer was in Washington, told the Generalissimo, after two weeks, that something would have to be done soon, as the ships could not go on floating about indefinitely, weighed down with soldiers. He proposed disembarking them at Chinwangtao, the nearest Chinese port to Manchuria. But this would mean marching them a distance overland of some hundred miles even to get beyond the border, and Chiang hesitated. Malinovsky had suggested that though he had no authority to permit the Chinese to land at Dairen or Port Arthur, there was no reason why they should not disembark at the three other Manchurian ports: Antung, Yingkow, and Hulutao. Therefore, Chiang decided to send them on to Hulutao.

  But now the Chinese Reds occupying Hulutao declared that they would not permit a landing there, and the Russians explained that in that case they couldn’t “guarantee” a safe landing. The A
merican ships duly steamed away toward Yingkow. There too they found the Chinese Communists busily engaged in preparing fortifications; there too they encountered a refusal. The American Admiral Barbey, he who had run into a similar situation in Chefoo, again retired, and told the Chinese Nationalist commander to arbitrate. The Chinese, Hsiung, asked Malinovsky for an explanation, and the Russian was very glib. He wasn’t responsible for the presence of the Chinese Reds, he explained. They had come up from the South, and what could he do about it? Let Hsiung talk it over with the Reds himself. This Hsiung refused to do. Malinovsky then said virtuously that he could not interfere in Chinese affairs. There was a quarrel: the Russians thereafter ignored the situation, leaving the matter to the Chinese Communists, who of course did not budge. In the end Barbey and his associate turned around and took their load to Chinwangtao.

  Chiang behaved as circumstances made necessary, as if these delays and betrayals were merely small obstacles that could be smoothed over with diplomatic exchanges. He went on, getting his men into Manchuria as best he might, trying to build up those centers of civil government that Stalin had so cheerfully promised to respect and protect. He sent five hundred officials up to Dairen and Harbin. The idea was that the rest of the government, and the police and military guard, could be enlisted from the local population. Very soon, in spite of the Russians’ courteous welcome, the Chinese from the South found out that they couldn’t recruit anybody. Chinese Communists kept moving in on them, interfering with their work, and even with such public utilities as water and electricity. Finally the mission had to be withdrawn. All through this crisis Chiang found it impossible to communicate with Stalin. The Russian was not at home.

  Malinovsky admitted that Chinese troops could be brought into Manchuria, if not through seaports, at least by air. But they were to come in only as the Russian troops withdrew, and these still gave no signs of withdrawing, though their deadline of December 3 was close at hand. Yet if they should retreat before the Nationalist troops got there, the way would be open for the Chinese Reds. Though all this juggling was transparently clear, Chiang went ahead playing the game according to the rules. When the Russians kindly offered to stay on until he could manage to get his troops in, he accepted the offer. The Soviet troops, therefore, announced they would stay on until January 3, 1946.

  All the time the Communists flowed in freely, with full access to the immense store of arms and equipment that had been left by the Japanese.

  Chiang’s affairs at home in the government, through the past few years, had been left to a routine that appeared superficially to work as well as it had done early in the war. Actually it was badly in need of overhauling. The Army had been overhauled, frequently and painfully, because of American prodding, but civil affairs had not received the same treatment. No man can do everything when he is in Chiang’s position, but Chiang had never admitted the truth of this precept; he felt that he was capable of keeping an eye on all the departments under his wing. During moments of strain such as those that came on thick and fast in the years succeeding Pearl Harbor, something had to go by the board, and that something was the ordinary mechanical process of civil governing. It was a crowded government, like all such bodies in exile. It was an uneasy one, subject to the difficulties and temptations that would naturally beset it, set down as it was in a backward community like Szechuan. It was badly in need of reform; full of small grafters and weakened by that plague of the distrustful East, nepotism.

  In times of peace Chinese nepotism and grafting are usually kept within reasonable bounds. But these eight years had been a period of turmoil and neglect, and their growth had got out of hand. Every grievance, every small outrage that could be dramatically exhibited to the people was now snatched up and used by the Communists to their advantage. Chiang’s own stamping grounds in Chungking and Nanking were seamed and cracked with resentment: there was no place in all the war-saturated land that was not in some way affected. China needed peace for a grand clean-up, but there was no peace.

  Faced with this situation, Wedemeyer himself—and he was not as easily stampeded into panic as some of his predecessors had been—took an exceedingly grave view of the domestic situation. His tour of duty was running out, but the Communist threat had suddenly swelled up, as it were, overnight. Was America justified in simply walking off and leaving Chiang to do his own battling? Diplomatically speaking it was still possible to keep the Communist menace apart from that of the Soviet, but the Russians were in their way even more of a perplexity to America, for they could not be confined to the boundaries of Chinese domestic disputes. The American marines, then—should they be kept on, after all? Should they be empowered to take offensive action when necessary? This alternative was so dangerous that Wedemeyer didn’t really contemplate it, but he realized that as the marines were at that moment stationed at ticklish points and carefully avoiding any complications that might be called domestic, they were a constant irritation to the Communists and Soviet Russia, while accomplishing no useful purpose. The general’s opinion was that Chiang would be able to hold North China on his own, but would certainly not be able to manage Manchuria as well. He suggested that Chiang concentrate and consolidate, and cut his losses. But here they ran into one of the deepest disagreements of all their association.

  Chiang could not possibly relinquish his claim on Manchuria. His whole career was based on the idea of a China united, once more in possession of the territory stolen by Japan. Since his earliest association with the Army the hope of a Free China had been fixed on restoration of her old status, before the Japanese began chipping away at the map. All the rest of it, the revolution and the long apprenticeship with Sun Yat-sen, and the war-lord battles, and the break with the Reds—all of it was a structure that was built around that central idea, China free and united. Chiang had no intention now, in 1945, of tamely giving up and settling into a nation that accepted its contracted limits—a nation that had merely exchanged one threatening neighbor for another—under a leader who had swapped more than three decades of struggle for nothing.

  He determined to go on trying. If the men in Washington wanted him to continue talking about a coalition with the Communists, if they still didn’t see what a waste of time it was, why, he would go on trying for that, too.

  14 THE MARSHALL MISSION 1945–47

  Washington did want him to go on trying. At that stage there was not much else they could think of to do. U. S. officials held a series of meetings about the situation at the end of November, and they decided to leave the marines in China for a while. They resolved to arrange a truce, if possible, between the Kuomintang soldiers and the Communists in disputed areas; they considered acceding to Chiang’s latest request, to transport more of his troops to the North, and they would certainly continue, they declared, to press for the coalition government. Some of them thought it might yet be achieved if only the Generalissimo would be a little more reasonable.

  Then Hurley administered a fresh shock to the State Department by resigning.

  He had several reasons, but the most outstanding was that he felt he couldn’t trust his colleagues in the Foreign Service. He considered it sinister that Acheson and Service, both of whom he particularly distrusted, should have been appointed to posts in Japan under MacArthur. Moreover, he had reason to suspect a leak somewhere in the State Department. Information that could not otherwise have got out was appearing in American leftist newspapers. In any case he was perturbed over the attitude toward his mission prevailing in Washington. More and more, it seemed to him, the Department leaned toward the Communists. He thought he detected an unseemly eagerness to push Chiang into a coalition somehow, anyhow, in order to get him off the public mind.

  And Hurley had to face the fact that this solution was as far off as ever. After months of fruitless arguing, negotiations had stopped, leaving Mao and Chou En-lai still insisting that their army be permitted to participate in the National Military Council, retaining their identity as Communists. The
y would not consider reorganization in the Nationalist forces. They demanded the right to nominate the chairman of provincial governments in the Border Regions as well as those provinces they already controlled, the vice-chairman of yet six more, and the deputy mayors of Peking, Tientsin, and Tsingtao. They claimed of the seventy seats of the Council twenty for themselves as against forty for the Kuomintang, with four more to go to the crypto-Communist group called the Democratic League.

  Hurley was convinced that he had come to the end of his rope.

  General Marshall had retired from his post as Chief of Staff. With World War II wound up, the most important question in international affairs, in American opinion, was the Chinese dilemma, and it seemed good judgment to send the general himself out to the East as a super trouble shooter. Marshall had been Stilwell’s chief all through the painful episodes that ended with Stilwell’s recall. He had championed his man to the end, as a good chief ought to, and his impressions of the rights and wrongs of the Nationalist-Red argument were colored by what he had heard from Vinegar Joe. His feeling about Chiang Kai-shek was one of caution and suspicion mingled with a certain amount of reminiscent rancor.