The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  John Carter Vincent watched it take off, his son beside him. “Son, there goes the bravest man in the world,” Vincent said. “He’s going to try to unify China.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Marshall Is Too Big

  For much of the winter, thick fog covered China’s wartime capital of Chongqing. The inland city lay at the confluence of two rivers, the Yangtze and the Jialing, and fog rose from their banks, suffusing the streets with darkness and damp. During the war this was a blessing, since Japanese pilots had a hard time bombing what they could not see. But for Americans posted there, it became a source of both incessant complaint and irresistible metaphor. Trying to navigate local intrigues was “like walking in the fog.” Foreign machinations had “so many threads that in the Chongqing fog now you see it now you don’t.”

  The day of Marshall’s arrival, December 22, was seasonably bleak. It had rained through the night, and black clouds lingered over the mountains. At an airfield outside the city, groups of Americans, Nationalists, and Communists stood in the mud, waiting for the plane to appear. The Americans had been in a state of high anticipation for days. “Everybody scurrying around doing not much of anything, but under the impression of great accomplishment, and all scared to death over the impending arrival of the great man himself,” recorded a young diplomat named John Melby. “No one knows what he is going to do, what his instructions, or how long he will be here.”

  Marshall had left almost a week before on his island-hopping journey across the Pacific: Washington to San Francisco, San Francisco to Honolulu, Honolulu to Kwajalein atoll, Kwajalein to Guam, Guam to Manila, Manila to the Chinese coast. In the Philippines, he stopped to revisit the country where he had done his first tour more than forty years earlier. When the plane passed low over his old post, he thought back to that rugged and innocent time—an officer new to the army, an army new to the ways of global power and distant imperial occupation.

  It was on long flights, aides said, that you got to know the general. The standard C-54 was a simple transport plane, so they gushed when they boarded this one, outfitted for Churchill: bedroom in the tail, deep leather chairs, wood paneling—“the plushest of all plush jobs,” one wrote home. Marshall had recruited three aides for the mission: Henry Byroade, a fast-rising officer who had been in China during the war; Richard Wing, a Cantonese-American orderly and cook; and James Shepley, a reporter on leave from Time who was, in a peer’s judgment, “never at a loss for any answer to anything.” For Marshall, it was not a familiar team. He was going, Katherine lamented, “without anyone to be close to him—whom he had known and depended on.”

  They had spent the journey plotting his first moves. Shepley and Byroade observed that Mao would not give up control of his insurgent armies until the Communists had a secure place in a transformed government. Chiang, however, would not share real political power until Mao had given up his armies. They sketched out a rough plan to get around this impasse. First Marshall would press the two sides to agree to a cease-fire and interim government, with Mao, Shepley suggested, taking on the role of Chiang’s deputy. Then Mao would surrender his forces “to bona fide control of the Central Government . . . not too much to expect from the Communists if Chiang gives them a voice in a coalition government.” From there, American money and advisers would back a long-term effort to secure a stable peace, build a true democratic government, and reconstruct a war-ruined China. The odds of this working might not be especially high, they acknowledged, but it was the best they could do.

  Marshall’s first stop in China had been Shanghai. A Nationalist honor guard saluted him as he landed. Flag-waving crowds lined the ten-mile route to the Cathay Hotel, the lush Art Deco bastion that housed the postwar U.S. headquarters. American and Chinese officers toasted him with cocktails. But once the toasts were over, he met with Wedemeyer, the polished, handsome, and ambitious commander of U.S. troops, and Walter Robertson, the senior American diplomat in China. They related the same grim message that had dominated their recent reports to Washington—the two sides were implacably hostile, the Communists were intent on power, Stalin was backing Mao, Chiang’s government was alienating the people, his commanders were inept. As ever, the problem was what else could be done. Contemplating the alternatives led back to the same basic formula: bolstering Chiang’s government while promoting a settlement and pressing for reform.

  The next day, Marshall continued inland to Nanjing, where Chiang himself was waiting. Before the Japanese onslaught drove his government to its redoubt in Chongqing, Nanjing had been the capital of Chiang’s Republican China; soon it would be again. Chiang had overhauled it on the model of Paris and Washington to be “a source of energy for the whole nation” and “a role model for the whole world.” There, he would look like the leader of a great power, a head of state to be approached with respect, not the equal of a “bandit” like Mao. When Chiang found the Nanjing airfield unpresentable the morning of Marshall’s arrival, he was furious.

  After flouting protocol to greet him on the runway, Chiang took Marshall to his house in the city, with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, in fur, sitting between them in the back of the car. They talked until almost midnight, Wedemeyer listening and Madame Chiang translating.

  “I should make him realize,” Chiang had written in his diary that morning, “that the U.S. and China share the same stake.” He focused on the Soviets, hoping to persuade Marshall that “we cannot emulate Eastern Europe or Yugoslavia and set up coalition government under the guise of ‘fake’ democracy.” Marshall wanted to reassure Chiang that he bore no grudge over the Stilwell affair. But he also wanted to convey the importance of American public opinion—for American policy and, by extension, for Chiang’s own prospects. Americans were “warmly disposed” toward Chiang’s government. They hoped to see him succeed. But whether that lasted, Marshall warned, hinged “almost entirely upon the United States public appreciation of the reasonableness and determination on the part of both sides to reach satisfactory settlement.” Chiang said he appreciated the candor; he would do all he could, “in spite of the past,” pursuing a political solution as long as the Communists proved willing to give up their armies. Marshall added that while he would listen objectively to all sides, he would share his personal views with Chiang alone.

  “I sensed that he made an excellent impression,” Wedemeyer wrote of Marshall afterward, in a letter to Patrick Hurley. Marshall’s “deference” had been “remarkable.” Chiang registered Marshall’s respect for his leadership (“he will advise only me”) and apparent wariness of Communist aims and “deceptive propaganda.” Chiang summarized in his diary: “The more deferential we are to the Communist Party, the more advantageous it is to us, and the easier to materialize Truman’s aims.” It was the conclusion Marshall had wanted him to reach.

  But here in Chongqing such commitments would be put to the test. As Marshall’s plane approached, the mood at the airfield was far from joyous. Government agents tried to chase away the Communists, stopping only after American officials stepped in, a trivial yet telling reflection of broader hostilities. Still, many hoped “that Marshall will fix everything,” as John Melby put it. Newspapers were reporting an instantaneous lull in fighting. Both sides had released optimistic statements of welcome.

  When he stepped off the plane into the mud and the gray, Marshall said little. A band played the Chinese and American national anthems. He greeted T. V. Soong, Chiang’s Harvard-educated brother-in-law, and Zhou Enlai, the Communist representative in Chongqing, and then drove off toward the city.

  Melby wondered: “Is Marshall more than a great soldier and a fine man?”

  Although few people remarked on it at the time, Marshall had lived in China before. For three years in the 1920s, he served in the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment in Tianjin, a coastal city southeast of Beijing. The Fifteenth was one of the most coveted assignments in the army. “In China one can live like a prince-of-the-blood on the pay of a second lieutenant,” reported the Infan
try Journal. Marshall’s first wife, Lily, had relished the posting: “Everyone over there lives in the most unbelievable luxury. Beautiful houses—wonderful food—& tremendously gay & interesting.” (A Virginia beauty with a faulty heart, Lily died shortly after their China sojourn.) There was a country club, a tennis club, a polo field, an ice rink, a dancing pavilion, and a lively cocktail bar, all with a pleasing air of late-imperial glamor. There was also, as Marshall noted with concern, an abundance of “cheap liquor and cheaper women—Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean.” The Fifteenth was said to have record rates of venereal disease.

  The draw for Marshall, however, was the prospect of “interesting events.” China had been in a state of almost continuous upheaval for decades. Since the Qing Dynasty’s defeat in the First Opium War in 1842, foreign powers had grabbed territory and wealth, extracted imperial privileges, and otherwise done whatever they could to curtail China’s sovereignty. Internal uprisings—the heavenly kingdom of the Taipings, the secret societies of the Boxers—compounded the instability. And the end of the Qing in 1912 had brought not a new order, not the triumph of Sun Yat-sen’s republican vision, but new chaos, with warlords and regional armies vying for dominance. Foreign powers fed on the disorder and deepened it, a vicious cycle that seemed likely to consume China.

  The Fifteenth was hardly unimplicated in this record of humiliation. Americans might not have liked to see it that way. Surely, they thought, we are not like the imperial powers, whose troops guard concessions they claim as their own. But to many Chinese, the 1,000 men in Marshall’s regiment, on Chinese soil to protect American interests, were as much an occupying army as the British or French.

  “We are in the midst of a Chinese civil war,” the 43-year-old Marshall wrote home after arriving in Tianjin, and he thought himself “very lucky” to be there to see it. With guns sounding in the distance, he had his troops guarding rail lines and clearing blockades. (“Can do” was the regiment’s motto.) He observed warlord armies marching by and tried to trace the webs of alliance and betrayal. He learned that the effectiveness of Chinese forces depended “on leadership and ability to secure pay for troops, ” and that “a Chinese soldier will go farther on a dough ball than an American soldier on a full ration.” He also registered the human toll of civil war. One Christmas morning, he watched refugees crawl down the road like “animals hunted to exhaustion.”

  He studied the language and ordered other officers to do the same, so they could carry out their work “without provoking the fatal first shot.” Before long, he related proudly, he knew 2,500 characters and could “grunt and whine intelligible Chinese,” whether to “discuss treaty rights” or to decipher “the wranglings and squabbles of the coolies and rickshaw men.” He wrote a friend, “I am getting to be quite a Chinaman now.”

  Yet the more Marshall saw, the more he realized how much he did not understand. In China, he wrote his mentor, General Pershing, “you can rarely judge by surface or apparent conditions. The real scheming is entirely beneath the surface.” Amid chaos, “no one ventures to predict just what is to happen. Chinese methods are too devious for foreign penetration.”

  But one development was clear: nationalism was on the rise, with ominous implications for foreign privilege. To Marshall, the question was whether “a strong man combining the qualities of statesman, politician, and military chief” could harness a nationalist vision to real power. As he was finishing his tour, a force in southern China, the Kuomintang, looked increasingly capable of doing so. Its armies were making their way north, taking territory, co-opting and crushing warlords, occupying cities—including, just before Marshall returned home, the cosmopolitan metropolis of Shanghai. Their leader was a 39-year-old military commander named Chiang Kai-shek.

  Chiang had a powerful sense of his own destiny. “Profound change first of all depends on one or two persons who manage deeply, delicately, and silently, then their successors join in and God responds to their call,” he copied in his diary while still in his mid-thirties. “Can you believe that I regard myself as one of those one or two persons?”

  He had, like Marshall, a ferocious will, impelled by brutal self-criticism. He compiled lists of his flaws: he was “conceited,” “stubborn,” “jealous,” “arrogant,” “extravagant,” “stingy,” “lascivious,” “ruthless,” “tyrannical.” To overcome those flaws, he demanded “meticulous self-control.” Every morning, he stood on his verandah, arms crossed, and contemplated his goals for the day. He, like Marshall, “loved to make decisions.” And he had a temper that, like Marshall, he struggled to suppress.

  Born to a merchant family south of Shanghai, Chiang grew up steeped in the duty and discipline of Confucianism; his given name, Kai-shek, meant “upright stone.” He also grew up feeling his country’s humiliation as his own. Ashamed of weakness, he fixated on power and how to win it. He studied military strategy in Japan, whose newfound superiority in such matters was both a model and a disgrace for proud Chinese. There, “utter depression” drove him to “riotous living,” and he developed a taste for high-end prostitutes, resulting in an infection that left him sterile. (He already had a son with his first wife, to whom his parents had married him at 14.) Soon, however, that dissolution gave way to single-minded devotion to a cause greater than himself. He started eating simply, and drinking boiled water instead of alcohol. “From this day on,” he pledged, “I will rise out of bed at six o’clock. I will remind myself of this humiliation and continue to do so until the national humiliation is wiped away completely.” His cause was the renewal of Chinese greatness, and his leader in this cause was Sun Yat-sen.

  Chiang had obvious value to Sun, the leader of China’s republican movement. Sun’s vision of a Chinese republic, founded on the Three People’s Principles of democracy, nationalism, and “people’s livelihood,” had helped topple the Qing, but in the turmoil that followed, warriors proved to have the advantage over visionaries. When Sun’s Nationalist party, the Kuomintang, won elections, a militarist rival dissolved parliament. Discovered as a willful young officer, Chiang rose quickly, becoming commandant of the party’s military academy, Whampoa. And after Sun died in 1925, Chiang was well positioned to take charge and set about unifying China himself—not by the appeal of Nationalist principles, but by the force of Nationalist arms.

  While Western governments fretted about their ascent, the Nationalists had looked to other patrons—the Soviets. Sun had dispatched Chiang to Moscow, bearing letters for Lenin and Trotsky, to discuss strategy and cultivate support. The Kremlin complied, sending money and advisers. This patronage had come with a condition—accepting members of the newly formed Chinese Communist Party into Nationalist ranks—but it was one Sun thought reasonable. A young party member named Mao Zedong took over the Peasant Movement Training Institute, while another, Zhou Enlai, became Chiang’s deputy for political affairs. (Also on staff was a young Vietnamese nationalist who would become known as Ho Chi Minh.) Soviet advisers even worried that Chiang, who had sent his son to their country to study at the University of the Toilers of the East, was showing excessive favoritism to Communists at Whampoa; they feared it might backfire.

  In fact, Chiang had doubts about this united front, and over time they grew. His three months in Moscow had left him wary of the Soviets. “I treat them with sincerity but they reciprocate with deceit,” he wrote in his diary. They, in turn, came to find him too proud, too sensitive to slights against him and his nation; one Soviet official described him as “a peculiar person with peculiar characteristics, most prominent of those being his lust for glory and power and craving to be the hero of China.” He began to fear the Kremlin would turn on him, and he was right to worry. “Chiang Kai-shek,” Stalin said, would be “squeezed out like a lemon and then flung away.” So after seizing Shanghai in April 1927, a key victory in his push north, Chiang enlisted a criminal syndicate called the Green Gang and purged his erstwhile Communist allies. Thousands were killed; Zhou, his Whampoa deputy, barely escaped,
with an $80,000 bounty on his head.

  “The Japanese are a disease of the skin, the Communists are a disease of the heart,” Chiang took to saying. (Ernest Hemingway commented after visiting, “Personally, I have known no disease of the heart which has ever been cured by such a violent means.”) Yet in the wake of the purge and military campaign, there was reason to think that this disease of the heart could be eradicated before long. The Communists were stuck in minor enclaves or on the run; Generalissimo Chiang was settling into his new capital in Nanjing, taking his place at the head of a new Chinese republic.

  Over the next ten years, he achieved things no leader had for decades. He brought much of China under one government. He put in place pieces of a modern state: common currency, updated laws, expanded education. There were problems, to be sure. Unity rested on deals with opportunistic warlords and regional leaders, and was held together with corruption, cajoling, and violence. Control required playing faction against faction, maintaining constant suspicion, and frequently privileging loyalty over effectiveness. Supposed commitments to measures such as land reform—the foremost demand of the rural masses—were blocked by reactionary supporters. But whatever the unstable and unsavory alliances, whatever Chiang’s autocratic tendencies, the achievements were real. “After a long waiting and desperate search,” admitted a former opponent, “we, to our great joy, have at long last found our Leader.”

  Chiang had also found a partner in his cause. After years of infatuation, he persuaded Soong Mei-ling, a sister of Sun Yat-sen’s widow, to become his third wife. Soon famous to the world as Madame Chiang, Mei-ling was unlike other women he knew: educated, opinionated, physically beautiful, intellectually fierce—and, like Sun, Christian. To win her hand, Chiang promised to convert, and Methodism became another element in his idiosyncratic worldview. In his imperfect Mandarin (it was not his native dialect), he told followers that only by embracing “the traditional virtues and the traditional spirits . . . will we be able to revive the highest culture of our nation, to restore our nation’s very special standing in this world.” Yet he also read the bible daily and wrote in his diary about “bear[ing] the cross along with Jesus.” And for many Americans, Chiang did become a messianic figure. “The Chinese have understood that the signs portended vast upheaval and out of the anguish would come the man to lead them,” Henry Luce proclaimed. “He has come.”