Then, in 1937, came Japan’s assault. In certain ways, war enhanced Chiang’s stature, and thanks to adept diplomacy, his nation’s. Foreign powers went from treating China as a virtual colony to recognizing it as a unitary state that stretched almost as far as it had in its imperial heyday, to include Manchuria, Tibet, and Xinjiang in the far west (Outer Mongolia was given up in exchange for Stalin’s support). Chiang, his champions could claim, had made China great again.
But mostly war meant ruin—for the people, landscape, and economy, and for Chiang’s national endeavor. It was not just the brutality of Japan’s Three Alls policy: kill all, burn all, loot all. It was not just the lethality: some 15 million dead, along with perhaps 80 million displaced. War halted nation-building, and then shattered much of what Chiang had built. The demands of conflict strained government finances, triggering high inflation and crushing taxes. Warlords withdrew their support, and Chiang, one dispatch reported, began “trusting no one but himself.” There were new opportunities for elite corruption—aid to be siphoned, black markets to be cornered—and new causes for popular resentment, as peasants sent their sons and crops to the army while officials and landlords sacrificed little. Millions died in a “man-made famine,” the rich feasting as the poor starved. Half a million drowned, and millions were left homeless, when Chiang blasted the Yellow River dikes, flooding an area larger than Switzerland to slow a Japanese advance—an act so shocking that even enemies had a hard time believing he had done it. By the end, industry and agriculture were decimated, cholera, plague, and malaria rampant, and the people, an American official assessed, “seething with unrest.”
With the war over, his 60th birthday a year away, Chiang reflected. “Fifty years of national humiliation, as well as the indignities and insults I have endured, are being washed away,” he wrote. Yet “while old wrongs have passed into history, we are in danger of being engulfed by new ones.”
The question now was whether Marshall’s arrival would lessen that danger or heighten it.
Some of Chiang’s closest advisers thought the latter. “Marshall is too big,” warned Chen Li-fu, leader of the Nationalists’ uncompromising conservative wing. “He will force a solution.” Chen feared that failure might be unacceptable to such a towering figure.
But Chiang himself was mostly heartened. He reasoned that Truman would not have called on Marshall if the United States did not consider China important. After a Chinese envoy was promptly invited to Moscow for talks, Chiang concluded that Stalin must think the same. Truman’s public directive was also reassuring: “not in line with the Communist Party’s wishes, and therefore beneficial to my state.”
Most heartening of all, a secret report had come from the Chinese embassy in Washington. The confidential deliberations in the White House had not been as confidential as Marshall thought. Someone leaked a key detail to Chiang’s ambassador, a detail omitted from not just the public directive, but the private one as well. A message went to the Generalissimo: “When Marshall asked the President what to do if the Chinese Communists do not knuckle under or if our government is not willing to accept the Communists’ conditions for being included in the government, the President answered, support your excellency.” Marshall’s bluff was already exposed.
Chongqing had been swollen, battered, and transfigured by war. Long considered a backwater, “an utterly feudal place full of opium and gambling,” its rocky hills and steep river banks were now crowded with Chinese from all walks of life: peasants and workers with nothing, high officials with briefcases and Buicks, industrialists who had floated whole factories down the Yangtze to keep them from the Japanese. “It was as if a county seat of Kentucky mountaineers had suddenly been called to play host to all the most feverishly dynamic New Yorkers, Texans, and Californians,” an American reporter explained. The city’s population, a few hundred thousand before, had quadrupled.
Unable to penetrate mountainous Szechuan by land, Japan had sent punishment by air, and Chongqing’s suffering became famous. “Fathers, mothers watched their children burnt alive,” Madame Chiang wrote an American friend, “children saw their parents struggling to fight across the flames only to disappear in the ruins of falling beams and pillars.” So, too, the wartime capital’s fortitude in the face of suffering. Chongqing, declared the U.S. Army’s Pocket Guide to China, “is the most bombed out city in the world. Yet the people go on.” Its inhabitants would crowd into shelters when an air raid started, then wash their clothes in bomb craters when it stopped. “They are unbeatable,” arriving Americans were told.
Before long, however, most newcomers started complaining. “The prevailing Chinese attitude toward Americans in Chongqing is hatred; the prevailing American attitude toward Chinese is bitter hatred,” said a U.S. intelligence report. In part the complaints were about the scheming and suspicion, the “rather medieval court intrigue.” But even more, they were about the stench and noise, the cold winters and hot summers, the chaos and cultural friction—or as a general quipped, the “yells, bells, and smells.”
John Melby had come after the war, fresh from a diplomatic posting in Moscow and charged with keeping tabs on Soviet activity in China. Letters to his mistress—Lillian Hellman, a prominent left-wing writer for Broadway and Hollywood, almost ten years his elder and also married—were litanies of woe: “a dreary expanse of mud and bedraggled Chinamen”; “you feel that never again can you get warm or dried out”; the available liquor was “a local gin which I simply cannot get down.” A navy doctor warned new arrivals they would get “a postgraduate course in respiratory troubles” thanks to the fumes of burning coal and raw sewage that infused the fog. “Really the most foul sanitary place I’ve ever seen,” an officer wrote in his diary. “No wonder they die by the millions.” The Americans griped about rats, peddlers, and power outages, and the squeals of pigs slaughtered in the streets. They mocked mistranslations (“Sing Sing High Class Tailor—Ladies May Have Fits Upstairs”) and spouted expatriate clichés (“Time means nothing”). Soldiers tore around in jeeps, spraying filth.
On the afternoon of his arrival, Marshall was driven through streets of deep brown mud, past bamboo shacks on stilts along the rivers and newer buildings painted black against Japanese bombers, and up a hill to a gray stone bungalow that was an odd hybrid of Western and Chinese styles. With the incongruous name of Happiness Gardens and the uncommon luxury of a semi-reliable water heater (T. V. Soong had lived there before), the house was to serve as mission headquarters. There were bedrooms for Marshall and his staff upstairs, the river visible below when the fog cleared. On the first floor, there was a living room where he could work by a fireplace and a curving bay window that overlooked the teeming city outside.
Marshall was met with an immediate barrage of invitations, appeals, warnings, suggestions, and supplications. The point of not becoming the official ambassador was to avoid such a crush. But official or not, Marshall was, one American remarked, China’s white hope. Moreover, both press speculation and official chatter were rife with rumors that this mission was a prelude to some bigger job, maybe secretary of state. It was no surprise that half of Chongqing seemed to want to see or sway him.
“You arrive here just in time to save China from falling a prey to the civil wars,” one correspondent wrote. “We are mad with joy when hear of your arrivel,” fawned another. A group of “sincere Christians” invoked Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms to condemn Chiang’s “terror.” Others denounced Mao’s “treachery” and said they preferred death to Communist rule. Marshall heard from postal workers, mill workers, engineers, farmers, soldiers, and a group of self-described “poorly educated Chinese women.” His former “number one boy” from Tianjin wrote to request the cigarette concession at an American base; his former cook wanted the “privilege of collecting garbage” there, so he could sell it as scrap. An English-speaking man, knowing Marshall was a voracious reader, asked for his discarded novels, since “I am a big reader too . . . and long for new ones.” One
woman asked if she could borrow his airplane to visit her parents.
Messages also flooded in from across the Pacific. Senators wanted favors for constituents. Chinese-Americans wanted help locating relatives. Mothers wanted updates on soldier sons. A man from White Plains, New York, wanted the creation of “a great Christian republic in China.” There were offers of honorary degrees and board seats, reminders of birthday messages and payments on the Oldsmobile Marshall was buying for retirement, requests for interviews and autographs. Churchill asked for a signed picture, “which I should cherish with the happy memories of our association during these last strenuous but glorious years.” A former colleague sent a four-leaf clover.
The American diplomats and officers stationed in Chongqing, meanwhile, were anxious to see what Marshall would do now that he was here. They had been pulling the relevant files on Chinese politics, economics, and military affairs for his background, but most knew little about the mission beyond what was in public statements. The uncertainty was especially nerve-racking given how poisonous the official scene was, thanks to years of Hurley’s accusations and Stilwell’s barbs, not to mention the constant coming and going of operatives from various American intelligence outfits—in the words of one diplomat, “a pungent collection of thugs, post-debutantes, millionaires, professors, corporation lawyers, professional military, and misfits, all operating under high tension and in whispers.” When Melby got to Chongqing shortly before Marshall, he was struck immediately by the “gestapo atmosphere,” relating to Hellman, “Every officer here has taken me aside and given me advice on what I can say to whom and who should be trusted and who spies for whom.” The result was not just personal unpleasantness, but also diplomatic paralysis. “Everything seems bitched up,” he concluded. “There just ain’t no policy any more. Just fiddling.”
Although only 32, with a wry smile and receding hairline, Melby was cynical by nature, skeptical of both Soviet promises—he had spent the war in Moscow assuming he was always trailed or bugged—and his own country’s self-serving myths. On top of that, he was lovelorn. “I wish to Christ I had never heard of China or any place else except where you are,” he wrote Hellman.
Yet even Melby found cause for optimism in the selection of Marshall—“a natural for it, not something drawn from a hat.” Ivan Yeaton, an army colonel whose time heading the Dixie Mission in Yenan had fanned his anti-Communism, also took comfort: “I feel that a national hero such as he would never be sent here at this time just to be destroyed.”
To start, Marshall wanted to listen, to absorb as many facts and perspectives as he could. He recognized his mission was just the latest chapter in a long, intricate record of collaboration, betrayal, bloodshed, and negotiation between the Nationalists and Communists, including most recently the six weeks Mao had spent in Chongqing at Stalin’s behest. The military situation was also complex, notwithstanding the upbeat headlines in American newspapers. (“All Fighting Ceases in China’s Civil War” the Washington Post splashed across eight columns as Marshall was en route.) With U.S. help, the Nationalists had established a commanding presence in major cities and started making their way to southern Manchuria in preparation for Soviet withdrawal. Yet the Communists had a strong base in the north, centered in Yenan, a growing presence in Manchuria (thanks to intermittently active Soviet help), and a guerrilla network that posed a threat to railway and supply lines across much of China. Generals from both armies were maneuvering for position, while officials plotted to gain advantage in the coming negotiation. To further complicate matters, millions of defeated Japanese had yet to be shipped home, the ostensible primary function of American troops in China.
Both sides had been applauding Truman’s statement. “We are gratified,” said an official newspaper, “that the wishes of the National Government are exactly what is expected by the United States.” Chiang asserted that if only Washington had said all this before, “the Communists would not have been so rambunctious.” Communist spokesmen hailed progress in U.S. policy. But both sides were emphasizing the elements of the policy that best served them, overinterpreting particular points to their own benefit. The government praised Truman’s condemnation of autonomous armies, the Communists his condemnation of one-party government. Melby summed it up with characteristic sarcasm: “All official attitudes here today rejoice in the great wisdom and understanding about China which has come from the lips of the great man from Missouri.”
On Marshall’s first full day in Chongqing, December 23, Zhou Enlai arrived in the afternoon for a meeting. Zhou had spent the war as Yenan’s emissary to both the Nationalist government and, more consequentially, the community of foreign diplomats, reporters, and military officers stationed in the capital.
The Communists’ praise of Truman’s statement—and Marshall’s arrival—was not just propaganda. “The U.S. has already decided not to intervene directly in the Chinese civil war,” the CCP concluded from the statement. “Instead it is supporting China’s peaceful unification.” The CCP’s strategy, accordingly, was to “make use of Truman’s statement” for its own advantage. Party officials started insisting they had no problem with American troops and no interest in “Russian-style Communism in China.” Party members were told to improve their relationships with Americans. When six downed U.S. airmen were handed over from CCP custody to U.S. officials in Tianjin, the consul reported, “Communist attitude recently changed to friendliness toward the U.S.A.” Mao instructed Zhou to demonstrate flexibility in his dealings with the new envoy. “If Marshall uses the opportunity, the Communists will throw themselves in the lap of the U.S.,” a dispatch from the Dixie Mission predicted.
Zhou was well suited to this diplomatic offensive, and he turned his charisma on Marshall as soon as they sat down that afternoon. Zhou talked about Lincoln’s spirit of freedom and Washington’s spirit of independence. He cited the power of the American model of government, the achievements of American agriculture, and the importance of American commerce. He stressed his party’s interest in peace and democracy, in terms that struck Marshall as more hopeful and less qualified than those of Nationalist spokesmen. He emphasized that demobilization of Communist armies depended on democratization of the government but did not contest Chiang’s leadership. He criticized Wedemeyer’s continuing transport of government troops, arguing that it violated Truman’s dictate against fratricidal warfare, but did not make a scene when Marshall reiterated the United States’ commitment to helping Chiang’s armies enter Manchuria. At the end, they toasted: Marshall to “generous understanding,” Zhou to “lasting freedom.” The meeting, Zhou said afterward, had been delightful.
Marshall revealed little in these first days. He spent hour after hour receiving visitors and listening—to anyone, he said, “who has a genuine interest in the settlement of China’s problems.” High-minded liberals came to tell him about their efforts to chart a course between the government and the Communists; “we have called, America has answered,” said the University of Wisconsin–educated leader of one of the “third parties.” T. V. Soong, currently Chiang’s premier, came to ask if Marshall needed help with anything, and Marshall responded with a string of questions: “Where do you get coal?” “Where does your rice come from?” “What is behind your currency?” “Very roughly what do you need in freight cars?” And what, he wondered, were the similarities and differences between Soviet methods in Asia and in Europe? Others came to deliver messages in secret—dissident government figures, women afraid of reprisals from one group or another. “I have read a good deal and have listened,” Marshall said, “but I have got to listen more.”
On his second full day, December 24, Marshall agreed to meet with reporters at the American embassy. Still he revealed nothing. It would be “foolish” to try to answer any real questions, he pointed out, since “it will be some time before I can hope to get a fair picture of China.” Reporters came away with so little that they resorted to including in their stories the number of rain-slicked step
s he had climbed to the embassy—118—after declining to be carried in a sedan chair. They got little more when they tracked down people who had been to see him at his house. He had “expressed no opinion,” they were told. With so little in the way of facts, and so great an appetite for information about the great man and what he was doing, the papers took to printing rumors, many false: Marshall will have a cease-fire by Christmas; he has “a special fancy for flowers.”
Marshall’s silence drove Chongqing officialdom, Chinese and American, to the brink of panic. “Marshall has this entire country in a stew by the simple expedient of not saying anything or reacting when he is asked a question,” Melby wrote. “He just sits and listens impassively, breaking his silence only occasionally to ask a question.” When an interlocutor tried to provoke some response, he would politely refuse to take the bait.
Some people noticed that Marshall, though now a diplomat, continued to wear the uniform of a general. That must be meant to convey something, they thought, though as with his words and countenance, no one was sure exactly what.
It was Chongqing’s first Christmas since the war, and the exuberant holiday social calendar seemed like a boon for the cause of peace. Enemies and friends crowded into the same liquor-soaked affairs. “Women Communists were dancing with Kuomintang Ministers,” a correspondent wrote, and “Russians and Americans were pledging boundless friendship over glasses of Chongqing gin fizz.” Marshall made his first public appearance at a Christmas Eve party thrown by an American general. Officers of various militaries and diplomats of various embassies sipped eggnog and watched him have a fifteen-minute conversation with the Soviet ambassador before moving on to the Zhous. Marshall appeared “to handle the Communists well,” Melby observed.
The China Mission Page 7