The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  As for his Communist counterpart, there was never a doubt that it would be Zhou Enlai. In his youth, Zhou had been an actor, with delicate mannerisms that suited him well for female roles. It was a profitable training in what turned out to be his most potent qualities: a graceful bearing, a talent for indirection, the deliberate and magnetic presence of a performer onstage. He learned to advocate, dissemble, and evade with a disarming air of directness and candor. At times even Chiang, betrayed before, insisted Zhou could be trusted.

  He had charisma and knew how to wield it. Martha Gellhorn half-joked that she would follow him anywhere. (Hemingway, meanwhile, found him slippery.) He had warm eyes, thick and expressive eyebrows, slicked-back hair, impeccable clothing—when the occasion was right, a well-cut suit and black fedora.

  He came from what he described, in a session of “self-criticism,” as “a run-down feudal aristocratic family.” Amid lush rice paddies north of Nanjing, his parents gave him a name that meant “advent of grace,” and expected greatness. As a young man, he had lived in France. “Paris is beautiful,” he wrote on a postcard, “and so are the women!” He had joined leftist discussion groups at cafes near the Sorbonne and read Marx in English translation. He met young Chinese radicals, including future comrades Deng Xiaoping and Zhu De. By the time Zhou left Europe and returned to China, he was a Communist.

  At the time, the Nationalists and Communists were attempting their first united front, and when Zhou was assigned to work for Chiang Kai-shek at the Whampoa military academy, they struck a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Chiang focused on military affairs, Zhou on political. Only gradually did Chiang realize what Zhou was doing with this division of labor: turning cadets into Communists. Foreshadowing bloodier purges, the recruits were expelled and Zhou briefly put under house arrest. During this crackdown he met another rising party member, a specialist in peasant affairs named Mao Zedong.

  They were very different men. When Zhou talked about his childhood, he told stories of a loving mother. When Mao talked about his, he spoke of a savage father. Over the following years, they dealt with one another warily, shifting between collaboration and rivalry as each moved up, or down, the Communist hierarchy. But in time, the terms of the relationship started to clarify. For all his assets, Zhou did not, he realized, have what it took to win a struggle for supremacy, not against Mao’s guile and cruelty and sheer will to dominance. Zhou knew how to defer graciously to authority; Mao could never but rage against it. After the heroic hardships of the Long March and the first years of refuge in Yenan, Zhou conceded: “The direction and leadership of Mao Zedong is the direction of the Chinese Communist Party!” The revolution would be Mao’s, its doctrine Mao Zedong Thought, his homespun improvement on Marxism-Leninism. “We are all Chairman Mao’s good little children,” toddlers recited.

  Chairman Mao still needed Zhou, however, and Zhou stepped into his role with typical élan. “Mao’s housekeeper,” some sniped. Others were less damning: “Mao Zedong told Zhou all his thoughts and intentions, while Zhou Enlai translated them into action in the light of the actual conditions outside.” Mao’s insight had been to recognize, contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, the power of the rural masses, and especially of their hatred of elites. “A revolution is not a dinner party,” he said in an assessment of rural conditions, “but an act of violence.” But once hatred was unleashed, it took Zhou’s tactical savvy and political acumen to channel it—means to Mao’s ends. At times that meant urging patience or compromise, at times restraining violence or cleaning up after it. Yet Zhou also learned to push only as far as Mao would tolerate, at which point Zhou became extravagant in his deference. When he sensed Mao was going to criticize him, Zhou criticized himself. When Mao spoke, Zhou took notes on a pad held up in front of him so all would see.

  Throughout, Zhou remained a man of many personas: urbane cosmopolitan, Mandarin scholar-official, single-minded revolutionary. On the Long March, he had his bodyguard carry an inkwell from France. When a Communist agent cracked under torture, he sent five assassins to kill every member of the man’s extended family. Changeability was a quality Mao found particularly useful in Zhou, and never more so than when, early in World War II, the Communists needed a representative in Chiang’s capital. The politics and diplomacy, the plotting and public relations, the meetings and dinner parties—Zhou was made for the Chongqing scene.

  Once there, he cultivated diplomats, officers, and journalists. Reporters in need of copy relished his potent and articulate analysis, which no matter how misleading still contrasted favorably with the also misleading banalities of officious government spokesmen. Even when you knew he was lying, it was said, you could not help liking him. Officers gave him the code name Mainbocher, after a French-American line of haute couture; Mao was Moby, after the white whale.

  Over dinner, Zhou talked about books, world events, Paris, dropping French phrases into his tentative English conversation. He was a good dancer and drinker. Liquor brought out a flirtatious streak, but he never seemed to get drunk. Americans slapped him on the back and called him Joe. When he wanted to flatter them, he told them they were beginning to truly understand China.

  He had a staff of young Communists whose idealism was appealing even to skeptics. “They are vigorous,” recorded John Fairbank, a Harvard professor serving in U.S. intelligence, “because they are a selected group of believers and workers for a social cause.” Zhou taught the young believers to use their ardor for strategic purpose. When one asked why he, a revolutionary, wore Western suits, Zhou replied, “It is not the clothes that matter, little Zhu. If we dress like soldiers, we’ll smell of gunpowder.” When another blew up in a meeting, he chided, “Don’t be impatient and don’t hurt our friends’ feelings.”

  The Communists, as much as the Nationalists, saw opportunity in wartime relations with the Americans. Shrewd diplomacy might succeed in curbing support for the government and diverting some to Yenan. “Expose the darkness within the Chinese ruling circle to win their sympathy towards the CCP,” a directive said.

  To that end, Zhou traded avidly in nasty Chongqing gossip. Mao dispensed advice on handling Chiang to Americans: “You must not give way to his threats and bullying.” The Communists vowed that, treated as partners, they would be “more cooperative than the Kuomintang.” They claimed eagerness to fight, even as their armies shrank from combat and let Chiang’s absorb Japan’s fury. “If you land on the shores of China,” said Mao, “we will be there to meet you, and to place ourselves under your command.” They proposed that Mao and Zhou visit Roosevelt in the White House, though the offer never made it past the embassy. They also enthusiastically welcomed the idea of an American presence in Yenan—what became, once U.S. pressure swayed a resistant Chiang in the second-to-last year of the war, the Dixie Mission.

  The party issued guidance before the Americans arrived: “The KMT tries to talk them into doing things every day, they want this and that. We don’t raise the question at first and achieve instead their respect, and they will raise the question with us.” When the first contingent of soldiers, diplomats, and spies landed, the remote Communist base made for an exhilarating change from overcrowded, overly formal Chongqing. Mao sat talking with them for hours—like a crafty merchant, Soviets observed, who knows what buyers want to hear—and fox-trotted alongside them at Saturday night dances. They played basketball and helped devise a local version of Monopoly, Shanghai standing in for Atlantic City. The situation is excellent, young cadres would say, projecting assurance and hope—qualities that seemed exhausted in Chongqing. The Communists, reported a Dixie Mission diplomat named John Stewart Service, “are a unified group of vigorous, mature and practical men, unselfishly devoted to high principles, and having great ability and strong qualities of leadership. This impression—and I suggest, their record—places them above any other contemporary group in China.”

  The Communists worked to turn cautious esteem into concrete support. Marshall, as army chief of staff, had signed
off on Dixie with the hope that it would yield useful intelligence and assistance rescuing pilots who had crashed behind Japanese lines. But once in Yenan, some members of the mission pursued a broader mandate. The Office of Strategic Services shipped in thousands of pounds of radio gear to help the CCP communicate with its scattered troops. Intelligence agents offered lessons in spycraft, demonstrating how to use single-shot pistols as young Communists watched rapt. One OSS plan would have equipped and trained 25,000 guerrillas with special instruction in explosives.

  Once, on a flight, the officer heading the Dixie Mission asked Zhou whether the Communists viewed the Soviet Union or the United States as a better model of democracy. Zhou answered that the Soviet Union was the greatest democracy in the world. But, he added reassuringly, Soviet democracy was a long way off in China. American democracy would be just fine in the meantime.

  Washington had been asking versions of the officer’s question for years. Were the Chinese Communists true radicals or just “agrarian reformers”? Soviet stooges or headstrong nationalists? For the Communists, uncertainty allowed them to tell their story as they wanted it told. In 1936, they had invited a young American reporter named Edgar Snow to visit Yenan. His book about the experience, Red Star Over China, was both a bestseller—Roosevelt got a copy—and a dazzling exercise in mythmaking. Snow described a movement “fired by the belief that a better world can be made,” its philosophy more “rural equalitarianism than anything Marx would have found acceptable as a model child of his own.”

  The line became a common one, and not just in the Kremlin, with its skepticism of Yenan’s “cave Marxists” and peasant armies. Other reporters followed in Snow’s tracks, met ruddy-cheeked volunteers and spotted Mao tending his own garden, and returned to tell of “a cross between enlightened democrats and latter-day saints.” A Marine officer came, confirmed the accounts of “Eagle Scout Behavior,” and repurposed a Communist slogan as the battle cry of the Marine Raiders—work together, gung ho! Mao mused to visitors that the party might drop “Communist” from its name, since “the most conservative American businessman can find nothing in our program to take exception to.” John Service concluded, “The Communist political program is simple democracy . . . much more American than Russian in form and spirit.” In Washington, even avowed haters of Communism dismissed the Chinese strain as “so-called” Communism.

  The Nationalists protested that the Communists were selling “a bill of goods,” and with cause. Chiang had tried to keep American officials away from Yenan as long as possible out of fear of such “sinister intentions.” In a way, he had succeeded too well. In Chongqing, hundreds of Americans had years to see through the heroic rendering of him and his government, admiration turning to disgust. Much less so with Mao and his movement in Yenan; even the Dixie Mission was just an eight-room outpost, constructed in the war’s final year. Communist myth could easily look better from afar than Nationalist reality up close.

  Yet many who doubted the myth still grasped something else: the Communists’ strength could not be wished away. “Not that I like Communists,” a navy lieutenant wrote after his tour in Dixie, “but whatever they are they’ll have to be reckoned with.” American diplomats, some more taken in by propaganda than others, had been saying the same; several, including John Service, were sent home by Patrick Hurley for telling it like they saw it with unwelcome insistence. (Several months after leaving, Service was caught up, and cleared, in an espionage investigation when some of his China reports were found in the office of a left-wing magazine called Amerasia.) Mao reinforced the assessment every chance he got. “Chiang could not whip us during the civil war when we were a hundred times weaker,” he blustered. “What chance has he now?”

  American military intelligence reached a similar conclusion. “The Chinese Communists are the best led and most vigorous of present-day organizations in China,” a War Department study determined after hundreds of pages of analysis. It had an arresting opening as well: “The Chinese Communists are Communists.” It pointedly left no room for ambiguity: they were part of a Moscow-directed international movement that had carved a Soviet sphere of influence out of eastern Europe and would try to do the same in China. “The past records of Soviet Russian-Chinese relations give little support to the contention of those who maintain that Soviet Russia has no intention to dominate China,” the study elaborated. It was submitted to military leaders shortly before Marshall left the army.

  Two months after Hiroshima’s decimation and before Marshall’s arrival in China, George Orwell published an essay that took stock of the new world. In “You and the Atomic Bomb,” he looked toward a “peace that is no peace,” with “two or three monstrous super-states each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.” He imagined a country “at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

  This notion of a Cold War was new, but Orwell was hardly the only one struggling to make sense of postwar reality. Roosevelt had envisioned the Allies of the war going on to keep the peace, but doubts crept in even before his death. By the fall of 1945, American policymakers were well into a factious discussion about who Stalin was, what he was after, and what should be done about it. Would too much accommodation amount to appeasement, feeding his ambitions for domination? Would too little needlessly squander Allied comity, sowing tension that could lead back to war?

  Marshall had first encountered Stalin at a meeting of the World War II Allies. In discussions of strategy, the Soviet dictator was straightforward and pragmatic. But after a collective toast to the bravery of Soviet troops, he quipped in chilling response: “We do not praise our soldiers for being brave—they dare not be otherwise.”

  When Truman decided to dispatch Marshall to China, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace thought “the President’s attitude” would mean “World War Number 3.” Wallace was a prominent cabinet member—vice president until Truman replaced him on the 1944 ticket—but had begun criticizing the administration for, as he saw it, antagonizing Moscow. He judged Marshall “very strongly anti-Russian.” Others agreed, including Harry Dexter White, a senior Treasury official (and sometime Soviet intelligence asset), who thought Marshall would push a hard line. But hard-liners did not count Marshall in their camp either. They worried he was insufficiently animated by the Communist threat and placed too much stock in Soviet reliability during the war, when the Kremlin carried out commitments, he would note, to the precise day.

  Marshall had received a string of warnings about Soviet intentions in China. Wedemeyer wrote that Stalin had “created conditions favorable for ‘peaceful’ and ‘surreptitious’ penetration of communistic ideologies.” The embassy in Moscow reported that the Soviets considered the CCP “an effective machine to build upon and expand their influence in a somewhat similar manner to the methods they have used in central and Eastern Europe.”

  Yet viewed from Yenan, the relationship was hardly that straightforward. Mao, as much as Chiang, was dismayed by the inconstancy and imperiousness of his backers. “Soviet policy cannot be understood,” Communist leaders had recently declared in frustration.

  They had been saying much the same ever since Moscow’s Communist International, the Comintern, helped found the party two decades earlier. The Kremlin treated its new comrades, one complained, “as serfs.” Its dictates betrayed cluelessness about Chinese realities and, worse, disregard for Chinese outcomes when Soviet interests were at stake. (An early example not easily forgotten: Soviet insistence that the Communists be a “bloc within” the Kuomintang, leaving them exposed to Chiang’s purge.) As Mao saw it, strict adherence to the Kremlin’s “babble” would on more than one occasion have meant his death.

  During the war, Soviet survival outweighed revolutionary solidarity, and in the Kremlin’s judgment, the Nationalists, not the Communists, had the power to hold off Japan. When Chiang fell into the hands of a CCP ally, Stalin forbade
his execution; Mao was enraged but compliant. When Yenan requested Soviet weapons, Moscow instead sent tens of thousands of guns, airplanes, and tanks, along with advisers and pilots, to Chongqing; Mao, the Soviets grumbled, was conserving strength for later rather than fighting now. Even when it came to revolutionary solidarity, Stalin was skeptical. The CCP, he scoffed, was not only questionably Communist, but also “obviously too weak to become the leader of the anti-aggression struggle.” Mao, whose rise to party supremacy had come without much Soviet support, returned the sentiment: “We are certainly not fighting for an emancipated China in order to turn the country over to Moscow!”

  But for all the discord and divergent interests, Mao needed Stalin, and knew it. He struck a balance: a posture of respectful allegiance, a policy of self-reliance. His Communists would stay loyal but look out for themselves. “We should listen to the Soviets, but we should not listen to them completely,” CCP leaders said. Mao personally controlled a radio link to the Kremlin, transmitter and codes hand-delivered from Moscow. To keep it secret, he referred to Stalin as the “voice from the remote place.”

  Mao did not just need Stalin’s help. He also believed in Stalin’s revolution, even when Stalin did not believe in his. “Our party and every member of the Chinese Communist Party are Stalin’s pupils,” Mao said just before the end of World War II; he was ready to fight to carry the revolution forward. The Soviets, however, had other ideas. Without even the simple courtesy of a comradely warning, on the day of Japan’s surrender Stalin inked the Sino-Soviet Treaty, pledging to support Chiang’s government. He fired off orders to Mao: it was time to negotiate, not to fight. A civil war was certain to be destructive and, for the Communists, unlikely to be successful. It would also be an unwelcome irritant in Moscow’s interactions with Washington. And Moscow’s interests came first.