In Yenan, the Communists were doing their own rethinking. Mao, fully in command after his winter in retreat, had expressed increasingly sharp misgivings about his side’s commitments. He was warning that mediation was a ploy, “a long cord” to catch “a big fish.” He sent Zhou a message: “All that has happened lately proves that Chiang’s anti-Soviet, anti-CCP, and anti-democratic nature will not change.” Zhou was to backtrack and stall. In late March, when he flew to Yenan with the ostensible purpose of selling his colleagues on Gillem’s Manchuria truce-team directive, CCP leaders instead gathered to plot strategy. Communist “diehards,” as opposed to negotiation as those on the other side, invoked Nationalist “revisions” to the political agreements to bolster their case. “Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists will not put down their swords because of our substantial concessions,” two hard-line commanders argued. After five days of discussions, CCP leaders resolved, “We can neither participate in the National Assembly nor join the government.”
A year earlier, at the Seventh Party Congress in Yenan, Mao had told the Communist ranks that they were entering an era of global concord. “The Chinese people feel that the American people, who before were thought of as living in a distant place, now have become a close neighbor,” proclaimed his tract “On Coalition Government.” A year later, he was expounding on a rising “counterrevolutionary tide” and a fascist plot to kindle World War III. Like Chiang, Mao saw opportunity in the ferment. Before, global dynamics had constrained his ability to fight. Now global tensions held out the promise of true revolutionary solidarity and support. Warning of Washington’s imperial designs in China, the Kremlin had stopped demanding cooperation and started chiding Chinese comrades for being “too courteous to the Americans.” Moscow had instructed its representatives to expand contacts with the Communists. An American military assessment summarized, “the Soviet government is giving increasing aid to the CCP in the form of advice and leadership, coordination of troop movements and supply of captured enemy materiel.”
Moscow’s shift was not simply a matter of revolutionary solidarity. It was a way of punishing Chiang. He had proved less supine than hoped, more resistant than expected to a Soviet sphere of influence; a bolstered CCP would be the price he paid for insolence. It could also help check the Americans. The U.S. agenda in China no longer appeared as benign as it had a few months earlier, when the Moscow summit anointed Marshall de facto representative of the international community. The Kremlin now worried that his early success presaged more expansive American aims. And if Chiang could not be trusted to keep American influence at an acceptably nonthreatening level—Stalin’s threshold for feeling threatened was not very high—a more aggressive CCP could help guarantee Soviet interests.
Mao had started making bold ideological declarations: “The democratic forces of the people of the world are more powerful than the world reactionary forces.” But to Stalin, the Communists were still more means than end.
Months before his Long Telegram was passed around Washington, George Kennan had written another, less-noticed telegram on the Soviet Union’s objective in China—in his analysis, “maximum power with minimum responsibility.” He charted out the Kremlin’s likely approach: “She would prefer to work through an inwardly strong and nominally independent national Chinese Government sufficiently reliable and subservient to constitute an effective channel of influence. If this cannot be achieved, she is quite prepared to work . . . through local forces which will not hesitate, where necessary, to challenge central authority.” When it came to challenging authority, Mao was not known to hesitate.
On his second morning back, Marshall sat down for breakfast at Happiness Gardens. It was already clear that, unlike in December, he could not afford days of listening. With aides across the table, he launched into a comprehensive analysis of what had happened. He knew he needed to move fast, with “strong blows” that would “crack the major points one at a time.” By the end of breakfast, Caughey was newly confident they would find a way forward. “It may not be too good,” he recognized, “but it will be better than anyone else could do with the same set of circumstances before him.” Whatever happened, he thought, “there will never be any recriminations against General Marshall because he is not a defeatist.”
The typically buoyant Caughey had been hit with waves of foreboding in recent days. “I have never before been in on the ground floor of a war in the making,” he wrote his wife. Each side swore not to want it, but neither would stand down, and he found himself understanding why. “The strangest things happen every day to make you think one is right and then to make you think the other is,” he wrote. Or, he allowed, “Maybe everybody is wrong.”
Marshall came down closer to this latter view. His approach over the winter had depended on precise choreography, a virtuous cycle of commitments and concessions overcoming suspicion and building toward unity. Step by step, the Nationalists would give up political supremacy as, step by step, the Communists gave up their armies. But a vicious cycle of doubt and distrust, of moves and countermoves, had taken hold instead. Both sides stalled on their commitments, justifying equivocation as a reaction to bad faith. Even Marshall’s machinery of peace, meant to preempt such excuses, proved vulnerable. The Committee of Three was paralyzed, Zhou claiming he lacked authority to make key decisions, Chiang dispatching Chang Chi-chung to the far western region of Xinjiang and assigning a succession of less capable replacements. The Executive Headquarters had become a forum for debates that went nowhere. (That was no accident: the Nationalists had seeded their staff with secret-police agents and the Communists had seeded theirs with underground organizers, all more focused on espionage and incitement than compromise and negotiation.) In the field, members of truce teams outright refused to cooperate when it served their side not to. In one case, an American was shot at by Communists who did not like where he was looking.
Marshall searched for some way back onto the path of negotiation. But what he heard in response was not encouraging. Each side said negotiation had been rendered impossible by the other’s treachery.
On their first weekend back, Marshall and Katherine drove out to the Chiangs’ country house. On the surface it was a picture of amity, two couples on a getaway from the city. For the Generalissimo, however, it was a chance to prosecute a case. He was struck by Marshall’s anger, particularly at Nationalist hard-liners who, in Marshall’s view, had sabotaged their side’s best opportunity and given ammunition to CCP hard-liners in the process. “It was as if all blame should fall on us if compromise cannot be reached,” Chiang wrote in his diary. He tried to persuade Marshall that the time for negotiation was over, explaining that the Communists were doing the Kremlin’s bidding. They had no intention of following through on their commitments, and they never had. In Chiang’s view, Marshall’s prior efforts and apparent successes rested on a misguided faith in Communist sincerity.
On Monday, Marshall finally saw Zhou, who was also bent on blame. He argued that the Nationalists had shown themselves unwilling to share power and bore responsibility for fighting in Manchuria. Conditions on the ground had changed, Zhou said, and the old agreements had to change as well. The terms of military unification—especially the 14-to-1 ratio of Nationalist to Communist troops in Manchuria—were no longer acceptable.
It was a startling new posture for the usually courtly Zhou. Marshall thought “radicals and militarists” in the Communist ranks must have gotten the upper hand. Among CCP leaders, however, even Zhou was pushing a harder line. He had backed the attack on Changchun, flagrantly disregarding the January cease-fire he had done so much to secure. Upon Marshall’s return he had advocated driving talks to an impasse. It took Mao, of all people, to remind Zhou to “maintain friendly relations with Marshall.”
As more and more of Chongqing relocated to Chiang’s new capital, Marshall scrambled for some move that would stop fighting from spreading across Manchuria and beyond, some formula that would get the faltering political and
military agreements back on track. He ferried proposals back and forth, fruitlessly. He insisted to each side that it stood to lose from full-scale war in Manchuria. Neither seemed to agree.
Marshall realized he would be in China for some time to come. Harvard was due to award him an honorary degree later in the spring, but he wrote the university’s president to say he would not be back for the June ceremony. Maybe next year.
On April 29, Marshall summoned Zhou to Happiness Gardens one last time. Bags were packed, much of the staff already gone. Marshall’s message was uncharacteristic, an admission of despair. “I do not see anything more I can do in the way of mediation and I think it best this be understood,” he said. “I’ve exhausted my resources.” Zhou replied with another litany of accusations. He charged that Chiang was just as bad as the hard-liners in his ranks—“a difficult man to convince,” willing to compromise only when he had no other option. Marshall repeated himself: he did not know what else he could do.
Chongqing was reverting to the city it had been. Officers and officials flew east, diplomats and journalists following. Industrialists and traders returned to the coast. Refugees filed back to villages. Machines, vehicles, and furniture were hauled down steep banks and loaded onto barges for the trip downriver. “It is a strange, sad, lost feeling to watch a city die,” observed Melby. On the morning of April 30, Marshall took off for Nanjing.
Over the first three days of May, the last remaining Red Army regiments crossed from Manchuria into Siberia. The Soviet invasion was over. In Chiang’s government and in Marshall’s, some had feared it would go on indefinitely.
But the Soviets were proving they could cause as much trouble leaving as staying. Nationalist and Communist troops rushed to take freshly evacuated ground. “Minor civil war in Manchuria probably cannot be averted,” Gillem conceded. Perhaps, he offered optimistically, it would not spread.
For all sides, there was cause to contest the territory. Manchuria lay at the heart of Nationalist prestige, Communist strategy, Soviet ambition, and American dread. For Chiang, it would complete his restoration of Chinese greatness. For Mao, controlling even a swath would guarantee his party’s survival. There were Communists across three of Manchuria’s borders—with Mongolia, Korea, and the Soviet Union—who could be counted on for supplies and sanctuary. But it was Moscow’s intentions that most aroused Washington’s fears. If Stalin succeeded in harnessing Manchuria’s resources, it would mean, a military analysis predicted, “continued expansion of Soviet power in Asia southward through China and towards Indochina, Malaysia, and India.” With Manchuria lost, countries would topple one by one into the Kremlin’s camp.
Yet American certainty about the dangers of Soviet dominance did not mean confidence in the prospects of Nationalist control, particularly if Moscow and Yenan sought to thwart it. Chiang, Wedemeyer told Marshall, “is completely unprepared for occupation of Manchuria against Communist opposition.” The hazards were formidable: long supply lines, logistical complexities, unfamiliar territory, unhelpful neighbors. And the closer Chiang came to succeeding, the more sharply the Kremlin would respond—Moscow had long warned it would not stand by if the Communists in Manchuria were threatened with destruction. Wedemeyer had advised Chiang to shore up his presence in north China before going any further. Marshall had advised him to do everything possible to negotiate the takeover.
Chiang knew the risks. He recognized that an all-out battle for Manchuria might end badly—in the event of expanded Soviet support, he thought the Communists would likely win—and that the prudent move would be to consolidate control before pushing north. But as the Red Army left, his reservations fell away. Besides, he was not sure he could afford restraint. Without Manchuria, he noted in his diary, “how can we say we are a unified country?” An aide laid out the rationale: “Militarily, it is dangerous to go into Manchuria. . . . Politically, we have no choice.”
Chiang counted on the United States’ help. Hundreds of thousands of his troops, many American-trained and -armed, had already been transported up to and in some cases into Manchuria by the American military. Thousands more were on their way. Marshall had resisted Communist demands that such assistance cease altogether. To Zhou’s claim that it was “turning the truce agreement into a piece of sheer waste paper,” Marshall pointed out that Chiang had a right to move troops, under agreements with both the Communists and the Soviets. Nothing prohibited the Americans from helping.
The Soviets were less forthright. But it was clear that, as Chiang resolved to take what was his, they had resolved to play spoiler, despite assurances to the contrary. Throughout the winter, CCP cadres flocking into Manchuria had been under strict instructions: do nothing aggressive that might disrupt the Kremlin’s broader agenda. (When Chinese comrades overstepped their bounds, the Soviets threatened them with force.) But Stalin’s approach had changed. He now worried that complete Nationalist control would open the way to American dominance. As the Red Army left, his message to the CCP was a sharp change from winter: “fight without restraint.” Nationalist commanders were told little about specific withdrawal plans; Communist commanders often knew just where to be, and when. Sometimes Soviet trains even helped them get there. And while the Soviets carried away all the “war booty” they could, they left tens of thousands of seized Japanese weapons, from rifles and machine guns to artillery and tanks.
The Kremlin-CCP collusion in Manchuria was no secret to the Americans. They had been watching since the war, when two OSS detachments, Team Flamingo and Team Cardinal, had parachuted into Manchuria ahead of the Soviet invasion. More recently, the postwar successor to the OSS, the Strategic Services Unit, had been building a presence, and Marshall had pushed to send diplomats, “to give us the advantage of lookouts.” He had already seen persuasive evidence of Soviet weapons handovers, and the reports coming from Executive Headquarters were clear: there was extensive cooperation, aimed, Byroade assessed, at “the establishment of a Manchuria virtually dominated by Russia.” (He added, “I state the above knowing the full import of such statements.”) In an earlier discussion with Zhou, Marshall had pressed for an honest accounting of the relationship. Aides detected his growing anger in the face of decreasingly plausible denials. “Now he is not so sure they are not playing the Russian game,” Melby noted.
American intelligence had concluded by the beginning of May: “Due to their initially favorable strategic position the Communists gained an early political and military advantage in the race for control of Manchuria.” The Communists knew it. After months of restraint—staying away from large cities, focusing on political work, establishing “facts on the ground” without being too conspicuous—they were, reporters said, “cocky.” Some 300,000 of their troops had made their way in, picking up conveniently abandoned Japanese arms and demonstrating “high morale and fairly capable leadership,” according to American officers. Mao had sent a proven commander, Lin Biao, an insomniac and hypochondriac who was anxious in his personal habits but calm and tenacious in battle. “Everything is decided by victory or defeat on the battlefield,” Mao told Lin.
Yet for all his bravado, Mao did not actually foresee a fight to the death. He still saw a fight back to the negotiating table. Despite their anti-American fulmination, the Communists had not given up on Marshall’s mediation: they were sure he would soon compel Chiang to compromise, and they had only to stay strong until then. They had grabbed what they could and dug in, waiting for Marshall’s cease-fire. “Chiang has no choice other than to do what the Americans want,” Zhou argued; the desire for expansive American aid, conditioned on stability, would leave him little choice. The Nationalists could not afford a break with Washington.
So for now, the Communists would make their stand. They chose to do so at Siping, a Manchurian railway depot south of Changchun that they had occupied early in the Soviet withdrawal. The anticipated Nationalist counterattack came quickly. Day by day the exchanges grew bigger, with entrenched positions and masses of troops. It
was starting to look like real war. And it was unfolding on the Manchurian terrain Marshall had crossed on horseback thirty-two years before.
Chiang’s new capital was rich with dark symbolism. After the First Opium War, in 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing marked the start of China’s Century of Humiliation. Ninety-five years later, the Rape of Nanjing marked the apex of Japan’s savagery, with hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents killed, many by imaginatively sadistic methods—castrated and hanged, half-buried and consumed by dogs. The tally of rapes ran into the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. W. H. Auden wrote a sonnet that ended:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanjing; Dachau.
That dark past was to be part of a story of resurrection. It was in Nanjing that China’s Century of Humiliation started; it was in Nanjing that Chiang would bring it to a definitive end. It was in Nanjing that weakness had allowed China to be brutalized; it was in Nanjing that Chiang would make it strong again. “The greatest shame of my life,” he had said when fleeing ahead of Japanese conquest. A new China would rise out of shame, built on the ruins of the old.
First, though, came a more mundane task: moving a government and its appendages 750 miles and getting it up and running in a city scarred by years of war. Nanjing still bore marks of its past majesty. It was ringed by twenty-two miles of Ming dynasty wall, built of dark gray brick with crenellated battlements on top. It had a stately government complex and wide asphalt boulevards like those of Washington and Paris—vestiges of the first time Chiang made it his capital, in 1928. Mimicking a Ming emperor’s tomb, Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum sat on the slope of Purple Mountain, to the east. The mountain and the Yangtze River, arcing from west to north, were said to guard the city “like a coiling dragon and a crouching tiger.”
The China Mission Page 19