The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  The draw of Communism in China was not always philosophically precise. One American traveler came across a sign on a shop near Beijing: “After true Marxism is realized, this store will make great profits.”

  Many years before, however, Mao had fixed on his revolution’s central force. In his blandly titled Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, he spun a vision: “Several hundred million peasants in China’s central, southern, and northern provinces will rise like a fierce wind or tempest, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it. They will break through all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants, and evil gentry into their graves.”

  There was a military logic to Mao’s new approach, as well as an ideological one. Land redistribution would give the dispossessed something to lose and thus to defend. They would become soldiers fighting for their own. “The battle for China,” declared Mao, “is a battle for the hearts and minds of the peasants.” Hearts could be moved by hatred, and minds could be moved by fear. Newly radicalized peasants needed little reminding that the return of the Nationalists would mean the return of an old order and elite. And landlord retribution could be harsh, from beheading and dismemberment to immolation.

  Chiang’s takeover of areas formerly occupied by the Japanese had already provided distressing reminders of Nationalist misrule. Newly arrived officials seized land and houses, appropriated factories, and extorted bribes. “Officials down to the soldiers are using the resources of the country as their personal property,” a Nationalist investigation found. Chiang railed against the exploitation and extravagance, but often to little effect. In many places he made it worse, by sending those he was certain he could trust to administer areas they hardly knew. Loyal southerners were given control of north China and then Manchuria. (Chiang was especially suspicious of Manchurian elites and made little attempt to co-opt them.) These representatives arrived, Wedemeyer lamented, as “conquerors” rather than “deliverers.”

  For American observers, the takeover was just one more cause for dismay with Nationalist governance. There were frequent scandals over corruption and profiteering that Chiang seemed unable to do anything about. High Nationalist officials were rumored to be cornering the rice market amid widespread hunger. An intelligence report relayed alarm over the implications: “The Chinese Communists are said to be gaining popular support in all areas as a result of the National Government’s failure to provide either an attractive political and economic program, or even efficient local administration.”

  Marshall knew that the Nationalists had in the past managed real achievements, military and political. Now he wondered what power had done to them.

  But in Manchuria they began to succeed. On the night of May 18, the Nationalist assault overcame the Communist stand at Siping. A six-week barrage by tank, airplane, artillery, and machine gun had battered and finally broken Lin Biao’s defenses.

  Chiang’s confidence surged. Battlefield victory convinced the Nationalists that a “strategy of force is correct,” said an embassy report. Days earlier, Stalin had invited Chiang to Moscow for talks. Although Marshall thought they might yield something constructive, Chiang turned the invitation down. He did not need to bargain for Stalin’s help. He had the Communists where he wanted them.

  Yet Lin Biao’s forces, while defeated, had not been destroyed. By the time Nationalist troops marched into Siping on the morning of May 19, most of the Communists were hours into a northward retreat. They had slipped out of the city unnoticed as soon as defeat seemed inevitable.

  While he retreated, Lin thought of Napoleon in Russia. Certain of success, Napoleon had been tempted deeper and deeper in, winning battle after battle until he was in too deep. Marshall was starting to worry that Chiang, like Napoleon, was overconfident to the point of peril.

  When Marshall got angry, his eyes smoldered and the corners of his mouth turned down into something almost like a smile. He no longer raged as he had when young. He deployed his anger as a tool, only when useful. “You have to save your ammunition for the big fights and avoid a constant drain of little ones,” he once advised his stepson. Still, the effect could be fearsome. “I don’t believe I would like that man against me if he made up his mind,” said Melby. As May progressed, fighting in Manchuria spread, and the situation in the rest of China grew tense, Marshall had ample opportunity to put anger to use.

  As the battle for Siping entered its final hours, Marshall sat down for lunch on the sunny terrace of #5 Ning Hai Road. He was joined by Caughey, Till Durdin, and John Beal, the Time reporter enlisted to help Chiang manage his stateside image. Beal had spent his first few weeks in China politely reminding Nationalist officials how their words and actions came across on the other side of the Pacific. He was just beginning to understand Chiang’s missteps—keeping truce teams out of Manchuria, issuing bellicose statements as an assistance package was being finalized, rejecting deals in moments of assurance and then coming back too late for the same terms. Marshall blamed the influence of the hard-liners, especially the CC Clique. They were sabotaging his mission, out of fear—unreasonable fear, in his view—of constitutional government. They had little idea, he told Beal on the terrace, how “close they are to an abyss.”

  Marshall took on a harder edge with Zhou as well. No longer willing to simply hear out litanies of CCP complaints, Marshall had litanies of his own. The Communists were disabling communications, blocking progress at the Executive Headquarters, paralyzing truce teams in the field, even endangering the lives of their American members. He also conveyed heightened awareness of the outside help the Communists were getting in Manchuria. While uncertain whether the orders were coming directly from the Kremlin, he understood what was happening on the ground. It prompted an alert from Zhou to Yenan: Marshall knew about “Soviet support.” Chiang commented approvingly in his diary, “Marshall has gained a better knowledge of the mentality of the Communists.”

  For the time being, Marshall saw slim chance of success in another round of direct mediation. He was hesitant to insert himself into what seemed almost certain to be another stalemate. He ventured suggestions about what a settlement might look like, but otherwise focused his energy on preventing fighting from escalating from Manchuria into the rest of China. To that end, he struggled to get truce teams working again, with minimal results. “There have been so many violations I could not count them,” sighed an American Executive Headquarters official. Ultimately, Marshall found he could do little beyond “scattering enough Americans around to see, so I can keep the ship trim.” He warned that China was “trembling on the verge of a serious break which would inevitably involve a general civil war.”

  A reporter said he did not envy Marshall’s position. “It never was enviable,” Marshall snapped back.

  Facing a complete break, Marshall would not give up entirely. “The General still has his fire and enthusiasm,” said Caughey. Yet overpowering distrust meant that appeals to understanding no longer got traction with either party; both viewed Marshall as complicit in the other side’s machinations. The vicious cycles of self-fulfilling suspicion continued, as “each side consulted its own fears and then estimated the other man’s intentions,” as Marshall put it, viewing every potential threat as “a ‘will do’ rather than a ‘may do.’ ”

  On May 20, for the first time since coming to China five months earlier, Marshall released a statement to the press—a “propaganda blast” directed at both sides. After standard diplomatic language of concern, it got to the point: “This reckless propaganda of hate and suspicion seriously aggravates the present serious situation and can lead to results that would be disastrous for the people of China.” Marshall knew the message was likely to be denounced as inappropriate meddling in Chinese affairs, and Nanjing was buzzing within hours of its release. “But something had to be done,” he explained to Truman, �
�and I appeared to be the only person who would do it.”

  And then, after days of holding back from full involvement, after his plaintive private pronouncements and angry public admonition, Marshall saw a way forward begin to clear. Chiang’s forces were pursuing the Communists from Siping north toward Changchun, seventy-five miles deeper into Manchuria. Ever since the Communists had seized it in April, a flagrant violation of Marshall-brokered agreements on the day Marshall returned from Washington, Chiang had been adamant: he would not seriously talk peace until he got Changchun back. Now, defeated in Siping and retreating northward, the Communists were willing to make a deal. Marshall thought he could persuade them to relinquish Changchun to an Executive Headquarters team, and eventually to the Nationalists, while talks on broader issues resumed.

  On May 22, Marshall went to see Chiang. With a dinner party waiting, Chiang stepped away for a short conversation. He had already heard Marshall’s case for restraint in Manchuria—a case based less on the value of Nationalist magnanimity than on the risk of Nationalist overextension. “We are confronted,” Marshall stressed, “with a definite and serious weakness in the Government’s military position and a strategic military advantage of the Communist forces.” The better course would be to stop and consolidate strength in southern Manchuria, and Marshall’s arrangement would let Chiang pause without giving up Changchun.

  Chiang judged it reasonable. He told Marshall he was willing to interrupt his offensive and discuss Communist political and military complaints in exchange for progress on other stalled fronts, especially military demobilization.

  But Chiang had a concern: he had not heard from his generals on the ground in Manchuria in three days. He worried that, fired with bravado after victory at Siping, they might charge forward and attack Changchun. And Chiang did not dispute Marshall’s assessment that an attack “would fatally terminate all hope of an agreement.” Chiang proposed that he personally intervene, flying to Manchuria to prevent his troops from doing anything rash. Marshall approved, and offered his plane for the journey, both for safety and for the comfort of Madame Chiang, who though sick would go along. He urged them to leave as soon as possible, before the Nationalist offensive got much farther.

  Later that night, back on Ning Hai Road, Marshall sat down to draft a report to the president. For the first time since his return from Washington, he allowed himself a measure of optimism. There might be grounds for compromise, he explained, if only events on the ground did not spin further out of control first: “I am working against time, otherwise I’d be quite hopeful.”

  The next morning, Chiang boarded Marshall’s C-54 for the four-hour flight to southern Manchuria. He told Marshall he would be back within four days, maybe sooner. He would send word by courier once he landed and intercepted his armies.

  Zhou visited Ning Hai Road that evening. He was suspicious of Chiang’s purpose in going to Manchuria: was the goal really to rein in zealous generals, or to evade pressure while they continued to fight? Marshall pointed out that he had lent his own plane for the trip. He would not have done so for any purpose other than stopping the fighting.

  A story about the Marshalls had been going around Nanjing. Katherine was unhappy, the story went, and had fled to Shanghai following a recent marital spat. A furious Marshall had personally traveled the 185 miles to retrieve her, and she still refused to come back. “Mrs. Marshall, though over sixty, demands her diversions,” the gossips explained by way of background.

  When the story reached Marshall, he took it with wry good humor; Katherine did, too, except for the part about “her diversions.” In reality, she and Madame Chiang, fast becoming friends, had gone to Shanghai for a couple days away. Marshall had joined them for an evening and stayed the night in Katherine’s opulent seventy-foot-long hotel room. Marshall figured that “some of the die-hard government political boys” had twisted the Shanghai trip into a petty line of attack.

  However frivolous, the episode signified something darker. Marshall detected a mounting effort “to weaken my influence and clear the way for a war of extermination.” There had been no shortage of attacks on American policy in recent months. Now they were becoming more personal. In conversations around Nanjing, senior Nationalist officials said openly that Marshall was out to help the Communists.

  Perhaps more ominously, the same charge was being whispered in Washington. Jim Shepley, now back in his civilian job at Time, sent Marshall a warning on May 23, the day Chiang flew north. There was “a serious undercover rumor campaign in Washington to effect that you have been working with the Chinese Communists against Chiang and that this is the reason for present state of affairs.” Shepley knew members of Congress were involved, and suspected Chinese embassy officials, all intent on peddling the message that Marshall had “sold out to the Communists.” There had also been leaks about the still-unannounced $500 million in assistance, which Marshall was said to be using as a “club” against the Nationalists.

  It was no longer just hard-liners in Chiang’s government plotting to thwart Marshall. Hard-liners in his own government were, too.

  A group of prominent figures, including Henry and Clare Boothe Luce and Republican congressman Walter Judd, a former missionary in China, released a manifesto denouncing Yalta. Judd took to the floor of Congress to demand protection of the Open Door principle in China, proclaiming, “We cannot keep silent longer.” An editorial in Luce’s Life magazine, which had 13 million readers, called for a show of “U.S. might” in China (while wrongly asserting that Mao had visited Stalin in Moscow). Arthur Vandenberg, a prominent Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared: “We can no longer compromise principles themselves. That becomes ‘appeasement’ and appeasement only multiplies the hazard from which it seeks to escape.”

  Wedemeyer was still back in the United States, recovering from surgery and awaiting his ambassadorial appointment. He kept Marshall abreast of the chatter. “There have been rumblings and rumors around Washington to the effect that you have been taken in by the Chinese Communists,” Wedemeyer wrote. “I have been striving to obtain something tangible and pin down persons responsible.” He said he wanted to confront them directly, in defense of Marshall’s efforts to “minimize or remove the employment of force in the resolution of problems.”

  But Wedemeyer was savvy and ambitious. He could tell which way the wind was blowing. In letters to Marshall, he deplored the “lack of moral courage” in American political life, the abundance of opportunists eager to say “I told you so” about past events but with “nothing affirmative” to offer now. To others, he spoke out of the other side of his mouth. He told Luce’s reporters that Marshall himself was responsible for American weakness. “If we do not support Chiang Kai-shek, firmly and categorically,” he wrote Averell Harriman, “the Communists will take over and we will witness the substitution of one totalitarian power, Japan, for another (USSR) in the Far East.”

  One detail of Marshall’s efforts sparked particular outrage in Washington. Information about the planned “elementary school” for Communists was leaked to the press, soon after Chiang finally gave approval for it to go forward. Washington grandstanding promptly turned an initiative to speed the end of Communist armies into a pro-Communist ruse. “We are about to train anti-American forces that might fight us in the future,” inveighed a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On the floor of the House, there was a call for rooting out “the State Department official who is responsible for this sort of foreign policy,” which was said to “emanate from Moscow.”

  To Marshall, all the invective missed the point. As he registered the charges of critics—many of whom had been preaching the need for compromise, unity, and reform just a few months earlier—he did not contest their desired ends in China. Like them, he wanted to check Communism. The problem was that most critics had little understanding of the means. And when Marshall contemplated means, when he appraised the prospects of an attack and intensified Ameri
can involvement, his first question was whether it would work, whether it would bring desired ends closer or only create new, potentially greater problems. As he said to Chiang, “It is a matter of weighing the symbolic gesture against the actual power.” But in a Washington increasingly shaped by the anxiety and acrimony of US-Soviet tension, the symbolic gesture tended to carry more weight.

  According to the rumors, Marshall was ignoring ties between the Chinese and Soviet Communists, out of either naiveté or some secret pro-Kremlin proclivity. In fact, while the precise nature of the relationship between Moscow and Yenan was confounding even for those directly involved, Marshall was well aware of cooperation, especially in Manchuria, and had no doubt about CCP loyalties. He had never bought the notion that the Communists were mere “agrarian democrats”—after all, Zhou himself bristled at the characterization. Earlier in May, an analysis had come from the Dixie Mission: “Direct positive proof based upon personal observation together with much circumstantial evidence definitely establishes the fact that the Soviet Union is guiding the destinies of one of its strongest allies, the Chinese Communist Party, as it has in the past and will in the future.” Other intelligence reporting offered the mortars, machine guns, tanks, and rifles in Communist hands as “irrefutable deductive proof” that the “plentifully supplied” Communists had been plentifully supplied by Soviet patrons.

  Above all, Marshall’s judgment was a military man’s military judgment: an all-out offensive would not succeed. “The destruction of the Communist military forces in Manchuria,” he had told Chiang, “I do not think is within the power of the government.” In Washington, and in Nanjing, many heard about Communists with Japanese rifles and mismatched uniforms up against American-trained troops with American weapons, and assumed certain Nationalist victory. But Marshall considered what would happen if Chiang pushed north in Manchuria. His lines would stretch dangerously thin. Roads would be easily attacked, railroads sabotaged. The Communists would pick off Nationalist troops at vulnerable points. Logistics would break down. And eventually, if Chiang got far enough, the Soviets would respond with enhanced support for the CCP. Given the geography—long borders with Communist refuge on the other side—greater Soviet support would prove disastrous for Chiang, no matter how much help he got from the Americans. During his “encirclement” campaigns in the 1930s, a million Nationalist troops had failed to annihilate barely a quarter as many Communist “bandits.”