The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  The number of vexing issues had only grown since that first time. Both sides reopened once-settled military questions—how many troops each would ultimately give up, where they would stay in the meantime, when they would become part of a national army. Both resisted the basic principle of simultaneous progress on political reform and military unification. Once intent on staying as far away from politics as he could, Marshall had come to accept that political and military considerations could not be separated. In areas currently under Communist control, especially in Manchuria, the CCP would hardly accept being cut out of governance entirely, but nor would Chiang simply cede authority. And Marshall realized that it would not be enough to stop the fighting. The two sides needed a mutually acceptable answer about what would happen after fighting had stopped.

  Marshall harped on the inability of each side to understand the other’s concerns: “They can only see their own fears and, therefore, draw many false conclusions.” He watched each changing terms as convenient, or fixating on the other side’s infractions while explaining away its own. “I think they are both wrong and that they are both alike,” he said. “But they are both very human.”

  Marshall tried to get back into the old rhythm. He arrayed the Committee around the table. He proposed a point and then asked for assent. When he anticipated an impasse, he readied an easier point to turn to.

  But this time it did not go well. They bickered over distances. They disputed basic definitions. “Hanging in the hazy atmosphere are the fears and suspicions of one side against the other,” Caughey wrote while sitting at the Committee table and waiting for translation. “Bantering, elaborations, accusations are the mode.” Marshall did not conceal his exasperation. For the first time, he was spotted doodling in a meeting. He cut the session short, forgetting to serve tea. When they later reconvened, Hsu—a particularly ineffective appointment by Chiang, in Marshall’s view—failed even to show up, sending a substitute in his place. “We are not making much progress here,” Marshall quickly concluded.

  At the end of the dispiriting first day of the Committee’s return to action, Marshall and Katherine, recovered from her dysentery, went to the Chiangs’ for dinner. At Madame Chiang’s request, it was a purely American affair—the Marshalls and some aides, a few officers, a few diplomats. “We are getting along,” Chiang wrote in his diary afterward.

  At 10:30 the next night, June 23, the phone rang at Marshall’s house. Caughey took the call and found an aide to Zhou on the other end of the line with distressing news. At the Nanjing train station, a mob was attacking a “peace delegation” that had arrived from Shanghai, and nothing was being done to stop the beatings. Could Marshall intervene? Caughey immediately called Yu Ta-Wei, who promised that Nationalist troops would get the situation under control.

  The peace delegation, a dozen distinguished intellectuals, businesspeople, and civic leaders, planned to meet with Marshall, the Committee of Three, and Nationalist officials in Nanjing. A crowd of 100,000 had seen the delegation off from Shanghai earlier that day with an “anti–civil war parade,” chanting for peace and democracy and waving signs telling American troops, “Go Back to Your Home Sweet Home.” An organization called the Shanghai National Peace Movement distributed fliers demanding American neutrality and asking, “Did you and Mr. Abraham Lincoln Like Your Civil War?”

  When the delegation’s train pulled into Nanjing’s station, a mob was waiting. It ripped the signs and streamers from the cars, forced its way onboard, and started pummeling the activists.

  After Caughey was assured that the assault would be stopped, the phone rang again. The beatings—“merciless,” said reporters on the scene—were continuing, and there was still no sign of the authorities. It was after midnight by the time Nationalist troops intervened. The members of the peace delegation were covered in blood, their clothing in tatters. And it quickly emerged that Nationalist agents had been part of the mob. Even many Nationalists expressed dismay, blaming the CC Clique.

  Marshall was indignant, not just about the fact of the attack but even more by Nationalist inaction, despite promises to his aides that something would be done. When he raised the incident with Chiang, Marshall heard only feeble excuses in response, as Chiang’s foot went in anxious circles.

  The opening days of the cease-fire had overlapped with the Washington legislative calendar in an unfortunate way. As Marshall was playing mediator in the Committee of Three, the U.S. Congress was debating details of additional assistance to Chiang’s government. Since December, Marshall had tried to strike a careful balance between continuing essential help (and laying the groundwork for the much greater help that would flow to a new unified government) and not encouraging militarism by Nationalist hard-liners. The timing of this latest round sent the wrong message at a delicate time.

  Congress had signed off on $52 million in Lend-Lease equipment that had been promised during the war. Then the State Department had submitted a bill committing another $100 million in military assistance following the expiration of Lend-Lease on July 1. A note of endorsement from Marshall was appended to the request: “I believe that the passage of the bill by Congress would facilitate the efforts now being made to promote peace and unity between warring factions in China.” This new package came on top of other assistance over recent months—the transport of more than 400,000 Nationalist troops, the continued American troop presence, hundreds of discounted planes for the Chinese air force, a six-month supply of ammunition for Chiang’s troops.

  Sitting in a session of the Committee of Three, Marshall wrote Truman a hurried note, requesting that the administration issue a public clarification of what the aid was for, and what it was not for. The timing of the discussions in Congress, Marshall explained, was causing him “difficulty and embarrassment.” The CCP argued that the aid package was encouraging “the government’s tendency to deal with the Communists by force and thus is contributing to all out civil war,” and Marshall conceded that “some die-hard Kuomintang elements in other government councils are utilizing recent American measures as a basis for pressing the Generalissimo to push forward with a campaign of determination against the Communists.”

  Acheson issued a statement insisting that the legislation could not “rightfully be interpreted as current support of any factional military support in China.” The message was not especially persuasive. Communists did not pass up the opportunity for propaganda, and Nationalists viewed the aid as vindication no matter what they heard from Marshall or Acheson. The forces in Washington appeared to be developing in their favor.

  As the days of negotiation plodded toward the June 30 deadline, the Committee of Three accomplished little. Despite progress on reopening communications and granting Americans authority on field teams, consensus remained far off on key matters—especially local governance and military demobilization. Chiang had sent Marshall a set of demands that enumerated Communist military obligations but said nothing about his political commitments. Zhou reacted sharply. His side could not give up its armies—its “bargaining power in political matters”—without the other side giving up one-party rule. “If they think that way,” he said, “they are thinking war instead of peace.” Marshall sighed that he was “at a loss. . . . I find the two sides so far apart and so firm in their purpose, that I do not know what to say or do.”

  Outside, the heat was stifling. Cholera was spreading. Chen Li-fu was blithely telling Americans that the Communists could be annihilated in three months.

  With three days left before the cease-fire expired, Marshall found the two sides still “irreconcilably opposed” on key questions. That is what his weeks of “continued pressure without respite” had revealed: every discussion exposed a deeper gulf between them. He did not think another extension was viable.

  He tried a last burst of shuttle diplomacy between Chiang and Zhou, ferrying ideas and pressing for concessions. He saw Chiang for two and a half hours in the morning. Then, back on Ning Hai Road, he hosted Zhou from 1
:30 until 4:00, and then again at 6:30. Each side seemed convinced that the military balance would ultimately tip in its favor, meaning neither felt the need to give up any ground. There was also an ominous new dimension to the discussion. So far, ideology had arisen infrequently. But now, Zhou was suddenly stressing the fundamental ideological divide. “The Communists are protecting the rights and the social gains of the peasants in particular,” he insisted. “As soon as Government troops enter those areas, those benefits will be withdrawn and the peasants put under immense exploitation and suffering.” If it was a matter of ideology, of fundamental principles that allowed no compromise, the prospects for negotiation were grim. As Zhou would say, “Any concessions would constitute a failure of the Communist Party.”

  By this point, Zhou had already warned Mao that “negotiations are drawing close to the end.” Mao slammed Marshall’s mission as “a smokescreen for strengthening Chiang Kai-shek in every way and suppressing the democratic forces in China.” Even as Marshall continued his long afternoon meetings with Zhou, in Yenan Emancipation Daily was sharpening its attacks on the United States. “The American policy reminds us of the policy the Japanese imperialists used,” declared an editorial.

  As the deadline approached, Marshall saw Chiang and Zhou for hours every day—Chiang in the morning, Zhou in the afternoon. There was no clear way forward, but Marshall had his staff working late into the night, trying to concoct some new formula, some path around the multiplying deadlocks. Chiang thought it a sign of desperation: “He is terrified of warfare, as well as the Communist Party’s refusal to compromise.” And Chiang was not entirely wrong—Marshall was making a long-shot attempt to persuade them to stop fighting and start moving on basic commitments, agreeing to work out the details later.

  On June 29, the day before the cease-fire was due to end, Marshall went to Chiang’s office for a last try. The Nationalists’ Nanjing headquarters was not far from Ning Hai Road, in a complex that was a studied projection of Chinese greatness, past and future. Visitors arrived through an arched gate into a Qing-era hall, passed between rows of red columns decorated in gold calligraphy, and then entered a five-story Art Deco building, with Italian light fixtures and shuttling Otis elevators and clacking typewriters. Chiang’s upper-floor office was neat and unostentatious, paneled in dark wood, writing brushes lined up alongside three telephones on an otherwise spare desk.

  Marshall made his case. If Chiang would show flexibility on the areas he was insisting the Communists evacuate, Marshall thought there was a chance of getting CCP compliance on other matters. Perhaps a high-level committee could solve the question of how local governance would be handled in areas evacuated by CCP troops, another contentious issue. Through a variety of channels, the Americans had been reminding the Nationalists of the benefits of flexibility—above all, a respite that would give the economy time to stabilize, but also American support, including the $500 million in financial assistance Marshall had secured but still not released. With the hours winding down, Marshall also wanted Chiang to remember the consequences of failure. Chiang and his government, Marshall said bluntly, “would be judged by the world, and certainly by American public opinion, as having unnecessarily plunged the country into chaos by implacable demands and the evident desire to pursue a policy of military settlement.” When Chiang proposed that Marshall keep trying even if this cease-fire fell apart, Marshall snapped back, “I would decline to be an umpire on a battlefield.”

  “I can tell from his voice and tone that he is arrogant and untamable,” Chiang wrote in his diary that night. “I found it very unbearable.”

  After leaving Chiang’s office, Marshall held a last session with Zhou before the deadline, reminding him of his side’s infractions—worst of all, the attacks at the start of the cease-fire, which had, in Marshall’s assessment, helped provoke the Nationalists. (“Communist military supremacy in Shandong has apparently been established at least for the time being,” American intelligence had since determined.) Marshall’s dispiriting conclusion was that there was “no basis for optimism in the present tragic dilemma.”

  Zhou, for his part, exhibited a new level of bitterness, insisting, “I have made all the concessions I can.” He attacked the Nationalists as “unrelenting” in their effort “to strangle the Communists.” He rejected turning over territory because it would consign tens of millions of peasants to abusive landlords and “undemocratic government.” He charged that everything the Nationalists did betrayed an intention to destroy the Communists.

  Marshall replied wearily: “Is that all, General Zhou?”

  Madame Chiang came to Ning Hai Road that evening. The Generalissimo had a party to attend and could not come himself. But in any case, there was nothing new to report. He had made his final offer.

  Marshall sat down to draft a note of defeat to Truman. “A final breakdown” seemed “inevitable.” Chiang would not agree to stop fighting without a full commitment to Communist demobilization, and the Communists would not commit to demobilization until there was real political reform—the same deadlock Marshall thought he had overcome months earlier. Now, Marshall reported, commanders in the field were riled, and Nationalist generals in particular seemed ready “to settle matters by force.” Across China, the situation was “tense and explosive.”

  Yet when the cease-fire ended at noon the next day, it was with an unsettling whimper rather than a martial bang. As the clock ran out, Marshall was finishing a meeting with Chiang. At the outset, Chiang had asked if there was any chance the Communists would accept his terms at the last minute. “None at all,” Marshall answered. But he wanted to reiterate his warning. Nationalist generals had been making calls for war, privately and publicly, many of them apparently intended for his ears. It suggested, he told Chiang, that the Nationalist side “was washing its hands of any democratic procedure and was pursuing a dictatorial policy of military force.” Marshall offered an inflammatory analogy: it was like prewar Japan, with pugnacious military leaders dragging a country into war—and look, he needlessly emphasized, where it had gotten Japan.

  But Chiang had resolved to be “stern and straight.” He said he would direct his side not to go on the attack, but would make no promises beyond that. As they parted, he asked Marshall if he wanted to join him for a picnic.

  Marshall’s aides were not sure exactly what had happened. “There is something beneath it all that is so completely foreign to occidental mental processes that almost the whole picture is lost,” said Caughey. “It seems to be based on something else than logic.” Melby, however, found Chiang’s logic perfectly clear. “I think if I were the Gimo I would opt for war,” he wrote. “The only chance dying men have is to stake everything on a final throw before they get too weak.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Sisyphus in China

  On July 4, a few days later, Marshall was smiling. The United States had chosen that day, its own Independence Day, to grant independence to the Philippines after almost fifty years of occupation. As a young officer, Marshall had helped enforce that occupation. Now, delivering the toast at a party at the U.S. embassy in Nanjing, he was proud to say his country was giving it up.

  The handover brought a frenzy of American self-congratulation. “Twice the Philippines have been liberated by the United States,” crowed editorialists. Politicians hailed it as a model of what America could do for other benighted lands, starting with China. “We did not make them the first colony in a great new empire,” Representative Walter Judd would brag, “but instead started immediately to help them build a republic and trained their people for the independence we promised and delivered. This is the pattern which the remainder of Asia wants.”

  Marshall shared in the self-congratulation, but he also drew other lessons. He had done two army tours in the Philippines, from 1902 to 1903 and 1913 to 1916. He knew what it meant to be a 21-year-old second lieutenant serving as a de facto proconsul in a de facto colony on behalf of a new global power. He had seen and studi
ed guerrilla warfare, the last holdouts from a brutally suppressed insurgency taking the occasional shot at his jungle outpost. He had registered the toll of long occupation on both occupied and occupier. He had witnessed the rise of nationalism and anticolonialism—forces that the United States, in his view, resisted at its own peril. The American government’s declaration of Filipino independence, he now said, was “one of the most honorable episodes in world history.”

  For Chiang it was an opportunity to reflect pride back at his American patrons. The “establishment of the Philippine republic illustrates that the United States always is willing to help friendly neighbors realize their ideals of democracy,” extolled his official statement. He hoped that the moment would mark a new beginning for him as well. He had maintained his resolve, and as a result, he thought, Marshall had “lost his arrogance, aggressiveness, and disrespectfulness, and appeared courteous, humbled, and grateful.” The failure of the June cease-fire might finally persuade him to take a different approach. “He has perhaps realized that he was over the line.”

  Meanwhile, Katherine and Madame Chiang were becoming “chummy as a couple of college girls,” as one of Marshall’s aides cracked. Madame Chiang was a regular presence on Ning Hai Road, often at Katherine’s invitation. One day when Marshall was sitting in a meeting with Zhou, an aide handed him a scrap of paper. It was a teasing note: “Madame Chiang is here and is staying for lunch.—Your beloved wife.” Marshall laughed out loud; Zhou stopped speaking and looked up, perplexed.

  The Americans did not know just what the end of the cease-fire meant. There was no call to battle or declaration of war. On July 2, Zhou and Chiang even met face-to-face in Nanjing for the first time, a discussion urged by Marshall to try to overcome disagreements over local governance. “General Marshall worked incessantly seeking peace for China and the entire world,” said a Nationalist spokesman. “We should not disappoint him.” Both sides rushed to promise that, even with the cease-fire done, their armies would fight only in self-defense.