The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  He was feeling much less amicable, even after trading his uniform for a summer suit. Chiang’s departure for Kuling had condemned negotiations to virtual paralysis. That did not strike Marshall as an unintended consequence—he was reminded of Chiang’s previous prolonged absence, in Manchuria in May.

  The last time they had spoken, Chiang urged patience: “Let’s let time work this out.” But Marshall knew what that meant. As Chiang laid it out in his diary: “I should make Marshall realize that his success does not lie only in the mediation. There are other ways, for instance, assisting my government to ‘handle’ the Communists militarily.”

  After dinner this first night in Kuling, Marshall gave Chiang an unvarnished assessment of the course events were taking and all the ways in which the Nationalists were responsible. He thought that “aggressive military action” by Nationalist generals risked causing “irredeemable chaos.” The one bright spot was Stuart’s presence for the first time. Afterward, Stuart shared his insight: “The Chinese Problem, as I see it, has now come in certain decisive aspects to be largely the psychology of this one man”—Chiang.

  The next day, Chiang asked to see Stuart alone. When asked for his views, Stuart was as harsh as Marshall had been. Stressing that he spoke as an “old friend and as a friend of the country,” he warned of the dangers of inflation and growing opposition among China’s intellectuals. He urged the start of real land reform, the embrace of “true democracy,” and the avoidance of the kind of “violence” and “dictatorial methods” used by the Communists. It would be the only way, Stuart told Chiang, to defeat them.

  In the heat of the plains below, decay spread. The atmosphere was rife with intrigue. “The rumors around,” said Melby, “are as thick as the heat.” With Chiang away in Kuling, Nationalist hard-liners seemed unleashed.

  One day, a bearded professor was walking home in Kunming, a city in western China, when someone shot him in the back of the head. An outspoken peace activist and member of the Democratic League third party, the professor had just denounced the Nationalists at the funeral of another scholar executed by similar means the week before. He had also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and taught under Stuart at Yenching. Before long, it became clear that Nationalist agents had carried out the hit.

  Outrage followed quickly. There was “considerable evidence,” Stuart determined, “that assassinations were carefully planned and would probably continue.” The Americans would not stand by—not after the beatings at the Nanjing train station, when Nationalist assurances of protection turned out to mean nothing. In an unorthodox move, the American consul in Kunming gave refuge to a number of local political activists. “Persons who at the present time criticize the Government must expect to pay with their lives,” said one Nationalist official. A Nationalist general added pointedly that the security of the U.S. consulate could not be guaranteed.

  Marshall was furious. He attributed the “terroristic” crackdown to Chen Li-fu. The targets of some of the most vicious repression were not Communists but liberal opposition figures trying to stake out a third way. Chiang was quick to blame resistance—whether from speechifying intellectuals, disgruntled peasants, or striking workers—on CCP incitement. He was not always wrong, but by suppressing all opposition, he only helped the Communist cause. “Those who wanted a change had but one place to go,” as a U.S. diplomat would observe. And the Communists were adept at turning the outrage to their advantage. Zhou would ask, “Seeing that the Kuomintang is resorting to such actions, how can we continue the negotiations and talk about democracy?” There had been no movement on the political process in months. Chiang had recently postponed the National Assembly, originally scheduled for May, until November—leaving enough time to fight the Communists into submission.

  In the meantime, China’s economic plight was getting worse. According to T. V. Soong, the economy might not be able to handle another six months of instability. As it was, with more than two-thirds of the budget going to the military, inflation was rising fast. (An American financial expert who worked for Chiang pointed out that inflation had helped fertilize revolutionary sentiment in Russia before the Bolshevik takeover.) Marshall started to warn of “an economic situation the likes of which no other nation ever survived.” Chiang’s minister of information publicly agreed: “General Marshall is quite right in warning that continued civil war would bankrupt China.”

  To add to the travails, the full extent of Soviet plunder in Manchuria was becoming clear. The Red Army had carted off an estimated billion dollars of “war booty,” including 70 percent of Manchuria’s industrial capacity. Factories had been rendered inoperable and power plants stripped. China’s industrial development was said to have been set back a generation. Even the world-weary Melby was stunned when he went to survey the aftermath: “It is impossible to put all this in words, and if I had not seen myself I could not really have believed that this sort of thing could happen.” As Marshall learned of the depredation, he started advising that industrial development should from now on be concentrated farther south, given the strategic vulnerability of Manchuria. (He also acknowledged that Yalta hurt the United States’ ability to respond to Moscow’s assertiveness there, since it had “legalized Soviet position in Manchuria and thus weakened ours.”)

  To Marshall, political and economic considerations bolstered the case for Nationalist restraint. An attempt to eradicate the Communists through force would not only backfire militarily. It would also heighten political opposition, especially among the intellectual and professional classes, and worsen an already dire economic situation. Marshall had begun paying closer attention to these factors. (Melby had at first disparaged him for “seeing the situation only in terms of things and personalities, rather than ideas and conceptions as well.”) He peppered aides with questions about land reform. He requested a copy of a 1937 book called 400 Million Customers, about the wondrous potential and continually thwarted hopes of American commerce in China. “Yes, of course,” he replied when asked whether political factors were more important than military ones.

  Yet military developments were also unnerving. “The fighting spreads here and there like a slow fire,” said Melby. One summer night in Nanjing, the boom of artillery could be heard from the other side of the Yangtze.

  Marshall’s meetings with both Nationalist and Communist representatives had mostly devolved into a series of complaints about attacks and troop movements and threats, which he would wearily relay back and forth. “Each side accuses the other of exactly the same thing,” he offered yet again. In relating the pattern of aggressions and retaliations to Truman, Marshall confessed that “the acts were hard to determine and the data confusing.”

  On July 22, the Nationalist general Yu Ta-wei asked Marshall if he thought there would be a civil war. Marshall responded that there already was. When Yu asked how outside powers would respond, Marshall told him that the Soviets would fight openly for Manchuria and covertly for the rest of China, while the American public would call for a complete withdrawal.

  A few days later, T. V. Soong invited Marshall over for a movie. In a cavernous room that looked like it belonged in an English manor (a moose head was mounted over the fireplace), they watched a 1944 production of Henry V. Funded by the British government to boost morale during World War II, this film version abridged Shakespeare’s final scene—the epilogue in which military triumph brings political and economic catastrophe on the victor.

  “More meetings and more futility all the time,” Caughey wrote in his diary. “I don’t see how the General stands it.”

  Years earlier, watching Black Jack Pershing lead American forces in World War I, Marshall had grasped a lesson that stayed with him. “When conditions are difficult, the command is depressed and everyone seems critical and pessimistic, you must be especially cheerful and optimistic,” he recorded. “The more alarming and disquieting the reports received or the conditions viewed in battle, the more determined must be your attitude.�
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  Now even Katherine was taken in. “He never says die and maybe he will wear the Chinese down instead of their doing him in,” she wrote from Kuling.

  On July 26, the day after watching Henry V, Marshall repeated the five-hour journey from Nanjing. While he was gone, Kuling had been idyllic. Four thousand feet above the swelter and bloodletting of the plains, Katherine and the Chiangs had been picking mountain lilies and going on picnics. She joined them daily for a meal—chicken and waffles, tender steak—or to work in the garden with Madame Chiang. At night a fire burned invitingly in their living room, and their library had an appealing range of English books—H. G. Wells novels, I, Claudius, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When Katherine expressed her fondness for Madame Chiang’s high-necked silk dresses, a tailor was summoned to make her five. “They have been wonderful friends,” Katherine said of the Chiangs.

  Marshall would arrive in uniform with a stack of papers, then change into his light suit and retire to a wicker chair on the lawn for an Old Fashioned. They might play croquet or bridge—both Marshall, with his potent memory, and Madame Chiang, with her shrewdness, were fearsome opponents—or, more often, a Western board game that Katherine had recently taught the Generalissimo: Chinese checkers.

  Chiang was obsessed. (The symbolism—a leader vying for the mantle of Chinese nationalism playing an ersatz Chinese game in an imperialist-built retreat with an ersatz Chinese name—was unfortunate but undeniable.) “It was one of the most pleasant experiences of late,” he wrote in his diary after an evening of Chinese checkers. American officers arriving in Kuling promptly found themselves memorizing the game’s rules, at the behest of Katherine or Chiang or both. Sometimes during dinner, he clapped his hands and ordered a servant to bring a board so they could play at the table. Unable to converse, Katherine and Chiang each carried on a personal monologue as they peered at the board. “He speaks no English but says now he does not need a tongue,” she related.

  On this second visit to Kuling, Marshall was struck by their friendship. Chiang was “her devoted admirer.” At the moment, it seemed the only thing preventing a rupture. “If I was as successful in negotiations as she is in human relations,” said Marshall, “all would be well.”

  His umbrage was at a new high. “Substitute the name of Himmler for Chen Li-fu,” he exploded at one point, “and you have the same thing Germany had.” His concern was not just moral; it was also strategic. Pro-Nationalist sources were telling him that abuses were making Communists out of moderates. In the American newspaper clippings he received every day, Marshall also saw what was happening to Chiang’s image in the United States. Foreign correspondents were throwing around the term gestapo with distressing regularity. Even Luce’s Time was predicting that the Communists were “not likely to be halted in their revolutionary tracks by anything but a good government. The present government has been dissipating, selfishly and with utter callousness, American supplies and money.” Marshall told Nationalist officials that their greatest asset was Chiang’s “prestige”; if that prestige crumbled, China’s cause would become much more difficult. It was, Marshall said, “sheer tragedy.”

  Stoking the opprobrium, Sun Yat-sen’s widow—and Madame Chiang’s sister—had just released a searing public condemnation of her brother-in-law and his party. She denounced the violence and misrule and demanded a complete and immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops: “The American people, who are Allies and long friends of China, must be clearly told of this road to disaster.” To many Americans, it was a devastating indictment.

  Marshall had already cautioned Chiang about the costs of squandering public support, domestic and international. This time, Marshall hoped that Stuart might be able to deliver the message more effectively—to make the Generalissimo see “the tragedy impending” and “the overwhelming desire of the people of China for peace and their growing disapproval of the methods of the Kuomintang Party.” Unfortunately, Stuart had come down with dysentery. After four days of waiting in Kuling, with Stuart laid up in bed, Marshall resorted to delivering the message himself.

  When he saw Chiang on the morning of July 30, Marshall was angry about the growing power of Nationalist hard-liners. He was angry about the threats to opposition figures taking refuge in the American consulate in Kunming, and about the earlier Nanjing train station assault having continued despite promises it would be stopped. He was angry about the warped certainty of Nationalist generals that they “could liquidate within three to six months all Communist forces in China.”

  But Chiang was feeling confident, as he had been for weeks. During the ill-fated June cease-fire, his commander in Manchuria had assured him that the Nationalists would have no trouble wiping out Communist forces in the region. “Now let me give you my word that I will end military campaigns against the Communists in one year, and restore industrial production in two years,” he had promised his party.

  On the surface, such confidence seemed reasonable. Through the spring, Chiang had watched his US-trained and -equipped forces go face-to-face with the CCP’s armies and triumph again and again. Communist forces numbered perhaps one-third of his own; an even smaller fraction of Chinese territory was in Communist hands. Just as important, the world was going his way. The United States needed him as an ally in an escalating contest with the Soviet Union, and there was plenty of evidence—the extension of Lend-Lease in June, the likely Republican takeover of Congress in November—that Washington would back him fully no matter how angry Marshall was. Democracy, corruption, repression: these would prove secondary to the imperatives of a larger struggle.

  Coolly advising Marshall that there was no reason to be “anxious,” Chiang cited a Chinese proverb: when the fruit is ripe, it will drop into your lap. Marshall left that afternoon. He thought his four days on the mountain had been useless.

  On July 29, a convoy of trucks loaded with supplies for the Executive Headquarters set off from Marshall’s old post of Tianjin with an escort of forty-one American Marines. Partway to Beijing, outside of a village called Anping, they encountered a roadblock of boulders and carts. The Marines stopped to investigate. As they did, gunfire suddenly tore through the rows of crops on either side of the road.

  It was an ambush. Hundreds of men emerged, armed with machine guns and grenades, and surrounded the convoy. The lieutenant in charge was quickly killed. Only after four hours of fighting did the Marines manage to drive off the attackers and retreat toward Tianjin. By the end, three Americans were dead and a dozen wounded.

  Although details were murky, it quickly became clear who the assailants were. “Americans don’t accept this sort of thing calmly,” Marshall stormed at Zhou after returning from Kuling. Zhou attempted to discredit charges of Communist culpability: maybe it was staged, part of a plot? But the attack had come amid the surge in CCP anti-Americanism. It followed another recent incident in which seven marines on a picnic were seized by Communists and held for eleven days on charges of spying. The CCP account of the Anping ambush, Marshall spat at Zhou, was “a complete, and I think a deliberate misrepresentation.”

  A wounded marine died the next day, bringing the death toll to four. “The mothers of these boys,” said an officer, “will never understand why the U.S. should have armed forces over here.”

  Every few days, Marshall traveled between Nanjing and Kuling, each trip, up and down the mountain, requiring five hours and five forms of transportation. He was Sisyphus, Acheson would say, pushing his boulder up an impossible slope again and again. “He likes going up,” wrote Caughey, “but only for the purpose of seeing Mrs. Marshall.”

  As July came to an end, Marshall recognized that the situation around China was seething. Fighting was spreading in the north, and he feared it would not be long before it spread even further.

  Back in Kuling in the first days of August, Marshall continued to deplore Nationalist conduct, complaining that “narrow minded and bigoted militarists and a small nucleus of political irreconcilables pursue open civil
war.” He told Chiang that the current Nationalist approach was only helping the Communists. In addition to squandering Chiang’s prestige, it invited prolonged chaos that would create a “fruitful breeding ground for Communism” and an “exceptional opportunity for Soviet Russia to intervene.” For his part, Chiang was dismayed that Marshall was not more openly outraged by the Communist attack on the American Marines at Anping. “I figured the concessions the U.S. made will embolden the Communists to launch bigger attacks against the U.S. Army,” Chiang wrote in his diary. “But, since Marshall has swallowed it I shall not fixate on that. I will just wait for it to further develop.”

  In fact, Marshall had ordered a special Executive Headquarters unit, Team 25, to compile evidence in the face of CCP dissembling. The Communists had been hampering the investigation and seemed, reported a senior American official in Beijing, to be “acting under higher instructions to delay, impede, and obstruct in every way possible”—turning the inquiry into “absurd farce.” Between the recent kidnapping of the Marines, the Anping ambush, and now the obstruction, Marshall discerned an objective: to force American troops to withdraw. He had already heard from Navy Secretary Forrestal that such incidents “will lead to an aroused public opinion here exerting significant pressure to withdraw all Marines from China.”

  When Zhou came to see him in Nanjing on August 9, Marshall read the American Executive Headquarters official’s complaints aloud and then issued what amounted to a threat: if the Communists did not start cooperating with the inquiry, he would issue a public denunciation. And that would not only mark the likely end of his mission. It would also bolster hard-liners on the other side. “They would convict me of agreement with them by virtue of my own statement,” he said. Marshall gave Zhou twenty-four hours to change the Communist approach to the inquiry. “It must be positive action,” he stressed. “I will not wait any longer.”