The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  For Truman, Kennan’s call for “containment” and Clifford and Elsey’s cri de coeur served as unnecessary reminders of the extent of the world’s challenges. Neither, however, solved his problem of means. For now, his public concession to domestic politics would be to appoint a commission to ferret out Kremlin loyalists in government. A recent poll had asked, “What should be done about the Communists in this country?” The top response was, kill or jail them.

  “War will come again, soon or later, unless the West surrenders to the Soviet Union or the Soviet Union accepts collaboration with the West,” wrote Joseph Alsop, a prominent columnist. It was no longer just generals in Nanjing and revolutionaries in Yenan who were openly speculating about World War III. Churchill’s Iron Curtain was coming down.

  All of this was watched intently from the other side of the Pacific. Chiang knew that Truman’s China policy was a key exhibit in the campaign-trail charges of appeasement. As election results came in on November 5, he asked Ambassador Stuart about their significance, and afterward requested vote tallies from specific races. (Luce had told Chiang what to look for in order to gauge Republican momentum ahead of the 1948 presidential race.) Zhou also wondered whether the Republican landslide heralded a shift in U.S. policy.

  Marshall paid close attention to the currents, both political and geopolitical. He saw the analyses Kennan had dispatched from Moscow. He skimmed daily digests of press coverage of his mission, sent from Washington; when they stopped coming at one point, he sent an urgent telegram demanding they be restored: “I am at war.” He had also begun quietly entering his own account into the official record—the report he had drafted Till Durdin from the New York Times to begin compiling months earlier. Since mid-October, aides had been sending it back to Washington piece by top secret piece, as evidence in political trials to come.

  In the wake of the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the White House sent a message of reassurance, stressing that Truman “relied entirely and only on General Marshall’s judgment in the China problem.” That would not change, said Truman, “at least as long as I am President.”

  But a disquieting signal came soon after. An American businessman named Alfred Kohlberg turned up in China—“the kind of man who can spot a Communist at a thousand paces on a dark night,” John Beal observed after meeting him. The American China Policy Association, which had sprung up to attack the Truman administration and lobby for Chiang’s cause, was largely the work of Kohlberg. Now, in Nanjing, he was asking leading questions: he believed Marshall had been helping the Communists and was set on finding proof.

  November brought a piercing chill to the Nanjing air. Daylight saving time had ended, and dusk came early. “The beauty of fall is yielding to the promise of cold and death and a sense of doom,” wrote Melby.

  Chiang was still waiting for the Americans to come around, but now more hopefully. He had resolved not to give in to “bullying,” but also to “refrain from arguing.” That way Marshall might accept on his own what Chiang for months had been trying to make him see.

  On the day of the U.S. election, Chiang even proposed the sort of magnanimous gesture Marshall had been urging: a unilateral cease-fire, meant to demonstrate the Nationalist commitment to peace. As Chiang expected, Marshall approved. But when he saw a draft of the order, Marshall was disappointed again. The terms—a broad and pointed exception for “defense,” generally “provocative, confusing, and irritating language”—defeated the supposed purpose. Marshall thought it was a missed opportunity, another peace offer made “at the point of a gun.”

  Still, on November 8, when Chiang announced that a short-term cease-fire would begin in three days, Marshall decided to do what he could with the opportunity. The alternative was “total war,” and he was not yet willing to accept it. He took the offer to Zhou. “We have a saying,” Marshall said. “It may be one of Confucius’, I don’t know—‘while there’s life, there’s hope’—and I have been traveling on that a good many months.” The cease-fire was an opportunity for the Communists, he argued, one that could restart the political process on reasonable terms. But Zhou’s conditions once again seemed willfully implausible; given a chance to get what he claimed to want, he would give little in return.

  When Marshall resorted to his standard lament about distrust, Zhou interrupted: “This is not a matter of suspicion or misunderstanding.”

  Marshall did get one concession from Zhou, an agreement to attend a meeting of the Committee of Three. But on the morning of November 11, when it gathered around a table on Ning Hai Road, like old times at Happiness Gardens in Chongqing, whatever magic there had ever been was gone. Marshall urged restraint, a cease-fire, renewed commitment to political reform and military unification—a reprise of the agreements of almost a year earlier. But his fellow Committee members were now more interested in casting blame for battles under way. The meeting amounted to little more than two hours of reciprocal accusations.

  At the end of it, the Nationalists’ latest cease-fire went into effect. And that evening, Chiang agreed to a three-day postponement of the National Assembly, to November 15, at the behest of third-party leaders. But Zhou dismissed Chiang’s action as a “mock gesture,” with nothing new in the way of compromise. When Marshall pressed on specific disagreements over the National Assembly—who would be represented, how a constitution would be ratified—Zhou brushed him off. “Chinese affairs are too complicated,” he said. “I cannot give you an outline within a few minutes to make you fully understand this.”

  Over the three days of delay, third-party leaders, who had wrenched the postponement out of Chiang, had no more success than Marshall in hashing out mutually acceptable terms for a National Assembly. Marshall continued urging them to act together as a unified force, but the third parties were themselves riven by disunity. Some promised the CCP they would not take part in the Assembly, and others promised Chiang they would. Those leaders Chiang could not co-opt he would dismiss as Communist patsies; those Zhou could not co-opt he would chide as Nationalist stooges. The delay yielded nothing.

  The National Assembly opened on the morning of Friday, November 15. Delegates arrived and bowed three times before a looming portrait of Sun Yat-sen. Chiang, in military uniform, proclaimed it the most important event in China’s recent history. But it was hardly the gathering envisioned the previous January, the constitutional convention of a new Chinese democracy. No Communist representatives showed up. Nor did key third-party figures. Marshall worried the Assembly would be “an ineffective one party proposition.” Not wanting his presence to imply endorsement, he skipped the opening ceremony.

  There was an unsettling stillness in Nanjing as the Assembly got under way, “a feeling that nothing can be changed, that the chips have been laid down,” Melby recorded in his diary. Many others agreed.

  Zhou appeared on Ning Hai Road the next morning. For weeks he had been warning what would happen if the National Assembly opened on Nationalist terms: war throughout China. Since returning from Shanghai, he had seemed not just bitter, but also uncharacteristically haggard.

  Zhou went right to the point. He was leaving for Yenan a few days later, and not coming back. The start of the National Assembly, without the participation of the Communists and many of the third parties, had foreclosed further talks. Chiang, Zhou charged, “is intoxicated with the idea that force can settle everything.”

  To Marshall, the news hardly came as a surprise, disheartening though it was. Zhou left no room for argument, and Marshall made no effort to argue. He was ready to admit that negotiation was over.

  There was a final concern Zhou wanted to raise—the fate of a few dozen Communist representatives who would still be in Nanjing after he left. He wanted assurance of their safety, particularly in the event of a Nationalist attack on Yenan. Without hesitating, Marshall gave his word: American planes would evacuate them if it became necessary. They were there largely because of his mediation; he considered it his obligation to make sure they did
not come to harm.

  “I felt very grateful for your personal efforts despite the fact that due to various reasons (including some change in U.S. policy during the last part of this year) the negotiations have ended in vain,” Zhou told Marshall. “But I feel that I still have high respect for you personally.” Over the previous eleven months, they had spent hundreds of hours together, one-on-one and with the revolving cast of Nationalists who had joined them on the Committee of Three. Two men who awed those around them, who had a way of earning esteem even from adversaries, they had quickly established a rapport that brought grand promises—then gotten swept up in acrimony as those promises came apart, week by week. Yet into the fall, even as Yenan condemned Marshall as an agent of imperial reaction, Zhou had continued to refer to him as a “wise man.”

  The respect was reciprocated. Marshall had come to see Zhou as one of the smarter people he had ever encountered, and a scarily skillful negotiator. He had often maintained that Zhou was a relative moderate in his party, a champion of reconciliation among irreconcilables, just as Zhou hoped Marshall would. (Even some of Chiang’s advisers continued to describe Zhou as a “liberal-minded man with high integrity.”) But Marshall was never taken in by the notion, pushed by China hands in the American diplomatic and press corps, that Zhou was at heart a democrat, ready to shed his Communist trappings with the right signal from Washington. After all, Zhou never hesitated to identify himself as a true believer, a devoted Marxist and sincere admirer of the Soviet model, blanching at suggestions to the contrary. And Marshall had heard enough misleading propaganda from Zhou, and seen enough evidence of Soviet-CCP collusion, to recognize his capacity for deception.

  Yet Zhou was also careful to avoid outright lies when he could. The protests and predictions he shared with Marshall often turned out to have more validity than those from the other side. “Every time Zhou tells me there is going to be an attack it comes off,” Marshall would say.

  In part this owed to Zhou’s verbal and diplomatic facility. But it also owed to his skill in subterfuge and advantage in matters of intelligence. American cryptographers had labored since Marshall’s arrival to break Communist codes, in order to monitor the communications between Zhou and Yenan. They rarely succeeded, not even with help from Washington, thanks to Zhou’s reliance on “one-time pads,” secret codes that were used once and discarded. With the Nationalists, American codebreakers heard much more. When Chiang or a general said one thing in a meeting and promptly contradicted it in orders to the field, Marshall often found out soon afterward.

  Meanwhile, the CCP had planted agents throughout the Nationalists’ ranks—as Marshall could tell from the accuracy of Zhou’s charges. When Communists warned of an attack on Yenan, for example, they knew what they were talking about: they had a spy on the personal staff of the Nationalist general plotting it. What Marshall did not know was that his own side had been penetrated as well, not by the CCP but by the Soviets. While the young diplomats attacked earlier by Patrick Hurley as Communist agents were guilty only of telling it like they saw it (and in some cases of starry-eyed naiveté about Yenan), an economic adviser in the Nanjing embassy, Sol Adler, had passed information to KGB networks in the United States during the war, when he worked for another Soviet asset, Harry Dexter White, at the Treasury Department. Now in Nanjing, Adler was warning of the disastrous financial impact of Chiang’s military spending—though he was hardly the only one making that point. Marshall had called him “indispensable.”

  Before Zhou left Ning Hai Road, Marshall posed one last question: Was there anything more that he could do? He asked Zhou to discuss the matter with his comrades, without regard for “face,” and to get back to him with a response. “I am making a specific request of you,” Marshall stressed, “and I will await your answer from Yenan.” If that answer was no, he would have a definitive reason for finally going home.

  Two days later, on November 18, Zhou dropped by with his wife to say good-bye to the Marshalls. The only item of business was handing over a list of Communists who would stay behind and need to be airlifted out in the event of open war. The next morning, solemn and dapper in a dark trench coat and fedora, Zhou boarded a U.S. Army plane and took off north, uncertain he would ever return to the region where he was born.

  When the plane landed on the rocky Yenan airstrip, Mao stood waiting. Zhou stepped into the northern chill. Mao grasped his hand and presented him with a warm coat. To those watching, it was a signal: Zhou was still in favor.

  Trading his suit for a tunic, Zhou sat down with Mao to review the events of the past eleven months. With his usual exaggerated contrition, Zhou apologized for returning “empty-handed.” The self-reproach was hardly warranted. Mao had been content to sit back and see how negotiations played out. Now he and Zhou were in complete agreement: war to the death was the only way forward. “There was uncertainty as to whether or not we should fight the war,” Mao had concluded. “Now, this uncertainty has been cleared up.”

  It was the answer to Marshall’s question. There could be no more “fantasies” of peace.

  The fight would be long and grueling, Mao acknowledged. Victory might take three to five years without the involvement of American troops, fifteen to twenty if the Americans fought. But he was confident he would win either way. Even if the Nationalists managed to conquer Yenan, the Communists would ultimately conquer China. He could lose battle after battle, but he would still win the war. The reactionaries, Mao told comrades, were weaker than they looked.

  The dynamic he had long envisioned was already playing out in Manchuria. The Nationalists were taking territory but not destroying Communist armies. Their lines were long and vulnerable, their troops led by arrogant non-Manchurian officers, their opposition to land reform an effective recruiting tool for the CCP. (Join the revolution to protect the land, Mao’s organizers directed.) And then there was Manchuria’s long border with the Soviet Union, as mounting geopolitical tension promised enhanced outside support.

  In the global struggle between revolution and reaction, China was destined to be a key battlefield—Mao counted on that as much as Chiang did. “The postwar world has evolved into a standoff between U.S. reactionaries and the people of the world,” Mao explained. “The situation in China reflects this standoff.”

  Soviet policy had already started shifting accordingly. “The so-called ‘mediation’ mission of General Marshall is only a cover for actual interference in the internal affairs of China,” the Kremlin had concluded, amid worries that Washington aimed to make China “a bridgehead for American military forces.” While the extent of Soviet assistance remained a source of frustration for Mao, it was starting to increase. Recently the Kremlin had agreed to bring several hundred Chinese Communists across the border for secret military training.

  Americans were starting to discern the combative new posture. As battles between the Nationalists and Communists grew in scale and scope, hostile encounters with American troops were also becoming more frequent. There had been reports of Communists firing on marines’ hunting parties and railway guards, and of a raid on an ammunition dump. The American review of the Anping incident had settled on a straightforward account of the episode—an “ambush,” pure and simple, “methodically planned, prepared and executed by the Communist Party Military Forces.” The only question was from how high up authorization had come. “General feeling is that something nasty is about to happen,” judged an American officer at the Executive Headquarters.

  Melby wondered what the new posture meant for Marshall. “Very few people know how deeply hurt personally he is by the Communist attacks on his integrity,” Melby thought. “Attacks on his judgment or ability or influence he does not mind, but when it is on his integrity that hurts.” As Melby saw it, Marshall had bent over backward for the Communists: “He has taken from them what he has taken from no one else, and has been understanding when he has raised bloody hell with others.”

  But to Mao, Marshall’s apparent accommodat
ion, his overtures to peace, appeared to be part of a malevolent design. “You are swindlers,” accused an Emancipation Daily editorial, personally blessed by Mao and directed at the Americans. He told a reporter that Marshall’s mediation had been “a smoke-screen for strengthening Chiang Kai-shek in every way.”

  Mao’s charge was overblown but not entirely off-base. Marshall, in his own words, had pushed unity as the best way, perhaps the only way, for Chiang’s government to “swallow” the forces of revolution and “digest them before they became too powerful.” In the process, the Communists would become part of a political opposition that could compel Chiang and those around him to accept the kind of reform that, in Marshall’s view, was essential to their long-term survival. Communist participation was a means to an end: a Chinese state that could thwart a Communist takeover.

  Marshall flew north a few days after Zhou. This time he was bound not for Yenan but for Tianjin, the coastal city where he served his first China tour two decades before. His purpose was not nostalgia. The American troops who remained in China were stationed in the area. What to do with them now was one of his most pressing questions.

  Marshall found much unchanged in Tianjin, at least on the surface. He saw marines play football on the field where his former regiment, the Fifteenth, had played rugby matches against the French. He encountered old friends and employees—his Chinese teacher, his driver, his “number one boy.” There were still frequent parties, with the same array of Russian and Chinese and European women. Yet he also noticed planes crowded onto the old polo field and tanks onto the race track. Clubhouses had been converted into barracks. For the Americans there now, little of the post’s late-imperial glamor remained. The stakes had gotten too high.