The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  From Tianjin, Marshall proceeded inland to Beijing. In a dusty late November wind, he arrived at the wood-paneled chambers of Peking Union Medical College, where in February he had hailed the progress of his Executive Headquarters, as its three-man teams fanned out across north China halting battles and refereeing disputes. This time, he found this experiment in peace-building all but finished. Fewer than one-third of the teams were still operational. The officers assigned to implement the long-postponed unification of the Communist and Nationalist armies had abandoned post. A senior American officer conceded, “We had tried an approach and it hadn’t worked.”

  By now, the same could be said of U.S. policy more generally. The approach Marshall had helped hash out a year earlier, an extension of Washington’s approach through the final years of World War II, was in ruins—that much was clear. But what to do from here was another matter. As Americans waited to see how the National Assembly would unfold, and Marshall waited for an answer from Zhou, the discussion seemed stuck.

  The American election, and attendant fury over taxes and spending, had added pressure to withdraw the remaining troops, despite the apparent anger over appeasement. A poll asked Americans what their government should do in China. Just 18 percent answered to help the Nationalists, while 69 percent said to help neither side. The letters and telegrams to the White House continued: A MILLION AMERICAN MEN IN UNIFORM ARE STILL AT WAR THEY ARE BEING USED TO BOLSTER UP MERE FASCIST REGIME OF CHANG KAI SHEK INSTEAD OF PERMITTING THE CHINESE PEOPLE TO MAKE THEIR OWN DECISION. Americans wanted their boys home, and Washington worried about sustaining troop deployments elsewhere, starting with occupied Germany and Japan.

  From the State Department, Dean Acheson pledged to hold off the pressure as much as he could. But Marshall recognized that further withdrawals were a “political necessity.” And more important, he saw reasons other than domestic pressure for moving forward. Even at its height, the troop presence had been large enough to cause serious trouble but too small to do much good—an “irritant,” as Wedemeyer had put it, with little hope of countering a real Soviet effort and thus worth removing altogether. Marshall had long before concluded that the Communists “could not be liquidated by National forces without full-scale American intervention both in the movement of Chinese forces with American equipment and the use of American personnel, possibly even combat forces.” In the 1920s, when asked how many American troops would be needed to counter an indigenous force in China, an American general had answered: “Half a million and it would probably require a million more before the end of the first year.” At their height the year before, American troops had numbered a little over 100,000.

  Over the course of the fall, the Marines had been consolidating around Tianjin and Beijing, handing over guard duties at mines, bridges, and railway depots to Nationalist forces. (These forces should have little trouble holding important ground, Marshall pointed out, if the best of them were not shipped off to fight in Manchuria.) Fewer than 20,000 Marines now remained, down from three times that a year before, along with a few hundred army personnel. (The troops’ initial charge of repatriating the Japanese was more or less complete, with some 3 million, by the military’s count, sent back to Japan.) Marshall drew up plans to cut the Marine presence first to 10,000, and then quickly to 5,000. A drawdown would “purify” the American position as much as possible, he told Washington. And he wanted it done quickly, “before some new incident creates impression of reduction under hostile pressure. The numbers to be eliminated do little or no good and really complicate the situation.”

  Marshall considered certain capabilities useful, and these he pressed to maintain. The Military Advisory Group, the MAG, was up and running in Nanjing with several hundred officers, and he was also working to ensure an ongoing American intelligence capability as troops left. Yet he insisted on extreme care about what remaining troops did and did not do, to avoid incidents that could easily spin out of control—especially as pressure to take a more active role mounted in certain quarters on both sides of the Pacific.

  In Nanjing, Chiang wanted American officers to accompany his troops into the field. In Washington, military planners called for supporting the Nationalists “by all means short of actual armed intervention,” warning that Communism would spread from China to Vietnam and Malaysia and India. Marshall resisted. He worried not just about the risks of escalation, but also, more immediately, about the message to Nationalist hard-liners. They would take enhanced military support as vindication, a sign of unconditional backing that would undercut any pressure to change their self-destructive ways. In early November, U.S. army leadership had proposed a major mapping operation, with B-29s crisscrossing China, from Taiwan to Manchuria to Tibet, and an additional 2,000 soldiers on the ground. Marshall protested emphatically on the grounds that it would “cause silent rejoicing among KMT political die-hards” in their “hope that we must become involved in backing them in possible strife with Communists, Chinese or Soviet.” He also worried that it would weaken the United States’ hand in contesting Soviet interference, in China and beyond.

  With hindsight, Marshall could see that the collapse of his efforts the previous spring had owed as much to deterioration in the US-Soviet relationship as anything else. He had been struggling to make sense of this “year of international bickerings,” and he returned to Nanjing from Tianjin and Beijing to find a memo from Acheson. “As you know,” it explained, “one of our principal concerns, if not our principal concern, in endeavoring to bring about peace and unity in China, has been to forestall China’s becoming a serious irritant in our relations with Russia.” Acheson disavowed the once heady talk of China as a pillar of stability in Asia, but still hoped to prevent it from becoming a source of instability. “The principal problem,” he stressed, “is adjustment of our relations there with the Russians without prejudice to our legitimate interests.”

  When Marshall arrived in China the previous December, the most acute concern had been ensuring that Red Army troops did not extend their occupation of Manchuria indefinitely. Once they were gone, to the relief of both the Nationalists and the Americans, the concern had become unhelpful Soviet meddling. Marshall hoped that withdrawing American troops would put useful pressure on Moscow, effectively shaming it into decent behavior. (A large ongoing American troop presence, by contrast, would allow Moscow to blame China’s problems on Washington’s interference.) Many who had spent more time around Stalin, such as Averell Harriman, deemed that hope fanciful at best.

  Yet Marshall grasped Soviet objectives in China. Every analysis he requested or received sketched them in distressing terms. “Soviet intent, obvious from their current propaganda campaign, is to discredit U.S. activities in China with the hope of creating public clamor in the U.S. for withdrawal of all troops and cessation of U.S. efforts in China,” he read in a War Department paper. It emphasized that the consequences of “our exclusion from China” would be dire: “Soviet power analogous to that of the Japanese in 1941.” From Manchuria, American diplomats sent reports of Soviet “colonization.” One complained of an “iron curtain” blocking American access to the region.

  Marshall also recognized that Yenan and the Kremlin were “playing the same tune,” and that cooperation had been growing in recent months. He could see their “spiritual” affinity and convergent interests. (He recalled the portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the freezing meeting hall in Yenan.) There was considerable intelligence on secret radio communication and policy coordination. Less clear to Marshall was the degree of direct Soviet support. He had put diplomats, officers, and spies on the lookout for clear evidence of military assistance, and they were finding evidence of some, but less than the Nationalists claimed. Still, if sins of commission were harder to prove, the sins of omission were obvious—and perhaps more consequential anyway. As they withdrew from Manchuria, the Soviets had abandoned Japanese arms and let the Communists take them. They had made it difficult for Nationalist troops to travel, and easy
for Communists. “They could accomplish almost all their purposes by negative action,” Marshall would observe. He figured Stalin realized that, with the way things were going, he could mostly sit back and let Chiang and the Americans get into trouble on their own. (Unknown to the United States, the Kremlin and Yenan were also finalizing a commercial agreement, trading Manchurian soy, sorghum, and mutton for Soviet fuel and vehicles, along with some weapons—although Stalin remained cautious about sending large numbers, and the captured Japanese stockpiles remained the more important factor.)

  From Moscow, George Kennan had also speculated about the relationship between Yenan and the Kremlin. He accepted that the CCP was “subservient” to its Soviet patron. But in the long run, he thought that might change. In his analysis, the nationalism of the Chinese Communists would prove a source of comradely friction, especially given their ample cause for resentment of Soviet behavior over the years. In time, Kennan thought, those frictions could lead to fracture.

  For now, however, most nascent Cold Warriors were more focused on the subservience. Wedemeyer’s angry letters to American officers and Chinese officials made the case in especially stark terms. In a world “compartmented into two ideological camps,” he wrote, “the Central Government of China with all its incompetence and corruption at least is opposed to the expansion of Soviet influence in the Far East.”

  Nationalist hard-liners had long made the same case, and the American election encouraged them to raise the pitch. A global war was coming; all that mattered was which side they were on. It was a “lesser of two evils” logic, as John Beal described it to Chiang’s advisers, in the course of urging them to stop using it. He thought it “the easiest and weakest argument of all.”

  Marshall agreed that the logic was faulty. There was no doubt in his mind that Nationalist rule, for all its shortcomings, was far preferable to the Communist alternative. But that was not all that mattered. Without fundamental improvement, in his analysis, Chiang’s “lesser evil” had little chance of averting more dire outcomes. The Nationalist approach invited more, not less, Communist influence, and more, not less, Soviet infiltration.

  Marshall’s hold on most American aid, in place for the previous three months, was meant to drive this point home. He wanted to disabuse hard-liners of the notion they would be backed no matter what; to get the full-fledged American support they wanted, they would have to embrace reform. Marshall continued to push through some assistance that he thought especially crucial, sometimes over the objections of economic officials in Washington, and he pressed Congress to fund ongoing humanitarian efforts. (Total aid over the previous year, between loans, funding for relief efforts, and surplus-property transfers, already amounted to several hundred million dollars.) But he continued holding the $500 million economic package he had lobbied for in the spring, instructing congressional leaders to keep it in reserve for the appropriate moment. He continued blocking shipments of weapons, ammunition, and combat gear that might end up supporting military offensives. With Nationalist officials he was frank: his country wanted to help China, but it would not forever back a repressive one-party government. The stinginess of the new Congress, he explained, only made matters worse.

  “If you let this bunch know you are for them,” Marshall had complained before, “you can’t do anything with them.”

  Chiang and his advisers realized what Marshall was trying to do but refused to play along. After hearing that a request for ammunition had been denied, one Nationalist official breezily replied that it did not really matter, since the Communists would be crushed in a few months. And whatever Marshall’s seeming leverage over them, they had their own American allies, who could give them leverage over Marshall. They had cultivated not just figures like Henry Luce and Alfred Kohlberg, but also the Republican politicians who were, they were being told, set to drive out “the FDR party” in the next presidential election.

  They saw other allies in American business. (Kohlberg’s interest in China grew out of his time producing textiles there.) Early in November, Chiang’s government had signed a commercial treaty with the United States, pledging open markets and expansive opportunities for American firms, from oil and telephone companies to airlines. (At the time, more than half of China’s imports came from the United States.) Communists savaged the treaty as “a new national humiliation,” and even Chinese conservatives denounced it as a “new unequal treaty” that failed to protect China’s “industry, economy, and livelihood against American high-speed industrial competition.” But American executives, taken as ever with the potential of China’s 400 million customers, were pleased.

  As the end of November approached, Marshall waited and watched the National Assembly proceed. He worried that Nationalist hard-liners would have an easy time using it to cement their party’s control rather than lay the groundwork for more democratic rule. Without the participation of the Communists and some of the strongest third parties, there was little countervailing pressure. That had been part of the logic of a coalition, a way of compelling reform on recalcitrant Nationalists.

  Marshall had been far from alone in seeing a coalition as the best, and perhaps only, way forward. Even Chiang’s staunchest advocates—Luce, Congressman Judd, the Flying Tigers commander Claire Chennault, a slew of anti-Communist officers—had called for a coalition as essential to Chiang’s survival and China’s renewal. Now, however, many were denying they had ever considered it.

  It had been a year since Marshall had gotten Truman’s phone call tapping him for this mission. After nearly as long watching him in action, Melby found Marshall wearied by the prospect of moving forward. “I think I wanted to cry,” Melby wrote, “partly because he deserved a better fate than this. I know this sort of thing is the cruel logic of history, but that makes it no easier to take.” The past year had been a “great experiment,” Melby said, and the experiment’s results were becoming dismayingly clear. He thought that at this point, “Marshall feels he made a mistake in ever thinking coalition was desirable or useful or possible.”

  On Thanksgiving it snowed. All day Nanjing was windy and gray. By dusk, snow sticking to the streets, it looked almost like a New England town, sending waves of nostalgia over Americans who had been in China longer than they ever thought they would.

  The Marshalls spent the evening with the Chiangs. After a holiday meal, they settled in with cocktails, snow falling outside. Marshall and Madame Chiang enlisted aides for bridge. Katherine and the Generalissimo played Chinese checkers. They could still hardly communicate, though Chiang had started puckishly trying out bits of English on Katherine: “How do you do? You come back? Good-bye.” The “great shine” he had taken to her, Marshall remarked, might have been the only reason the diplomatic relationship had not broken down entirely by now.

  Two days later, on the last day of November, Chiang learned that Katherine would soon leave China for good. Marshall said he wanted her to spend winter in Honolulu rather than Nanjing for the sake of her health. Whatever the explanation, the news fed already rampant rumors that Marshall himself would soon go home.

  That was fine with Chiang. He was mystified by what Marshall thought he was accomplishing by keeping on. The Communists got something out of it, in Chiang’s assessment: as long as Marshall was around, Nationalist troops would hold back from attacking Yenan—and if an attack was delayed long enough, winter weather might intervene in the CCP’s favor. But as far as Marshall’s own thinking went, all Chiang could fathom was that it was a matter of pride: “Marshall is still daydreaming about continuing with the mediation so that his I-can-achieve-everything confidence is not shattered.” It was the behavior, Chiang raged to his diary, of a “vindictive thug”—“unreasonable,” “unethical,” and “arrogant.”

  In fact, Marshall was waiting for one thing in particular. He had gotten no certain answer to the question he put to Zhou: could anything more be done? When pressed, Communist representatives left behind in Nanjing responded with hard-edged b
luster. “We will not be coerced at the point of a gun,” they said. But from Yenan, Zhou himself was silent.

  Marshall resolved to wait until Monday, December 2. If he had heard nothing, he would accept his mission was finished.

  CHAPTER 15

  All of Chiang’s Horses and All of Chiang’s Men

  On Sunday, December 1, Marshall visited Chiang. It was late in the afternoon, a day ahead of the unspoken deadline for an answer from Zhou. Before then, Marshall wanted to have a difficult conversation.

  As they began to talk, Marshall warned Madame Chiang, there to translate as usual, that he intended to deliver some harsh messages, which she should feel free to frame or soften as she saw fit. No, she replied. She thought her husband should hear what Marshall had to say.

  Marshall was blunt. He thought Chiang was leading China toward disaster, with an approach practically “calculated to put the Communists in power,” and said so. The Nationalists were pouring money into the military, for the sake of a war they could not win, at the expense of an economy straining under spiraling inflation and a society growing more and more desperate. (The problem was not just that so much of the budget went to the military, but that corruption kept so much tax revenue from making it into the budget in the first place.) No matter how “brutal” the Nationalist attempt to annihilate the Communists, Marshall stressed, it would ultimately succeed only in sowing chaos—and chaos would play into Mao’s hands.

  To Marshall’s mind, economic and societal collapse was the real risk for the Nationalists, and Chiang was proceeding along a course that made collapse more likely. T. V. Soong had told Marshall that the Nationalists could afford only a few more months of war without setting off financial calamity (and Soong thought that “if China collapses, the Communists will take over”). Other Nationalist officials predicted that Communism “would spread like wildfire” in the event of all-out war. The dynamic was clear in upheavals elsewhere—war was midwife to revolution.