Marshall contended that the Nationalists had squandered an opportunity to lock the CCP into a political deal months earlier, in February and March. Now they were squandering an opportunity to save themselves through economic and political reform. He saw party ranks marred by “rottenness and corruption and extortion,” especially at lower levels, and dominated at higher levels by a “hard-boiled element” that has “ruined my efforts and is now ruining China.” Every time he thought he had persuaded Chiang to change course, this element sabotaged any shift, having “coolly calculated on inevitable support of their party government by the United States.” Marshall hoped Chiang would understand that—whatever he thought he knew of American strategy, of American politics, of deliberations in Washington—that calculation was wrong.
There was nothing uniquely astute about Marshall’s insights. Chiang’s own advisers could be unsparing about their side’s failings, and clear-eyed about the implications. Even Wedemeyer had recently written Chiang that force would never be “the permanent solution to the Communist problem. The best antidote to the spread of Communistic ideologies is the establishment of good government, sound economy and the uniform recognition of the individual rights of human beings. . . . Only in areas of unrest, chaos, and oppression are the Communists successful in spreading their invidious propaganda.”
But Marshall now wanted to be more brutally frank with Chiang than anyone had been before, forgoing the usual careful respect in hopes of scaring him straight. (One of Chiang’s problems was that generals and aides and advisers rarely gave him unvarnished bad news.) Marshall recounted the past year’s broken promises, lapsed agreements, missed chances. People once called Chiang a modern-day George Washington, Marshall said, but they never would again.
As Marshall spoke, Chiang listened intently to his wife’s translation, his foot tracing circles in the air. When it was his turn, he spoke for over an hour.
Chiang brushed aside the warning of collapse. China’s agrarian economy was less affected by war and instability than a more developed economy would be, he explained, and could survive at least long enough for his armies to destroy Mao’s. And he assured Marshall that victory was no more than eight to ten months away. In Chiang’s view, Communist guerrilla methods were becoming less and less effective against the Nationalists’ military machine, built with American help.
The Communists had never intended to cooperate, Chiang reiterated. They were stooges set on doing the Kremlin’s bidding, and always had been. No amount of Nationalist forbearance or acquiescence, no degree of democratization or reform, could have kept them from turning to rebellion in the end. The distrust Marshall so often deplored had nothing to do with it.
Chiang argued that military force was the only way the situation would be settled. That demanded a complete reconsideration not of the Nationalist approach, but of American policy. There was still time, Chiang told Marshall, to do the right thing.
Chiang’s faith in the United States had been tested over the last several months. On this very day a year earlier, he had reflected on Marshall’s selection and figured that American attention would work to his benefit. The leaked accounts of the Oval Office conversations before Marshall’s departure had been even more encouraging, a sign that, for all the apparent evenhandedness of the Americans, for all their clamoring for democracy and reform, he would ultimately have their backing. “The Communist Party’s scheme to sabotage my government’s relationship with the United States turned out to benefit me,” he had determined when Marshall arrived. But Marshall had done much to call that certainty into question—his prodding, his criticism, his slowdown in assistance, his persistence in mediation. In moments of exasperation, Chiang had to remind himself, “If I were to give up on the United States the ramifications are unimaginable.”
In recent weeks, Chiang had been trying to sell Marshall on a new role, one that might put him firmly on Chiang’s side: Marshall could stay in Nanjing as a personal adviser. Chiang repeated the invitation now.
Marshall had turned the offer down before and did again. He had watched others take up similar charges, fired by the hope that with the right advice, the right blueprint for success, Chiang, and China, would live up to American aspirations. They came with technocratic assessments and high-minded reforms, only to be thwarted by the realities of power and politics and chaos on the ground. Over the past year, Marshall had seen his own counsel ignored again and again, and that was even though he had the U.S. government behind him. He had fully registered Chiang’s “customary willingness to say ‘yes’ without, however, accepting the advice given.” Was there any reason to believe he would be more effective as a mere adviser? He figured that the real purpose of Chiang’s offer was to attract more American support.
Marshall had increasingly focused on this quandary—how to help a partner do what the United States thought was necessary when that partner had other ideas. No matter how badly Washington wanted to support Chiang, no matter how big its stake in ensuring his survival and blocking Communist advances, it could help only insofar as Chiang and those around him were willing and able to help themselves. Otherwise all the money and weapons and advice in the world would be for naught.
“There are few harder stunts of statesmanship,” an American official would note, “than at one and the same time to sustain a foreign government and to alter it against its fears and inclinations.” Or as Marshall would put it, “The question is to what extent you can crack the whip.” He wanted to help Chiang—after all, he had spent weeks in Washington wrenching a massive assistance package out of a stingy, skeptical Congress—but could do so effectively only “if he gives us the opportunity.” The United States could not want it more than he did.
Chiang had bet these reservations would fall away amid global hostilities. What he heard from his sources in Washington gave him plenty of reason to think this bet would turn out right. But such confidence only infuriated Marshall. Chiang’s advisers were making a “serious error,” he said; the United States would not “be dragged through the mud by these reactionaries.” He had asked that a message be delivered to the “militarists” in Nationalist ranks: “The army is draining 80 to 90 percent of the budget and if you think the U.S. taxpayer is going to step into the vacuum this creates, you can go to hell.”
Ultimately, Marshall’s frustration with Chiang’s failings was not just a matter of moral outrage, or of principle for principle’s sake. To Marshall, the principles were crucial to a strategic objective, part of the means to a desired end. The financial mismanagement, the suppression of dissent, the carpetbagging and abuse—these were consequential errors, not secondary considerations.
And yet Marshall retained a basic respect for Chiang. Unlike Stilwell and others before, Marshall did not let frustration curdle into contempt. He would say he was fond of the Generalissimo, and aides were struck by their mutual graciousness even as the mission foundered. Despite tolerating so much corruption in the party, “his personal integrity is on a high level,” Marshall believed of Chiang, his commitment to his country sincere no matter how frequently wrongheaded his approach. Chiang would often do the right thing in the end, Marshall once said, but “always too late.”
After converting to Christianity two decades earlier, Chiang had underlined a passage in a religious volume: “God never uses anybody to a large degree until after He breaks that one all to pieces.” He had borne that sense of destiny for much of his life. He could speak of democracy when he needed to. He had recently stood before the National Assembly and declared his readiness “to return to the people of the entire nation the responsibility of government.” But at bottom, he saw his duty in Confucian terms—renewal would come through the leadership of a proud, upright, noble leader. Madame Chiang told Marshall that she had tried for years to make her husband understand democracy, but with only two percent success.
As their conversation neared its end, Chiang told Marshall that he was ready to give up his burden and retire. He h
ad just to complete this final act—defeating the Communist threat for good.
The exchange had lasted three hours, into the evening. When Marshall left, Chiang reflected on their discussion and thought he had persuaded Marshall. Marshall reflected and thought it revealed just how wide the gulf between their respective visions was. Over almost a year of meetings and meals, parties and outings with their wives, games of croquet and cards and Chinese checkers, neither of them had been swayed.
Both men had gotten where they were through sheer will, each renowned for tenacity and resolve. Marshall had come to see stubbornness as Chiang’s greatest strength and greatest weakness—the fatal flaw of a tragic hero. Chiang might have said the same of Marshall.
This was not the first time Marshall had watched a society spiral into chaos, militarism, and revolution. Conditions like these had opened the way to Nazism and Fascism in Europe in the 1930s, a fresh memory that lay behind his pleas to Americans at the end of World War II. “Along with the great problem of maintaining the peace we must solve the problem of the pittance of food, of clothing and coal and homes,” he exhorted. “Neither of these problems can be solved alone.” As important as events on the battlefield were other questions—“where the mouthful of food will come from, where they will find shelter tonight and where they will find warmth from the cold of winter.” Now more than ever, wars would not be won by arms alone.
In China, the warnings of collapse were not hyperbolic. Its currency was plummeting, inflation surging. The Shanghai cost-of-living index had doubled in a matter of months. As prices rose, merchants hoarded rice. In city after city, strapped workers went on strike. Protesters shouted, “We are begging food from the mouth of guns!”
Chiang and the Nationalists hardly deserved sole blame. Even the most enlightened ruler or most capable administration would have struggled to reverse the toll from years of war and foreign exploitation. Yet in holding himself up as China’s preeminent national leader, Chiang had taken on unsupportable expectations of what he could deliver. Fury over stalled postwar revival, over food shortages, over hyperinflation, over centuries-old landlord depredations and official corruptions and peasant agonies, easily became fury at his rule—especially with a little encouragement from savvy Communist organizers. It was a domestic replay of the diplomatic resentments of World War II, when unmet promises of China’s potential bred antipathy in Allied capitals. Chiang once again struggled to live up to a fatally heroic image. His stature was a curse.
The judgments were harsh, the forecasts dire. An American financial adviser to the Nationalists assessed that they were already years behind in implementing a serious financial reform to check inflation. The “ancient evils,” worried Ambassador Stuart, had “reasserted their hold.” There was talk of the Mandate of Heaven ceasing to grace Chiang’s rule.
A former aide sent Marshall a series of New Yorker articles by John Hersey, the young Tianjin-born reporter so heartened by Marshall’s progress the previous winter (and since then made famous by his dispatch from Hiroshima). “China has fallen apart once more,” Hersey wrote, “and it looks now as if all of Chiang’s horses and all of Chiang’s men would have a very, very hard time putting her together again.”
The day after his long discussion with Chiang, Marshall radioed an unvarnished account of their exchange to Washington. When his rear echelon delivered it to the Oval Office, Truman responded not just with his standard message of vague encouragement, but also with a note of permission: whenever Marshall thought it was time for him to come home, he could. The timing, the telegram specified, “is yours and yours alone to determine.”
That was also the day, December 2, Marshall had set as his own deadline for an answer from Zhou. Since returning to Yenan, Zhou had given damning statements to journalists. Planeload after planeload of Communists had taken off from Nanjing and Shanghai and Beijing, headed north. But Marshall had asked for a straightforward answer to his straightforward question of whether anything more could be done. By December 3, he had still not gotten one.
A brief note arrived from Yenan two days later. Rather than a direct answer, it set out conditions for restarting negotiations. Zhou’s demands—reverting to the troop positions of a year earlier, dissolving the National Assembly—were so flagrantly implausible that they made the answer to Marshall’s question inescapably clear. The Communists as much as the Nationalists were committed to settling China’s future by force.
Marshall got the point. The Communists were “beyond our reach.” The only good he could do now was to stay in Nanjing as the National Assembly proceeded, in the hope that his presence would ensure as constructive an outcome as possible. The assembly would be a test of whether Chiang’s regime could find a path to reform even without the pressure of Communist participation, and become the kind of partner Washington could fully back. So Marshall waited and watched. Nanjing was wet, windy, and cold.
On the evening of December 7—five years to the day since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—the Chiangs came to #5 Ning Hai Road. Katherine, sinuses in rough shape, had decided to fly the following morning. Although she regretted leaving Marshall, especially with Christmas coming, he was insistent. She did not know how long she would be waiting for him in Honolulu. Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo said their good-byes, all promising to stay in touch.
Katherine took off early the next day. Marshall pestered aides for updates on her trip, unable to hide his concern. That afternoon, he joined Madame Chiang for a long walk on the slopes of Purple Mountain. (Marshall’s hill walks could be strenuous enough to wear out young officers.) Madame Chiang had been a friend and a generous host to Katherine, and Marshall was grateful. He was equally grateful for Madame Chiang’s help with his official efforts. Despite how things had turned out, he considered her a force for good. He thought Chiang would be “lost without her.”
Katherine’s departure set off another flurry of rumors that Marshall’s would soon follow. Aides in both Washington and Nanjing fielded a barrage of phone calls from reporters demanding to know if the rumors were true. Chinese newspapers announced that Marshall would go home any day now—and continued to announce it day after day. The rumors were summarily denied. Caughey instructed his wife to ignore the apparent good news in the press (good at least as far as the family was concerned, since it would mean he was coming home).
“The General came out here for sixty days and he has been here for a year and he literally does not know when he will leave,” Melby speculated. “Never having failed before, he cannot yet bring himself to admit he has failed this time.”
But after a few days of rumor and denial, Marshall sent a note to Acheson: “It appears now very likely that I should return to Washington in the near future, though this possibility should not leak out.”
His exit would be his last chance. As Marshall could see, neither side had been particularly interested in his mission succeeding for the past few months at least. They had been interested only in how it would end, and how that ending would be perceived, in China, in the United States, and by the rest of the world. A departure on the right note, with the right flourish, would usefully shape those perceptions.
On December 15, he wrote out a long message by hand—the first draft of a statement he would issue when he left. He had been discussing it with aides for a few days, wondering how he could both call out the Communists for their obstructionism and make “reactionary elements” in Nationalist ranks “see the handwriting on the wall,” while bolstering the remaining liberals, of all parties, who might still be able to right China’s course.
There was also the debate back home to consider. Since the midterm election, it had grown even more heated. Leading the campaign on one side was Luce. Time called for ending Marshall’s efforts and letting Chiang finish off the Communists once and for all. Nationalist victories, it brightly proclaimed, made negotiation unnecessary. (Undercutting its own assurance, the magazine also warned: “If the U.S. does not openly and quickl
y give full material and economic support to the Nationalist Government, China must pass into the Russian orbit. This could only mean a U.S. strategic retreat to the line of the Mariana Islands.”) Luce followed up with a private telegram, which Marshall found “shallow, if not completely biased” by personal connections.
Other recently laudatory voices turned derisive. “If George Marshall remains in China until he is as old as Methuselah, he won’t make peace,” General MacArthur told an adviser to the Nationalists. “Marshall, you know, will be running with Truman in the next campaign and he may even be number one.” Marshall sensed not just the more sharply personal edge to the criticism, but also the damage it was doing to his efforts to encourage Chiang on a better path—and by extension, to Chiang’s own prospects. The drumbeaters would stoke the militarists’ fervor for a final showdown and, Marshall deplored, “seriously weaken my hand because of encouragement to the controlling clique.”
Yet the pro-Nationalist view was not the only one gaining currency in the United States. Even as Luce and his allies called for all-out support of Chiang, other voices, equally strident, called for Washington to wash its hands of China altogether. “Chiang Kai-shek’s brand of democracy is not ours, any more than is Mao Tse-tung’s,” wrote the Harvard scholar John Fairbank, who had done wartime intelligence work in China. “We have let our fears of Russia and of communism, on which the right-Kuomintang plays so skillfully, drive the Chinese revolution further into dependence on Russia and upon communism.”
A new book about China was making American bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club lists, and when it arrived in Nanjing, it caused a stir there as well. The young Time correspondent Teddy White had broken definitively from his boss and published (with another Luce reporter, Annalee Jacoby) a powerfully reported broadside called Thunder Out of China. It was the counterpoint to the visions of the Luce empire, with Chiang not as Confucian-Christian savior but as lord of misrule. “We are left as the patrons of the decadent and corrupt, and the Russians become the patrons of the vigorous and dynamic,” White and Jacoby wrote. “Americans must now realize one of the hard facts of Chinese politics—that in the eyes of millions of Chinese their civil war was made in America.”
The China Mission Page 33