The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  Thus his plea to Chiang now. Be farsighted, Marshall urged. His own mission, his attempt to cement peace and political democratization and military unification, may have failed. But it was not too late, Marshall said, for Chiang to change China. He could throw himself into winning over the Chinese people, into leading them along a better path, into building a liberal party, rather than risking everything on the battlefield. It would make him “the father of the country.”

  They had talked for two hours. As soon as he was back on Ning Hai Road, Marshall wrote a message to Truman. “It is quite clear to me that my usefulness will soon be at an end for a variety of reasons,” Marshall conceded. He had become “persona non grata.”

  He still wanted to fire his last salvo, calling out both Nationalist reactionaries and the Communists. But beyond that, Marshall told the president, the mission was finished: “It is now going to be necessary for the Chinese, themselves, to do the things I endeavored to lead them into.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Into the Fire

  On the first day of 1947, just as on the first day of 1946, Hart Caughey was awakened early and ordered to get to Marshall’s room as soon as he could. Caughey had spent nearly every day for a year at the great man’s side, in awe throughout despite going from despair to dogged hope and back to despair about the mission’s prospects. “I don’t know when I’ve been so depressed,” he wrote his wife on Christmas Eve. Sixteen months since the end of the war he was sent to China to fight, he still did not know when he could go home.

  When Caughey reported, Marshall was in bed. The evening before, the Chiangs had thrown a party for his 66th birthday. Marshall showed up in their living room in dress uniform and was greeted by fifty guests—the usual array of officers and diplomats, but also Nationalist figures such as Chen Li-fu. Madame Chiang, fur draped over her shoulders, presented him a red-and-gold long-life candle. The Generalissimo toasted his labors in the cause of peace. (Other guests knew nothing of the request for recall Marshall had sent three days earlier and found his response strangely restrained.) He left at 9 p.m., not early enough to stave off a relapse of his lingering cold.

  Sick in bed this New Year’s morning, he had summoned Caughey for a change in plans. Marshall was supposed to fly to Shanghai for an Army-Navy football game and string of receptions. His cold gave him reason to skip the trip. But there was an added benefit to his not going. Protests over the Christmas Eve rape were getting bigger and angrier, and his arrival in Shanghai risked adding fuel to fire. Both Chiang and the city’s mayor had requested that Marshall stay away. He would be a lightning rod for anti-American ire—demonstrations that day were being called “anti-US-brutality marches”—and they worried about what might happen.

  Even in Nanjing, under tighter control, protests were growing. A crowd of 1,500 students massed outside the new American embassy—in an unfortunate resonance, the building had previously belonged to the Japanese puppet president—and spewed invective at every American they saw. “Bloody GI, Get out Before We Kick You Out,” said banners. Marshall’s aides took circuitous routes through the city to avoid hostile encounters with rock-throwing demonstrators. Elsewhere, the protests were larger. Crowds screamed that Washington was plotting to turn China into a colony; that Americans were worse than the Japanese; that just as American marines were violating Chinese women, the American government was violating Chinese sovereignty. Ambassador Stuart met with a delegation of students and tried to be conciliatory. But other American officers and officials argued, privately and publicly, that the incident had been blown out of proportion or even trumped up entirely, “the Dreyfus case of North China,” perhaps a Communist setup. Such denials only made things worse.

  For Chiang, the protests required a delicate response. A leader vying for the mantle of nationalism, he could hardly stand against them. Yet demands for American withdrawal threatened his interest in more military help. In a radio broadcast, he walked a fine line, hailing Chinese sovereignty while warning that the young were “too easily influenced and deceived.”

  Yenan could be more categorical. It spotted opportunity and was quick to take advantage, hailing the protesters’ “struggle to the death” against “American imperialists and their running dogs.” The rape of Shen Chung, it pronounced, was the rape of the entire Chinese nation.

  The popular outrage was hardly of Communist manufacture, or the protests of Communist instigation. But it was just the kind of sentiment and circumstance that CCP leaders were adept at turning to their own revolutionary ends—particularly Zhou, who had long recognized that patriotic students could be made into useful allies. “Confused, frustrated and faithless,” wrote Till Durdin in the New York Times, “the young people of China are in a mood that makes them ready tools for a campaign rooted in the already existing dissatisfaction with the government and with another country that has done much to support it.”

  Anti-Americanism had been on the rise for months, just waiting for the right spark to set off a nationalist conflagration. A little more than a year earlier, Chinese crowds could be heard chanting, “America is the very best.” But before long, they were instead cursing the United States for fomenting war and thwarting peace. A Shanghai newspaper had recently polled 18,907 locals and claimed that 98.9 percent wanted American troops gone. Canadian shopkeepers started writing “Canada” on their front doors.

  American officials could explain away the anger as a sublimation of other grievances. “Widespread resentment against Government which cannot be openly expressed is being turned almost entirely against the U.S.,” rationalized an embassy report. Marshall detected CCP propaganda, “successful in stirring up an active and unreasoning anti-American feeling,” especially among a “naive” Chinese intelligentsia, all with the aim of driving out the United States.

  While there was some truth to such analysis, a string of other outrages involving American troops had preceded the rape. There were seemingly endless stories of bar fights and beaten prostitutes and black-marketeering. A drunk sailor thrashed a Shanghai rickshaw-puller to death. There were so many traffic accidents involving American military jeeps—“city tigers,” some Chinese called them—that residents hinted darkly that these might not really be accidents. To add insult to injury, U.S. officers had negotiated a deal allowing their troops to be tried in U.S. military courts, evoking the impositions of imperialists past.

  “The fund of Chinese good-will toward the United States is a tangible asset to our credit in this country and a factor which exists outside the realm of ideologies and political parties,” Marshall had observed earlier. Now, he feared, that good-will risked being “tossed to the winds in the destruction of the great respect in which the world has held the American Army.”

  To an unsettling degree, it had happened already. The United States, Melby assessed, “has lost an amount of goodwill and friendliness that is equaled only by the amount of goodwill the Russians have lost. I think it would be difficult to exaggerate the hatred in which we are both held.”

  On January 3, Marshall, still sick, received two confidential messages from Washington. The first, a telegram from Secretary of State Byrnes, was a response to Marshall’s admission that there was nothing left to do. “We are in hearty accord with the course you have pursued and the views you express as to future action,” the telegram read. It ended with a request from the president that Marshall return to the United States for consultations on China and “other matters.”

  The second was from the president himself. He had summoned Marshall’s rear echelon to the Oval Office for a message that was to be conveyed to Nanjing in “utmost secrecy.” Truman wanted Marshall back as soon as possible, for reasons related to those “other matters”—“the project the President has previously discussed with you.” Marshall did not need further clarification. Truman had not dropped the idea of replacing Secretary of State Byrnes after all. Marshall’s worries were about to expand in both scale and scope, his retirement put off a while longer.
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  “Your country is fortunate in having the benefit of your counsel at this critical time,” Truman had written a few days earlier in a birthday note. The fact that “the Chinese have fallen short of acting upon your wise counsels” had done nothing to alter that judgment.

  Both the Nationalists and the Communists had chosen to act on those counsels only when it suited them. Marshall looked back at the seeming miracles and subsequent disappointments of his mission’s opening act and judged: “They were both so frequently in the wrong that there was never a clear case for either side, except possibly in last February when I felt the Communists had played the game with cleaner hands than the Government.” To the extent the Communists had, it was only insofar as they thought a successful negotiation was in their interest—they had their own reasons to cooperate. As those reasons changed, as a result of both Nationalist reactions and, even more, Soviet encouragement, they had stopped playing along. At critical moments throughout the mission, each side had cause to put off a settlement in order to press its advantage—stringing Marshall along until it decided his services as a mediator might once again be of value. Ultimately, both sides were right to be suspicious of the other.

  For all the sense of China as some exotic other, Americans tended to project their own country’s experience onto China’s struggles. Was the divide between Nationalists and Communists really so different from the divide between Republicans and Democrats? (If Democrats and Republicans had independent armies, Wedemeyer had quipped, they would be at war as well.) Marshall was not immune to the temptations of American analogy. He had talked about baseball umpires and Benjamin Franklin, about American rights and freedoms. He had pointed out that Americans were still arguing about their own civil war—supposedly evidence that two sides did not have to agree on history to coexist in a government. (The American civil war was not mere history to Marshall: his own family had been split by it, and he had been the only northerner in his class at the Virginia Military Institute at a time when the war was a fresh wound for southern cadets.) Of course, the analogy could be turned on its head: if it took a civil war for Americans to work out fundamental political questions, perhaps the Chinese needed a civil war as well. Still, such projections made it easy to imagine China, with the right advice or assistance or exhortation, quickly becoming the great power America wanted it to be.

  Marshall would sometimes speak of China’s potential for greatness. Its resources, its economic promise, its population—“all should combine to free the people from their present distress and lift China to its rightful position among the nations of the world.” But the vision had become vague and aspirational; Marshall did not think it would happen any time soon.

  To most Americans, that whole line of speculation seemed fanciful at this point. Their concern was less China’s potential for world leadership than China’s relevance to US-Soviet competition. As Marshall thought about how best to end his mission, the embassy worked on its own reassessment of the U.S. position. The end result, dispatched to Washington, emphasized that the Kremlin was intent on using “confusion and chaos . . . to precipitate a collapse which can be fully exploited,” and that “the most logical instrument for the accomplishment of this objective is the Chinese Communist Party.” The embassy saw little cause for hope that the government would reverse the deterioration, by showing the Chinese people “that it can give them a life at least as good, if not better, than the Communists hold out.” The Nationalists, “if left unmolested, will surely dig their own graves and prepare confirmation of the Communist thesis.”

  On January 5, two days after receiving Truman’s request, Marshall replied with a message for the president: “I think I fully understand the matter to be discussed. My answer is in affirmative if that continues to be his desire. My personal reaction is something else.”

  He began choreographing his exit, with the precision of a director and the flair of an actor, for maximal impact on his audience. He would tell almost no one, not even most aides, until a couple of days before. He would time the public announcement to get the news into the press just a day in advance. He would put out a bracing statement as he left. And then he would let the impact of his valedictory rebuke sink in for a few days—before revealing that he was taking over as secretary of state, the shock of his appointment compounding the shock of his departure.

  He hoped the sequence would, somehow, spur a constructive rethinking in Nationalist circles that would, someday, allow a return to peaceful unification. In giving up he might achieve what he had been unable to by keeping on, a jolt to set things on a better course. Either way, it would be his mission’s final move.

  To maintain surprise, Marshall accepted invitations for dates when he would be long gone. He asked aides in Washington to stop forwarding mail, but to tell no one they were doing so. Since most of the staff living at #5 Ning Hai Road had no idea what was coming, he delayed packing. Caughey, one of the few in the know, had to resist settling outstanding debts from his games of darts.

  On January 6, at dusk, Marshall went to see Chiang. It had been a dreary weekend in Nanjing, and it was rainy and windy as Marshall passed through wet and darkening streets. He had decided the day before that he would fly on the morning of January 8.

  Marshall promptly delivered the news, and Chiang responded with a disquisition on past American slights: the Yalta accords in February 1945, the Moscow summit the following December, various risible proposals for US-Soviet-British cooperation in China. It was Chiang in proud Nationalist mode, and Marshall was not sure what to make of it at this particular moment. Ever since concluding that further mediation was futile, Marshall had struggled to make Chiang see that he must embrace change on his own, constructing a more open China that would give the Communists a stark choice between cooperating and being marginalized. Marshall held out hope that Chiang would come around, whatever the objections of his most trusted hard-line advisers and other self-serving sycophants around him. In that regard, this response was not especially encouraging.

  Marshall omitted a detail from their conversation—the coming secretary of state nomination. Not even Chiang would know beforehand. Each of them had spoken of this current undertaking as a final act: Chiang said he would defeat Mao and then step down, responsibilities finished; Marshall would fulfill his China mission and get back to his aborted retirement. Each, however, was coming to sense that, far from a final act, he was in the first stage of an even greater challenge. It was not turning out to be the ending either of them hoped.

  On his last day in China, Marshall had a full schedule. He wanted to avoid a flood of lavish events and formal obligations—an added reason for the last-minute announcement—but people scrambled to get a few minutes of his time, just as they had upon his arrival thirteen months before.

  He saw Nationalist figures he regarded as forces for good, reminding them that “courage and patriotism” among liberals was key to China’s future. He understood the weaknesses of these squabbling factions, in both Nationalist ranks and third parties. Yet the only way forward was for them to join together to push Chiang, and China, in the right direction.

  He saw one of the Communist representatives left behind by Zhou, who had never given him the courtesy of a direct answer to his question. Marshall recognized that it had become “almost impossible to deal with the Communists.”

  He saw T. V. Soong and warned of the “disagreeable” statement to come, explaining that he felt compelled to deliver it, in an effort to “arouse bitterness and anger” among the “radicals, reactionaries, and irreconcilables.”

  He left letters of recommendation for his driver (“careful, understands motor cars”) and masseur (“an excellent masseur”). He invited a group of children to Ning Hai Road for ice cream and let them stay to watch a movie as he continued his meetings. He received a gift from the embassy staff, a watch like one he had recently admired on Walton Butterworth’s wrist.

  In the evening, he saw Chiang. Over Marshall’s last Chin
ese meal, each delivered a warm toast. Marshall praised Chiang’s thoughtfulness and sincerity; that Chiang had remained courteous and composed even in harsh moments was, Marshall thought, the sign of a “really big man.” Chiang also made a last bid for unqualified American support—and thought he may have made the case at last. That night he wrote of Marshall: “He was grateful for my hospitality and patience. This is attributable to me holding my tongue and bearing insults for the past year. Whether he will assist me or not, it will be a success for me if he leaves without holding any grudges against me.”

  The Chiangs had scrambled to get parting gifts together. For Caughey, there was a silk robe to take to his wife, decorated in plum blossoms—“symbolic of the triumph of the spirit in adversity,” Madame Chiang explained. For Marshall, there was a note signed by Chiang to pass to President Truman: “In her hour of crisis, my country has been most fortunate in having General Marshall with us.”

  Marshall’s final statement was meant to insult, but it was not a surly outburst. It was a carefully aimed parting shot.

  Marshall had worked on the text for almost a month. He had exact specifications for its release, everything from header (“personal statement by General Marshall”) to timing (no more than twenty-four hours after the announcement of his departure). His words were chosen to provoke radicals on both sides. Seeing him gone, they would attack him as viciously in public as they did in private. And then, later, the announcement of his new position would come. In the case of the Communists, the vitriol would be clarifying. In the case of the Nationalists, it would sideline hard-liners—since Chiang, the thinking went, could not afford to keep close advisers who had openly maligned the new secretary of state. Marshall hoped the result would be to “strengthen the position and influence of the better elements.”