Even leaving aside governance, China presented challenges. There was growing anti-Western nationalism, ferociously clear in the protests ahead of Marshall’s departure. There was sheer scale—as Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff noted, “an area twice the size of Europe and with a population three times that of Europe is afflicted with most of the ills of Europe, including ideological conflict, plus those arising from a precipitate and concentrated transition from medievalism to modernism.” Calls to back Chiang to the same extent as Greece ignored that greater Shanghai alone was roughly the size of Greece.
Above all, there was the fact of Chiang and his party needing to change in profound ways for aid to have the desired effect. In Europe, a few years of assistance were likely to get economies working again; the same could not be said for China. Militarily, Chiang continued the self-defeating practices Marshall had deplored—retaining bad generals, neglecting training and morale, overextending lines, and alienating local populations. No amount of aid or advice could counteract those shortcomings. The Nationalists already had the advantage in weapons and troops, as well as a surfeit of counsel, as Marshall knew from unhappy experience: “They greeted me in the most sympathetic fashion and did nothing.”
As the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan took hold, Chiang and his champions fixed on Washington’s supposed double standard. The situations in Europe and Asia were “identical,” they asserted. To approach the two differently, charged Representative Walter Judd, was both “racist and naive”; Chiang speculated that Marshall was driven by antipathy toward the “yellow-skinned.” If the United States was set on containing Communism, the argument went, China deserved as unstinting a commitment as any other country. (Kennan, the progenitor of containment, countered: “If I thought for a moment that the precedent of Greece and Turkey obliged us to try to do the same thing in China, I would throw up my hands and say we had better have a whole new approach to the affairs of the world.”)
For Marshall, realism about what could be done in China did not mean giving up and doing nothing. He rejected calls to end aid—Truman grumbled about “pouring sand in a rathole”—or renounce Chiang. (That would put the United States in the lousy position of administering the “coup de grace” to the Nationalists.) He asked colleagues for ideas and solicited proposals for “what we can conceivably do.” He pushed piecemeal assistance, hoping to “provide a breathing space” for reform. He also loosened the arms embargo in place since the last months of his mission. At the time it was implemented, Nationalist armies had been well supplied, as Chiang’s disregard of the embargo made clear. But once concerns over potential shortages arose, Marshall let up, allowing munitions dumps to be “abandoned” to the Nationalists and, by May 1947, scrapping the embargo altogether.
“I have tortured my brain,” Marshall said in June, shortly after giving his Harvard speech, “and I can’t now see the answer.”
He even turned to General Wedemeyer, sending him temporarily back to China in July. “A Marshall Plan for China?” headlines speculated. But after several weeks on the ground, Wedemeyer was despairing. His reports painted a grim picture of “apathy and bewilderment,” “pathetic” troops, and police suppression of “the mildest forms of political disagreement.” Without sweeping change, all-out assistance “would merely make rich men richer and the Chinese Communists would march on successfully.” He recommended more military and economic aid, arguing Washington should try to save the situation no matter how long the odds. But nothing in his analysis—this from one of Chiang’s most ardent advocates—suggested that even a major increase would do much good. Before returning, he excoriated Nationalist officials for every failing Marshall identified, and more. (“The insult imposed upon us by Wedemeyer is even worse than that of Marshall and Stilwell,” Chiang lamented.) The Communists were in “excellent spirit,” Wedemeyer concluded, the Nationalists “spiritually insolvent.”
Amid the push to get the Marshall Plan through Congress, Marshall also backed a $500 million China Aid bill (in part to head off opposition to European assistance by Chiang’s advocates among American legislators). At 10 percent of what would go over the same period to Western Europe, an economy more than five times larger, the package was hardly insignificant. But it was less than the Nationalists wanted, in scale and kind, and Marshall knew it was likely to achieve little other than “buying time.”
His position changed in another regard as well: if a coalition government had ever been a viable idea, Marshall conceded it was no longer. Instructions went to American diplomats in Nanjing: “overlook no suitable opportunity to emphasize the pattern of engulfment which has resulted from coalition governments in eastern Europe.” What had appeared essential in 1945, even to Chiang’s American champions, appeared dangerously fanciful in the world that had taken shape since.
Through 1948 and into 1949, the situation deteriorated along lines many predicted, and then abruptly got much worse.
Although his forces had retreated everywhere, Mao promised victory in five years. Less than two years later, on October 1, 1949, he stood on Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace and, Zhou beside him, declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Two months after that, Chiang fled to Taiwan, never to return.
Much about how this happened was, as Marshall put it, “foretold.” The undoing began in Manchuria, where overextended Nationalist armies led by high-handed commanders made for easy targets. (American advisers urged Chiang to cut his losses and consolidate his position farther south, but he demurred.) The Communists captured huge quantities of American arms and turned them back on their intended beneficiaries. (“He is losing about 40 percent of his supplies to the enemy,” Marshall said of Chiang. “If the percentage should reach 50 percent he will have to decide whether it is wise to supply his own troops.”) Nationalist forces switched sides en masse—including, as the end neared, former Committee of Three member Chang Chi-chung. City dwellers and liberals increasingly backed the CCP as well, as inflation spiraled upward, political repression intensified, and Chiang retracted promises of reform.
As the CCP advanced, it was no longer waging a war of daring guerrilla strikes, as its mythology held, but of massive battles. Its decisive campaign, starting in late 1948, approached world-war scale, with encounters involving hundreds of thousands of troops and spanning hundreds of miles. And as Mao tallied wins, Stalin took another look at his Chinese comrades and conceded he had been wrong to doubt them. Realizing revolution had a chance, he increased the flow of weapons and assistance. CCP griping about Soviet stinginess, though never allayed entirely, started to ease. (Mao still could not get a face-to-face meeting with Stalin.) A new American intelligence operation, the Central Intelligence Agency, reported that, while hard evidence was difficult to come by, Soviet support was undoubtedly growing.
In Washington, warnings got more strident. If China fell, Communism would proceed like “a snowball rolling down into the valley of despair and destruction,” said Wedemeyer. Congressman Judd used a baseball analogy: Communism would reach first base in China, second base in the rest of Asia, third base in Africa, and home in America.
As warnings escalated and the Communists advanced, so did calls to do something to stop them. General Douglas MacArthur, not known for prudence, quipped that anyone advocating ground troops for China “should have his head examined.” Yet various proposals sought to heighten American commitment in ways that Marshall feared would lead dangerously in that direction. Wedemeyer wanted to send 10,000 advisers, with leeway to get more closely involved. James Forrestal, in the new post of secretary of defense, promoted a plan to revive the Flying Tigers. Senior army officers wanted to take command of ten Nationalist divisions. Naval officers wanted a joint American-Nationalist force, to “stand and hold, come hell or high water.” Nationalist officials proposed placing American advisers throughout their ranks and American bases on Chinese soil. Henry Luce published a slashing essay in Life by former ambassador William Bullitt urging American over
sight of Chiang’s armies, with MacArthur in charge. (“The independence of the U.S. will not live a generation longer than the independence of China,” Bullitt declared.) At the other extreme were schemes to unseat Chiang and install someone more pliant.
Marshall resisted the push, intervening with Truman when necessary. He supported assistance but opposed anything suggesting “direct responsibility for the conduct of civil war in China, or for the Chinese economy, or both.” He backed military advice but blocked steps that raised the risk of “getting sucked in” along an unpredictable path of intervention and escalation. Failed half-measures could too easily necessitate larger commitments. Ultimately, he warned, the United States would “have to be prepared to take over the Chinese Government, practically, and administer its economic, military, and government affairs.” That would not just spur a nationalist backlash among Chinese, likely negating any benefits. “It would involve this Government in a continuing commitment from which it would be practically impossible to withdraw.”
The price of that commitment would be high. It would mean less for “more vital regions where we now have a reasonable opportunity of meeting or thwarting the Communist threat,” and a “dissipation of resources” that would “inevitably play into the hands of the Russians.” Yet it was not just about resources. A full-scale military commitment would, Marshall warned, involve “obligations and responsibilities . . . which, I am convinced, the American people would never knowingly accept. We cannot escape the fact that the deliberate entry of this country into the armed effort in China involved possible consequences in which the financial costs, though tremendous, would be insignificant when compared to the other liabilities involved.” In his assessment, to have even a hope of destroying the CCP by force, Chiang would need “full-scale American intervention”—at a minimum several hundred thousand troops. And loose talk of World War III only heightened Marshall’s leeriness. “The Chinese have long been intent on the U.S. going to war with Soviet Union,” he noted, “with the expectation that the U.S. would drag the Chinese Government out of its difficulties.”
Marshall’s position infuriated Chiang. “Every time I see soldiers without wisdom, troops in disorder, and youngsters being rude,” he fumed, “it reminds me that all of this is Marshall’s fault.” Yet as ever, Chiang was resolute: “Since God loves me and entrusted me with a mission, I will not quit halfway. What can the likes of Marshall and Stalin do to me?”
His salvation was supposed to come with the 1948 American presidential election. Chiang had been hearing for years that Truman and Marshall would be driven out by more sympathetic Republicans. “If Marshall does not change his insulting policies towards China he will without a doubt lose momentum,” Chiang reassured himself. “The American people will not be controlled by a warlord.” On the campaign trail, Thomas Dewey, the Republican nominee, pledged additional advisers and weapons and, according to messages from Wedemeyer, would be open to even more once in the White House. Chen Li-fu crossed the Pacific to hand a letter to Dewey—seeing Marshall in Washington, Chen claimed to be there observing democracy in action—and returned with promises of a significant military commitment. The assurances reinforced Chiang’s “almost mystical” faith, as Stuart put it, that America would rescue him; there were reports of his troops withdrawing into cities and hunkering down until Dewey won. As election day in November approached, Dewey led in the polls by double digits.
Truman’s victory was a shock for many, but an especially unpleasant one for Chiang. “The diplomatic situation will become even worse,” he bemoaned. His armies lost Manchuria the same day.
Marshall had been looking forward to the election as well. He had been putting off kidney surgery, and a new presidential term would be his moment to finally step down. The resurrection of Western Europe was under way; a transatlantic alliance was taking shape; American pilots were valiantly subverting a Soviet blockade in the Berlin airlift. For his role in all of this, for giving “hope to those who desperately needed it,” Time again named Marshall its man of the year.
In China, however, assessments were more dire than ever. (Marshall had expected that American success in the West might bring increased Soviet mischief in the East.) “The long-anticipated crisis in China has unmistakably arrived,” the CIA reported. “Its main features conform approximately to the pattern that was anticipated—military defeats, economic collapse, political defections, and a general sense of the desirability of peace at any compromise.” Pessimistic strategists were turning their attention to options for limiting the fallout, by holding the line against Communism in Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, and to speculation that the CCP would soon enough prove an unreliable partner for the Kremlin. “When the issue of subservience to Moscow has become more immediate than that of ‘U.S. Imperialism,’ Chinese nationalism will prove stronger than international Communism,” the CIA prophesied hopefully.
As Marshall prepared to hand the State Department’s reins to Dean Acheson, the Nationalists made final appeals. Chen Li-fu called on Marshall to be a sick China’s doctor, an embattled China’s Lafayette. One official would issue another request for “an extension of the Marshall plan to the Far East.” Another would acknowledge that because of Nationalist failure “to make appropriate political, economic, and military reforms, your assistance has not produced the desired effect,” by way of promising to better utilize assistance going forward. (Total American aid since World War II already amounted to some $3 billion, more than half military.†) But at his last National Security Council meeting, on November 23, 1948, Marshall warned once more against “dispersion of U.S. resources, in response to the many demands upon them, over so many areas that no conclusive result will be obtained anywhere.”
At the start of December, as he checked into Walter Reed Hospital for surgery, Madame Chiang arrived in town to make an appeal in person. She had kept up frequent, friendly correspondence with the Marshalls, sending Katherine updates on weather and doctor’s visits and current events—“all the American women have been rushing out of Shanghai and Nanjing the past week”—and teasingly addressing Marshall by a childhood nickname, General Flicker. She still ranked just below Eleanor Roosevelt on lists of the women Americans most admired. Yet now newspapers referred to Madame Chiang not as China’s Florence Nightingale or Joan of Arc, but as an “embarrassing guest.” Staying with Katherine in Leesburg, she visited Marshall in the hospital and pleaded for increased assistance, stressing that the fights in China and in Berlin were one and the same. It did not take her long to see that her plea had failed.
Just before Chiang’s defeat, Marshall looked back on the challenges in China over the previous four years. “I have never known any problem that had so much complexity in it,” he reflected. He also recognized that this observation, no matter its accuracy, would mean little in the frenzy of recrimination to come: “People want action and they want it today. That is the way democracy goes and you cannot get away from it.”
Soon they would start asking the barbed question: Who lost China? Chiang, at least, had a ready answer. He blamed Marshall, “who lost us and lost China.” Looking back, Chiang wished he had prevented Marshall’s mission from ever happening.
At other times, Chiang acknowledged his own errors: he had scattered his forces, overcommitted in Manchuria, relied on “muddle-headed” generals and “degenerate” officials. As the end came, he wrote in his diary: “I increasingly realize that it was unwise for us to not heed Marshall’s and Russia’s attempt to mediate our problems with the Communists. . . . but I did not expect Marshall to be this stubborn.”
Marshall had said before: Chiang was always too late.
For Americans, 1949 was a year of nasty shocks. Communists took China. Moscow tested an atomic bomb. American officials were charged with spying on their own government—some rightly, many wrongly. Tension and terror, mounting steadily since the war, spiked to new highs. The Cold War had fully arrived.
The Truman administration rush
ed to tell its version of how China was “lost,” in the form of a white paper detailing American efforts and Nationalist shortcomings. “The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States,” Secretary of State Acheson wrote in a prefatory note. “Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result.”
What followed was unique in the annals of American foreign policy: a lengthy, sophisticated attempt, with freshly declassified documentation, to explain to the public why events unfolded the way they did. Politically, it was an abysmal failure.
In the angry debate and prolonged panic just beginning, the white paper incited many and persuaded few. (Acheson’s takeaway was that explanations to the American people must be “clearer than the truth.”) Chiang condemned it as “a heavy blow to our people.” Mao held it up as proof of “intervention” by the “neurotic United States imperialist group—Truman, Marshall, Acheson.” (The very premise fanned Mao’s paranoia: if Americans believed China was lost, surely they would try to win it back.) Congressional Republicans mocked it as a “whitewash of a wishful do-nothing policy.”
Politics had never really stopped at the water’s edge, as the adage claimed. But insofar as Marshall had succeeded in attracting broad support for his efforts as secretary of state, comity disintegrated in the vitriol of the China debate. “There is no such thing as a bipartisan foreign policy,” declared Republican senator Robert Taft. Chiang’s advocates in the “China Lobby” launched a “full-dress attack” on the administration. Editorialists denounced America’s “moral retreat.” John F. Kennedy—speaking in Salem, Massachusetts, of witch trials fame—rued the “tragic story of China” and derided Marshall’s role in it. Under pressure to demonstrate a strong stand on China’s periphery, Truman committed $10 million in military aid to fight Communism in Vietnam. (Marshall, now from the sidelines, warned against being “plunged by political momentary pressures into action that we may find later was highly inadvisable.”)
The China Mission Page 37