BY MID-JULY 1949, Chiang Kai-shek was already in Guangzhou with Li Zongren and other Nationalist regional and factional leaders, whom he had earlier despised and long resented. One purpose of this gathering was to create a new KMT Extraordinary Committee to cope with the Nationalist resistance against the Chinese Communists, and to demarcate new war zones and responsibilities within their shrinking territories south of the Yangtze. This was a goal which the Americans expected to be “almost futile.”1 Chiang was elected chairman of this committee, giving him a new sort of political legitimacy useful to his subsequent activities both on the mainland and Taiwan. To rescue a demoralized Nationalist regime, Chiang openly declared his desire to safeguard Guangzhou and consolidate South China as the last anti-Communist base. But his fellow Nationalists did not share such a resolve. General Yu Hanmou, for example, Chiang’s handpicked garrison commander of the Guangzhou metropolis, did not hesitate to show his pessimism about an effective defense of Guangzhou. Yu therefore asked Chiang to consider replacing him with someone more capable of doing the job. Chiang, furious, reprimanded Yu by threatening that he would personally go to the forefront to lead the command if the latter did not feel responsible enough to fulfill his duty.2
Without a doubt, Chiang Kai-shek’s presence in Guangzhou in the summer of 1949 had major political implications. An ostensible reunion of Chiang and Li Zongren was made possible, at a time when the Nationalist forces under Bai Chongxi were able to hold their “Maginot Line,” running from Changsha in Hunan down to Amoy in Fujian and Swatow at the eastern tip of Guangdong. Upper Nationalist echelons, including both Chiang and Li, were cautiously optimistic that, so long as Hunan province could be held as a shield against further Communist advance, a Guangzhou-based Nationalist regime might secure Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan Island, and the rest of Southwest China.3 Indeed, the Nationalist war cause momentarily showed signs of improvement in the early summer of 1949. In Central China, Bai Chongxi’s divisions on the Hunan-Jiangxi border miraculously fended off the PLA for more than eight weeks. In the far northwest, the Ma Muslims and Hu Zongnan’s divisions triumphantly regained a dozen counties and cities in Shaanxi Province, at one point forcing PLA Marshal Peng Dehuai to withdraw eastward. These successes allowed Chiang to express excitement about KMT’s “revival of will to resist” to Lewis Clark, the American minister-counselor in Guangzhou.4 Equally elated by the Nationalists’ momentary military achievements, Roger Lapham, chief of the Economic Cooperation Administration’s (ECA) mission to China, passed on his verbal message to Li Zongren to the effect that Washington would still be willing to save his regime. If the Nationalists continued to hold the current defense line, Lapham promised, renewed U.S. aid might soon be forthcoming.5
Chiang Kai-shek wanted to remain viable as a likely recipient of any renewed U.S. aid, and began a whirlwind of domestic and international political activity to improve his visibility. On July 10, 1949, at the invitation of Philippine President Elpidio Quirino, Chiang flew to Baguio for a brief but high-profile visit. In Baguio, Chiang and Quirino discussed a Pacific Union along the line of the newly created NATO, including Nationalist China, the Philippines, South Korea and virtually every Far Eastern nation willing to embrace an anti-communism stance.6 Lewis Clark wryly commented on Chiang’s diplomatic drama as nothing more than marking “a definite change from [his] retirement.”7 Bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom, on the other hand, posited that Chiang believed the Philippines and other states in the proposed Pacific Union might be utilized as instruments to bring further pressure on Washington for aid to his anti-Communist cause in China. They therefore advocated that efforts should be made to wean Quirino from Chiang, and to influence the former to adopt an alternative plan that excluded Nationalist China. It was also proposed that Washington should make it clear to Quirino and Chiang that the proposed anti-communist movement and any structure that might be evolve from it must not appear to be “an instrument designed primarily to extract and channel U.S. or other western aid.”8 CIA officials, while concurring with the State Department, warily remarked that one crucial purpose of this Chiang-Quirino show might be to “legalize” the undefined position of Taiwan, probably through a joint declaration by the Pacific powers that the island was not a part of Communist China.9
K. C. Wu, now a key member in the newly established KMT Director-General’s Office, who accompanied Chiang to Baguio, revealed to his contacts in the U.S. Consulate General in Taipei that the trip was actually part of an overall effort to prepare “for further disasters on the mainland,” hinting that Chiang might be seeking a refuge in exile.10 Wu’s disclosure thus further convinced the consular staff’s earlier surmise that Chiang, preparing for the worst, might attempt to transfer a portion of the government’s gold reserve from Taiwan to the Philippines.11 In his personal diary, though, Chiang only mentioned that one important achievement resulting from his visit to Baguio was to secure President Quirino’s permission to sell surplus war materials left by the United States to him so as to continue Nationalist resistance against the Communists.12
Four weeks later, on August 6, Chiang conducted another significant, although comparatively low-keyed visit to Jinhae on the southern tip of the Korean peninsular, where he was warmly greeted by South Korean president Syngman Rhee. The formation of an anti-communist bloc in East Asia and an attempt on Chiang’s part to elevate his prestige, as the foreign diplomatic corps in China observed, were ostensible reasons for this visit.13 More critically, however, was Chiang’s endeavor to seek Rhee’s support in creating several covert offshore outposts at Chiang’s disposal along South Korea’s western coast. As Chiang’s secret files now reveal, Chiang planned to use these Korean offshore isles as staging posts to infiltrate Communist-controlled North China, to block potential Communist naval activities, to offer his intelligence personnel out of Qingdao a safe haven, and, in time, to launch a military counterattack in North and Northeast China.14 A politically sophisticated Rhee did not make any commitment, but instead asked Chiang for more military assistance, such as the training of Korean air and naval operations, and an incredible list of arms for sale or as gifts, from the Nationalists, including thirty F-51 fighter planes, five C-47 transport aircrafts, thirty AT-6 trainers, 50,000 USM/30 rifles, and seven warships of various types.15 The requests were hard to entertain, and Chiang was noncommittal. The meeting thus produced little more than hollow statements and a moderate increase in Chiang’s personal prestige among the ailing Nationalist hierarchy.
5.1 Chiang Kai-shek (middle) meets with Philippine president Elpidio Quirino (right) at Baguio in July 1949 in an effort to establish an anticommunist alliance in Asia. (Courtesy KMT Party History Institute)
5.2 Chiang Kai-shek (second from left) with the first couple of South Korea in Jinhae in August 1949. (Courtesy of the KMT Party History Institute)
Back in Taiwan, Chen Cheng continued to act in accordance with his own plan, thereby his relationship with Chiang did not improve. In mid-July 1949, Chen openly rejected Chiang’s order to set aside part of the island’s military provisions for Tang Enbo’s troops entrapped in Fujian. Chen’s disobedience led a maddened Chiang to upbraid Chen as “feudal” and “wanton.”16 When the fall of Fuzhou was imminent in the last week of August 1949, Chiang pressed Chen to dispatch naval and air forces from Taiwan to relieve the besieged Nationalist forces. Using the excuse of bad weather, Chen defied Chiang’s order once again.17
At one point in 1949, Chen seemed closer in his relationships with the elements from other KMT cliques and factions than with Chiang. According to a secret report from the CCP underground units in South China, around early summer 1949, when there was much discussion about consolidating Guangzhou under Li Zongren’s leadership, Chen Cheng was having very intimate contact with such anti-Chiang Cantonese militarists as Chen Jitang, the governor of Hainan Island appointed by the Guangxi Clique. Exchanges of military representatives between Taipei and Hainan were underway, and both men seemed to agree on launching joint military tr
aining programs for anti-Communist campaigns.18 One likely reward for Chen’s closeness to Li, according to one British consular report from Taiwan, would be a division of the Nationalist defense establishment into two sections, with one established in Chongqing in Southwest China and the other in Taipei under Chen’s command.19
Chen Cheng had reasons to be tough with Chiang. For a moment in the middle of 1949, the United States seemed still to place its hope on Chen, rather than any other military leaders on the island. With a series of positive reforms now being launched for the good of Taiwan, Chen was more instrumental, in the eyes of some officials in Washington, than Sun Liren, who was more cooperative with Chiang, at least outwardly. While Chen rejected Chiang’s instructions, Sun, albeit reluctantly, was willing to dispatch one of his best student regiments from Fengshan to Amoy to rescue Tang Enbo’s crumbling forces. Moreover, Sun complied with Chiang by sending another artillery battalion of his own to Zhoushan to fight an equally perilous battle there. After learning of the sacrifice of his men in Fujian, Sun expressed his regrets to the U.S. consular staff in Taipei at such “piecemeal commitment of these half-trained troops,” as well bitter complaints about Chiang Kai-shek and the “abhorrent KMT regime.”20
With these new developments along China’s southeast coast, American diplomats in Taiwan observed with sobriety that Sun Liren’s authority would be considerably curtailed by Chen Cheng. When the command structure of Southeast China was reorganized in mid-August 1949, Sun was made head of the Taiwan Defense Command, while Peng Mengqi was slated to lead the Taiwan Peace Preservation Command. Although the two positions were equally ranked under Chen Cheng’s command, it soon turned out that Peng’s command would include all garrison forces and the police in Taiwan, leaving Sun with only an empty title. Peng, known as Chen Cheng’s cohort, now virtually became the second boss on the island.21 The Americans on the island also noticed that, while other Nationalist forces in Taiwan were salaried with silver dollars, only Sun’s men were paid in the increasingly devalued bank notes. A highly dubious proposition from the U.S. consular staff in Taipei was that the continued influx into Taiwan of Nationalist troops from the mainland under Chen and Peng’s command did nothing to enhance Taiwan’s defense capability, but instead only diluted Sun’s military influence on the island.22
These observations led U.S. officials both in Taipei and in Washington to temporarily believe that Chen Cheng’s presence in Taiwan “creates fewer problems” than Chiang Kai-shek’s, and thus Washington should convey its views to Chen instead of Chiang.23 It was therefore not surprising that, around mid-September 1949, when rumor was prevailing that a Formosan autonomous government would soon be established after Guangzhou fell to the Communists, the United States predicted Chen Cheng, the so-called Minister of War of this new regional political mechanism, would be the real person to reign behind the scenes.24
In early August 1949, the situation on the mainland suddenly became critical when the governor of Hunan, Cheng Qian, and the 80,000-odd Nationalist forces under him, defected to the Chinese Communists. This was a decisive blow to Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, who had so far admirably established an effective resistance movement in South China.25 The result of this “transfer of political loyalty,” to cite Cheng Qian’s words, threatened to collapse Guangzhou’s defense line on the eastern front. As the Nationalist “Maginot Line” was now exposed to the turncoats in Hunan Province, the Nationalist bases in Guangdong and Guangxi had become extremely vulnerable.26 Shortly thereafter Bai arduously but quite successfully prevented a possible domino effect within the remaining Nationalist forces under his command. Nevertheless, a sudden shift of the political landscape in Central China would very likely dim the last hope of American support for Li Zongren. On August 6, Li candidly inquired of Lewis Clark whether Washington would still consider supporting certain “autonomous areas continuing to resist communism,” such as the Ma Muslims in the northwest and, notably, Guangxi province and the Guangxi army under Bai. Li now intended to return to his home province as leader of the local resistance forces.27
Before obtaining a clear response from Lewis Clark, an anxious and impatient Li had already instructed V. K. Wellington Koo, Nationalist Chinese ambassador in Washington, to propose to the State Department a draft military aid program for China. In this draft proposal, Koo pointed out that the Nationalists still controlled a vast integral territory extending from Inner Mongolia and the Northwest to most of the provinces south of the Yangtze. These territories constituted a large base of operations against the Communists, and it was in this chain of mountains that the Japanese had been successfully stopped at the peak of World War II. Koo accordingly urged Washington to render a total of $287 million in military aid to Li’s Nationalist government.28
Upon receiving Koo’s proposal, Dean Acheson and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson carefully evaluated its feasibility. Most State Department staff took a rather unfavorable stance toward Koo’s request. Wesley J. Jones, counselor for the American embassy in China, stated that Li and Bai were going to withdraw to a province “already infested with Communist bandit groups” operating on the Yunnan-Guangxi and Guangdong-Guangxi borders.29 Robert Strong, U.S. chargé d’affaires in China, also deemed Li’s appeal inappropriate, as it lacked “realistic plans of [a] long-range nature” on the basis of which the United States could consider the question of aid.30
On September 16, 1949, when the greater Guangzhou metropolis was apparently in danger, Li Zongren conveyed an urgent message, via Robert Strong, to Vice Admiral Oscar C. Badger, commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Far East. Li stated that his government was in an extremely difficult situation, and within a few days its fate would be decided in the battle in Hunan. Li argued that if the United States intended any military, financial, or even moral backing, regardless of the amount, “the time is now.” “Our position is critical,” Li exclaimed.31 As it would turn out later, Badger did stretch out a helping hand to the moribund Nationalists. However, Badger’s help went not to Li, but, surprisingly, to an ostensibly deserted Chiang Kai-shek.
The collapse of Hu Zongnan and the Ma Muslims’ defense in Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, and Qinghai in late August and early September, along with the open secret that a peaceful “transfer of power” within the Xinjiang provincial authorities was underway, had indicated that Southwest China was now the Nationalists’ final hope on the mainland. In mid-September 1949, Capitol Hill approved a new budget of $75 million in the Military Assistance Program (MAP), under the auspices of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, to assist the “general area” of China. One month later, on October 14, Louis Johnson sent a memorandum to Acheson in which the much worried defense secretary specified straightforwardly that as long as the Nationalist forces were able to hold the defensive line in China’s southwest and established bases of training and operations for a counterattack, he was ready to offer China’s regional leaders military aid from the new MAP program.32
A response memorandum was prepared a week later by the planning-level staff in the State Department, agreeing that, despite the bleak situation of the Chinese Nationalists, there was still a non-Communist area in South China some 500 miles wide and a potential anti-Communist belt in Southwest China of even greater depth. These areas, as the State Department bureaucrats saw it, separated Southeast Asia from Communist-controlled China, and once China fell, all of Asia would, in all probability, eventually succumb to communism. Bringing Chiang Kai-shek and Li Zongren together and reunifying the KMT now seemed impractical, and as a result, the situation was ripe for the rise of local warlords in the non-Communist areas, as these portions of China were no longer controlled by one man or a group or by a central government. The memorandum concluded that a “modest, well-directed” program of aid to China would now be in the security interest of the United States, and that the program for aid to China should include “aid directly to non-Communist forces” as long as this was practicable.33
Not everyone in Washington was happy
with such a conclusion. The CIA, for example, in its estimate issued on October 19, 1949, insisted that, even with extensive U.S. support short of major armed intervention involving the use of combat forces, none of the non-Communist regimes in China could survive beyond 1950 except on Communist sufferance. To sum up, as the CIA perceived, there was no survival potential for non-Communist regional regimes in China.34 Nonetheless, with a strong possibility that U.S. aid would be forthcoming to secure Southwest China, a fierce power struggle over that region soon erupted between Chiang and Li, leading to a revelation of a hitherto untold story of an aborted Yunnan independent movement during the last months of 1949.
A VEILED STRUGGLE IN SOUTHWEST CHINA
Around mid-August 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek was in deep trouble with the Nationalist high military officials over the defense in the southeast, and when the fall of Fuzhou at the other end of the Taiwan Strait was imminent, he became extremely worried about Taiwan’s defense. The island’s unresolved legal status, coupled with Washington’s ambiguous attitude toward the issue, further deepened this. These considerations prompted Chiang to search for an alternative power bastion on the mainland. In late August, a secret proposal was brought to Chiang’s attention. Li Zonghuang, one of the very few Yunnanese politicians who had Chiang’s trust, suggested to Chiang that he use Yunnan as his final territorial base against the Communists, as the security of both Taiwan and Guangdong was in doubt. Li’s rationale was logical: Yunnan, a high, mountainous plateau with an area estimated at more than 150,000 square miles and a population of about 12 million, remained free from an immediate PLA threat. In addition, the province’s geographical proximity to Burma and Indochina was ideal for communicating with the outside world. But to consolidate Yunnan as Chiang’s final redoubt, it was imperative to settle with a politically wayward governor Lu Han and other proactive leftist elements in the province.35
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