China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  In September, Davies arrived for talks with Mao, Zhou, and others, and his presence in Yenan, where he joined his childhood friend Jack Service, must in its way have been a moving and even portentous event for both men. Like Service, Davies had been born in Sichuan, where his parents were among that evangelical Christian cohort striving to bring the light of Jesus to China, though neither Davies nor Service grew up sharing their parents’ proselytizing mission. Instead, they joined the U.S. Foreign Service, and after the United States entered the war, both ended up as political advisers to Stilwell. Davies was headquartered in New Delhi and traveled frequently to China, to Washington, D.C., even to Moscow and to Cairo in 1943 (for the summit among FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Chiang), where he assessed such questions as British and Soviet aims in the war and how they differed from both China’s and America’s. He gained a reputation for independence of thought, straightforwardness, and an uncommon ability to ferret out the delusional wishful thinking that was common during the war, especially among Americans.

  Some, for example, worshipped Churchill and felt it entirely normal that Britain and America developed a special relationship during the war and that the United States agreed to give the war in Europe priority over the one in Asia, so that bombers needed in China went to Britain instead. But Davies warned that, in Asian eyes, British-American intimacy made it appear that “we have aligned ourselves with the British in a ‘whiteocracy’ to reimpose western imperialism on Asia.” In another report of prophetic accuracy, he warned against taking “steps committing us to colonial imperialism lest we find ourselves aligned with an anachronistic system in vain opposition to the rising tide of Asiatic nationalism, possibly enjoying Russian support.” In other words, don’t get swept up in Britain’s goal of reestablishing its colonial empire in Asia (or France’s similar desire) and don’t allow Stalin to champion a new order in Asia, while the United States remains attached to the decaying remnants of the past. This was excellent advice, though it wasn’t followed a generation later in Vietnam, where another nationalist-Communist revolution was forming.

  Davies also understood the tendency of Americans, schooled in the optimistic creed that “all things are possible provided that you have the guts, grit, gumption and go,” to overestimate the possibilities of sheer goodwill, especially in the face of the indelible and conflicting ambitions of Asia. “One of our major mistakes,” he said in 1943, commenting on the American demand that Chiang put Stilwell directly in charge of his armies, “is attempting the impossible—command over the Chinese.” What Davies and Service both understood, and what many of their superiors—including, in this example, Stilwell—didn’t, was that to reform China’s national armies, Chinese politics would have to be reformed first, and reform would be taken by Chiang Kai-shek as a grave threat to his autocratic regime.

  The two men formed the core of a group inside the American embassy in Chungking that had arrived at a realistic assessment of the true nature and prospects of the government of China. They saw the corruption and unpopularity of the Chiang regime at a time when more senior Americans believed in Chiang and his cohort as the indispensable embodiments of China’s future. They were convinced that the official American policy of forging a coalition between the KMT and the CCP was bound to fail, because neither party could accept the conditions of the other and survive. Under the circumstances, they were utterly convinced that the United States needed to find a way to build relations with the Communists, while maintaining its paramount relationship with the central government and without waiting for that halcyon day when China would be united. The first reason for this was utterly in line with American policy—to gain Communist support in the war against Japan. Everything that the United States did in China, from training and equipping new divisions of Chinese troops to encouraging the KMT and the CCP to bury their differences, was directed toward this aim.

  John Paton Davies poses for a picture with Chinese Communist leaders in Yenan in October 1944. From left: Zhou Enlai, the Communists’ chief contact with foreigners; Zhu De (commander in chief of the Communists’ army); Davies; Mao Zedong; and Ye Jianying, Zhu’s chief of staff.

  Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press (illustration credit 4)

  But Davies and Service had a second aim, much less widely accepted—indeed, never accepted as official American policy—but one that indicated a good deal of sympathy for the appeal that Mao was making to them. Like a majority of the China hands actually based in China, Davies and Service had been coming to the conclusion that the war against Japan was going to be followed by a civil war in China and that the Communists were going to win it. To be sure, the Kuomintang was portrayed in the press, and was believed, with some misgivings, by senior policymakers, FDR in particular, to be not just the legitimate government of China, but also a valiant and indispensable party, the inevitable future leaders of an emerging great power.

  This was the conventional wisdom that Service, Davies, and the other China hands actually on the scene in China were coming fervently, urgently, to disbelieve. The KMT had lost its revolutionary élan, they felt. It was becoming unpopular among ordinary Chinese and even more so among the intellectual and cultural elite. Its ranks were full of cynical petty tyrants; it was ineffective and, most important, beyond the possibility of reform, which meant that the Communists, who had not lost their revolutionary élan and were using the war to set up numerous base areas behind enemy lines, were going to come to power.

  “The lines of future conflict are being formed by the course of the present one,” Davies wrote in 1943. “We can now be assured of further war and revolution in our time.” After his visit to Yenan, Davies asked the key question: Were the Communists going to take over China? His answer was unambiguous: Yes. Chiang’s only chance to survive after the war, Davies wrote, depended on an American “intervention on a scale equal to the Japanese invasion of China,” but there was no chance, Davies knew, that the United States would send a million troops to fight in a Chinese civil war right after it had brought its armies home from Europe and the Pacific. And that’s why, Davies wrote weeks after his visit to Mao in Yenan, “The Communists are in China to stay. And China’s destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs.”

  Davies’s hope and expectation was that forging a working relationship with the inevitable future rulers of China would further American interests because only that might induce the Communists to lessen their dependence on the Soviet Union. The United States could get the kind of help in the war against Japan that it found hard to get from the central government, and it could give the Communists options at the same time. By talking with the Communists about military cooperation, Davies wanted to encourage them to think that they might have a friend in the United States after the war. “I hoped that my show of interest might help a bit to keep alive the thought that there perhaps could be an American alternative to war-ravaged, necessitous solidarity with the Soviet Union,” he wrote later.

  Just how good a possibility that was for the United States depended on just how red the Chinese Communists were, how ideologically committed they were to the global triumph of the international proletariat. In the estimate of Davies and the China hands, they weren’t really all that red or all that ideologically committed. In subsequent years, many of the China analysts admitted that the view they had of this matter during the war was tinged with more than a bit of wishful thinking. “I obviously underestimated the commitment of the Chinese Communist ruling party at that time to ideology and the dexterity with which Mao and company manipulated it,” Davies was to write. “As I see it now, in the clear light of hindsight,” David Barrett confessed in 1969, when Mao’s China was engulfed in the vast purge known as the Cultural Revolution, shouting venomous epithets at the United States, “the mistake I made in 1944 was in not considering the Chinese Communists as enemies of the United States.… Communism as a political doctrine was just as much anathema to me then as it is now, but I was naïve to the ext
ent that I thought the Chinese members of the Party as Chinese first and communists afterwards.”

  Davies’s belief that the Communists were going to come to power no matter what American experts thought of them meant that nothing would be lost in the attempt to woo them from the Soviet embrace, even if the attempt failed. And if it succeeded, there was a great deal to be gained. His conviction, as he put it later, was that “belief in a creed is susceptible to withering, decay and perversion,” which meant that the Chinese Communists might be “backsliders.” They “would return to revolutionary ardor only if driven to it by domestic and foreign pressure.” This was not the view of such bastions of public opinion as Henry Luce’s Time Inc., which burnished the reputation of Chiang for the entire war even as it warned of the dread consequences of a Communist takeover of China.

  But among the China experts, the journalists, and many of the military advisers in China, starting with Stilwell, two trends developed over time. One was the disillusionment and irritation with Chiang and the KMT that we’ve seen taking hold among Stilwell, the professional China hands in the State Department who advised him, and among some of the journalists; the other was a hopefulness directed toward Mao among many of those same people, an admiration of the Communists for not sharing Chiang’s alleged traits of hypocritical inactivity and excuse-laden passivity toward the Japanese.

  “China is in a mess,” Second Secretary Service wrote in a State Department dispatch in March 1944. “No military action on a significant scale is in sight.… Internal unrest is active and growing.… For the sorry situation as a whole Chiang, and only Chiang, is responsible.” A month before the start of the Dixie Mission, the American ambassador, Clarence Gauss, cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull that a “general gloom and a discouraged and somewhat defeatist attitude is becoming prevalent at Chungking in Chinese official and other circles.” The Kuomintang-led government, Gauss said, had failed to “offer any appreciable resistance” to the Japanese in Henan, which was at the time the main target of the Ichigo offensive. Chinese peasants, afflicted by their own “deplorable conditions,” were turning on Chinese troops, while in China’s urban centers “there is covert and fearful criticism by officers, intellectuals and others of Generalissimo Chiang; of his complete concentration of all power and authority in his own hands … of his present capricious, suspicious and irascible attitude on both domestic and foreign problems … of his attitude of suspicion of Soviet Russia and his irritation that he has not been able to infect the United States with such suspicion.”

  In retrospect, it is easy to see that Chiang’s apprehensions regarding the Soviet Union and his wish to persuade the United States of his view were understandable and justified. But at the time, Stalin was the brave ally who was taking the brunt of the Nazi attack at Moscow and Stalingrad, and it was not in the American character to be overly suspicious of such an ally. The American view was encapsulated by Roosevelt, who assured Churchill in 1942 that he could “handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office.” Warned by some of his advisers that Stalin would devour whole countries after the war, Roosevelt’s feeling was that “Stalin is not that kind of man.” It is not clear what kind of man Gauss thought Stalin was, but his generally sour view of Chiang seems to have led him to dismiss him even when he was right.

  And that was the mechanism by which many Americans in the field (the perceptive and hardheaded Gauss not among them) grew enchanted with the Communists as their contempt for the Nationalists intensified. The American press was not monolithic in its portrayals of China either, and, indeed, for many reporters based in China, as for most Americans, the Chinese Nationalists remained valiant resistance fighters against the Japanese occupier. But here and there in 1944 and increasingly in 1945, the gloomier views of Chiang and his government got through to the American public, and Chiang himself was aware of it. “American public opinion toward China is becoming increasingly critical in the U.S.… If we have a failing, we must correct it,” he told his closest advisers in March, around the time that Service was blaming him for China’s “sorry situation.”

  The increasing skepticism regarding Chiang was well summed up in a 1943 New York Times analysis by Hanson Baldwin, a highly respected military analyst who had earlier won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the battle of Guadalcanal. All those earlier reports of Chinese victories over Japan were incorrect, he wrote. “China is unquestionably losing most of her battles with Japan,” whose soldiers “can go anywhere they please in China at any time since the Chinese defenses against them are weak.” There was, Baldwin wrote, a misunderstanding of Japanese actions in China, encouraged by the tendency of the official communiqués of the Chinese government to misinterpret them. Unlike the Germans in Russia, the Japanese were striving to police and administer the vast areas of China they already held, not to seize new territory, Baldwin wrote. Their troops went out on forays so as to “dislocate Chinese offensive preparations,” and they sometimes suffered casualties in the skirmishes with Chinese troops before they withdrew to their original positions, and these skirmishes were magnified by the official communiqués into “battles and the usual Japanese retirement to their original positions into major strategic ‘retreats.’ ”

  Baldwin amplified his view, adding more detail, in a companion piece published in Reader’s Digest whose title was “Too Much Wishful Thinking about China.” But despite his clairvoyance on the military situation, Baldwin’s own thinking retained some elements of wishfulness regarding Chiang and the KMT. While China’s armed forces are “weak,” he said in his Times analysis, the “will of Free China to resist, symbolized by one man—Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—is still a major determinant in the affairs of the Orient.”

  Davies and Stilwell, who believed this to be claptrap, didn’t shy away from back-channel efforts to influence public opinion. The two were in Washington in 1943, and Davies arranged several meetings for Stilwell, including one with more than a score of reporters at the home of Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, during which Stilwell got his views of Chiang across.

  In this atmosphere, it was perhaps not surprising that diplomats, military officers, and journalists alike would see in the Communists a hopeful alternative, an idea that had been fostered for years by a group of pathbreaking journalists, most conspicuous among them Edgar Snow, the keen, young, adventurous, and leftist China expert whose book Red Star over China, published in early 1938, gave a glowing, novelistic introduction of the Communist movement to the American public. Snow had spent about four months with Mao and his cohort in 1936, not long after the Communists had escaped the KMT’s encirclement campaigns against them and set up a new base area in Shaanxi province. Mao granted Snow many long nights’ worth of interviews, and the resulting book sold out its first edition of 4,800 copies the day after it was published, and it remained a best-seller for months afterward.

  Red Star was enormously influential. After living in a haze of legend and rumor, the “Chinese Soviets,” as the Communists were commonly called, were suddenly famous, presented to the western public in a brilliantly written, credible first-person account describing them as the heroes of a glorious and thrilling adventure story. Here were the men, and a few women, who had survived Chiang Kai-shek’s persistent attempts to annihilate them, who had endured the grueling, death-defying trial by fire of the Long March, and were now fighting a clever, scrappy, and courageous guerrilla campaign against the reprehensible Japanese invaders.

  “If the book has been correctly interpreted,” the reviewer in The New York Times intoned, “the significance of Red China is not that it is red but that it is Chinese and that it may portend the long-predicted ‘awakening’ of the Chinese people and the ultimate frustration of Japanese imperialism.” The reviewer, one R. L. Duffus, does not fail to mention the “treachery, venality, and incompetence” of the leaders of the central government of Chiang Kai-shek, along with the horrors of what he called China’s “pagan medievalism,” and, of course
, Japan’s effort to reduce the country to “imperialistic serfdom.” The Duffus review quotes Snow himself to the effect that it was “no wonder, when the Red Star appeared in the northwest, thousands of men arose to welcome it as a symbol of hope and freedom.”

  Red Star over China was and still is a journalistic classic, but it was also a carefully planned and brilliantly executed public relations coup engineered less by Snow himself than by the Communists, who chose him to break their story to the world. Mao and the CCP wanted to garner attention for themselves in the western press at a time when the Chiang regime had banned even the mention of the Communist movement in China’s newspapers. The evidence is strong that they identified Snow as the right person to invite to their mountain stronghold. While he leaned to the left politically, he had a reputation for independence—unlike the fellow traveling journalists who made no secret of their preference for the Communists—and he would thus have the credibility they wanted in their effort to end their isolation from world public opinion.