China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Snow had come to China in 1928, an ambitious young man eager to make his mark. He started in Shanghai, where he was befriended by both Agnes Smedley, the rebellious, feminist, pro-Communist, anti-KMT writer, and Soong Qingling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, who, in contrast to her younger sister Mei-ling, Chiang’s wife, had become an opponent of Chiang and an influential, virtually untouchable critic of his “white terror.” By 1935, Snow was living with his wife in Beijing (called Peiping at the time) and writing about China for the Saturday Evening Post, which had the second-largest circulation among magazines in the 1930s. He also wrote articles for the New York Sun and the London Daily Herald, which had named him a special correspondent.

  In Beijing, Snow and his elegant, glamorous, equally ambitious wife, Helen Foster Snow, known also by the pen name Nym Wales, had befriended students in Beijing and helped them organize mass demonstrations in late 1935 against Japan and against the KMT’s policy of fighting the Communists rather than the Japanese. Not long after the demonstrations, the Snows were approached by a young man who went by the name David Yui—Chinese name: Yu Qiwei. He was an agent in North China of the Comintern, the Soviet-led organization that helped, advised, inspired, financed, and often controlled Communist parties outside the Soviet Union. Yui was a well-placed man of twenty-four. The Snows knew him to be a Communist, the only one they socialized with in Beijing, where the Communist apparatus was almost nonexistent. Among Yui’s contributions to the Communist revolution was his recruitment of his Shanghai girlfriend, the actress Jiang Qing, into the party, the same Jiang Qing who would soon go to Yenan, become Mao’s fourth wife, and, years later, serve as a radical firebrand in the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76.

  Snow wanted to visit the Communist base area, which at the time was in the old walled town of Bao-an, north of their future home in Yenan. It would be, he wrote to an editor, “a world scoop on a situation about which millions of words have been written, based only on hearsay and highly colored government reports.” He expressed his wish to Yui, who seems to have helped broker an invitation from the Communist leadership. Snow also got help from Soong Qingling, whom he visited in Shanghai and asked to use her influence with the Communists to secure their permission for his trip.

  The trip was thus at Snow’s initiative, but in the months before the Xian Incident ended Chiang’s campaigns against them, the Communists were thinking along the same lines. Specifically, Stalin, like Mao, was looking for ways to force Chiang to end his anti-Communist offensive and to fight Japanese aggression instead. As we’ve seen, Stalin was deeply worried that Japan would secure an easy victory in North China and then be free to strike across the border into Soviet Siberia. Mao’s parallel worry was that Chiang would make peace with Japan, thereby freeing him to pursue his campaign of annihilation against the Communists, whose forces had been depleted by the campaigns in Jiangxi and by the Long March. “To change this situation,” one historian has written of Snow’s pathbreaking visit, “and force Chiang to drop his bloody fixation, required, as Stalin saw it, and as Mao came to agree, some dramatic public relations campaign that would give the revolutionists validity in the eyes of the world as a legitimate popular Chinese political movement.”

  Snow and Mao perfectly matched each other: the former, as one of his biographers has put it, was “a romantic adventurer in search of a literary grail,” while the latter saw himself as a reincarnation of the bandit heroes of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the swashbuckling classic that Mao had read in his youth about a time of turbulence in China’s long history. The stories he told Snow of guerrilla warfare in Jiangxi, the dangers and hardships of the Long March, and his patriotic, anti-Japanese ardor perfectly fit Snow’s own hatred of Japanese and western imperialism, his identification with China’s struggle, his dislike of Chiang and the KMT, and, perhaps above all, his yearning to write an epic story.

  Snow’s evident partiality to the Communists was amply reciprocated in their treatment of him. Escorted on a trip with the Eighth Route Army, he was greeted at the entrance to one town he visited by a banner reading “Welcome the American Internationalist to Investigate the Soviet Regions.” Bugles rang out as he entered through the gate in the town’s ancient wall, while troops from three Red Army divisions lined up singing songs, shouting slogans, and saluting as he passed. “I felt,” Snow noted in his diary, “like a generalissimo with his prick out.” In one place, he played tennis every morning with three members of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government. He taught the wives of the Bao-an elite to play gin rummy. When he left Bao-an on October 12, the entire Communist leadership, except for Mao, who famously slept late, came to see him off, shouting “Shi Lo Tungzhi Wansui!”—Ten thousand years to Comrade Snow!”

  Comrade Snow! Snow didn’t give himself this honorific. Still he was no neutral, much less a skeptical observer. He was a talented and enterprising young man with abundant literary talents enacting the historical role of l’homme engagé, as the French put it, the man participating in the great cause of his time. Snow was not a Communist himself. Zhou Enlai was not just covering for him when he told the American China expert Owen Lattimore in 1941 that Snow would never understand what Marxism was. He was indeed quintessentially American, a choir boy in his youth, an Eagle Scout, a believer in democratic freedoms who had discovered one of the great stories of the twentieth century. And yet his identification with Mao, perhaps his vested interest in the position he staked out on the Chinese revolution, led him unwaveringly to champion Mao and the Chinese revolution long after it had become clear that Mao himself was no believer in democratic freedoms. In doing this, Snow became an apologist for a dictator. He suffered for this. Later in his life he found it almost impossible to find work as a journalist or writer in the United States, because he was viewed as partisan, an advocate for a discredited cause, which he was.

  Snow was not the only one. He belonged to a group of people who were dismissive of the Nationalists and favorable toward the Communists to varying degrees—from rhapsodic championship of their cause to more sober appraisals of the chance they were more nationalistic and democratic than ideological and hard-line. There were diplomats, military officers, and journalists in this amorphous group, which in the end formed one side of what was to become a bitter, irreconcilable division in American life, in which their advice would go ignored, their careers be ruined, and China and the United States become enemies.

  Some of this group, especially the Foreign Service China experts, had gotten to know each other in Beijing in the early to mid-1930s, when they were young, drawn to the romance of China, and imbued with a dislike of both the Japanese imperialists and the KMT for what they saw as its repressive nature. Among them were Chinese-language officers at the American legation, Jack Service, John Davies, Raymond Ludden, and, Snow’s best friend in Beijing, O. Edmund Clubb, all of whom were to occupy important positions as diplomatic experts on China, and all of whom, like Snow, were later to be shadowed by the charge that they had been, at best, naïve and, at worst, treasonous in their portrayals of the Communists. It was Clubb who urged Snow to undertake his trip to Shaanxi, wanting like his colleagues at the American legation to break the KMT’s blockade of information about the Communists, to know who they were, and to be able to report accurately on them to the State Department.

  A few of the old Beijing crowd were together again in 1938 in Hankou, where they were joined by a few others who were to play significant roles in the ferocious later debates about China. Hankou, the industrial center on the Yangzi, was the temporary KMT capital for a few months following the Japanese seizure of Nanjing and before the KMT’s more permanent move farther up the river, past the great Yangzi gorges, to Chungking. Davies was there as a Foreign Service officer. Stilwell was the military attaché, accompanied by his closest aide, Captain (later General) Jack Dorn, known as Pinky to his friends. A few journalists covering the Sino-Japanese War in those years before the United States got into the war had also moved to Hankou, Snow, new
ly famous as the author of Red Star, among them, along with his wife and some other left-wing journalists, including Agnes Smedley; Freda Utley, who was English; Anna Louise Strong; and Jack Belden of the United Press, a frequent traveling companion of Stilwell, who later accompanied him on the famous walk out of Burma in 1942. Evans Carlson, a Marine Corps officer, was in Hankou also. He had been able to observe the Eighth Route Army in North China even before Snow made his trip there. Carlson left the Marines when he was forbidden publicly to express his admiration for the Communists.

  They called themselves the last-ditchers, the dozen or so Anglo-Americans in Hankou, a city that everybody knew was directly in the path of the Japanese juggernaut moving inexorably up the Yangzi Valley. The war was near, as Davies put it, in the form of “air raids, troop movements, wounded soldiers arriving from the front, Soviet ‘volunteer’ airmen and German military advisors in the streets, hordes of dazed refugees fleeing before the oncoming enemy, students rushing about the city pasting patriotic posters on walls and calling on everyone to resist the foe, and finally the Communists planting dynamite in key buildings to greet the invaders with a scorched earth.” The diplomats and journalists and others used to gather for meals and conversation, always about Japan and its unforgivable brutality, about China, the Nationalists and the Communists, at Davies’s apartment, which was in the stately Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, or at a restaurant called Rosie’s.

  The last-ditchers liked each other, and according to the Times’s Tilman Durdin, there was “close collaboration and friendship between correspondents and American officials in Hankou.” The common thread was what Durdin called their “deep sympathy” for China and its suffering under the Japanese. Among them, Smedley, Strong, and the Snows were unabashed admirers of the Communists and, almost by definition, opponents of the KMT. The more hardheaded analysts like Davies viewed these rhapsodic pro-Maoists with wry detachment, and the notion that the Communists represented a dawn of freedom and hope was not universally shared; even some of Snow’s friends chided him for writing a pro-Mao rhapsody rather than an objective, skeptical report. Still, the body of work produced by the journalists in the group was favorable to the Communists and disparaging of the KMT. As early as 1934, Agnes Smedley had published China’s Red Army Marches, an impassioned account, based on interviews with Communist commanders, of the early effort led by Mao to create a Soviet-style republic in Jiangxi province in south central China. Smedley later published two more books full of glowing descriptions of the Communists, China Fights Back in 1939 and Battle Hymn of China in 1943. Anna Louise Strong’s One-Fifth of Mankind: China Fights for Freedom, published in 1938, is in the same political genre. Not to be outdone by her famous husband, Helen Snow also traveled to the Communist area and in 1939 published, as Nym Wales, Inside Red China, which, like Snow’s Red Star, was enthusiastically pro-Mao. More than a few other young Americans looking for adventure went to China in the late 1930s, and some wrote books that, while forgotten today, enhanced the portraits of the heroic Communist guerrillas and the vicious Japanese occupiers alike. Humane Endeavor: The Story of the China War, by Haldore Hanson, a young man who traveled with Communist troops behind enemy lines, was heralded in 1939 in the New York Times as “a thrilling description of a world within a conqueror’s world, living its own life with the shadows of bayonets over it, but at times paying the ultimate penalty meted out by the Japanese with their Punic vengeance.” It is difficult to say exactly to what extent these portrayals of China’s revolutionaries seeped into the public consciousness or formed the background to the later views of diplomats. The books of Snow, Smedley, and others were counterbalanced by Luce’s mass-circulation Time and Life, whose portraits of the Nationalists were almost as favorable as the leftist portraits of the Communists. Yet it is striking that, in their more sober ways, many other analysts who were in no way leftists or pro-Communist romantics adopted positions, mostly expressed in official government communications, not all that different from those of Snow and Smedley. Stilwell, a registered Republican and a political conservative all his life, believed that the Communists’ goal was “land ownership under reasonable conditions.” Frank Merrill, who commanded Merrill’s Marauders, told Mike Mansfield during Mansfield’s inspection of China at the end of 1944 that the Chinese Communists “were not allied to Moscow but were primarily a Chinese agrarian group interested in land and tax reforms.”

  Mansfield’s own conclusion about the Communists: They are “a force to be reckoned with,” having 90 million people under their control under “a system of government which is quite democratic.” As for the Kuomintang, it

  is hated more every day and this is due to fear of the army and the attitude of tax collectors; and is proved by the revolts of the peasantry, the party criticism by provincial leaders, students [sic] revolts against conscription and the fact that many Chinese will stoop to anything to get to America and, once there, to stay there. It is corrupt. It speaks democratically but acts dictatorially. The worst censorship in the world is located in Chungking and there is one detective assigned to every ten foreigners.… Meetings of Liberals are invaded by Kuomintang toughs, spies are everywhere and people are afraid to talk.

  This was a vision both of themselves and of their KMT rivals that the Communists themselves did their best to foster in what, especially after the American entry into the Pacific war at the end of 1941, became a creative, multifaceted campaign to influence American public opinion and to gain support from the American government. The remarkable person, the glowing personality, the diplomatic genius, who both masterminded and embodied this effort was Zhou Enlai.

  Zhou’s contact with American diplomats and journalists began during the brief Hankou period, when, under the terms of the United Front, which was in its early phase of goodwill, he was the official Communist representative in the KMT capital, and he made himself readily available to the American and British diplomats and journalists who were stationed there, a practice that he continued in Chungking for the entire war. In May 1942, Zhou gave a letter to Edgar Snow, asking him to pass it along to Lauchlin Currie, one of Roosevelt’s chief White House aides, in which he enumerated the Communists’ military successes against the Japanese and, for the first time, asked the United States to give some of its China aid directly to the CCP. Zhou soon proposed what eventually became the Dixie Mission, and he expanded his journalistic charm offensive from well-known leftists like the Snows and Agnes Smedley to the more neutral members of the mainstream press whose numbers had increased in Chungking after Pearl Harbor and who, Zhou knew, were becoming increasingly disillusioned with Chiang and the KMT.

  Only a few years before, Zhou had been a man with a high price on his head. Now, because of the United Front and the supposed alliance between the CCP and the KMT, he lived mostly in Chungking, where he maintained an active social calendar, mixing comfortably at dinners and receptions with American diplomats and journalists, explaining China to them, striving to reassure them of the reasonableness of the Communist movement, the treachery of the Kuomintang right wing, and the contribution the Communists could make in the fight against Japan, if only the United States would allow them to. Zhou was so smooth, so articulate, so sophisticated in his analyses, so worldly, cultivated, and seemingly sincere, that he was viewed less as a partisan for one of the two main armed and competing parties in China and more as a friend, as some of the journalists called him, and a reliable source.

  “Zhou Enlai had an amazing mind, for detail as well as for synthesis, a memory that could with ease recollect dates, quotations, episodes, incidents,” Theodore H. White, the Time correspondent in Chungking from 1941 to 1945, later wrote, saying that he had “become friends” with Zhou early on in his China sojourn. White, who was one of the best and most famous journalists of the middle decades of the twentieth century, was veritably worshipful of Zhou, who, he wrote, “was, along with Joseph Stilwell and John F. Kennedy, one of the three great men I met and knew in whose presenc
e I had near total suspension of disbelief or questioning judgment.” Later he understood Zhou to be “a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century,” but he “had a way of entrancing people, of offering affection, of inviting and seeming to share confidences. And I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.”

  It was the ruthlessness that was well hidden, that and Zhou’s total devotion to the cause that defined his life. Zhou was complex. He was in style, family background, and education more like the urbane, humanist intellectuals who founded the Communist Party in the early 1920s than the callow and shallow, semi-educated zealots who took over the party in its later, radical phase. He came from a family of scholar-officials of the sort who, having passed the Confucian exams, had staffed the imperial bureaucracy in bygone days but had fallen into obscurity as the Manchu dynasty collapsed. Zhou went to the Nankai Academy in Tianjin, which was an ultra-elite Chinese high school, a kind of Asian Eton or Harrow, modern, reformist, and public-spirited. He studied English, was editor of the student newspaper, acted in plays, and finished at the top of his class. Then, like many of China’s brightest young people, Zhou spent a couple of years in Japan before returning to China at the end of World War I.

  There, in the northern port city of Tianjin, he joined the secretive “Awakening Society,” one of the many study groups that opposed the warlord-dominated government of China and discussed competing visions of national revitalization. Like many such students, Zhou studied Marxism and even met a few of the intellectual-scholar types who, inspired by the success and the promise of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He spent from 1921 to 1924 in Europe, traveling to London and Berlin but staying mostly in Paris. It was there that he joined a Communist cell and became a leader in the overseas branch of the fledgling CCP, then, under close Comintern supervision, allied to the KMT in the first United Front.