China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  When Zhou came home, he was already well connected and highly regarded in the movement that was going to remake China. Though only twenty-six years old, he was appointed political commissar of the Whampoa Military Academy down the Pearl River from Canton, a school created to form a modern, skilled Chinese officer corps. The academy was led by another man of China’s future, the lean and hungry Chiang Kai-shek. Zhou’s job was to instruct cadets in the ideology of the KMT, which at the time was, like the CCP, a revolutionary party being advised by a Comintern agent.

  The United Front, as we’ve seen, lasted until 1927, when Chiang carried out his preemptive coup against the Communists, and from that point on, Zhou was in opposition. And being in opposition meant total engagement in the clandestine and brutal life-and-death struggle with the KMT agents whose task was to hunt down Communists and kill them.

  This is the part of Zhou’s history that was undetected by his American friends later in Chungking. Zhou, living underground in Shanghai under assumed names, switching from safe house to safe house, never appearing in public, was the founding head of the Communists’ secret police force, the Teke, which included a platoon of assassins known as the Red Squad. In 1931, one of Zhou’s agents, a certain Gu Shunzhang, was arrested by the KMT police and after being tortured provided information that led to the capture and assassination of some Communist operatives in Shanghai. In retaliation, Zhou ordered the Red Squad to assassinate Gu’s entire family, some fifteen people, and this order was scrupulously carried out. Shortly after that, another of Zhou’s agents was seized when, disobeying Zhou’s orders, he spent the night in a hotel with his mistress. The agent, tortured before being killed, gave away Zhou’s cover, which forced him to leave Shanghai for Mao’s rural base area in Guangxi province, a wanted man.

  This history suggests an essential element in the Chinese picture. The partnership known as the Second United Front, formed to combat Japan, theoretically made the two biggest parties in China friends and allies, but the depth and deadliness of their recent struggles with each other left behind a residue of hatred and distrust that was ineradicable, especially in a culture with no experience or tradition of peaceful political competition. And so here was Zhou Enlai, who had a few short years before been engaged in a game of murder and revenge, set up in the Kuomintang’s temporary capital, engaging in the gentle arts of political socializing and persuasion, meeting regularly with foreign journalists and diplomats and trying to persuade them that the Communists were reasonable and trustworthy. He lived with his staff of half a dozen in a ramshackle old compound deep in a Chungking alley, which became ankle-deep in mud whenever it rained. There was a reception room with a few chairs and a couch all covered “with the same coarse blue cloth worn by Chinese peasants and workers.”

  Except for Mao, the elite of the Chinese Communist movement, including Dong Biwu, one of the founders of the party—“no one could have seemed milder, frailer, kindlier,” White said of him—was made available there for American callers. The casual modesty of Zhou’s headquarters, especially compared with the forbidding formality of Chiang’s, made a favorable impression, similar in its way to the Valley Forge–like encampment in Yenan.

  It was a seduction literal and figurative. One of Zhou’s assistants—“his personal favorite and mine,” according to White—was a certain Gong Peng, who, White adds, “was the most beautiful Chinese woman I ever encountered.” Gong used to give the daily Communist briefings to the foreign press, carrying carbons of the latest Radio Yenan broadcasts to the downtown Press Hostel and distributing them to the various foreign journalists who lived there. She was, White says, the daughter of a “warlord” and, as an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter from the revolutionary mecca of Yenan, “a true pistol packing heroine.” This enhanced her appeal for White, who was a romantic at heart, prone to unreciprocated infatuations, though there seems to have been some exaggeration in his description of Gong, who wasn’t a warlord’s daughter and never packed a pistol. She did nonetheless exemplify the sort of young person who flocked to the Communist cause in those years and who helped to give it its allure of fashion and political chic.

  Gong’s father had gone to the same Japanese military academy as Chiang Kai-shek, and he played a prominent role in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. His stories of that event later thrilled his daughter, who loved reading Chinese Robin Hood fiction as a girl. Three years into the new republic, its president, a former imperial military commander named Yuan Shikai, declared himself a new emperor, and when Gong Peng’s father wrote a manifesto condemning Yuan for this imperial pretention, he was obliged to escape China to save his life. He took his family to Yokohama, where Gong Peng was born in 1914. Her birth name was Gong Cisheng, a Buddhist phrase meaning “compassion for all living beings.”

  A few years later, Yuan died amid nationwide resistance to his rule, and the Gong family moved to Shanghai. There, Gong Peng and her older sister attended St. Mary’s Hall, a selective all-girl institution founded by Episcopal missionaries in 1850 where Chinese middle-class families sent their daughters. After graduation in 1933, the Gong girls went to Yenching University in Beijing, another elite institution founded by Protestant missionaries, where there was an active Communist cell. She was a leader in the anti-Japanese student demonstrations in 1935. In 1936 she joined the Communist Party.

  While in Beijing, she became close to Edgar and Helen Snow. After Snow’s return from Yenan in 1937, she and a group of her friends met at the Beijing home of Randolph Sailor, an American psychologist, who showed them the original typescript of Red Star over China along with a short film that Snow had made during his stay in Shaanxi province. Thus it was through a foreign journalist’s account that Gong and other left-leaning Chinese students became acquainted with Mao’s thrilling revolutionary movement. “On the tiny screen of the Snow family,” Gong’s daughter wrote years later, “Mom first saw the liveliness of Yenan and its soldiers and how energetic and vigorous Mao Zedong, Zhu De, and other revolutionary leaders were, and it was almost as if she could breathe in the atmosphere of Yenan.”

  Thus inspired, in 1938, with Shanghai under Japanese occupation, Gong Peng joined the youthful throngs who went from China’s most advanced cities to the Yenan hinterland, traveling in the company of a couple of friends—“their young and aspiring hearts full of passion,” her daughter later wrote. Once, while taking a walk along a local stream, she encountered Mao himself. He asked her name, which while at Yenching University she’d changed from Cisheng to Weihang, meaning “sustain the voyage.” In Yenan she’d changed her name again, to Gong Peng, after a revolutionary martyr named Peng Bai. Mao told her she had made a good choice, and after that, she regularly attended his lectures, sitting in a front row and taking notes. She would be a devoted pupil of Chairman Mao for the rest of her life.

  She married in Yenan in 1940, and after her husband was sent off on a mission, she was transferred to Chungking, where her fluent English made her useful on Zhou’s staff. Two years later she learned that her husband had been killed, and three years after that, she married another Zhou protégé, Qiao Guanhua, a gifted, handsome young graduate of Qinghua University who edited The Masses, a Communist magazine. (According to John K. Fairbank, who knew them both, their meager wardrobe was stolen by a thief who inserted a pole with a hook on it through a window grating, whereupon Fairbank gave Qiao one of his Oxford tailored suits.) Qiao became foreign minister of China in the 1970s but was purged during one of China’s later factional conflicts.

  In Chungking, Gong achieved a kind of celebrity status with the foreign press corps, now hundreds of journalists strong, many of them young men charmed by the slender, comely, twenty-eight-or-so-year-old woman who spoke to them in perfect English and evidently believed fervently in what she said. In that, she offered a pleasant contrast to the glib press officers of the Kuomintang, with their daily fabrications, the regime of censorship, the atmosphere, as Ambassador Gauss put it, of the “slightly ridiculous.” />
  Fairbank, then an OSS officer whose job was to collect Chinese and Japanese written materials for the Department of War Information, was sufficiently taken by the Gong Peng phenomenon to note it in a letter to his wife, Wilma, back home, describing her as “the official appointee for contact with barbarians” with “a taming effect on everybody I know,” mentioning Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, the broadcast journalist Eric Sevareid, Chennault’s aide Joe Alsop, and “part of the British embassy” as especially smitten. According to Sevareid, she was less an object of sexual desire than a kind of unattainable beauty, inspiring a sort of courtly devotion. She was, he later wrote, “the leading spirit” of Zhou’s headquarters, “a tall-stemmed flower.” She was “graciousness, urbanity, but she was also the fresh, trusting decency of open-faced youth.… In her presence the male-female feeling all but disappeared, replaced by a sexless awe and admiration.…More than a few foreign correspondents and diplomats fancied themselves in love with her—but it was a little too much like falling in love with Joan of Arc.”

  While the press’s relations with the KMT press office were tense and formal—Sevareid, for example, described it as “a place of mockery and make-believe, solemnly repeated day after day”—the inclination of many of the American journalists was to sympathize with Gong Peng, and to believe her. Also contributing to her favor among the foreigners was the general image of the Communists, formed, not by their headquarters in Yenan, but by Zhou’s modest establishment in Chungking, whose members were constantly under secret police surveillance and perpetually worried about arrest. “The CCP in Chungking was still an isolated group of underdogs and no sense of menace attached to them,” Fairbank recalled. In that atmosphere, he wrote later, Gong was “the voice of dissidence in a city of yes men and time servers. She was the spokesman of the outs, whose ideals of betterment exposed the evils of the ins,” though Fairbank recalls the one-sidedness of her role. “What she put forward was a liberal bill of particulars against the KMT—its assassinations, press suppression, smashing of printing plants, railroading of liberal critics, refusal to permit demonstrations, denial of the right to strike, and so on,” he wrote to his wife—all “civil liberties that the CP also denied.” And that the Communists, once in power, have denied ever since. Still, few of Gong Peng’s admirers noted this inconsistency. Severeid, normally as hardheaded and perceptive as a journalist can be, bemoaned what he called her “heartbreaking life,” trapped in Kuomintang-controlled Chungking, where she was kept under constant watch by the government secret police, a life that “only a woman of soul and exalted vision” could have endured. Once, speaking to Sevareid, Gong expressed her longing to breathe the air of freedom, by which, no doubt, the Americans assumed, this alumna of two missionary schools meant American-style freedom. “If only I could be for a little while in a place where there is freedom,” she told him once, “just to see what it is like again for a little while.”

  The press corps used to try to concoct schemes by which Gong could go to the United States on some sort of scholarship. Meanwhile, they watched over her. Severeid talks about a “silent conspiracy” among the correspondents and foreign diplomats that if she ever disappeared into the swamp of the KMT’s secret police, they would call it to the attention of the world, make it a diplomatic incident. Once she came down with dysentery. Fairbank told Atkinson that she was sick, and he arranged for her to be seen by an American navy doctor, who cured her with sulfa drugs. On another occasion, Gong contacted John Service to tell him that her husband, Qiao, was sick and needed a blood transfusion. Service volunteered to donate some of his own blood, and though in the end Qiao recovered without his doing so, his gesture showed something a bit more than purely professional interest in Gong. Still later, after the war, another journalist, Barbara Stevens, who had gotten to know Gong Peng in Chungking, transported the infant son she’d had with Qiao to Gong’s family in Shanghai.

  Qiao Guanhua, an aide to Zhou Enlai at the Communist wartime delegation in Chungking, and his wife, Gong Peng, Zhou’s press secretary, in 1943. Gong especially inspired a powerful fascination on the part of numerous western diplomats and journalists (illustration credit 5)

  It’s tempting to see something sexually intentional in Zhou’s choice of Gong Peng to be his press secretary in Chungking. The Chinese Thirty-six Strategems, an ancient compilation of adages about how to prevail in war and politics, includes “the beauty trap,” the dispatch of a woman to the enemy’s camp to induce its soldiers to neglect their duties, allow their vigilance to wane, and perhaps to fight among themselves for her favor. Certainly the attitude of much of the American press corps toward Gong Peng bespoke the feeling they had toward many of the Communist revolutionaries they encountered in Chungking, so likable and attractive in real life, so different from the prevailing image of the Communist, the Red, the Bolshevik, the Marxist-Leninist. “She was not only young and beautiful,” a Chinese journalist wrote of Gong Peng in Chungking during the war, “but was very well-mannered and wore a qipao [a close-fitting dress with a slit up one thigh] and sat on a chair and looked very sincere, which made all the journalists stare at her, and because she spoke fluent English, she became an archetype of beauty and revolution.”

  It’s telling in this regard that a few years later, after the Communists had taken power, there were a few instances when Gong Peng, now a senior official in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, crossed paths with some of the reporters she had charmed back in Chungking. She had become a Communist bureaucrat, distant, severe, and unapproachable. In the early months after the “liberation,” before American reporters were expelled from the country, she snubbed the old friends who encountered her, or she crossed the street to avoid them. In the 1950s, she became the head of the information department of the foreign ministry, in charge of handling the very few foreign journalists, mostly from Africa or Asia, who went on highly controlled visits to China.

  When the Canadian journalist William Stevenson saw her in China in 1956, she reprimanded him for taking pictures of ancient monuments rather than showing the country’s revolutionary progress. She went with Zhou Enlai to Geneva in 1954 during the conference that ended the French war in Indochina, and some of the Americans covering the event who knew her back in the Chungking days tried to renew the acquaintance, but were rebuffed. At a banquet, she objected when a newsreel photographer took her picture while she was lighting a cigarette. She made no further public appearances, despite the fact that she was supposedly Zhou’s press officer. She remained, in the words of one journalist present, “in seclusion at the Beau-Rivage Hotel, a brooding, grave-faced woman in a filmy blue dress.”

  The Communist seduction didn’t work on everybody. Tillman Durdin, the New York Times correspondent in China in the days right after the war, told one friend that “Zhou overwhelmed you by the force of his personality and his clever arguments. But after hearing him month after month and year after year, you can’t trust what he says.” Still, the Communists’ effort to present themselves in a favorable light, including Zhou’s part of it in Chungking, was an amazing success, even if some of that success came not so much because the Communists seemed so good but because the KMT was so bad. “It was so utterly hopeless in free China,” Durdin said, explaining the common attitude about both the KMT and the CCP in China. “The graft, the misery, the lack of will to fight any more. Even I felt that it could not be worse and must be better in Communist China.”

  Favorable press coverage of the Communists reached an apex during the reporters’ trip to Yenan when it was finally allowed by Chiang in the spring of 1944. It was a remarkably successful venture for the Communists and a public relations fiasco for the KMT. Israel Epstein, a Polish-born Jew whose family had gone to Asia in 1920 to flee anti-Semitism, reported on the trip for the Times and other publications. His dispatches were chock full of startling contrasts between the bold and democratic Communists and the corrupt, decadent, repressive KMT.

  In his first dispatch
for the Times, he wrote about Xian, the government-controlled city that the delegation passed through on their way to the Communist headquarters. “The police state features of Xian were evident at every step,” he wrote later, noting that the street on which the Communists’ Eighth Route Army office could be found “was empty of people—such was the [KMT] surveillance that anyone daring to walk there might be suspected of secret contact with the Com-munists.”

  In Xian also, the KMT minders produced a deserter from the Eighth Route Army, but this initiative became a propaganda flop when it turned out he had escaped from a CCP area because he refused to work clearing land and planting crops, which was one of the Eighth Route Army’s duties. He was caught twice trying to escape, but said he wasn’t jailed or beaten, only “criticized”—so much for the KMT accusations of “savagery” on the part of the Communists.

  On the Xian part of the trip, Harrison Forman of the New York Herald Tribune wrote in a book published in 1945, “We learned later that special rickshaw-men, who insisted that we make use of their services, were assigned to the Guest House. When we refused to ride, they followed us wherever we went.” Once, as Forman was returning to the Guest House, somebody handed him an envelope. Inside it was a dissenter’s proclamation denouncing the Kuomintang tyranny and informing Forman of the extraordinary precautions that had been taken by the government “to deceive you, to blockade you, and to watch you.” A fund of $5 million had been appropriated, the document said, involving hundreds of agents who will be in the guise of “translators, ushers, servants, and roomboys.” The writer identified himself as “a lodger and citizen of Xian” fighting for the “cause of freedom.” He also expressed confidence that Communism can never control China because “any party who wants to have the whole power, and thus deprive the other of his rights and liberty, will sustain a crushing defeat.”