China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Over time, Kang became an easily recognizable figure in Yenan, though he appears to have been invisible to the American visitors of 1944 and 1945: they never mention him in dispatches that are full of descriptions of other senior Communist leaders. “Kang always wore Russian jackets and knee-high boots and he went around with a big dog,” one ranking party member, Shi Zhe, who was Mao’s Russian interpreter, has written in a memoir. “He was followed by four security guards whenever he went out, and he looked very confident. He was already the most frightening figure in Yenan. He was like a faithful dog always ready to follow his master’s [Mao’s] command and attack his master’s enemies.” Pyotr Vladimirov saw a lot of Kang, who, he said, spoke Russian, albeit “with an accent, without conjugating verbs,” and with a “very poor vocabulary.” As if to illustrate the inequality that Wang complained about, he lived in a big house with its own peach orchard that formerly belonged to a landlord. He has, Vladimirov wrote,

  a shrill and hissing voice.…Kang Sheng always smiles. It seems that the smile has been glued to his thin, bilious face. When he listens, he inhales the air noisily, in a Japanese manner.…[He is] gnarled of features and energetic in a nervous way. The impression he gives of himself is that of a wooden puppet suspended on strings.

  Mao with Kang Sheng, the chief of his secret police and the principal organizer of his ideological purges. (illustration credit 6)

  It was in the Rectification Campaign of 1942 that Kang, with Mao’s evident approval, perfected his technique, which was to find some exemplary target, make a plausible accusation, and then pressure him into an admission of guilt as an example to everybody else—or, as the Chinese proverb has it, to kill the chicken to frighten the monkey. Confessions were extorted in the fashion that became standard in China—a combination of extreme isolation, mass denunciation rallies, a newspaper campaign, wearying interrogations, torture, and a vow to the accused that a full admission of guilt and a self-criticism would lead to lenient treatment while stubborn insistence on non-guilt would be punished severely. All of this took place as a sort of perverse group therapy, in which first destabilizing a person with “a powerful shock” and then getting him on the “road to recovery” were the key ingredients. The Rectification Campaign was a cure for thinking independently, or, as the Chinese journalist Dai Qing said of the Wang Shiwei case, it enacted “the ugliest nightmare in human history—the smothering of dignity and freedom of thought in the name of revolution.” It had, in addition, that particular Orwellian element that distinguishes the psychological methods of twentieth-century totalitarianism: the goal was not simply to make the thought-control target admit his errors and flaws but to so thoroughly destroy his sense of autonomous individuality that he feels gratitude and love for the leader who restored him to the correct path—Chairman Mao.

  An early example of the method involved a nineteen-year-old man named Zhang Keqin, who was a student at what was called the Xibei, or northwest school, set up by Kang precisely to train agents for the job of internal intelligence. Zhang was a handy target because, in 1942, someone he knew from Chungking sent him a pro-Kuomintang magazine. His father, a doctor, had treated Kuomintang officials, which was taken as evidence of a special relationship with the enemy. In addition, Zhang had been denounced as a Kuomintang spy by one of the young men who had come to Yenan with him. There was no evidence to support this accusation, but Zhang, still a teenager and, no doubt, terrified, was unable to prove that it was false. Kang Sheng ordered him arrested and interrogated. He was questioned for three days and nights in a method called chelunzhan, literally “cartwheel war,” in which interrogators replace each other in a nonstop bombardment of questions during which the suspect has no respite and no sleep. In the end Zhang, unable to endure any more, admitted to the charge against him.

  Zhang’s case contained all the elements sought by the engineers of what the historian Gao Hua has called “this live show.” With tears streaming down his face, he manufactured a story that fit the Communists’ preferred narrative of betrayal and redemption. He said that he had become a secret agent, joining a Communist cell that was actually set up as a kind of decoy by the KMT. He fingered others who were secret agents among the friends who had journeyed to Yenan with him, including the person who had initially fingered him, and then he expressed his gratitude to the party for saving him from his errors and making him a new person. Having demonstrated the perfect functioning of the system of confession and reform, Zhang was then dispatched by Kang Sheng to lecture to other students at the Xibei school. His example, psychological torment followed by treatment as an ideological model, induced others in Yenan to manufacture stories of shortcomings, misbehavior, and ideological errors and of their need for thought reform so that they could become models also. “Once you confessed, you had a better life,” Shi Zhe wrote in his memoir, “and if you didn’t confess you were tortured and stayed in prison. The more stories you made up the better you were treated.”

  In 1944, after two years in the hands of the Yenan security apparatus, Wang Shiwei was ushered out to be interviewed by some Chungking-based Chinese reporters (no foreigners were ever given access to him). One of Wang’s crimes had been to express the view that Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s were “dubious.” Very likely he knew that after months or years in detention the falsely accused would be expected to make full, abject public confessions, admitting to thoughts and deeds either that they never had or that were in no way criminal. The Czech writer Milan Kundera spoke of the moral inversion produced by Stalinist persecution in which the disoriented person desperately searches his life in order to find crimes to admit to. This seems to be what happened to Wang Shiwei. When first accused, Wang refused to admit any guilt, but now, brought before the Chungking reporters, looking, one of them said, like he was “reciting from a textbook,” Wang became what he had most despised. “I deserve to be executed,” he said. “But Mao is so magnanimous … I am extremely grateful for his mercy.”

  Wang Shiwei remained an object of public vituperation for the duration of the Rectification Campaign. He was, the propaganda intoned, the inhabitant of a “counter-revolutionary shit-hole.” He was a member of an “anti-party gang” that had “sneaked into the party to destroy and undermine it.” A mob of other writers obediently wrote articles in which they drew the mandatory lessons from Wang’s ideological errors; these articles had titles like “Thoroughly Smash Wang Shiwei’s Trotskyite Theories and Anti-Party Activities” and “The Literary and Artists Circle’s Correct Attitude and Their Self-Examination Regarding Wang Shiwei,” which was by Ding Ling. Wang was locked up in a Yenan prison unknown to members of the American military mission, and in 1947, as the CCP evacuated Yenan in advance of KMT troops, he was hacked to death and his body dumped into a well in a village near the Yellow River.

  Twenty-five years later, with Mao ensconced inside what Beijing residents didn’t dare call the new forbidden city, a talented and renowned essayist and playwright named Wu Han, who was also a deputy mayor of Beijing, wrote a historical allegory called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. It was about a just official in the Ming dynasty who had been punished for speaking truths to power, and it was an unmistakable reference to Mao and his practice of cashiering old revolutionary comrades for daring to criticize his autocratic rule. Wu Han’s play was performed and published in 1961, and it took five years for Mao to find the political backing he needed to launch a counterattack, which he did in 1966 when one of his radical henchmen, Yao Wenyuan, accused Wu Han of wanting to “replace the state theory of Marxism-Leninism with the state theory of the landlord and bourgeoisie.” In such a way did the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten sanguinary years and produced the ultimate apotheosis of Mao, begin with a campaign against a writer and his impure thoughts. Wu Han was imprisoned for having created a work of literature, a play. In 1969, he was beaten to death. The Communists, as Harrison Forman put it, “take their culture seriously.”

  Does it real
ly matter that the members of the Dixie Mission were ignorant of the Rectification Campaign, that some journalists said some ridiculously worshipful things about Mao, or that most of the American travelers to Yenan in the final months of World War II missed the essential nature of Maoism, its ruthlessness, its cruelty, its repressiveness, its Orwellian manipulation of the truth? The United States has had cordial relations with numerous dictators over the years, including dictators like Chiang Kai-shek. Once the Cold War broke out, it was not a country’s domestic arrangements that determined its relationship to the United States; it was whether it aligned itself with the Soviet Union and put itselt in the service of Soviet goals. In the long stretch of time since the months of the Dixie Mission, numerous observers and scholars have forcefully argued that there was nothing inevitable about Chinese enmity toward the United States. If Washington had constructed a separate, cooperative relationship with Mao and his cohort in the final months of the war, rather than giving one-sided support to Chiang Kai-shek, then, as Service has put it, we might not have ended up with “the close friend and ally we once hoped for,” but we would at least have had something better than “bitter enmity.” Most important, Service and numerous other scholars and observers have argued in later years, we would not have ended up backing the losing side in a harsh and bloody civil war, and therefore “Korea and Vietnam would probably never have happened.”

  And yet it was important to Davies, Service, and Stilwell that the Communists were potentially democratic; that they seemed more American than Russian; that they sought nothing more radical or revolutionary than a reform of rural taxes; that they would go their own vigorously independent and nationalistic way rather than the way of Stalin and the Russians. To say that they were wrong is not to condemn them or to find them negligent in their duties. These were brave, intelligent, honest, and admirable men trying to puzzle out the truth in murky circumstances, and, moreover, they were more realistic than their adversaries inside the very divided American government and their policy prescriptions were more reasonable. Very few people placed in their complex and difficult situations would have done better than they did. But they made mistakes, and the main one they made was to overestimate the compatibility of Chinese Communism with American values and aspirations. Perhaps there was an element of self-delusion in this, of wishful thinking, because though the China hands were realists, they were also believers in the American mission of fostering democracy in the world, and it would have been more difficult proposing closer ties to Mao if they had been clearer about the profoundly illiberal, destructively totalitarian regime he would establish. This is where their ignorance of the Rectification Campaign becomes significant. In later years, many have contended that Mao and his cohort were driven into radicalism because they were first thrust into isolation and insecurity by the West. But the Rectification Campaign shows that this is incorrect. What the Americans in Yenan did not see or understand was that the elements of Mao’s rule that would become visible after the Communists took total power in China were already in place years before that occurred, and that included the adoption of all the methods of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

  An argument exactly opposite to the one made by Service and the other China experts in the Foreign Service has also frequently been made; it was made by the new American emissary, Patrick J. Hurley, by Henry Luce, by General Wedemeyer, by the members of what came to be called the China Lobby, and by the congressmen and senators in Washington who later conducted a witch hunt for those they believed responsible for “the loss” of China to the Communists. This argument was that the Foreign Service officers’ rosy view of Mao coupled with their denigration of Chiang led to an erosion of support for the KMT, and if that support had not eroded, the Communists would not have come to power, and so the wars in Korea and Vietnam would never have occurred.

  The events of late 1944 to early 1946 show that both arguments are wrong, the argument that it was a mistake not to cooperate with the Communists and the argument that more support should have been given to Chiang Kai-shek. Both positions are based on the notion that it is for the United States to shape the world to its specifications and that, if it takes the right actions, it has the ability to do this. As we’ll see, American policy was bungling, inconsistent, and improvised; it was not the product of a well-thought-out strategic plan. There are lessons to be learned from this, among them the importance of establishing reasonable goals and pursuing them sensibly, rather than suffer the loss of prestige and self-confidence that comes from loudly announcing unrealistic goals and then failing to achieve them. But it was not American policy that determined the outcome in China. It was the forces on the ground over which the United States, with its vast but not unlimited power, never exercised decisive control.

  PART II

  Seeds of Animosity

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Wrong Man

  The cry rang out over the grass airstrip and the bare brown hills of Yenan, and Chairman Mao and General Zhou, as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were known to foreigners at the time, didn’t quite know what to make of it. “I shall never forget the expressions on their faces,” Colonel David D. Barrett, the commander of the Dixie Mission, wrote later.

  John Davies called the utterance, made by FDR’s special representative in China, Patrick J. Hurley, “a prolonged howl.” Barrett said it was an “Indian war whoop.” Mao and Zhou, despite the indisputable richness of their experience and the adventurousness of their lives, had never encountered anybody quite like Hurley, who was to charm them at first, disappoint them later, and, ultimately confound, perplex, and infuriate them, while vindicating their ideological predisposition against capitalist and imperialist America.

  Mao and Zhou were not the only ones who had never encountered anybody quite like Hurley. The political officers at the American embassy, and those attached to General Wedemeyer’s staff, didn’t know what to make of him either, and in the end, a conflict broke out between them that was to open up an ugly episode in which malicious and reckless accusations were made, careers were destroyed, and the United States lost the possibility of a reasoned debate on China.

  Hurley arrived from clammy, rubble-strewn, death-infected Chungking into the bracing, crisp, fresh air of Yenan aboard an American army C-47, which was on a periodic shuttle run carrying mail and supplies to the Dixie Mission members. The date was November 7, 1944, nearly two months after Hurley’s arrival in China. He’d had meetings with the Communist representatives in Chungking during his few weeks there, as he plunged into the task of reconciling the two antagonistic armed parties to each other, so they could dedicate their united energies to fighting the Japanese, but he’d refused Communist invitations to visit Yenan, even ignoring a personal letter from Mao himself, since he wanted to be sure of Chiang’s acquiescence in his diplomatic enterprise. But even after he felt himself ready to meet the senior Communist leaders in their own lair, he hadn’t let them know in advance of his trip.

  Because any American plane arriving at the Yenan airstrip was an occasion, Barrett was on hand when Hurley arrived, and so was Zhou Enlai, who didn’t know who the tall, gray-haired man emerging from the C-47 was, even though Hurley did everything he could to make a compelling first impression. He wore what Barrett described as “one of the most beautifully tailored uniforms I’d ever seen,” with three rows of campaign ribbons (leading Barrett to quip: “General, you’ve got a ribbon there for everything but Shay’s Rebellion”). Zhou asked Barrett, who was wearing a blue padded overcoat, the identity of the resplendent new arrival. When he was told that it was Roosevelt’s special emissary, he “disappeared in a cloud of dust” to fetch Mao. Soon the Chairman appeared in his beat-up ambulance. An honor guard was assembled, bugles blared, Hurley saluted, and it was at this point that he let loose his Choctaw whoop, which, while it surprised the Communists, was typical Hurley. He strove to make the most of his rough-and-ready cowboy background, his “boisterous goodwill,” as the historian Barbara Tuchm
an described it. It was his way of breaking the ice. Pressing the cowboy metaphor, the historian Herbert Feis said, “He tried to corral both sides [KMT and CCP] within a fence of general principles, and turn them into a committee for law and order.” Despite his stumble on the Stilwell front, Hurley remained optimistic that his good intentions, persuasive charm, and plain common sense could overcome the obstacles of mutual animosity and conflicting ambitions of China’s two armed parties.

  After the welcoming ceremonies, Hurley, Mao, Zhou, and Barrett climbed into the ambulance and bounced off toward the walled town of Yenan, all of the participants in this scene surely touched by a sense of historic possibility.

  For Mao and the Communists, the presence among them of a special representative of the president of the United States was a milestone in their long climb back from the near annihilation they had suffered at the hands of Chiang only a few short years earlier. In 1937, after the Long March and a brief stay at their first refuge of Bao’an, the Communists had seven thousand men left of the one hundred thousand that had begun the trek a year earlier. Now they credibly claimed to have nearly one million men in their army, plus an estimated 2.5 million men in part-time militias serving as a reserve force. The Communists controlled territory with a population of about ninety million people spread out across North China in both occupied and non-occupied areas.