China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Here is the president of the United States, having sent millions of his fellow citizens into mortal danger in war, doing what he must, which was to insist that the beneficiary of the American sacrifice shoulder its share of the burden. And Roosevelt’s advisers had been telling him that if China lost Kunming, it would essentially be knocked out of the war, and then “at least an additional year and possibly several years of additional warfare … would be required to defeat Japan and liberate China.” But in truth, as it turned out, the alarms of Hurley, Atcheson, and Chennault turned out to be exaggerated. There was no Japanese run on Kunming or on Chungking, no need to evacuate the embassy. Chiang’s “defense in depth” strategy was in this effective. Meanwhile, Chiang believed that in tying down a million Japanese troops in China, he was already shouldering the burden of the war, and what, he could have asked in any case, did the American president mean by “our efforts to save China”? China had survived for eight years, four of them before Pearl Harbor, while the United States was supplying Japan with strategic raw materials. What reason was there to think China couldn’t go on for a few months or even years more now that the United States was “rolling the enemy back in defeat all over the world”? Was it wrong of him to believe that saving China meant not fighting Japan, which was nearly defeated anyway, but making sure that a Communist dictatorship didn’t position itself to take power once Japan had been disposed of by the valiant Americans?

  This was the fundamental incompatibility of the priorities of Chiang and Roosevelt, the one striving to preserve himself, the other to save the lives of his nation’s soldiers. For the United States, getting the government and the Communists into the same “corral,” as Feis later put it, became a panacea, the solution for China. And everybody, including those who disagreed with each other about almost everything else, supported this solution. Even Chennault, Chiang’s best friend among the Americans, told Roosevelt that what was needed was “true unification between Chungking and Yenan,” so that the civil war that Chiang knew was looming in the future wouldn’t take place. That was where FDR’s personal representative needed to play his historic role.

  And so Hurley bent himself to the task. In his initial meetings with Chiang and with the Communists in Chungking, the outlines of a deal had begun to come clear, at least to Hurley. It would be a five-point plan in which the CCP would essentially gain recognition as a legal party in exchange for agreeing to place its army under a centralized command. Chiang and the KMT were ready to accept this arrangement, and why not? Legal recognition of the CCP would be a small price to pay if the party’s leaders were willing to give up independent control of their armed forces. Chiang must have been extremely skeptical that Hurley would persuade Mao to agree to this formula.

  Hurley’s first formal meeting in Yenan was on November 8. Hurley dominated the opening session, which took place in the morning, presenting a written version of the five-point plan to Mao. This document called on both parties, the KMT and the CCP, to “work together for the unification of all military forces in China for the immediate defeat of Japan and the reconstruction of China.” In a passage clearly written by Hurley and redolent of the effort made over the decades to remake China in the Christian and democratic image of the United States, the document further called for both parties to work for “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Then came the paragraph in which the central government would regard the CCP as a legal party.

  Mao was in command during the afternoon meeting. He began with what Barrett called a bit of “polite persiflage,” and then plunged into an angry denunciation of Chiang, on whom he put the blame for China’s disunity. What was needed, Mao said, was not simply a central military council but an entirely reorganized government consisting of the KMT, the CCP, and the other political parties. In other words, Mao insisted on much more than mere legal status for the Communists. His demand was for a coalition government in which the KMT and the CCP would have equal status, though he doesn’t seem to have provided any specifics as to how exactly this government would function. Mao was ominously confident of his chances should there be no agreement on a coalition. Hurley’s assumption seems to have been that the central government was overwhelmingly powerful and that the Communists would gratefully accept its offer of legal status. His five-point proposal specified that the Communist troops would get “the same pay and allowances” as Nationalist troops, the implication being that this would be an improvement for the ragtag Communist troops.

  Mao bluntly pointed out to Hurley his mistake on this point, saying (as reported by Barrett), “the National Government armies were no longer able to fight.” The government had nearly two million men in its army and 779,000 of its men were blockading the Communists, while the rest of the government armies simply ran away when the Japanese were there. The best historians of this period estimate that 400,000 government troops were blockading the CCP, half of Mao’s figure but still a high proportion of Chiang’s forces. As for equal pay and allowances, Mao pointed out what many of the American China hands had already noted in their dispatches to Washington, which is that, in Barrett’s summary, “Chiang’s men were starved and miserably clad, and many were so sick and weak they would scarcely march even for short distances.” Barrett agreed on this point, writing: “I had myself seen soldiers topple over and die after marching less than a mile.” The Communist armies were the ones who were well fed, well clothed, and in good physical condition.

  Hurley’s reply to this was to point out that, so far from running away, China had won recent victories in Burma and on the Salween, and, moreover, that Mao’s tirade against Chiang contained the words that any enemy of China might use, somebody who wished to see China “continue to be divided against itself.” This was nonsense, and Mao knew it. “General,” he said to Hurley, “what I have said about Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang has already been said by President Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill, Doctor Sun Fo [Sun Yat-sen’s son, an influential member of the KMT’s liberal wing], and Madame Sun Yat-sen. Do you consider these persons the enemies of China?”

  Hurley changed the subject. Chiang, he said, genuinely wanted to come to terms with the Communists and, as evidence of this, he was willing to give one seat on the National Military Council to the CCP.

  Mao was contemptuous of this offer.

  Hurley: Well, it’s a foot in the door.

  Mao: A foot in the door means nothing if your hands are tied behind your back.

  Hurley: Membership on the Council would give the Communists full knowledge of all military plans and operations, including, presumably, any contemplated against the Communists themselves.

  Mao: The Military Council is a powerless body whose current members are kept in the dark; it is so unimportant that it hasn’t bothered to meet in a long time.

  “Chairman,” Hurley countered, “if you do not think the terms offered by the Generalissimo are fair enough to induce you to join in a coalition government, on just what terms would you be willing to do so?”

  Mao spent a day conferring with his cohort and the next day made a counterproposal to Hurley that led to agreement between him and the Communists. When agreement was reached, as Barrett put it, the Communists were “greatly pleased,” and no wonder. The agreement gave the Communists everything they wanted, including a “Coalition National Government embracing representatives of all anti-Japanese parties and non-partisan political bodies.” This last category consisted of the small, non-armed democratic parties that had emerged in the shadow of the KMT dictatorship, the largest of which, the Democratic League, was the main party of China’s left-leaning intellectuals, many of whom had been schooled in the United States. In such a way did the proposal essentially do away with the one-party dictatorship that Chiang had headed since 1927 and that he clearly felt was essential for his continued rule as well as for the future of China—though, as we will see, he did slowly relent on that point under American pressure.

  The deal struck in Yenan
also included an expansion of Hurley’s earlier “of the people” language to a full-fledged elaboration of America’s most liberal aspirations for China. “The Coalition National Government will pursue policies designed to promote progress and democracy and to establish justice, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association,” even “the right of writ of habeas corpus,” which had never existed in any form in China’s three-thousand-year history, and wasn’t to exist in its future either. These phrases were obviously inserted by Hurley, who spent an afternoon and an evening fiddling with the text before the final meeting on the morning of November 10. Hurley’s political differences with Roosevelt did not stop him from tossing into the text a couple of Roosevelt’s most ringing phrases. The new government of China “will also pursue policies intended to make effective those two rights defined as freedom from fear and freedom from want.”

  The movement Mao controlled had no free press, no free speech, and no rights of assembly or habeas corpus. But he and his lieutenants were happy to sign an American-style bill of rights since they had no intention of honoring it if they ever came to power. They had simply accepted an unalterable principle of political life, which is that the party out of power has more to gain from demanding democratic freedoms than the party in power. This was especially the case in China in late 1944, when disaffection with the KMT, but not with the remote, largely unknown Communists, was growing, and the government’s response consisted of the very repressive measures—imprisonments, press censorship, and bans on demonstrations—that the Communists themselves would make permanent features of their rule.

  The American attempt to mediate between the two main Chinese armed parties did not lead to the collapse of the Kuomintang and the empowerment of the Communists, but it inevitably helped the Communists with Chinese public opinion. Mao could, without embarrassing himself with the evident expediency of it all, feed the hunger in China for liberal freedoms, portraying the KMT as freedom’s enemy and himself as its champion, though the paradox is that the greater long-range threat to freedom in China was Mao himself.

  On Hurley’s last afternoon in Yenan, the two sides engaged in what Barrett called “a love feast, with everybody in a happy mood.” Later, outside the meeting hall, Hurley said to Mao, “Chairman, I think it would be appropriate for you and me to indicate, by signing these terms, that we consider them fair and just,” and so they placed the documents on a flat stone and each man in turn scratched out his signature—Mao signing American-style with a pen rather than Chinese-style with a waxed seal. Just before leaving for the airfield, Hurley did add a caveat. “Chairman Mao,” he said, “you of course understand that although I consider these fair terms, I cannot guarantee the Generalissimo will accept them.”

  The optimistic Hurley, though, seems to have anticipated no problem getting Chiang to agree to the revised document. Hurley himself had signed it, after all, and he enjoyed the weight and prestige of the United States, which wanted a deal and whose support Chiang desperately needed. He had had close consultations with Chiang before he turned up in Yenan, so surely he had some idea of just how far Chiang would go. For these reasons, the Communists probably felt that Hurley knew what he was doing. As a sign of that, Zhou and a secretary accompanied Hurley on his plane to Chungking, where, presumably, Zhou would handle any further necessary refining of the text.

  As soon as Hurley landed in Chungking on November 10, he sent the Hurley-Mao document to T. V. Soong, intending that it be passed on to the Gimo. An alarmed Soong rushed to Hurley’s quarters. “The Communists have sold you a bill of goods,” Soong said. “Never will the National Government grant the Communist request.”

  What was this bill of goods? The exact terms of the coalition envisaged by the Hurley-Mao agreement were never spelled out, though presumably they involved some sharing of power and authority, a certain number of government portfolios going to the Communists while Chiang remained president of the republic. But Soong believed that Hurley had been taken in by Mao on this point. It was obvious to him and to Chiang that the Communists would be able to use their presence in a coalition to strengthen their hand in an ultimate contest for total power, to win from within. In other words, the very reason the Communists were happy with what Hurley had wrought was the reason Chiang couldn’t accept it. When confronted with reports of American discussions with the Communists, Chiang commonly expressed the worry that, once again, the Americans would be “fooled” by the Communists’ hypocritically heartfelt expressions of love for the United States and for democracy, and of selfless determination to do whatever they could to help defeat Japan. Now Hurley, whom he had counted on for understanding, was repeating the pattern. Despite Chiang’s warnings to the contrary, Hurley continued to believe the Molotov-Stalin description of Mao and his followers as “margarine Communists” rather than radical Marxist-Leninists whose goal was both total power and a total transformation of Chinese society. This belief formed the basis for his negotiating strategy. In Hurley’s frequently reiterated view, the Soviets would not back the CCP, which meant that if the pressure on the Communists remained strong and consistent, they would eventually have no choice but to accept a weak role in a KMT-dominated government.

  But Chiang knew better. He knew that Mao was a real revolutionary, and that there was a deep ideological connection between him and the Soviets. As we’ll see, Chiang hoped that by fostering good ties with Moscow he could prevent the Russians from giving all-out backing to the CCP, but he nonetheless found himself warning Cassandra-like of the Communists’ nature as fully red, while the Communists for their part encouraged the United States in the belief that they were radish-like.

  On the airplane back to Chungking, Barrett sat next to Zhou, and he asked him whether he thought the United States or the Soviet Union to be the greater democracy. “We consider the Soviet Union to be the greatest democracy in the world,” Zhou replied, but, he added, “we know it may take a hundred years for us to attain this state of democracy. Meanwhile we would be extremely glad if we could enjoy the same sort of democracy you do in the United States today.” Never mind the ominous naïveté, or the willful ideological blindness, in believing Stalin’s Russia to be history’s greatest democracy. What Americans always took away from a comment like that one of Zhou’s was the benign and reassuring message that Communism was an ideal to be achieved in some distant future and that in the very long meantime, the Communists could be friends of the United States.

  Given Chiang’s large armies, his reputation abroad as the savior of China, and the recognition he enjoyed from other countries, including the Soviet Union, as the only legitimate ruler of China, why should Chiang have felt that a deal with the Communists was a path to disaster?

  The answer to that question has to do with the chief difference between the United States and China, allied countries that could nonetheless not find common ground: It’s what the historian Tang Tsou has called American simplicity versus Chinese complexity. For Americans, the singular goal was the defeat of Japan, and since that was also the Chinese goal, Americans couldn’t understand why Chiang seemed so hesitant about measures that would help to achieve it, such as a reform of the Chinese armed forces, the firing of incompetent commanders, the consolidation of ramshackle, underequipped, and badly led divisions into a smaller number of disciplined and effective troops. For Americans like Stilwell this military reform was simple good sense. It would help defeat Japan and, along the way, equip Chiang with the kind of army he’d need in the future confrontation with the Communists.

  Similarly, Hurley must have felt that the KMT would welcome a chance to compete peacefully with the Communists in American-style political contests, in which everybody has his say, the party with the most votes wins, and the losing party will wait for another chance to win in the next election. But what was simple for the Americans was infinitely complex for Chiang. Chiang’s power rested on a network of personal relations among China’s militar
y chieftains that went back to his days as commander of the Whampoa Military Academy and, in some key instances, to his days in Japan when he was a young military academy cadet. The armed forces were not simply an army; they were a network of power bases, some loyal to Chiang and others (often the more effective of them) independent of him, potentially even rivals to him. Chiang needed to keep commanders loyal to him in charge of their armies, even if it meant tolerating the way they padded their rolls with nonexistent soldiers so as to receive their salaries from the central government, even if they lined their pockets by trading strategic materials with the Japanese, even if they were ineffectual commanders. Chiang refused to fire the commanders who owed allegiance to him. Moreover, during the war, he refused to supply able commanders in combat who did not owe allegiance to him, because in China’s quiltwork of personal military relations, they were not part of his personal network.

  Chiang faced a similar problem when it came to political reform, a rather abstract, shorthand phrase whose practical meaning was allowing the Communists into the government as a legal party and then competing with them for popular favor. For the United States, political reform would give the Chinese government legitimacy, broaden its popular support, and quell the incubating dissatisfaction and disillusionment among students and intellectuals. The coalition would give Chiang the stronger portfolios, and he would continue to be commander in chief of the armies, an ally of the United States, and the president of his country.

  Chiang, however, was convinced that political reform is what would destroy him. For him, the Americans, with all their goodwilled naïveté and gullibility, failed to take into account the reality of Chinese political culture, in which to be conciliatory, to be forced to grant legal status to an erstwhile bandit gang, would be interpreted as weakness, and to be seen as weak was to invite defections to the other side. The Communists themselves would enjoy a tremendous surge in popularity, prestige, and stature. This was the reason for Davies’s prediction that many of Chiang’s senior officers would desert him once the Communists had an American imprimatur, because in China’s winner-take-all political system there is no profit in sticking to a loser. Centuries ago, Machiavelli warned that the prince who invited powerful rivals into his principality, hoping to disarm them and weaken them, was paving the way for his own loss of power. Chiang Kai-shek probably didn’t read Italian Renaissance political theory, but he nonetheless understood that his own power depended not on making a deal with the vigorous and durable Communists but on not making a deal with them and, instead, on destroying them, lest they destroy him.