China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

But Hurley didn’t stick with this position for very long. Soon, somewhat inexplicably, he adopted a strikingly pro-Nationalist position. He came to anchor one pole of the American debate about how to deal with Chiang, the other pole being a quid pro quo camp that felt nothing should be given to Chiang, whether Lend-Lease aid or moral support, without getting specific commitments from him in return, especially commitments regarding political reform and the streamlining of his armies. Frank Dorn, Stilwell’s aide-de-camp, had made this argument crisply and succinctly. Only dealing with Chiang on an “ultimatum basis,” he said, could push China away from its political sclerosis.

  Hurley rejected this approach, and in doing so he joined the consensus of the senior American leadership, which had never had much stomach for a quid pro quo policy. This view emanated from the president himself, who, as a fellow head of state, one who knew the loneliness of power, had a natural sympathy for Chiang. “The Generalissimo finds it necessary to maintain his position of supremacy,” FDR wrote in a letter to Marshall. “You and I would do the same thing under the circumstances. He is the Chief Executive as well as the Commander-in-Chief, and one cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.”

  Hurley later explained to Roosevelt the reasonableness of Chiang’s view that to accept a deal with the CCP would be viewed as a victory for them and a defeat for him, and a defeat for him would be fatal. Moreover, the deal signed by Hurley and Mao on that rock in Yenan skirted the basic question: How was power to be shared in a country that in its three-thousand-year history had never once witnessed a peaceful struggle for power? Hurley, in making his deal with Mao, had failed to understand, as Davies put it, “that the concept of a loyal opposition did not exist in China and that Chiang’s system of balancing off a variety of competing opportunists would not survive the introduction of western democracy with its free-for-all popular participation, particularly when one of the competing forces would be a dynamic, proliferating, disciplined organization determined to destroy that system and seize power.” Hurley’s near-unconditional backing of Chiang was his response to Davies’s analysis, but it was exactly the opposite of what Davies, a firm member of the quid pro quo camp, would have had him do. “By December,” Davies told an interviewer years later, “General Hurley began to assert, without confirmation from Washington, that American policy was one of unqualified support of the National Government of China and the Generalissimo.” It was a policy, Davies continued, that Hurley insisted on enunciating so forcefully and with such an absence of any nuance or willingness to compromise “just at the time its validity … had become questionable.”

  Hurley’s support was no doubt welcome to Chiang, but it did not relieve him of his predicament. Chiang firmly believed that democratic reforms, especially allowing a coalition government, would do him in, but at the same time he couldn’t simply reject the goal of a deal with the Communists without endangering the goodwill of Hurley and Roosevelt. So the KMT replied to the Hurley-Mao plan with a counterproposal that it must have known would be rejected by the Communists. It had three points, compared to the Mao-Hurley five, but the gist of it was that the central government would agree to recognize the Communists as a legal party if in exchange the Communists would “give their full support to the National Government in the prosecution of the war of resistance, and in the post-war reconstruction, and give over control of all their troops to the National Government.”

  Shown this counterproposal in Chungking, Zhou, not surprisingly, turned it down, saying there was no point in even carrying it back to Yenan. That established the unalterable pattern between the two Chinese sides and the United States for the next two years of strenuous American attempts at mediation. Mao wanted legal recognition, and of course he could, like the French and Italian Communist parties did after the war, compete peacefully for power in democratic elections, though such a solution would have been unprecedented in China. Mao wanted to be part of a coalition government, but he saw giving up control of his own army as tantamount to suicide. Both sides made paper concessions to satisfy the Americans as well as to court Chinese public opinion, which wanted a deal between the two parties, but the goal of both parties remained the same: power—in the KMT’s case to keep it and in the CCP’s case to seize it.

  Nonetheless, Hurley still believed that his efforts would bear fruit. “We are having some success,” he wrote to Secretary of State Stettinius in December, though it is difficult to find any success at all in the historical record. He was meeting daily with Chiang, he said, and Chiang had been persuaded that “in order to unite the military forces of China and to prevent civil conflict it will be necessary for him … to make liberal political concessions to the Communist Party and to give them adequate representation in the National Government.”

  This was the situation in Chungking in those last few weeks of 1944 and the first few of 1945. Chiang remained in his secluded villa, surrounded by his antique porcelains, catered to by silent servants, surrounded by his closest aides, who tended to tell him what he wanted to hear. Zhou lived on his modest lane in Chungking, watched over by the secret police (who occupied space in the same building), lunching and dining with American journalists and diplomats, exuding his usual charm and his aura of reasonableness, providing his assurances that all the Communists wanted was to defeat Japan and to install a democracy in China. Hurley shuttled quixotically between them, striving for common ground and nonexistent common ultimate goals. On December 4, he, Wedemeyer, and Robert B. McClure, Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, visited Zhou, and together they tried to convince him to accept what was now the Hurley-Chiang three-point plan, to no avail.

  On December 7, Barrett and Zhou flew back to Yenan, Zhou because there was nothing further to talk about in Chungking, Barrett because Hurley wanted him to convince Mao to accept what Zhou had rejected. This initiative produced a remarkable confrontation, one in which Mao spoke with furious incisiveness, telling Barrett why he would never accept Chiang’s proposal but at the same time assuring him that he wanted to be friends with the United States, even while expressing supreme confidence that whatever happened in the talks Hurley was brokering, the future belonged to him. It was an impressive performance and an impressive sight, this shrewd peasant Communist in his padded clothing holed up in a cave in China’s northwest speaking passionately to an American colonel and almost exactly predicting the future.

  Zhou was also present at this meeting, during which Mao, in Barrett’s account, more than once “flew into a violent rage.” At one point, when Barrett told him that Chiang saw the Hurley-Mao five-point plan as a way of forcing him out of power, Mao leaped to his feet and shouted, “He should have left the stage long ago.” Chiang’s days may not be numbered, Mao argued in effect, but his years certainly were. And if, Mao said,

  on his record, the United States wishes to continue to prop up the rotten shell that is Chiang Kai-shek, that is its privilege. We believe, however, that in spite of all the United States can do, Chiang is doomed to failure.… We are not like Chiang Kai-shek. No nation needs to prop us up. We can stand erect and walk on our own feet like free men.

  Mao reaffirmed his earlier vow to provide support for an American landing on China’s coast, offering to do what Chiang had so hesitated to do with Stilwell: put his troops under an American commander. “We would serve with all our hearts under an American general, with no strings or conditions attached,” he told Barrett. “That is how we feel toward you. If you land on the shores of China, we will be there to meet you, and to place ourselves under your command.”

  Barrett’s impression, as he left this discussion, was that he had “talked in vain to two clever, ruthless, and determined leaders [Mao and Zhou] who felt absolutely sure of the strength of their position.” He tried to argue with them, but their answers were of the self-confidently defiant kind. By refusing to accept a deal, Barrett said, Mao would “give Chiang Kai-shek an excellent opportunity to claim
that all he has been saying about the Communists being traitors and rebels has been proved beyond contention.” Mao’s reply: “He has been calling us rebels and traitors for so long that we are accustomed to it. Let him say what he pleases.”

  Barrett: “If the Japanese are turned back from Kunming and Kweiyang by the forces of the Kuomintang and the United States, you are going to look very bad.”

  Mao: “Should this happen, no one will cheer louder than we will.”

  And, finally, Barrett: “If the Generalissimo is defeated and you have done nothing to help him in his hour of need, the United States may withdraw her forces from China altogether [and leave the Communists to fight the Japanese on their own].”

  Mao: “The United States cannot abandon China.”

  Mao was also angry at Hurley, and because the feeling was soon to be mutual, there was a quick unraveling of the cordial atmosphere that had prevailed on Hurley’s visit to Yenan. Mao understood, he told Barrett, that Hurley had warned him he couldn’t force Chiang to sign the five-point plan they’d agreed to, but “after Chiang Kai-shek refused these fair terms we did not expect General Hurley to come back and press us to agree to a counter-proposal which requires us to sacrifice ourselves,” he said. “If General Hurley does not understand this now, he never will.” Moreover, Mao warned, “there may come a time when we feel we should show this document, with the signatures, to the Chinese and foreign press.”

  Mao did not release the document with Hurley’s now-embarrassing signature on it, but his mere threat to do so had a deep effect on Hurley, who, in Davies’s words, “raged that Mao had tricked him.” “The motherfucker!” he exclaimed to Barrett. At the end of 1944, having refused to renew the negotiations, Zhou and Mao laid down four new conditions for a deal: (1) that Chiang release all political prisoners, (2) that he withdraw the government forces surrounding the Communists, (3) that he abolish all “oppressive regulations which restricted the people’s freedom,” and (4) that he end all secret police activity. Hurley was infuriated. The Communist leaders had to know that these seemingly very pro-democratic demands would make it even more difficult for Chiang to accept a coalition, since, as the historian Herbert Feis put it, Chiang had to regard them “as equivalent to allowing the Communists to carry on their revolution without opposition or hindrance.” The Communists, moreover, had no intention of observing the principles involved in the territory they controlled. Mao, with his just-completed two-year purge, had eliminated all opposition, choked off independent views, and tightened control of his own propaganda machinery, which was the only permitted medium of communication.

  If Hurley was upset with Mao, he was to be even more upset with members of his own camp, including Davies, Barrett, and even for a time, Wedemeyer, over a series of actions and gestures toward the Communists that merely perpetuated the contacts and conversations that had been taking place between Americans and what some liked to call the Yenan regime since the beginning of the Dixie Mission several months before. Hurley willfully misunderstood the contacts that, coincidentally, were taking place as his negotiating effort was falling apart, and this misunderstanding was to lead to an effort to purge the American embassy of much of its expertise on China.

  On December 15, 1944, Barrett went to Yenan again, and Davies, who was making preparations to leave China, went along with him. According to Davies’s later account, he was in Hurley’s office when the ambassador received a phone call from Barrett, who, he presumed, mentioned the imminent trip to Yenan. After Hurley and Barrett spoke, Davies got on the line with Barrett and “with Hurley standing close by,” the two men discussed over the phone their Yenan plans. “It was a routine trip made as a member of Wedemeyer’s staff,” Davies later wrote. His purpose was “to get a quick last impression of the Communist oligarchy before going to Moscow,” a purpose that would seem entirely logical and innocuous for a diplomat about to be posted to the Soviet Union.

  But Hurley had been developing suspicions that plotting on behalf of the Communists was taking place behind his back, and he saw Davies’s trip as part of the plot. In fact, Davies and some of the others on Wedemeyer’s staff did like the Communists and felt comfortable with them, and since they believed the Communists would take power eventually, they felt it was in the American interest to build relations with them, beginning with military cooperation. “The Chinese Communists were going to win,” Arthur R. Ringwalt, a political analyst at the embassy in Chungking, said later, summing up the consensus among the China hands, “and what was the use in opposing a movement that was almost unopposable.” They also disliked the Kuomintang and made little secret of it. All this led Hurley, befuddled and insecure in an alien political world, to embrace his suspicions.

  He was encouraged in this by Foreign Minister T. V. Soong, Hurley’s main point of contact with Chiang’s government. After Davies’s departure for Yenan, Soong called Hurley to tell him that his agents had informed him that Davies was there, and Hurley, who seems genuinely not to have known—despite the phone calls in his presence—told him the report was untrue. When Hurley found out that Davies had indeed left for Yenan, he had to call Soong to assure him he hadn’t tried to deceive him. “The Foreign Minister had evidently succeeded in the age-old ploy of putting someone on the defensive through imputing dishonorable motives to an innocent mistake,” Davies wrote later.

  When Davies returned to Chungking, he explained what had happened; Hurley appeared to be “mollified,” Davies thought. But he wasn’t. Earlier, in speaking with Davies, Hurley had referred to Soong as one of the “reactionaries” who was blocking a KMT-CCP deal; now he assumed that Soong was a more truthful man than Davies, one of the brightest and most dedicated officers the Foreign Service has ever known. Soong passed along what he claimed to be a reliable intelligence report from his agents in Yenan to the effect that Davies had advised the top Communists to pay no attention to Hurley because he was “an old fool.” The fact is that there were more than a few professional Foreign Service officers posted to the embassy in Chungking who believed that to be the case. Some of the career officers, speaking among themselves, began referring to Hurley as a figure of “crass stupidity,” as “a stuffed shirt playing at being a great man,” as “Colonel Blimp,” or, borrowing from what they knew to be a Chinese epithet for him, dafeng, or “Big Wind.” When one of the American career diplomats, Edward Rice, who’d been in China for a decade, met with Hurley to give him a briefing, he was able to say “Hello” and “Good-bye” but nothing else during what he described as an incomprehensible monologue by the ambassador. “Hurley may not have been insane,” another of the American professional diplomats, Philip Sprouse, later told an interviewer, “but at routine staff meetings he would invoke the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg address, with such passion that at the end of his spiel you always felt like saying, ‘All right, I’ll vote for you.’ ”

  Davies shared this unfavorable assessment of his boss, but the accusation that he had told Mao that Hurley was an old fool lacked all credibility. There was no evidence, apart from Soong’s unconfirmed, unsourced, and evidently self-interested intelligence report, that he had done anything of the kind.

  At this point in the history of American relations with China, after more than four years of desultory Chinese effort in the war against Japan, four months after the dismissal of the revered Stilwell, and even less time since the scare that the Japanese would move against Chungking, the mood inside the American embassy was, as the newly arrived John Melby put it, “poisonous.” The “principal occupation,” he wrote in his diary, “seems to be eavesdropping and ducking around corners. Those who hew the line with Ambassador Hurley swagger. Others are mostly evasive.”

  The disagreements inside the embassy echoed the incoherence of overall American policy, or, as Davies put it at the time, the unlikelihood that “American policy can be anything other than a vacillating compromise between realism and wishful thinking.” Hurley pressed the Communis
ts to resume the talks he had come to China to sponsor even as he expressed his growing disillusionment with the “Yenan regime” and his increasing insistence on sticking with Chiang, all the while cultivating his suspicion that his American subordinates were undermining his efforts. At the same time, these subordinates sent a thick file of reports and opinions describing a fateful weakening of Chiang and making clear their view that Hurley was wrong about … everything. He was wrong about the degree of support for the Communists. He was wrong in assuming that only Chiang could lead China. The China hands were proposing that the Communists be supplied with arms while Hurley was heading angrily in the opposite direction.

  At the end of the year, the embassy held its annual Christmas party, the first since Stilwell’s departure, Hurley’s arrival, and the Ichigo offensive, and the last that would be attended by Davies, who was due to leave for Moscow within days. “Hurley lifted a glass to me and boomed, ‘Here’s to you, John,’ ” Davies remembered. Then, wearing a sprig of evergreen behind his head like an Indian feather and letting loose a succession of Choctaw war whoops, Hurley led a snake dance around the room. At the end of the party, he told Davies that he would stop harassing him. “And you do the same with me.”

  Before he left China, Davies wrote his cable arguing that the American unwillingness to engage in realpolitik, by which he meant recognizing the Communists’ strength and the Kuomintang’s weakness, could end up handing the Soviets “a satellite in North China.” He sent a copy to Hurley. Five days later, Davies called on Wedemeyer and Hurley to say good-bye, making bold to compliment Hurley on his distinguished career and saying it would be a “deplorable culmination” to get “entrapped by Chinese intrigue in case his negotiations failed.”

  “Hurley flushed, then turned florid and puffy. He would break my back, his Excellency roared,” Davies wrote. Davies leaves his account at that, but Wedemeyer describes an extraordinary ensuing scene, with Hurley making the reckless and slanderous accusation that Davies was a Communist and was trying to undermine the government of China. As Davies heatedly denied the accusation, tears came into his eyes. The next day, Davies left for Moscow, and soon thereafter Hurley tried to break his back.