China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  During his journey, Ludden and his team members had talked with local commanders about what they needed in the way of supplies and what they would do with them, and from his observations and their answers, Ludden estimated that if they were provided with “adequate explosives,” the Communist armies “can with a maximum advance notice of 40 days cripple North China rail communications.” Ludden also reiterated the opinion of Service and others that the Communists were “liberal democratic and soundly nationalistic.”

  To be sure, they were nationalistic, but liberal democratic? Ludden in this rosy judgment reflected either that there was an element of “stage-setting for the deception of foreign visitors,” or that the China experts’ eagerness to promote cooperation with the Communists made them overeager to find virtues in them that were lacking in the KMT. But Ludden was surely right that with better weapons and supplies, the Communists could have made a major contribution to the war against Japan.

  For his part, in a cable of the same day, Davies, now in his new post in Moscow, elaborated on the advantages to the United States of closer ties with Yenan. Moscow, he said, must be viewing the situation in China with “sardonic satisfaction” as the Chiang regime decays, the Communists grow stronger, and the United States remains uncertain about what to do. If the United States would cooperate with Yenan, Davies averred, it would have a chance of strengthening the pragmatic, nationalistic faction inside the Chinese Communist Party, while weakening “those doctrinaires favoring reliance upon the Soviet Union.”

  “The profound suspicion and hostility in the United States to the tag ‘Communist,’ the Kremlin probably knows, prejudices the American public against the Chinese Communists,” Davies wrote. “Marshal Stalin must be informed that … most Americans are attached to the fiction that only through Chiang Kai-shek can China in war and in peace realize its destiny.” This ideological stubbornness, this “inability to engage in realpolitik,” could lead us “to lose what we seek: the quickest possible defeat of Japan and a united, strong and independent China. And the Soviet Union may stand to gain … a satellite North China.”

  In a similar vein, Service and Ludden wrote to Wedemeyer, arguing, “The intention of the Generalissimo to eliminate all political opposition, by force of arms if necessary,” and his habit of paying more attention to his domestic opposition than to the fight against Japan, was the heart of the KMT’s gradual loss of standing with its own people and the reason for its poor military performance. “Support of the Generalissimo is desirable in so far as there is concrete evidence that he is willing and able to marshal the full strength of China against Japan,” the two American China experts wrote. “Support of the Generalissimo is but one means to an end; it is not an end in itself.”

  The person on the receiving end of these communications was the head of the China desk in the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, John Carter Vincent, a distinguished-looking forty-five-year-old Kansan who’d had half a dozen assignments in far-flung posts in China, including as minister-counselor of the embassy in Chungking, where he knew the leading China hands well—not that he always shared their opinions. Vincent, like most of the Foreign Service professionals, had a low opinion of Hurley, and he liked Davies and Service, the most ardent advocates of building ties with the Communists, but he also thought they were a bit rhapsodic in their visions of Mao and his cohort. “They overdid it,” Vincent told his biographer, Gary May, speaking of Davies and Service, who were a decade or so younger than Vincent, more impatient than he was, and prone, because of their awareness of Chiang’s shortcomings, to “ascribe all virtue to the Communists,” as he put it in a speech in 1944, not mentioning Davies and Service by name but clearly having them in mind.

  Vincent was pretty sure that Hurley’s mission would fail, and though he had an aversion to the Communists, without any truly attractive options his policy recommendation was pretty close to that of the China hands. The best option for the United States and for China, he felt, was for Chiang to stay in power but for him to move quickly toward a more inclusive, democratic political system—otherwise he was likely to be overthrown, most likely by the CCP. But, Vincent understood, Chiang was unlikely to relinquish one-party rule, and therefore the United States needed to have “an alternative solution,” not to find itself stuck with the failing leader of a failing government. And the alternative was more or less what Service and Davies were recommending: arming the Communists without asking Chiang’s permission to do so.

  These views made their way into a State Department paper on China policy that was given to Wedemeyer when he arrived in Washington but, tellingly, was kept from Hurley. The paper was an effort to bridge the divide between those favoring all-out support for Chiang and those who wanted to build relations with the Communists. The short-term objective in China, the one Wedemeyer should concentrate on, was defeating Japan, the paper said, and this was to be achieved in the political sphere by uniting all the Chinese factions, which, of course, is what Hurley was attempting to do. It would be good, the paper allowed, if the United States were able to arm all of the factions, including the Communists, but, unfortunately, that was politically impossible—unless circumstances arose under which it became possible. If the United States at some point needed to land troops on the China coast, for example, then American commanders “should be prepared to arm the Communists.” Moreover, while American policy was to encourage a unified China, that “did not necessarily mean that China should be united under the Generalissimo.” It was important to maintain “a degree of flexibility” in this regard.

  Smart and realistic as this was, Vincent’s alternative lacked concrete practicality. It didn’t answer the question about the consequences to the Chinese central government of making a separate military deal with the Communists, which would have been so severe a blow to Chiang and would very likely have precipitated his overthrow. At what point would Chiang’s unwillingness to give up his one-party rule justify American military cooperation with the Communists? In not addressing these questions, Vincent’s paper illustrated the lack of clear direction and the absence of good options at a time when strong, clearheaded leadership was needed. With President Roosevelt in his final, frail days, nobody at the top of the American government was providing leadership on China. Instead, into the vacuum, it was the least qualified, most temperamental, dangerously injudicious man on the scene who took charge.

  For his part, Chiang was perfectly aware of his dilemma, and prone to alternating bouts of gloom and fury about it. Following the Yalta agreement, he felt, as he put it in his diary, “fear and suspicion” that something had been hidden from him, and of course he was right. No fool, he dispatched his ambassador in Washington to query Roosevelt on the matter, and when Chiang learned that Roosevelt had admitted to the secret protocol to the Yalta accord, he felt that he had been “sold out.”

  Illustrating Chiang’s sour mood, when he attended a meeting of the State Council, a powerless group that rarely convened, a party elder from Canton by the name of Tsou Lu asked about Zhou Enlai’s demand that the Communists be allowed to send a representative to the San Francisco Conference, the upcoming meeting at which the future victors in the war would discuss the creation of the United Nations. The Communists had, to Chiang’s annoyance, been making propaganda hay out of the Gimo’s refusal to broaden China’s representation at the conference, arguing that China would appear to all the world to be the unrepresentative dictatorship that it was. Chiang, an American embassy account of the State Council meeting said, “became enraged and delivered a stinging reprimand to Tsou … and damned the liberals generally.” When the subject of the Communists came up, Chiang’s “face was red with anger and his voice and hands shook. When he finished his frightened audience remained completely silent and he adjourned the meeting.”

  In Chungking, the China hands were increasingly feeling that China policy was in a crisis. E. J. Kahn, a writer for The New Yorker, interviewed Ludden, Davies, Service, and other China hands in the
early 1970s. They told him that back then they were all living in the same house in Chungking where “there were no women around, and they spent their evenings in desultory addiction to bridge or darts or crossword puzzles, or in analyzing and reanalyzing the gloomy condition of China.” They nursed the conviction that “if they didn’t do something fast, everything the United States had tried to do in and for China up to then might go down the drain.”

  And so the China hands decided on a drastic step. They deputized Service to write an analysis that would be sent on to Washington where it would arrive at just about the same time as Wedemeyer and Hurley. George Atcheson, the diplomat in charge of the embassy during Hurley’s absence, expressed some misgivings about this initiative. “They’ll say we’re all traitors, that when the cats were away the mice began to play,” he said. So to preempt that possibility, they inserted this sentence: “The presence of General Wedemeyer in Washington as well as General Hurley should be a favorable opportunity for discussion of this matter.” Atcheson then signed the paper and off it went, with an unabashed declaration in it that Hurley’s reporting on the KMT-CCP negotiations had been “incomplete and non-objective,” which is about as powerful a statement of dissent inside a diplomatic staff as it’s possible to imagine.

  According to Service later, all of the political officers on the staff of the embassy agreed with this telegram. Even General Mervin E. Gross, Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, who was in command during Wedemeyer’s absence, had endorsed it. The United States, it said, should present Chiang with an ultimatum. Roosevelt should “inform Chiang Kai-shek in definite terms that we are required by military necessity to cooperate with and supply the Communists and other suitable groups who can aid in this war against the Japanese.” Moreover, there was no need to wait until a KMT-CCP unity pact had been agreed to before giving this notification to China’s president. As the historian Herbert Feis summarized the argument, the recommended policy would “secure the cooperation of all Chinese in the war; hold the Communists on our side instead of throwing them into the arms of the Soviet Union; convince the Kuomintang that its apparent plans for eventual civil war were undesirable; and advance the cause of unification within China.”

  For Hurley, who believed exactly the opposite, the telegram was a declaration of war. Clearly it had been timed not just to coincide with his arrival in Washington but also to undermine him as the policy debate took place. In the fashion characteristic of him, he wasn’t able to see it for what it was, an urgent and even brave expression of disagreement on the part of a group of intelligent and well-informed men. It was, he charged, “an act of disloyalty.” To arm the Communists would be to recognize the Communists as “armed belligerents,” and this would “result in the speedy overthrow of the National Government.” Hurley now felt there was nobody in the embassy or the diplomatic service he could trust. Lending substance to this conviction, on March 5 he was summoned to the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs of the State Department for a meeting where, as he put it, he got “put on the carpet” and made to defend what he regarded as settled matters of policy. His authorized, totally sympathetic biographer quotes him describing himself at this event as facing “a full array of the pro-Communists of the State Department as my judges and questioners.”

  The battle lines were drawn, and the stakes were the nature of the American role in Asia. But in this first American contest between two radically opposed points of view on what to do in a poor Asian country where a weak government faced a Communist revolution, Hurley’s direct access to the president was the trump card. He went to the White House, which had been given a copy of the dissenting Chungking telegram on March 2, and, as Feis records it, “the President upheld Hurley.” There would be no arms or supplies given to the Communists, no separate agreement with them that was not approved in advance by the central government.

  As before, Roosevelt simply had no stomach for exacting concessions from Chiang by putting a gun to his head. He may have felt, especially after the secret agreement he’d made with Stalin at Yalta, that he couldn’t further humiliate the president of China by forcing him into concessions that Chiang believed would lead to his overthrow. The whole point, as Roosevelt saw it, was to bring colonialism in China to an end, and to encourage the country to emerge as a strong, independent, and friendly power. Turning Chiang Kai-shek into an obedient vassal was not the way to achieve that end.

  There was a practical matter as well. The Yalta agreement, while devastating for Chinese pride, bound the United States ever closer to the Chiang government. Russia, by the terms of the secret deal, was pledged to give aid only to the KMT government, not to its ideological allies, the Communists. And now, here was a proposal that the United States effectively recognize the Communists as the de facto government of northern China and that, in defiance of the wishes of an allied government, it provide arms and aid to that de facto government! And what if Chiang were to fall from power as a result of this American help to its enemy? Then, as the historian Gary May has written, the Russians would be freed from their obligation to support only the Nationalists. “They could therefore,” May concludes, “join the Chinese Communists and seize control of China.”

  Whatever FDR’s reasoning, Hurley was now armed with a vote of confidence from the president, and he used it to press what amounted to a purge of the professional China experts in the field, the men who had been in the country for years, who spoke the language, who knew the place and its dramatis personae. John Davies, luckily for him, had already left for Moscow where he was greatly appreciated by George Kennan, the chargé at the embassy there. But John Service, who had gone to Yenan in March to report on a Communist Party congress, learned, upon his return to Chungking, that he was to disembark for Washington right away, which he did, the only passenger on a military plane making the long trip via South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, arriving on April 12, the very day of FDR’s death. Arthur Ringwalt was also reassigned. So were several others, including a third secretary, a language officer, and George Atcheson, the embassy’s number two, who was replaced at Hurley’s insistence by a Virginia banker, Walter S. Robertson, who knew nothing about China and, perhaps because of that, got along well with Hurley.

  Hurley also imposed a ban on American diplomatic travel to Yenan, so the easy access that the China hands had had to senior Communist officials was cut off. Service also later reported that Hurley’s habit of showing diplomatic dispatches to Nationalist Chinese officials had a dampening effect, because their sources might be endangered. “Some,” Service said, “were called on the mat to receive a lecture, in mule-skinner language, from the Ambassador.” Hurley’s triumph was not the main reason that the possibility of friendly relations with the Chinese Communists evaporated, but it was a contributing factor, since it confirmed to Mao and his advisers what they were disposed to believe anyway, which was that the United States was an imperialist power dominated by monopoly capitalists that was going to be their enemy inevitably.

  The men whose services on China were now lost to the United States had kept up a remarkable, often brilliant flow of reporting on China for the entire war. They were interested in everything. John Stewart Service wrote fact-rich reports on cleavages within the Kuomintang military, about the propaganda on both sides of the war, on why some Chinese collaborated with the Japanese, on the effects of censorship on public opinion, on how the Communists were able to expand their bases into Japanese-occupied territory, and many other topics, even on the wall slogans and posters of both the Kuomintang and the Communists and what they showed of the nature of China’s political culture and the image that the two parties strove to present of themselves and each other. Service’s report in March 1945 on Chiang’s rivalry with a group of commanders known as the Guangxi Clique was a deft dissection of the inner workings of Chinese politics, showing, among other things, why it was more important to China’s president to weaken his potential rivals than to promote capable officers to higher positions.
This thoroughly Machiavellian application of “Divide and Rule,” Service wrote, “may have seemed to Chiang to be his only alternative. Being itself weak, the only hope of the Central Government, by this limited view, was in weakening—and keeping weak and disunited—all the opposition groups. ‘Unity,’ to Chiang obviously means domination.”

  Service and the other diplomatic pros made a major mistake, which was to become starry-eyed about Mao, to stress the “democratic” impulses of the CCP, to miss utterly the repression of dissent that the Communists engaged in even as they called on the KMT to respect civil rights. They were duped by the Communists. There is no avoiding that conclusion. But they were in no way pro-Communist, as Hurley and the committees of witch-hunters would later allege in their efforts to blame them for “losing” China. The term that Hurley insisted on applying to them—“disloyal”—was an ugly slander. Not until forty years later, when a new generation of China experts was able to go to China again, would the United States enjoy such a consistently high level of reporting and analysis on China as was provided by Service, Ludden, Davies, Atcheson, Rice, John Emmerson, and the others who were removed from their posts in Hurley’s purge.

  At the beginning of April, still in Washington, Hurley gave a widely covered press conference, watched attentively in Chungking and Yenan, announcing in no uncertain terms that there would be no aid to the Communists, because such aid would be equivalent to recognizing another Chinese government other than the one the United States was pledged to support. Hurley threw in a statement of his usual optimism, saying that the various parties in China were “drawing closer together” and that his goal of unity was achievable. But the main message was that, until this unity could be achieved, there would be no “fostering or assisting the development of armed Chinese Communists.” This declaration was inconsistent with the position paper that the State Department had given Wedemeyer only weeks before, but nobody emerged to contradict the man the press referred to as Major-General Hurley.