China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  So did other Chinese units, all along the seventy-five-mile-long front of the Japanese attack. When a large gap appeared in the front northwest of Shanmen, a Chinese army, the 18th, moved in and prevented an enemy breakthrough. Elsewhere along the front, Chinese units were “holding well, and replying to every Japanese gain with counterattacks.” Meanwhile something rare in the struggle against Japan was occurring. Zhijiang became one of a string of bases stretching all the way to Kunming, where supplies poured in. A field hospital was established to care for the wounded, and a vehicle maintenance company was set up so that damaged supply trucks could be fixed and continue to function. A network of supply points extended out from Zhijiang on both roads and navigable streams. Food, weapons—submachine guns, 60-millimeter mortars, Bren guns—ammunition, and even summer uniforms arrived at those points and then were distributed by truck or sampan to the Chinese troops, even as portable surgical hospitals were set up to the rear of the front.

  The fighting continued for months in this Chinese backwater. Eventually, eight base hospitals were operating so wounded Chinese soldiers got medical attention rather than being left to die as had happened so often during this long war. Rice came in by boat from the Dongting Lake area to the northeast and was distributed by truck to the troops, so there was no need for another of the malign practices common among Chinese soldiers, stealing food from local villages or going desperately hungry. An army does indeed travel on its stomach, a basic and elementary point that often seemed lost on Chinese Nationalist armies, but not in the battle for Zhijiang.

  Meanwhile, as the experience of Colonel Jones indicated, there was good cooperation between Chinese commanders and their American advisers. Stilwell’s frustrations in 1942 in Burma, where his orders were ignored or countermanded by Chiang, were not repeated in western Hunan in 1945. One liaison officer, Colonel George L. Goodridge, who had arrived in February to help with the training of Chinese troops, reported, “Whenever the situation changed, the general called the liaison officer to the map and after explaining the situation, asked for his opinion.… In most cases the ensuing order followed along the lines of the plan suggested by the liaison officer.”

  On May 2, at the entrance to the Wuyang Valley, on the southern route of the Japanese advance, the Chinese Fifth Division directly faced the enemy. A decision was made, with the agreement of American advisers, to attempt an encirclement, which, the official history says, “was a complete success,” with “a fair amount of Japanese equipment including artillery, some documents, and six prisoners” seized. In the days ahead, China’s 121st Division moved north and succeeded in turning the Japanese left flank. Other units streamed down from the north and cut behind the Japanese concentrations, forcing the enemy to find ways to retreat.

  On May 11, the 11th Division of the Chinese 18th Army captured a Japanese supply dump along with five hundred horses. Meanwhile, seeing the magnitude of the effort that would be required to avoid defeat, and aware of the orders of Imperial General Headquarters to redeploy toward the coast, Okamura decided against sending in reinforcements and ordered his forces to withdraw from the Zhijiang campaign.

  Around this time, apparently sensing an opportunity, Chiang Kai-shek did what he had done so often before. He sent orders to his commanding general, He Yingqin, to seize the city of Hengyang in central Hunan province. This was exactly the kind of aggressiveness and boldness that Americans, most notably Stilwell, felt Chiang always lacked. Still, it was interference, and Wedemeyer, learning of the order, reminded the Gimo that he, Wedemeyer, couldn’t very well coordinate the overall battle if Chiang was giving orders to his generals without telling him about them. The Chinese, Wedemeyer also said, weren’t ready for an operation on the scale required to retake Hengyang. Chiang backed down, saying that he hadn’t issued an order but only expressed an opinion. In other words, Wedemeyer had managed what the irascible Stilwell had failed to do, which was persuade China’s president and commander in chief not to meddle.

  By June 7, the fight to hold Zhijiang was over. The Japanese had retreated to their original positions. The battle for Zhijiang has to be counted among the successes of the Chinese. The immediate threat to Chungking and Kunming was averted. The way for further moves east toward Canton and Hong Kong by the Chinese lay open. The Japanese lost 1,500 men killed and 5,000 wounded. Chinese casualties were higher—nearly 7,000 dead and 12,000 wounded—but the Chinese had had many more troops in the fight than the Japanese. Assessing their failure, the Japanese command attributed it to the “great advance” the Chinese had made. And this came even though the battle had broken out well before the training program envisaged by Alpha was finished.

  “Real progress was being made in China theater,” the official history concludes. The Chinese had adopted procedures “contrary to their accepted practices” and this “reflected credit upon both their spirit of cooperation and the powers of persuasion of Wedemeyer, McClure, and their staffs.” Not everything went well. The Americans in particular cited the Chinese tendency to allow surrounded Japanese units to escape, which was a time-honored practice in Chinese warfare. The Thirty-Six Stratagems, written at a different time and under different circumstances, aims to avoid the costs of battle by always leaving open to the enemy a path of retreat. China’s Nationalists adhered to this tradition, to the irritation of their American advisers. But they had also shown that, when properly equipped and led, they could fight with the best of them.

  This demonstration, moreover, came at a time when many American observers, encouraged in this view by the Communists, were in a state of what they regarded as realistic despair about Chiang’s armies, believing that they were hopelessly inadequate and would always refuse to fight. Hadn’t Mao told Barrett that the KMT’s troops were turning and running away rather than fighting the Japanese? Here was one important instance, in a new situation, where they stood, fought, and won.

  But there was something else as well, something truly sinister and sensational at the same time, and that was to haunt any sort of free discussion of China for years to come. It was an episode that came to be called the Amerasia spy case, which was to affect all of the China experts, but John Service most directly and most devastatingly. It all began in January 1945 when a small but influential journal, Amerasia, read by many of those professionally interested in Asia, whether in the State Department or universities, published a report innocuously titled “British Imperial Policy in Asia.”

  The article was read by Kenneth Wells, who worked in the South Asia department of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wells noted that some sections of the report were almost verbatim copies of parts of a report that he had written on British-American relations in Southeast Asia. Wells’s report had been classified; it was secret. And Wells wanted to know how Amerasia had gotten it. So did the FBI, which put the editors of Amerasia under surveillance and, in an illegal operation, broke into the magazine’s offices in an effort to discover the presumably traitorous sources of the leak.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mao the God, Service the Spy

  While Hurley purged the Chungking embassy of its best China hands, Mao Zedong was enjoying the fruits of his own purge and Rectification Campaign of the previous two years, having himself crowned the demigod of the Chinese revolution. From then on, he was to be much more than a first among equals, more than just a charismatic and respected party leader. From now on, he was to be a genius of a sort of papal infallibility, a giant of history, a magnificent hero bringing light and hope to what would otherwise be a dark and oppressive world. A catchy and tuneful anthem, composed in 1943, put it this way (it rhymes in Mandarin Chinese):

  The East is Red,

  The sun is rising,

  China has produced a Mao Zedong.

  He serves the welfare of the people,

  He is our great savior.

  Mao’s apotheosis was a gradual thing, built on a series of victories in the inte
rnal struggles for power that had always taken place inside the Communist movement, but it reached its culmination at the Seventh National Representative Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which opened in April 1945, and whose five hundred delegates obediently elected Mao chairman of all of the CCP’s ruling bodies—the Central Committee, the Secretariat, the Politburo, and the Military Council—thus concentrating power into a single leader’s hands in a way that had never been done in the history of Chinese Communism. But as important as Mao’s formal posts was the nonstop adulation, the continuous and fulsome praise of Mao that was a mandatory ritual for the Communists’ assembly. Those party figures who had previously held enough power and influence to rival Mao inside the top leadership confessed that they had been mistaken to oppose him in the past, and they pledged their loyalty in the future.

  This secular deification blended some of China’s own imperial customs with practices originating with Comrade Stalin and found useful by his most important acolyte, Mao. The previous spring, the Chinese leader had been invited to plant the first grain of millet, replicating the ritual of centuries past when the emperor symbolically plowed the first furrow. But the cult of Mao’s personality was also an almost inevitable feature of twentieth-century totalitarianism, adopted by dictators of the right, like Mussolini and Hitler, and those of the left, Mao himself as well as the Vietnamese Communist Ho Chi Minh and the North Korean “genius of all mankind,” Kim Il Sung. In the case of the revolutionary left, this exaltation of the leader derived from the notion of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the proletariat, with the Great Leader serving as the indispensable vanguard of the vanguard, the embodiment of history’s inevitable progress toward the proletarian ideal. Of course, it also served the goal of unopposed power by the party and the delegitimation of any opposition, which is the reason China’s Communists today keep Mao on a pedestal, despite their acknowledgment of his many mistakes.

  The irony of Mao’s apotheosis in 1945 is that it took place at the very time that the Communists were expressing outrage over the KMT’s one-party dictatorship and the excessive, dictatorial concentration of power in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek. The CCP raised Mao to superhuman and superlegal status even as it made its demands in Hurley’s negotiations that Chiang share power in a democratic coalition, that political prisoners be released, the Nationalists’ secret police curbed, and freedom of the press restored. The party laid the groundwork for Mao’s elevation to all-powerful dictator even as it made reassurances to the Americans in the Dixie Mission and to Hurley that the Communists’ intentions were entirely democratic.

  The Seventh Congress was held in an auditorium in Yenan that rang with chants of “Long Live Chairman Mao” (echoing the “Long Live” chants that for centuries had greeted China’s emperors). The proscenium arch bore the slogan in large Chinese characters meaning “March forward under the banner of Mao Zedong.” For the first time Mao Zedong Thought—known in Chinese as Mao Zedong sixiang—was written into the constitution as an official pillar of Chinese Communist ideology, given equal status with Marxism-Leninism. Liu Shaoqi, chosen number two in the party, made one of the major addresses of the congress, almost every paragraph of which was laden with boilerplate phrases about the brilliance of Mao’s leadership, the correctness of his policies, and the need to study his thought. Mao had prepared carefully for this event. About half of the party members originally chosen to be delegates at the Seventh Congress had been purged during the Rectification Campaign that had ended a few months before and then been replaced by new delegates screened by a party leadership to be sure they had been cleansed of any dissatisfaction with the cult of Mao.

  Just before the congress’s opening, Mao had presided over a Central Committee plenum that adopted a lengthy text called “Resolution on Certain Historical Questions.” The purpose of this document was retroactively to find Mao’s policies of the past correct in every instance. This supposedly scientific and scholarly substantiation of the Great Leader’s legitimacy came straight from Soviet practice. In 1938, his own apotheosis complete after the Great Purge, Stalin published his History of the CPSU (Bolshevik), Short Course that stigmatized his past rivals and declared all his own policies to have been correct. Stalin’s short course was translated into Chinese and made mandatory reading for political indoctrination. It is not enough in a totalitarian system for the Great Leader to eliminate all opposition and to establish his cult of infallibility; he also has to give a scientific gloss to the eradication of any intellectual foundation for opposition. Accordingly, as preparation for the Seventh Congress of the CCP and the adoption of Mao’s official history as party doctrine, even Wang Ming, the most powerful, prestigious, and recalcitrant of his past rivals, admitted that his past opposition to Mao was an ideological error. In exchange for this gesture, Mao held up the congress’s opening session until Wang, who was ill, could be wheeled on a gurney into the meeting hall.

  If Mao had had his way in the matter, he would have cashiered Wang entirely, severed him from the party, and perhaps put him in prison, but it was at Stalin’s insistence that he didn’t carry out these wishes. There is an obscure element of score-settling here, dating to the vicious Kuomintang-Communist struggles of years before. At the end of 1943, Mao wrote to Georgi Dimitrov, the head of the Comintern (which was abolished in May 1943, though Stalin, often through Dimitrov, continued to have unofficial ways of giving instruction to Communist parties around the world), charging Wang with having “engaged in various anti-party activities.” Wang had once been arrested in Shanghai, Mao said, and while he was in prison, he admitted that he was a party member, after which he was released. The implication was that Wang Ming had been turned by the KMT and was possibly a double agent. It was the sort of vague charge of disloyalty that Kang Sheng specialized in as he rooted out Mao’s enemies real and imagined and subjected them to reeducation during the Rectification Campaign. Now Mao seemed to be applying it to his chief rival in the party.

  But Wang had lived in Moscow for several years, and he had his own contacts there, including with Dimitrov, and for several months in 1943 both he and Mao were sending messages to the headquarters of the global revolution asking for support of their position in what was otherwise an internal Chinese Communist matter. Wang’s letters to Dimitrov accused Mao of being an “anti-Leninist” and a “Trotskyite,” both grave, veritably mortal accusations in the world of international Communism. Dimitrov, no doubt at Stalin’s insistence, issued a Solomonic judgment in this matter, throwing his support to Mao in the Chinese power struggle, but asking Mao not to sever Wang from the party. Mao, for the sake of “unity,” complied with this wish.

  The episode is a further demonstration of the closeness of the relations between the two Communist parties, and the higher status of the Soviet party. Mao adhered to Moscow’s wishes even in this case of a rival whom he had accused of being a traitor. In subsequent years, after the death of Stalin and the Sino-Soviet split, Mao would suffer no such moderating influence, and his attacks on former close colleagues would end in their disgrace and humiliation. These former close colleagues included the aforementioned Liu Shaoqi, who showered adulation on Mao and the Seventh Congress but who was savagely persecuted later by the young people whom Mao incited to acts of mob violence during the Cultural Revolution. Liu was publicly beaten, denounced as a “capitalist-roader,” a “revisionist,” and a KMT agent, and allowed to die of untreated diabetes.

  Wang signed on to the compromise brokered by Moscow in 1945, abjectly admitting that policies he had previously claimed credit for were “Mao Zedong’s contribution, not mine as I had earlier believed.” It was all in the spirit of the moment. “Resolution on Certain Historical Questions” made Mao the hero of every major success of the Communist Party, even when, in historical fact, Mao had had nothing to do with that success or even opposed the thinking that had led to it. “Resolution,” for example, gave credit to Mao for the battle of Pingxingguan of 1937, a minor and rare victory ov
er the Japanese aggressors much celebrated in Communist lore, though it was fought at a time when Mao, in contrast to Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, opposed using Communist forces in direct engagements with the Japanese.

  In one major respect, the congress must have been a confusing event for at least some of those attending it. On the one hand there was the conspicuously undemocratic concentration of power in the hands of one of the most illiberal Great Leaders of all time, a concentration that was itself the fruit of the ruthless suppression of any wayward thoughts or tendencies that others engaged in. To be sure, Mao’s ascendency was due in significant measure to his extraordinary leadership and to the fact that the movement under his command had not only survived but also expanded remarkably during the Japanese war. But this ascendency was also due to Mao’s extraordinary ability to outmaneuver his potential rivals for power by gathering around himself a hard core of avid supporters who saw to it that his writ was enforced. Every member of the Communist movement in Yenan knew that Mao’s commanding position was sustained by terror, repression, imprisonment, reeducation, and purges, administered by Kang Sheng’s secret internal security apparatus.

  But in his speeches at the Seventh Congress, Mao made repeated and emphatic assurances that the Chinese Communist Party favored a democratic system and that it would never favor a Soviet-style one-party state. Those words “democracy” and “democratic” appeared and reappeared in every one of Mao’s statements. “Beyond all doubt,” Mao declared in his major speech, a nearly book-length text that must have taken hours to read aloud, “the urgent need is to … establish a provisional democratic coalition government for the purpose of instituting democratic reforms,” after which “it will be necessary to convene a national assembly on a broad democratic basis and set up a formally constituted democratic government.” This, in turn, “will lead the liberated people of the whole country in building an independent, free, democratic, united, prosperous and powerful new China.”