China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  He was a good-looking young man, intense, ambitious, extremely intelligent. There is a photograph taken of him when he was about twenty wearing the high-collared robe of a young scholar, his expression serious and determined as he looks at the camera through wire-rimmed spectacles. He was a very good student, and in 1907 he received a scholarship to study at Yale University, a dream come true. What tremendous benefit that could have both for him and for his country, to which he intended to return.

  Ma was the beneficiary of American idealism directed toward China, its earnest wish to help it overcome the decrepitude and decay of its recent history. After the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century, China, prostrate and humiliated, was forced to pay an immense indemnity to make up for the damage done and lives taken by the Boxers. The United States, alone among the recipients of this money, put its share into a scholarship fund for Chinese students. That was where the funds came from for Ma to get his BA in economics at Yale, which he did in 1911, just as the last dynasty, the Qing, was being overthrown. Then, in 1914, as the rest of the world was tumbling into the Great War, he received a PhD at Columbia University in economics and philosophy.

  Equipped with new ideas and with the prestige that these degrees conferred, Ma, now a thorough man of the world, returned to a China where revolutionary ideas were gripping the minds of the country’s best young people, Ma included. He experienced the disorder and violence of the warlord years but also the excitement of the reunification of much of the country under the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek. Eager to participate in the country’s resurgence, he helped found a new institution of higher education, the Chinese College of Commerce, in Shanghai, and he became president of the Chinese Economics Society, where he began to advocate the idea that economic growth and democracy went together, that you couldn’t succeed in the first without the openness, the exchange of ideas, and the freedoms of the second.

  Ma supported the Kuomintang for a time, but during the 1930s he became a critic of Chiang’s authoritarian, undemocratic tendencies, and in 1940, in the midst of the Japanese war, Chiang’s security services put him under house arrest and banned him from public activities. He spent the next five years under this ban, but was not forgotten by other Chinese writers and teachers, members of the small, often western-educated elite that enjoyed great prestige though no power in China, who tended to share Ma’s loss of faith in the KMT and its ability to command a bright future for his country.

  At the end of 1944, the ruling party, feeling the pressure both from its own intellectuals and from the United States to relax its repressive policies, released Ma from house arrest. If the government was hoping that this gesture would turn a grateful Ma into a supporter, it was grievously mistaken. He made his first public appearance at a meeting of what was called the Friday Dinner Gathering, which was held in a ballroom in Chungking. This was a regular event sponsored by progressive merchants and businessmen and attended by hundreds of people whose purpose was to meet each other and exchange views about that most preoccupying question: China’s present plight and future prospects.

  All the seats in the hall were occupied when the lights suddenly brightened and the evening’s host walked in with Ma, dressed in a sky-blue satin robe. “Tonight, we will welcome Professor Ma Yinchu and celebrate his new-gained freedom,” the host, Wu Gengmei, announced, and the audience, apparently not having been informed that Ma would be among them that night, broke into enthusiastic applause.

  Ma took the floor, thanking the assembly for its welcome, and then assured it that he had made no deal with the government in exchange for his release. “I, Ma Yinchu, am still the old disobedient Ma Yinchu,” he began. As a price for the termination of his detention, the authorities had banned him from giving speeches, he said, even as he plunged ahead with a speech. It was entitled, typically for Ma, “China’s Industrialization Is Inseparable from Democracy,” and it was a public chastisement of his audience and of people like himself for a kind of moral and practical apathy. There are people, he said, “who hide in the Great Rear Area [the unoccupied zones of China], consume farmer’s rice, and deploy farmer’s sons to risk their lives, who eat fish and meat, wear silk and satin, live in tall buildings, and drive cars” at a time when China urgently needed altruistic civic involvement and self-sacrifice. Ma’s words were harsh and unsparing, like those of an Old Testament prophet, lambasting China’s “leading citizens” for being “cruel and rapacious” and for “plundering the wealth of people at this moment of life and death” while so many other people suffered the death, poverty, and dislocation of the war. China’s real heroes, Ma declared, were the peasants, the millions who “lost their arms and legs, bled or were killed by famine and pestilence, or struggled between the gullies.”

  There was something in this speech and even in the academic-sounding title of it that echoed of the recent past and prefigured later events in China, after the Communists had taken power. China had never been a democracy, not in its entire four thousand years of recorded history, but its modern intellectuals like Ma wanted it to be. Earlier in the century, the dominant slogan among students and intellectuals looking for ways to build a new country was “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.” The science part of it would lift the country out of the morass of useless custom and superstition. Lu Xun (formerly transcribed as Lu Hsun), China’s leading twentieth-century writer, wrote a powerful story about a sick boy whose parents used the last of their money buying the only medicine that, they were told, could cure him, a steamed bun dipped in the blood of a freshly killed child. For Lu, this grim medical hoax symbolized the country’s larger imprisonment in ignorant tradition, in the desperation of the poor, in the power of family patriarchs, the subordination of women, the virtual enslavement of daughters by their mothers-in-law, who themselves were victims of one of the country’s darkest and at the time still widely observed practices, footbinding. Science could cure China of these multiple afflictions. It was why Ma Yinchu had studied metallurgy.

  And then there was Minzhu Xiansheng, Mr. Democracy, which alone could detach China from stultifying authority, enliven it with a sense of civic engagement, and awaken the unused energies of its people. Hence Ma’s idea that industrialization was inseparable from democracy, that the country couldn’t create a modern economy with a premodern political system. “The world has already become democratic,” he said. “All countries must take the democratic path after the war ends, or they will not be able to guarantee their own survival and independence.”

  For “democracy,” Ma does not seem to have had in mind a western-style electoral system. For him democracy was a focus on popular welfare, especially the welfare of the rural masses, and in this he clearly believed that the Communists were more in tune with national needs than the Nationalists. The Communists accepted Mr. Science, especially after the death of Mao in 1976. They called it the Four Modernizations. But they rejected Mr. Democracy, and this led, in 1978, to another dissident slogan, coined by an electrician named Wei Jingsheng who worked at the Beijing Zoo. It was “Democracy: The Fifth Modernization,” and whether Wei knew it or not, the main idea of his slogan came directly from Ma Yinchu’s speech at that Friday Dinner Gathering in Chungking in 1944. The irony is that for all the nasty authoritarianism of the Kuomintang in 1944 and 1945, Ma was able to continue to voice his opinions. Even though he was supposedly banned from making speeches, he did make them, at that meeting of the Friday Dinner Gathering and later at other events. As for Wei Jingsheng, living under Communist Party rule in 1979 in a country suffering no foreign assault, after a closed and secret trial, he was arrested and sent to prison for a total of eighteen years.

  For the remaining months of the war in 1945, while the United States tried to figure out what its China policy should be—whether total support of Chiang Kai-shek or a balanced policy that included arms aid to the Communists—Ma was denouncing the Kuomintang but not the Communists, who were a lot closer to his peasant heroes than the
KMT was. At a meeting of the Chinese Muslim Association in Chungking in March, Ma used the rather strange metaphor of a vacuum tube to lament the absence in China of a great political leader. Of course, Chiang Kai-shek was supposed to be exactly such a leader, but Ma likened him to a device that is empty inside and refuses to heed anything on the outside. “The ‘Vacuum Tube’ I was talking about was him—Chiang Kai-shek,” Ma said, lest he be misunderstood.

  Still later, in an article published in the pro-Communist Xinhua Daily in Chungking, there was Ma again, this time “trembling with fear” for his country as he chastised his fellow countrymen for tolerating the intolerable—the desperate poverty in the streets, the millions of hungry people, the disease, the famine, the deaths, the filth. And while this terrible suffering was taking place, the country’s leaders “still want to solicit grains and recruit soldiers, driving paupers to the battlefields of ice and snow where they risk their lives for ‘them.’ ”

  Ma’s brave and tough criticism seems, especially from the vantage point of decades later, to have been willfully and erroneously one-sided. There are no harsh words in his speeches or articles about Mao’s Communists, though they were to prove far more repressive than the KMT. But Ma felt that Chiang had reached a point of hopelessness, while the Communists, both fresh and distant, seemed a cleaner and brighter alternative. This was a mixed and complicated matter in China as the great war in Asia came to an end and a new war loomed, between the weakened Kuomintang and the strengthened Communists. There were many in the country who feared the Communists, who criticized them for their subservience to the Soviet Union, and who were aware of their heavy-handed attempts within their own ranks to silence or intimidate truly independent writers and thinkers. Ironically, it was among left-wing writers who identified with the Communists or who belonged to the highly influential League of Left-Wing Writers, which received instructions from the party’s cultural bureaucrats, that the awareness of the CCP’s intolerance of dissent was most acute. During the 1930s, there were ferocious quarrels between these bureaucrats and some of China’s best-known and most beloved writers, including, most conspicuously, Lu Xun, the most prominent of them all.

  Still, among most intellectuals—or, in the absence of precise data on this, what seemed to have been most writers and thinkers—it was the Kuomintang that caught their fire for the simple reason that the Kuomintang was in power, and had been in power for nearly two authoritarian decades. As the war came to an end, not very many people either inside China or outside it—except for the more prescient analysts like Service and Davies—predicted that within a few short years the KMT would escape to Taiwan and the Communists take power. The central government seemed strong. It had a huge army, including thirty-nine top-flight divisions being trained and equipped by the United States, while the CCP was still perceived to be a poorly armed mass of guerrillas. The government enjoyed a total monopoly among armed Chinese forces in air and sea power, and, of course, it maintained a many-tentacled secret police organization. So when Ma and others disparaged the KMT, while remaining silent about the CCP, it was in part because they were willing to give the Communists the benefit of the doubt and in part because they saw the KMT as the government of China likely to remain in place indefinitely, while the Communists were a faraway rival merely asking at that point to be included in a coalition.

  Moreover, there were bitter memories among these people of the Kuomintang’s violent attacks on writers and thinkers during the years when Chiang was consolidating his power and terror reigned in the places where artistic creation and intellectual ferment were taking place, Shanghai especially. These were men largely unknown to or forgotten by Chiang’s avid supporters outside of China, like Qu Qiubai and Hu Yepin, leftist writers and poets, men of eloquence and passion, who sided with the Communists in the early years and were arrested by Chiang’s secret police and killed by firing squads during the 1930s. These events were not forgotten in China, especially among what might be called the cognoscenti, the writers, poets, and playwrights—Lao She, the author of the celebrated novel Rickshaw Boy, is a prominent example—who began to find their voices with the end of the war and who tended to give the Communists but not Chiang Kai-shek the benefit of the doubt. Lu Xun himself always despised Chiang as a dictator, and this dislike was shared by the left-leaning Shanghai intelligentsia that in 1945 was beginning to envisage a future without the Japanese occupying army. And then there were the suspicions, the sense of alienation, and the fears of the KMT felt by members of what came to be called the third force, the people like Ma Yinchu, often educated in the United States, who didn’t become Communists but who watched with growing disillusionment and anger the KMT’s continued recourse to the tools of repression. And, finally, there were the students, imbued, as young people generally are, with a kind of idealistic impatience, furious at the slothfulness, the corruption, the arrogance of a government that was unable to defend the country, compared to the Communists, who were believed to be waging courageous guerrilla warfare against the hated occupier.

  “China is now divided into two countries: the democratic China, composed of various parties under the leadership of the Communist Party, and the Fascist dictatorship of the Kuomintang,” read a letter from students at Fudan University, handed over to the American vice president, Henry Wallace, when he was on an official visit to Chiang in the summer of 1944. “The former is positively carrying on the war and protecting the people, while the latter sits back and oppresses the people.”

  And so, when the war ended, it was difficult to find independent-minded people ready to proclaim Chiang’s heroism or brilliance. No doubt, millions of Chinese still lionized Chiang, still saw him as the symbol of the wartime refusal to surrender, as the man on the white horse brandishing that sword of patriotic defiance. But the public defection of the immensely prestigious Ma Yinchu, of many of the country’s other famous writers and scholars, and of thousands of restive students suggested a weakness at the core, and it was a weakness that the only other armed force in the country knew how to use for its advantage.

  All over China, the sudden surrender of Japan announced itself in different ways, but the reaction was the same: joy followed by a sober realization that for China almost nothing had been settled by the victory and that, at worst, another war loomed. At a prison camp for American and Allied soldiers in Manchuria, a Japanese lieutenant announced at the morning roll call, “By order of the emperor, the war is amicably terminated.” The word “amicably” brought raucous, bitter laughter from the soldiers. Most Americans and most Asians had thought the war would go on for a lot longer, but it was shortened by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, and the simultaneous entry into the war of the Soviet Union, which, in accordance with the promise Stalin made to Roosevelt at Yalta, invaded Manchuria on the day after the Hiroshima bomb.

  “Yenan boiled over,” Shi Zhe, Mao’s Russian translator, remembered, as news of the end of the war reached the Communists’ headquarters:

  There were red flags all over, in the center [of Yenan] and the surrounding mountains, drums beating, fireworks exploding, and people throwing their hats into the air. The farmers gave away apples and pears, and people who didn’t know each other hugged and danced. That night the mountains and fields were seas of fire and floods of joy. Eight years of hard fighting against the Japanese finally ended with success. The carnival went on for three days.

  The unexpectedness of the end intensified the euphoria that engulfed China, though the giddy mood was tempered by the agonies of the war’s dreadful aftermath. “In mid to late August, people around the country were showered in happiness and rebirth and people in the occupied zone celebrated until sunrise,” recalled Chu Anping, a young writer for a new magazine called Keguan, or Objectivity, one of the many new journals that sprang into existence when the end of the war led the government to relax its strict censorship rules. On the evening of August 10, there were fireworks displays all ov
er China. The head of a government office in Chungking spent ten thousand Chinese yuan on fireworks. “Most of the people, especially government employees, students, merchants, and other so-called people of the upper class threw themselves into a swirl of revelry,” wrote Lu Ling, an essayist and playwright, remembering the short-lived euphoria that came with the enemy’s surrender. College students sang lines from “La Marseillaise.” Drums were set up on the streets; the din of hardwood clappers and cymbals, used in Sichuan opera, filled the crowded streets.

  Within hours, American planes appeared in China’s skies to drop parachute packs of food and medicine into prisoner-of-war camps. In Shanghai, Theodore White rode down Bubbling Well Road from the airport and found it jammed with Chinese “cheering, waving little American and Nationalist flags.” At the waterfront, where the peddlers usually sold dried fish, they were offering silk-screened portraits of Chiang Kai-shek, one small sign that the Gimo was still regarded as the man who had seen China through its ordeal. The White Russian owner of a cabaret offered free drinks to any American in uniform, as well as his “choice of any woman in the house, any race, any color, any size—and he had them all.”

  This was more than the end of a war. There was a sense of a new era dawning and the ending of an old one that had begun with the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century and included China’s defeat by Japan in 1895—the era of Chinese humiliation. In his memoirs, the writer Xia Yan, a senior editor for the Xinhua Daily and a founder, with Lu Xun, of the League of Left-Wing Writers, listed the elements of national shame related specifically to Japan: there was the loss of Taiwan in the first Sino-Japanese war; the Twenty-One Demands of 1915, when China acceded to Japan’s sphere of influence in the northeast; the Mukden Incident of 1931, when Japan seized Manchuria; the bombing and occupation of Shanghai that year; the Marco Polo Bridge Incident six years later, when Japan signaled its intent to conquer all of China. “This near hundred years of humiliating history had finally come to an end,” Xia wrote. “The entire Xinhua Daily staff went crazy. Actually all of Chungking, all of China went crazy.”