Chiang Kai-shek learned that the struggle for national survival was over while having dinner with some senior officials and the ambassador of Mexico in Chungking. He and his companions heard cheering and firecrackers from the nearby United States military headquarters. They investigated and learned that Japan had given up. A few days later, Chiang made a radio speech to the Chinese people jubilant over the great victory and, in a show of magnanimity, instructed his people not to exact vengeance against the many hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops and civilians in China. He sent his chief of staff, He Yingqin, to Nanjing to accept the formal document of surrender from General Okamura, and the day after that, Chinese troops entered Nanjing, the first time in seven years that any Chinese authority except the puppet government had set foot in what had been the national capital. “I am very optimistic,” Chiang told Time in an interview, part of a rhapsodic cover story on China at war’s end that declared the country had never before “been so close to an era of peace and progress.” And at the top of it all, the magazine declared, “moved the alert, taut, indefatigable Generalissimo, the first architect of victory and now the first hope of peace.”
China, however, was materially devastated, deeply divided, and backward, and the rhapsody of victory was soon replaced by a sober and anxious assessment of the problems that lay ahead. The tremendous progress it had made in the ten years of relatively stable Kuomintang government between 1927 and 1937 had been wiped out, except in Manchuria, which was soon to be systematically stripped of most of its industry by the Russians. Most of the railways were out of operation. Shipping was crippled. The roads were terrible, the bridges and tunnels wrecked, farms were saddled with shortages of everything they needed, from draft animals to fertilizer. All over China, millions of refugees, on the move from their places of wartime refuge to their homes, were without resources or work and faced with a roaring inflation that was making whatever money they had nearly worthless. Already by late 1945 the wheelbarrow had become the common mode of conveyance for money, because so much of it was needed. In November in Shanghai, a rickshaw race was held for public amusement. Chinese, White Russian, and American women sat in the rickshaws, which were decorated with crepe paper and banners and pulled by Chinese coolies. The winning coolie got seven million Chinese dollars, which was equivalent to twenty-two American dollars, and when he put it in his rickshaw to take away, it took up the same space as the passenger he’d just discharged.
Chiang himself actually had a firmer grip on reality than Henry Luce and the other editors of Time writing about him in New York. “Everybody takes this as a day of glory,” he wrote in his diary. “I alone feel great shame and sorrow.”
He doesn’t explain why he felt that way, but the devastation of his country must have weighed heavily on Chiang’s mind, the ruination of the great plans he’d had for China when he’d established his government in Nanjing eighteen years earlier. Had it not been for the Japanese invasion, Chiang Kai-shek would almost surely have been president of a unified country with the Communist revolt quelled, national sovereignty fully restored, and the most populous country on the planet on its way to being a significant world power. Instead, he had to worry that rather than enjoy rewards from his stubborn eight-year refusal to surrender to Japan, he would face an even greater challenge to his rule. Stalin and Mao, as he put it in his diary, could “plunge China into chaos and anarchy.”
Chiang was not alone in this worry. The end-of-war euphoria was quickly replaced by the fear that a new civil war would soon follow. Aside from that, for intellectual leaders like Ma Yinchu there was the more general anguish about the country’s miserable condition. “I was excited for a while,” the left-wing poet and essayist Hu Feng wrote later, remembering the carnival atmosphere in Kunming, the firecrackers exploding, the crowds massing in the streets, the American jeeps flooding into the downtown areas, “but I cooled down pretty quickly.” Hu had studied in Japan in the 1930s and was a prominent member of the League of Left-Wing Writers after returning to China, a friend of Lu Xun, a critic of the Communist apparatchiks who tried to impose an ideological orthodoxy on the dissenting culture, an opponent of censorship. “Japan, China’s nemesis for ten years has fallen, but how can China stand on its own in the future? … The victory can cloud people’s minds, but, sadly, my mind isn’t susceptible to being clouded.”
“Within these few weeks,” Chu Anping, the commentator at Keguan, wrote, referring to the few weeks in September and October after the end of the war, “the lands that were once occupied for seven or eight years have been occupied for a second time,” this time by “indescribably unethical and incompetent national officials.” The country was in terrible condition on every civilian front, he wrote. “Our finances in the recuperated areas are in tatters, and in the great rear areas they are chaotic. Industry is bankrupt. There are closed shops everywhere.… Transportation is a tangle and in the past three months, even the shipping on the Yangzi River hasn’t recovered its normal state. At first there was a lot of regulation; now there are a lot of black markets.”
Most ominously, Chu wrote, the civil war that both the KMT and the CCP promised they wanted to avoid was already occurring, and the laobaixing, the ordinary people, who yearn for peace, “can’t do anything but sigh.” The KMT was corrupt and exhausted, devoid of “vital young people,” while the CCP, as he put it, demonstrated “excessive support of the values of another country,” namely Russia.
For months following V-J Day, literally millions of people were on the loose, trying to get home from the places they’d fled to during the war. At what had been a small stop on the Lunghai Railroad, the major east–west line that had been bombed and strafed repeatedly during the war, an immense crowd of refugees had gathered with no place to go. It rained heavily for days, and so people turned the teahouses, drinking places, restaurants, and other shops along a small market street into dormitories. Two locomotives exploded in the station, causing hundreds of casualties. People lucky enough to get on trains found that the trains’ roofs were full of holes. “The waiting area has become a little river,” a visiting journalist, Dong Luoyu, reported, “and people urinated and more than urinated around the station so the stench is terrible.” What China needs, he wrote, is “revolutionary change, a new spirit, but what we see offers no promise.”
Dong moved east along the railroad line, finding that the walls of villages had been destroyed, grass was growing everywhere, “and all we could see were abandoned grass shacks and barely a human trace.” This was a consequence of the flood and famine of 1943, when the government had broken the Yellow River dikes trying to stop the Japanese advance. “The trees along the roads near the village were all stripped of bark because the people had eaten it,” Dong wrote. “Victory has arrived, but a month later there’s no substantial return of people or any rebuilding.” It’s only when he got all the way to the coast and the former German colony of Qingdao, where detachments of American marines had landed, that he found anything hopeful. “The market is full of laughter and chatting. American friends are always so youthful and energetic.”
The places that suffered the least were those that had been seized by Japan early in the war and thus avoided being the scenes of battle. In big cities like Qingdao, Beijing, and Shanghai, all scenes of decadent collaborationism during the war, there was less wholesale wreckage than in areas like Changsha and Guilin—but life nonetheless underwent a kaleidoscope of changes. Goods hoarded for the entire war suddenly appeared on the market, like shiny American cars, all of them from 1941, the last year before Pearl Harbor. “Shanghai was bulging,” the American scholar Owen Lattimore wrote, with such items as American electrical appliances that had been almost impossible to get in the United States itself, but had been hoarded in Shanghai by merchants who, in exchange for their cooperation with the Japanese occupier, had been able to seal their warehouses, which were now reopened. But even in Shanghai, then as now China’s richest city, the proliferation of goods didn’
t make up for all the things that were absent. For many the city seemed not newly opulent but bare, stripped down, because before they left, the Japanese had taken away everything from the light fixtures to the spigots. “It was a raw, unheated city,” according to one historian. “This place called Shanghai is very, very cold,” an American colonel, John Hart Caughey, wrote in a letter home, because “all the radiators are gone.” The Japanese, he said, “seemed to think that if they got all the scrap metal up into the vicinity of Manchuria that it would make for a Great East Asia Corporation and so they moved everything out.” Caughey, looking from his window in the Metropole Hotel (where hot water was provided three times a week), noted people “who walk along in a daze and poorly dressed. You know to look at them that they are about to freeze to death and no one pays the least bit of attention.” At the same time, the age-old Chinese custom of “squeeze,” a kind of normative corruption, took on new forms. A brisk extortion business emerged as Chinese who had remained behind in Shanghai or Beijing were made to pay fines or risk being accused of collaboration, whether they had collaborated or not. Officials sent by the KMT to recover factories that had been taken over by the Japanese during the war sold them off and pocketed the money.
An observant young Chinese journalist named Mei Huangzao wrote a series of articles on Shanghai for the Da Gong Bao describing what he called the postwar chaos and the inability of the government to regulate it. He reported a widespread, disillusioned remark heard on the streets: “The Shanghai that is out of the darkness isn’t as good as the Shanghai that was in the dark.” There were crowds everywhere competing for a paucity of services. “When the trolley arrives at the station, people jostle for position like soldiers advancing in a war.”
“There are a lot of robberies,” Mei wrote:
Three or five people form armed gangs and invade people’s houses. Incidents like that can always be seen in the newspaper. The officials won’t tolerate this. Right next to Jingansi Road, the world famous race track, has become the execution ground.… This reporter arrived in Shanghai on Novembre 22, and, according to my friends, the day before a group of criminals was executed. After a couple of days, another group was executed. In the first group there was a former company commander in the army, a Mr. Song, and his crime was to have led a group of people with weapons to steal gold bars from people’s houses.
The robberies were a consequence of unemployment. Poor, desperate men unwilling to “face the risk of the race track worked the crowded trolleys,” since picking pockets didn’t lead to execution. These petty criminals, Mei reported, were hauled to a police station and beaten if they got caught, and then they “resume their business and sharpen their skills. Such a spirit of daring should be attributed to their empty stomachs.” There were other problems. Hyperinflation was one of them, and the Shanghainese who had spent the war in the city blamed the free-spending habits of the returnees who had gone to Chungking during the war and who were now “buying up whatever they wanted” with the paper currency that was being printed by the government. There was impatience over the handling of what were called “traitors,” the people who had worked for the puppet government in Nanjing and who, according to public regulations, were supposed to be sent to courts for trial. But they were “just hanging around and nothing was being done with them,” Mei reported. Again, there is a sense here of inefficiency, malfeasance, and incompetence on the part of the authorities. “The reunion of the government and the people after eight years should be like the reunion of a father and a son after a long separation, but why does the government put on this mask of harshness and indifference as if they’re thousands of miles away?” Mei asked.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Everything Stalin Wanted
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria began one minute after midnight on August 9, 1945, when eleven armies and more than one million men shouting “Death to the samurai!” swept into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo along a two-thousand-mile front. The tattered and depleted Japanese were no match for the battle-hardened Soviets, who were equipped with 27,000 artillery pieces, 5,500 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 3,700 aircraft. The Japanese, though they knew an invasion would come eventually, were taken by surprise, their intelligence having missed the massive Soviet buildup, which was itself in large part a product of American deliveries of supplies by some seventy Liberty ships landing in Vladivostok. Most of the elite Kwantung Army, the Japanese force that had conquered Manchuria fourteen years earlier and occupied it during most of the war, had been moved to defend against American attacks in the Pacific. Within a few days, the Soviets were in full occupation of Manchuria and parts of North China.
The Soviet invasion, the last major land battle of World War II, was one of the largest and easiest military successes of the war. Coming three days after the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, and only hours before the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, it was surely unnecessary to secure the surrender of Japan, though it may have played a role in Japan’s decision to give up the fight. The Soviet troops behaved with astonishing brutality, even by the standards of World War II. Bands of Russian soldiers looted and raped in various places in Manchuria and northern Korea, the victims mostly civilian Japanese who had lived in Manchukuo after it became part of the Japanese empire. Not surprisingly after fourteen years of humiliating occupation, it was not only Russians who exacted reprisals. The Soviets allowed “the non-Japanese, one and all, three days of open looting,” an American intelligence group, known as Team Cardinal, reported from Mukden. Chinese mobs, armed with ordnance from the fourteen thousand Japanese civilians who were trying to flee the carnage, attacked or burned down Japanese buildings. Casualties, Team Cardinal estimated, ran into the hundreds.
Many civilians committed suicide, encouraged to do so by Japanese army officers who believed that was a better option for them than to suffer Russian or Chinese reprisals. Years later, a popular Chinese television series told the story of a young Japanese girl who, finding to her horror that her entire village had destroyed itself, took refuge with a Chinese family, where she became the concubine of a Chinese man. When the American Cardinal intelligence team asked about the atrocities committed in Mukden, the Russian high command explained that the first troops into the city comprised soldiers whose homes and families had been destroyed by the Germans. These “revenge troops” were used as a shock force, a Russian two-star general reported, and “ ‘not being normal in their minds,’ were bent on looting, killing and rape.”
The chief beneficiary of the Russian invasion was that great master of ruthless, amoral realpolitik, Joseph Stalin, for whom it was part of a larger scheme to expand Soviet power and influence in East Asia, or, as George Kennan put it in a cabled enumeration of Russia’s postwar goals, to seek “domination of the provinces of China in Central Asia contiguous to the Soviet frontier.” Stalin had assured Roosevelt at Yalta that he’d invade Manchuria within three months of the end of the war in Europe, and he fulfilled that promise, to the day. He also vowed to leave Manchuria within three months of the Soviet invasion. As we’ll see, this was a promise he did not fulfill.
The invasion was the major element in a policy of masked aggression that was as audacious as it was successful. Another part of it was to lull the United States and the central government of China into a state of complacency about Soviet intentions. Stalin’s greatest fear, especially in the wake of the awesome demonstrated power of the atomic bomb and the exclusive American possession of it, was that the United States would become alarmed over Soviet expansion in the East and would do something about it, most likely by giving Chiang massive support or even sending American troops to North China. So Stalin’s scheme in 1945 was to accomplish that expansion of influence without making the Americans nervous. The always perceptive Davies wrote in a memo at the time, “The Kremlin will be careful in performing its political surgery in Asia to cause during the next two or three years as little shock and pain as possible to the United States.�
� Moscow would pursue what he called a policy of “anesthetization,” and in this the Soviet leader had no better or unwitting a helpmate than Hurley.
The American ambassador, having gotten rid of the best of the China hands, had met with Stalin and Molotov in Moscow on his way back to Chungking from Washington in April, and they had told him what he wanted to hear, namely that they would support his effort to reach a negotiated settlement between the KMT and the CCP. As Kennan pointed out, Stalin was safe in making this promise, because he knew that Mao would agree to nothing requiring him to give up his own army, and that Chiang would agree to nothing that allowed Mao to keep it. In this respect, supporting American policy in China meant absolutely nothing in practice.
But Hurley, a man ever ready to find nefarious hidden motives in the analyses and actions of the professional China hands, believed that Stalin’s assurances meant everything. Only a few days after Hurley’s meetings with Stalin, Harriman, who had been in the room, warned that Hurley had been too optimistic. An aide who summarized Harriman’s analysis of the situation for Washington’s benefit said that “Marshal Stalin would not cooperate indefinitely with Chiang Kai-shek and that if and when Russia enters the conflict in the Far East, he would make full use of and support the Chinese Communists even to the extent of setting up a puppet government in Manchuria and possibly North China.”
Hurley paid no attention, nor does he appear to have registered the display of Soviet intentions elsewhere. Even before he left for Moscow in early April, the Russians had already imposed a compliant Communist government in Romania, and they had expressed their intention of moving Poland’s borders to the west into what had been Germany, exchanging that for a broad swath of territory in the east that would go to Ukraine—this without the sort of consultation with Britain or the United States that had been promised at Yalta. It was becoming clear also that Stalin intended to put a pro-Soviet group into power in Poland, which prompted Roosevelt to complain directly to him that his actions were putting at risk “our program of international cooperation.” Nor does Hurley seem to have noticed the commentary in the Soviet press, which, according to Everett Drumright in the division of Chinese Affairs at the State Department, was aimed at “discrediting the Chungking government—with which it maintains diplomatic relations—and of praising the Chinese Communists and enhancing their prestige.”
China 1945 Page 34