China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  One member of the team, an American-educated economist named Chang Kia-ngau, noted on arriving at the Changchun airport that it was “filled with Soviet officers and soldiers,” and that there were very few Chinese around. “Then we found that we cannot use the national currency,” he wrote in his diary. “On the same day I received a report saying the Soviet Army was plundering industrial equipment”—power generators, furnaces, broadcasting equipment, automobiles, even office furniture. When the Chinese asked when they could install their own administrations in various places, Malinovsky replied that he needed to get instructions from his superiors. When asked if he could provide transportation for the Chinese delegates, Malinovsky said there were no vehicles, ships, or planes available, though, he added, “this issue can be negotiated between the two governments on the basis of the Sino-Soviet treaty.” Would the Soviets allow the Chinese to take over the printing bureau of the former puppet regime? Malinowsky needed to seek instructions from his superiors on that too.

  Not surprisingly, the initial meetings with the Soviet commander led Chang to the impression that “the Soviets have no intention of actively supporting the transportation of our troops into the northeast,” though Soviet obstructionism was always veiled behind a phony offer of some other way to help. Malinovsky urged the Chinese to use the railroads to move their men into position, but the Chinese knew, and surely Malinovsky knew, that Communist troops in Shanhaiguan had cut the railroad lines between Manchuria and China proper.

  As October wore on, the fullness of Soviet control of Manchuria became clearer and clearer, the obstructionism less petty. An aide to Malinovky identified by Chang as Major General Pavlovsky, formally notified the Chinese that they considered all the former Japanese industrial equipment in Manchuria to be war booty that belonged to the Soviet Union. The Chinese protested. The Soviets compromised, saying that Japanese state-owned industry would be war booty. Private Japanese property, of which there was much less, could go to China. The Soviets had 1.5 million troops on the ground. There was nothing China could do to resist.

  It’s easy to imagine the disadvantage of the Chinese in what was supposed to be collaboration but was really a dictation of terms. Here was Malinovsky, representing the triumphant army of the second most powerful country on earth, facing off against the representative of a weak, devastated, and divided country armed with nothing much more than the declared friendship of a faraway superpower. On the most urgent matter of the ostensible return of Manchuria to Chinese government control, General Hsiung informed Malinovsky that China intended to transport troops from Hong Kong on American vessels and land them at the port of Dalian. Malinovsky’s reply was that the Sino-Soviet treaty had declared Dalian to be an open city devoted only to commercial purposes, and therefore it would be a violation of the treaty to allow Chinese troops to land there. In other words the Soviets, having, in that very treaty, recognized China’s central government as the country’s sole legitimate authority, to which they were obliged to give moral and material support, were now telling that same government that it was barred from dispatching its own armed forces to portions of its own territory.

  Astonished at the bluntness and audacity of Soviet obstructionism, Chang Kia-ngau wrote to Chiang Kai-shek warning him that the Soviet intention was to create a “special regime” in the north wherein the northeast provinces of China would be “completely surrounded.” “I’m afraid even the Manchurian coastline is in danger of being blockaded,” Chang said, and when that happened, “the northeast is bound to become a sitting duck for the Soviet Union.”

  Malinovky, always ready with some reasonable alternative solution, assured the Chinese and their American escorts that, while Dalian, which was Manchuria’s biggest and best deep-water port, was closed to them, they could land troops farther north at the smaller ports of Huludao and Yingkou, and the Americans, not wanting a fight, agreed to that. But when the small armada of American ships arrived at Huludao, they found that Chinese Communist troops were in control of the port and were vowing to fight if the government forces tried to land there.

  It was an extraordinary scene. As at Chefoo earlier, Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey was in command of the American ships, charged with helping the government retake control of its territory. Barbey had ample forces with him to deal with the Communists if it came to a fight, but he had been instructed to avoid conflict. Given the circumstances, he told the Chinese Nationalists to negotiate the matter with the Russians. General Hsiung duly brought up the landing at Huludao with Malinovsky, pointing out that the Soviet commander had assured him of a safe disembarkation there. Malinovsky had given a window between November 5 and 10 for the landing. The American task force arrived on the 7th. Malinovsky replied that the Communist troops had not come through territory under Soviet control but from the south, so what could he do? The ever-eager-to-help Malinovsky suggested that Hsiung talk things over with the Eighth Route Army, which Hsiung naturally said he could not do, knowing that the Communists were not going to politely give up Huludao and allow government troops to land there just because he asked them to. When Hsiung inquired of Malinovsky what the Russians would do if there was a clash between the Communists and the government troops, the Soviet commander’s reply was that he would desist from interfering in China’s internal affairs.

  The task force, still under Barbey, proceeded to Yingkou, the last alternative Manchurian port where the government troops could be landed. There, the Communist-appointed mayor of the town was on the dock shouting to the Americans at the railings of their ships that the Communists would resist any effort by the government to land its forces. Barbey, following orders not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, ordered the ships back to sea. The landing of the government forces would take place well to the south at the port of Qinwangdao, and, indeed, after sailing the Bohai for days with no result, the American task force deposited its consignment of troops there in mid-November.

  By now, Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who spoke fluent Russian, had joined the Chinese negotiating team at Changchun. On November 4, the younger Chiang went to see Malinovsky and complained to him that Communist troops had prevented the expected landing of government forces at Yingkou. Malinovsky’s reply was that Soviet troops were few in number in Yingkou, so resistance to the Communist troop movements was impossible. “It is very clear,” Chang Kia-ngau noted in his diary, “that the Soviets deliberately are allowing Eighth Route Army men into Huludao and Yingkou to obstruct the efforts of government troops to land there.”

  Chang Kia-ngau was beginning to understand the reasons for Soviet obstructionism: the friendly wartime relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were turning sour in the postwar period. Many times, speaking in a “stern” tone, Malinovsky protested to the Chinese that the Americans had sent a warship to Dalian. Chang understood that the Russians wanted to exclude any and all American forces from Manchuria, and this put China in a bind. In the background to this were American actions to exclude the Soviets from playing a role in the occupation of Japan, which Moscow was demanding as a reward for the five days its troops had participated in the war. Soviet propaganda trumpeted the theory already advanced by Mao that it had been the Russian invasion of Manchuria, rather than the succession of American victories in the Pacific and the use of the atomic bomb, that had turned the tide in the Asian war. This was the justification advanced by the Russians as they systematically stripped Manchuria of Japanese-built industry. Possession of the Japanese-built factories was just compensation for the losses the Soviets had suffered in the war. The message was clear: If the United States insisted on monopolizing postwar Japan, the Soviets would do the same in northeast Asia.

  And so the charade continued. Malinovsky’s next helpful suggestion was for the central government to airlift troops into the cities of Mukden and Changchun, and dilatory negotiations proceeded in November on the execution of this plan. But by this time, Chiang Kai-shek was growing pessimistic about
the whole Manchurian matter, uncertain that he could prevail if he forced the issue and worried that any steps toward civil war would incur the anger of the population. This was easy to understand. China’s revitalized press was full of ardent expressions of hope for civil war to be avoided. At the end of October, ten liberal professors in Kunming, still the location of several of the universities displaced during the war, sent an open letter to Mao and Chiang urging the end of China’s “one-party dictatorship” and the convocation of a political council composed of representatives of all parties and factions. Noting the growth of this sentiment, the American embassy cautioned that “these professors are distressed at what they described as the ‘new American policy toward China.’ They’re at a loss to understand the ‘all-out support’ given to the Central Government by the U.S., which they believe merely increases the determination of Gen Chiang Kai-shek not to establish a genuine coalition government in China and not to surrender any real power now held by the KMT.”

  The Communists, cleverly aligning themselves with this growing trend in public opinion, were making the same complaint about the KMT’s one-party dictatorship and the same demand for a coalition government. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek had announced plans to hold a political consultative conference in Chungking in November, a gathering of all the political factions in China that would decide on the means for later elections to a national assembly. Chiang seemed in this to be responding to the clamor among the intelligentsia and to pressure from the United States to move toward democracy, and, indeed, he had taken some steps in that direction. In the spring, even as the CCP was holding its ceremonial glorification of Mao at its Seventh Congress, Chiang presided over the Sixth Kuomintang Conference, the first since 1938. Among its resolutions was one calling for a general national conference for later in the year that would make arrangements for a multiparty election for a new national assembly. Chiang also ended the system of stationing political commissars with every major army unit, a move, urged on him by his American advisers, that aimed at moving away from party control of the armed forces—a move that the Communists have not made to this day. When the war ended, Chiang also took steps toward political reform, notably ending press censorship and releasing political prisoners. Was this pure window-dressing, as the Communists and many later historians have assumed? The Chinese government under Chiang was still a one-party dictatorship, but public criticism was taking place and being tolerated; there was ferment in the air. The announcement of a political consultative conference was an element of this ferment, and at the end of the talks in Chungking, Mao agreed to it in principle, though, as we will see, the Communists never really gave it much of a chance in practice.

  Mao’s own sincerity is deeply questionable. In Yenan after his negotiation with Chiang ended, Mao oversaw the CCP’s propaganda, which advertised the CCP as the party of peace, and he continued to move his troops as fast as possible into Manchuria. The Eighth Route Army had blocked all the ports except for Qinwangdao. In mid-November, Lin Biao occupied Changchun, one of the cities that the Soviets had designated as an airlift destination for government forces. The Soviets, always eager, they said, not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, did nothing to stop this from happening. Chiang Kai-shek was reduced to hoping that if he could maintain good relations with the Russians, proving to them that he would cause them no trouble in Manchuria, they could still be persuaded not to help the Communists. And so the plans for an airlift were dropped.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  What to Do?

  In Washington during October and November the mood turned gloomy as reports of Communist advances and national government troubles flowed in from the American diplomatic posts in China. In early October, the message from the American consulate in Xian was that the Communists were becoming “increasingly active” north of the Yellow River. The vision that took hold of the minds of American policymakers was of an inexorable infiltration of Communist forces into North China. The new chargé d’affaires in Chungking, Walter Robertson, who had arrived after Hurley’s purge of the embassy, told Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that the Communists already controlled most of the triangle of territory formed by Kalgan, Beijing, and Tatung, a strategic, heavily populated area—Kalgan the gateway to Mongolia, Tatung on one of the Great Wall passes into Manchuria, Beijing not only a big city but, as the former imperial capital, a place of great symbolic significance. The Communists were, moreover, showing “extreme antipathy toward the United States,” Robertson said, and they were growing ever closer to the Soviet Union, which was seizing former Japanese arms depots and “handing over much of the booty to the Communists,” despite their treaty commitment to aid only China’s central government.

  Robertson’s experience in government before his arrival in China had been as director of Lend-Lease in Australia. Later, after the Korean War, he would become assistant secretary of state for Asia, and in that position he was known as a diehard supporter of Chiang Kai-shek. But during his time as chargé in China, he was very unlike Hurley. He was polite, reasonable, “not an extremist,” as one colleague later put it; “the soul of courtesy,” said another. There is no question that later he hated the Communists and liked the KMT, but his reporting in 1945 on the machinations of Mao and the Soviets seems undogmatic and factual. Unlike Hurley, Robertson wrote reports that largely corresponded with those of others, both military personnel and civilians in the field.

  There was some good news in October. Robertson reported that the marines helped the central government take the surrender of the Japanese garrison in Beijing, which had the effect, Robertson said, of “reducing [the] Communist menace which has been growing steadily since [the] war ended.” But as the weeks went by, most of the news from China was alarming. Robertson passed along weekly reports from the American military attaché, which amounted to a steady chronicle of Communist advances and Soviet trickery. At the beginning of November, the attaché reported that the New Fourth Army was retreating from the central provinces of Kiangsu and Chekiang and that this would “augment [the] strength of Communist forces in [the] North.” The next week the attaché announced the gloomy news that “the threat of large-scale civil war in China seems to be growing.” The Communists were attacking railroads and vowing to continue doing so unless the KMT ceased its troop movements. Meanwhile, the optimism of October about an imminent breakthrough in the KMT-CCP negotiations was fading. “It appears at present almost hopeless that any permanently satisfactory solution can be reached,” Robertson said.

  Faced with a deteriorating situation, Chiang pressed General Wedemeyer for American ships to transport two more Chinese armies to the north, via Tianjin. Wedemeyer turned him down, replying that the United States had already transported enough troops for the government to handle the Japanese surrender, and he was not authorized to do anything more. “Dissident elements,” Wedemeyer cabled to Marshall, meaning the Communists, “and not Japanese are the cause of the present serious trouble and therefore the movement of additional troops is not within the scope of our mission.” In addition, Wedemeyer said, he wanted to withdraw the marines by the middle of November, and moving more troops north, where Chiang already had five armies, would mean prolonging the marines’ deployment in China.

  A few days later, Wedemeyer again reported to Marshall that he was under “heavy pressure” from Chiang to move Chinese troops to Manchuria, but, Wedemeyer said, unconvincingly given Moscow’s behavior, “The policy has always been that this was a China-Soviet matter.”

  By the middle of November the military attaché’s reports were ever more alarming and pessimistic. “Impasse seems to have reached a critical stage … as no progress was made toward a solution.” The “conflict was increasing on all fronts [such that] large areas of China [are] already in a state of civil war.” The Communists were attacking Taiyuan, there was “fierce fighting” at the Hebei-Shaanxi border, and the Eighth Route Army was continuing to destroy rail lines in the northeast in its effort to preven
t a move there by the government’s armies. Around the same time, the consul in Tianjin informed Washington that ordinary rail service in North China was “practically non-existent,” as the Communists were “looting trains, planting mines, removing rails, burning sleepers, and destroying roadbeds on a big scale.” The attaché’s report for November 18 concluded that the civil war in north and central China had “reached a new high.” The week after that, he wrote, despite some government success in pushing the Communists out of Shanhaiguan, the coastal gateway between Hebei province and Manchuria, the Communists were moving into areas vacated by the withdrawing Russians, and they now seemed “well-entrenched” with an estimated one hundred thousand troops in place. The final hope of the American diplomats in China was that Chiang’s scheduling of the People’s Consultative Conference for the beginning of December, when the Communists said they would attend, might at least lead to a hiatus in the fighting. But then the Communists announced that they wouldn’t attend the conference after all, and it was canceled. The cancellation, the attaché said, was “the darkest aspect of a gloomy week.”

  Wedemeyer was the go- to guy in China, much more so than Robertson or anybody else, the man that Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, and the secretary of war turned to for advice, and Wedemeyer was in a state of pessimistic agitation. Months before in Washington, he had, like Hurley, dismissed the Communist danger, saying it could be disposed of with relative ease. Now he was worried both about the central government’s weakness and about the unreality of American policy. The State Department position on the matter was that, yes, American help to the central government would, as it was commonly put, result in “collateral aid or prestige” to Chiang, but that didn’t amount to interference in China’s affairs. Wedemeyer, in a lengthy cable to Marshall on November 23, the same day that Chiang reiterated his “urgent appeal” for more American help, saw the sophistry of this argument. He didn’t question the need for the marines to be in China. To withdraw them, he wrote, would hand the Communists “a complete victory for their invidious propaganda campaign and acts of intimidation.” But support of the national government “will definitely involve American forces in fratricidal warfare. There can be no mistake about this.… We need to be clear of this consequence if it is U.S. policy to help with unification of China and Manchuria under National Government.”