But, as we know, Mao was operating in a larger context. February 1946 may have been the high point of the Marshall mediation in China, but it was also the time when the Cold War was taking shape and the conflict between the Soviets and the West was explicitly recognized. On February 11, Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, identifying the “iron curtain” that had descended in Europe. Stalin, replying, made his own speech in which he declared that war between the Soviet Union and the West was “inevitable.” Later that same month, George Kennan, still at the American embassy in Moscow, sent his famous “long telegram” to the State Department laying the foundations for what was to become the containment policy.
In March, Moscow let the CCP’s leaders know that it was going to withdraw from several of Manchuria’s big cities, telling them that, in accordance with the Sino-Soviet treaty, they would have to turn these places over to government forces, but that the Chinese Communists should get ready for action. And so the Eighth Route Army advanced into southern Manchuria, taking a number of small and medium-sized towns there.
It was at this same time that American diplomats in China began noticing a change in the attitude of the Communists. In a long memo to Marshall, Raymond Ludden, who had traveled in Communist territories as a member of the Dixie Mission in 1944 and reported on their local popularity, said that the CCP was cleaving ever closer to the Soviet line. Their newspapers, for example, had been repeating the Soviet official position that it had been the Russians who were mainly responsible for the World War II victories in both Europe and Asia, while the American and British contributions were no longer even mentioned. The CCP, he continued, had begun to use the word “fascist” in its propaganda, “fascist in a completely Russian sense—that is, anyone who is in opposition to Russian, and now likewise Chinese Communist wishes.” Ludden wondered whether these verbal gestures were signs that the Chinese Communists were no longer primarily “nationalist reformers” but had become “a satellite force of Russian expansion in Asia.”
Ludden was too close to the changing situation for his suspicions to harden into established fact, but subsequent historians, notably Michael M. Sheng, have found that by March 20 a new CCP strategy had emerged. It was to seek to divide Manchuria into north and south zones, with the city of Changchun as the dividing point. “Our party’s policy is to use all our strength to control Changchun, Harbin, and the whole Changchun Railway,” Mao said. “No matter how much sacrifice that may take [we must] prevent Chiang’s troops from occupying these two cities and the railway.”
Meanwhile, Zhou Enlai continued to complain bitterly to Lieutenant General Alvan C. Gillem, who was in charge of the mediation mission while Marshall was in Washington, of American help to the central government. On March 30, he warned that if “the U.S. Forces Headquarters shall continue to move Government troops into Manchuria, we would deem such action as a change of U.S. Policy toward China, and a lack of faith on the part of the Government to implement a real truce in Manchuria.” Zhou made this threat despite the indisputable fact that the ceasefire agreement with which he was intimately familiar specifically allowed the central government to move troops “toward and into Manchuria” and that these troops would be transported by the United States. By infiltrating their own forces into southern Manchuria, it was the CCP that was violating the accord.
On March 18, Mao cabled Zhou to express his current view of Chiang. “All that has happened lately proves that Chiang’s anti-Soviet, anti-CCP, and anti-democratic nature will not change,” Mao wrote. Two days later, Mao was writing to Zhou again, informing him that the Communist Party would no longer take part in the National Assembly, which was to draft China’s new constitution. China’s revolution, he had decided, had to be won on the battlefield.
Mao may have been sincere in his expression of disappointment, but he seems to have been reacting far more to the intensification of the Cold War than to Chiang’s antidemocratic actions. On March 20, reporting on the fast-moving political developments in China, the counselor of the American embassy in Chungking, Robert Smyth, told Byrnes that “the Gimo has displayed … a laudable spirit of cooperation and willingness to compromise.” Chiang, Smyth continued, “wants to implement [the] PCC program and there is no effective challenge to his authority.” Meanwhile, Smyth said, “the Communists would appear by current violent diatribes against KMT to be preparing for such a contingency by an early disclaimer of responsibility therefor.”
This does not mean that there was no chance the KMT hard-liners could have derailed the movement toward a more democratic China or that they didn’t want to do so. The constitution was to be drafted by a national assembly that was scheduled to meet in May, and the KMT wanted to dominate that assembly. But a political process had begun in China that had popular support and that had already deprived the KMT of the kind of untrammeled power it had exercised during the war. Mao’s expressed views, mirrored by the intensifying propaganda campaign being mounted by Yenan, are hard to explain other than as a product of his impatience to have power for himself. The propaganda referred in distressed terms to secret police intimidation, the imprisonment of dissidents, the suppression of student protests, and the harassment of journalists, but Mao’s future actions as the godlike leader of China were to show very little concern for those things, or for civil liberties in general. Mao in the early months of 1946 had the option of persisting with the blueprint drawn by the Marshall mission—to elect a national assembly, write a new constitution, and eventually to compete for power in elections. That was the intention he signaled to Marshall when he told him that “the democracy to be initiated in China should follow the American pattern.”
But there is no indication that Mao meant what he said. His ambition wasn’t for China to be democratic; it was to be China’s Stalin, to seize total power, which he had already done inside the CCP. He had voiced enthusiasm about Marshall’s mediation and the PCC because he needed to buy time and to avoid blame for civil war, not because he wanted China’s press to be free or non-Communist political prisoners to be released.
Early in April, the Liberation Daily, which, up to that point, had refrained from personal criticism of Chiang, published a vituperative attack on him, which was duly reprinted by the New China Daily in Chungking. It accused the Chinese leader of fomenting civil war while having failed to implement all four of the pledges he had made to the PCC—allow civil liberties, legalize all political parties, hold local elections, and release political prisoners.
The central government’s press office presented a persuasive, even impassioned, rejoinder to the Communists’ attack, making the case that all four of the pledges were being implemented.
What of the machinations of the irreconcilables? A more rigid, myopically self-serving, cynical, and corrupt political faction would be difficult to find in the historical record. If Mao was driven by the unquenchable urge to seize power, the irreconcilables were motivated by a terror of losing it. The worst moment came in July 1946 when two prominent members of the Democratic League, Li Gung-pu and Wen I-duo, were assassinated by members of the Kunming garrison, which, probably aroused by the recent student demonstrations, had put out a general order that members of the league, who tended to support the Communists inside the PCC, should be killed. There is no proof that Chiang approved of these assassinations, and, indeed, as Jay Taylor has argued, he had little reason to want them to take place, given the public relations cost of such acts of repression. The new American ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, reported to Washington, citing attacks by what he called the “Gestapo,” that “ruthless terrorism prevails in Kunming.” Following the killings, several league members, including the anthropologist Fei Xiaotung, who was perhaps the most internationally famous Chinese intellectual, took refuge for a time in the American consulate. Stuart in a meeting with Chiang complained about the assassinations and warned him that intellectuals in general were becoming disaffected. Chiang promised to do something about it.
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There were no reports of assassinations of dissenting intellectuals in Kunming or elsewhere after that, so perhaps Chiang did give instructions for that kind of repression to cease. Prominent intellectuals like Fei and Chu Anping, whom we saw earlier commenting on the mood at the end of the war, carried out their activities, as did Ma Yinchu and other prominent figures who made no secret of their disillusionment with the KMT. The right wing of the KMT, guided by the Chen brothers, may have been pressing for a constitution that, had it been adopted, would have given near-dictatorial powers to the president, but they did not succeed in this endeavor, which didn’t appear, at least to the Americans, to have Chiang’s support. Meanwhile, despite the activities of Chiang’s secret police, the Communist New China Daily continued to appear in Chungking, reprinting the vituperative anti-Chiang editorials of the Liberation Daily. Zhou Enlai and the other Communist delegates were closely watched by the KMT security police, but they lived otherwise undisturbed down their narrow alley.
Still, the Communist propaganda machinery, not surprisingly, did its best to use incidents like the Kunming assassinations to attack Chiang and the KMT. In this sense there was a tremendous irony to the actions of the irreconcilables. Their importance lay not in their ability to derail the reform program, even though that is what they wanted to do. It was to provide the CCP, a revolutionary movement as secretive, ruthless, and undemocratic as any of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, an occasion to present itself as a vigorous champion of political openness, the free press, and civil rights.
Marshall kept working through the winter and spring of 1946 to restore the ceasefire and to establish a working democratic government. He had literally hundreds of meetings, the transcriptions of which, all dutifully preserved in the State Department archives, run into many hundreds of pages. But the talks represented a kind of make-believe world, a cocoon closed off from the reality of the country outside. The transcripts of the meetings make for dreary, wearisome, repetitive reading, full of mutual accusations, insincere declarations of peaceful intent, and Marshall’s concrete, detailed, practical proposals for ending the fighting, all of them increasingly irrelevant. The parties pored over the minute details of proposed agreements as if these agreements would come into force with actual effect. They never did.
The possibility of a deal between the KMT and the CCP wasn’t destroyed by the CC clique or any other party but by the resumption of the civil war. The KMT and the CCP blamed each other. Neither wanted to be seen as the party that wrecked the chance for peace, and both were at fault for doing so. “There has always been a wealth of accusations on both sides regarding the wrongdoing and evil purpose of the other side,” Marshall told Zhou Enlai. There was “a complete contrast in views,” he continued. His purpose wasn’t to adjudicate primary fault versus secondary fault. That would have been impossible. He simply wanted to get both sides past the stage of mutual blame toward a renewal of the agreements already made, but both sides were too prone to attack when the circumstances were favorable.
Marshall’s effort would continue until 1947, but it came to an effective end on March 7, 1946, when, without any notification to the Chinese central government, some forty trainloads of Soviet troops rolled out of Mukden along with a caravan of tanks, trucks, and big guns, as well as the giant portrait of Stalin that had decorated the Red Army headquarters since the previous August. The Soviet withdrawal precipitated a scramble for territory that didn’t really end until the civil war itself ended in the Communist victory four years later.
At the time of the Soviet withdrawal, some one hundred thousand Communist troops, according to American estimates, were in the vicinity of Mukden, but the Nationalists, whose best troops had moved up the rail line from Qinwangdao, were ahead of them, driving Communist detachments out of the suburbs and pouring into the city itself. The KMT commander, Lieutenant General Chao Kung-wu, proclaimed “a decisive victory” over the Communists, who, he claimed, had been pushed back to more than ten miles from the city.
There was reason for this exultation. The entry of the Nationalists’ 52nd Army into Mukden marked the first time troops of the central Chinese government had been in Manchuria’s largest city since the Japanese invasion of 1931. In addition, the American-trained and -supplied government armies had performed well, driving the Communists back so effectively that Chiang was emboldened to think that if he acted firmly he could destroy Mao’s army by force, contrary to the urgent entreaties of Marshall, who warned him that his forces would become overextended and dispersed, and who in the world knew more about orders of battle and the importance of supplies and logistics than George C. Marshall?
Chiang held Mukden, but things went badly for him elsewhere. In April, while Marshall was still getting accolades in Washington for his job well done, the Soviets pulled out of Changchun, their Manchurian headquarters, giving the Communists advance notice of their departure and telling them, as before, to be ready for action. The central government had a force of some seven thousand troops in the city. The day after the Russian withdrawal—Nationalist propaganda claimed a half hour after it—twenty thousand Communist troops attacked. The New York Times’s Henry A. Lieberman, along with a half-dozen other American journalists, was present, and he reported savage street-to-street fighting and heavy casualties. The Communists’ Eighth Route Army detachments, going as usual by the pseudonym Democratic Unity Army, were a “disciplined, trained, organized, well-officered fighting machine,” Lieberman said, and they had an impressive arsenal of Japanese artillery, machine guns, and rifles. Lieberman noted that the Communists denied having gotten those weapons from the Russians. A large body of the attacking troops had arrived in Manchuria six months earlier, having sailed there on junks from the Manchurian port of Chefoo, where the Communists had prevented the Americans from landing government troops the previous fall.
The decisive action took place at the central government’s headquarters inside a five-story bank building in the middle of Changchun. There, about one thousand five hundred KMT troops put up, in Lieberman’s words, an “Alamo-like defense” against superior forces that directed withering fire at the building and turned it into an “inferno.” When the government troops finally tried to escape, they got bottled up at the bank’s revolving door and hundreds of them were gunned down in the plaza in front of the building.
The seizure of Changchun was the Communists’ biggest military success against the government so far, and it left Marshall’s mediation, the January 10 ceasefire, the PCC resolutions, and the planned armed forces reorganization all in tatters. “Marshall’s Efforts Fail” was the page-one headline in The New York Times on April 30. The Communists justified their renewed offensive on the grounds that the government had violated the truce, and it had, especially in moving troops toward Zhifeng in Jehol province. Radio Yenan, Liberation Daily, and the New China Daily in Chungking put out a steady stream of accusations along these lines, not only for truce violations but for the right wing’s efforts to sabotage the political settlement. Zhou Enlai repeated these accusations during his long sessions with Marshall, which continued despite the renewed fighting, vigorously protesting among other things the American help to the government in transporting troops to Manchuria. Still, the Communist attack on Changchun was a blatant violation of the truce. The most respected independent newspaper in China, Da Gung Bao, which frequently criticized the central government, called it “shameful.”
The seizure of Changchun came just as Marshall was returning to China from his stay in Washington, so it would logically have been the first item on his agenda as he resumed his meetings with Zhou Enlai and the government representative, but strangely, in his first session with Zhou, on April 23, he said nothing about it. He issued not a single word of remonstrance over the Communists’ aggressive action, though later he identified the capture of Changchun as a decisive element in the collapse of the agreements he had so painstakingly negotiated. With Zhou he simply plunged ahead wi
th a proposal for a new ceasefire. By contrast, when he met later that same day with the government representative, General Hsu Yung-chang, who was filling in for Zhang Chun, Marshall scarcely concealed his irritation at the Nationalists, saying that they had now inadvertently “educated the Communists with a new sense of power.” He listed a host of government failures, from not submitting reports on troop movements to searching the homes of Communists in Beijing, though most important in Marshall’s mind was the government’s attack on Zhifeng. “The Communists,” Marshall told Hsu, “are now in a position where they can present excessive demands on the Government,” meaning, it would seem, that their seizure of Changchun, which could have been avoided by a smarter government policy, had given them military advantages they didn’t have before.
A few days later, Marshall wrote a lengthy report to Truman in which he assessed blame more evenhandedly. The Communists are “jubilant” over their seizure of Changchun, he wrote, and “no doubt their generals are dominating the negotiations of their representatives.” Emboldened by their success, he said, the Communists had begun a propaganda campaign against the American transport of government troops to Manchuria. Zhou, he said, “urges me to withdraw shipping support to force the Generalissimo’s hand,” but the Gimo himself was being told by his advisers and by his generals to adopt “a policy of force which they are not capable of carrying out even with our logistical support and presence of Marines in North China ports of Tsingtao, Tientsin and up the railroad towards the Port of Chinwangtao.” In other words, Marshall concluded, “The outlook is not promising and the only alternative to a compromise arrangement is, in my opinion, utter chaos in North China to which the fighting will inevitably spread.”
Indeed, the outlook was not promising, though there were to be several major twists and turns on Chiang’s road to defeat and the Communists’ to victory. Following the advice of his generals, Chiang did take the initiative after the fall of Changchun. His crack First Army moved up the railroad from Mukden to Szepingkai and retook Changchun on May 24, then headed farther north toward Harbin, the big city in northern Manchuria that was in Communist hands. Early in June, after persistent entreaties by Marshall, who was rejecting new requests by Chiang to transport still more Nationalist troops into the battle, Chiang agreed to a new ceasefire, which lasted for a crucial three weeks.
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