China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Needless to say, Hu Feng had no lawyer. No journalist in China independently investigated the case against him. There were no open hearings, no habeas corpus petitions, during which the government had to justify his detention. For the first ten years of his imprisonment, Mei Zhi was not allowed to know where her husband was being held or even whether he was alive, until, in an act intended to show the “leniency” of the party, she was allowed to visit him and to send him small gifts of food and clothing. “You should trust the party,” an official at the Ministry of Public Security told Mei Zhi, adding of her husband, “we are all committed to reforming him.”

  The punishment of dissent, or of fabricated dissent, was harsher and psychologically more insidious under the Communists than it had been under the KMT, and the scope of individual freedom far smaller. In July 1946, as we’ve seen, several members of the Democratic League, fearful of the right-wing thugs who had assassinated two of the league’s members, took refuge for a time at the American consulate in Kunming. Among them was Fei Xiaotong, China’s pioneering anthropologist and champion of the peasantry, widely known both inside China and abroad. A graduate of Yenching (later Peking) University, he had studied with Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneering anthropologist, at the London School of Economics, and, like many of his colleagues, he was a member of the Democratic League, which generally allied itself with the Communists. He was, with good reason, fearful of the KMT’s secret police and hired thugs, but he was never imprisoned or persecuted during the reign of Chiang Kai-shek. During the war, he lived at one of the universities in exile in Kunming and carried out research in villages in Yunnan province. He was able to spend a year in the United States. He wrote many articles in Chinese publications and enjoyed considerable fame.

  In the years right after 1949, Mao generally pursued the moderate policy toward non-Communist intellectuals that he had adopted during the war years and during the long struggle for power. Many of the intellectuals who had criticized the KMT were given important positions in the new society. Fei was named vice president of the National Institute for Minorities and a member of the prestigious, if powerless, National People’s Congress.

  In 1956, in order to flush out opponents, Mao, in what came to be known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraged China’s intellectuals to speak their mind, and Fei offered some critical ideas. As a result, he was forced to stand before howling crowds and to admit his “crimes against the people.” Later, during the vast purge known as the Cultural Revolution of the mid- to late 1960s, he was beaten and forced to clean toilets by the youthful Maoist enforcers called Red Guards. Unlike many other such victims of Maoist cruelty, Fei survived and later taught at Peking University, but he said that he had lost what would have been his twenty-three most productive and useful years.

  Others suffered similarly. Ma Yinchu, the American-educated economist who, in 1944, had likened Chiang to a “vacuum tube,” became the president of Peking University. Chu Anping, whose writings in Keguan, or Objectivity, made him a prominent figure in the days after the Japanese surrender, became the editor of the Guangming Daily, a newspaper read largely by intellectuals. Ma fell from grace when he proposed a population control program for China at a time when Mao believed that population control was a plot by the imperialist powers to keep the Third World weak. Under another kind of leader than Mao, Ma’s suggestion that China curb its birth rate would have been treated as what it was, an idea to be debated. Under Mao, it was deemed instead to be a kind of thought crime, an implicit collusion with the enemies of China.

  Ma was ridiculed in person at an assembly of students and faculty at Peking University by Kang Sheng, and for several years he was singled out for the kind of rhetorically bloated attack that only a Communist propaganda machine can muster, illustrating the daily “minute of hate” that Orwell described in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, during which all people stand to shake their fists and shout epithets at the great enemy. Ma was dismissed from public life, accused of a nonsensical list of political crimes, and made into a sort of non-person as long as Mao was alive; after Mao’s death, like Fei, he was rehabilitated and he was able to resume his scholarly life.

  At least Ma avoided actual incarceration. Many others didn’t. In 1957, Mao initiated the first mass purge since the Yenan Rectification Campaign. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of being “rightists,” including numerous western-educated people who had returned to the country from abroad to help build the “new China.” Many of them were sent to labor camps to “remold” their thoughts. Many died there. In 1958, Chu Anping was branded an “anti-party, anti-socialist bourgeois rightist.” He was made to clean the streets—it became a standard practice of Maoism to force people to do hard manual labor as a way of getting them to adopt a “proletarian world view.” He was imprisoned, and when he was released, he disappeared, probably a suicide, though this is not known for sure.

  The writer Wang Ruowang, imprisoned for three years by the KMT in the 1930s, then imprisoned under Mao for four years in the 1960s, testified in The Hunger Years, his autobiographical novel (banned in China), to a difference between the two regimes. Chiang’s secret police’s use of torture, unjustified as it was, was aimed at extracting information about the activities of members of the Communist Party. Under the Communists, torture was also commonly used, except that it was aimed at extracting confessions to crimes that had never been committed, or to thoughts that should not have been illegal. “The basis of the interrogation,” Wang wrote, “was nothing more than the order from above that so-and-so should be overthrown.”

  Mei Huanzao was the young newspaper reporter for Da Gong Bao who wrote the description of Shanghai in the months after the end of the war that I cited earlier. After the “liberation” of 1949, Da Gong Bao moved its office to Beijing, and Mei was invited by the editor of another paper, Wen Hui Bao, to stay in Shanghai and work there. The editor in question was Xu Zhucheng, another prominent non-aligned intellectual who had welcomed the Communists. Xu, like practically every member of this category in China, was declared a rightist in the purge of 1957, and sent away for the usual rounds of psychological torment and self-criticism. A new editor, appointed by the party’s propaganda department, took over the leadership of Wen Hui Bao.

  One day, the new editor asked Mei Huanzao his opinion of the political campaign. The editor seemed to be giving Mei an opportunity to engage in a ritual of Maoist rule, which was known as biaotai, to take a public stand, during which the person in question was expected to proclaim a prefabricated encomium to Mao, to praise the Communist Party and support its suppression of the “counterrevolutionaries’ ” plot to overthrow China’s socialist system. But Mei instead expressed his distress at Xu’s plight. He was immediately surrounded by a hostile group, the enforcers of Maoist writ who populated every institution in the country—the schools, the newspapers, the neighborhoods—who asked him to explain what he meant. Somehow, Mei was able to excuse himself. He may have said he needed to visit the lavatory. He went straight up the stairs to the rooftop of the Wen Hui Bao building and jumped to his death.

  Forty-one years after the arrest of Hu Feng, China was a vastly freer country. And yet, in 2006, another literary critic, essayist, and advocate of free expression, a professor at the Beijing Normal University named Liu Xiaobo, was arrested by China’s Public Security Bureau and, after a closed trial of a few hours’ duration, was sentenced to eleven years in prison for the crime of “subverting state power.” The persecution of Liu (who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010) marked a new turn toward repression that has continued unabated. In August 2013, a party circular banned discussion in China of seven allegedly subversive subjects, among them what it called “western constitutional democracy” and the Communist Party’s “past mistakes.”

  China has changed for the better since the days of Chairman Mao, but the practices of its senior leaders remain fundamentally incompatible with the values that Americans regard as inalienable.


  Two months before Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the United States Department of State issued a 1,054-page collection of documents whose purpose was to defend the American government against the accusation that it was responsible for what was now clear, that China would be “lost” to the Communists. The formal title of this famous volume was United States Relations with China with Specific Reference to the Period 1944–1949, but it has been universally known as the White Paper on China. A preface written by Dean Acheson, when he was secretary of state in January 1949, made the case: China had not fallen into the Communist camp because of any failure by the United States; it had been “lost” by the government of Chiang Kai-shek, which had become “demoralized and unpopular,” beyond saving, despite what the White Paper showed to have been a massive American effort over the years to prevent it.

  Contrary to the Truman administration’s hopes and expectations, however, the White Paper did not settle the argument. Most important, it failed to deter a revival of the false and ugly charge, initiated by Patrick J. Hurley as he resigned the ambassadorship of China in late 1945, that a group of pro-Communist China experts in the State Department had sabotaged American China policy and undermined China’s legitimate, pro-American government. This was the key domestic American feature of Mao’s triumph in China, the shameful hunt, engineered by the right-wing demagogues who emerged out of the shock of Chiang’s defeat, to attribute that defeat to the treasonous behavior of a few plotters inside the government.

  Not all of the Americans who served in China during the war suffered from accusations of blame, but many of them did. Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had performed competently and even wisely as commander of the China theater, joined those recklessly heaping blame on the China professionals in the Foreign Service for having sabotaged American interests. Wedemeyer’s accusations were strangely belated. During his time in China, including those fateful months of late 1945 and early 1946 when the race between the Nationalists and the Communists to control Manchuria was taking place, he wrote many dispatches to Washington, but in none of them did he take the position that the State Department’s China hands were guilty of disloyalty. He made these accusations later; he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan in 1985.

  Patrick Hurley went home to Oklahoma after his sudden resignation as ambassador and ran three times for the U.S. Senate, without success. Until his death in 1963, he insisted to anyone who would listen that the China hands had been disloyal and had brought about disaster. But the main task of accusation fell to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, who built a career by blaming the supposed Communists in the State Department for the loss of China, and for other damage to the United States.

  Even a figure as highly respected as George C. Marshall, and, one would think, above any possibility of suspicion, fell into McCarthy’s sights. Marshall persisted in his futile effort to mediate the KMT-CCP conflict in China until, finally, he left the country in 1947, replacing James Byrnes as secretary of state. It was then that he forged the plan of massive economic help to Europe that came to be called the Marshall Plan. In 1951, McCarthy published a book blaming Marshall for the Communist takeover in China, accusing him, in a statement that has been notorious ever since for its nonsensical hyperbole, of membership in “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

  Marshall emerged largely unscathed from the McCarthy storm. In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the lower-ranking China experts were not so lucky. Most of them were able to resume their careers at the end of the war, but eventually the “loss” of China doomed virtually all of them.

  John Paton Davies served in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Peru. In 1948, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom for his bravery and leadership after the plane carrying him and a group of others crashed in Burma in 1943. But in 1954, the State Department’s Loyalty Security Board decreed, with no persuasive evidence, that he lacked “judgment, discretion, and liability.” He was fired from the State Department and his security clearance taken away. He became a successful furniture manufacturer in Lima, Peru, and died in 1999.

  John Stewart Service, after serving as an aide to General Douglas MacArthur in the occupation of Japan, was similarly dismissed in 1952. He was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1957, but, dogged by the accusations against him in the Amerasia Affair, he was going no place as a diplomat. He resigned and worked as a librarian and editor at the University of California’s Center for Chinese Studies in Berkeley, California.

  John Carter Vincent was posted for a few years to Switzerland, then to Morocco, but he too was attacked during the McCarthy witchhunts, accused on patently flimsy hearsay evidence of being a Communist. He was forced to step down from the State Department in 1952. John K. Fairbank was also accused of disloyalty by the McCarthyites, and went through an extremely stressful and trying period when he and other China experts, Owen Lattimore among the best-known of them, were investigated by Congress. But unlike the State Department officers, Fairbank was protected by his position as a professor of history at Harvard, where he nurtured a knowledge of China among generations of scholars, journalists, and diplomats, including the author of this book.

  There is no doubt that, whoever lost it, China’s emergence as a Communist country closely allied to the Soviet Union and aiding revolutionary movements elsewhere in Asia was a tremendous defeat for the United States. Mao himself practically gloated over the American loss. In a famous speech made in August 1949, only days after the release of the White Paper, Mao used Acheson’s own words to lampoon the American position. Acheson, he noted, admitted that Chiang Kai-shek couldn’t be saved because his government was “demoralized and unpopular.” Why then, Mao asked, if the Americans understood that the Chinese people no longer wanted him, did the United States provide aid to the KMT? The only possible answer, Mao declared, was that the United States was an imperialist country among whose goals was “to turn China into a U.S. colony.” Chiang Kai-shek and a war “to slaughter the Chinese people” were the implements used to achieve this goal. But America had failed, Mao said, because “the Chinese people have awakened, and the armed forces and the organized strength of the people under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party have become more powerful than ever before.” Mao also emphasized what he called “the towering presence of the Soviet Union, this unprecedentedly powerful bulwark of peace bestriding Europe and Asia,” which, he said, deterred the Americans from “direct, large-scale attacks on China.”

  Mao’s speech, triumphant as it was, can be interpreted in two ways. One is to see it as a statement that Communist China and imperialist America must be enemies by their very antagonistic natures. The other way is to take it as a disguised wish for the United States to have made a wiser choice in China, to have declined to support the KMT in the civil war, since, if it had, normal or at least non-antagonistic relations would have been possible. But as it was, in making its choice to be hostile to the Communists, the Americans left Mao with no choice but, as he put it in another 1949 speech, to “lean to one side,” the Soviet side, and this is what led to the twenty-five years of mutual distrust and animosity.

  Could it have been different? Writers, politicians, and scholars have given heated, mutually conflicting answers to this difficult question for more than half a century. On one side of the debate has been the argument that the United States could, had it acted more firmly and more presciently, have saved Chiang Kai-shek from the Communist onslaught, and China would slowly have evolved in a pro-western, democratic direction. Had the Americans provided more help to the KMT; had they been clearer about the strategic goals in China; had they not burdened the Chinese government with demands that it halt the fight against the Communists during the Japanese occupation; had it flown more Nationalist divisions to Manchuria during Chiang’s initial and almost successful offensive in early 1946; ha
d Stilwell and the China hands not besmirched the reputation of Chiang while being smitten by Mao and the Communists—then the Communist victory could have been prevented.

  There were a few people making that argument during the Japanese war, most prominently perhaps Joseph Alsop, the well-connected cousin of FDR who became an influential newspaper columnist after the war. Alsop, as we’ve seen, told everybody who would listen to him that it was “idiotic” not to have seen that the Communists would be pawns of the Soviet Union and that to oppose Chiang’s wish to concentrate on the future struggle with the Communists was a cataclysmic mistake. Alsop believed that the United States should be ready to move large numbers of its own troops to China after the war to ensure that the KMT was able to establish its control.

  Alsop also believed that the American people, once enlightened as to the strategic stakes involved, would support a war against the Communists in China. The mass clamor for American troops to be brought home once the war was over, however, indicates that Alsop was wrong about that. Very likely, had the United States followed his recommendation, it would have found itself in something like what it experienced two decades later in Vietnam—a commitment to a costly and debilitating struggle on the Asian mainland that it couldn’t win. The Communists were too entrenched, too strong, and too solidly backed by the Soviet Union, which would have been perfectly happy to see Americans bleeding and dying in China as the Cold War was being waged around the world. And, as Acheson correctly put it, there was nothing that the United States could have done to overcome the deficiencies of the KMT government. The Chinese people made their choice. It may have been the wrong choice, but it wasn’t an American prerogative to make that choice for them.

  The opposite option would have been for the United States to have given no support to the KMT, and thereby not to incur the wrath of Mao. That was the argument of the China hands, and it was a better argument than Alsop’s. Unfortunately, figures like Davies and Service, smart and dedicated public servants as they were, were naïvely dazzled by the Communists in 1944 and 1945, when they had frequent contacts with Mao and his cohort in Yenan. Their preference for Mao did not change the direction of American policy. Despite the disillusionment with the KMT and the heroic portrayals of the Communists that appeared in books and articles, the United States intervened in China’s “fratricidal strife” on Chiang’s side, not the Communists’.