China 1945

by Richard Bernstein

  Could the years of antagonism have been avoided, as Mao seemed, ambiguously, to suggest in that speech of August 1949, had the United States jettisoned Chiang earlier and remained neutral in China’s domestic struggle? Over the years, a strong current of opinion has answered “yes” to that question. Especially in the wake of the Vietnam War, many scholars, journalists, foreign policy pundits, and ordinary people have believed that the United States made a historic mistake by opposing the forces of Asian revolution and siding instead with right-wing dictatorships, beginning with Chiang’s, and that this fundamental error is what made revolutionary parties across the world—whether the Communists of China or Vietnam or, later, the Islamists of Iran—take America as an enemy. In this view, Sino-American antagonism was a product of misguided American decisions, which themselves reflected the failure to listen to the wiser voices within the American debate.

  This argument may be valid when applied to other parts of the world, but it is not persuasive in the case of China. For one thing, a strict hands-off policy in China was as politically impossible as a massive military intervention. Democracies are prone to a kind of middle ground in matters that generate strong differences of opinion. A massive intervention would have been opposed by millions of Americans because the tremendous effort involved in saving a distant, not-very-democratic regime would not have seemed remotely justified to them.

  Those same millions would have been convinced, however, that it would have been shameful, too narrowly self-interested, and unworthy of a superpower to leave a long-standing ally entirely to its own devices as it faced a dread challenge. The atmosphere of the impending Cold War, the well-grounded conviction that a messianic, profoundly illiberal, and menacing force was on the rise, fostered the American belief that something had to be done for Chiang, even given his imperfections. By late 1945, it was clear that Stalin, in blatant violation of his treaty obligations to China’s central government, was turning Manchuria over to Mao, and it would have violated the American sense of fairness to have stood by and done nothing to help. In retrospect, it is easy to see that what was done was not going to be enough, and that Chiang would lose mainland China. But that was far from clear at the time. When the decisions to help Chiang were made in Washington, he seemed to have sufficient resources to carry on a successful fight, certainly in China south of the Great Wall, if not in Manchuria.

  The dominant force shaping China and China’s future relations was not the American choice; it was the nature and actions of the Soviet Union and of Mao. The turning point of those years was not some decision made in Washington, D.C., or a press conference by Patrick Hurley, or the dispatch of the marines to Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. It was the Soviet Union’s invasion of China’s northeast provinces in August 1945. Once that occurred, there was no further chance that Mao and the Communists would settle for a political deal with the KMT, despite the concerted efforts of American mediators to bring that about. Once Stalin had more than a million soldiers occupying Manchuria, the Chinese civil war became inevitable, because Mao understood that the central government no longer had the capability to eliminate him militarily. The irony, of course, is that the president of the United States, meeting with Stalin at Yalta, implored the Soviets to send their troops to Manchuria and that the Soviet invasion was facilitated by American Lend-Lease supplies. But as Averill Harriman and George Kennan understood at the time, Stalin was going to send his eleven armies, headed by the implacable Rodion Malinovsky, whether the United States asked him to or not. China may, in this sense, have been “lost” by Chiang Kai-shek; but mainly it was won by Stalin and his loyal acolyte, Mao.

  It was not American support for Chiang that determined the future of the Sino-American relationship; it was Mao’s ideological closeness to Stalin and his need for Soviet help. Mao needed the support and goodwill of the powerful and nearby Russians far more than he needed that of the ambivalent and faraway Americans. The Cold War had begun. Soviet-American animosity was an established fact, and even if he had wanted to, Mao could not have ignored Stalin’s demand that he “lean to one side.” Neutrality was not permitted in the universe that Stalin dominated.

  But Mao didn’t want to take a middle position. Mao was not a Tallyrand seeking a balance of power. He was a visionary and a revolutionary deeply imbued with the global culture of radical and violent transformation that emanated like a shock wave from the Bolshevik Revolution. The character, the beliefs, and the ambitions of Mao and the movement he led were what guided Chinese history, not some decision made in Washington. Another man might have been different. A less ideological figure and, certainly, a more democratic one, would have worked for an early rapprochement with the richest and most powerful nation on earth. He might have strived, like newly independent India did at the time, to benefit from relations with both the world’s superpowers. He might, like Nelson Mandela many years later, have opted for a healing reconciliation among former enemies. But Stalinism offered Mao the path to the absolute power that he craved, and class struggle had always been his creed. Mao favored violence and not what he called “benevolence,” by which he meant a foolish weakness of will. “To sit on the fence is impossible,” Mao said in the summer of 1949, as the KMT was reeling and he was readying himself to take power. “In the world, without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism.”

  It would have been psychologically impossible for Mao to emerge as non-aligned in the Cold War. The man who left in his wake the corpses, literal and figurative, of most of his closest revolutionary comrades, for whom the betrayal of friends was a key ingredient of his total power, who for a decade during the Cultural Revolution maintained friendly relations with only one other country in the world, tiny and, at the time, ultra-Stalinist Albania—this man was not likely to have remained for long on good terms with the United States, even if the Americans had assiduously courted his favor in 1945, even if they had sought, after 1949, to build normal relations with China’s new government. A revolutionary China under Mao was destined to single out the United States as an enemy and to do so for a long interval, until China had exhausted itself in its revolutionary fervor and it faced a greater and closer rival and threat to its independence.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks, as always, to my editor, Jon Segal, for his loyal support, his excellent judgment, his constructive needling, and his friendship; and, of course to Sonny Mehta and the others in the professional team at Knopf who helped to bring about this book, with a special mention to Meghan Houser. And, of course, my gratitude to Kathy Robbins, my stalwart agent, and to her helpers in the Robbins Office, whose kindness, understanding, and encouragement were, as they’ve always been, indispensable.

  Others helped in many ways. I’m grateful to two friends from my days in graduate school, Andrew J. Nathan and Steven I. Levine, both now among the best and most informed experts on Chinese history and politics, for the many important suggestions, criticisms, and corrections they’ve made as the manuscript was in progress, though needless to say, if there are mistakes of fact or judgment in this book, they are mine. My thanks also to Wenyi Zhou, my amazingly smart, gifted, and resourceful researcher at Columbia University; her work was remarkable, as was her calm tolerance of my many urgent questions. My thanks also to Alice Su for her very valuable help with Chinese sources at an early stage of the research; to Jay Barksdale at the New York Public Library and Chengzhi Wang of the Columbia University East Asian Library; to Nancy Hearst, Kati Marton, David Margolick, Edward Jay Epstein, Michael M. Sheng, Max Hastings, Ben Gerson, Doug and Nancy Spelman, and Catherine Talese, all of whom helped to keep this project on track.

  And, of course, to Zhongmei and Elias, the twin centers of my existence, who put up with my absences, my long hours locked away in my upstairs study in Brooklyn, and my curious obsession with events of seventy years ago.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  When one of the American ships: New Yor
k Times, Dec. 14 and 17, 2013.

  “just because it wasn’t”: Global Times, Dec. 21, 2013.

  CHAPTER ONE: A Rare Victory

  “We got a hell of a beating”: Donovan Webster, The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 45.

  “succeed—or else”: Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sunderland, The United States Army in World War II: Stilwell’s Command Problems (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1956), p. 34.

  He ferried his seventy-two thousand: Ibid., pp. 340–49.

  “sickeningly wasteful”: Ibid., p. 346.

  “a long, hot day of mountain climbing”: Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 222.

  “shabby cover of an emaciated body”: Charles F. Romanus and Riley Sutherland, United States Army in World War II: Time Runs Out in CBI (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1959), p. 370.

  “an area the Japanese wanted to hold”: Ibid., p. 135.

  “a smashing climax”: New York Times, Jan. 4, 1945.

  “a powerful tonic”: New York Times, Jan. 24, 1945.

  like eating a porcupine: Webster, p. 60.

  “is making the Ledo-Burma Road”: New York Times, Feb. 9, 1945.

  “It is believed”: Romanus and Sutherland, Time Runs Out in CBI, p. 332.

  invited to sleep at the White House: William Jones, “Correspondence Sheds Light on FDR Post-War Vision,” Executive Intelligence Review, July 6, 2007.

  “if I give him everything I can”: Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic Battle for Berlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 162.

  “We would serve with all our hearts”: David D. Barrett, Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944 (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1970), p. 73.

  CHAPTER TWO: The Generalissimo and the Americans

  “cook up a workable scheme”: Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 257–58.

  “I believe it would work”: Ibid., p. 258; Frank Dorn, Walkout: With Stilwell in Burma (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1971), pp. 77–79.

  “why Chiang’s troops aren’t”: Taylor, pp. 247–48.

  Stilwell told Eifler that he’d changed: Ibid., p. 258.

  “a masterpiece”: Ibid., p. 125. Taylor cites Zhang Guotao, Rise of the Chinese Communist Party (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1972), pp. 478–79, and Yang Kuisong, Xianshibian xintao [A New Study of the Xian Incident].

  “the last five minutes”: Taylor, p. 126.

  “the Red Army’s first sign”: Ibid., p. 134.

  “a national hero”: Ibid., p. 135.

  “a splendid and noble personality”: F. F. Liu, A Military History of Modern China, 1934–1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 99.

  “genuine patriot”: Owen Lattimore, China Memoir: Chiang Kai-shek and the War Against Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990), p. 149.

  “due to the genius of one man”: Han Suyin, Destination Chungking (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), p. 17.

  “he is there”: Ibid., p. 131.

  “she had managed to survive”: Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), p. 279.

  “the bloodiest battle”: Ibid.

  “followed France’s example”: Ibid., p. 280.

  more gallant and resolute: Ibid.

  “China could hope for victory”: Ibid.

  “bent his head”: Taylor, p. 136.

  “undependable scoundrel”: Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 371.

  “great believers in make-believe”: Ibid., pp. 250–51.

  “Where is the gallant resistance?”: Ibid., p. 320.

  “a one-party government”: Ibid., p. 378.

  “The Chinese strategy”: United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereinafter FRUS), 1944, vol. 6, pp. 6–7.

  “We should pull up the plug”: Wedemeyer, p. 205.

  “the first time since the war began”: Taylor, p. 243.

  In his memoir of his wartime service: Oliver Caldwell, A Secret War: Americans in China, 1944–45 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), pp. 8–9.

  “The Peanut says”: Taylor, p. 226.

  “He can have no intention”: Tuchman, p. 153.

  “He can’t make up his mind”: Ibid., p. 273.

  “fatally compromised”: Ibid., p. 274.

  “Resisting the Japanese”: Lattimore, p. 190.

  “failure to recognize”: Alan K. Lathrop, “The Employment of Chinese Nationalist Troops in the First Burma Campaign,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 2 (Sept. 1981): 405.

  “inferiority of striking power”: Tuchman, p. 214.

  he had been rated number one: Ibid., p. 225.

  an extraordinary communications snafu: Lathrop, p. 410.

  “I have to tell CKS”: Tuchman, p. 279.

  “It is expecting a great deal”: Taylor, p. 201.

  “When Burma was crashing”: Tuchman, p. 284.

  “has abandoned my 100,000 soldiers”: Taylor, p. 205.

  “the retreat would have been orderly”: Ibid., p. 208.

  “We have taken Mytkyina”: Taylor, p. 207.

  “Lean back, brother”: Don Lohbeck, Patrick J. Hurley (Washington, DC: Henry Regnery, 1956), p. 308.

  Chiang found Hurley “different”: Taylor, p. 285.

  rejected the request: Ibid., p. 286.

  “crazy little bastard”: Ibid.

  “been delayed, ignored”: Ibid.

  “you have won this ball game”: Ibid., p. 287.

  “I now understand”: Ibid., pp. 287–88.

  “compulsive and stormy sobbing”: Ibid., p. 289.

  “the most severe humiliation”: Ibid.

  “Rejoice with me”: Ibid., p. 291.

  “patronizing attitude”: Ibid., p. 289.

  “is a professional, works hard”: Ibid., pp. 291–92.

  “My heart is broken,” Ibid., p. 292.

  “Stilwell’s every act”: FRUS, 1944, p. 170; Taylor, p. 294.

  Stilwell invited the correspondents: Peter Rand, China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 246.

  “STILWELL BREAK”: New York Times, Oct. 31, 1944.

  “The record of General Stilwell”: Lohbeck, p. 305.

  “small, graceful, fine-boned man”: Wedemeyer, p. 277.

  “how many people”: Ibid.

  “He seemed shy”: Ibid., p. 278.

  “we would have no difficulties”: Ibid.

  “I have now concluded”: Romanus and Sutherland, Time Runs Out, p. 52.

  “underlay most of China’s military problems”: Ibid., p. 65.

  “Conditions are really bad”: FRUS, 1945, vol. 7, p. 7.

  CHAPTER THREE: The Devastated Country

  Early in 1932: Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2013), p. 20.

  “We Sympathize”: Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938–1945 (New York; Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 42.

  one hundred billion dollars: Arthur Waldron, “China’s New Remembering: The Case of Zhang Zhizhong,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (Oct. 1996): 948.

  “When no outside pressure”: Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time: Life in Provincial China During the Crucial Years 1940–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Sentry Edition, 1967), p. 298.

  “boom towns”: Ibid., p. 298.

  “sheltered well over a hundred thousand”: Ibid., p. 241.

  “After each lengthening raid”: Ibid., pp. 244–45.

  “the road to the west”: Ib
id., p. 252.

  “piled with the families”: Ibid., p. 256.

  “The difficulty of survival”: Ibid., p. 27.

  “Public spirit, generosity”: John K. Fairbank, introduction to Peck, p. 3.

  “You have seen misery”: John F. Melby, Mandate of Heaven: Records of a Civil War, China, 1945–1949 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 21.

  “Everything went on in the streets”: Ruth Altman Greene, Hsiang-ya Journal (Hamden, CT: Archon Press, 1977), p. 6.

  It was a quiet, privileged campus: Edward Gulick, Teaching in Wartime China: A Photo Memoir, 1937–1939 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 72–73.

  “as foreign eccentrics”: Ibid., p. 74.

  “we all live like lords”: Nora B. Stirling, Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict (Piscataway, NJ: New Century Publishing, 1983), p. 57.

  Joseph Stilwell, at the time: Greene, p. 111.

  “the arsenal behind the hospital”: Ibid.

  Chiang came to Changsha: Diane Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 63.

  “With the running off”: Greene, p. 112.

  “going like a bonfire”: Ibid., p. 113.

  “the fires blazed”: Ibid., p. 114.

  The fire was a consequence: New York Times, Nov. 21, 1938.

  Soong Mei-ling: Greene, p. 114.