Shortly after his victory, I flew to Kalgan to interview Fu Tso-yi, one of the most remarkable of the Nationalist generals. A stout, good-humored man, the general had held sway for years as a warlord in Suiyuan Province (now part of Inner Mongolia), with a regional army of nearly a half million men loyal solely to him. Through efficient and relatively enlightened rule he had earned the devotion of the peasantry and was widely respected as a just ruler by the Communists as well as the Nationalists. His seizure of Kalgan, a city of some 200,000 near the Great Wall, was a severe blow to the Communists. After accepting the surrender of the city by Japanese occupiers in 1945, the Communists had transformed Kalgan into a major communications center, where it also established the North China Associated University. In taking the city, Fu partially blocked the Communists’ vital corridor extending from Central and North China to Communist-held areas in northern Manchuria. General Nie Rongzhen, the Communist regional commander, withstood three days of bombing by Nationalist planes as Fu Tso-yi’s cavalry approached, before abandoning the city. Foreseeing accurately a time when he would recapture the city, Nie did not destroy the railroad yards, the six key river bridges, or the large tobacco factory before he retreated.
In Kalgan I stayed at a hostelry that no longer bore the Communist-given name of “Liberation Hotel.” Fu welcomed me warmly, briefed me on his Tat’ung and Kalgan campaigns, and then put on a show with a ride past one of his famed cavalry units mounted on the small rugged Mongolian ponies which the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan rode in their conquests of Asia and eastern Europe. The use of these horsemen in the drive on Kalgan may have been the last time in history that mounted cavalry was employed in a major military operation. The general also provided me with an escort for a visit to the Belgian Catholic mission at the Inner Mongolian village of Siwantse, thirty miles north of Kalgan. I toured the mission’s twin-towered cathedral, erected in the eighteenth century, which loomed over an adjacent seminary and convent. I stayed that night in one of the outlying parish compounds whose priest had the job of sending supplies farther into the interior to other clergy in isolated areas who worked as farmers and teachers while propagating their faith. Awake near midnight, I saw a lantern shining in the courtyard and going there found the priest in the freezing weather hauling water from the well. I offered to help and then asked how he endured his arduous daily labor. “Oh, I have good news,” he said. “The Vatican is sending another priest to help me.” “Good,” I said. “When do you expect him?” “He will come, perhaps in two years,” the priest replied. He was typical of other Catholic missionaries I met in remote areas living in the most spartan conditions.
Several weeks after my visit to Siwantse, I learned from the Nationalist-censored press that there had been a guerrilla raid on the mountain village. The defending local militia had been massacred, and before going off on the following day the guerrillas had burned the church and other buildings of the mission, including the library with its priceless collection of ancient Tibetan and Mongolian manuscripts. Several of the Belgian priests were said to have been kidnapped. While Nationalist officials described the raiding guerrillas as Communists, the manner in which Siwantse had been savaged and then abandoned, as I noted in my dispatch, suggested that they might not have been Communists but bandits, many of whom operated in the noman’s-land between the contending armies.
Traveling with the truce teams to battlegrounds throughout North China and Manchuria, I found the members courageous and willing but ineffective. General Alvin Gillem, the senior American officer, complained that neither of the two Chinese sides fulfilled commitments they made to disengage the combatants. They signed agreements which they knew they were not going to keep, he said. So the American side could do nothing but get signatures, knowing that those agreements and the accompanying documents had no practical value. In January 1947, when the Marshall mediating mission finally collapsed, Executive Headquarters was closed down.
In early November, Huang Hua arranged for me to visit Mao’s headquarters in Yenan, whose approaches were being blockaded by Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. The blockade had been imposed during the war against Japan. One of Stillwell’s complaints about the Generalissimo’s behavior during that war was his practice of diverting troops from operations against the Japanese to blockade his Communist foes in the internal struggle for power. I had no forewarning that I would be in Yenan at a crucial turning point in Chinese Communist relations with the United States.
2
YENAN
AT MAO ZEDONG’S HEADQUARTERS
I flew to Yenan aboard a rattling old U.S. Air Force C-47 transport, one of the Executive Headquarters’ planes, in a two-and-a-half-hour flight that took us over the Shensi Mountains to the edge of the Gobi Desert. Maneuvering through twisting mountain passes, we bypassed a Tang dynasty pagoda atop a hill and bumped to a hard landing on an airstrip in a narrow valley. Members of the U.S. Army Observer Group, famed as the Dixie Mission, and Chinese officials were on the airstrip to meet this monthly supply aircraft. In a jeep we forded the murky Yen River, a tributary of the Yellow River, and driving into Yenan entered the compound of the U.S. Army Group, where I was to be quartered. The compound had been hollowed out of the adjacent loess hill and was enclosed in an earthen wall. It encompassed a row of cavelike living quarters with a mess hall and a recreation center named after Captain Henry C. Whittlesey, a former member of the Dixie Mission. Whittlesey, a talented writer, had been captured and executed by the Japanese in February 1945 after he and a Chinese photographer entered a town thought to be secure. A Chinese Communist battalion was destroyed in great part when it was deployed against the Japanese in a failed effort to rescue the pair. The remains of the photographer were found in a cave many years later, but not those of Whittlesey. The members of the Dixie Mission, originally eighteen military officers and diplomats, had their living quarters and offices in the cave structures, which were actually tunnels with whitewashed clay walls about eighteen feet long lined with stone blocks and a wooden frame window at the entrance. Light bulbs powered by the compound’s generator dangled from the arched ceiling. Charcoal braziers provided meager heat. The size of the Dixie Mission had been recently cut back to a small number of army liaison officers, and the Chinese were using some of the empty cave dwellings as guest rooms. I was assigned to one of them and slept on a straw mattress resting on wooden planks supported by sawhorses.
The compound fronted on a city in which thousands of people dwelled in small houses on the valley floor while others occupied some ten thousand caves dug out of the hillsides. Once a thriving ancient walled city, Yenan had been almost entirely destroyed in 1938 by Japanese bombing. The Communists brought it back to vibrant life by making it their headquarters, expanding the community with hospitals, a university, a radio station, and a large open wooden amphitheater in which traditional Peking Opera and other performances were staged. Apart from the peasants bringing their produce into the city, everyone on the streets and in the government buildings wore similar padded blue cotton tunics and trousers, and leather-soled sandals or cloth shoes. Unlike in Peking, there were no beggars on the streets. Pausing at the little shops along the streets, I encountered students from every part of China. As many as 100,000 cadres had been trained in the Central Communist Party School in the valley and sent out to organize party cells in the countryside. Evenings I watched the cave dwellers, some twenty thousand of them, mainly workers in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) apparatus, bearing flickering kerosene lanterns—there was no electricity except for that supplied by generators at the American compound or in the hospitals—wend down the hillsides to the wood and stone buildings on the valley floor to attend political meetings and performances by theatrical groups. There was a Saturday night dance at which Mao himself and a mix of officials and ordinary folk would prance to American tunes played by a small string orchestra. Mao, said to be ill, was not at the dance I attended. When the weather was mild, the dances would take place in a grove of t
rees called the Peach Orchard.
Soon after I arrived in Yenan, I was at a dinner attended by the top leaders, one of whom was Liu Shaoqi, general secretary of the Communist Party, second in power to Mao and Zhu De, commander in chief of the newly organized People’s Liberation Army (PLA), a force then of about a million troops comprising the legendary Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and the Democratic Forces of Manchuria. Mao Zedong was not there, and my promised interview with him never materialized. I was told that he was ill and under the care of two Russian doctors, Orlov and Melnikov. Members of the Dixie Mission surmised correctly that the doctors were also being used by Mao for liaison to Moscow. Mao also had the medical attention of an American doctor, George Hatem, known to the Chinese as Dr. Ma Haide, with whom I had very useful conversations. Hatem, a personable, dark-eyed man of Lebanese origin who wore the usual cotton clothes except for a black beret, arrived in China during the war against Japan at the age of twenty-three after receiving some medical training in his native Lebanon and Europe and attending pre-med school in the United States. He traveled to Yenan with Edgar Snow, stayed on to work in public health, married a Chinese girl, Zhou Sufei, became a Chinese citizen, and joined the Communist Party. When I met him, he was a senior staff member of the Norman Bethune Memorial Hospital, named after a much celebrated Canadian who journeyed to China in 1938 during the war against Japan and provided medical assistance with meager equipment and supplies to Communist troops at camps in remote areas.
Mao was absent from all the events which I attended. While I was told simply that he was ill, I speculated that he had retreated into isolation, possibly suffering one of his bouts of depression to which he had been subject over many years. It was said that he was most prone to these depressions when his political and military fortunes ebbed. He was living in a small wood and mud-plastered house with his third wife, Jiang Qing, and their eight-year-old daughter, Li Na. I saw Jiang Qing only once. One night there was a performance in the Peking Opera House of yang-ko peasant dances. In the yang-ko—literally the “seedling song dances”—the performers did chain-step folk dances while singing ideological-themed songs. Jiang Qing was there seated in the front row beside Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, and other members of the Central Committee. I sat in the row behind them. I had seen photographs of Jiang Qing before her marriage to Mao when she was a glamorous, bejeweled movie actress: her hair long, eyebrows penciled thin, and lips heavily rouged. The woman seated beside Liu wore glasses, no makeup, her hair cut in a bob, and she was dressed like the others in a cotton tunic padded against the November chill, baggy trousers, and a black cap. She was chatting gaily and applauding the performance. Although seated with the notables, she was not at the time in the inner circle of political leadership. She was active in Yenan’s cultural life but in the main simply Mao’s attentive housewife. She was restricted to that role by the party leaders, who never quite approved of Mao’s marriage to this woman with a risqué Shanghai past replete with prior marriages and affairs. Recalling that scene in later years, I thought there was far more theater in the front row than on stage. Two decades later, Jiang Qing would become the driving force in the Cultural Revolution and locked in a power struggle with Liu Shaoqi, who was seated at her side on that theatrical evening in Yenan. Their struggle ended for both in turn in imprisonment and ghastly deaths.
Three months prior to my arrival in Yenan, I was told that Mao had granted an interview to the sixty-year-old leftist American writer Anna Louise Strong, one of his most fervent admirers. He received her on the earthen terrace in front of the cave he used as an office. The cave had been enlarged into a three-room apartment with white plastered walls and a brick floor. The interview, published eventually in Strong’s monthly Letter from China and in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, became probably the most quoted interview ever given by Mao to a journalist. When Strong asked Mao about the possibility of the United States employing an atom bomb in a war with the Soviet Union, he replied: “The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons.” When I toured China in 1971 I recalled that interview with ironic amusement. The “paper tiger” had become more real to Mao following his furious ideological split in the early 1960s with Nikita Khrushchev. The Chinese were feverishly building air raid shelters, which I was shown in China proper and Manchuria, against the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. They were also girding for the possibility of a Russian strike at Lop Nor in Xinjiang Province, where they were testing their own atom bomb.
My dinner with the Communist leadership in Yenan, despite an abundance of toasts with mou-t’ai, a clear 120-proof liquor distilled from fermented sorghum, was a very gloomy affair. It was punctuated with denunciations of the deceitful Chiang Kai-shek and to my discomfort expressions of disillusionment with the United States. They saw the United States moving toward greater intervention on behalf of the Nationalists. Zhou Enlai, who ranked with General Zhu De behind Mao and Liu Shaoqi in the party hierarchy, was returning shortly to Yenan from Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital, bearing details of yet another American aid program for the Nationalist government. Zhou had been recalled to Yenan by Mao after talks with Chiang on the formation of a coalition government, conducted in Chungking by General Marshall, had ended in total failure. Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) Party had reneged on an agreement reached earlier for a constitutional framework which would have provided for a degree of autonomy for the provinces, thus assuring the Communists continued political dominance in the areas which they currently held. Chiang had also refused to pull Nationalist troops back to the positions of January 13, 1946, specified under the terms of the cease-fire negotiated by Marshall. The breaking point had been the Nationalist seizure on October 11 of Kalgan, which I had just visited. Prior to Fu Tso-yi’s seizure of Kalgan, Zhou had asked Marshall to warn the Nationalists: “If the Kuomintang government does not instantly cease its military operations against Kalgan, the Chinese Communist Party feels itself forced to presume that the Government is thereby giving public announcement of a total national spilt, and that it has ultimately abandoned its pronounced policy of peaceful settlement.”
Marshall, frustrated and impatient with the deadlock in the negotiations, would leave China in January complaining that both Chiang and Mao had sought to exploit his mediation efforts for political and military advantage. As recorded in the so-called White Paper on China, reviewing events from 1944 to 1949, published by the U.S. State Department in August 1949, President Truman had sent a message to the Generalissimo before Marshall’s departure deploring the lack of progress in the negotiations. In denouncing extremists of both the Kuomintang and Communist parties, Truman said:
The firm desire of the people of the United States and of the American government is still to help China achieve lasting peace and a stable economy under a truly democratic government. There is an increasing awareness, however, that the hopes of the people of China are being thwarted by militarists and a small group of political reactionaries who are obstructing the advancement of the general good of the nation by failing to understand the liberal trend of the times. The people of the United States view with violent repugnance this state of affairs. It cannot be expected that American opinion will continue in its generous attitude toward your nation unless convincing proof is shortly forthcoming that genuine progress is being made toward a peaceful settlement of China’s internal problems.
The criticism in the Truman message was directed in the main at the Generalissimo’s government. However, except for a brief freeze on arms deliveries to facilitate the Marshall negotiations on a coalition government, there had been no interruption in the American military and economic aid program for the Nationalist government. Truman was bowing to the pressure being exerted on him for continued aid to Chiang Kai-shek by the Republican
Party and the China Lobby, an American citizens’ group committed to support of the Nationalists. While Zhou Enlai was still in Chungking negotiating on the creation of a coalition government, the Truman administration concluded an agreement for the sale of war surplus equipment and supplies to the Nationalist government at a fraction of their procurement value of $900 million. Marshall was unable to persuade Zhou Enlai that the surplus was essentially of a “civilian type,” an obvious misrepresentation of the nature of most of the matériel. In the bitterest and most denunciatory terms, I was told by the Communist leadership at my dinner with them that this latest aid program was final proof that the United States was committed to unilateral support of Chiang Kai-shek. It was a breaking point in relations with the United States that would not be mended until the visit of President Richard Nixon to China in 1972.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 3