On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  10

  COMMUNIST OCCUPATION

  At daybreak I picked up Chester Ronning at the Canadian Embassy, and we drove to the Northwest Gate, where thousands of Communist troops in their padded yellow uniforms and flat peaked caps were marching into the city. They sat down in orderly lines on their bedrolls along the sidewalks, with rifles tilted over their shoulders, listening to briefings from political commissars and singing revolutionary songs. People from nearby houses brought them tea and hot water, which the peasants call “white tea.” Nationalist army stragglers, their weapons thrown away, passed by unmolested. In celebration of their victory, Communist soldiers climbed onto the facades and roofs of government buildings and Chiang Kai-shek’s former office in the Heavenly Palace to plant their red flags. In a last gasp of defiance, three Nationalist Mosquito bombers strafed the Ming Tomb Airfield trying to detonate the fuel and ammunition dumps there. They overshot the field and wounded some children at play nearby.

  Students from Nanking University, some of them Audrey’s old chums, together with students from the ten other colleges and universities in the city, were at the Northwest Gate, some in trucks, shouting welcoming slogans and cheering the columns of troops. But the students, neatly dressed and obviously middle class, were bypassed silently. The Communists were not yet accepting them as comrades, although they had been among the six thousand students who three weeks earlier had staged militant demonstrations demanding an end to the Civil War. The demonstrations had been put down violently by Nationalist gendarmes. Within weeks, many of the students who massed at the gate to welcome the Communists troops were put into ideological indoctrination classes and organized into work squads. They were typical of an entire generation of university students who were trapped ideologically during the Civil War. Hungering for an effective role in determining their country’s destiny, they had been compelled to make a choice between aligning themselves with a Nationalist dictatorship or a Communist one. Many fell between the cracks and became tragic victims of the purges of the Civil War. Forty years later, their student successors, demonstrating in Tiananmen Square for reform and democracy, would fall victim to fatal gunfire when the Communist government summoned troops to reassert control.

  By the afternoon of that first day of the occupation, I was in trouble with the military. Upon my return from the Northwest Gate, three soldiers entered my office as I sat at my typewriter. Liu, my number one servant, was with them. Addressing themselves to Liu, they asked what I did. “Oh! He sends messages to the United States,” Liu said casually, not aware he was arousing Communist vigilance. “What does he say in these messages?” he was asked. I cringed as Liu replied: “He reports about everything.” That did it. Within a few minutes, the house was surrounded by armed sentries. I could not leave, nor could my cook go to the market for food. Ronning, hearing of my plight, delivered food packages through the wrought-iron gate of the stone wall surrounding the compound. I telephoned an officer at the embassy and had him send a message to Fred Hampson in Shanghai: “Boy Scouts at my door.” Hampson promptly included that in one of his dispatches. After two days, without explanation, the sentries vanished. Thereafter I was free to move about. I accompanied Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French Magnum photographer, as he worked the bylanes of the city, taking some of his great China photos. My dispatches were not censored. The only newspaper to publish in the city, one filled with laudatory articles welcoming the Communists, was the Catholic Yi Shih Pao. Xinhua, the official Communist news agency, began functioning immediately, staffed by journalists who two days earlier had been working for the official Nationalist Central News Agency.

  Nanking was administered by a Military Control Commission headed jointly by General Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping. Liu, designated as mayor, spoke reassuringly to the city inhabitants, directing his remarks particularly to the businessmen: “Members of the Communist Party announce unreservedly that we fight for Communism, that we plan eventually to materialize a Communist society. However, being believers in materialism, we realize that the revolution in its present stage belongs to the New Democracy. Under these conditions we should make friends with over 90 percent of the people and we oppose only the reactionaries who represent less than 10 percent.” During the period of New Democracy, Liu said, “We will concentrate on the development of production by promoting private as well as public enterprises, giving equal attention to capital and labor.” His remarks, apparently made in consultation with Deng Xiaoping, who chaired the Nanking Municipal Party Committee, were very much in keeping with what Liu Shaoqi had told me in Yenan would be the policy after victory in the Civil War. It was a policy that Mao Zedong would abandon at the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and which would not be realized until Deng Xiaoping came to power as the paramount leader in the 1970s.

  In late April, Nationalist bombers based on Taiwan began circling over the city every few days. The bombers, B-24s, B-25s, and Canadian Mosquitoes, came in quite low, since the Communists had no antiaircraft shielding the city other than limited range .50-caliber machine guns. Many of the bombs seemingly intended for the utilities and plants along the riverfront dropped into the Yangtze River. It appeared as if some of the pilots were deliberately trying to avoid bombing their own people.

  On April 25, the radio announced the fall of T’aiyuan, the walled capital of Shansi Province, which had been ruled continuously since 1911 by the warlord Yen Hsi-shan. Marshal Yen, called the “model governor” by Nationalist adherents, had run a prosperous quasi-independent province. He had built more than six hundred miles of excellent roads and two rail lines, also developing agriculture and the forests so that the province had become virtually self-sufficient in food. Behind the thirty-foot-thick walls of his capital, arsenals produced rifles, machine guns, light artillery, and ammunition. When Communist troops swarmed into Shansi in the fall of 1948, the marshal retreated into T’aiyuan. Shortly after the Communist siege began, I flew to the airstrip within the city on one of Chennault’s CAT transports, toured the impressive defenses, and heard the marshal declare his intention to hold out. The Generalissimo, Yen’s close ally, had begun a massive airlift by the civilian transports carrying about five thousand tons of rice into the city monthly. Although short of foreign exchange, the Chiang government spent some $300,000 a day to sustain it. The rice deliveries were insufficient, however, for the population, and thousands starved to death. Resistance ended on April 24 after Yen flew out to Canton, where the Nationalist cabinet had been installed in February. There, he succeeded Ho Ying-chin as premier on June 2 and went promptly to parley with his ally, the Generalissimo.

  During May, there was little radical change in the cultural life of Nanking. The Communist-control commission imposed restrictions on the local press and schools only gradually. Most university students in general greeted the establishment of Communist power enthusiastically. They formed speaking teams which toured the city explaining the “New Democracy” to the people. On the streets they performed the yang-ko, or “seedling song dances,” which I first saw in Yenan in the local Peking Opera House, performed under the auspices of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife. Each dancer, arms akimbo, would take three short steps forward and then three backward, with a kick as an added flourish, while cymbals and drums gave the beat. Couples would weave in and out under a bridge of arms. Communist soldiers taught the students the steps, and newspapers published words of the songs. One song went:

  Reactionaries who exploit the people deserve to be cut into thousands of pieces.

  They totally ignore the affections of the common people and want only to be dictators.

  Big landlords, big warlords, big compradors, big families—all conspire together, all conspire together.

  And, therefore, we poor people suffer.

  Chen Yi’s troops left Nanking soon after the occupation to join other units wheeling eastward to capture Hangchow and encircle Shanghai, which fell on May 25. Behind an enormous ditch and a ten-foot wall erected by thousands
of civilians laboring under the command of the garrison, the Nationalists put up a brief face-saving defense of Shanghai. Tang En-po, the Nationalist commander, pledged to turn Shanghai into a “second Stalingrad.” Chiang Kai-shek flew into the port city from his retreat in Fenghua, spoke of “total victory within three years,” and hastily departed. Chen Yi’s troops thereafter paraded into, rather than stormed, Shanghai. They rounded up 100,000 passive Nationalist soldiers.

  Rail, telegraph, and telephone communication between Nanking and Shanghai resumed within a few days after the fall of the port. But the Nanking telegraph office declined, as it had for several weeks, to accept international traffic. I sent my dispatches out by phone, mail, or courier to the AP office in Shanghai, which retained international links. Communist officials did not attempt to impose censorship on the few American and French correspondents who remained in Nanking.

  In the diplomatic compounds life had become very boring. With their sources of information dried up, diplomats had little to report to their home governments. Typically, the American ambassador, J. Leighton Stuart, made only one note in his diary on April 30: “Charades after dinner at Jones’.” But in the next weeks, Stuart was to become the central figure in a series of history-making events.

  11

  HUANG HUA AND J. LEIGHTON STUART

  A turning point in relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists ensued in May 1949 with the arrival in Nanking of Huang Hua, with whom I had become very friendly in Peking. What transpired would tend to freeze relations between Peking and Washington for more than two decades.

  For the Communists the former Nationalist capital had become the only venue available for diplomatic contact with the Western nations, and in particular, the United States. To undertake the most critical demarche Zhou Enlai detached Huang Hua from work with the Politburo and dispatched him to Nanking as chief of the External Affairs Office of the Military Control Commission, the department responsible for relations with the foreign ambassadors. With the exception of General Roschin, the Soviet ambassador, who, on Stalin’s orders, had complied with the Nationalist invitation to relocate in Canton, all the foreign envoys had remained in the city. Roschin’s transfer to Canton was very much in keeping with the double game Stalin was playing with the Nationalists and the Communists. From the standpoint of diplomatic protocol, Stalin behaved punctiliously in ordering his ambassador to follow the Moscow-recognized Nationalist government to Canton. But it was also a maneuver that put him in position to salvage any possible gain from the wreckage of Nationalist China while accruing him additional leverage in his manipulation of Mao. Andrei Ledovsky, then the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy, and several other Russian diplomats were instructed to remain in Nanking as liaison and consultants to the Communist Military Control Commission. Ledovsky continued to be a useful source for me as he had been in Peking when he served there as consul general.

  In recalling my conversations with Huang Hua in Peking, it was apparent to me why he had been selected for the Nanking mission. J. Leighton Stuart would be the key intermediary in any approach to the West, and in particular the United States, and Huang Hua was the logical choice to engage him. Huang Hua had been a student at Yenching University in 1935 when Stuart was serving as president. He was well known to Stuart as the militant leader of the school’s student council. They had renewed their acquaintance in 1946 when Stuart visited Peking and met with Huang Hua, who was then posted at Executive Headquarters, where I met him. These two were now to become the principal actors in a diplomatic critical interplay between the United States and the new Communist regime. My reconstruction of these events is based on talks in Nanking with the key figures at the time, the sole access given to me by Philip Fugh to Stuart’s personal diary after the ambassador’s death in 1962, conversations over the years with Huang Hua, and recollections in his book Memoirs published in 2008.

  Zhou Enlai had reason enough to want Huang Hua to open exploratory talks with Stuart at the first opportunity prior to the formal founding of the government of the People’s Republic of China, which was to take place on October 1, 1949. Although the American military advisory group had been withdrawn, the Communists were still fearful of U.S. military intervention in the Civil War. They were aware that American officials were in talks with Nationalist leaders on the possible creation of a new resistance base in western or southern China. On the Burmese border, Nationalist units were regrouping with covert American help. There was the possibility that the U.S. Navy would be deployed to block the invasion of Taiwan, which was being readied by General Chen Yi in the southern ports. The United States had just transferred four ships to the Nationalist Navy, supplementing other military aid en route to the Chiang Kai-shek forces on Taiwan. The Nationalists were urging a diversionary landing by American troops on the South China coast. Stalin had warned Mao of “the danger of Anglo-American forces landing in the rear of the main forces of the People’s Liberation Army.” Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists were aware that President Truman had in secret deliberations with his aides expressed adamant opposition to any such action.

  Huang Hua was told in Peking by Zhou Enlai to proceed cautiously in his approach to Stuart. He was to call on him only as a private citizen and as his former student at Yenching. “Be careful. Keep in constant touch with the Central Committee” was his final instruction before Huang Hua departed for Nanking. “My understanding of his word,” Huang Hua recalled in his Memoirs, “was that the Central Committee was concerned about the possibility of US armed intervention against the New China. It had, therefore, concentrated more than one million troops of the Second and Third Field Armies in the Shanghai-Nanking area.”

  Huang Hua made the rather risky overland journey to Nanking by train and by truck, bypassing areas still held by Nationalist militia. The first foreigner received by Huang Hua after he was installed in his office in the former Nationalist Foreign Ministry was Chester Ronning. Fluent from childhood in Chinese, Ronning had been asked by the diplomatic corps to represent them, since the Communists were insisting that all business be conducted in Chinese. Ronning was told that the ambassadors would not be entitled to the usual diplomatic privileges and immunities because their governments had no official ties with the Revolutionary Military Commission then ruling in Peking. This was later modified to allow diplomats to communicate by cable in cipher with their governments. Huang Hua, soon after arrival, agreed to meet with me. He was in army uniform rather than in the civilian tunic he had worn in Peking. He greeted me in Chinese but then, becoming less formal, chatted in English and told me that I would be free to carry on my work as a correspondent. After the fall of Shanghai, Huang Hua arranged a visit for me to the port city, where Fred Hampson was still holding the AP fort.

  A few days after his arrival, Huang Hua contacted Philip Fugh, the American ambassador’s personal secretary, and arranged to call on Stuart at his residence. Ostensibly, it was to apologize for a minor incident, an intrusion by Communists soldiers who stumbled into the ambassador’s bedroom during the occupation of the city. But Stuart noted in his diary that the meeting with Huang Hua on May 14, which lasted an hour and forty-five minutes, “may be the beginning of better understanding.” Huang Hua raised the question of U.S. recognition of the future Communist government on condition that Washington sever all ties with the Nationalist government. Stuart gave him a hedged reply with no firm assurance. Stuart, accompanied by Fugh, his secretary, paid a return visit to Huang Hua on June 6 at the Foreign Ministry, where arrangements were made for the ambassador to visit Shanghai for a Yenching student reunion. Two days later, Fugh telephoned Huang Hua to ask if the ambassador could visit Peking in keeping with his past custom of celebrating his June 24 birthday at Yenching University. Fugh said the visit might afford an opportunity for a meeting with Zhou Enlai. Huang Hua, indicating that Stuart would likely be welcome, referred the request to Peking, and the ambassador informed the State Department of the proposed visit. Hu
ang Hua’s message to Peking inspired a sequence of intricate political maneuvers. Lu Zhiwei, chancellor of Yenching, was asked, presumably by Zhou Enlai, to write a letter to Stuart inviting him to Peking. On June 28, Stuart received a puzzling letter from the chancellor which already assumed that he would be making the trip. After a telegraphic exchange with Peking to confirm the contents of the Lu message, Huang Hua visited Stuart to tell him that Mao and Zhou would welcome him heartily.