On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  After the departure of Ambassador Stuart from Nanking in August 1949, the former capital shriveled as a news center, and the AP asked me to proceed to Hong Kong for reassignment. The opportunity to leave came after the Nationalists announced they would relax the coastal blockade to permit the liner General W. H. Gordon to call at Shanghai to pick up foreigners. The night before boarding the Gordon, Robert Guillain, the correspondent for Le Monde, and I strolled down the Bund to the Cathay Hotel, where we were to have dinner. We walked past the tall buildings, dark and desolate, which had once housed the foreign banks, great trading companies, and clubs. Many of the 100,000 foreign residents of the city had fled. Caretakers of foreign properties were standing by helplessly as the Communists took over their enterprises. The Communists were insisting that Chinese staff be retained on full pay in the transition period although business was at a standstill. When we entered the great dining room of the Cathay, it was empty except for several score waiters, all still attired in immaculate white jackets. We dined alone with seemingly dozens of waiters hovering over us. I paid the bill, putting the tip on a silver tray; I glanced up and saw eyes peering from all parts of the room at it. The waiters had depended in the greater part for their livelihood on tips. There had been no other guests that day. Growingly uneasy, Guillain and I hastened into the night.

  The next morning as I passed through customs at the Shanghai quay, a Communist officer watching over the proceedings saw that I was declaring books. He stuck a hand into my trunk and came up with the grass woven paperback copy of Mao Zedong’s On Coalition Government, in which Mao once again advanced the concept of “New Democracy,” that had been presented to me in Yenan. “Where did you get this?” The Chinese officer exclaimed in Chinese. “In Yenan in 1946,” I replied. The officer looked at me intently, ordered my trunk closed, and waved me and my baggage past the guards without further formalities. As the liner left the brown waters at the mouth of the Yangtze on September 25 and entered the blue of the East China Sea, one of the 1,219 passengers, mostly diplomats and foreign businessmen, mounted onto a deck bulkhead and shouted: “We are liberated.” I turned away, leaned over the rail, and looked back to China. Monumental events were impending there. How soon, I wondered, could I find a way to get back to China?

  12

  THE PURGE OF MY CHINA DEPUTIES

  There were two devastating postscripts to my early experience in China which have never ceased to anguish me. Both concern the Chinese journalists who worked as my deputies during the Civil War.

  Shortly before I left occupied Nanking in September 1949, the Communists began to systematically tighten their ideological hold on the population. Virtually everyone was drawn into study and indoctrination meetings. Those attending were required to confess past sins and faulty ideological thinking and to pass judgments on the thoughts and activities of friends, neighbors, and business associates. As the so-called reeducation campaigns became more intense and onerous, there was a change in the private attitudes of many Chinese intellectuals who had welcomed the Communists to the city. The change was visible in the demeanor of J. C. Jao, my Chinese deputy in the AP office. A man in his late forties, Jao had earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, class of 1924, went on to graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and upon return to China worked for the Chinese Educational Mission in Peking. When he joined the AP as a part-time correspondent, he was the editor of the Tsingtao Daily Herald and was teaching at Shantung University in that port city. Tsingtao was the principal base of the some fifty thousand U.S. Marines who were landed in North China in 1945 to assist the Nationalist government in accepting the surrender of the Japanese forces. Jao covered the withdrawal of the marines to shipboard from Tsingtao in February 1949 and then went to Nanking to work as an assistant to Harold Milks, serving as an interpreter, translator, and an occasional writer of short dispatches. A tall, spare man, rather reserved in manner, Jao was an independent thinker and politically liberal.

  Jao had awaited the arrival of the Communists with evident apprehension. In the days immediately before the occupation he would not venture out of the AP compound. I therefore was surprised on the morning after the Communist entry to find him in good spirits and hopeful about the future. Like many of his Chinese friends, Jao was caught up in the talk of “liberation” and impressed by the good conduct of the Communist troops. As the summer wore on, however, and the Communists began to tighten their controls, he began discreetly to voice sour observations. When I left Nanking, leaving him in charge of the AP office, he was distrustful of the Communists. In January 1950, on behalf of the AP he traveled to Peking seeking permission for me to return from Hong Kong to the newly established capital to open an AP bureau there. In a letter to Fred Hampson in Shanghai, reporting on his inconclusive efforts, he noted that he hoped that eventually an American correspondent would be appointed so that he could retire safely to the limited role of interpreter and translator rather than continuing as an identifiable writer. Some months later, after his return to Nanking, he was brought into a Communist indoctrination course and questioned about his background and ties with Americans. He wrote to Hampson saying he was resisting accepting a job with the Communists in which he would be required to write anti-American propaganda. Contact was lost with him soon after.

  On February 21, 1951, the Peking government promulgated a drastic decree on the “punishment of counter-revolutionary offenses.” By then a purge had already begun in the countryside and urban areas. The people were spurred to denounce “counter-revolutionaries,” and executions of the accused began to take place following mass trials. Those executed included former Nationalist officials, landlords and other gentry in the countryside believed hostile to the regime, businessmen accused of antistate practices, intellectuals and others who had been associated with Westerners and suspected of ideological opposition to the Communists. The Korean War thickened the atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and denunciation. The purge was intended to eliminate any elements in the population who might in the future rise and collaborate with the United States and Chiang Kai-shek in efforts to unseat the Maoist regime.

  In Shanghai, the Liberation Daily reported that J. C. Jao had been arrested in Nanjing on April 27, 1951, in a roundup of suspected “counter-revolutionaries” in several cities. Although he was no longer employed as a reporter by the AP, he was accused of being an “international espionage agent” who had spied for the news agency. On May 5 the Liberation Daily announced that Communist firing squads had liquidated 376 “counter-revolutionaries” in Nanjing, 293 in Shanghai, and 50 in Hangzhou. The Nanjing and Hang-zhou executions were said to have taken place on April 29 following public trials attended by as many as 150,000 people. The report cited J. C. Jao as a typical “counter-revolutionary.” We never heard anything from Jao, or anything about him, thereafter.

  The Communists never disclosed the total number of those executed in the nationwide Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries, which continued into 1952. In October 1951 it was announced that the people’s courts alone had tried 800,000 accused counterrevolutionaries during the first half of 1951. In a speech on June 26, 1957, Premier Zhou Enlai stated that 16.8 percent of the counterrevolutionaries had been sentenced to death, most of them before 1952. This would mean that at least 134,400 had been executed in the first six months of the purge. Colonel Jacques Guillermaz, the distinguished Sinologist, who served as French military attaché in the Nationalist capital during the Civil War and later in Peking, estimated in his History of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1949, published in 1968, that a total of 1–3 million had been executed. Other independent experts have made estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to several million. The estimate of more than 10 million put forward by Nationalist officials on Taiwan has not been accepted as reliable by scholarly researchers.

  My other Chinese colleague who suffered the Maoist purges was Peter Liu, a tall, strikingly handsome man in h
is twenties, son of a Nationalist Foreign Ministry official and grandson of a high-ranking official in the Manchu imperial court of the Qing dynasty. A graduate of St. John’s University in Shanghai, Peter spoke flawless English and was employed as a translator at Executive Headquarters in Peking in 1946 when I met him and asked him to do some translation work for me. When the International News Service transferred me to Nanking in 1947, I brought him along as my assistant, and he continued to report for INS after I resigned to join the Associated Press. After the Communists occupied Nanking, he was sent by them to the Peking Foreign Languages Institute for training in government work. When the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries was unleashed, he endured interrogations but managed to survive. In April 1957 Liu counted himself lucky when he landed a job with the official Xinhua News Agency. He was at work there during Mao’s 1957 Hundred Flowers Campaign, a short-lived period of liberalization when intellectuals were invited to join in a “blooming and contending” critique of Communist Party policies. Liu was caught up in a “self-rectification” campaign in which all individuals were expected, in the light of their experiences, to recommend improvements in party and government operations. Liu, anxious to be counted among the true revolutionaries, took the invitation seriously and indulged within Xinhua in a public critique. The Hundred Flowers abruptly ceased to bloom on June 8, 1957, with the publication of an editorial in the official People’s Daily. The critics had overreached themselves, and Liu was found to be among the sinners. It was the beginning of another Maoist purge, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which would punish some 550,000 people who in speaking out had voiced inner feelings contrary to party policies. It was a campaign conducted on the instructions of Mao Zedong by Deng Xiaoping, who subsequently became general secretary of the Communist Party and later paramount leader of the country. Liu was denounced as a “bourgeois rightist” at so-called criticism and self-criticism meetings where his work with me for an American news agency was recalled. On March 8, 1958, Liu was put on a bus and taken through the gates of a compound enclosed by tall walls topped by electrified wire netting. It was the Peking Municipal Detention Center for Corrective Education through Labor. Liu was then thirty-three years of age, and he remained in that labor camp for twenty-one years.

  In 2001, Peter Liu published an autobiography, Mirror: A Loss of Innocence in Mao’s China. In his book and letters to me, he described how following the Communist takeover in 1949 he decided to remain on the mainland, rather than emigrate to Hong Kong or Taiwan. “I still wanted to dedicate my youth and abilities to the new-born Republic.” However, in a postscript to his book he wrote:

  I was rehabilitated at the age of fifty-five after twenty-one years in the labor camp. This plus nine wasted years as a suspected spy made up three decades from the age of twenty-five to fifty-five years, the prime of my adult life, all ruthlessly trampled to smithereens along with the unreserved enthusiasm with which I flung all of myself into the embrace of my beloved motherland. I received an apology for a “mistaken indictment” on the day of my rehabilitation, but was refused compensation of financial losses caused by my salary cut. I was neither elated at the apology nor saddened by the refusal of a compensatory payment, because neither was of any consequence with the humiliation I went through and the losses I sustained. At seventy-two I am long past the age of ambitions and adventures.

  The author is shown sitting in front of a map in the Associated press compound in Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist capital, shortly before the city fell to Mao Zedong’s forces in April 1949. The author met the troops of the People’s Liberation Army as they entered the Northwest Gate and sent the first news report on the Communist occupation of the city. Courtesy Associated Press

  A Nationalist cavalry company retreating in November 1948 from Pengpu on the Huai River, the point at which the author earlier crossed the Nationalist lines to the front where Chiang Kai-shek’s armies would be defeated in the decisive Battle of the Huai-Hai in January 1949. The author was held captive for a time by Communist troops during the battle. Photo by Jack Birns of Life magazine/courtesy University of California Press

  Member of suicide attack squad of the People’s Liberation Army heavily equipped with grenades in action during the Battle of the Huai-Hai. Courtesy author/Memorial Museum of the Huai-Hai Campaign

  Defeated Nationalist commanding general, Tu Yu-ming, captured during the Battle of the Huai-Hai, is led away by Communist troops. Tu was appointed by Chiang Kai-shek despite the fact that he was held responsible for the major Nationalist defeat earlier in Manchuria. Courtesy author/Memorial Museum of the Huai-Hai Campaign

  General Chiang Wei-kuo, the son of Chiang Kaishek, commanded the Nationalist Armored Corps during the Battle of the Huai-Hai. Chiang managed to escape by air from the city of Hsuchow as it was being encircled by Chinese Communist forces. Courtesy Chinese government archives

  The three leading field commanders of the People’s Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War (left to right): Generals Lin Biao, Liu Bocheng, and Chen Yi. Lin Biao was later accused of involvement in a plot to assassinate Mao Zedong. He attempted to flee in September 1971 with his wife and son to the Soviet Union, but his Trident jet crashed in the Mongolian mountains and all aboard were killed. Courtesy Personal collection of Jacquez Guillermaz/author/Memorial Museum of the Huai-Hai Campaign

  On Chinese New Year’s Day, 1949, with his armies collapsing, Generalissimo President Chiang Kai-shek went to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum on Purple Mountain in Nanking. As the author watched, Chiang mounted to the tomb of the founder of the Chinese Republic, bowed, and looked out over his capital for the last time. He then drove to the Heavenly Palace and announced his resignation, naming Li Tsung-jen as acting president. He later flew to Fenghua, his birthplace, where he prepared his retreat to Taiwan. Courtesy Associated Press

  As Communist armies closed in on Shanghai, General Chiang Ching-kuo, a son of the Generalissimo, ordered the public execution of captured Communist agents and black market speculators in commodities. The author was in shanghai in November 1948 when the crackdown began. Shown is the execution of accused perpetrators in Chapei Park. The city fell to the Communists on May 25, 1949. Photo by Jack Birns of Life magazine/courtesy University of California Press

  American Ambassador J. Leighton Stuart shown chatting with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking in 1947. Stuart attempted to negotiate an end to the Civil War. He was invited to go to Peking to meet with Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, but President Truman forbade the trip. Photo by George Silk of Life magazine/courtesy author

  Mao Zedong is shown in Peking’s Tiananmen Square reviewing his troops in a victory parade celebrating the capture of Nanking and the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. Nationalist General Fu Tso-yi surrendered Peking peacefully to Maoist forces on January 23, 1949, after secret negotiations with General Lin Biao, whose troops were besieging the city. Courtesy Associated Press

  Liu shaoqi, head of state of China, was denounced as “taking the capitalist road” by Mao Zedong in a power struggle during the Cultural Revolution that erupted in 1966. He was purged from the Communist Party, placed under house arrest, and died of medical neglect in 1969. When Liu’s collaborator, Deng Xiaoping, came to power after Mao’s death in 1976, Deng rehabilitated his memory. Courtesy Associated Press

  Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong and the leading driving force in the Cultural Revolution, being handcuffed by policemen just after being sentenced to death at a political trial on January 25, 1981. She was accused of disrupting the country with violent excesses during the Cultural Revolution. Her sentence was later commuted, but she died in a prison hospital in 1991 by hanging herself in her bathroom. Courtesy Xinhua, Official Chinese News Service

  Edgar Snow, author of the epic Red Star over China on the rise of the Chinese Communist movement, is shown in 1970 with Huang Hua, on a visit to Bo’an in Shaanxi Province, where Snow interviewed Mao Zedong in 1936 with Huang Hua acting as interpreter. Bo’an was M
ao’s head-quarters for a time during the Civil War. They are shown standing outside of Mao’s old residence. In 1976 Huang Hua was appointed foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China. Courtesy author, from private collection of Huang Hua

  During the French Indochina War, the author traveled in 1950 with a Foreign Legion convoy to the Vietnam-China frontier. Shown at a French army post on the frontier are (left to right) Wilson Fielder of Time magazine, the French officer in command of the post, Carl Mydans of Life magazine, and the author. Courtesy Carl Mydans’ personal collection

  General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, commander of the French forces in the French Indochina War that were defeated by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, is shown in 1951. Shortly afterwards he returned to Paris, where he died of cancer and was given a marshal’s funeral and honored at a massive parade. Author’s collection/Official French Army photo

  Graham Greene. This photo was taken in the author’s Saigon apartment in 1951 when the British writer was doing research for his novel The Quiet American. Photo by Audrey Topping

  Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) chief of state and former emperor Bao Dai (second from left) with U.S. chargé d’affaires Edmund Gullion during a tiger hunt in Vietnam’s Central High-lands in 1950. Standing at right is Admiral Russell Berkey, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Lieutenant Commander Drake (kneeling at left) shot the tiger. Courtesy Associated Press