China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (16 page)

Information on these questions came secondhand from ambiguous sources. One official dispatch written by an American diplomat at the embassy in Chungking conveyed impressions about the Communist movement as if it were on another planet, identified its sources as “
a French national who was in Communist-controlled territory,” a “Belgian Eurasian who recently travelled through that territory,” and “an American airman who crashed in an area controlled by Chinese guerrillas.” The White House formally asked Chiang’s government for permission to send American military observers to the Communist headquarters in February 1944. Chiang replied that he would “facilitate” this plan, but he stiffly resisted it.

Chiang’s resistance was understandable, since the American request amounted to an unofficial recognition of the Communists and their state within the larger state of China. And yet the KMT probably did itself no favors in blocking American contact with the Communists or, for that matter, in its overall propaganda about them, which the American ambassador, Clarence Gauss, termed laden with “
obvious untruths,” “hardly credible,” and “slightly ludicrous.” And it was, though it wasn’t all wrong either. The official portrayal of the CCP, given by chief of staff
Ho Ying-chin to Stilwell’s chief of staff, Major General
T. G. Hearn, in April, was this: Its aim was “
to prolong China’s war of resistance as long as possible … in the hope of creating a state of general confusion in the Far East [in order to] seize the political power in China to serve as a stepping stone towards a World Revolution.” As for Communist troops, Ho said, they were “only an unorganized and undisciplined and untrained horde” that was collaborating with the Japanese, not fighting them. The Communists, moreover, according to Ho, were deeply unpopular in the areas they controlled because their policy was to “terrorize them into submission,” but because “there is always the possibility of an armed revolt on the part of the Chinese Communists against the Central Government,” it has been necessary to “maintain a certain number of troops in that region.” The Americans estimated that about 400,000 government troops maintained a blockade of the Communist area and were unavailable for anti-Japanese combat.

Ho’s communication was more a caricature than an outright falsehood.
The Communists were indeed a greater long-range threat to Chiang’s rule in China than the Japanese, and a “World Revolution” masterminded from Moscow was their ultimate goal, though a much more distant and theoretical one than Ho believed. Under the circumstances, a public relations campaign to prevent any favorable view of the Communists from gaining traction in American policymaking circles was deemed essential to the KMT’s survival, and the policies it pursued directly reflected this goal. Western reporters in Chungking suffered a heavy censorship that didn’t exactly enhance the government’s credibility, nor did the frequent press briefings, which, as Ambassador Gauss put it, consisted largely of the “
mouthing of homilies.” Unfortunately for the KMT, the foreign press and diplomatic corps came simply to disbelieve the reports put out by the Government Information Office, with its impressive accounts of Chinese victories and staggeringly huge and suspiciously precise figures for Japanese casualties. No detail was overlooked. For some time the authorities banned the use of the word “inflation” from western news reports—this at a time when just about every person in Chungking was suffering from rapidly rising prices.

Needless to say, under the circumstances, no verifiable picture of the Chinese Communists was available in Chungking, where western reporters were based, and, indeed, these reporters were banned even from mentioning the Communists in their dispatches except, as
Harrison Forman of the
New York Herald Tribune
later noted, “
to quote the Generalissimo and other high government officials when they accused the Communists of ‘forcibly occupying national territory,’ of ‘assaulting National Government troops,’ or of ‘obstructing the prosecution of the war.’ ” The foreign reporters’ requests to be allowed to visit the Communist areas were entirely unwelcome, and they became more numerous as impatience with censorship increased. Chiang himself worried aloud that the “
young and naïve” members of any American observer mission would “believe the CCP’s propaganda” and pass along their credulity to “senior officers in Washington.”

Chiang was caught between the perceived need to manipulate opinion and the need to maintain a degree of credibility among the foreigners. In addition, by the spring of 1944, the government was getting mauled by the Ichigo offensive in Honan province and was threatened by an attack in Shaanxi, making it more than ever dependent on American
Lend-Lease supplies.
Chiang also nurtured a certain hope that, contrary to his fears, if western reporters and military observers visited the
Communist headquarters in
Yenan, they might come to understand the dictatorial and deceitful nature of the Communists. In April, Chiang replied to a formal request submitted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Association, whose president was
Brooks Atkinson of the
Times,
saying that the government would allow a visit to Yenan—provided the Communists would “
guarantee full freedom of movement and investigation during [the] trip in Communist areas.”

A few months later, a press delegation consisting of a handful of American and British correspondents left for Yenan, accompanied by both KMT and Communist officials—“minders” in current journalists’ parlance. Shortly after, Chiang relented on the request for an official military observer mission and what soon came to be known as the
Dixie Mission—because it would be based in rebel territory—was born.

On the day of the observers’ arrival in Yenan there was a lunch with
Zhu De, commander of the Communist armies, and with Zhou Enlai, who didn’t wait to show off his skills at personal diplomacy. “Captain,” he said to
Jack E. Champion, the pilot of the damaged C-47, “
we consider your plane a hero. Fortunately, another hero, yourself, was not injured. Chairman Mao has asked me to convey to you his relief that you came to no harm.” Mao himself helped to set the affable tone, writing in an editorial in
Liberation Daily
that the arrival of the mission was “
the most exciting event ever since the war against Japan started.”

Very soon, Service and Barrett were lunching, dining, and drinking tea with the men who would, four years later, become the leaders of the People’s Republic of China, and they liked them. Their dispatches describe the Communist leaders as direct, unpretentious, full of Eagle Scout vigor, and, above all, cordial, accessible, unguarded, and open—these latter qualities were in unspoken contrast to Chiang Kai-shek, who lived in imperious seclusion in his antique-laden hilltop residence outside Chungking, dubbed Peanut’s Berchtesgaden by Stilwell. Years later,
Mao and other senior Communists were to occupy a garden compound adjacent to the Forbidden City in Beijing surrounded by high walls and a moat and as forbidden to ordinary people as the palace next door had been.
But in Yenan they impressed their American visitors with the simplicity of their lives, residing in caves fitted with wooden doors and paper-lined window frames, furnished with rustic desks and tables, as well as a stand for an enamel washbasin. This was not Berchtesgaden; this was more akin to Valley Forge.

The caves themselves were an impressive sight, cut out of the loess
cliffs in levels, connected by a geometry of steep zigzag paths. Each cave had an arched entrance, a narrow terrace in front for a small vegetable garden, and perhaps a chicken coop or pigpen or a children’s play area. The impression was of a sort of desert encampment on a grand scale, like the children of Israel in the Sinai, or the Roman legions in the Middle East. There was no indoor plumbing. The latrines were located a good distance away. The caves were dimly lit with kerosene lamps and heated by charcoal braziers that emitted a dangerous amount of carbon monoxide; one of the mission members,
Melvin A. Casberg, a doctor from St. Louis, warned his colleagues to keep the cave doors open for ventilation when the heat was on. The Communist leaders wore padded cotton jackets and pants unadorned by any insignia of rank, and they said they longed for friendship with America, which, they insisted, they admired for its democratic nature. To Forman, who had been to Yenan a few months before on the journalists’ guided tour, the whole scene was “
a magnificent symbol of the tenacity and determination of the Border Region people.”

After just six days in Yenan,
Service reported to the State Department on his initial first impressions, which were “extremely favorable,” very much like Forman’s. One enters an area like Yenan, he said, “with a conscious determination not to be swept off one’s feet,” to remain aware that things couldn’t be quite as good as they’ve been described by previous visitors. And yet, he continued, “All of our party have had the same feeling—that we have come into a different country and are meeting a different people.”

Among the elements in the picture that impressed Service and, he says, the other members of the observer group were a few absences—“of show and formality, both in speech and action,” of “bodyguards, gendarmes and the clap-trap of Chungking officialdom,” and of “beggars” and “desperate poverty,” both of which were inescapable elsewhere in China. “Mao Zedong and other leaders are universally spoken of with respect (amounting in the case of Mao to a sort of veneration) but these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking,” Service reported. As for the fight against the Japanese, “morale is very high.… There is no defeatism, but rather confidence. There is no war-weariness.” At the same time, “there is everywhere an emphasis on democracy and intimate relations with the common people.” He found himself in agreement with one of the western journalists already there who observed, “We have come to the mountains of North Shaanxi
to find the most modern place in China.” Most important perhaps, Service ruminated on the likelihood that the KMT would fail in the long run and that the Communists would succeed. “One cannot help coming to feel that [the Communist movement] is strong and successful, and that it has such drive behind it and has tied itself so closely to the people that it will not easily be killed.” In this he was entirely correct; this view came to be shared by a majority of the State Department’s China experts.

A month after his arrival, Service was received by Mao for a meeting that lasted eight hours, during which the Communist Party chairman pleaded with this junior American diplomat, a mere second secretary from the embassy in Chungking, for long-term cooperation. Mao said he wanted an American consulate to be established in Yenan and to remain there after the end of the war, because, Mao said, the end of the war would mean a withdrawal of the military observers, and an official American civilian presence would deter a Kuomintang attack. Mao requested that the Americans pressure Chiang to undertake democratic reforms, so that the Communists could participate in the government. He worried aloud that if the Kuomintang didn’t reform itself, there would be civil war, and then American arms would be used against the Communists. To forestall that prospect, Mao asked that American aid go to all forces fighting the Japanese, including the Communists. He told Service that the Chinese considered Americans to be the “
ideal of democracy” and a restraint on the repressiveness of the KMT.

In September, Davies arrived for talks with Mao, Zhou, and others, and his presence in Yenan, where he joined his childhood friend Jack Service, must in its way have been a moving and even portentous event for both men. Like Service, Davies had been born in Sichuan, where his parents were among that evangelical Christian cohort striving to bring the light of Jesus to China, though neither Davies nor Service grew up sharing their parents’ proselytizing mission. Instead, they joined the U.S. Foreign Service, and after the United States entered the war, both ended up as political advisers to Stilwell. Davies was headquartered in New Delhi and traveled frequently to China, to Washington, D.C., even to Moscow and to Cairo in 1943 (for the summit among FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Chiang), where he assessed such questions as British and Soviet aims in the war and how they differed from both China’s and America’s. He gained a reputation for independence of thought, straightforwardness, and an uncommon ability to ferret out
the delusional wishful thinking that was common during the war, especially among Americans.

Some, for example, worshipped Churchill and felt it entirely normal that Britain and America developed a special relationship during the war and that the United States agreed to give the war
in Europe priority over the one in Asia, so that bombers needed in China went to Britain instead. But Davies warned that, in Asian eyes, British-American intimacy made it appear that “
we have aligned ourselves with the British in a ‘whiteocracy’ to reimpose western imperialism on Asia.” In another report of prophetic accuracy, he warned against taking “
steps committing us to colonial imperialism lest we find ourselves aligned with an anachronistic system in vain opposition to the rising tide of Asiatic nationalism, possibly enjoying Russian support.” In other words, don’t get swept up in Britain’s goal of reestablishing its colonial empire in Asia (or France’s similar desire) and don’t allow Stalin to champion a new order in Asia, while the United States remains attached to the decaying remnants of the past. This was excellent advice, though it wasn’t followed a generation later in Vietnam, where another nationalist-Communist revolution was forming.

Davies also understood the tendency of Americans, schooled in the optimistic creed that “all things are possible provided that you have the guts, grit, gumption and go,” to overestimate the possibilities of sheer goodwill, especially in the face of the indelible and conflicting ambitions of Asia. “
One of our major mistakes,” he said in 1943, commenting on the American demand that
Chiang put Stilwell directly in charge of his armies, “is attempting the impossible—command over the Chinese.” What Davies and Service both understood, and what many of their superiors—including, in this example, Stilwell—didn’t, was that to reform China’s national armies, Chinese politics would have to be reformed first, and reform would be taken by Chiang Kai-shek as a grave threat to his autocratic regime.