China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (18 page)

Baldwin amplified his view, adding more detail, in a companion piece published in
Reader’s Digest
whose title was “Too Much Wishful Thinking about China.” But despite his clairvoyance on the military situation, Baldwin’s own thinking retained some elements of wishfulness regarding Chiang and the KMT. While China’s armed forces are “weak,” he said in his
Times
analysis, the “will of Free China to resist, symbolized by one man—Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—is still a major determinant in the affairs of the Orient.”

Davies and Stilwell, who believed this to be claptrap, didn’t shy away from back-channel efforts to influence public opinion. The two were in Washington in 1943, and Davies arranged several meetings for Stilwell, including one with more than a score of reporters at the home of
Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the
Washington Post,
during which Stilwell got his views of Chiang across.

In this atmosphere
, it was perhaps not surprising that diplomats, military officers, and journalists alike would see in the Communists a hopeful alternative, an idea that had been fostered for years by a group of pathbreaking journalists, most conspicuous among them
Edgar Snow, the keen, young, adventurous, and leftist China expert whose book
Red Star over China,
published in early 1938, gave a glowing, novelistic introduction of the Communist movement to the American public. Snow had spent about four months with
Mao and his cohort in 1936, not long after the Communists had escaped the KMT’s encirclement campaigns against them and set up a new base area in Shaanxi province. Mao granted Snow many long nights’ worth of interviews, and the resulting book
sold out its first edition of 4,800 copies the day after it was published, and it remained a best-seller for months afterward.

Red Star
was enormously influential. After living in a haze of legend and rumor, the “Chinese Soviets,” as the Communists were commonly called, were suddenly famous, presented to the western public in a brilliantly written, credible first-person account describing them as the heroes of a glorious and thrilling adventure story. Here were the men, and a few women, who had survived Chiang Kai-shek’s persistent attempts to annihilate them, who had endured the grueling, death-defying trial by fire of the
Long March, and were now fighting a clever, scrappy, and courageous guerrilla campaign against the reprehensible Japanese invaders.

“
If the book has been correctly interpreted,” the reviewer in
The New York Times
intoned, “the significance of Red China is not that it is red but that it is Chinese and that it may portend the long-predicted ‘awakening’ of the Chinese people and the ultimate frustration of Japanese imperialism.” The reviewer, one
R. L. Duffus, does not fail to mention the “treachery, venality, and incompetence” of the leaders of the central government of Chiang Kai-shek, along with the horrors of what he called China’s “pagan medievalism,” and, of course, Japan’s effort to reduce the country to “imperialistic serfdom.” The Duffus review quotes Snow himself to the effect that it was “no wonder, when the Red Star appeared in the northwest, thousands of men arose to welcome it as a symbol of hope and freedom.”

Red Star over China
was and still is a journalistic classic, but it was also a carefully planned and brilliantly executed public relations coup engineered less by Snow himself than by the Communists, who chose him to break their story to the world. Mao and the CCP wanted to
garner attention for themselves in the western press at a time when the Chiang regime had banned even the mention of the Communist movement in China’s newspapers. The evidence is strong that they identified
Snow as the right person to invite to their mountain stronghold. While he leaned to the left politically, he had a reputation for independence—unlike the fellow traveling journalists who made no secret of their preference for the Communists—and he would thus have the credibility they wanted in their effort to end their isolation from world public opinion.

Snow had come to China in 1928, an ambitious young man eager to make his mark. He started in Shanghai, where he was befriended by both
Agnes Smedley, the rebellious, feminist, pro-Communist, anti-KMT writer, and
Soong Qingling, the widow of
Sun Yat-sen, who, in contrast to her younger sister Mei-ling, Chiang’s wife, had become an opponent of Chiang and an influential, virtually untouchable critic of his “white terror.” By 1935
, Snow was living with his wife in Beijing (called Peiping at the time) and writing about China for the
Saturday Evening Post,
which had the second-largest circulation among magazines in the 1930s. He also wrote articles for the
New York Sun
and the
London Daily Herald
, which had named him a special correspondent.

In Beijing, Snow and his elegant, glamorous, equally ambitious wife, Helen Foster Snow, known also by the pen name Nym Wales, had befriended students in Beijing and helped them organize mass demonstrations in late 1935 against Japan and against the KMT’s policy of fighting the Communists rather than the Japanese. Not long after the demonstrations, the Snows were approached by a young man who went by the name David
Yui—Chinese name: Yu Qiwei. He was an agent in North China of the
Comintern, the Soviet-led organization that helped, advised, inspired, financed, and often controlled Communist parties outside the Soviet Union.
Yui was a well-placed man of twenty-four. The Snows knew him to be a Communist, the only one they socialized with in Beijing, where the Communist apparatus was almost nonexistent. Among Yui’s contributions to the Communist revolution was his recruitment of his Shanghai girlfriend, the actress
Jiang Qing, into the party, the same Jiang Qing who would soon go to Yenan, become Mao’s fourth wife, and, years later, serve as a radical firebrand in the
Cultural Revolution of 1966–76.

Snow wanted to visit the Communist base area, which at the time was in the old walled town of Bao-an, north of their future home in
Yenan. It would be, he wrote to an editor, “
a world scoop on a situation about which millions of words have been written, based only on hearsay and highly colored government reports.” He expressed his wish to Yui, who seems to have helped broker an invitation from the Communist leadership. Snow also got help from Soong Qingling, whom he visited in Shanghai and asked to use her influence with the Communists to secure their permission for his trip.

The trip was thus at Snow’s initiative, but in the months before the
Xian Incident ended Chiang’s campaigns against them, the Communists were thinking along the same lines. Specifically, Stalin, like Mao, was looking for ways to force Chiang to end his anti-Communist offensive and to fight Japanese aggression instead. As we’ve seen, Stalin was deeply worried that Japan would secure an easy victory in North China and then be free to strike across the border into Soviet Siberia. Mao’s parallel worry was that Chiang would make peace with Japan, thereby freeing him to pursue his campaign of annihilation against the Communists, whose forces had been depleted by the campaigns in Jiangxi and by the Long March. “
To change this situation,” one historian has written of Snow’s pathbreaking visit, “and force Chiang to drop his bloody fixation, required, as Stalin saw it, and as Mao came to agree, some dramatic public relations campaign that would give the revolutionists validity in the eyes of the world as a legitimate popular Chinese political movement.”

Snow and Mao perfectly matched each other: the former, as one of his biographers has put it, was “
a romantic adventurer in search of a literary grail,” while the latter saw himself as a reincarnation of the bandit heroes of
Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
the swashbuckling classic that Mao had read in his youth about a time of turbulence in China’s long history. The stories he told Snow of guerrilla warfare in Jiangxi, the dangers and hardships of the Long March, and his patriotic, anti-Japanese ardor perfectly fit Snow’s own hatred of Japanese and western imperialism, his identification with China’s struggle, his dislike of Chiang and the KMT, and, perhaps above all, his yearning to write an epic story.

Snow’s evident partiality to the
Communists was amply reciprocated in their treatment of him. Escorted on a trip with
the Eighth Route Army, he was greeted at the entrance to one town he visited by a banner reading “Welcome the American Internationalist to Investigate the Soviet Regions.” Bugles rang out as he entered through the gate in the
town’s ancient wall, while troops from three Red Army divisions lined up singing songs, shouting slogans, and saluting as he passed. “I felt,” Snow noted in his diary, “
like a generalissimo with his prick out.” In one place, he played tennis every morning with three members of the Northwest Branch Soviet Government. He taught the wives of the Bao-an elite to play gin rummy. When he left Bao-an on October 12, the entire Communist leadership, except for Mao, who famously slept late, came to see him off, shouting “
Shi Lo Tungzhi Wansui!
”—
Ten thousand years to Comrade Snow!”

Comrade Snow! Snow didn’t give himself this honorific. Still he was no neutral, much less a skeptical observer. He was a talented and enterprising young man with abundant literary talents enacting the historical role of
l’homme engagé,
as the French put it, the man participating in the great cause of his time. Snow was not a Communist himself.
Zhou Enlai was not just covering for him when he told the American China expert
Owen Lattimore in 1941 that Snow would never understand what Marxism was. He was indeed quintessentially American, a choir boy in his youth, an Eagle Scout, a believer in democratic freedoms who had discovered one of the great stories of the twentieth century. And yet his identification with Mao, perhaps his vested interest in the position he staked out on the Chinese revolution, led him unwaveringly to champion Mao and the Chinese revolution long after it had become clear that Mao himself was no believer in democratic freedoms. In doing this, Snow became an apologist for a dictator. He suffered for this. Later in his life he found it almost impossible to find work as a journalist or writer in the United States, because he was viewed as partisan, an advocate for a discredited cause, which he was.

Snow was not the only one. He belonged to a group of people who were dismissive of the Nationalists and favorable toward the Communists to varying degrees—from rhapsodic championship of their cause to more sober appraisals of the chance they were more nationalistic and democratic than ideological and hard-line. There were diplomats, military officers, and journalists in this amorphous group, which in the end formed one side of what was to become a bitter, irreconcilable division in American life, in which their advice would go ignored, their careers be ruined, and China and the United States become enemies.

Some of this group, especially the Foreign Service China experts, had gotten to know each other in Beijing in the early to mid-1930s, when they were young, drawn to the romance of China, and imbued with a
dislike of both the Japanese imperialists and the KMT for what they saw as its repressive nature. Among them were Chinese-language officers at the American legation, Jack Service, John Davies, Raymond Ludden, and, Snow’s best friend in Beijing,
O. Edmund Clubb, all of whom were to occupy important positions as diplomatic experts on China, and all of whom, like Snow, were later to be shadowed by the charge that they had been, at best, naïve and, at worst, treasonous in their portrayals of the Communists. It was Clubb who urged Snow to undertake his trip to Shaanxi, wanting like his colleagues at the American legation to break the KMT’s blockade of information about the Communists, to know who they were, and to be able to report accurately on them to the State Department.

A few of the old Beijing crowd were together again in 1938
in Hankou, where they were joined by a few others who were to play significant roles in the ferocious later debates about China. Hankou, the industrial center on the Yangzi, was the temporary KMT capital for a few months following the Japanese seizure of
Nanjing and before the KMT’s more permanent move farther up the river, past the great Yangzi gorges, to Chungking. Davies was there as a Foreign Service officer. Stilwell was the military attaché, accompanied by his closest aide, Captain (later General) Jack Dorn, known as Pinky to his friends. A few journalists covering the Sino-Japanese War in those years before the United States got into the war had also moved to Hankou, Snow, newly famous as the author of
Red Star,
among them, along with his wife and some other left-wing journalists, including
Agnes Smedley;
Freda Utley, who was English;
Anna Louise Strong; and
Jack Belden of the United Press, a frequent traveling companion of Stilwell, who later accompanied him on the famous walk out of Burma in 1942.
Evans Carlson, a Marine Corps officer, was in Hankou also. He had been able to observe the Eighth Route Army in North China even before Snow made his trip there. Carlson left the Marines when he was forbidden publicly to express his admiration for the Communists.