China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (25 page)

The events of late 1944 to early 1946 show that both arguments are wrong, the argument that it was a mistake not to cooperate with the Communists and the argument that more support should have been given to Chiang Kai-shek. Both positions are based on the notion that it is for the United States to shape the world to its specifications and that, if it takes the right actions, it has the ability to do this. As we’ll see, American policy was bungling, inconsistent, and improvised; it was not the product of a well-thought-out strategic plan. There are lessons to be
learned from this, among them the importance of establishing reasonable goals and pursuing them sensibly, rather than suffer the loss of prestige and self-confidence that comes from loudly announcing unrealistic goals and then failing to achieve them. But it was not American policy that determined the outcome in China. It was the forces on the ground over which the United States, with its vast but not unlimited power, never exercised decisive control.

PART II

Seeds of Animosity

CHAPTER SIX

The Wrong Man

T
he cry rang out over the grass airstrip and the bare brown hills of Yenan, and Chairman Mao and General Zhou, as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were known to foreigners at the time, didn’t quite know what to make of it. “
I shall never forget the expressions on their faces,” Colonel David D. Barrett, the commander of the Dixie Mission, wrote later.

John Davies called the utterance, made by FDR’s special representative in China,
Patrick J.
Hurley, “
a prolonged howl.” Barrett said it was an “Indian war whoop.” Mao and Zhou, despite the indisputable richness of their experience and the adventurousness of their lives, had never encountered anybody quite like Hurley, who was to charm them at first, disappoint them later, and, ultimately confound, perplex, and infuriate them, while vindicating their ideological predisposition against capitalist and imperialist America.

Mao and Zhou were not the only ones who had never encountered anybody quite like Hurley. The political officers at the American embassy, and those attached to General Wedemeyer’s staff, didn’t know what to make of him either, and in the end, a conflict broke out between them that was to open up an ugly episode in which malicious and reckless accusations were made, careers were destroyed, and the United States lost the possibility of a reasoned debate on China.

Hurley arrived from clammy, rubble-strewn, death-infected Chungking into the bracing, crisp, fresh air of Yenan aboard an American army C-47, which was on a periodic shuttle run carrying mail and supplies to the Dixie Mission members. The date was November 7, 1944, nearly two months after Hurley’s arrival in China. He’d had meetings with the Communist representatives in Chungking during his few weeks
there, as he plunged into the task of reconciling the two antagonistic armed parties to each other, so they could dedicate their united energies to fighting the Japanese, but he’d refused Communist invitations to visit Yenan, even ignoring a personal letter from Mao himself, since he wanted to be sure of Chiang’s acquiescence in his diplomatic enterprise. But even after he felt himself ready to meet the senior Communist leaders in their own lair, he hadn’t let them know in advance of his trip.

Because any American plane arriving at the Yenan airstrip was an occasion, Barrett was on hand when Hurley arrived, and so was Zhou Enlai, who didn’t know who the tall, gray-haired man emerging from the C-47 was, even though Hurley did everything he could to make a compelling first impression. He wore what Barrett described as “one of the most beautifully tailored uniforms I’d ever seen,” with three rows of campaign ribbons (leading Barrett to quip: “General, you’ve got a ribbon there for
everything but Shay’s Rebellion”). Zhou asked Barrett, who was wearing a blue padded overcoat, the identity of the resplendent new arrival. When he was told that it was Roosevelt’s special emissary, he “
disappeared in a cloud of dust” to fetch Mao. Soon the Chairman appeared in his beat-up ambulance. An honor guard was assembled, bugles blared, Hurley saluted, and it was at this point that he let loose his Choctaw whoop, which, while it surprised the Communists, was typical Hurley. He strove to make the most of his rough-and-ready cowboy background, his “boisterous goodwill,” as the historian
Barbara Tuchman described it. It was his way of breaking the ice. Pressing the cowboy metaphor, the historian
Herbert Feis said, “
He tried to corral both sides [KMT and CCP] within a fence of general principles, and turn them into a committee for law and order.” Despite his stumble on the Stilwell front, Hurley remained optimistic that his good intentions, persuasive charm, and plain common sense could overcome the obstacles of mutual animosity and conflicting ambitions of China’s two armed parties.

After the welcoming ceremonies, Hurley, Mao, Zhou, and Barrett climbed into the ambulance and bounced off toward the walled town of Yenan, all of the participants in this scene surely touched by a sense of historic possibility.

For Mao and the Communists, the presence among them of a special representative of the president of the United States was a milestone in their long climb back from the near annihilation they had suffered at the hands of Chiang only a few short years earlier. In 1937, after the
Long March and a brief stay at their first refuge of Bao’an, the Communists had seven thousand men left of the one hundred thousand that had begun the trek a year earlier. Now they credibly claimed to have nearly one million men in their army, plus an estimated 2.5 million men in part-time militias serving as a reserve force. The Communists controlled territory with a population of about ninety million people spread out across North China in both occupied and non-occupied areas.

They had achieved this remarkable growth by dint of vigorous and brilliant organizing aided by a skillful self-presentation to China’s domestic audience, but it was the Japanese invasion that had been crucial to their success, because it forced Chiang to defer his military campaigns against them and gave them a patriotic pretext for building up their own armed forces—whose purpose, they could pretend, was not to take power and impose a proletarian dictatorship but to defeat the hated invader. Years later, in 1972, when the Japanese prime minister
Tanaka Kakuei apologized to Mao for Japan’s aggression, Mao reportedly told him that no apology was necessary. “
If imperial Japan had not started the war,” he said, “how could we Communists have become mighty and powerful?” Even if this story is apocryphal, Mao’s comment would have been true.

Hurley quickly tried
to establish a sense of common ground with Mao, with whom he shared a rural background and a predilection for earthy language. They passed a man herding some sheep, and Mao told Hurley that he’d been a shepherd in his youth. Hurley said he’d been a cowboy. When the Sino-American party crossed the Yan riverbed, Mao informed his guest that the river rose in the spring and dried up in the summer. Hurley told Mao that the rivers in Oklahoma got so dry in the summer that you could tell where the fish were by the dust they raised. The ambulance passed a Chinese farmer having trouble with a balky mule, and Hurley shouted out, “Hit him on the other side Charley.” Barrett translated this somewhat mysterious remark (Charley?) for the puzzled Mao and Zhou, a task made even more difficult by “
the saltiness of the General’s remarks and a manner of discourse that was by no means connected by any readily discernible pattern of thought.”

Hurley had an earthy, picaresque quality that transcended national boundaries, but he was an amateur when it came to China, and it was
to become clear in the weeks ahead that he was in over his head on what had become his main task, achieving KMT-CCP unity and cooperation. He wasn’t in this sense the only amateur to take over American China policy at that time. Among the others was Edward Stettinius, FDR’s new secretary of state and a figure who has not occupied a very prominent place in the annals of American foreign policy. He was, like Hurley himself, an almost serendipitous appointment. He just happened to be available in a moment of need, an awkward contrast in this sense with his counterparts on both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist sides, respectively the wily and well-connected
T. V. Soong and the consummately shrewd, deeply experienced Zhou.

Stettinius had grown up on an estate on Long Island and been an executive at General Motors and U.S. Steel before he became
Lend-Lease administrator in 1941, then, in 1943, deputy secretary of state. He was evidently a capable man, but his experience, including his role as chairman of the War Resources Board, was entirely domestic, though he had dealt with foreign affairs in a limited way as the administrator of the Lend-Lease program. Historians have described Stettinius’s appointment as secretary of state in 1944 as an indication of Roosevelt’s intention to bypass the State Department and to run his own foreign policy. On China specifically, the president tended to communicate with Chiang through his trusted adviser
Harry Hopkins, who maintained close contact with Chiang’s brothers-in-law,
H. H. Kung and T. V. Soong, who were often in Washington.

The ambassador to China during most of the war,
Clarence E. Gauss, whose feelings about Chiang and the KMT pretty much matched those of Stilwell, had always been kept out of the loop, and, unlike Hurley, he enjoyed no direct access to the American president. Also unlike Gauss, Hurley was disinclined to listen to the views of the China hands like Service, Davies, and Ludden, who were technically political advisers to Wedemeyer and continued to send their reports to him. “
If I haven’t been given American policy, I shall make American policy,” Hurley announced on arriving in Chungking. And he did, following his own whimsical course, getting support from the president when he needed it and essentially silencing alternative government views.

The professional China hands, most of whom had been in China for a decade or more and served in several different postings around the country, were instantly skeptical of the new special emissary’s chances of success. There was too much animosity between the Nationalists and
the Communists, too much past bloodshed, and, most important, too many irreconcilable ultimate goals for Mao and Chiang to come to any sort of durable compromise, the China hands believed. By coincidence, on the very day of Hurley’s arrival in Chungking, John Davies, already there, composed a cable to the State Department in which he’d laid out in highly realistic terms the conflicting ways in which the two major parties in China viewed each other and the United States.