China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (27 page)

This was the fundamental incompatibility of the priorities of Chiang and Roosevelt, the one striving to preserve himself, the other to save the lives of his nation’s soldiers. For the United States, getting the government and the Communists into the same “corral,” as Feis later put it, became a panacea, the solution for China. And everybody, including those who disagreed with each other about almost everything else, supported this solution. Even Chennault, Chiang’s best friend among the Americans, told Roosevelt that what was needed was “
true unification between Chungking and Yenan,” so that the civil war that Chiang knew was looming in the future wouldn’t take place. That was where FDR’s personal representative needed to play his historic role.

And so Hurley bent himself
to the task. In his initial meetings with Chiang and with the Communists in Chungking, the outlines of a deal had begun to come clear, at least to Hurley. It would be a five-point plan in which the CCP would essentially gain recognition as a legal party in exchange for agreeing to place its army under a centralized command. Chiang and the KMT were ready to accept this arrangement, and why not? Legal recognition of the CCP would be a small price to pay if the party’s leaders were willing to give up independent control of their
armed forces. Chiang must have been extremely skeptical that Hurley would persuade Mao to agree to this formula.

Hurley’s first formal meeting in Yenan was on November 8. Hurley dominated the opening session, which took place in the morning, presenting a written version of the five-point plan to Mao. This document called on both parties, the KMT and the CCP, to “work together for the unification of all military forces in China for the immediate defeat of Japan and the reconstruction of China.” In a passage clearly written by Hurley and redolent of the effort made over the decades to remake China in the Christian and democratic image of the United States, the document further called for both parties to work for “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Then came the paragraph in which the central government would regard the CCP as a legal party.

Mao was in command during the afternoon meeting. He began with what Barrett called a bit of “polite persiflage,” and then plunged into an angry denunciation of Chiang, on whom he put the blame for China’s disunity. What was needed, Mao said, was not simply a central military council but an entirely reorganized government consisting of the KMT, the CCP, and the other political parties. In other words, Mao insisted on much more than mere legal status for the Communists. His demand was for a coalition government in which the KMT and the CCP would have equal status, though he doesn’t seem to have provided any specifics as to how exactly this government would function. Mao was ominously confident of his chances should there be no agreement on a coalition. Hurley’s assumption seems to have been that the central government was overwhelmingly powerful and that the Communists would gratefully accept its offer of legal status. His five-point proposal specified that the Communist troops would get “the same pay and allowances” as Nationalist troops, the implication being that this would be an improvement for the ragtag Communist troops.

Mao bluntly pointed out to Hurley his mistake on this point, saying (as reported by Barrett), “the National Government armies were
no longer able to fight.” The government had nearly two million men in its army and 779,000 of its men were blockading the Communists, while the rest of the government armies simply ran away when the Japanese were there. The best historians of this period estimate that 400,000 government troops were blockading the CCP, half of Mao’s figure but still a high proportion of Chiang’s forces. As for equal pay and allowances,
Mao pointed out what many of the American China hands had already noted in their dispatches to Washington, which is that, in Barrett’s summary, “
Chiang’s men were starved and miserably clad, and many were so sick and weak they would scarcely march even for short distances.” Barrett agreed on this point, writing: “
I had myself seen soldiers topple over and die after marching less than a mile.” The Communist armies were the ones who were well fed, well clothed, and in good physical condition.

Hurley’s reply to this was to point out that, so far from running away, China had won recent victories in Burma and on the Salween, and, moreover, that Mao’s tirade against Chiang contained the words that any enemy of China might use, somebody who wished to see China “continue to be divided against itself.” This was nonsense, and Mao knew it. “General,” he said to Hurley, “
what I have said about Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang has already been said by President Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill, Doctor
Sun Fo [Sun Yat-sen’s son, an influential member of the KMT’s liberal wing], and Madame Sun Yat-sen. Do you consider these persons the enemies of China?”

Hurley changed the subject. Chiang, he said, genuinely wanted to come to terms with the Communists and, as evidence of this, he was willing to give one seat on the National Military Council to the CCP.

Mao was contemptuous of this offer.

Hurley:
Well, it’s a foot in the door.

Mao: A foot in the door means nothing if your hands are tied behind your back.

Hurley: Membership on the Council would give the Communists full knowledge of all military plans and operations, including, presumably, any contemplated against the Communists themselves.

Mao: The Military Council is a powerless body whose current members are kept in the dark; it is so unimportant that it hasn’t bothered to meet in a long time.

“Chairman,” Hurley countered, “if you do not think the terms offered by the Generalissimo are fair enough to induce you to join in a coalition government, on just what terms would you be willing to do so?”

Mao spent a day conferring with his cohort and the next day made a counterproposal to Hurley that led to agreement between him and the Communists. When agreement was reached, as Barrett put it, the Communists were “greatly pleased,” and no wonder. The agreement
gave the Communists everything they wanted, including a “Coalition National Government embracing representatives of all anti-Japanese parties and non-partisan political bodies.” This last category consisted of the small, non-armed democratic parties that had emerged in the shadow of the KMT dictatorship, the largest of which, the
Democratic League, was the main party of China’s left-leaning intellectuals, many of whom had been schooled in the United States. In such a way did the proposal essentially do away with the one-party dictatorship that Chiang had headed since 1927 and that he clearly felt was essential for his continued rule as well as for the future of China—though, as we will see, he did slowly relent on that point under American pressure.

The deal struck in Yenan also included an expansion of Hurley’s earlier “of the people” language to a full-fledged elaboration of America’s most liberal aspirations for China. “The Coalition National Government will pursue policies designed
to promote progress and democracy and to establish justice, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association,” even “the right of writ of
habeas corpus,
” which had never existed in any form in China’s three-thousand-year history, and wasn’t to exist in its future either. These phrases were obviously inserted by Hurley, who spent an afternoon and an evening fiddling with the text before the final meeting on the morning of November 10. Hurley’s political differences with Roosevelt did not stop him from tossing into the text a couple of Roosevelt’s most ringing phrases. The new government of China “will also pursue policies intended to make effective those two rights defined as freedom from fear and freedom from want.”

The movement Mao controlled had no free press, no free speech, and no rights of assembly or habeas corpus. But he and his lieutenants were happy to sign an American-style bill of rights since they had no intention of honoring it if they ever came to power. They had simply accepted an unalterable principle of political life, which is that the party out of power has more to gain from demanding democratic freedoms than the party in power. This was especially the case in China in late 1944, when disaffection with the KMT, but not with the remote, largely unknown Communists, was growing, and the government’s response consisted of the very repressive measures—imprisonments, press censorship, and bans on demonstrations—that the Communists themselves would make permanent features of their rule.

The American attempt to mediate between the two main Chinese
armed parties did not lead to the collapse of the Kuomintang and the empowerment of the Communists, but it inevitably helped the Communists with Chinese public opinion. Mao could, without embarrassing himself with the evident expediency of it all, feed the hunger in China for liberal freedoms, portraying the KMT as freedom’s enemy and himself as its champion, though the paradox is that the greater long-range threat to freedom in China was Mao himself.

On
Hurley’s last afternoon in Yenan, the two sides engaged in what Barrett called “
a love feast, with everybody in a happy mood.” Later, outside the meeting hall, Hurley said to Mao, “Chairman, I think it would be appropriate for you and me to indicate, by signing these terms, that we consider them fair and just,” and so they placed the documents on a flat stone and each man in turn scratched out his signature—Mao signing American-style with a pen rather than Chinese-style with a waxed seal. Just before leaving for the airfield, Hurley did add a caveat. “Chairman Mao,” he said, “you of course understand that although I consider these fair terms,
I cannot guarantee the Generalissimo will accept them.”

The optimistic Hurley, though, seems to have anticipated no problem getting Chiang to agree to the revised document. Hurley himself had signed it, after all, and he enjoyed the weight and prestige of the United States, which wanted a deal and whose support Chiang desperately needed. He had had close consultations with Chiang before he turned up in Yenan, so surely he had some idea of just how far Chiang would go. For these reasons, the Communists probably felt that Hurley knew what he was doing. As a sign of that, Zhou and a secretary accompanied Hurley on his plane to Chungking, where, presumably, Zhou would handle any further necessary refining of the text.

As soon as Hurley landed
in Chungking on November 10, he sent the Hurley-Mao document to T. V. Soong, intending that it be passed on to the Gimo. An alarmed Soong rushed to Hurley’s quarters. “The Communists have sold you a
bill of goods,” Soong said. “Never will the National Government grant the Communist request.”

What was this bill of goods? The exact terms of the coalition envisaged by the Hurley-Mao agreement were never spelled out, though presumably they involved some sharing of power and authority, a certain number of government portfolios going to the Communists while Chiang remained president of the republic. But Soong believed that
Hurley had been taken in by Mao on this point. It was obvious to him and to Chiang that the Communists would be able to use their presence in a coalition to strengthen their hand in an ultimate contest for total power, to win from within. In other words, the very reason the Communists were happy with what Hurley had wrought was the reason Chiang couldn’t accept it. When confronted with reports of American discussions with the Communists, Chiang commonly expressed the worry that, once again, the Americans would be “fooled” by the Communists’ hypocritically heartfelt expressions of love for the United States and for democracy, and of selfless determination to do whatever they could to help defeat Japan. Now Hurley, whom he had counted on for understanding, was repeating the pattern. Despite Chiang’s warnings to the contrary, Hurley continued to believe the Molotov-Stalin description of Mao and his followers as “margarine Communists” rather than radical Marxist-Leninists whose goal was both total power and a total transformation of Chinese society. This belief formed the basis for his negotiating strategy. In Hurley’s frequently reiterated view, the Soviets would not back the CCP, which meant that if the pressure on the Communists remained strong and consistent, they would eventually have no choice but to accept a weak role in a KMT-dominated government.

But Chiang knew better. He knew that Mao was a real revolutionary, and that there was a deep ideological connection between him and the Soviets. As we’ll see, Chiang hoped that by fostering good ties with Moscow he could prevent the Russians from giving all-out backing to the CCP, but he nonetheless found himself warning Cassandra-like of the Communists’ nature as fully red, while the Communists for their part encouraged the United States in the belief that they were radish-like.

On the airplane back to Chungking, Barrett sat next to Zhou, and he asked him whether he thought the United States or the Soviet Union to be the greater democracy. “
We consider the Soviet Union to be the greatest democracy in the world,” Zhou replied, but, he added, “we know it may take a hundred years for us to attain this state of democracy. Meanwhile we would be extremely glad if we could enjoy the same sort of democracy you do in the United States today.” Never mind the ominous naïveté, or the willful ideological blindness, in believing Stalin’s Russia to be history’s greatest democracy. What Americans always took away from a comment like that one of Zhou’s was the benign and reassuring message that Communism was an ideal to be achieved in some
distant future and that in the very long meantime, the Communists could be friends of the United States.

Given
Chiang’s large armies
, his reputation abroad as the savior of China, and the recognition he enjoyed from other countries, including the Soviet Union, as the only legitimate ruler of China, why should Chiang have felt that a deal with the Communists was a path to disaster?

The answer to that question has to do with the chief difference between the United States and China, allied countries that could nonetheless not find common ground: It’s what the historian
Tang Tsou has called
American simplicity versus Chinese complexity. For Americans, the singular goal was the defeat of Japan, and since that was also the Chinese goal, Americans couldn’t understand why Chiang seemed so hesitant about measures that would help to achieve it, such as a reform of the Chinese armed forces, the firing of incompetent commanders, the consolidation of ramshackle, underequipped, and badly led divisions into a smaller number of disciplined and effective troops. For Americans like Stilwell this military reform was simple good sense. It would help defeat Japan and, along the way, equip Chiang with the kind of army he’d need in the future confrontation with the Communists.