China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (35 page)

CHAPTER NINE

Hiding the Knife

J
ohn Service made his final visit to Yenan in March 1945, when he had long talks with Mao that convinced him more than ever that an opportunity for a constructive working relationship with the Chinese Communists was there for the United States to seize, if only it had the wisdom to do so. While he was there, he got the news that American troops had stormed the Japanese stronghold of
Okinawa, news, he felt, that had put Mao into “exceptionally good spirits, getting out of his chair to act out dramatic embellishments of his talk, and diverging to recall amusing anecdotes.” Mao expressed chagrin that the negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek mediated by Ambassador Hurley were proving “fruitless,” for which he blamed Chiang Kai-shek, but he was defiantly confident that if Chiang resumed his effort to wipe out the Communists by force, he would fail. “
Chiang could not whip us during the civil war when we were a hundred times weaker,” he said.

But whatever happened in China, whether the negotiations succeeded or failed, whether the United States provided arms to the Communists or not, Mao assured Service that China and the United States would be natural allies. They had “
strong ties of sympathy, understanding, and mutual interest,” Mao said, as Service paraphrased him. They were both “essentially democratic and individualistic … by nature peace-loving, nonaggressive and non-imperialistic.” For all of these reasons, Service cabled, continuing to summarize Mao’s comments, “there cannot be any conflict, estrangement, or misunderstanding between the Chinese people and America.” The Communists’ goal is moderate, Mao said, encouraging what Barrett was later to call the “agrarian reformer guff.” It was reduced rents, progressive taxation, and the “institution of democracy.” As for the United States, Mao repeated
the assurance he’d given Barrett a few months earlier, that even if the United States declined to provide his forces with “
a single gun or bullet,” the Communists “will continue to offer and practice cooperation in any manner possible to them. Anything they can do … the Communists consider an obligation and duty.” But if the United States did see fit to arm the Communists, advantages would accrue to both countries. The war with Japan would come to a quicker end and the Americans would “win the undying friendship of the overwhelming majority of China’s people.”

These talks confirmed Service in his conviction that in its one-sided support for Chiang the United States was “letting the tail wag the dog” and losing a historic chance to build a cordial relationship with the Communists. A few months before, on an earlier visit to Yenan, Service had written, “
Politically, any orientation which the Chinese Communists may once have had toward the Soviet Union seems to be a thing of the past.” The United States was a far more potent prospective partner in economic and technological development than the Soviet Union, and it had no colonialist designs on Manchuria or other regions of China, like Xinjiang. “The conclusion,” Service wrote in September 1944, “is that American friendship and support is more important to China than Russian.” Now he and Davies felt ever more urgently that the United States needed to act on that fact. From Moscow,
Davies weighed in with a memo of his own in mid-April. He warned that the KMT lacked popular support, that it had no program to attract popular support, and that it was “inefficient, venal, and stale” with little chance of prevailing against the “dynamic and disciplined” Communists. As for the Communists, Davies continued, they began “as an instrument of Moscow’s policy of world revolution,” but the events of the war, during which they’d gotten very little help from the Russians, have pushed them in a nationalist direction. Will they nonetheless decide to be “voluntary creatures of Russian foreign policy?” Would they be “willing to cooperate with us on terms equal to or better than those which they will extend to the Soviet Union?” We don’t really know, Davies admitted. “What can be said at this juncture, however, is that if any Communist regime is susceptible to political ‘capture’ by the United States, it is Yenan.”

In 1960,
fifteen years after Davies’s memo, Mao led China into a furiously angry
break from its erstwhile ally and socialist brother, the Soviet
Union, accusing it of crimes of ideology and aggression, using the stilted bombast that China’s Communists always use against their foes, even today. In addition to the war of words, there were armed clashes in 1969 over a disputed island in the Ussuri River (Wusulijiang in Chinese) on the border between Chinese Manchuria and Soviet Siberia. This new rivalry paved the way, after an interval of more than another decade, for the historic rapprochement between China and the United States, which began in the early 1970s.

China’s anti-Soviet animosity and its balance-of-power détente with America have given great credibility to the idea that China under the Communists would always have been amenable to the “American overtures” of which Davies spoke, and that at least non-hostile relations with the United States would have come about if only the Americans had not persisted in their blind and self-defeating support of Chiang.

Behind this perception is a historical interpretation, namely that the Chinese Communists never really trusted the Russians, never got much real aid from them, sometimes felt betrayed by them, and always yearned, as Mao repeatedly told the Dixie Mission representatives, to benefit from a normal and friendly cooperation with the United States. Mao, after all, was a “radish Communist” or a “margarine” one, not a real one, this line of thinking posits. He wanted to adapt Marxism to China’s purposes, and in so doing to preserve China’s independence from the USSR, which loomed gigantic and threatening on the northern border, practically shouting at China to engage in a strategic balancing act with the distant United States. Hurley himself, in the one area of agreement between him and the China hands, believed this. The supreme authorities on the topic, Stalin and Molotov, had personally assured him that Mao and his followers were not real Communists.

Some historians have concluded that when Mao did, for the first decade of his rule, allow China to be a “creature of Russian foreign policy,” it was because the United States had pushed him in that direction. Many times during the Japanese war he had been furious at Stalin for the Soviet leader’s unapologetic pursuit of his own interest at the expense of the Chinese Communists’. Later, Mao spoke of Stalin’s “treason.” He called him “
this hypocritical foreign devil.” He felt humiliated by Russia’s semi-colonial exercise of power in Manchuria as well as in Xinjiang in western China, and by Stalin’s haughty treatment of him. He would have wanted, this argument goes, to keep his country free of Soviet domination.

This view is supported by any number of what have become accepted facts. Mao was almost from the beginning—certainly ever since the KMT’s bloody anti-Communist coup of 1927—an unorthodox revolutionary. After the massacre of Communists in Shanghai, Mao led the party to the countryside, where he believed the revolution could be based on the oppressed peasantry, an idea that would have seemed ridiculous to Marx, whose ideas about what he called “the idiocy of rural life” precluded any such Maoist possibility. Mao built up a network of rural soviets in Jiangxi province in south central China—modeled on the powerful workers’ soviets, or councils, that helped pave the way for the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.

Mao’s biggest rivals for power inside the CCP were for years a group of what were called the “returned students” or the “28 Bolsheviks,” led by the proud and ambitious early party member
Wang Ming. Wang had been sent to study in Moscow in the mid-1920s, and there he remained, except for a couple of years in China, until 1937. He missed all the action in Shanghai and in Mao’s rural soviets. He was not on the
Long March and therefore didn’t have the prestige attached to that myth-making event. But he had tremendous stature from his association with the center of the world revolution, where he had frequent contacts with Stalin and Stalin’s agents, and he was seen to represent the
Comintern, the Communist International, which was founded in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution and was pledged to fight “by all available means including armed force for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.”

Using the orthodox language of Marxism-Leninism, Wang criticized Mao for his “nationalist deviation,” and this added to the perception of Mao as a Chinese patriot first and only secondarily as an international revolutionary. His triumph over Wang in a series of power struggles, culminating in the early 1940s, appeared to be a triumph of his independent pragmatism over Stalinist orthodoxy, a point that Mao stressed in his own writings. “
Marxism apart from Chinese peculiarities … is merely an empty abstraction,” he said. “We must discard our dogmatism and replace it with a new and vital Chinese style and manner.”

Then there was the actual experience of World War II. For the entire war, Mao had gotten what Davies called “shabby treatment” from the Soviets, who formally recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s government as the only legitimate government of China, never openly supported the
Communists in their struggle against Chiang, never recognized them as an alternative government (as it did the Polish Communists), never even gave them much in the way of arms. In 1937 at the very beginning of the Sino-Japanese war, Stalin and Chiang signed a non-aggression pact, after which the Soviets, seeking to bolster their resistance to the common Japanese enemy, provided weaponry to the Nationalists, including what was to become the main fighter plane of the Chinese air force. Even after Yalta, the Soviets’ public pledge was to continue to support the Chiang government, to the point that during the subsequent civil war, the Soviet ambassador to China, in contrast to his American colleague, accompanied the Nationalists as they retreated to the south. Even a figure like
Walter Judd, the ardently pro-Chiang congressman who believed that Mao would put Russian interests ahead of China’s, found that Stalin himself had been entirely “
correct and circumspect” in his relations with China. Judd said he had found
no evidence “that Moscow has been backing or supplying, either with materials or with guidance, the Communist government in China during the last seven years.”

Judd was far away, but the Americans on the scene, particularly the members of the
Dixie Mission who were in Yenan for a year and a half, saw no evidence of any strong Soviet influence or even presence at Chinese Communist headquarters. The acutely observant Service supposed there was probably “some contact between the Chinese Communists and Moscow,” most likely between CCP members in the Soviet Union using a “radio at Yenan.” But he believed this contact was minimal. At the time of Service’s final visit to Yenan in March 1945, there had been very little travel between Yenan and Moscow for years, perhaps one or two planes a year, and those planes were thoroughly searched by agents of the central government during refueling stops in Lanzhou in western China. The last duly searched plane from Moscow had landed in Yenan the previous November. In all of Yenan, by Service’s count, there were a grand total of three Russians in early 1945, one surgeon and two reporters for the Tass news agency. More important perhaps, and supporting Judd’s assertion, in all the considerable contact that the Dixie Mission observers had had with the Chinese Communist armies, including months spent accompanying their guerrilla fighters, “there have been found no Russian arms or equipment.”

This perception that Mao’s contacts with Stalin seemed very occasional and unimportant supported the conviction of the China hands,
including Stilwell, Davies, and Service, that the Chinese Communists might welcome friendly ties with the United States, in part because it would make them less dependent on the Soviet Union and therefore, once they took power, as they were inevitably going to do, less likely to be part of a monolithic anti-western Communist bloc in Asia. Under the circumstances, it made perfect sense to predict that China under Communist Party rule could be lured out of the Soviet embrace.

The preponderance of the evidence indicates, however, that these American China experts, so right about so many things, so shrewd and realistic in most of their judgments, were mistaken in this. Years later, Davies acknowledged his mistake, writing in his memoirs that it had been “
unrealistic” to think there was much chance of “politically capturing” the
CCP.

Davies attributed his mistake to an “underestimation of the Communists’ commitment to ideology,” and this is true. But another analytical fault of the China hands was to take the balance of power as the operating principle in international relations. It made sense to them that China would want to balance the awesome power of the Soviet Union with the less threatening power of the United States, and, indeed, China did do that a couple of decades later. What they underestimated was the Chinese Communists’ membership in the international club of revolutionaries as the essential and ineradicable essence of their character and identity. Being straightforward men of integrity themselves, Service and Davies didn’t detect the breathtaking deceit that was practiced on them by Mao and Stalin, two of the greatest masters of deception that the world has ever known. Nor did they entirely appreciate the extent to which Mao acknowledged not only Stalin’s position as the leader of the worldwide proletarian revolution but also the extent to which he needed him; once the
Cold War began, he would have little choice but to side with the Soviets. Logic and experience told the Americans that it would not be in China’s interest to submerge itself in a bloc of states subordinate to Moscow. Logic and experience said that Mao would see Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and he would avoid it for himself by creating a strategic balance with the United States.

But in 1945—and earlier and later too—Mao didn’t see Eastern Europe the way Americans did, as satellite states deprived of their freedom and independence. He saw Soviet domination there—though he would not have called it that—as part of a grand, futuristic plan for an international revolution. By now, the idea of a proletarian world revolution
seems so quaint that it’s hard to believe that anybody in the United States or in China actually believed in it. But for much of the twentieth century, it was an idea that fired the aspirations of millions like Mao, who saw the world divided between exploited semi-sovereign or entirely colonized have-nots like China and the rich and powerful forces of imperialism. Mao in this sense saw very little conflict or, as he would have put it, “contradiction” between his interests and Soviet goals. The scholars
Alexander V. Pantsov and
Steven I. Levine, whose biography of Mao draws extensively on Pantsov’s access to previously unavailable Soviet archives on this point, conclude that as the war wound down Stalin saw a chance in Asia “
to radically alter the correlation of forces in the world arena in favor of the USSR.” And a key to that reordering was a triumph of the Communists in China.