China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (37 page)

In the self-contained, sealed-off world of Communist ideology, much that was viewed in the rest of the world as benign or certainly inoffensive was construed to be wickedly conspiratorial. Around the time of the CCP’s founding, the major world powers, including the United States, Japan, and Britain, attended a conference in Washington whose main result was a set of agreements limiting the size of one another’s navies. Seen by the treaty makers as a hard-won victory in the effort to prevent an arms race and the outbreak of another world war, these Washington treaties were castigated by the Chinese Communists as an imperialist “robbery” that “will compel 400 million Chinese people to enter into slavery under
the new international trust.”

An interpretation like that would, if Americans had known of it, have been difficult for them to understand. They had, in general, a benign view of themselves and an especially benign view of themselves when it came to China. Americans have always felt that their “open door” policy, first formulated at the end of the nineteenth century when other countries were forcibly extracting colonial privileges from China, was consistent with the idealistic American impulse to help remake
China as a Christian democracy. When, for example, China was forced to pay a huge indemnity to the imperialist powers after its defeat by them in the
Boxer Rebellion of 1898, the United States put the funds it received into an educational trust for bright Chinese students to study in America.

But for a Chinese of the first half of the twentieth century, American intentions were not always seen in so favorable a light. In 1915, while war raged in Europe, Japan imposed its notorious twenty-one demands on China, pressing China to agree to a host of concessions, from giving Japan control of the Manchurian railways to allowing its Buddhist preachers to proselytize in China. The weak Chinese government acceded to these demands, setting off massive protests, especially by students. A few years later, in the wake of World War I, the victorious Allies wrote into the
Versailles peace treaty a clause awarding Japan control of the German colony of
Qingdao in Shandong province. Chinese intellectuals responded to this new insult with a four-year period of protests and self-examination known as the
May Fourth Movement, which powerfully engaged the minds of intellectuals, including those who would soon found the Communist Party. For them, the spectacle of the supposedly benign United States agreeing to give hated Japan control over Chinese territory validated the suspicion that the “open door” was an American euphemism for maintaining its share of the China market.

This view of America was one of the main points of difference between the CCP and the KMT. Both parties wanted to achieve full independence for China by eliminating extraterritorial privileges in the treaty ports. Chiang Kai-shek always suspected, correctly, that British policy was not to help China become strong and independent but to keep it weak and tethered to the West, so Britain could preserve its empire, including
Hong Kong and its extraterritorial compounds in Shanghai and elsewhere. But, especially after the break with the Communists in 1927, the KMT became increasingly tied to the United States even as it constituted itself, in Communist eyes, as the party of the landlords and the big capitalists. Chiang and the rest of the Kuomintang were as patriotically committed to full Chinese independence as the Communists; nonetheless, they grew closer to the United States as time went by, and many of its leading figures were educated not in the University of Toilers of the East but in American universities. Chiang himself was a convert not to Marxism-Leninism but to Methodism; his
glamorous wife went to Wellesley; his brother-in-law and prime minister, T. V. Soong, was an alumnus of Harvard; his finance minister,
H. H. Kung, a graduate of Oberlin College and the Yale Law School. China’s government ministries were heavily populated by English-speaking graduates of
American universities.
Theodore H. White
organized a Harvard Club in
Chungking in 1940 and, he later wrote, it “included a larger proportion of the high officials of Chiang Kai-shek’s government than a Harvard Club would have in John F. Kennedy’s Washington.” Chiang was open to missionary activity in China and to big business, and he failed before the outbreak of World War II to eliminate the extraterritorial privileges in the treaty ports—such things as immunity from prosecution in Chinese courts and foreign-run police forces—that were so injurious to Chinese pride. And so, as the KMT came to seem ever more an American acolyte, it lost its anti-imperialist credentials.

Nobody in the Chinese Communist leadership went to Harvard, Wellesley, or Yale. There were no private or public links, no sentimental old school ties, and few religious affiliations connecting senior Chinese Communists with the United States. The Communists always held anti-imperialism as a central tenet, along with their interpretation of global politics as a series of “contradictions” among the imperialists themselves or between them and the colonized world.

The anti-imperialist credo showed itself in large things and small, in the political and the personal. Illustrating the last of these, in 1937, Mao’s wife,
He Zizhen, became infuriated when she caught Mao in a flirtation with a comely actress known as Lily (her real name was
Wu Guangwei), who was introduced to him by the leftist American journalist
Agnes Smedley. One night, during a quarrel with Mao, He Zizhen turned her wrath against Smedley, accusing her of being an “imperialist”—later, when she complained to other party leaders, she called Smedley an “
imperialist procuress”—while asking Mao, “Are you really a communist?”

Mao most definitely was a Communist, and while his observance of what was supposed to be superior Communist morality was inconsistent, his vision of American imperialism was unchanging, and it was one of the things that made his friendly attitude toward the United States a temporary departure, a tactical move. The classic Chinese
Thirty-Six Stratagems for Waging War and Politics
includes the ploy known as “Hide the knife behind a smile.” The aim of it is to ingratiate
yourself with your enemy when you need to keep him at bay, confuse him, or, to use the Marxist-Leninist terminology, exploit the “contradictions” between him and other enemies, to prevent them from combining against you. Once Mao was in power, the approved jargon changed to a kind of bombastic boilerplate about “American imperialism” and its “running dogs” that, while rhetorically ridiculous, represented his default ideological position. His belief in the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of revolutionary authority was also permanent. The war caused both Stalin and Mao to relinquish ideological goals, to hide the knife for a while, so that ideological goals could be achieved later.

Even before the Japanese war
, Mao consistently demonstrated obedience to this principle. During the
Xian Incident of 1936, when, as we’ve seen, Mao’s initial impulse upon hearing of the Xian kidnapping was to put Chiang, the man he’d been calling a “traitor,” on trial, with his execution the most likely result, Stalin told Mao to agree to a
United Front instead. Mao obeyed, and a few months later he made
a public self-criticism, admitting that he had been wrong and Stalin right.

According to the historian
Michael M. Sheng, who has examined Chinese records unavailable to earlier researchers,
Mao and Stalin did, as Service suspected, use
a radio contact to communicate with each other during the war, and this contact was more important than Service believed. The radio was a secret, inherited from the earlier days of Comintern influence. It had fallen into disuse during Chiang’s encirclement campaigns against the Communists, but it was restored at Mao’s behest in 1936 and it remained in place for the entire war. In 1940, Zhou Enlai, after his sojourn in the Soviet Union for medical treatment, brought back to China a set of radio transmitting equipment and two sets of codes—for example, the phrase “remote place” meant Stalin—to make the
Moscow-Yenan connection more reliable. The radio connection in Yenan was referred to as an “Agriculture Department,” and put under one of Mao’s most trusted lieutenants. The man who translated Stalin’s messages to Mao,
Shi Zhe, wrote in his memoirs decades later that Mao kept total control over the files of these messages, keeping them in his residence where nobody else had full access to them. The files were burned at Mao’s orders in 1946, probably so that Stalin’s close, everyday involvement in the CCP’s affairs, at a
time when he was supposedly being “correct and circumspect” toward China, would remain secret and any suggestion that the CCP was a Soviet proxy could be avoided.

Zhou Enlai also brought $300,000 with him from Moscow, one of
numerous financial contributions that the Soviets secretly made to the CCP over the years, which both added a measure of influence and control and belied the Soviet pretense of non-interference in China’s internal affairs. Even after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and Stalin was plunged overnight into a desperate struggle for survival, the money flow to the CCP continued. Pantsov and Levine cite in particular a document unearthed from Soviet archives showing that on July 3, 1941, a bit more than two weeks after the German onslaught began, $1 million was released for assistance to the CCP central committee, and $1 million in 1941 was a great deal of money.

The pattern for the entirety of World War II and, indeed, until after the CCP’s seizure of power in 1949 remained one of close consultation, cooperation, and agreement between Russia and China’s Communists. For the entire length of the Sino-Japanese War, Stalin’s greatest fear in the east was of a Japanese attack, a sort of renewal of the war of 1905 extended from Japan’s Manchurian base into Soviet Siberia. To prevent that, Stalin wanted the strongest possible China, and the strongest possible China was one led by Chiang Kai-shek with the Communists cooperating with him. Stalin understood that the Communists were not yet capable of taking power. They had barely survived Chiang’s annihilation campaigns against them in the early and mid-1930s, and their forces, now bottled up in their fortress in northern Shaanxi province, were small and badly armed compared to those of the central government. The best option under those circumstances was to support the Kuomintang and to do nothing that might anger its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, or to push him into a peace deal with Japan, which would free the Japanese to turn their attention to Russian Siberia.

And so, from the Xian Incident on, Stalin’s essential orders to Mao were threefold: to support the Soviet Union, maintain the United Front, and avoid arousing American suspicions that the Communists’ long-range plan was for revolutionary conquest. This involved numerous twists and turns; Mao frequently had difficulty suppressing his go-it-alone impulses, but he did consistently yield to Stalin’s preferences. In 1939, to take a striking example of this, leftists the world over were shocked and dismayed when Stalin and Hitler agreed on their non-
aggression pact, followed by their division of Poland. The various Communist parties had to make a quick and awkward ideological about-face, offering praise of an alliance with Hitler, who until then had been their devil incarnate.

Mao was no exception. Suddenly, what was yesterday’s unthinkable alliance was today’s brilliant tactical stroke, one that destroyed the imperialist warmongers’ goal of profiting from a German-Soviet war. The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Mao told a group of New China News Agency reporters, “has
shattered the intrigues by which the reactionary international bourgeoisie … sought to instigate a Soviet-German war.” It also, Mao said, enumerating numerous advantages of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, “has broken the encirclement of the Soviet Union by the German-Italian-Japanese anti-Communist bloc … and safeguarded socialist construction in the Soviet Union.”

In 1940, with Chinese men being used alive for bayonet practice and thousands of its women being raped by the Japanese, Franklin Roosevelt made a radio address in which he declared an American national emergency. Thinking that this was preliminary to an American entry into the war, the Kuomintang was ecstatic over this speech. The Communists, however, expected to support the German-Soviet pact, were in the odd position of having to oppose any military move against the Russian ally, Germany, or its ally, Japan. Therefore, the CCP’s response was to call Roosevelt a “warmonger.” Drawing on its theory of imperialism,
Liberation Daily
warned that the American ruling class was preparing to “drive the American people into the
slaughterhouse of imperialist war to generate great war profits for some sixty of the richest families in America.”

Mao was to change this perception the following year, impelled to do so by the German surprise attack on the Soviet Union, which led both Stalin and Mao to call for an “international anti-fascist United Front,” and Roosevelt was transformed in China’s propaganda from “warmonger” to “
enlightened bourgeois politician.”

This does not mean that the underlying vision had altered. Years later, when he was on the verge of taking power, Mao repudiated the notion that China needed help from the United States and the West. “
Their
capitalists want to make money and their bankers want to earn interest to extricate themselves from their own crisis—it is not a matter of helping the Chinese people,” he said.

There were times when Mao’s obedience to Stalin put him into conflict with others in the CCP’s leadership, at a time when these other
members were equals, not the obedient subordinates they later became. In 1940, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, wanting to fight Japanese aggression, acting against Stalin’s instructions, pushed the CCP into the
Hundred Regiments Offensive. When the offensive produced a horrific result for the Communists, Mao, back in control, returned to a policy of limited guerrilla hit-and-run attacks; in doing so, he was restoring the standard low-risk, low-casualty, maximum-propaganda-value strategy that had been proposed by Stalin.

At least twice over the course of the anti-Japanese struggle the impetuous Mao became convinced that Chiang was gearing up for an attack against him—he remembered Chiang’s murderous assault on the Communists in Shanghai in 1927—and he wanted to strike preemptively, which of course would have damaged or destroyed the United Front. On both occasions, Stalin, communicating through the secret radio connection, told Mao that he was exaggerating the risk of a KMT attack, and he asked him to stay patient and to do nothing to weaken the United Front. Mao acquiesced.