China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (38 page)

One of these instances involved the biggest military confrontation between the two parties that took place during the Japanese war, known as the
New Fourth Army Incident. In early 1941, perhaps without Chiang’s permission, one of his generals attacked a division of the Communist New Fourth Army (NFA), inflicting heavy losses on it over a three-day period. The two sides blamed each other for this violation of the United Front. The NFA division had agreed to a government order to withdraw from south of the Yangzi River to north of it. According to the KMT, it had disobeyed this order and was maneuvering for position. The Communists claimed that the division was simply looking for a safe place to cross the river and had been attacked before it was able to do so.

It is very likely that the Communist version of this is the true one, because at the time both Stalin and Mao felt it in their interest to maintain good relations with the KMT. After the attack, a furious Mao wanted to declare the United Front dead and to mount a full-scale offensive against the KMT, both military and political. But in radio messages to Mao,
Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist who headed the
Comintern for Stalin, ordered Mao to “
rely on the people who advocate the maintenance of the united front … and do everything to avoid the spread of civil war.” When Mao expressed some annoyance at this, Dimitrov radioed him two more times to insist on maintaining the United Front, and Mao assented.

In April 1941, Stalin delivered what must have been another shock to Mao. He signed a non-aggression
pact with Japan in which he recognized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in exchange for Japan’s recognition of the
People’s Republic of Mongolia, which, though nominally independent, was controlled by the
Soviet Union. This was an extraordinary development. All the while, Mao had worried that Chiang Kai-shek, his past and future mortal enemy, would make peace with Japan, and now here was Stalin himself doing exactly that! The deal, moreover, would enable Japan to put more troops into China, since it no longer had to guard against a move by the Russians. Moreover, China claimed
Outer Mongolia as its own.

Still,
Mao endorsed the new agreement. He did so because it was in the preeminent interest of the Soviet Union, since, as Mao argued, the threat of an Asian war between the Russians and Japan had now been averted, and Stalin had defeated the Anglo-American plot to pit the Axis against the Soviet Union. (Russia had not yet been attacked by the Nazis.) In addition, Mao said, engaging in a bit of twisted logic to explain why it was a good thing that the Soviets were recognizing Japan’s conquest of three provinces of China, until this point Chiang had seen himself as crucial to the Soviet strategy of deterring a Japanese attack. He could feel he was more important to Moscow than the CCP, which might have emboldened him to surrender to Japan and attack the Communists. Now he couldn’t.

Two events later in 1941 changed everything about the strategic picture, but they didn’t change Mao’s obedience to Stalin. The first was Hitler’s great betrayal of Stalin. On June 22, Hitler mounted Operation Barbarossa, a surprise, three-front attack on the Soviet Union. Stalin, having been allied to the fascists for two years, now put out a call to Mao asking for all-out support of the antifascist struggle. Mao wrote to Zhou to ease off on his already weakened opposition to American participation in the war. “No matter whether they are imperialist powers or not,
if they are antifascist, they are good.”

The second event was the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States into the war as a declared combatant, pledged to use its own armed forces to defeat Japan and to expel it from China. The day after the attack, Chiang cabled Roosevelt offering “
to stand with you until the Pacific and the world are free from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy.”

For Mao, the American entry eliminated any remaining possibility that
Japan would attack the Soviet Union, but he still nurtured his chief worry about an alliance between Chiang and the Americans, an alliance that would turn its attention to the Communists once the Japanese were disposed of. The best way to avert this, and to give Mao a chance to build up his forces for a long-drawn-out war, was to establish his own ties with the United States and to gain American recognition as a legitimate political party. Mao had already done
public relations work with leftist journalists like
Edgar Snow, but the purpose of that venture was as much to get attention in China, where Snow’s book would and did leak through the gaps in KMT censorship, as it was to build a favorable image in the United States.

Now the goal was to win over the Americans, inviting mainstream journalists to Yenan, hosting the
Dixie Mission, and helping to rescue downed American fliers, assuring the Americans of their friendly feeling, and making the gestures of friendly relations that the Communists perfected in 1944 and 1945. There were those assurances made by both
Mao and Zhou that it would take decades to create true communism in China and in the meantime they admired American democracy—assurances that would prove false within a few short years of the Communists’ takeover of power in 1949. There were Zhou’s comments to American visitors in Chungking about the Communists’ intention of respecting individual freedoms and rights and his demands that the Kuomintang do the same by releasing political prisoners and curbing its secret police. As we’ve seen, near the end of 1944 Mao told members of the Dixie Mission that he would welcome an American landing of troops on Chinese soil and that he would happily place his forces under American command. “
There is no such thing as America not intervening in China,” he told Service in March 1945. “You are here as China’s greatest ally. The fact of your presence is tremendous. America’s intentions have been good.”

In some ways, Mao probably meant what he said, or some of it, especially when he enlisted American help in creating a coalition government and when he offered military help to an American landing on the China coast. Mao was always confident of his ability, if given a meaningful place in the central government, to use it to expand his influence and eventually to take power. By the time of the Yalta agreement, he had more than a million well-fed, highly motivated troops under his command, facing government forces that were severely depleted. If he had gotten the go-ahead to provide logistical support for an American
landing on the China coast, he would have been able to extend his power to new areas south of the Yangzi River, which was a stated goal.

But his expressed willingness to put his troops under American command was pure public relations. “
We shall never agree to that,” Mao cabled Zhou in Chungking on January 25, 1945, and his reason harked back to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It would put the party’s troops “under foreign command, turning them into a colonial army,” Mao said. America was the imperialist power, the Soviet Union the revolutionary one. And that is what mattered when it came to distinguishing between permanent friends and permanent enemies.

CHAPTER TEN

The War over
China Policy

A
t the end of February 1945, Wedemeyer and
Hurley left China together, arriving
in Washington a week later. Wedemeyer went about laying out plans to seize a port on the China coast in the spring. Hurley’s purpose was more amorphous, more political, and more divisive. He was troubled by rumors he had heard in Chungking that Stalin and Roosevelt had reached a secret deal regarding China when they met at
Yalta in February, and he wanted information on that from Roosevelt himself. He also wanted to be given total control of policy on China, and to make public what that policy was—essentially unconditional support for Chiang Kai-shek.

As we’ve seen, Hurley was a man prone in the final weeks of 1944 to eruptions of fury. He was convinced that his attempts to get the KMT and CCP to make a deal were failing because a few Foreign Service officers wanted them to fail, and the talks Bird and Barrett had had with Mao and others in his camp about intelligence cooperation and supporting American paratroopers in northeast China were proof of this infidelity.

One of Hurley’s biographers attributes some of this irascibility to physical discomfort, the dankness and filth of Chungking, insomnia, and even toothaches, to which the ambassador was prone. Hurley needed glasses but refused to wear them, with the result that he suffered from splitting headaches. His attention span was short; he couldn’t read lengthy documents. Once, at a Chungking cocktail party, with Chinese guests in attendance, he and McClure got into such an angry exchange that only the intervention of friends prevented them from coming to blows. He commanded little respect, even if most people behaved properly toward him. The Communists called him
Little Whiskers. At sixty-
two years of age, it’s not out of the question that he was suffering from mental decline; at least, some observers believed that to be the case. “With increasing frequency [
Hurley] forgot where he was, with whom he was, and even what he had just said,”
Time
’s
Annalee Jacoby told an interviewer.

To the consternation of the professional China experts in the embassy and on Wedemeyer’s staff, Hurley began censoring their dispatches. “He said that he was sent to China to support the Nationalist government and that we should not report anything which reflected [poorly] on the quality and caliber of the Chinese administration,”
Arthur R. Ringwalt, the senior political officer at the embassy, recounted later. “
We would write dispatches saying what we thought of the situation, and he refused to send them in.”

In one instance, Hurley sat for weeks on a paper submitted by Ringwalt describing the tendency of arms given to Chiang’s government to be sold to the Communists or lost in local conflicts. When Ringwalt asked the ambassador what he planned to do with the report, Hurley summoned T. V. Soong to his office and in Ringwalt’s presence showed him the document. Not surprisingly, Soong declared that it was untrue.
The dispatch was never sent.

All along, Hurley insisted that he was on the verge of success, that he would have achieved it already had it not been for the unauthorized meddling of people like Davies, Barrett, and Bird. The paradox is that, while he disagreed with them about everything else, Hurley’s view of Mao’s followers as not “real Communists” was in agreement with the China hands’ view of them. “
I pause to observe that in this dreary controversial chapter two fundamental facts are emerging,” Hurley wrote in February, after the Chungking talks had collapsed, Zhou had returned to Yenan, and Mao was ignoring the American pleas to return to the table:

In the face of Hurley’s irascible wrongheadedness, the China hands fought back, their opposition ripening into an open rebellion against
their boss and ambassador. In the late fall, Raymond Ludden and three other members of the Dixie Mission went on a 1,500-mile, four-month-long journey from Yenan due south about one hundred fifty miles to Fuping, most of it in supposedly Japanese-controlled territory that had been infiltrated by Communist forces. Ludden’s observations exercised a powerful influence on the China hands. The men put on Chinese padded winter clothing and traveled by jeep, by mule, and on foot through rugged, mountainous terrain, sometimes coming within a mile or so of Japanese detachments. They met Communist guerrillas all along the route and were impressed by their stalwart simplicity, their dedication, and, perhaps most important, their good health and high morale. They encountered young urban Chinese who were teaching in rural villages. They saw primitive factories making everything from textiles to explosives. What they didn’t see was military action of any significance, as an informal truce prevailed between the Chinese and Japanese in North China, under which the Communists and their million troops did not engage Japanese forces except in small hit-and-run attacks. At one point, the five Americans met the crew of a downed American bomber who had been brought by the Communists safely through enemy lines, a feat that required a great deal of organization along a large swath of territory as well as the cooperation of local people.