China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (39 page)

Returning to Yenan in January 1945, Ludden discovered that there was an American plane at the airstrip that was heading back to Chungking, so he jumped aboard, returned to the embassy, and described to his fellow China hands what he’d seen. When he met Hurley, Ludden naturally expected the ambassador to be at least a little curious about his expedition, but
what Hurley seemed most interested in was who exactly had authorized the trip (the answer was Barrett, the commander of the Dixie Mission) and whoever that person was, who had authorized him.

Early in 1945, Ludden’s findings finally arrived in Washington, where they fell straight into the heated and ongoing China debate. Ludden’s firsthand observations were entirely consistent with what Davies, Service, Barrett, and Bird had been saying. He stressed the geographic breadth of the Communists’ operations and the support they enjoyed from local people. “
There is no valid reason to doubt but that
popular support of the Communist armies and civil administrations is a reality which we must consider in future planning,” he wrote. The impression that the Communists were not well-liked by the people under its rule was not, as some (namely Hurley) were maintaining, “a stage-setting for
the deception of foreign visitors.… The simple Communist program of decent treatment, fundamental civil rights, sufficient food, and sufficient clothing for the peasant has brought about genuine unity between the Eighth Route Army and the people.”

During his journey, Ludden and his team members had talked with local commanders about what they needed in the way of supplies and what they would do with them, and from his observations and their answers, Ludden estimated that if they were provided with “adequate explosives,” the Communist armies “can with a maximum advance notice of 40 days cripple North China rail communications.” Ludden also reiterated the opinion of Service and others that the Communists were “
liberal democratic and soundly nationalistic.”

To be sure, they were nationalistic, but liberal democratic? Ludden in this rosy judgment reflected either that there was an element of “stage-setting for the deception of foreign visitors,” or that the China experts’ eagerness to promote cooperation with the Communists made them overeager to find virtues in them that were lacking in the KMT. But Ludden was surely right that with better weapons and supplies, the Communists could have made a major contribution to the war against Japan.

For his part, in a cable of the same day, Davies, now in his new post in Moscow, elaborated on the advantages to the United States of closer ties with Yenan. Moscow, he said, must be viewing the situation in China with “sardonic satisfaction” as the Chiang regime decays, the Communists grow stronger, and the United States remains uncertain about what to do. If the United States would cooperate with Yenan, Davies averred, it would have a chance of strengthening the pragmatic, nationalistic faction inside the Chinese Communist Party, while weakening “those doctrinaires favoring reliance upon the Soviet Union.”

“The profound suspicion and hostility in the United States to the tag ‘Communist,’ the Kremlin probably knows, prejudices the American public against the Chinese Communists,” Davies wrote. “Marshal Stalin must be informed that … most Americans are attached to the fiction that only through Chiang Kai-shek can China in war and in peace realize its destiny.” This ideological stubbornness, this “
inability to engage in realpolitik,” could lead us “to lose what we seek: the quickest possible defeat of Japan and a united, strong and independent China. And the Soviet Union may stand to gain … a satellite North China.”

In a similar vein, Service and Ludden wrote to Wedemeyer, arguing,
“The intention of the Generalissimo to eliminate all political opposition, by force of arms if necessary,” and his habit of paying more attention to his domestic opposition than to the fight against Japan, was the heart of the KMT’s gradual loss of standing with its own people and the reason for its poor military performance. “Support of the Generalissimo is desirable in so far as there is concrete evidence that he is willing and able to marshal the full strength of China against Japan,” the two American China experts wrote. “Support of the Generalissimo is but
one means to an end; it is not an end in itself.”

The person on the receiving end
of these communications was the head of the China desk in the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, John Carter Vincent, a distinguished-looking forty-five-year-old Kansan who’d had half a dozen assignments in far-flung posts
in China, including as minister-counselor of the embassy in Chungking, where he knew the leading China hands well—not that he always shared their opinions. Vincent, like most of the Foreign Service professionals, had a low opinion of Hurley, and he liked Davies and Service, the most ardent advocates of building ties with the Communists, but he also thought they were a bit rhapsodic in their visions of Mao and his cohort. “
They overdid it,” Vincent told his biographer, Gary May, speaking of Davies and Service, who were a decade or so younger than Vincent, more impatient than he was, and prone, because of their awareness of Chiang’s shortcomings, to “
ascribe all virtue to the Communists,” as he put it in a speech in 1944, not mentioning Davies and Service by name but clearly having them in mind.

Vincent was pretty sure that Hurley’s mission would fail, and though he had an aversion to the Communists, without any truly attractive options his policy recommendation was pretty close to that of the China hands.
The best option for the United States and for China, he felt, was for Chiang to stay in power but for him to move quickly toward a more inclusive, democratic political system—otherwise he was likely to be overthrown, most likely by the CCP. But, Vincent understood, Chiang was unlikely to relinquish one-party rule, and therefore the United States needed to have “an alternative solution,” not to find itself stuck with the failing leader of a failing government. And the alternative was more or less what Service and Davies were recommending: arming the Communists without asking Chiang’s permission to do so.

These views made their way into a State Department paper on China policy that was given to Wedemeyer when he arrived in Washington but, tellingly, was kept from Hurley. The paper was an effort to bridge the divide between those favoring all-out support for Chiang and those who wanted to build relations with the Communists. The short-term objective in China, the one Wedemeyer should concentrate on, was defeating Japan, the paper said, and this was to be achieved in the political sphere by uniting all the Chinese factions, which, of course, is what Hurley was attempting to do. It would be good, the paper allowed, if the United States were able to arm all of the factions, including the Communists, but, unfortunately, that was politically impossible—unless circumstances arose under which it became possible. If the United States at some point needed to land troops on the China coast, for example, then American commanders “should be prepared to arm the Communists.” Moreover, while American policy was to encourage a unified China, that “did not necessarily mean that China should be united under the Generalissimo.” It was important to maintain “
a degree of flexibility” in this regard.

Smart and realistic as this was, Vincent’s alternative lacked concrete practicality. It didn’t answer the question about the consequences to the Chinese central government of making a separate military deal with the Communists, which would have been so severe a blow to Chiang and would very likely have precipitated his overthrow. At what point would Chiang’s unwillingness to give up his one-party rule justify American military cooperation with the Communists? In not addressing these questions, Vincent’s paper illustrated the lack of clear direction and the absence of good options at a time when strong, clearheaded leadership was needed. With President Roosevelt in his final, frail days, nobody at the top of the American government was providing leadership on China. Instead, into the vacuum, it was the least qualified, most temperamental, dangerously injudicious man on the scene who took charge.

For his part, Chiang was perfectly aware of his dilemma, and prone to alternating bouts of gloom and fury about it. Following the
Yalta agreement, he felt, as he put it in his diary, “
fear and suspicion” that something had been hidden from him, and of course he was right. No fool, he dispatched his ambassador in Washington to query Roosevelt on the matter, and when Chiang learned that Roosevelt had admitted to the secret protocol to the Yalta accord, he felt that he had been “
sold out.”

Illustrating Chiang’s sour mood, when he attended a meeting of
the State Council, a powerless group that rarely convened, a party elder from Canton by the name of
Tsou Lu asked about
Zhou Enlai’s demand that the Communists be allowed to send a representative to the
San Francisco Conference, the upcoming meeting at which the future victors in the war would discuss the creation of the
United Nations. The Communists had, to Chiang’s annoyance, been making propaganda hay out of the Gimo’s refusal to broaden China’s representation at the conference, arguing that China would appear to all the world to be the unrepresentative dictatorship that it was. Chiang, an American embassy account of the State Council meeting said, “became enraged and delivered
a stinging reprimand to Tsou … and damned the liberals generally.” When the subject of the Communists came up, Chiang’s “face was red with anger and his voice and hands shook. When he finished his frightened audience remained completely silent and he adjourned the meeting.”

In Chungking,
the China hands were increasingly feeling that China policy was in a crisis.
E. J. Kahn, a writer for The New Yorker, interviewed Ludden, Davies, Service, and other China hands in the early 1970s. They told him that back then they were all living in the same house in Chungking where “there were no women around, and they spent their evenings in desultory addiction to bridge or darts or crossword puzzles, or in analyzing and reanalyzing the gloomy condition of China.” They nursed the conviction that “
if they didn’t do something fast, everything the United States had tried to do in and for China up to then might go down the drain.”

And so the China hands decided on a drastic step. They deputized Service to write an analysis that would be sent on to Washington where it would arrive at just about the same time as Wedemeyer and Hurley.
George Atcheson, the diplomat in charge of the embassy during Hurley’s absence, expressed some misgivings about this initiative. “
They’ll say we’re all traitors, that when the cats were away the mice began to play,” he said. So to preempt that possibility, they inserted this sentence: “The presence of General Wedemeyer
in Washington as well as General Hurley should be a favorable opportunity for discussion of this matter.” Atcheson then signed the paper and off it went, with an unabashed declaration in it that Hurley’s reporting on the KMT-CCP negotiations
had been “incomplete and non-objective,” which is about as powerful a statement of dissent inside a diplomatic staff as it’s possible to imagine.

According to Service later,
all of the political officers on the staff of the embassy agreed with this telegram. Even General
Mervin E. Gross, Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, who was in command during Wedemeyer’s absence, had endorsed it. The United States, it said, should present Chiang with an ultimatum. Roosevelt should “
inform Chiang Kai-shek in definite terms that we are required by
military necessity to cooperate with and supply the Communists and other suitable groups who can aid in this war against the Japanese.” Moreover, there was no need to wait until a KMT-CCP unity pact had been agreed to before giving this notification to China’s president. As the historian
Herbert Feis summarized the argument, the recommended policy would “
secure the cooperation of all Chinese in the war; hold the Communists on our side instead of throwing them into the arms of the Soviet Union; convince the Kuomintang that its apparent plans for eventual civil war were undesirable; and advance the cause of unification within China.”

For Hurley, who believed exactly the opposite, the telegram was a declaration of war. Clearly it had been timed not just to coincide with his arrival in Washington but also to undermine him as the policy debate took place. In the fashion characteristic of him, he wasn’t able to see it for what it was, an urgent and even brave expression of disagreement on the part of a group of intelligent and well-informed men. It was, he charged, “an act of disloyalty.” To arm the Communists would be to recognize the Communists as “armed belligerents,” and this would “result in the speedy overthrow of the National Government.” Hurley now felt there was nobody in the embassy or the diplomatic service he could trust. Lending substance to this conviction, on March 5 he was summoned to the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs of the State Department for a meeting where, as he put it, he got “put on the carpet” and made to defend what he regarded as settled matters of policy. His authorized, totally sympathetic biographer quotes him describing himself at this event as facing “
a full array of the pro-Communists of the State Department as my judges and questioners.”

The battle lines were drawn, and the stakes were the nature of the American role in Asia. But in this first American contest between two radically opposed points of view on what to do in a poor Asian country where a weak government faced a Communist revolution, Hurley’s
direct access to the president was the trump card. He went to the White House, which had been given a copy of the dissenting Chungking telegram on March 2, and, as Feis records it, “
the President upheld Hurley.” There would be no arms or supplies given to the Communists, no separate agreement with them that was not approved in advance by the central government.

As before, Roosevelt simply had no stomach for exacting concessions from Chiang by putting a gun to his head. He may have felt, especially after the secret agreement he’d made with Stalin at
Yalta, that he couldn’t further humiliate the president of China by forcing him into concessions that Chiang believed would lead to his overthrow. The whole point, as Roosevelt saw it, was to bring colonialism in China to an end, and to encourage the country to emerge as a strong, independent, and friendly power. Turning Chiang Kai-shek into an obedient vassal was not the way to achieve that end.