China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (52 page)

The Soviet occupation of the vast territory of Manchuria marked a turning point in Asia. It made impossible the arrangement that the United States desired in postwar Asia by which China, the largest country and potentially the wealthiest and the most powerful, would be united under a central government that would be both democratic and friendly to the United States. The Russian troops had taken up their positions on Chinese territory just as the alliance of convenience of World War II was breaking up and the world was entering the Cold War stage, in which Washington and Moscow would confront each other throughout the world in an existential contest for global power.

Even before the end of the war in Asia, the Soviet goal of dominating Eastern Europe was becoming crystal clear to the Truman administration, which made some fleeting and belated efforts to forestall a similar effort in Asia. In July, during the conference at
Potsdam among Stalin, Truman, and Clement Attlee (who replaced Churchill as British prime minster during the meeting), the American secretary of state, James Byrnes, was moving away from the idea that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would be necessary for a quick end to the war against Japan. Byrnes, a close aide recalled, wanted to “
outmaneuver Stalin on China.” The
atomic bomb was a secret, but an ultimatum was issued to Japan at Potsdam to surrender or face annihilation, and Byrnes hoped that an early Japanese surrender would preempt the agreement made at Yalta by which the Soviets would send their divisions into China.

Japan ignored the ultimatum, however, and in any case Byrnes was overruled by Truman, the only president since Teddy Roosevelt who had actually been in combat during a war and whose priority, like Roosevelt’s
at Yalta half a year earlier, was to save the lives of American soldiers. “I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it,” he wrote to his wife from Potsdam on July 18. “I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and
think of the kids who won’t be killed!”

And now the
Soviets were in Manchuria, their armies commanded by a tough Bolshevik veteran,
Rodi
on Malinovsky, a man about whom John Melby, the Soviet expert at the American embassy in Chungking, commented, “there was
not a drop of gentleness or mercy.” And once the Soviets were installed in Manchuria, all the other arguments and possibilities of past years and months—and especially whether a smarter policy by the United States might earlier have encouraged Chinese Communist independence of Moscow—faded into insignificance. With the end of the war, the situation was drastically and irretrievably different, and the biggest difference was that the Chinese Communists now sensed that victory for them was in view. The Soviet invasion meant that the Communists were dominant in North China and there was virtually nothing that could be done, short of a massive effort by the United States on a scale of the recently concluded war, to dislodge them.

This was the underlying reason American relations with the Chinese Communists steadily soured with the end of the war even as American emissaries tried to broker a peace agreement between them and the Nationalists. Something opposite to Hurley’s hope and expectation occurred. So far from feeling abandoned by the Sino-Soviet
treaty, the Chinese Communists felt emboldened by the Soviet occupation of China’s three northeastern provinces. Rather than needing the United States more than ever, the Chinese Communists needed it less. They didn’t want open conflict with the United States, but they were ready now aggressively to confront it if and when they found the Americans acting against their interests. A few months before, Mao had told John Service, “
There is no such thing as America not intervening in China. You are here, as China’s greatest ally. The fact of your presence is tremendous.” Now, Mao understood that American intervention would inevitably help his opponents in his struggle with them for control of China, and therefore the Communists just as inevitably had to see the United States as an obstacle to its aims.

On August 12
, three days after the Nagasaki bomb but three days before Hirohito’s surrender announcement,
Zhu De was already ordering four armed groups to move to Manchuria and to cooperate with the Russian troops already there. A few days later, on the eve of his trip to Chungking,
Mao dispatched nine regiments to the northeast and told Communist cadres who had come from Manchuria years before to return home. Then, while Mao strolled with Chiang Kai-shek in the presidential garden in Chungking, recognizing his authority, he continued to maneuver to expand the
CCP’s power into Manchuria, the eventual goal of which was to oust Chiang from power. Getting hold of Japanese arms was, as always, the key immediate goal for the poorly armed Communists. In January, Zhu De had asked for $20 million in American money to buy arms from puppet troops. Now it was the
Soviet Union that would be the main supplier, even though for the Soviet Union to provide arms to the CCP was a blatant violation of the Sino-Soviet treaty. Very quickly,
the Soviets took 925 airplanes, 360 tanks, 2,600 cannon, and 8,900 machine guns from the Japanese along with huge quantities of smaller weapons. How much of this weaponry ended up in Communist hands is not clear, though much of it clearly did.

Despite this provision of captured arms, it would have been hard for the Chinese Communists to know exactly what help they would get from the Soviets, or how Moscow would balance its wish to help them with its obligation under the Sino-Soviet treaty not to help them at all. But the Communists understood that ultimately they and the Soviets were on the same team and shared the same purpose. “
They are Red Army; we are Red Army too,”
Liu Shaoqi, number two in the Communist hierarchy and now back in Chungking during Mao’s absence, assured his colleagues. “They are Communists; so are we.”

On the day after Mao’s arrival in Chungking for his talks with Chiang, the CCP in Yenan published an order governing the Eighth Route Army troops it had sent to Manchuria. The Chinese forces should refer to themselves not as the Eighth Route Army but as the Northeast Volunteer Army. They should keep a low profile, stick to minor roads, enter only villages and cities where there were no Red Army units, and avoid publishing newspaper accounts of their movements. Striking in these orders is Yenan’s confidence that they were going to get help from the Russians, even if that help had to be kept secret. “
The Soviet Union doesn’t interfere with Chinese internal politics,” the order declared. “It takes an indulgent attitude toward our activity in the Northeast as long
as we don’t cause diplomatic difficulties.” The Chinese historian
Yang Kuisong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, puts the matter this way: “
The Soviets not only gave secret help to establish the revolutionary center in Dongbei [the Northeast] but also provided weapons and ammunition that was enough to arm a hundred thousand guerrilla soldiers, enabling them to completely defeat the KMT in much less time than was expected.”

Certainly, relations between the ragged Chinese Communist soldiers and the Red Army veterans quickly warmed up after the Soviets kept CCP troops out of Mukden. In their first meetings with the Eighth Route Army, Yang has written, the Soviets took them to be bandits, so poorly armed and clothed were they, which prompted Yenan to order its units to pay attention to how they dressed. But this early caution soon gave way to close and cordial contact.

On September 9, while he was negotiating with Hurley and Chiang, Mao received a report from Zeng Kelin, the commander of the Eighth Route Army detachments that had gone to Manchuria, describing the cordial welcome he received from the commander of the Russian troops outside the port of Shanhaiguan, where Zeng had arrived ten days earlier. The two of them held what a Chinese historian has called “a grand city-entering celebration,” after which the Soviets allowed Zeng, his troops, and his civilian cadres to go on to the port of Jinzhou and then to Mukden itself, taking over the territories on the route. This was around the time that Theodore White was reporting that the Soviets had given “the back of their hand” to the Eighth Route Army, but according to Zeng, he was guest of honor at a festive banquet held for him at the Dahe Hotel in Mukden. “They affectionately called us ‘comrades,’ ” Zeng later wrote of his Soviet hosts.

In the middle of September, Malinovsky, who had set up headquarters in
Changchun, the main city of Jilin province northeast of Mukden, sent an emissary to Yenan to sort things out with the Chinese Communists. This was a big event in Yenan. The Communists told the members of the
Dixie Mission to stay away from the airfield, which the next morning was ringed with Communist security troops armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. At noon,
the Soviet emissary’s plane arrived from Mukden. It disgorged a small group of uniformed Soviet military personnel who were quickly escorted to the CCP’s headquarters. Malinovsky’s
emissary made a public statement to the effect that CCP troops would have to withdraw from Manchuria. The members of the Dixie Mission would presumably get wind of that statement, and that was probably its purpose, though the head of the mission, Colonel
Ivan D. Yeaton, says nothing about it in his memoirs. In any case, the Soviet emissary’s public speech was followed that night by a private meeting with the Communist leaders during which he spelled out what would be the real Soviet policy. Large Manchurian cities like Mukden, Changchun, and Harbin would be turned over to the central government, and the CCP would have to withdraw from those cities, but the Soviet Red Army would support Communist troops elsewhere, as long as these troops were in the guise of local armed forces.

The Communists were delighted with this arrangement. It was the opportunity they had been hoping for. It meant in practice that, while they would be kept out of a few big cities, they would be free to send their forces anywhere else. Mao had announced, after he’d given up his adventurist plans to seize Shanghai and other big cities, that Communist strategy would be to occupy the countryside and mobilize the people there. This would not result in the overthrow of Chiang for the time being, but, as he put it, “
We want to bore our way in and give Chiang Kai-shek’s face a good washing, but we don’t want to cut off his head.”

After their session with the Soviet colonel, the Politburo members held a late-night meeting. They proposed a program summed up in the slogan “expand to the north and defend toward the south,” which
in practice meant dispatching twenty-five thousand cadres and two hundred thousand troops to the north. Mao signaled his approval from Chungking, and within months the
number of Chinese Communist troops in the northeast had reached four hundred thousand, under the command of
Lin Biao. Among the subterfuges used by the Soviets, always eager to keep up the appearance of adherence to the Sino-Soviet treaty, was formally to prohibit armed Eighth Routers from passing through their lines, but to permit them to go as civilians. These “civilians” would then be given Japanese weapons, which were superior to the ones they were not allowed to bring into Manchuria with them.

“
There is a possibility that they armed the people,” a Communist spokesman in Chungking admitted to American journalists, meaning the civilian “volunteers” who had been allowed to cross the Soviet lines. “They may have gotten some arms from the Japanese.” In such a way were Communist soldiers able to take up positions behind the Manchurian ports of Huludao and Yingkou. Many of these troops marched overland across Inner Mongolia from the Communist base areas in the northwest, but there were also tens of thousands of Eighth Routers in the eastern province of Shandong, and these needed to be sent by boat to Manchuria.