China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (59 page)

China evoked family quarrels. Every person saw in China a different beast. True, we’re “disillusioned about China because of its constant civil wars,” Luce wrote in
Life.
We ask ourselves, “Is there now a going concern called China with which … America can and should deal?” Luce’s answer to his own question was a resounding yes. “
Most Americans grossly underestimate the significance in China of this simple fact: that the legal government of China maintained itself on Chinese soil (not in exile) as the only government over at least half the land of China, and held the allegiance of the great majority in the other half.”

The policymakers were not in disagreement with Luce’s argument. The day before their meeting with Byrnes, November 26, Patterson and Forrestal wrote a memo in which they parted company with Wede-meyer’s pessimism regarding the national government’s chances of getting
North China and Manchuria under its control. Patterson and Forrestal weren’t willing to give up yet. There was no detailed examination of Wedemeyer’s conclusion. The secretary of state and the secretary of war brought no technical military expertise to bear on the relative strengths of the government on one side and the Soviet-supported Communists on the other. There was no talk of domestic Chinese disillusionment with Chiang, or of the possibility that, in the Chinese tradition, the mandate of heaven was passing from one imperial figure to another. They didn’t discuss just what it would take in the way of troops and supplies to ensure that Chiang prevailed in his contest with the Communists. Forrestal and Patterson simply didn’t like the idea that the United States might, as the later expression had it, “cut and run” where a long-standing ally was concerned. It “appears undesirable … to retreat from any of the stated objectives without the most careful consideration,” they wrote to Byrnes. If America changed its policy of support for Chiang Kai-shek, the two cabinet members wrote, “we will appear to world opinion to have
deserted an ally.”

That very day, Wedemeyer sent off another cable to Marshall, reiterating his “
considered opinion” that Chiang would be unable to gain control of North China and Manchuria without “further U.S. and/or allied assistance” and, in the case of Manchuria, without “the wholehearted cooperation of the Soviet Russians.” In his talks with Chiang, Wedemeyer said, the Chinese leader had agreed to “temporarily forgo reoccupation of Manchuria” and to concentrate on North China instead. But even that, Wedemeyer said, might be too much for him. The lines were too long and “Communist depredations” too damaging. Wedemeyer was not saying that the United States should “cut and run,” but merely making it clear that if the United States opted to help the central government, that help was going to have to be substantial and sustained over a long period of time. “Also,” Wedemeyer warned, “
it’s impossible for me to carry out orders to help Central Government forces and to carry out [the] order to avoid participation in fratricidal warfare.”

Byrnes started the meeting of the next day by reading aloud the Patterson-Forrestal letter. After that, Forrestal expressed his opposition to “yanking the marines out of North China now.” He offered a solution to the likely opposition by the public to any long military commitment in China: America should talk to the Russians and “get the UN into the
picture,” he said. But what, Byrnes asked, would the United States actually ask the Russians to do? Stay in Manchuria beyond the date they had promised to withdraw, December 2, which was less than a week later?

Forrestal: “No, but we can ask them to support the Chiang Kai-shek government.”

Byrnes: Well, the Russians are already treaty-bound to support only the national government, so it’s “difficult to know just how we should approach the Soviet government on the subject.”

Byrnes repeated what he had been told by the Chinese ambassador to Washington: that the Soviets had promised not to permit any armed Communists to enter Manchuria.

While Byrnes saw the pointlessness of asking the Soviets to do what they insisted they were doing already, though Byrnes knew they weren’t, he had little new to offer to solve the crisis in China. Instead, he went back to the same formula that previous American officials had proposed in their relations with Chiang. “Taking everything into account,” he said, “
perhaps the wise course would be to try to force the Chinese Government and the Chinese Communists to get together on a compromise basis, perhaps telling Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that we will stop the aid to his government unless he goes along with this.” He recommended that Ambassador Hurley be sent back to China right away to give this message to the Chinese leader again. It was decided that the marines would stay on in China for the time being; exactly how long nobody seemed to know. Meanwhile, the United States would press ever harder for the Communists and the Nationalists to come to an agreement and stop their fighting.

This was how the United States found itself more deeply involved in China’s civil war, neglecting Drumright’s warning against doing it “half-heartedly” and Wedemeyer’s warning that it would require a big and long commitment or it wouldn’t work. The policy emerged as a sort of in-between measure, since the two main alternatives, of abandoning an ally and coming in heavily with substantial American forces, were both impossible. Byrnes’s “wise course” does not even examine what the United States should do if the KMT and the CCP refused to go along with it. All of this illustrated the tendency of a democracy, when in a period of befuddlement, to do a little here and a little there, to try to satisfy opposing constituencies without making any clear or burdensome commitments, and at the same time, to nurture the hope, however forlorn, that the whole problem might go away if the two sides to the
conflict would settle their differences through an American-mediated negotiation.

Forrestal, though he seems to have said nothing at the meeting with Byrnes, noted the almost casual way in which the decision was made to delay the marines’ departure from China and to press for a negotiated settlement of the CCP-KMT conflict. It showed, he noted in his diary, “
the symptoms of that ‘on-the-one-hand—on-the-other-hand’ disease which was to blight so many documents on Chinese policy in the ensuing years.”

This time
Hurley refused
to cooperate. On the 26th, the day before the Forrestal-Patterson meeting, he’d told Byrnes that he didn’t want to go back to China. He was thinking of resigning, he said. Byrnes persuaded him to stay on. His country needed him, Byrnes said. Chiang insisted he be ambassador. On November 27, the very day of the Byrnes-Forrestal-Patterson meeting, Hurley visited at the White House with Truman, who told him the situation in China was looking grave and that he needed to get back right away, preferably by leaving the next day.

Truman, thinking that Hurley had agreed, then went to a lunch with his cabinet. During the meal, he got an unexpected message: Hurley had issued a statement to the press that he was resigning after all. Without the courtesy of letting the president or the secretary of state know of this decision in advance, Hurley, headstrong and erratic to the end, had allowed his accumulated fury to overcome his better judgment.

In a letter given to the press, Hurley addressed what he regarded as the root of America’s China problem: not Soviet machinations, or Communist aggressiveness, or the popular disillusionment with Chiang, but, he said, the professional American diplomats who, despite his efforts to relieve them of their posts, remained in positions of power and responsibility. At a press conference and in his written statement Hurley named no names, mentioning only “
the professional foreign service men [who] sided with the Chinese Communist armed party and the imperialist bloc of nations whose policy it was to keep China divided against herself,” but of course he meant the China experts in Chungking and Washington who had questioned his judgment: John Service, who after being exonerated in the Amerasia case had been reassigned to Tokyo as an adviser to MacArthur, accompanied there by
John Emmerson and
George Atcheson, the latter the formal author of the letter to
the State Department of a few months earlier that had called
Hurley’s reporting on China “incomplete and non-objective;” John Davies, a particular bête noire of Hurley, who was now a valued aide to
George Kennan in Moscow; and John Carter Vincent, head of the East Asia desk at State, where, Hurley complained in his letter, he was one of “my superiors.”

This was sensational news, the big story of the moment.
The New York Times
reprinted Hurley’s statement in full, describing it in a separate page-one article as a “blistering denunciation of the administration of foreign policy by professional career diplomats.” In an editorial, the
Times
solemnly advised the Truman administration to look into the charges and “
give some assurance to the country … that policy adopted at the top is actually followed faithfully down the line.” And Hurley wasn’t done.

At the American embassy in Chungking, the news created “
an uproar, with all barriers down and all tongues wagging with what they have wanted to say for a long time,” John Melby, the Soviet specialist, noted in his diary. Hurley’s accusations had now exposed “the internal controversy over what we should do here and the deep bitterness between opposing points of view.” The Nationalists were dismayed, but the Communists were delighted. Radio Yenan, which had been denouncing Hurley as the chief representative of “American imperialist elements,” said, “China’s civil war instigators in Chungking regret his resignation, [but the] Chinese people regard it as
a victory for American people.”

A few days later, Hurley, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, did name names—Atcheson’s and Service’s in particular, as the men who had worked so hard to subvert American policy and turn China over to the Communists. Then he was off to the Senate where in two days of testimony he again accused Atcheson and Service of conspiring to bring about Chiang’s fall. “
Pat Hurley came out with a roar, both fists swinging,”
Time
recounted of this appearance. “His white mustache bristled, his black-ribboned pince-nez wobbled on his nose. He pounded away on his main theme.” In reply, James Byrnes, the secretary of state, was forced formally to investigate these grave charges to determine if they were unwarranted, thereby unintentionally adding to their visibility. American Foreign Service officers had reported their views and analyses in the way they were supposed to—nothing disloyal about that, he said. But Hurley’s sensational accusations had for the first
time put the charge of disloyalty and double-dealing on China into the public arena, and it was to remain there in its poisonous and prosecutorial way for decades.

Truman, mightily annoyed
at Hurley’s abrupt departure, needed another ambassador right away, and he knew who he wanted. That night,
he called George Marshall, who had just arrived at his home in Leesburg, Virginia, looking forward to a restful retirement after his busy career as a soldier and chief of staff. Marshall’s wife was halfway up the stairs to have a brief rest before their first dinner at home when the phone rang. “General, I want you to go to China for me,” Truman said. Marshall, who wanted to wait until after dinner to break the news to his wife, said, “Yes, Mr. President,” and hung up. An hour later the radio news announced Marshall’s new appointment. “I couldn’t bear to tell you until you had had your rest,” Marshall told his wife. What is not clear is whether Marshall himself understood the full import of that very brief conversation with Truman, that he would not only be ambassador to China but that the task of reconciling the two armed parties of China and bringing a halt to the nascent civil war would now fall on his shoulders.

Meanwhile, the situation
had turned modestly for the better. In mid-November, tired of Soviet trickery and intent on calling international attention to it, Chiang ordered the negotiating team to leave
Changchun. The initial reaction of the Soviets was to step up harassment. A member of the Communist-controlled police force was killed, and immediately posters appeared all over the city blaming the
KMT and demanding the expulsion of the government delegation, ignoring the fact that the delegation had been ordered to leave by the country’s president. The headquarters were “haunted by the sound of the wind and
the cry of the cranes,”
Chang Kia-ngau, the economist on the Chinese government team, wrote in his diary, sounding like a Tang dynasty poet. The water supply and telephone service were cut off. “The feeling is that a great catastrophe is about to occur.”

That day, one hundred sixty members of the KMT delegation left Changchun by airplane for Beijing, and almost immediately the Soviet tone changed. Until then, Stalin’s main tactical instruction to the CCP
was that it could “act” in Manchuria by moving its own troops and blocking those of the government, but it could not “
speak out”; it could not openly declare its intention of taking over Manchuria. All along Stalin had maintained the show of normal, exclusive relations with Chiang, keeping his embassy in Chungking and having no official contact with Yenan.
Stalin’s communications with
Mao took place informally and in secret through his representatives in Yenan and via the radio transmitter that had been provided by the Comintern years before.

Two days after the withdrawal of the KMT team from Changchun, Stalin sent a note to Chiang saying that he would “eradicate all mob action” in Manchuria, and proposing that the Soviet Red Army postpone its departure in order to help in this endeavor. A few days later, the Russians told Chiang that they would guarantee the landing of government troops in the major cities of Manchuria, Mukden and Changchun. Meanwhile,
Stalin told the Communists to get their own troops out of those cities and not to fight government forces in those areas—even as the Soviets stepped up their supplies of arms to the Communists from the arsenals in Dalian and North Korea.

In Changchun, a Soviet officer called in local newspaper reporters and told them that opposition to the national government was to be banned. Almost from one minute to the next, the
posters criticizing the KMT disappeared and were replaced by others supporting it and praising international cooperation. Malinovsky vowed to prohibit Communist activities in areas where the central government established its authority. He banned the issuing of banknotes by the Communist army, and
he expressed the hope that the KMT delegation would return to Changchun.