China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (60 page)

The Russians were following their usual flexible policy, helping the Communists while avoiding anything to provoke stepped-up American involvement, and Mao, though impatient and annoyed at this caution, understood this. On November 20, Yenan sent new instructions to its bureau in Manchuria, informing it that instead of trying to occupy Manchuria’s big cities, the Communists’ main force should take “
middle and small cities and minor railways as the focal points, and backed against the Soviet Union, Korea, Outer Mongolia, and Jehol, create powerful base areas.” Naturally, many of the Communist rank and file, the thousands who had migrated to the “liberated areas” during the war, were unhappy with this policy. They were told to “look at the whole situation,” and engage
Mei-Chiang,
a newly minted pejorative shorthand
for the supposed alliance between America and Chiang Kai-shek. The contest between the KMT and the Chinese revolutionaries was a mirror of the looming, larger global struggle between Russia and America, between the “New Democracy” and the capitalist reactionaries, but as a tactical matter, to avoid American interference, the Soviet Union had to “separate itself in appearance from the CCP.” The Chinese Communists had, likewise, to “pretend that the CCP has no connection with the Soviet Union,” even as it should “try to
neutralize the United States.”

There were other improvements in the situation. Government troops, helped by the United States, made progress
in Manchuria by forcing the Eighth Route Army to retreat from the area around
Qinwangdao. Student demonstrations took place in some big cities, and for a change, rather than target the central government, they protested the Communists’ closeness to the Russians. On December 16, 1945, Chiang visited Beijing. It was the first time the recognized leader of China had been to the city since the full-scale war broke out in 1937; for that entire length of time, China’s glorious former imperial capital had been in the hands of the Japanese invaders. One hundred thousand students were on hand to greet the Gimo at
Tiananmen Square before the entrance to China’s grandest imperial relic, the Forbidden City, and they gave him what Chiang’s biographer
Jay Taylor has called “
a thunderous greeting.” Thousands of people rushed forward to touch him or simply to stare. A huge portrait of him, showing him in his stern, authoritarian persona rather than in his avuncular scholar’s pose, was put up over the
wumen,
or Meridian Gate.

From Beijing, Chiang flew to Nanjing, his own former capital, to take up full-time residence in the military academy compound there, where he thanked “Our Heavenly Father” for “
glorious victory” and surveyed the throngs of citizens lined up along his route to cheer him.

On the main strategic question, namely the role of the Soviet Union, Chiang no doubt understood the Communists’ two-sided policy, but he was nonetheless happy with the Soviets’ apparent change in attitude. His Russian-speaking son, who had carried out negotiations with Malinovsky in Changchun, told him in early December that the Soviets had “
agreed to almost all the Government’s proposals, including abolishment of all non-government armed forces.”

Is it possible that the leaders of China’s central government believed this, especially when the Russians were simultaneously adding to the
Communists’ arsenal? Chiang had always hoped that by appearing strong and demonstrating that the CCP had no chance of overthrowing him he could induce Moscow to keep its distance from Mao. Consequently, Chiang decided not to protest the wholesale removal of billions of dollars’ worth of former Japanese industrial plants from Manchuria. He made no effort to reduce the neocolonialist advantages the Soviets had gotten in Dalian and Port Arthur and on the Manchurian railways. He hoped that he could satisfy Moscow, persuade the Russians that their interest lay in supporting him rather than Mao. It was a reasonable calculation at the time, but as events would soon show, it was entirely wrong.

The American diplomatic reporting on the situation in China became notably more optimistic. The military attaché’s report in early December noted that a government plane had been dispatched to Yenan to bring Zhou Enlai to Chungking for more talks on convening the elusive Political
Consultative Conference and that the editorials in the Communist press “
indicate a more positive attitude toward discussion of compromise measures.” The Communist opposition has been “weakened,” the attaché concluded, and now it seemed “unlikely that the Chinese Communists can hold long against well-equipped and trained Central Government forces now being moved in.”

By early December, seven government armies were embarked on a large-scale three-pronged move to take over the north. One column was moving to capture Kalgan, which was north of Beijing and controlled the main overland route to Manchuria. A second column was advancing along the Beijing–Gubeigou Railway to capture the passes in the region of the Great Wall. A third prong, consisting of troops that the Communist press had earlier declared to be wiped out, was thirty miles from Mukden, where a major battle was shaping up. These government troops were the best in the national army.

By the middle of December, American intelligence believed that the Communists would decline to defend Mukden. The attaché’s report said that the Communists were facing “
more serious threats to their domination,” as the government’s forces moved closer to Kalgan and into Jehol province. The government’s Eighth Army meanwhile had landed, with American help, in
Qingdao and was moving to chase the Communists from the ports they controlled in
Shandong, most importantly Chefoo, where they had earlier prevented the marines from landing.

By the third week in December, Zhou was back in Chungking and the convening of the PCC seemed “certain.” The tide was turning in favor of the government, and the timing was perfect because the new ambassador to China was about to arrive at his post and the United States to embark on another concerted effort to broker a deal between the Communists and the government that would lead to a unified and democratic China. And George C. Marshall, a figure of impeccable manners, reputation, and credentials, the architect of military victory on two continents, a man whose stature and reputation dwarfed those of the mercurial Hurley, was sure that while American diplomatic efforts in China had failed in the past, this time they were bound to succeed.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Marshall Comes Close

E
verybody is waiting for Marshall and too much is being expected of him,” John Melby told his diary two days before the arrival of Truman’s distinguished new emissary and the man who was going to avert a Chinese civil war, if anybody could.

Melby doesn’t say why many were regretting the formation of the Marshall mission, but most likely the regret came from a worry over the United States expending its resources and putting its prestige at stake in a highly visible pursuit of the impossible. There was a divide between the Americans inside China with their realistic sense of the bitter irreconcilability of the two sides in the conflict and the Americans back home in the United States with their abiding faith in political compromise and institutionalized nonviolent struggle for power, both of which were entirely absent from China’s tradition. But perhaps overriding it all was the commanding figure of Marshall himself, his stature, his record so entirely unmarked by failure. “
He is a modest man and completely without vanity,” one of his senior aides wrote home after his first glimpse of Marshall. He was the kind of man who refused to accept any awards
or decorations during the war, feeling that to do so while soldiers were dying in the field would be unseemly. “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime,” Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, told Marshall at a ceremony marking his retirement as chief of staff, “and you, sir, are
the finest soldier I have ever known.”

Melby, who first met Marshall in Chungking at the end of December, found that he made “a good and direct impression,” though he wasn’t as tall as he’d imagined. Marshall, who had organized the armies, the logistics, and the commands that defeated the Axis, was famous for never interfering with the men he named to lead troops in the field or attempting to manage battlefield decisions from afar. As Melby got to know him, he had “
the growing impression of a man who is a really great soldier and a great man in the sense of being truly humble and unimpressed with himself,” but he also didn’t quite appreciate that the task of diplomatic mediation in China was going to be more frustrating, more littered with unanticipated obstacles, than even winning a global war. Marshall, Melby observed, was a man “whose outlook and experience have the limitations of a professional soldier.”

Everybody was waiting for Marshall. Chinese and American honor guards were on hand when his plane landed in Shanghai on December 20, 1945. Albert Wedemeyer, the American military commander in China, escorted him in a black Buick sedan to the Cathay Hotel, the grand, tarnished edifice on the city’s famous Bund where sixteen years earlier Noël Coward had written his play
Private Lives.
The Cathay, built by Victor Sassoon, the Iraqi Jew who was the great real estate magnate of the
International Settlement, was the showplace of the foreign-run part of Shanghai, overlooking the broad Huangpu River, which was crowded with junks, sampans, steamships, and, now, American naval vessels. Marshall was in the city during what amounted to an American military occupation: the marines were making their presence felt. They played football and baseball at the city’s famed racecourse and caroused at night, exploring what
Time
delicately called “the licentious pleasures of the cities,” Shanghai and others.

Some of Marshall’s entourage went out to view this American occupation. On their way back to their ships late at night, some of the marines engaged in the pastime of pedicab racing. Coolies were hired. The servicemen took their places in the passenger seats. The race began down broad Nanjing Road or Bubbling Well Road or one
of Shanghai’s other main streets, which wasn’t so bad, one member of Marshall’s party reported, “except that they try in some way or other to spur the coolie on and that usually takes the form of
hitting him on the back with a belt.”

By the time of Marshall’s arrival in China, the euphoria evoked by Japan’s defeat had been replaced by a sour, contentious, and pessimistic mood. The reality that after eight years of Japanese occupation the country was already engulfed in a civil war was setting in. Intense fighting between central government forces and the Communists was taking place in numerous areas stretching from Shaanxi province in the west to Shandong in the east. And there was more than just the division between Communists and Nationalists spoiling the thrill of the victory over Japan. There were also deep arguments among the non-Communists as well, especially among the KMT and the several democratic parties representing businessmen, intellectuals, and students that emerged as wartime restrictions on political activity came to an end. In many quarters, Chiang Kai-shek was still revered as the hero who had led the nation through the years of resistance. He was the best-known man in China, his picture everywhere, his speeches duly reported in the pro-KMT press, and he had a glamorous wife who slept in the White House when she visited Washington. But a powerful disillusion about the ruling party was also setting in, and there was a feeling among many that the postwar American presence in China, exemplified by those marines hitting Chinese pedicab drivers with their belts, was a neoimperialist imposition.

In late November, student demonstrations erupted in
Kunming, where several universities were still in the places of their wartime exile. Kunming had been the headquarters of Chennault’s Flying Tigers during the war and under the political control of
Lung Yun, the warlord of Yunnan province. It had therefore always been a freer place than most of unoccupied China, less burdened by the KMT’s wartime restrictions. It was also a rare center of successful resistance and counterattack against the Japanese, as Chinese forces, with indispensable support from Chennault’s fighter planes, drove the Japanese from the
Salween Gorge back to
Burma. In one notable battle, Lung Yun had helped to turn near defeat into victory, taking command after a Chinese general was shot dead and rallying Chinese troops to prevent what would otherwise have been a disastrous enemy crossing of the Salween. But with the war over, Chiang sent his own army to Kunming, where after
several days of bloody confrontations, they took over the city, sending Lung to a meaningless job in Chungking.