China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (69 page)

This argument may be valid when applied to other parts of the world, but it is not persuasive in the case of China. For one thing, a strict hands-off policy in China was as politically impossible as a massive military intervention. Democracies are prone to a kind of middle ground in matters that generate strong differences of opinion. A massive intervention would have been opposed by millions of Americans because the tremendous effort involved in saving a distant, not-very-democratic regime would not have seemed remotely justified to them.

Those same millions would have been convinced, however, that it would have been shameful, too narrowly self-interested, and unworthy of a superpower to leave a long-standing ally entirely to its own devices as it faced a dread challenge. The atmosphere of the impending Cold
War, the well-grounded conviction that a messianic, profoundly illiberal, and menacing force was on the rise, fostered the American belief that something had to be done for Chiang, even given his imperfections. By late 1945, it was clear that Stalin, in blatant violation of his treaty obligations to China’s central government, was turning Manchuria over to Mao, and it would have violated the American sense of fairness to have stood by and done nothing to help. In retrospect, it is easy to see that what was done was not going to be enough, and that Chiang would lose mainland China. But that was far from clear at the time. When the decisions to help Chiang were made in Washington, he seemed to have sufficient resources to carry on a successful fight, certainly in China south of the Great Wall, if not in Manchuria.

The dominant force shaping China and China’s future relations was not the American choice; it was the nature and actions of the Soviet Union and of Mao. The turning point of those years was not some decision made in Washington, D.C., or a press conference by Patrick Hurley, or the dispatch of the marines to Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. It was the Soviet Union’s invasion of China’s northeast provinces in August 1945. Once that occurred, there was no further chance that Mao and the Communists would settle for a political deal with the KMT, despite the concerted efforts of American mediators to bring that about. Once Stalin had more than a million soldiers occupying Manchuria, the Chinese civil war became inevitable, because Mao understood that the central government no longer had the capability to eliminate him militarily. The irony, of course, is that the president of the United States, meeting with Stalin at
Yalta, implored the Soviets to send their troops to Manchuria and that the Soviet invasion was facilitated by American Lend-Lease supplies. But as Averill Harriman and George Kennan understood at the time, Stalin was going to send his eleven armies, headed by the implacable
Rodion Malinovsky, whether the United States asked him to or not. China may, in this sense, have been “lost” by Chiang Kai-shek; but mainly it was won by Stalin and his loyal acolyte, Mao.

It was not American support for Chiang that determined the future of the Sino-American relationship; it was Mao’s ideological closeness to Stalin and his need for Soviet help. Mao needed the support and goodwill of the powerful and nearby Russians far more than he needed that of the ambivalent and faraway Americans. The Cold War had begun. Soviet-American animosity was an established fact, and even if he had
wanted to, Mao could not have ignored Stalin’s demand that he “lean to one side.” Neutrality was not permitted in the universe that Stalin dominated.

But Mao didn’t want to take a middle position. Mao was not a Tallyrand seeking a balance of power. He was a visionary and a revolutionary deeply imbued with the global culture of radical and violent transformation that emanated like a shock wave from the Bolshevik Revolution. The character, the beliefs, and the ambitions of Mao and the movement he led were what guided Chinese history, not some decision made in Washington. Another man might have been different. A less ideological figure and, certainly, a more democratic one, would have worked for an early rapprochement with the richest and most powerful nation on earth. He might have strived, like newly independent India did at the time, to benefit from relations with both the world’s superpowers. He might, like Nelson Mandela many years later, have opted for a healing reconciliation among former enemies. But Stalinism offered Mao the path to the absolute power that he craved, and class struggle had always been his creed. Mao favored violence and not what he called “benevolence,” by which he meant a foolish weakness of will. “
To sit on the fence is impossible,” Mao said in the summer of 1949, as the KMT was reeling and he was readying himself to take power. “In the world, without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism.”

It would have been psychologically impossible for Mao to emerge as non-aligned in the Cold War. The man who left in his wake the corpses, literal and figurative, of most of his closest revolutionary comrades, for whom the betrayal of friends was a key ingredient of his total power, who for a decade during the
Cultural Revolution maintained friendly relations with only one other country in the world, tiny and, at the time, ultra-Stalinist Albania—this man was not likely to have remained for long on good terms with the United States, even if the Americans had assiduously courted his favor in 1945, even if they had sought, after 1949, to build normal relations with China’s new government. A revolutionary China under Mao was destined to single out the United States as an enemy and to do so for a long interval, until China had exhausted itself in its revolutionary fervor and it faced a greater and closer rival and threat to its independence.