Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (62 page)

Chen Gongbo had taken over as acting head of the Reorganized Government. Zhou Fohai, meanwhile, remained fully engaged in his double game. While second-in-command to Chen Gongbo, he was also in constant communication with Dai Li, as they planned for the occupation of eastern China by Allied (US) forces. (By the summer of 1945, over 60,000 US military personnel, including 34,726 air troops and 22,151 ground troops, were present in the China Theater.)
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Zhou guaranteed that the soldiers of the Reorganized Government would join in alongside the regular American troops, and also that they would reject any alliance with the CCP. Zhou and Gu Zhutong, commander of the Nationalist Third War Zone (in eastern China), engaged in lengthy discussion about securing the coastline from Shanghai to Zhejiang in advance of an Allied invasion.
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The fraternization between the Nationalists and the Wang regime disconcerted many outside observers. John Paton Davies, for one, wrote of Gu Zhutong in a slightly bewildered fashion: “He is not particularly disloyal—or loyal—he is too busy trading with the Japanese.”
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But Zhou Fohai found a comparison that seemed to make sense to him. On August 21 Zhou observed that the Vichy government had had to relocate in the face of Operation Overlord. “Their situation is similar to ours,” he noted, adding “they don’t have time to mourn themselves, so we will mourn them.” In the last days of the war in Europe, the French collaborationist government would argue that its cooperation with Germany had been a means of protecting France when no outside help was forthcoming: Marshal Pétain would famously claim that when General de Gaulle had been France’s “sword,” he himself, as the head of the Vichy government, had been France’s “shield.”
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Wang’s regime had of course used the same argument two years before the Vichy government had even been formed, seeing itself as engaged in the same task as Chongqing but through different means. Zhou saw other worrying parallels with the French situation. The Americans were still stuck in the French countryside outside Paris, and the streets of the capital were filled with Resistance fighters attacking the Germans. “This could happen in Nanjing and Shanghai,” Zhou wrote. “We can’t imagine how chaotic that would be.”
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Davies expressed dismay that Chiang’s regime was talking to the collaborators. He would have been even more aghast if he had known of another set of even more confidential meetings in the spring of 1945. There is intriguing though still incomplete evidence that the Communists were engaged in talks with the Japanese at a small village in Jiangsu province, in anticipation of a land campaign in eastern China in the coming year. The Japanese proposed that they would not stand in the way of the Communist New Fourth Army or the 700,000-odd troops still under the control of the Nanjing regime, instead concentrating their fire on the Nationalists. It is hard to know how far these talks would have gone. As with Chiang, talking to the Japanese did not equate to surrendering to them, and the CCP should be given the benefit of the doubt as genuine anti-imperialists. Yet the Communists were, like the Nationalists and Wang’s regime, keen to make the most of a changing and unpredictable situation.
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By the start of 1945 it seemed clear that the Nazi grip on Europe would end within months. Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill turned their attention to concluding the war in Asia as swiftly as possible. At Teheran, in November 1943, Stalin had pledged an eventual Soviet entry into the Pacific War when the European tide had turned, and now Roosevelt wanted to make sure that commitment was acted on. Far off in the New Mexico desert, an extraordinary experiment was taking place to develop an atomic bomb. But in early 1945 it was still unclear whether it would work, and the Allies had to make plans for a campaign to conquer Japan that might involve a long and extremely bloody campaign. The fate of much of Europe and Asia was to be decided at a conference that began on February 4, 1945, at Yalta, on the Black Sea, in the Crimea region of the USSR.

Much of the conversation at Yalta was about the fate of postwar Europe, with the division of the Continent into zones under Western and Soviet influence. But Asia was also a major topic of discussion. The Combined Chiefs of Staff were convinced that victory would not come until mid-1947, and told Roosevelt and Churchill so, increasing the pressure on them to make sure that Stalin would participate in the war in Asia.

However, Stalin’s participation came with conditions. He demanded control of the Kurile Islands, an archipelago stretching from the north coast of Japan to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, and the southern part of Sakhalin Island, just off Russia’s coast. He also asked for a variety of military and transport concessions in Manchuria, as well as the maintenance of Outer Mongolia under de facto Soviet control. (The Nationalists still laid claim to all of Mongolia.) While Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria would be fully acknowledged, Soviet influence in the region would also be confirmed. Stalin wanted the other leaders to agree to these demands without any prior consultation with China. In return, Stalin would pledge to enter the war against Japan no more than ninety days after the end of the war in Europe. The deal was made in a series of secret agreements that supplemented the official record of the conference.
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Chiang Kai-shek was not privy to any of the Yalta discussions about China’s future, but he had his suspicions. “The influence of this conference on China will be great,” he acknowledged. “I hope Roosevelt isn’t plotting with Churchill and Stalin against me.” When he heard even the public terms of the agreement, Chiang was plunged into gloom, thinking that the world would be thrown back into the same race for dominance that had marked the aftermath of the Great War. “This meeting of the three leaders has already carved the seeds of the Third World War,” he wrote. “Roosevelt is still calling this a diplomatic victory—this is really laughable.”
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Chiang’s suspicions were fueled by rumors that there were secret clauses attached to the Yalta agreement. Finally, Roosevelt met the Chinese ambassador to the US, Wei Daoming, and admitted that there were indeed hidden agreements relating to Manchuria; on learning this, Chiang was furious. Meanwhile, Hurley had returned to Washington. He too was concerned at rumors of concessions to the Soviets, and after some delay Roosevelt allowed him to see the details of the Yalta agreements. Hurley was shocked by what he read, as he was by a State Department paper that suggested the Americans might arm the Communists if the former landed on the Chinese coast. Roosevelt supported Hurley’s views on Chiang, although he cautioned him not to say anything in public that might make the job of reconciliation between the Nationalists and the Communists harder. But on April 2 Hurley held a press conference in Washington at which he declared that the United States would recognize only the National Government and have no further dealings with the Communists.
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Even if Roosevelt had wished to soften the stark position that Hurley had outlined, he had little chance to do so. The ailing president had used the last reserves of his energy in fighting the global war, and on April 12, 1945, just ten days after Hurley’s announcement, Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his home in Warm Springs, Georgia. As the nation mourned, Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president. Among the problems the shrewd but underbriefed new commander in chief had to deal with was the growing crisis in China. For just as American intelligence in China had been weakened by the turf war between the OSS and Milton Miles’s SACO (Sino-American Cooperative Organization), so differing voices continued to emerge from the State Department. Hurley clung to a position of absolute support for Chiang. Service and Davies continued to speak out in favor of alternatives in case Chiang proved recalcitrant or just collapsed. In turn, Hurley became more convinced that opposition to him was personal.
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These character-driven squabbles would lead to one of the postwar tragedies in American politics: the sterile debate on “Who Lost China?”

Although Hurley’s declaration of faith in the Nationalists had been made in public, he still failed to understand that power had shifted within China and that he might have done better to advise Chiang to form a coalition government that would allow him room to regroup. Mao denounced the American’s move angrily. “For all its high-sounding language,” he fumed, “the Hurley-Chiang racket is designed to sacrifice the interests of the Chinese people, further wreck their unity, and . . . lay a mine to set off large-scale civil war in China.”
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Throughout the speech Mao denounced Chiang as “His Majesty,” and poured scorn on his ideas for constitutional renewal through a National Assembly as no better than the paper-thin parliaments that had been convened during the warlord era of the 1920s. He added, a couple of days later, that “the policy of the United States toward China as represented by its ambassador Patrick J. Hurley is creating a civil war crisis in China.”
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Mao’s confidence was fueled, in part, by a conviction that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war would tilt the balance of power toward the CCP. But the Communist leader underestimated the protean pragmatism of Joseph Stalin. During the Yalta discussions, Roosevelt had ceded to Stalin a restoration of the rights in East Asia that Russia had lost after the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. But Roosevelt secured an assurance that the USSR would not actively support the Communists against the Nationalists. Roosevelt told Chiang about this condition, but Stalin did not tell Mao.
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The Communist leader was unaware of Stalin’s betrayal.

Not that Chiang was happy to trust Stalin’s good faith, and as it turned out, with good reason. On April 30 Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker under the ruins of Berlin. On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe ended. Now, at last, Asia would be at the center of the conflict, and the USSR would be part of that effort. In early July Chiang sent T. V. Soong, along with his Russian-speaking son Ching-kuo, to Moscow to negotiate terms with Stalin. Stalin agreed to recognize only Chiang as the ruler of China, but made extensive demands in return, including China’s recognition of Outer Mongolia’s independence and the granting of a privileged status for the USSR in Manchuria. The question of what China would cede to the Soviets was still unresolved when Stalin left for the Allied conference at Potsdam in the middle of the month.

Chiang was angered at Truman’s refusal to intervene in the Sino-Soviet negotiations. “This is an insult,” he fumed. “I didn’t acknowledge Yalta. I didn’t take part, I don’t have responsibility for it, so why should I carry it out? They really do think that China is their vassal.” Echoing his thoughts at the deepest moment of the Stilwell crisis, Chiang brooded: “American diplomacy really has no center, no policy, no morals.”
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The Ichigô campaign had been just as destructive to Chinese society as it had to its military, creating yet more deprivation and destruction in China’s most fertile areas. The efforts in the early war years to create a more integrated system of welfare provision had always become weaker the further one traveled from Chongqing, but by the last year of the war, they seemed a hollow mockery in the face of massive need. To tackle the problem, China engaged with a remarkable new organization: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). Roosevelt had realized that in the areas liberated from the Axis powers, there would be immense misery, and a formally coordinated effort was needed to make provision to feed starving people and enable countries to rebuild their societies. Although some forty-four countries signed UNRRA’s founding document at the White House on November 9, 1943, it was always heavily bankrolled by the US and run primarily by American administrators.

The China office was headed by the American Benjamin H. Kizer, who arrived in Chongqing in December 1944. Kizer had been warned repeatedly that it was one of the worst postings possible: hot, hilly, and lacking in any workable transport network. The buildings he was assigned were better than many, however. “On clear days, which are rare at this season,” he noted, “they command a fine view of the river and the hills beyond.”
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His personal comfort, however, was of trivial importance in comparison to the task he had been set. And the task was made more difficult from the beginning because the American and Chinese sides had such widely differing interpretations of UNRRA’s role.

The crossed wires between the Chinese government and UNRRA were evident in declarations made just a few months after the two sides had begun working with each other. Jiang Tingfu was a distinguished Nationalist figure who had been made head of CNRRA (Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Agency), the partner organization that was supposed to coordinate with UNRRA within China’s territory. Jiang declared on July 3, 1945, that the success of relief and rehabilitation efforts in Guizhou and Guangxi provinces showed that “China is demonstrating a determination to help herself before aid can reach her from outside.” Jiang detailed the way in which the Chinese government agencies were working alongside major NGOs such as the American Red Cross, the Chinese Red Cross, and the Associated Christian Colleges. Overall, Jiang declared, the joint effort was paying “enormous dividends” in “experience and ‘know-how’ gained.”
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Yet despite the geniality of tone, Jiang was signaling an expectation of much greater provision by UNRRA. He expressed a widely held belief in official Chinese circles that if the US wanted a progressive government to emerge, they should also help pay the price. It was not the fault of the Chinese that their country had been battered into submission in the first place. Kizer, on the other hand, had reason to assume that UNRRA material would feed the maw of a ravenous and corrupt state, and his letters suggest that he was unable to take the Nationalist government entirely seriously. In May 1945, six months after the establishment of the UNRRA China offices, Kizer characterized Jiang as “dragging his feet,” an example of how the Chinese side wanted to “do nothing.”
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