The Atlantic and Its Enemies (16 page)

China under the Communists was to go through another terrible generation, but she started out with a good deal of international sympathy. The Kuomintang had few admirers, and any observer of the terrible sufferings of the Chinese people at Japanese hands was prepared to give the Communists the benefit of the doubt. British recognition was almost immediate; and a man such as Joseph Needham, devout Anglican, distinguished Cambridge biochemist, and then the great historian of Chinese science, spent years in China at the worst time and was devoted to her; there were children of missionaries such as the American writer Pearl S. Buck, who won a Nobel Prize for her thirties novel about the life of the Chinese peasant (a New York wit wrote, not inaccurately, that of the seven American Nobel laureates for literature, five had been alcoholics, the sixth a drunk, and the seventh Pearl S. Buck). Many men in the American State Department had assured their superiors that Mao Tsetung was just a well-meaning socialist. Besides, to begin with, Mao and his team were relatively moderate. All of this was of course to descend into frenzied nightmare, and the first stage came with China’s involvement in an absurd, bloody and long-lasting affair, the Korean War. When it ended in 1953, with a loss of 750,000 Chinese lives, it concluded almost thirty years of internecine and international war, further interspersed with famines and epidemics (brought about, in one instance, by the release of plague-bearing rats which the Japanese had raised in a biological warfare establishment in Manchuria, and then, upon surrender, released). It was small wonder that Mao and a very large part of the population did not respond altogether rationally to international events.

There was another factor: relations with the USSR. China was of course dependent upon foreign aid, and her Communists’ admiration for the Russian Revolution went back to the very beginning. True, Stalin had played a game between Mao and Chiang, but he counted as all-powerful and there were Soviet agents even in Mao’s closest entourage - his doctor, for instance. Stalin had wanted Mao to remain north of the Yangtze so as not to provoke the Americans. Disapprovingly, he delayed for weeks on end as to inviting Mao to Moscow, treating him as once the Khan of the Golden Horde had treated obscure, grubbing princes of Muscovy when they were supposed to turn up with their tribute to his vast tent-palace on the Volga. Stalin fobbed off Mao with the preposterous excuse that the grain harvest had to be brought in before a proper meeting could occur (summer 1948), and there was a minor row before Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, because his successors asked for peace, which Stalin said should be explored by the Chinese Party whereas Mao stood up for himself. The Russians still benefited from the ‘unequal treaty’ that gave them a sovereign role on Chinese territories in the north-east, linking Moscow with eastern Siberia, and they wanted controlling rights in Outer Mongolia as well, a very sensitive area that abutted on a Chinese Moslem region that was not necessarily loyal to Peking. Stalin fired some warning shots - arresting poor old Anna Louise Strong, who was stranded in Moscow; and, when Mao claimed some sort of ideological headship over questions of imperialism, Andrey Orlov, Mao’s doctor from the Main Intelligence Directorate, was arrested and tortured by the Ministry of State Security’s grand inquisitor, Viktor Abakumov (and several other contact men died strangely: even Mikhail Borodin, who had managed Comintern affairs in Shanghai, was picked up). Stalin sensed a rival, and when finally Mao did go to Moscow (by train) in December 1949 he was only one of several leaders greeting Stalin on his seventieth birthday (and for weeks he was belittled by his treatment - he even had to write a crawling letter to ask what was happening).

At length Stalin agreed to make a new treaty with China; Chou En-lai arrived - by train rather than plane for fear of ‘accidents’ - together with various experts who would work with the Russians to make China a major military power. A treaty did come about in February 1950 with a loan (much of which was subtracted in assorted ways). There were to be fifty major industrial projects and ‘the bases for strategic co-operation’; in exchange the USSR in effect took Outer Mongolia, or, as the Chinese saw it, half of Sinkiang and Manchuria, and through ‘joint ventures’ it had very favourable terms for tungsten and other materials important for armament. The Chinese had to pay large salaries for the technicians, who were exempted from Chinese jurisdiction. Both Stalin and Mao had come an enormously long way from their remote and bullied infancies. They had waded through tidal waves of blood, and, though neither was an ideologist of any seriousness, they did know that Communism was a formula for victory on an unimaginable scale. Under it, Russia had developed an empire far more powerful than that of the Tsars; and Mao had accomplished a feat still greater, to restore the power of the ancient Chinese empire. There was of course already an implicit rivalry, given that Tsarist Russia had been foremost among the European powers in stealing this or that march on China, ever since 1689, when Jesuits on both sides had negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk, laying down a common border. That rivalry broke out into the public gaze in 1960, but in 1950 it was still confined, given Mao’s dependence on Moscow, and given also his satrap-like admiration for the achievements of the Kremlin.

But Mao could at least test the old imperial waters. He could, for instance, consider Vietnam, where was now a common border. There, a battle had developed between the French empire, obstinately holding on, and the Communist resistance to it, under Ho Chi Minh. Stalin had shown little interest in this (he did not answer Ho Chi Minh’s telegrams in 1945) but matters changed once Communist Chinese troops were on the border late in 1949. Ho had fluent Chinese (having lived in China for ten years) and he made a dramatic entrance at the final dinner for Mao in Moscow in mid-February 1950. The two men went back by train (sandwiched between dismantled MiG-15 fighters and military technicians who were to advise as to the aerial defence of coastal cities). The first agreed step was for Mao to build up the link to Vietnam. New roads were created such that by August 1950 the French lost control of the border region to the better-armed Vietnamese Communists; and Chinese help meant that Ho Chi Minh could establish the same sort of ‘little-soviet’ base as Mao himself had had after the Long March. But there was another and more important part of the old Chinese imperial inheritance to consider: Korea.

Korea had a strategic position, as a south-eastern peninsula of Manchuria, pointing towards Japan. She also had a torn history at Japanese hands. However, she was a poor country, and in 1945 her fate was fairly casually decided: Soviet troops, invading from the north, would stop in the middle, at the 38th Parallel, and Americans would be established to the south. Rival regimes then emerged. A leathery Methodist, Syngman Rhee, was promoted in the South, while Communist North Korea formally became independent in 1948 under Kim Il Sung, a figure (also with a Protestant background) who emerged from Chinese shadows and had trained for a time at Khabarovsk in Siberia. Kim had megalomaniac qualities (he eventually proclaimed himself ‘President for Eternity’) and went to Moscow in March 1949, as Mao was winning in China. He wanted help to seize the South, where consolidation, with a small American presence, was ramshackle (as happened in Japan, there was a considerable enough Communist element there). That was refused: Stalin’s hands were full with the Berlin blockade. However, Mao was less discouraging, though he wanted action only ‘in the first half of 1950’, by which time he would control all of China. He even said that Chinese soldiers might be sent in, because the Americans would not be able to tell them apart.

In January 1950 Stalin did tell him that he was ‘prepared to help him’ but also said to rely on Mao. War in Korea would offer some advantages to the Soviets. They could test their own new technology as against that of the USA; Stalin told Mao in October 1950 that there was a brief opportunity to fight a big war as Germany and Japan were out of action and ‘if a war is inevitable then let it be waged now and not in a few years’ time’. There was another motive, to do with Japan. The USSR (and in the main the British) had been roughly shouldered aside by the American military when Japan was occupied. For a time, MacArthur ran Japanese affairs very high-handedly, comparing himself favourably with Julius Caesar, whereas Moscow felt that Japan was close enough to the Soviet eastern lands for Soviet interests to be taken into account.

Initially American policy in Japan was muddled and naively punitive; Japan sank into a morass of epidemic, starvation, black marketeering and crime that was worse than Germany’s: inflation reached 700 per cent in so far as there were goods with prices to be inflated. Then, in 1948, the American learning curve made its usual advance: Japan would have to be run not according to American New Deal principles, but according to her own patterns. Besides, there was a serious enough Communist presence in Japan, and by 1948 there was an even more serious Communist presence just over the water, in China. An equivalent of Konrad Adenauer, Yoshida Shigeru, emerged in politics, with a clean record, and the Americans co-operated. In December 1948 Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor, saw that Japan would have to be the American industrial ‘powerhouse’, now that China was falling to the Communists, and he sent a banker, Joseph Dodge, to produce a (rough) equivalent of Ludwig Erhard’s plans for West Germany: currency stabilization, resistance to union wage demands, trade credits and a very low exchange rate for the yen against the dollar. The Korean War, breaking out a few months later, created a demand for Japanese goods and services, and injected $5,500 million into the economy. As with Germany, the new programme went together with relaxation of war criminals’ imprisonment; some were quietly rehabilitated and restored to the bureaucracy, and one (Shigemitsu Mamoru) even became foreign minister. All of this needed a regularization of Japan’s international position,
i.e.
a peace treaty, and discussion of this was in the air in 1950 (although formal negotiation only started in 1951, ending that same year with a San Francisco Treaty that not only gave the Americans several bases, but also foreshadowed Japanese rearmament). A rearmed Japan was an obvious threat to both Mao and Stalin; on the other hand, in mid-January Acheson had said in public that the outer line for the USA would not involve the Far Eastern mainland. Taking advantage of this, in April 1950 Stalin encouraged Kim. He would not help directly; Mao would have to do it. On 15 May Mao agreed to help if the Americans came in.

In the meantime, an election had been proclaimed in South Korea, in a context of upheaval; and there already had been bloody fighting on this or that occasion across the 38th Parallel, as the North Koreans tried to deter or terrorize non-Communists in the South. On 25 June, presenting these battles (which had already caused 100,000 casualties) as provocations, the North Koreans invaded. They had 400,000 men, 150 Soviet tanks, 40 modern fighters and 70 bombers, whereas the South Koreans had 150,000 soldiers, with 40 tanks and 14 planes. There were few American troops, and the immediate results were disastrous - Seoul, the Southern capital, captured on 28 June, and the Southern army disintegrating. However, Syngman Rhee did not surrender, and the Americans reacted very quickly. They were given a present: at the United Nations, the Soviet representative had been boycotting meetings of the Security Council, to protest at the exclusion of Communist China. He was therefore not present when Truman asked the UN to resist the aggression; accordingly, the Korean War was not just an American one, but formally concerned the United Nations; in effect, it became a NATO affair, with even a Turkish contingent.

However, the North Koreans’ advantage lasted for some time. By early August they had taken 90 per cent of the South, and there was a desperate fight for the area around Pusan; an American force was overwhelmed and its general captured. But the American shuttle from Japan started to operate, and strategic B29 bombers shattered the North’s communications and supply dumps. General Douglas MacArthur then launched a very bold amphibious operation at Inchon, on Korea’s western coast, near Seoul. Against difficult weather, over a sea of mud, and with tides that required very precise timing, it succeeded; only a few thousand of the North Koreans escaped entrapment, and in October 1950 the Americans invaded North Korea. MacArthur’s weakness was vainglory, and he advanced, without considering the risks, to the Yalu river and the Chinese border, no doubt dreaming that he could reverse the verdict of the Chinese civil war (American warships were also now protecting Taiwan).

On 29 September Kim asked Stalin for ‘volunteers’ from China, and Mao ordered his forces to be ready, even calling his Politburo for a discussion (though he later said that the decision to intervene was taken by ‘one and a half men’, the latter being Chou En-lai. They gambled, as it turned out, rightly, that the Americans would not use the bomb, that Chinese superiority in sheer manpower would prevent defeat (and many of the hundreds of thousands to be sacrificed were anyway former Nationalist soldiers). Chou and Lin Biao went to see Stalin on the Black Sea on 10 October, talked through the night and obtained a guarantee of equipment though not of direct air support. On 19 October Chinese intervention did occur, as Mao mobilized his millions, moved them by stealth, in fact enlisted some Soviet fighter support (which proved to be very effective) and confronted American troops on 1 November. Now came the great surprise: these Chinese troops, lightly equipped and able to move fast, defeated the Americans. One division marched at night over mountain roads and managed eighteen miles per day for nearly three weeks on end, and with such feats the Chinese brought about the longest retreat ever undertaken by an American army; a vast evacuation had to be carried out at the end of 1950. The line stabilized, roughly along the 38th Parallel where it had started out, and Seoul was retaken, in utter ruins, in March 1951. In some desperation, MacArthur publicly suggested an aerial attack on China, with hints that the atomic bomb might be used as well. Was Korea worth a nuclear war? Truman’s allies were appalled, and that gave him an excuse to remove MacArthur from command. His more prudent successor elected to stay on the 38th Parallel.