Fifty Years in China - The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador

by John Leighton Stuart

Dr. Stuart will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the great representatives of that historic line of educational missionaries in China.

Dr. Stuart’s great achievement as the founder and builder of Yenching University must be judged against that background. “Dreams cost money,” as he tells us. And his vivid descriptions of the successes and failures of the fund-raising campaign which he and Dr. Henry Winters Luce carried on for many years throughout the United States not only are valuable records but also often make the most interesting and most thrilling reading in this autobiography.

At last Yenching University became a dream that came true. As a friend and neighbor of Yenching who watched its growth

Dr. Stuart’s seventieth birthday was celebrated on June 24, 1946. Ten days later, he was urged by General George C. Marshall, Special Representative of President Truman in China, to serve as the American Ambassador to the Republic of China and to assist him in the work of the Marshall Mission. On

United States Senate where it was unanimously approved. Dr. Stuart’s ambassadorship lasted six and a half years (July, 1946—December, 1952).

Dr. Stuart’s memoirs of these years occupy nearly one half of the book and fall into two main parts: part one (Chapters 9-12) records the political and military events of the years 1946-49 and his own impressions and comments about those events; part two (Chapters 13-15) contains the thoughts and reflections on the Department of State’s “White Paper” on United States Relations with China, on the tragedy of the loss of the Chinese mainland to World Communism, on his own life and life ideals, and finally on “what policy the United States should pursue in regard to China.” I must confess that I have found the chapters of part one (Chapters 9-12) rather oversimplified and often difficult to follow as a summary report of the enormously complex events from the early months of General Marshall’s Mission to China down to the fall of the Nanking-Shanghai area to the Communists.

His personality and prestige and the lofty yet reasonable ideals which had brought the delegates together created an atmosphere of good feeling and high endeavor which made possible the five resolutions which, if put into effect, would have ended the controversy, formed a coalition government on a democratic basis and led to a reorganization and training of troops on both sides under American advice. . . .

First, “the United States is cognizant that the present National Government of China is a ‘one-party government’ and believes that peace, unity and democratic reform in China will be furthered if the basis of this Government is broadened to include other political elements in the country.

And secondly, “the existence of autonomous armies such as

that of the Communist army is inconsistent with, and actually makes impossible, political unity in China.

The first objective was to cause the Chinese to form a coalition government with the Chinese Communists fairly and effectively represented; the second was to cause them to “eliminate” the autonomous armies of the Chinese Communist Party and “integrate” them into the National Army.

that was the Yalta formula deviously devised by Stalin for Poland and for all “Liberated Europe”; that was what Mao Tse-tung openly demanded on April 24, 1945, in his fifty-thousand-word report to the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party held in Yenan—a report entitled “On Coalition Government.”

But they had absolutely no intention of having their autonomous armies “eliminated” or “integrated” into the National Army:

In plain language, the weapon was to be not military pressure or intervention, but the withholding of American aid to China.

But this weapon could only checkmate the Chinese Government and had no effect whatever on the Chinese Communists, whose armies had been racing by land and by sea to Manchuria where they could obtain unlimited aid from the Soviet Occupation Forces and from the Soviet Union, now the contiguous, strongest base of revolution for the Chinese Communists.

successfully pressing General Marshall to stop or suspend American aid to China!

because of the loud protests of the Chinese Communists.

So the Marshall Mission failed because of its inherently impossible objectives, which neither Secretary Byrnes, nor President Truman, nor General Marshall, nor Mr. John Carter Vincent (who more than anyone else was largely responsible for drafting the Marshall directives) ever fully understood.

The government naturally wanted the Diplomatic Body to remove to Canton and thus help to maintain its own prestige. Technically we all were accredited to it and properly

should follow it to the “temporary capital.” My counselor, who also had the rank of Minister, Lewis Clark, was ordered to proceed to Canton with a working staff. The ambassadors of those countries belonging to the North Atlantic Group had been meeting informally during these puzzling weeks for conference.

All were of the same opinion—to stay temporarily in Nanking—and were similarly supported by their governments. I was forcibly reminded of our new position in the world not only by the attitude of the members of that Group but by t...

There was an ironic humor in the fact that, as it turned out, the Soviet Ambassador was the only Chief...

The Soviets seem rather careful about doing the correct thing according to protocol.

what my old friend, Nelson Johnson, at that time the American Ambassador, had said to me soon after the Japanese invasion of China, to the effect that we were watching one of the most fateful dramas of history, with seats in the front row but powerless to do anything but look on and interpret. I remember wondering at the time whether the representative of the United States need be only a spectator. Yet, here was I sitting luxuriously in a private box watching an even more heartrending performance.

The earlier one had at least had the splendidly heroic quality of a clearly defined and united resistance to a vastly more efficient foreign aggressor, whereas this one had become a gigantic struggle between two political ideologies with the overtones of democratic idealism perverted by bureaucratic incompetence on the one side, succumbing to a dynamic socialized reform vitiated by Communist dogma,

was glad in the end that I was compelled to stay in Nanking.

But during the years 1947-8, Secretary Marshall’s experiences with Soviet Russia, as shared by the entire American nation and supported largely by the opinion of the western world, led to a radical change of attitude toward the whole subject. It came to be assumed that the Communist party in every country was controlled from the Kremlin in the interest of world revolution by violence, that it would dominate any coalition and utilize its power for enforcing all the evils of a totalitarian system, and that communism was, in short, a sinister menace to free institutions, unscrupulous in the employment of any means to attain its ends, to be feared and fought on all fronts.

In course of time I received the most explicit instructions not to encourage or in any way assist in the formation of a coalition which included Communists. American

official policy had seemingly therefore completely reversed itself. Chinese communism was undoubtedly in the orthodox Marxist-Leninist tradition, but would it be transformed by historical, demographic and other factors inherent in the Chinese environment, by the impossibility of enforcing totalitarian techniques in so vast and amorphou...