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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Pomfret
It was no longer just journalists who were taking up the Communists’ cause. As early as January 23, 1943, Jack Service, a second secretary at the US embassy in Chongqing, had appealed to the State Department for permission to visit the Communist stronghold in Yanan.
Service suggested that the US government recognize the Communists as a partner in the fight against Japan.
How much the Chinese Communists actually fought the Japanese during World War II is subject to debate. The official history of the People’s Liberation Army claims that Communist guerrillas battled continuously against the Japanese. However, in January 1940, Zhou Enlai told Stalin that China had suffered more than one million casualties, of which forty thousand, or about 4 percent, were Communists.
The Communists, he wrote, “have long been abstaining from both active and passive action against the aggressors.”
The Americans on Stilwell’s staff, however, believed that the Communists were fighting.
By 1944, officials in Washington generally agreed that the United States should reach out to the Communists. In late June of that year, Vice President Henry Wallace came to Chongqing to press the case, urging Chiang to allow an American mission to the Communist redoubt in Yanan. Chiang reluctantly agreed.
The Americans assembled a delegation of officers, enlisted men, and two American diplomats, including Jack Service, to travel to Communist-held territory. Led by Colonel David B. Barrett, a chubby Chinese-speaking assistant military attaché at the Chongqing embassy, the delegation was known formally as the United States Army Observation Group to Yanan.
Mao’s goals in the talks, according to a report by Vladimirov, the Soviet political adviser, were to secure diplomatic ties with the United States and cadge as many weapons from Washington as possible.
Vladimirov reported that Mao viewed the talks as part of the game against Chiang, not as a function of the war with Japan. “His calculations are simple,” Vladimirov wrote, “whenever Chiang Kai-shek suffers a defeat, the [Communist] Special Area benefits.”
Mao urged Service to persuade America to provide the Communists with arms and promised that his party would be a better ally than Chiang Kai-shek. “We would serve with all our hearts under an American general,” he said, “that is how we feel toward you.”
American intelligence on the Communists was laughable.
Barrett’s team was struck by the Communists’ vigor and popularity. Jack Service, who did the bulk of the political reporting, called the party’s leaders “modern” and “Western” and compared them favorably with the has-beens in Chongqing. Service took seriously Mao’s remarks that “what China needs most is democracy, not socialism” and that foreign capital would be welcome in China after the war. Service did not realize that Mao’s charm offensive had been carefully calibrated with Stalin to veil the party’s radical intentions and attract Chinese liberals
Stalin played his part in this game, soft-pedaling any connections with the Chinese Communists even as he bankrolled their operations with a monthly stipend of American dollars and gold. In a June 1944 meeting with Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to Moscow, he described Mao and his band as “margarine Communists.”
In cultivating America, the goal wasn’t an alliance, he said, but to “neutralize” the role America would play in the upcoming civil war.
Unlike in Chongqing, where everyone griped constantly about Chiang, he observed, “Mao and the other leaders are universally spoken of with respect.” This was a sign of the party’s popularity, he argued, not the result of its having just spent two years terrorizing those who dared to think otherwise. “There is no feeling of restraint or oppression,” Service wrote. “There is no hesitation in admitting failure.” The program in the Special Area, he declared, “is simple democracy … much more American than Russian in form and spirit.”
The term “so-called Communists” began popping up with increasing regularity in State Department reports out of Chongqing.
Service was the ultimate China Hand. Born into a missionary family in China in 1909, he routinely expressed his love for the country and was one in a long line of Americans who believed that he could mend China
Service reacted to the Red Zone as if it were the fulfillment of the century-old missionary dream for a spiritually rejuvenated China.
Davies had also been born in Sichuan to missionary parents. He believed that a civil war in China was unavoidable and that America needed to befriend the Communists because they were going to win.
Davies’s bet hung on his conviction that the Reds were not all that red; he called them pragmatists and ideological “backsliders.” He also held to the notion that like all other Chinese, they could not say no to America. He was wrong on both counts. “I obviously underestimated the commitment of the Chinese Communist ruling party at the time to ideology and the dexterity with which Mao and company manipulated it,” Davies acknowledged later in life.
There were, of course, practical reasons to supply the Communists, chief among them the need to rescue American pilots who had been shot down by the Japanese over Communist-held territory.
Vladimirov was even more dismissive. When Mao sent a telegram to Moscow on July 19, 1944, claiming that the Communists had enjoyed a string of successful operations against Japan, Vladimirov informed Moscow that Mao had inflated the figures. “The Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army have actually folded up military operations since 1941,” he reported. Years later, Barrett acknowledged that he, too, had been “unduly impressed with the Communists.” He pleaded “naiveté.”
The warm feelings many Americans harbored for China’s Communists came from many sources, but the master at wrapping Chinese Communism into an attractive package for American consumption was Zhou Enlai. “He was one of the smoothest liars in the world, but you couldn’t help but like him as a person,” recalled Henry Byroade, a US Army officer who had extensive dealings with the Communists.
Zhou’s persuasiveness was legendary. Time’s Theodore White ranked him with Stilwell and John F. Kennedy as “the three greatest men I met … in whose presence I had near total suspension of disbelief.”
The leftist American belief that Communism provided an answer for China fit neatly within the American missionary tradition.
In a review in the Nation, Lin’s old friend Edgar Snow seemed to shed the last vestiges of objectivity, calling the Communists the most democratic administration in China.
In a rebuttal in the Nation the following month, called “China and Its Critics,” Lin acknowledged that American public opinion was not on his side. China’s Communists had become “America’s sacred cow.” He had been a longtime critic of the Nationalists’ political oppression, but Chiang’s depredations were a garden party compared to the regimented thinking imposed in the Red Zone.
Lin made an important point about American “China Hands.” Though many of them could speak Chinese, few could read it. They never bothered to check Communist Party documents and relied instead on “what the communists say … to foreigners on a conducted tour.”
As Hu Shih had once asked Frank Goodnow, Lin asked his old American friends why the Chinese didn’t deserve freedom. “Liberty for Americans is their life blood, but for Chinese, what does it matter anyhow?” he wrote to Pearl Buck. “The consigning of 500 million to totalitarian rule does not even arouse a ripple of phlegm.… I have no country to return to. I suppose Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley think I am a fool not to jump into the Communist heaven.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s success in convincing most of the State Department diplomatic corps that it was patriotic, moderate, and willing to fight Japan had a significant effect on the outcome of China’s civil war. It weakened support for the Kuomintang and enticed Americans to believe that the Communists were an acceptable alternative to Chiang Kai-shek. As World War II drew to a close, it also reinforced the notion that the Communists would be responsible members of a coalition government and not dedicated to seizing absolute power later on.
But other Americans were always willing to help out. In 1946, Claire Chennault, along with legendary fixer Tommy Corcoran, founded a new airline to provide airlifts for the United Nations relief agencies in China. Civil Air Transport, as it was called, soon began shuttling more than aid. It transported Nationalist reinforcements and ammunition into cities surrounded by Communist troops. Within a few years, the Central Intelligence Agency would purchase the operation for $2 million, change its name to Air America, and use it in clandestine operations throughout Asia.
But on July 2, 1946, then acting secretary of state Dean Acheson informed Marshall that if full-scale civil war erupted, the United States would stop backing the Nationalists and leave China. There was no mention of Truman’s earlier commitment to Chiang. Then in the summer of 1946, the Truman administration agreed to transfer millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to Chiang’s forces.
Chiang Kai-shek could be forgiven for being perplexed. “Even when we offer to pay cash for American weapons, their State Department still refuses to issue an export license,” he complained.
The United States, Stuart told Marshall, should “have either given sufficient aid to the National Government … or we should have withdrawn.” Instead, the Americans had opted for “a hesitating, half-hearted form of continuing assistance,” which guaranteed Chiang’s defeat.
Most biographers have treated the failure of the Marshall Mission as a blip in a career of untarnished success. But Marshall’s defeat in China had a deep effect on his later work in Europe with the Marshall Plan and in fashioning a strategy to confront Communism. Never again would the general advocate a negotiated power-sharing agreement with a Communist regime. With diplomat George Kennan, he would become an architect of a containment strategy that involved massive support for anti-Communist governments that endured for more than thirty years.
The American troops felt trapped between the Nationalists and the Communists and lashed out at innocent Chinese.
Communist accusations against the United States took on the hyperbolic fanaticism that would characterize anti-American propaganda for the next half century.
Then, on Christmas Eve 1946, the Communists got the atrocity they had been waiting for. A nineteen-year-old Peking University student named Shen Chong was grabbed in downtown Beijing by two US Marines, who took her to an open field, where one of them, Corporal William G. Pierson, allegedly raped her. On December 30, eight thousand students marched in Beijing to protest the purported crime. A day later, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party ordered underground operatives to take control of this issue to demand not only justice but a US withdrawal.
The Shen Chong case gave the Communists ammunition as they angled to turn public opinion against the United States. Earlier in 1946, when the terms of the Yalta agreement were formally revealed in China, student protests had focused on Soviet depredations in Manchuria, including hundreds of rapes. But thanks to the Communist campaign, an anti-American movement had replaced anti-Soviet fury.
In February 1947, the British told the Americans that they could no longer afford to aid the royalist government in Greece, which was struggling to avert a Communist takeover. Turkey, too, was in danger of becoming a Soviet satellite. Truman stepped into the breach, telling Congress on March 12 that the United States must help “free people who are resisting attempted subjugation.” In addition to military aid and advice, the Americans readied a massive program to rebuild Europe—the Marshall Plan.
Chiang’s ambassador, the veteran diplomat Wellington Koo, worked the halls of Congress, arguing that China deserved military assistance as much as Greece and Turkey.
But Marshall, now secretary of state, told Congress on February 20 that for America to roll back the Communists in China, the United States would have “to take over the Chinese Government.” It was too big a task. Asked what a Communist China would mean for the United States, he replied that it would be too weak to constitute a threat.
For the Truman administration, the Truman Doctrine, whereby the United States committed to assisting anti-Communist regimes worldwide, did not apply to China. As the president told his cabinet in March 1947, giving China more aid would be “pouring sand into a rat hole.”
Back in the United States, Wedemeyer argued, contrary to Marshall’s bet, that the fall of the Republic of China directly threatened the security of the United States and that Washington needed to double down on the Generalissimo.
The State Department did fend off Republican attempts to deploy American advisers with Nationalist combat units as the United States was doing in Greece.
The end of World War II forced China’s American-educated liberals to make a difficult choice between two illiberal parties. For years, China’s “Third Force” had struggled barehanded against the two armed camps—the Communists and the Nationalists—arguing that a free society would make China strong.
But as the war ended, instead of cultivating China’s conscience, Chiang Kai-shek cracked down. In October 1945, he ousted Long Yun, the warlord in Yunnan province who had sheltered the liberals. Next, agents of his archconservative adviser Chen Lifu moved in. In December, Chen’s hit men were suspected of killing four students in Kunming during a demonstration against civil war. In June, Nationalist thugs assaulted a coalition of students and intellectuals who had come to Nanjing to appeal for peace.
Of course, for all the nasty authoritarianism of the Nationalist regime, it paled in comparison to what awaited China’s intellectuals under Mao Zedong.
Nonetheless, the Kuomintang’s spasmodic crackdowns and assassinations played into the Communists’ hands.
In April 1945, delegates from fifty nations gathered in San Francisco for the founding conference of the United Nations.
