China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice
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Authors: Richard Bernstein
Tags: #History, #Modern, #20th Century, #Asia, #China, #Political Science, #International Relations, #General
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Richard Bernstein
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bernstein, Richard, [date]
China 1945 : Mao’s revolution and America’s fateful choice / Richard Bernstein. — First edition.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-307-59588-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-35351-9 (eBook)
1. United States—Foreign relations—China. 2. China—Foreign relations—United States. 3. China—History—Republic, 1912–1949. 4. Taiwan—History—1945– 5. Mao, Zedong, 1893–1976. 6. Chiang, Kai-shek, 1887–1975. I. Title.
E183.8.C5B439 2014
327.7305109′044—dc23
2014003598
Front-of-jacket photograph: Conference at Yenan Communist Headquarters with Chairman Mao Zedong, August 27, 1945. Photo by Frayne / U.S. Army / National Archives / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.
Jacket design by Oliver Munday
Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.
v3.1
TO THE MEMORY OF
Clare Bernstein
For men change their rulers willingly hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse.
—
Niccolò Machiavelli
The whole state apparatus, including the army, the police, and the courts, is the instrument by which one class oppresses another … it is violence and not “benevolence.”
—
Mao Zedong
T
ranscribing names of Chinese people and places is complex, because of the multiple ways in which it has been done over the years, and because some names have changed since the period covered in this book. For place-names, I have mostly used the names that were employed in 1945, and if the name used today is different, I show that in parenthesis after the first mention. The two main instances of this are
Mukden, the largest city in Manchuria, which is now known as Shenyang, and
Chefoo, present-day Yentai. An exception is
Beijing, which means “northern capital.” In 1945, the city was known as Peiping, meaning “northern peace.” But I render it as Beijing, in the way that has become generally accepted today.
In 1945, the main system used for transcribing Chinese names into the Latin alphabet was called Wade-Giles, and it decreed, for example, that the leader of China’s Communist Party was Mao Tse-tung. But since coming to power, the Communists have adopted an alternative system, known as
pinyin, by which the aforementioned name is rendered Mao Zedong, and for most names, including Mao’s, this book follows the
pinyin system currently in use. However in the case of Kuomintang officials, I use the
Wade-Giles system still in use on Taiwan. Thus, I refer to the Kuomintang official who negotiated the ceasefire of January 1946 as Chang Chun. The pinyin spelling would be Zhang Chun. The Kuomintang itself would be Guomindang, or GMD, in pinyin, but I have used the old romanization—Kuomintang, or KMT.
Finally, a small number of the names are rendered in a way that does not correspond either to pinyin or Wade-Giles but is still so familiar that it would be confusing to abandon it. The chief example is the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In pinyin his name would be Jiang Jieshi, but his name is rendered as Chiang Kai-shek in this book. The names of several Chinese cities are similarly rendered—hence Canton (rather than the pinyin: Guangzhou) and Chungking (pinyin: Chongqing).
Introduction
N
ear the end of 2013, something new made its presence known in the waters off the coast of China. It was an aircraft carrier, bought from Ukraine and refurbished in the port of Qingdao. Called the
Liaoning
, it was China’s first-ever such craft and therefore, while not nearly as swift or powerful as the American colossi that patrol the world’s oceans, a sign of China’s growing power and, more important, of its intention to project that power well beyond its shores.
Naturally, this was of interest to the United States, which dispatched ships of its own to observe the
Liaoning
as it sailed with its escort of destroyers and cruisers in international waters.
When one of the American ships, a guided missile carrier known as the
Cowpens
, almost collided with a Chinese vessel that cut closely and aggressively across its bow, there was angry comment on both sides.
The American secretary of defense called China’s action “irresponsible.” China, through its controlled press, declared that the
Cowpens
had intruded into a “no sail” zone declared by China in the
South China Sea, virtually all of which China claims to control, though that claim is not accepted by the United States or by other countries in Asia. The newspaper
Global Times
, an English-language mouthpiece for China’s ministry of propaganda, warned that China had a right to defend its territory, and “
just because it wasn’t capable of asserting its interest in the past doesn’t mean it has given up this right.”
There were other high-seas confrontations between China and the United States in the early years of the twenty-first century, as China indicated an intention over the long run to supplant the United States as the dominant power in East Asia and the western Pacific.
But for the historian what is striking about the newest phase of
Sino-American relations is how closely it echoes the past, particularly actions undertaken by earlier Chinese Communist forces to warn the United States away, to stop it from exercising what it assumed to be its paramount power in Asia. The most important and best-known of these actions took place during the Korean War in 1950, when, for the first and, so far, only time, China and America engaged in large-scale hostilities. But the first armed standoff between the United States and the Communist Chinese took place five years earlier than that along a dusty, tree-lined road between the Chinese port of Tianjin and the ancient imperial capital, Beijing (then known as Peiping) that was being patrolled by detachments of United States Marines.
It was September 1945. The devastating war against Japan, which had occupied much of China
for eight years, had ended only weeks before. The United States had sent its marines to China’s north coast to help maintain order there and to enable China’s central government to retake possession of its previously occupied territory. But the Chinese Communists, who had warmly welcomed American soldiers, diplomats, and journalists during the war, now didn’t want American troops on the ground in China at all. And so they embarked on a campaign of harassment and intimidation that was more lethal than anything that has happened in the more recent confrontations on the high seas. Shots were fired in anger, men were killed, and prisoners were taken, including some who were on missions like that of the
Cowpens
nearly seventy years later, to collect information that the Communists didn’t want them to have.
The year 1945 in this sense marked the origin of a rivalry between the United States and China’s Communists that, like a recurring illness, has always reinstated itself, and has bedeviled the relations between the two sides even after periods of near-rhapsodic warmth and declarations of common interest, during which the suspicions and animosities of the past seem to have been put permanently to rest. It is a strange rivalry in its way, because for all of these decades, China and the United States would appear to have had much more to gain from friendly cooperation than from conflict—gains in trade and investment, cooperation against environmental degradation, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. In 1945 too, until the clashes that began on the road between
Tianjin and Beijing, the United States and the Chinese Communists had not only cooperated in the war against the Japanese occupiers, but they had also talked enthusiastically about major plans for the future, during which American money and technology would help lift China out of poverty.
That didn’t happen, of course. The mood that seemed so buoyant at the beginning of 1945 deteriorated, and replacing the banquets and toasts and declarations of friendship that had taken place earlier were armed clashes, mutual accusations, and, especially from the Communists, angry expressions of eternal and inevitable enmity. Not all of the more recent rivalry between China and the United States has its origins in that one year, but the pattern of enmity, which resulted in two devastating wars, first in Korea and later in Vietnam, was established during the months just before and just after the end of World War II in Asia.
Was this pattern avoidable? Could things have been different? The answers to those questions are to be found in the chronicle of events of 1945, the turning-point year for both China and the United States, whose relations in coming years will do more to affect the shape of the planet than those between any other two countries.