China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (19 page)

They called themselves the last-ditchers, the dozen or so Anglo-Americans in Hankou, a city that everybody knew was directly in the path of the Japanese juggernaut moving inexorably up the Yangzi Valley. The war was near, as Davies put it, in the form of “
air raids, troop movements, wounded soldiers arriving from the front, Soviet ‘volunteer’ airmen and German military advisors in the streets, hordes of dazed refugees fleeing before the oncoming enemy, students rushing about the
city pasting patriotic posters on walls and calling on everyone to resist the foe, and finally the Communists planting dynamite in key buildings to greet the invaders with a scorched earth.” The diplomats and journalists and others used to gather for meals and conversation, always about Japan and its unforgivable brutality, about China, the Nationalists and the Communists, at Davies’s apartment, which was in the stately Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, or at a restaurant called Rosie’s.

The last-ditchers liked each other, and according to the
Times
’s Tilman Durdin, there was “
close collaboration and friendship between correspondents and American officials in Hankou.” The common thread was what Durdin called their “deep sympathy” for China and its suffering under the Japanese. Among them, Smedley, Strong, and the
Snows were unabashed admirers of the Communists and, almost by definition, opponents of the KMT. The more hardheaded analysts like Davies viewed these rhapsodic pro-Maoists with wry detachment, and the notion that the Communists represented a dawn of freedom and hope was not universally shared; even some of Snow’s friends chided him for writing a pro-Mao rhapsody rather than an objective, skeptical report. Still, the body of work produced by the journalists in the group was favorable to the Communists and disparaging of the KMT. As early as 1934, Agnes Smedley had published
China’s Red Army Marches,
an impassioned account, based on interviews with Communist commanders, of the early effort led by Mao to create a Soviet-style republic in Jiangxi province in south central China. Smedley later published two more books full of glowing descriptions of the Communists,
China Fights Back
in 1939 and
Battle Hymn of China
in 1943. Anna Louise Strong’s
One-Fifth of Mankind: China Fights for Freedom,
published in 1938, is in the same political genre. Not to be outdone by her famous husband, Helen Snow also traveled to the Communist area and in 1939 published, as Nym Wales,
Inside Red China,
which, like Snow’s
Red Star,
was enthusiastically pro-Mao.
More than a few other young Americans looking for adventure went to China in the late 1930s, and some wrote books that, while forgotten today, enhanced the portraits of the heroic Communist guerrillas and the vicious Japanese occupiers alike.
Humane Endeavor: The Story of the China War,
by
Haldore Hanson, a young man who traveled with Communist troops behind enemy lines, was heralded in 1939 in the
New York Times
as “
a thrilling description of a world within a conqueror’s world, living its own life with the shadows of bayonets over it, but at times paying the ultimate penalty meted out
by the Japanese with their Punic vengeance.” It is difficult to say exactly to what extent these portrayals of China’s revolutionaries seeped into the
public consciousness or formed the background to the later views of diplomats. The books of Snow, Smedley, and others were counterbalanced by Luce’s mass-circulation
Time
and
Life
, whose portraits of the Nationalists were almost as favorable as the leftist portraits of the Communists. Yet it is striking that, in their more sober ways, many other analysts who were in no way leftists or pro-Communist romantics adopted positions, mostly expressed in official government communications, not all that different from those of Snow and Smedley. Stilwell, a registered Republican and a political conservative all his life, believed that the Communists’ goal was “
land ownership under reasonable conditions.”
Frank Merrill, who commanded Merrill’s Marauders, told
Mike Mansfield during Mansfield’s inspection of China at the end of 1944 that the Chinese Communists “
were not allied to Moscow but were primarily a Chinese agrarian group interested in land and tax reforms.”

Mansfield’s own conclusion about the Communists: They are “
a force to be reckoned with,” having 90 million people under their control under “a system of government which is quite democratic.” As for the Kuomintang, it

This was a vision both of themselves and of their KMT rivals that the Communists themselves did their best to foster in what, especially after the American entry into the Pacific war at the end of 1941, became a creative, multifaceted campaign to influence American public opinion and to gain support from the American government. The remarkable person, the glowing personality, the diplomatic genius, who both masterminded and embodied this effort was Zhou Enlai.

Zhou’s contact with American diplomats and journalists began during the brief Hankou period, when, under the terms of the
United Front, which was in its early phase of goodwill, he was the official Communist representative in the KMT capital, and he made himself readily available to the American and British diplomats and journalists who were stationed there, a practice that he continued in Chungking for the entire war.
In May 1942, Zhou gave a letter to Edgar Snow, asking him to pass it along to
Lauchlin Currie, one of Roosevelt’s chief White House aides, in which he enumerated the Communists’ military successes against the Japanese and, for the first time, asked the United States to give some of its China aid directly to the CCP. Zhou soon proposed what eventually became the
Dixie Mission, and he expanded his journalistic charm offensive from well-known leftists like the Snows and
Agnes Smedley to the more neutral members of the mainstream press whose numbers had increased in Chungking after Pearl Harbor and who, Zhou knew, were becoming increasingly disillusioned with Chiang and the KMT.

Only a few years before, Zhou had been a man with a high price on his head. Now, because of the United Front and the supposed alliance between the CCP and the KMT, he lived mostly in Chungking, where he maintained an active social calendar, mixing comfortably at dinners and receptions with American diplomats and journalists, explaining China to them, striving to reassure them of the reasonableness of the Communist movement, the treachery of the Kuomintang right wing, and the contribution the Communists could make in the fight against Japan, if only the United States would allow them to. Zhou was so smooth, so articulate, so sophisticated in his analyses, so worldly, cultivated, and seemingly sincere, that he was viewed less as a partisan for one of the two main armed and competing parties in China and more as a friend, as some of the journalists called him, and a reliable source.

“
Zhou Enlai had an amazing mind, for detail as well as for synthesis, a memory that could with ease recollect dates, quotations, episodes, incidents,” Theodore H. White, the
Time
correspondent in Chungking from 1941 to 1945, later wrote, saying that he had “become friends” with Zhou early on in his China sojourn. White, who was one of the best and most famous journalists of the middle decades of the twentieth century, was veritably worshipful of Zhou, who, he wrote, “was, along with Joseph
Stilwell and
John F. Kennedy, one of the three great men I met and knew in whose presence I had near total suspension of disbelief or
questioning judgment.” Later he understood Zhou to be “
a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century,” but he “had a way of entrancing people, of offering affection, of inviting and seeming to share confidences. And I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.”

It was the ruthlessness that was well hidden, that and Zhou’s total devotion to the cause that defined his life. Zhou was complex. He was in style, family background, and education more like the urbane, humanist intellectuals who founded the Communist Party in the early 1920s than the callow and shallow, semi-educated zealots who took over the party in its later, radical phase. He came from a family of scholar-officials of the sort who, having passed the Confucian exams, had staffed the imperial bureaucracy in bygone days but had fallen into obscurity as the Manchu dynasty collapsed. Zhou went to the Nankai Academy in Tianjin, which was an ultra-elite Chinese high school, a kind of Asian Eton or Harrow, modern, reformist, and public-spirited. He studied English, was editor of the student newspaper, acted in plays, and finished at the top of his class. Then, like many of China’s brightest young people, Zhou spent a couple of years in Japan before returning to China at the end of World War I.

There, in the northern port city of Tianjin, he joined the secretive “Awakening Society,” one of the many study groups that opposed the warlord-dominated government of China and discussed competing visions of national revitalization. Like many such students, Zhou studied Marxism and even met a few of the intellectual-scholar types who, inspired by the success and the promise of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He spent from 1921 to 1924 in Europe, traveling to London and Berlin but staying mostly in Paris. It was there that he joined a Communist cell and became a leader in the overseas branch of the fledgling CCP, then, under close
Comintern supervision, allied to the KMT in the first United Front.

When Zhou came home, he was already well connected and highly regarded in the movement that was going to remake China. Though only twenty-six years old, he was appointed political commissar of the
Whampoa Military Academy down the Pearl River from Canton, a school created to form a modern, skilled Chinese officer corps. The academy was led by another man of China’s future, the lean and hungry
Chiang Kai-shek. Zhou’s job was to instruct cadets in the ideology
of the KMT, which at the time was, like the CCP, a revolutionary party being advised by a Comintern agent.

The
United Front, as we’ve seen, lasted until 1927, when Chiang carried out his preemptive coup against the Communists, and from that point on, Zhou was in opposition. And being in opposition meant total engagement in the clandestine and brutal life-and-death struggle with the KMT agents whose task was to hunt down Communists and kill them.

This is the part of Zhou’s history that was undetected by his American friends later in Chungking. Zhou, living underground in Shanghai under assumed names, switching from safe house to safe house, never appearing in public, was the founding head of the Communists’ secret police force,
the
Teke
, which included a platoon of assassins known as the Red Squad. In 1931, one of Zhou’s agents, a certain
Gu Shunzhang, was arrested by the KMT police and after being tortured provided information that led to the capture and assassination of some Communist operatives in Shanghai. In retaliation, Zhou ordered the Red Squad to assassinate Gu’s entire family, some fifteen people, and this order was scrupulously carried out. Shortly after that, another of Zhou’s agents was seized when, disobeying Zhou’s orders, he spent the night in a hotel with his mistress. The agent, tortured before being killed, gave away Zhou’s cover, which forced him to leave Shanghai for Mao’s rural base area in Guangxi province, a wanted man.

This history suggests an essential element in the Chinese picture. The partnership known as the Second United Front, formed to combat Japan, theoretically made the two biggest parties in China friends and allies, but the depth and deadliness of their recent struggles with each other left behind a residue of hatred and distrust that was ineradicable, especially in a culture with no experience or tradition of peaceful political competition. And so here was Zhou Enlai, who had a few short years before been engaged in a game of murder and revenge, set up in the Kuomintang’s temporary capital, engaging in the gentle arts of political socializing and persuasion, meeting regularly with foreign journalists and diplomats and trying to persuade them that the Communists were reasonable and trustworthy. He lived with his staff of half a dozen in a ramshackle old compound deep in a Chungking alley, which became ankle-deep in mud whenever it rained. There was a reception room with a few chairs and a couch all covered “
with the same coarse blue cloth worn by Chinese peasants and workers.”

Except for Mao, the elite of the Chinese Communist movement, including
Dong Biwu, one of the founders of the party—“
no one could have seemed milder, frailer, kindlier,” White said of him—was made available there for American callers. The casual modesty of
Zhou’s headquarters, especially compared with the forbidding formality of Chiang’s, made a favorable impression, similar in its way to the Valley Forge–like encampment in Yenan.

It was a seduction literal and figurative. One of Zhou’s assistants—“his personal favorite and mine,” according to White—was a certain
Gong Peng, who, White adds, “
was the most beautiful Chinese woman I ever encountered.” Gong used to give the daily Communist briefings to the foreign press, carrying carbons of the latest Radio Yenan broadcasts to the downtown Press Hostel and distributing them to the various foreign journalists who lived there. She was, White says, the daughter of a “warlord” and, as an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter from the revolutionary mecca of Yenan, “a true pistol packing heroine.” This enhanced her appeal for White, who was a romantic at heart, prone to unreciprocated infatuations, though there seems to have been some exaggeration in his description of Gong, who wasn’t a warlord’s daughter and never packed a pistol. She did nonetheless exemplify the sort of young person who flocked to the Communist cause in those years and who helped to give it its allure of fashion and political chic.