China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (29 page)

And later, with SACO and Miles still in operation, Wedemeyer wrote again:

Lieutenant Dobbins, who compiled a report on Tai for the American Military Intelligence Division, wrote, “
Hundreds of Tai Li’s victims have been killed, thousands languish in prisons and concentration camps not knowing why they are there or for how long.”

What is curious is a certain abstract quality to these summaries of disappearances, tortures, and executions that are alleged to have taken place during the war. Some victims of KMT repression are known—including, for example,
Ma Yinchu, an American-trained economist and a regular critic of Chiang. Ma was kept for much of the war under house arrest, which, of course, was a repressive measure, but he was not killed, nor was he sent to a concentration camp or a harsh prison; as we will see, when he was released from house arrest, he immediately began making heated anti-KMT speeches. Before the war, in the 1930s, Tai’s
Blue Shirts carried out several assassinations, including those of at least two liberal critics of the KMT regime,
Yang Xingfo and Shi Liangcai, the editor of the Shanghai newspaper
Shi Bao
. In addition, a Blue Shirt
publication boasted of the executions of some forty “traitors” in Wuhan, that is, Chinese who were collaborating with the Japanese enemy—this in the years between the
Mukden Incident in 1931 and the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident six years later. There were also executions of Chiang’s rivals for power, including members of a group of young generals whom Tai Li suspected of plotting to arrest Chiang late in 1943. In 1944 Chiang had one of his favorite generals,
Zhang Deneng, shot when, instead of defending Changsha against the Japanese, Zhang evacuated the city with trucks allegedly crammed with his own possessions. Chiang, as
Jay Taylor has written, would not have stopped himself from ordering
large numbers of executions if he had felt his regime was threatened, but there is no clear evidence that he actually did.

The KMT secret police and Tai most assuredly did not observe the niceties of due process. It can be assumed that beatings and torture of prisoners were common in China then, as they are in China now. But the BIS was neither the Gestapo nor the OGPU, not in its efficiency, its thoroughness, or its documented wholesale murderousness. China under the KMT was not a democracy, nor was it a fascist regime meriting comparison to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia; indeed, given the conditions of the war, the atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue, the existence of a rival puppet government, and a Communist opposition, the surprise may be not that its misdeeds were many but that they weren’t more. The reports on Tai compiled by Americans in China contain virtually no names of anti-Chiang dissenters who were executed or who disappeared, and this absence of specifics suggests the possibility that some of the reports of abuses by BIS and Tai were based on hearsay, or stemmed from a tendency, encouraged by Tai’s reputation as a kind of Nationalist Fu Manchu, always to believe the worst that was said about him.

There were Americans on the scene at the time who believed this. Captain Miles defended Tai, arguing in a memoir that his malfeasance was simply assumed, more imaginary than real. Similarly, in January 1946, an
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) report by one
J. C. Metzel noted that ONI had received “
numerous adverse reports on Tai Li,” but all of those that Metzel investigated, he wrote, “have proved to be misleading, most of them being false and the others distorted.”

The chief of ONI,
Thomas B. Inglis, writing about Tai Li at the end of the war, concluded that Tai, while tough, had to be judged by the practices of China, not America. “
As head of the National Police in wartime,
it has been his duty to deal with traitors and criminals under laws and customs definitely cruel and barbarous by our standards,” Inglis wrote. Tai’s secret police function, he continued, had “made his name feared in broad elements of Chinese society, not only among the actual criminal classes, traitors and collaborationists, but among the multitude who are basically loyal and respectable.” These were the people “who are loud in complaints about his power to arrest and detain without warrant, and his description as hatchet man for the political reactionaries,” but Inglis concluded, Tai had “simply carried out wartime duties by methods customary in his country.”

The problem, however, was that Tai appeared to be an unscrupulous thug in the mold of Himmler or Beria, Stalin’s secret police head, even if the comparison was exaggerated. Tai Li’s secret police had the outward attributes of a Gestapo or an OGPU, operating in the shadows in a secret guarded compound and answerable only to one man with the peremptory title Generalissimo. It was known to exist, and therefore it inspired fear, and since nobody knew exactly what it was doing, it inspired even more fear.

By contrast, as we’ve seen, the sprawling Yenan regime also had its secret police and its shadowy commander,
Kang Sheng, who was answerable only to the man known as the Chairman. And yet the observers at the time, the Americans and even the Chinese, seem never to have compared Tai to Kang, and this is telling. The CCP’s security apparatus was so entirely closed, so utterly opaque, that it did not come to widespread public notice, and therefore it inspired hardly any fear at all, except among those who, like Wang Shiwei, fell under its boot and disappeared, with no brave reporter to reveal to the world what had become of him.

The lesson is this: The party that stands caught between dictatorship and liberal democracy gives away a strategic advantage to the parties that stand solidly in either one camp or the other. The KMT, whose faults could be known, fell under a certain inescapable and damaging opprobrium; the Communists, whose faults were hidden by distance and propaganda, were given the benefit of the doubt.

Conspiracy theorists
would see in such a thing as SACO proof of the underlying goal of the United States, which, as the Communists believed of the American “reactionary clique,” was to keep China safe
for imperialist exploitation. But notable about the operations of the various intelligence agencies in China in the weeks and months around the end of the war was how ad hoc they were, how uncoordinated and unattached to any central plan or central strategic concept. Miles and SACO, while officially approved by the American government, operated almost independently of any central control. Nobody was in charge of everything, not even Wedemeyer, though he gradually tried to put the
espionage activities under his control. “
One outstanding weakness in Allied war efforts in China is the fact that there are so many different agencies operating independently and uncoordinated, running at cross purposes,” Wedemeyer wrote to Marshall in a top secret cable at the end of 1944.

Thus
Hurley was only one of the American protagonists of the Chinese drama. He was ignorant of some of the activities of the others, which would have grave consequences, as we shall see. Hurley’s focus, his obsession, remained the attempt to forge a KMT-CCP deal, and he was constantly optimistic about succeeding in this endeavor despite the accumulating evidence that he wasn’t and probably couldn’t. For a while, after Chiang’s rejection of the Hurley-Mao five-point plan, he seemed willing to blame the national government for the ensuing impasse. On November 13, he told Davies that he thought the plan was reasonable, adding that he suspected that the KMT’s intransigence was coming from T. V. Soong, whom, to Davies, he called a “
crook.” Chiang, he declared—this to Davies’s great surprise; it was the first time he’d heard of it—had promised to make a deal with the Communists in exchange for the dismissal of Stilwell, and now, he believed, Soong was sabotaging that arrangement.

But Hurley didn’t stick with this position for very long. Soon, somewhat inexplicably, he adopted a strikingly pro-Nationalist position. He came to anchor one pole of the American debate about how to deal with Chiang, the other pole being a quid pro quo camp that felt nothing should be given to Chiang, whether Lend-Lease aid or moral support, without getting specific commitments from him in return, especially commitments regarding political reform and the streamlining of his armies.
Frank Dorn, Stilwell’s aide-de-camp, had made this argument crisply and succinctly. Only dealing with Chiang on an “
ultimatum basis,” he said, could push China away from its political sclerosis.

Hurley rejected this approach, and in doing so he joined the consensus of the senior American leadership, which had never had much
stomach for a quid pro quo policy. This view emanated from the president himself, who, as a fellow head of state, one who knew the loneliness of power, had a natural sympathy for Chiang. “
The Generalissimo finds it necessary to maintain his position of supremacy,” FDR wrote in a letter to Marshall. “You and I would do the same thing under the circumstances. He is the Chief Executive as well as the Commander-in-Chief, and one cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.”

Hurley later explained to Roosevelt the reasonableness of Chiang’s view that to accept a deal with the CCP would be viewed as a victory for them and a defeat for him, and a defeat for him would be fatal. Moreover, the deal signed by Hurley and Mao on that rock in Yenan skirted the basic question: How was power to be shared in a country that in its three-thousand-year history had never once witnessed a peaceful struggle for power? Hurley, in making his deal with Mao, had failed to understand, as Davies put it, “that
the concept of a loyal opposition did not exist in China and that Chiang’s system of balancing off a variety of competing opportunists would not survive the introduction of western democracy with its free-for-all popular participation, particularly when one of the competing forces would be a dynamic, proliferating, disciplined organization determined to destroy that system and seize power.” Hurley’s near-unconditional backing of Chiang was his response to Davies’s analysis, but it was exactly the opposite of what Davies, a firm member of the quid pro quo camp, would have had him do. “
By December,” Davies told an interviewer years later, “General Hurley began to assert, without confirmation from Washington, that American policy was one of unqualified support of the National Government of China and the Generalissimo.” It was a policy, Davies continued, that Hurley insisted on enunciating so forcefully and with such an absence of any nuance or willingness to compromise “just at the time its validity … had become questionable.”

Hurley’s support was no doubt welcome to Chiang, but it did not relieve him of his predicament. Chiang firmly believed that democratic reforms, especially allowing a coalition government, would do him in, but at the same time he couldn’t simply reject the goal of a deal with the Communists without endangering the goodwill of Hurley and Roosevelt. So the KMT replied to the Hurley-Mao plan with a counterproposal that it must have known would be rejected by the Communists. It had three points, compared to the Mao-Hurley five, but the gist of it was
that the central government would agree to recognize the Communists as a legal party if in exchange the Communists would “give their full support to the National Government in the prosecution of the war of resistance, and in the post-war reconstruction, and give over control of all their troops to the National Government.”

Shown this counterproposal in Chungking, Zhou, not surprisingly, turned it down, saying there was no point in even carrying it back to Yenan. That established the unalterable pattern between the two Chinese sides and the United States for the next two years of strenuous American attempts at mediation. Mao wanted legal recognition, and of course he could, like the French and Italian Communist parties did after the war, compete peacefully for power in democratic elections, though such a solution would have been unprecedented in China. Mao wanted to be part of a coalition government, but he saw giving up control of his own army as tantamount to suicide. Both sides made paper concessions to satisfy the Americans as well as to court Chinese public opinion, which wanted a deal between the two parties, but the goal of both parties remained the same: power—in the KMT’s case to keep it and in the CCP’s case to seize it.

Nonetheless,
Hurley still believed that his efforts would bear fruit. “
We are having some success,” he wrote to Secretary of State Stettinius in December, though it is difficult to find any success at all in the historical record. He was meeting daily with Chiang, he said, and Chiang had been persuaded that “in order to unite the military forces of China and to prevent civil conflict it will be necessary for him … to make liberal political concessions to the Communist Party and to give them adequate representation in the National Government.”

This was the situation
in Chungking in those last few weeks of 1944 and the first few of 1945. Chiang remained in his secluded villa, surrounded by his antique porcelains, catered to by silent servants, surrounded by his closest aides, who tended to tell him what he wanted to hear. Zhou lived on his modest lane in Chungking, watched over by the secret police (who occupied space in the same building), lunching and dining with American journalists and diplomats, exuding his usual charm and his aura of reasonableness, providing his assurances that all the Communists wanted was to defeat Japan and to install a democracy in China. Hurley shuttled quixotically between them, striving for
common ground and nonexistent common ultimate goals. On December 4, he, Wedemeyer, and
Robert B. McClure, Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, visited Zhou, and together they tried to convince him to accept what was now the
Hurley-Chiang three-point plan, to no avail.