China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (46 page)

Ma’s hometown was
Shaoxing, an ancient place of Buddhist temples, literary teahouses, and wooden homes built Venice-like alongside a warren of lakes and canals. Shaoxing was, and still is, the country’s capital of vintage rice wine. Ma’s father was a winemaker who wanted his son to follow him into the family business, and who then disowned him when, in the newborn modern spirit, Yinchu wanted to study science, metallurgy, and economics, which he did at some of China’s best schools.

He was a good-looking young man, intense, ambitious, extremely intelligent. There is a photograph taken of him when he was about twenty wearing the high-collared robe of a young scholar, his expression serious and determined as he looks at the camera through wire-rimmed spectacles. He was a very good student, and in 1907 he received a scholarship to study at Yale University, a dream come true. What tremendous benefit that could have both for him and for his country, to which he intended to return.

Ma was the beneficiary of American idealism directed toward China, its earnest wish to help it overcome the decrepitude and decay of its recent history. After the defeat of the
Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century, China, prostrate and humiliated, was forced to pay an immense indemnity to make up for the damage done and lives taken by the Boxers. The United States, alone among the recipients of this money, put its share into a scholarship fund for Chinese students. That was where the funds came from for Ma to get his BA in economics at Yale, which he did in 1911, just as the last dynasty, the Qing, was being overthrown. Then, in 1914, as the rest of the world was tumbling into the Great War, he received a PhD at Columbia University in economics and philosophy.

Equipped with new ideas and with the prestige that these degrees conferred, Ma, now a thorough man of the world, returned to a China where revolutionary ideas were gripping the minds of the country’s best young people, Ma included. He experienced the disorder and violence of the warlord years but also the excitement of the reunification of much of the country under the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek. Eager to participate in the country’s resurgence, he helped found a new institution of higher education, the
Chinese College of Commerce, in Shanghai, and he became president of the
Chinese Economics Society, where he began to advocate the idea that economic growth and democracy went together, that you couldn’t succeed in the first without the openness, the exchange of ideas, and the freedoms of the second.

Ma supported the Kuomintang for a time, but during the 1930s he became a critic of Chiang’s authoritarian, undemocratic tendencies, and in 1940, in the midst of the Japanese war, Chiang’s security services put him under house arrest and banned him from public activities. He spent the next five years under this ban, but was not forgotten by other Chinese writers and teachers, members of the small, often western-educated elite that enjoyed great prestige though no power in China, who tended to share Ma’s loss of faith in the KMT and its ability to command a bright future for his country.

At the end of 1944, the ruling party, feeling the pressure both from its own intellectuals and from the United States to relax its repressive policies, released Ma from house arrest. If the government was hoping that this gesture would turn a grateful Ma into a supporter, it was grievously mistaken. He made his first public appearance at a meeting of what was called the
Friday Dinner Gathering, which was held in a ballroom
in Chungking. This was a regular event sponsored by progressive merchants and businessmen and attended by hundreds of people whose purpose was to meet each other and exchange views about that most preoccupying question: China’s present plight and future prospects.

All the seats in the hall were occupied when the lights suddenly brightened and the evening’s host walked in with Ma, dressed in a sky-blue satin robe. “Tonight, we will welcome Professor
Ma Yinchu and celebrate his new-gained freedom,” the host,
Wu Gengmei, announced, and the audience, apparently not having been informed that Ma would be among them that night, broke into enthusiastic applause.

Ma took the floor, thanking the assembly for its welcome, and then assured it that he had made no deal with the government in exchange for his release. “I, Ma Yinchu, am still the old disobedient Ma Yinchu,” he began. As a price for the termination of his detention, the authorities had banned him from giving speeches, he said, even as he plunged ahead with a speech. It was entitled, typically for Ma, “China’s Industrialization Is Inseparable from Democracy,” and it was a public chastisement of his audience and of people like himself for a kind of moral and practical apathy. There are people, he said, “who hide in the Great Rear Area [the unoccupied zones of China], consume farmer’s rice, and deploy farmer’s sons to risk their lives, who eat fish and meat, wear silk and satin, live in tall buildings, and drive cars” at a time when China urgently needed altruistic civic involvement and self-sacrifice. Ma’s words were harsh and unsparing, like those of an Old Testament prophet, lambasting China’s “leading citizens” for being “
cruel and rapacious” and for “plundering the wealth of people at this moment of life and death” while so many other people suffered the death, poverty, and dislocation of the war. China’s real heroes, Ma declared, were the peasants, the millions who “lost their arms and legs, bled or were killed by famine and pestilence, or struggled between the gullies.”

There was something in this speech and even in the academic-sounding title of it that echoed of the recent past and prefigured later events in China, after the Communists had taken power. China had never been a democracy, not in its entire four thousand years of recorded history, but its modern intellectuals like Ma wanted it to be. Earlier in the century, the dominant slogan among students and intellectuals looking for ways to build a new country was “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.” The science part of it would lift the country out of the morass of useless custom and superstition.
Lu Xun (formerly transcribed
as Lu Hsun), China’s leading twentieth-century writer, wrote a powerful story about a sick boy whose parents used the last of their money buying the only medicine that, they were told, could cure him, a steamed bun dipped in the blood of a freshly killed child. For Lu, this grim medical hoax symbolized the country’s larger imprisonment in ignorant tradition, in the desperation of the poor, in the power of family patriarchs, the subordination of women, the virtual enslavement of daughters by their mothers-in-law, who themselves were victims of one of the country’s darkest and at the time still widely observed practices, footbinding. Science could cure China of these multiple afflictions. It was why Ma Yinchu had studied metallurgy.

And then there was
Minzhu Xiansheng,
Mr. Democracy, which alone could detach China from stultifying authority, enliven it with a sense of civic engagement, and awaken the unused energies of its people. Hence Ma’s idea that industrialization was inseparable from democracy, that the country couldn’t create a modern economy with a premodern political system. “
The world has already become democratic,” he said. “All countries must take the democratic path after the war ends, or they will not be able to guarantee their own survival and independence.”

For “democracy,” Ma does not seem to have had in mind a western-style electoral system. For him democracy was a focus on popular welfare, especially the welfare of the rural masses, and in this he clearly believed that the Communists were more in tune with national needs than the Nationalists. The Communists accepted Mr. Science, especially after the death of Mao in 1976. They called it the Four Modernizations. But they rejected Mr. Democracy, and this led, in 1978, to another dissident slogan, coined by an electrician named
Wei Jingsheng who worked at the Beijing Zoo. It was “Democracy: The Fifth Modernization,” and whether Wei knew it or not, the main idea of his slogan came directly from Ma Yinchu’s speech at that Friday Dinner Gathering in Chungking in 1944. The irony is that for all the nasty authoritarianism of the Kuomintang in 1944 and 1945, Ma was able to continue to voice his opinions. Even though he was supposedly banned from making speeches, he did make them, at that meeting of the Friday Dinner Gathering and later at other events. As for Wei Jingsheng, living under Communist Party rule in 1979 in a country suffering no foreign assault, after a closed and secret trial, he was arrested and sent to prison for a total of eighteen years.

For the remaining months
of the war in 1945, while the United States tried to figure out what its China policy should be—whether total support of Chiang Kai-shek or a balanced policy that included arms aid to the Communists—Ma was denouncing the Kuomintang but not the Communists, who were a lot closer to his peasant heroes than the KMT was. At a meeting of the Chinese Muslim Association in Chungking in March, Ma used the rather strange metaphor of a vacuum tube to lament the absence in China of a great political leader. Of course, Chiang Kai-shek was supposed to be exactly such a leader, but Ma likened him to a device that is empty inside and refuses to heed anything on the outside. “
The ‘Vacuum Tube’ I was talking about was him—Chiang Kai-shek,” Ma said, lest he be misunderstood.

Still later, in an article published in the pro-Communist
Xinhua Daily
in Chungking, there was Ma again, this time “
trembling with fear” for his country as he chastised his fellow countrymen for tolerating the intolerable—the desperate poverty in the streets, the millions of hungry people, the disease, the famine, the deaths, the filth. And while this terrible suffering was taking place, the country’s leaders “still want to solicit grains and recruit soldiers, driving paupers to the battlefields of ice and snow where they risk their lives for ‘them.’ ”

Ma’s brave and tough criticism seems, especially from the vantage point of decades later, to have been willfully and erroneously one-sided. There are no harsh words in his speeches or articles about Mao’s Communists, though they were to prove far more repressive than the KMT. But Ma felt that Chiang had reached a point of hopelessness, while the Communists, both fresh and distant, seemed a cleaner and brighter alternative. This was a mixed and complicated matter in China as the great war in Asia came to an end and a new war loomed, between the weakened Kuomintang and the strengthened Communists. There were many in the country who feared the Communists, who criticized them for their subservience to the Soviet Union, and who were aware of their heavy-handed attempts within their own ranks to silence or intimidate truly independent writers and thinkers. Ironically, it was among left-wing writers who identified with the Communists or who belonged to the highly influential
League of Left-Wing Writers, which received instructions from the party’s cultural bureaucrats, that the awareness of the CCP’s intolerance of dissent was most acute. During the 1930s,
there were ferocious quarrels between these bureaucrats and some of China’s best-known and most beloved writers, including, most conspicuously,
Lu Xun, the most prominent of them all.

Still, among most intellectuals—or, in the absence of precise data on this, what seemed to have been most writers and thinkers—it was the Kuomintang that caught their fire for the simple reason that the Kuomintang was in power, and had been in power for nearly two authoritarian decades. As the war came to an end, not very many people either inside China or outside it—except for the more prescient analysts like Service and Davies—predicted that within a few short years the KMT would escape to
Taiwan and the Communists take power. The central government seemed strong. It had a huge army, including thirty-nine top-flight divisions being trained and equipped by the United States, while the CCP was still perceived to be a poorly armed mass of guerrillas. The government enjoyed a total monopoly among armed Chinese forces in air and sea power, and, of course, it maintained a many-tentacled secret police organization. So when Ma and others disparaged the KMT, while remaining silent about the CCP, it was in part because they were willing to give the Communists the benefit of the doubt and in part because they saw the KMT as the government of China likely to remain in place indefinitely, while the Communists were a faraway rival merely asking at that point to be included in a coalition.