China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (63 page)

Almost immediately, both sides were complaining about truce violations by the other side. Zhou, talking to Marshall in Chungking on January 14, the day after the ceasefire proclamations, complained that government forces were marching on
Zhifeng despite Chiang’s vow to leave the status of that city for later talks. Marshall replied that he’d had a personal assurance from Chiang that the government would abide by the ceasefire agreement and that Chiang would be in an “
impossible situation” if he failed to do that. Most likely, Marshall said, the ongoing hostilities were “minor actions on a low level and could be straightened out by the Executive Headquarters.”

Marshall cabled Byroade, who met in Beijing with
Ye Jianying, a Long March veteran who was the Communist commissioner. There were a couple of tense days. The commissioners agreed to drop leaflets on the area the next day announcing the ceasefire. Byroade sent an American plane to Zhifeng to see if a truce team could land at the airport, which was reported badly damaged, but the plane failed to return
and there had been no contact with the pilot, Lieutenant
Estele I. Sims. The next day, another plane was sent, and that plane was able to make radio contact with Sims, who reported that he had been detained by the Russians and his plane interned because he did not have proper identification and no written orders describing his mission. It was the price of doing things so quickly without any past experience to serve as a guide.

Byroade wanted to send a truce team to Zhifeng immediately, but Ye resisted, saying the Communist members of the team had not arrived yet. On January 16, an American plane was sent to Kalgan, which was in Communist hands, to transport the CCP truce team members to Beijing, where both the American and the government staff were waiting, but when the plane returned with fourteen Communists aboard, they turned out to be not truce team members but one general and thirteen bodyguards for Ye. The Communists, to the Americans’ irritation, also brought a cargo of propaganda brochures to be distributed to the population in Beijing. “
It is obvious that General Ye does not want teams sent either to Zhifeng or Kalgan,” Robertson and Byroade reported to Marshall on the 17th, and they speculated that this was because the Communists were strong in both places. “All delays so far have been due to General Ye’s failure to furnish representatives.”

But within days, the mechanism was up and running. Daily “trusums,” truce summaries, were being sent out by Byroade, who told Marshall, “Both sides are
greatly exaggerating their claims of violations.” On January 21, two American journalists were able to get to Zhifeng, riding on the truce team plane. It was the first time American reporters had gotten into any place in Manchuria since the Soviet invasion five months before.
Henry A. Lieberman of
The New York Times
gave a favorable description of the “
weathered mud huts of a sprawling pastoral city,” occupied by friendly Russian soldiers in sheepskin coats, wool-trimmed hats, and felt boots. He quoted the Soviet commander saying he couldn’t wait to go home. Around the same time, Zhou in Chungking told interviewers that the fighting was dying down.

The mood was good. Madame Chiang showed up in Changchun, the Soviet occupation headquarters, bearing thirty thousand boxes of candy to give to Soviet troops as an expression of gratitude for their part in the defeat of Japan. “
The fighting did stop,” Byroade said years later. “Goods and medicine started moving. A lot of sieges were lifted.” The three-man truce-monitoring teams were getting into the field. American newspapers quoted an official of the Executive Headquarters saying,
“There is
no longer any doubt that both parties want peace and will do everything within their power to attain it.”

“
Affairs are progressing rather favorably,” Marshall wrote to Truman on February 4, summarizing the developments of the previous few weeks.

Early in March,
Marshall took a three-thousand-mile trip through northern China to see the country’s disputed terrain for himself, the terrain now being roamed by three-man truce-monitoring teams, each of them headed by an American military officer. The high point of the trip was Yenan, where other American officials—including Service, Davies, Hurley, and Barrett—had preceded him, and where there was a face-to-face meeting with Mao. “
Thousands stormed the field to get a glimpse of the five star ambassador whom the Communists regard as the leading personality in the present China peace,” Radio Yenan reported. “
I was frank to an extreme,” Marshall wrote to Truman about his meeting with Mao, meaning that the Communists could have real American cooperation, including arms and training for their armed forces, but only if the Communists were sincere about following a peaceful path. Mao, Marshall said, “showed no resentment and gave me every assurance of cooperation.”

Wherever Marshall went in Communist-controlled territory, he reported, his reception “was enthusiastic and in cities tumultuous.” And no wonder. Here was a great hero of the victory over Japan traveling to the remote headquarters that had been considered a bandit lair only a few months before. The greatest living American, as Truman had put it, was giving formal recognition to Yenan as a kind of capital, a seat of power that had to be taken into account. His visit to Yenan was an affirmation of the Communists’ new stature. They were participating in the PCC; they were full members of the Executive Headquarters and of the truce-monitoring teams that were spreading out on American airplanes all over China’s vast northeast. The American officers on these teams, Marshall noted to Truman, “have performed
an amazing task,” which was “to dominate a region larger than Pennsylvania and bring factions who have been at war for 18 years to a peaceful understanding.”

In February, after more marathon sessions of the Marshall mission, the two Chinese sides agreed to reduce the size of their armies, with the balance of forces heavily in favor of the national government. In all, there would be ninety KMT divisions (a full division was almost fourteen thousand officers and men) to only eighteen for the Communists.
Starting in about eighteen months, the forces of the two sides would be combined into a single command. Both sides would give up their political commissars, so the armies would for the first time be nonpolitical, under the control of a government rather than a political party. Most remarkable perhaps—all of these provisions seemed remarkable—the Communists agreed to reduce their forces in Manchuria to a single army, compared to the thirty they had there at the time of the Marshall talks. Six armies would be allowed to the Nationalists.

This was all too good to be true. The Communists appeared to have done what they had always maintained would be suicidal for them to do: allow government troops to move into areas where they were strong and give up control of their own armed forces. In fact, the evidence is strong that they never intended to do these things. On February 12, while the Marshall talks were heading into the home stretch, Mao told a meeting of the Politburo that “the United States and Chiang Kai-shek intend to eliminate us by way of nationwide military unification,” a comment indicating that Mao still saw military unification as surrender. “
We want unification, but we do not want to be eliminated,” he continued. “In principle, we have to advocate national military unification; but, how we shall go about it should be decided according to the concrete circumstances of the time.”

The statement was vague, but Mao appears to have wanted to reassure his colleagues in the Politburo that the military talks were mainly for show. Like his “scrap of paper” comment after his meetings with Chiang in the fall of 1945, he felt the actual agreement meant very little, because implementing it would be up to him. In
Changchun,
Chang Kia-ngau, Chiang’s representative in the economic talks taking place with the Soviets, was looking at the announced details of the ceasefire and the military integration agreements, and his reaction was prophetically skeptical. “The National Government evidently presumes that because the Northeast is an ‘exception,’ it can send troops to recover our sovereignty,” he wrote in his diary. But what the central government didn’t seem to know was that “owing to secret support from the Soviets, for a long time Chinese Communist armed forces there have grown in strength day by day.” Moreover, Chang observed, the Chinese Communists could easily get aid given Manchuria’s long border with Soviet Russia; the government’s lines were long and depended on a single rail line and two small ports. “
I shudder,” Chang wrote, “as I view and ponder the future.”

But that was a rare dark thought and a private thought at that. For the moment, the mood was buoyant. On February 9, three days before he told the Politburo that the military agreement was, in effect, another scrap of paper, Mao was singing a different tune to an American reporter. “Generally speaking,” he said, “China has stepped into a stage of democracy.
Marshall’s effort to bring an end to the civil war, to facilitate peace, unity, and democracy is
undeniably outstanding.”

In March, Marshall went to Washington to report to Truman, who greeted him like the hero he was. The Chinese leaders “are succeeding in
terminating the hostilities of the past twenty years,” Marshall said at a press conference. The two Chinese sides, he said, “are now engaged in the business of demobilizing vast military forces and integrating and unifying the remaining forces into a Central Army.”

Marshall’s sincerity is not to be disputed. He was an honest man and a straight-talker, not given to glossing over difficulties. Mao was justly famous for his statement that power comes out of the barrel of a gun—his pithy argument for the Communist Party to have its own army and never to trust only in peaceful political struggle. But Marshall evidently really believed that the Communists would give up their independent military if they could be assured of a truly democratic system. “
It was very remarkable,” he declared in his press conference, “how quickly we could straighten out what seemingly were impossible conditions and which had their tragic effect on the Chinese people.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

From Hope to Antagonism

I
n March, while George Marshall was in the United States, things began to fall apart in China. He got back to Chungking in April and within a few weeks his reports to Truman were stripped of their earlier optimism. “
The outlook is not promising,” he told the president in a letter of April 6. “I have found a complete break between the government and the Communists on the Manchurian question with hostilities increasing in intensity and threatening to spread south into China proper.”

The Nationalists had embarked on an effort to defeat the Communists by sending their armies into Manchuria, and despite some initial success, in Marshall’s very expert opinion they were now in “a seriously weak and
dangerous military position of which the Communists were fully aware and seized the advantage accordingly.” Marshall remembered the decision made at that White House meeting in December to continue to support Chiang even if his actions caused the peace talks to break down, but that did not lessen his dismay over the failure of the ceasefire to hold. Equally demoralizing, as the Communists got stronger they became more hostile to the United States. An American intelligence analysis in July concluded that between Marshall’s arrival at the end of 1945 and the outbreak of new hostilities in the spring, the CCP’s attitude toward the United States changed from “one of restrained hope to
open antagonism.” Barring an increasingly unlikely “compromise arrangement,” Marshall said, there will be “
utter chaos in North China to which the fighting will inevitably spread.”

What went wrong?

Initially Marshall believed that the fault lay with the central government and the faction that he called “the irreconcilables,” a group
of generals who didn’t want to lose their privileged positions, and the group inside the KMT known as
the CC clique, named after the brothers
Chen Li-fu and
Chen Kuo-fu, whom Chiang had known since before the revolution of 1911. Many of Chiang’s most important allies—his chief of staff,
Ho Ying-chin, and
Tai Li, his secret police chief—had been
students at the
Whampoa Military Academy in the early 1920s when Chiang was the school commandant. But Chen Li-fu and Chen Kuo-fu came from an even earlier time in Chiang’s life, when, shortly before the revolution of 1911, he returned to China from a military academy in Japan and joined the revolutionary forces that were striving to overthrow the Qing dynasty. The local revolutionary leader and military governor of Shanghai,
Chen Chi-mei, became a patron of Chiang. The Chen brothers were Chen Chi-mei’s teenage nephews, who rose in the KMT’s ranks under Chiang’s tutelage until, years later, they became the powerful and undisputed leaders of the party’s vehemently anti-Communist right wing.