China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (9 page)

At the end of 1944, a young congressman from Montana,
Mike Mansfield, who had been a marine stationed in China and had taught Far Eastern history at Montana State University, was dispatched by FDR on a three-month fact-finding mission in China.
“Conditions,” he wrote to Roosevelt in January 1945, “are really bad.” The main problem, Mansfield felt, was the rift between the Nationalists and the Communists, which sapped China’s strength in the face of the common Japanese foe. In addition, he wrote, the Nationalists were corrupt and incompetent, their army ill supplied, badly fed, and poorly led. And yet, he concluded, “Chiang is the one man who can make Chinese unity and independence a reality. He and he alone can untangle the present situation because, in spite of some of the things he has done, he is China.”

A sort of squaring of circles begins to emerge in views like those of Mansfield and others, in which Chiang was deemed to be a deeply flawed leader, strangely disconnected from the suffering of his people and the abuses inflicted on them by his own government. Yet at the same time these hardheaded, unsparing analyses are accompanied by the judgment that his destiny and China’s destiny are one and the same. For the first of several times in its subsequent experience shoring up right-wing dictators against Communist revolutionaries, the United States depended on an Asian leader whose performance was unsatisfactory but who was nonetheless the American choice for the future.

CHAPTER THREE

The Devastated Country

T
he
Sino-Japanese War was devastating and unnecessary. For eight years it raged across China creating an immeasurable degree of death, destruction, and loss—loss in the conventional senses of death and material damage but also the loss of commonality, of humanistic relations among the Chinese themselves, as the struggle to survive overwhelmed the country’s capacities for compassion, mutual aid, and fellow feeling.

The main and climactic battles of this war took place between 1937 and 1945, but it could be said to have started in 1895 when Japan, resurgent, implacable, and unrestrained in its pursuit of international prestige—which meant emulating the major European powers in their scramble for colonial possessions—made a colony of the entire island of
Taiwan, which had belonged to China for centuries. But Japan’s major goal was the possession of Korea and Manchuria, the vast landmasses just across the Sea of Japan that were stepping-stones toward the even larger prize, which was China. China, normally the dominant country in northeast Asia, was weak, in political disarray, and incapable of defending its historic interests in Korea or in its farther-flung provinces, like Manchuria, which became contested territory between Japan and the other powerful nation in the area, imperial Russia.

In 1905, Japan announced itself as a major player in the contest for colonies when it soundly thrashed Russia in a war with the chief characteristic of many colonial wars: the two combatants fought it entirely on the soil of a third country, China, which was not a combatant. The
Russo-Japanese War marked the first time that an Asian power had defeated a European one in a major conflict. Japan’s armies outfought and outmaneuvered the Russians both on land and, perhaps even more important, at sea. In the decisive land battle for Mukden, the largest Manchurian city (now called Shenyang), the Russians lost ninety thousand men. In the decisive naval confrontation, in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, the Japanese fleet under the command of Admiral Togo Heihachiro annihilated the Russian fleet, most of which had sailed eighteen thousand miles from its home port in the Baltic Sea. Only three Russian ships escaped. Russia lost all eight of the battleships in its fleet and five thousand men—compared to Japanese losses of three torpedo boats and 116 men. Russia agreed that Korea would be part of Japan’s
sphere of influence, and Japan seized the whole country in 1910. Japan was awarded the southern half of the Sakhalin Island chain, which had belonged to Russia, and it took over the special colonialist rights that Russia had had in southern Manchuria, including a lease on the port of Port Arthur and control over the South Manchurian Railroad. From that point on, it became a constant Russian ambition to recover these losses, and this, as we will see, was to have major consequences for China and the United States.

As a result of its victory, Japan was the indisputable great power in Asia and the fastest-rising power in the world, a country preparing to move on to the audacious, racially tinged goal of replacing white European colonialism in all of Asia, creating a vast new sphere to be led by Japan. It made modest progress toward this goal after World War I when, as a reward for having aligned itself with the winning side, it was granted the former German possessions in Shandong province in China, including the coastal city of
Qingdao, known in the West for the eponymous brewery that the Germans had built there. Japan gave those possessions back to China in the 1920s as the world collectively began to feel some remorse for its violations of China’s sovereignty, and Japan, more moderate and accommodating than it later became, felt the need to make a conciliatory gesture.

But then Japan’s moderates lost control of the situation to its extreme nationalists and militants bent on realizing the country’s pan-Asian destiny, which, they believed, would require an apocalyptic final showdown with western civilization. To dominate Asia, they first had to dominate China, which they despised as flabby, corrupt, and inferior, and to dominate China, they needed to retain control of Manchuria and to build it into a base for expansion.

In 1931 and 1932, the militarists, supported by Emperor Hirohito, gained complete control. Nationalist groups with names like the Cherry
Blossom Society and the Blood Brotherhood League committed a series of domestic assassinations. One victim was the last prime minister who attempted to curb the army’s ambitions on the Asian mainland, which wiped out any vestiges of moderation. In 1931, in what came to be called the
Mukden Incident, the members of the
Kwantung Army, which was the epicenter of armed Japanese nationalism, blew up some railroad tracks on the Southern Manchurian Railway near Mukden, blamed the Chinese for the sabotage, and then used the incident to seize control of all the northeastern Chinese provinces that made up Manchuria. A few months later, they persuaded the last emperor of the overthrown Qing dynasty,
Henry Pu-yi, to become the puppet leader of a new, supposedly independent country called Manchukuo.
Early in 1932, an angry Chinese crowd beat up five Japanese Buddhist monks in Shanghai—or, as some accounts had it, Japanese officers bribed Chinese thugs to assault the priests. In response, the Japanese sent troops into the Chinese section of the city (the international settlements where most Japanese citizens lived was always off-limits to warfare in Shanghai). When units of the Chinese army, advised by their German trainers, effectively resisted, Japan sent an enormous land and naval invasion force to Shanghai and used both gunboats and biplanes to bomb heavily populated Chinese residential areas, the first such bombing of an urban center in history though it was soon to be followed by many more in both Asia and Europe. The long-term, remorseless, and atrocity-laden effort to conquer all of China had begun.

These aggressions aroused futile protests in the League of Nations. The creation of Manchukuo was deemed to be illegitimate, but no practical steps were taken to punish Japanese aggression. More important, though Chiang Kai-shek’s government sent troops in an unsuccessful effort to resist the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1932, it acquiesced to Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. It was in the midst of its nationalist revolution, striving to forge a “new China,” modern, strong, self-reliant, and free of foreign infringements on its sovereignty, and Chiang, the leader of this revolution, understood that the country was militarily feeble and unable to thwart Japanese ambitions. The slogan, before Chiang was kidnapped in Xian and forced to abandon it, was “internal pacification before external resistance.”

But Japan’s manufacture of “incidents” continued, and each of them was used as a pretext for further encroachments. Beginning on July 7, 1937, when a Chinese patrol killed a Japanese soldier on night
maneuvers near an ancient marble span called the Marco Polo Bridge, so named because the Italian traveler was supposed to have crossed it in the fourteenth century, Japan turned to the conquest of all of China. Responding to this new “incident,” it sent four divisions of its heavily armed Manchurian-based troops through the Great Wall with the objective of seizing the four provinces of China north of the Yellow River, the old imperial capital of Beijing included. With that move, full-scale war between the two countries broke out, and it continued intermittently, its lulls interspersed with periods of intense fighting, for the next eight years.

By the time World War II
had spread to Western Europe, when Germany invaded Belgium, Holland, and France, the Japanese assault on China was four years old, and during those four years, China fought entirely alone, without allies or support, except for some financial and material aid from the Soviet Union and the United States and, more significantly, the efforts of Chennault’s American Volunteer Force, which used airfields in the interior of China to make the Japanese pay at least some price for their invasion of the country’s northern and coastal provinces.

Like Ethiopia after Mussolini’s invasion two years before, China in 1937 appealed to the rest of the world for help, but no help came, not from the League of Nations, which had been set up to make international aggression illegal and of which Japan was a member, and not from the United States. China had a great sentimental importance to Americans, who had been sending their traders there since the late eighteenth century and whose missionaries had been bringing what they ardently believed to be the benefits of Christian civilization to the Chinese for a hundred years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to tell visitors about his Delano ancestors’ connections to China. The music room at the family’s ancestral home, Hyde Park, was filled with Chinese porcelain and lacquer antiques that the president’s ancestors had collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But less than twenty years after the end of World War I, the United States was in no mood to intervene in a
foreign conflict, whether
in Europe or Asia. For most of the first four years of the
Sino-Japanese War, the United States continued to supply Japan with vital raw materials, the most important of which was oil, so in a way Americans were collaborators in China’s humiliation
and despoliation. In 1931, after the
Mukden Incident, the headline in the Hearst tabloids provided a succinct summary of the American attitude, wherein its sentimental attachments to China were trumped by China’s strategic unimportance. “
WE SYMPATHIZE. BUT IT IS NOT OUR CONCERN.” The same headline could have been written after the Japanese invasion of 1937, even if the sympathy was greater and the knowledge of Japanese atrocities more immediate.

The United States was brought directly into the war only in 1941 when, on December 7, Japan launched its surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor. By that time, China’s military and civilian losses were staggering, yet it showed a determination to resist that should have put most of Europe to shame. In contrast to China, for example, France surrendered in six weeks in the face of the German invasion of 1940; it then established an obsequious collaborationist government, and until the D-Day invasion of 1944 remained in a state of noncombative subjugation. World War II also ended quickly in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Greece, and the other occupied countries of Europe. All of them suffered the heavy hand of the German occupation, including the mass murder of the Jews. The West experienced guerrilla opposition to the occupation and the savage reprisals that the Germans exacted whenever their troops were attacked. Britain, of course, never surrendered and was never invaded. But of the continental European countries only the
Soviet Union experienced full-scale war on its own territory for more than a few months. The Soviet Union was at war for a total of nearly five years, the United States for nearly four. China’s war, excluding the initial Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, lasted eight full years.