China 1945 Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Richard Bernstein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bernstein, Richard, [date]

  China 1945 : Mao’s revolution and America’s fateful choice / Richard Bernstein. — First edition.

  pages cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-307-59588-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-35351-9 (eBook)

  1. United States—Foreign relations—China. 2. China—Foreign relations—United States. 3. China—History—Republic, 1912–1949. 4. Taiwan—History—1945– 5. Mao, Zedong, 1893–1976. 6. Chiang, Kai-shek, 1887–1975. I. Title.

  E183.8.C5B439 2014

  327.7305109′044—dc23

  2014003598

  Front-of-jacket photograph: Conference at Yenan Communist Headquarters with Chairman Mao Zedong, August 27, 1945. Photo by Frayne / U.S. Army / National Archives / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

  Jacket design by Oliver Munday

  Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  v3.1

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  Clare Bernstein

  For men change their rulers willingly hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  The whole state apparatus, including the army, the police, and the courts, is the instrument by which one class oppresses another … it is violence and not “benevolence.”

  —Mao Zedong

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Note on Chinese Names and Places

  Map

  Introduction

  PART I: INNOCENTS IN CHINA

  CHAPTER ONE: A Rare Victory

  CHAPTER TWO: The Generalissimo and the Americans

  CHAPTER THREE: The Devastated Country

  CHAPTER FOUR: Mao, Zhou, and the Americans

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Dark Side

  PART II: SEEDS OF ANIMOSITY

  CHAPTER SIX: The Wrong Man

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Rage of an Envoy

  CHAPTER EIGHT: A Moral Compromise

  CHAPTER NINE: Hiding the Knife

  CHAPTER TEN: The War over China Policy

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Mao the God, Service the Spy

  PART III: VICTORY AND FAILURE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Hearts and Minds

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Everything Stalin Wanted

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Facts on the Ground

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: What to Do?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Marshall Comes Close

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: From Hope to Antagonism

  EPILOGUE: The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note on Chinese Names and Places

  Transcribing names of Chinese people and places is complex, because of the multiple ways in which it has been done over the years, and because some names have changed since the period covered in this book. For place-names, I have mostly used the names that were employed in 1945, and if the name used today is different, I show that in parenthesis after the first mention. The two main instances of this are Mukden, the largest city in Manchuria, which is now known as Shenyang, and Chefoo, present-day Yentai. An exception is Beijing, which means “northern capital.” In 1945, the city was known as Peiping, meaning “northern peace.” But I render it as Beijing, in the way that has become generally accepted today.

  In 1945, the main system used for transcribing Chinese names into the Latin alphabet was called Wade-Giles, and it decreed, for example, that the leader of China’s Communist Party was Mao Tse-tung. But since coming to power, the Communists have adopted an alternative system, known as pinyin, by which the aforementioned name is rendered Mao Zedong, and for most names, including Mao’s, this book follows the pinyin system currently in use. However in the case of Kuomintang officials, I use the Wade-Giles system still in use on Taiwan. Thus, I refer to the Kuomintang official who negotiated the ceasefire of January 1946 as Chang Chun. The pinyin spelling would be Zhang Chun. The Kuomintang itself would be Guomindang, or GMD, in pinyin, but I have used the old romanization—Kuomintang, or KMT.

  Finally, a small number of the names are rendered in a way that does not correspond either to pinyin or Wade-Giles but is still so familiar that it would be confusing to abandon it. The chief example is the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In pinyin his name would be Jiang Jieshi, but his name is rendered as Chiang Kai-shek in this book. The names of several Chinese cities are similarly rendered—hence Canton (rather than the pinyin: Guangzhou) and Chungking (pinyin: Chongqing).

  Introduction

  Near the end of 2013, something new made its presence known in the waters off the coast of China. It was an aircraft carrier, bought from Ukraine and refurbished in the port of Qingdao. Called the Liaoning, it was China’s first-ever such craft and therefore, while not nearly as swift or powerful as the American colossi that patrol the world’s oceans, a sign of China’s growing power and, more important, of its intention to project that power well beyond its shores.

  Naturally, this was of interest to the United States, which dispatched ships of its own to observe the Liaoning as it sailed with its escort of destroyers and cruisers in international waters. When one of the American ships, a guided missile carrier known as the Cowpens, almost collided with a Chinese vessel that cut closely and aggressively across its bow, there was angry comment on both sides.

  The American secretary of defense called China’s action “irresponsible.” China, through its controlled press, declared that the Cowpens had intruded into a “no sail” zone declared by China in the South China Sea, virtually all of which China claims to control, though that claim is not accepted by the United States or by other countries in Asia. The newspaper Global Times, an English-language mouthpiece for China’s ministry of propaganda, warned that China had a right to defend its territory, and “just because it wasn’t capable of asserting its interest in the past doesn’t mean it has given up this right.”

  There were other high-seas confrontations between China and the United States in the early years of the twenty-first century, as China indicated an intention over the long run to supplant the United States as the dominant power in East Asia and the western Pacific.

  But for the historian what is striking about the newest phase of Sino-American relations is how closely it echoes the past, particularly actions undertaken by earlier Chinese Communist forces to warn the United States away, to stop it from exercising what it assumed to be its paramount power in Asia. The most important and best-known of these actions took place during the Korean War in 1950, when, for the first and, so far, only time, China and America engaged in large-scale hostilities. But the first armed standoff between the United States and the Communist Chinese took place five years earlier than that along a dusty, tree-lined road between the Chinese port of Tianjin and the ancient imperial capital, Beijing (then known as Peiping) that was being patrolled by detachments of United States Marines.


  It was September 1945. The devastating war against Japan, which had occupied much of China for eight years, had ended only weeks before. The United States had sent its marines to China’s north coast to help maintain order there and to enable China’s central government to retake possession of its previously occupied territory. But the Chinese Communists, who had warmly welcomed American soldiers, diplomats, and journalists during the war, now didn’t want American troops on the ground in China at all. And so they embarked on a campaign of harassment and intimidation that was more lethal than anything that has happened in the more recent confrontations on the high seas. Shots were fired in anger, men were killed, and prisoners were taken, including some who were on missions like that of the Cowpens nearly seventy years later, to collect information that the Communists didn’t want them to have.

  The year 1945 in this sense marked the origin of a rivalry between the United States and China’s Communists that, like a recurring illness, has always reinstated itself, and has bedeviled the relations between the two sides even after periods of near-rhapsodic warmth and declarations of common interest, during which the suspicions and animosities of the past seem to have been put permanently to rest. It is a strange rivalry in its way, because for all of these decades, China and the United States would appear to have had much more to gain from friendly cooperation than from conflict—gains in trade and investment, cooperation against environmental degradation, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. In 1945 too, until the clashes that began on the road between Tianjin and Beijing, the United States and the Chinese Communists had not only cooperated in the war against the Japanese occupiers, but they had also talked enthusiastically about major plans for the future, during which American money and technology would help lift China out of poverty.

  That didn’t happen, of course. The mood that seemed so buoyant at the beginning of 1945 deteriorated, and replacing the banquets and toasts and declarations of friendship that had taken place earlier were armed clashes, mutual accusations, and, especially from the Communists, angry expressions of eternal and inevitable enmity. Not all of the more recent rivalry between China and the United States has its origins in that one year, but the pattern of enmity, which resulted in two devastating wars, first in Korea and later in Vietnam, was established during the months just before and just after the end of World War II in Asia.

  Was this pattern avoidable? Could things have been different? The answers to those questions are to be found in the chronicle of events of 1945, the turning-point year for both China and the United States, whose relations in coming years will do more to affect the shape of the planet than those between any other two countries.

  PART I

  Innocents in China

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Rare Victory

  Nineteen forty-five, the eighth year of the war between China and Japan, opened with a Chinese military success. It was a rare and therefore heartening event in a China that had become perhaps not inured to defeat but well acquainted with it, and with the human devastation that it brought with it.

  The victory took place in western Yunnan province along the border with Burma at a place called Wanding, a semitropical customs station that under normal circumstances nobody outside the region would have heard of. Then as now, the town was connected to Burma by a single-lane wooden bridge over a tributary of the Salween River. It was a not-very-charming place of small merchandise markets, customs sheds, and a frontier inspection station set in a breathtaking territory of terraced fields, swift muddy streams, and fingers of mist that crept down an endless succession of far-flung valleys. There, on January 3, 1945, two large Chinese armies, one coming across Yunnan province from the east, the other from the west across Burma, converged on some two thousand weary and hungry but battle-tested and well-dug-in Japanese troops.

  Wanding’s momentary importance came from its position at the northeast exit of Burma’s Shweli Valley. Three years earlier, a Japanese army, using forced marches through the jungles and coordinated air and ground assaults, had seized all of Burma, up to then a British colony, thereby achieving two important goals as Japan sought to extend its sway across all of Asia. One, the eviction of the British from Burma completed the eradication of white European colonialism in East and Southeast Asia. Japan had already chased the British from their possessions in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, and the Americans from their only Asian colony, the Philippines (Vichy France, allied to Nazi Germany, was still nominally in control of the Indochinese countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but Japan largely dictated terms there too).

  The other Japanese goal was to blockade China, in effect, lay it under siege, preventing it from getting supplies from the outside world and thereby forcing it to surrender. When Japan embarked upon its full-scale invasion of China in 1937, its expeditionary armies took control of all the country’s ports on its long Pacific coast—Dalian, Port Arthur, Yingkou, Huludao, and Qinwangdao in the northeast; Tianjin, Chefoo (now Yentai), Qingdao, Ningpo, and Shanghai in central China; Amoy, Swatow, Canton, and the British colony of Hong Kong in the south. The Japanese also prevailed upon Vichy France to close the old railroad leading from the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi to Kunming in southwest China, so that former overland route was no more. For the early years of the war, the Soviet Union supplied substantial arms and equipment to China, but that stopped in 1941 when the Soviets became too busy with their own struggle against Nazi Germany to ship much of anything to China.

  The result was that China, a continent-sized country with a population of 425 million, was in imminent danger of being entirely cut off from the rest of the world, and therefore cut off from its sources of military supplies. In response, China’s government dispatched two hundred thousand laborers from Yunnan to Burma to construct a two-lane, all-weather road that served for five years as the final segment of a very long supply route to China. Goods shipped from San Francisco came by freighter to the Burmese-British port of Rangoon (now Yangon), then inland by train five hundred miles to the town of Lashio in the Shan states of eastern Burma; from there, these shipments went by truck up the steep gradients of the Burmese tribal borderlands and over the Wanding bridge into China itself. The road continued northeast for another five-hundred-mile stretch through the corrugated verdure of rural Yunnan province, crossing a trestle bridge over the deep, steep banks of the Salween River and ending up in Kunming, the provincial capital.

  With Japan’s conquest of Burma, China’s sole connection to the rest of the world was a treacherous, high-altitude air route over the Himalayas from northeast India. Known ruefully to the pilots who flew it as “the Hump,” this often fatally dangerous supply line provided China with all the arms, ammunition, and fuel it could get in its desperate war of resistance against the well-armed Japanese. The supply was woefully inadequate. And that is why the reopening of the Burma Road was a constant and, in the case of one commander in particular, obsessively pursued goal. It would be a way of supplying China and thereby helping it to make a greater contribution to the main and overriding objective of the war in Asia, which was the defeat of Japan.

  The commander for whom Burma was an obsession was Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, a legendary figure, much written about at the time, who subsequently served as chief of staff to the supreme Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, and as commander of all American forces in the entire China-Burma-India theater. The only problem with the latter designation was that, with the important exceptions of teams of advisers, some very effective army air force units, and a famous guerrilla battalion known as Merrill’s Marauders, there were hardly any American combat forces in the theater. Stilwell commanded Chinese troops almost exclusively, deployed reluctantly by Chiang, who had many fronts, military and political, to contend with, Burma relatively minor among them. In 1942, when the Japanese first invaded Burma, Stilwell had gotten separated from the main body of the Chinese troops he was commanding, and narrowly escaped the pursuing Japanese by walking to Ind
ia, where he minced no words to the journalists who met him there. “We got a hell of a beating,” he said. “We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and retake it.”

  Now, at the beginning of 1945, the United States and China were retaking it, and even though Stilwell, relieved of his command four months earlier at Chiang’s insistence, was no longer on the scene, the two armies converging on Wanding had been largely created and trained by him, and they were carrying out his tactical plan. One arm of the pincer, made up of twelve Chinese divisions known as the Y-Force, had moved the five hundred miles toward Burma through Yunnan province from Kunming, commanded for that long march by the Nationalist general Wei Li-huang—aka “Hundred Victories Wei”—but prodded into action every hard-earned mile of the way by American liaison officers who were assigned to every large Chinese unit. Wei, ordered by Chiang to “succeed—or else,” began fighting his way through Yunnan in April 1944. He ferried his seventy-two thousand troops, his pack animals, and his weaponry by moonlight across the treacherous Salween, which cuts north–south through central Yunnan province. He fought in torrential monsoon rain and thick fog that turned to sleet in Yunnan’s higher elevations, building bridges over innumerable mountain streams, receiving supplies by air drop, and keeping the Japanese on the defensive. Wei got crucial help from the American 14th Air Force, aka the Flying Tigers, the storied unit led by General Claire Chennault, which relentlessly strafed and bombed Japanese troops during the entire Salween campaign. Still, Wei’s forces took heavy casualties from an enemy always ready to fight and die rather than surrender. Colonel John H. Stodter, a liaison officer attached to the Y-Force, recalled the Chinese practice of attempting “to climb up through inter-locking bands of machine gun fire,” a “sheer bravery” that seemed “sickeningly wasteful.”