China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (4 page)

“
We would serve with all our hearts under an American general,” Mao gushed to an American envoy in the fall of 1944, one of many statements he made about the strength of the Communists’ friendly regard for the United States. “That is how we feel toward you.”

And then
, over the course of the year, it all fell apart. By the end of 1945, pretty much all realistic hope of avoiding civil war, forging a united, pro-western China, and maintaining good relations with a Communist Party integrated into a functioning government had been effectively dashed. The American ambition was still being formally pursued, but it was clear, certainly in retrospect but to many even then, that it was a futile pursuit, a chimera. Japan was gloriously defeated, but the victory won in the Pacific turned out to be only a way station toward a tremendous, unprecedented loss, namely the emergence of a China entirely closed to the United States, deeply inimical to its values, bombastically hostile to its interests, and closely allied to its most menacing rival, the Soviet Union. Within a few short months, the American dream for China evaporated in a cloud of recrimination and accusation.

This, far
more than the battle at Wanding, was the real turning point for the United States in Asia. The war to rescue China from the hands of an enemy was won, but China was then quickly lost. The main American goal in Asia unraveled as China slipped into the hands of a dictator allied to a new enemy whose ambitions, values, and practices were deeply inimical to those of the United States. This condition would endure for a quarter of a century. It would lead the United States, in its attempt to prevent history from repeating itself, to fight two costly wars, one in Korea, the other, the most disastrous conflict in twentieth-century American history, in Vietnam. Both of these wars were among the long-range effects of the events that took place in the twelve months and a little more that followed the heartening success at Wanding.

CHAPTER TWO

The Generalissimo and the Americans

O
nce during the Sino-Japanese War the president of the United States talked with his senior military representative in China, Joseph W. Stilwell, about the possibility of assassinating
Chiang Kai-shek. FDR didn’t use the word “assassinate,” and it seems unlikely that he meant precisely what Stilwell took him to mean, though this confusion could be said to mirror the deep ambiguity and uncertainty of American policymakers as they tried to maneuver throughout the war and after it in the murk and gloom of Chinese domestic politics. Stilwell’s version of this matter comes through his chief of staff and most trusted subordinate, General
Frank Dorn, who met with Stilwell in Chungking on the latter’s return from a conference in Cairo in 1943, attended by FDR, Chiang, and Stilwell himself.

Stilwell and FDR had had a twenty-minute private meeting in Cairo, Stilwell told Dorn, during which, as Stilwell related it, describing the president as if he were a Mafia godfather had told him, “in that Olympian manner of his: ‘Big Boy, if you can’t get along with
Chiang and can’t replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.’ ”

In Dorn’s account, Stilwell instructed him to “
cook up a workable scheme and await orders,” and Dorn did just that, devising a contingency plan for an assassination that would have been worthy of a Hollywood thriller. The Gimo, or the Gissismo, or CKS, or Cash My Check, or Generalissimo, General of Generals, as Chiang was variously called by Americans, either respectfully or derisively, would be taken on a flight to Ramgarh, India, to inspect Chinese troops being trained there as part of the effort to improve China’s backward army. The pilot would pretend to have engine trouble and order his crew and passengers to bail out. Chiang would be ushered to the door of the plane wearing a faulty parachute and told to jump.

“
I believe it would work,” Stilwell told Dorn.

There was of course
no assassination of Chiang, nor did Dorn receive further instructions from Stilwell on this matter. There is, moreover, no other evidence that FDR expressed any desire to have Chiang eliminated, and it seems unlikely that he did, despite the ominous sound of that you-know-what-I-mean uttered to Stilwell. Roosevelt had his occasional bursts of irritation at Chiang, but he also nurtured a certain sympathy for him as a fellow head of state, another lonely man at the top of the unwieldy contraption known as a political system. Roosevelt, whose ancestors on the Delano side had made their fortune in the China trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shared that very American wish for China to rise out of the ashes of its recent deplorable condition, preferably by adopting American ways. Unlike, for example, his closest wartime ally, Winston Churchill, who thought American aspirations for China to be silly and wishful, FDR aspired for Chiang to be one of the Big Four of the postwar world, along with Churchill,
Stalin, and himself, and he believed that Chiang was the only person with the prestige and standing to lead his afflicted country to a new era of respectability. His remark to Stilwell at Cairo came at a moment of particularly intense puzzlement at what seemed to Roosevelt a combination of evasiveness, deceitfulness, and imperiousness on Chiang’s part. At the Cairo conference, speaking to his son Elliott, FDR wondered why Chiang seemed so loath to allow Stilwell to train Chinese troops, why he kept “thousands and thousands of his best men on the borders of Red China,” and, above all, “
why Chiang’s troops aren’t fighting at all.”

Stilwell has been lionized in histories of this period and in biographies, and, indeed, he was a powerful figure, a brilliant commander much beloved by his troops even when he drove them almost beyond endurance. He was a straight-talker with no tolerance for fakery, deceit, or incompetence, but he was also truculent, indiscreet, stubborn, lacking in sober judgment, and disinclined to recognize his own mistakes—not, in other words, the right man for the job in China, which required fewer prejudices and more diplomatic finesse than he was capable of. He despised Chiang, whom he called “Peanut,” not only in his diaries but in his utterances to his staff and superiors, and from time to time he mused aloud on what a good thing it would be if he could be removed from the scene. Even before the Cairo conference or his conversation with Dorn, Stilwell had summoned Carl F. Eifler, the senior American intelligence officer for China, to his office in New Delhi, and, according to Eifler, told him that to pursue the war successfully, “it would be necessary to get Chiang Kai-shek out of the way.” Under instructions from Stilwell, Eifler inquired about how to achieve this objective, and he determined that botulinus toxin, which is undetectable in an autopsy, would be an effective weapon. But in May 1944, at a meeting in his headquarters in Burma,
Stilwell told Eifler that he’d changed his mind about eliminating Chiang and nothing further was done.

These were outlandish ideas—to throw an allied leader out of an airplane, or to poison him in the fashion of some Roman Empire plot. But the mere fact that it is part of the historical record, mentioned in the memoirs of creditable witnesses and discussed in the serious biographies of Chiang, makes it a gauge of sorts to the dilemma facing American policymakers in China, a poor and divided country, during World War II and right after it, coping with an imperfect leader whom they counted on for more than he could deliver.

It is worth noting in this connection that twenty or so years later, the United States was complicit in the
assassination of a supposedly allied Asian leader—
Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963—with more than a passing resemblance to Chiang. Diem was killed by local rivals who had gained the approval of the Kennedy administration because his erratic rule and growing unpopularity were deemed by senior officials to be increasingly problematic.

Chiang was a sort of predecessor to Diem, in that he too was the leader of a corrupt rightist dictatorship, though he himself was rigorously honest in the financial sense. Chiang’s wife, American-educated
Soong Mei-ling, came across to foreigners as charming and imperious—“dragon lady” is the common, racially tinged pejorative; Diem was represented in this sense by his sister-in-law, the glamorous, charming, and vindictive Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, educated in France and assumed, like Madame Chiang before her, to exercise great influence behind the scenes. Ngo was a Catholic, Chiang a Methodist. Both faced Communist insurrections that rendered them helpless without American aid and goodwill.

But Chiang was never a client ruler in the way that Diem was. He was a man who came to power on the basis of his own intelligence and charisma; he was not put in a gated presidential palace by a foreign intelligence agency. In the decades since World War II, it has become conventional wisdom to see Chiang as one of the great incompetents of twentieth-century history, but at the time, and even subsequently, there was reason to see him in a more sympathetic light, as an effective leader striving under tremendous disadvantages to push his country into a brighter future. Recent biographers, especially Jay Taylor, a former American diplomat, have emphasized Chiang’s good qualities rather than his deficiencies, and have portrayed him as laboring under almost impossible circumstances, especially after the ruinous Japanese invasion. Chiang was born in Zhejiang, the coastal province south of Shanghai, in 1887 and educated in part at a Japanese military academy. He became the chief protégé of Sun Yat-sen, the first republican leader of China, the man who led the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and established the Kuomintang, promising after a period of authoritarian tutelage to establish a western-style democracy. Chiang was slender, small, stiff, prideful, and patriotic, imbued with a sense of China’s humiliation at the hands of foreigners and determined to do something about it, though following the revolution of 1911, China, far from becoming a powerful democracy, had fallen into fragmentation and chaos, its territory divided up among a group of competing warlords and prone to Japanese aggression.

Among Chiang’s great achievements was the
Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928 when the army he led established a fragile sort of unity across the country. He was advised in that endeavor by members of the Communist International dispatched from Moscow, his armies trained by the German officers who had forged the kaiser’s forces in the years leading up to World War I. This was a great moment in Chinese history, even if it has taken on the appearance of a brief interlude, lost in the tumultuous events that followed it, great because Chiang, in eliminating many of the warlords and establishing a modern government, embodied the national and nationalist aspirations of a majority of his countrymen. His army was by far the best in China, and it made the heretofore scary private armies of the warlords seem almost quaintly archaic by comparison. The world saw in Chiang a young, competent, visionary leader who would finally, after so many false starts for China, lead his country into the modern world.

But Chiang was never able to overcome the deep divisions in China or the byzantine, sometimes literally murderous politics of rival parties. In 1927, he mounted a vicious coup against his allies in the reunification drive, the Communists, who he believed, probably correctly, were plotting, with Moscow’s connivance, to eliminate him, once he had served his purpose. The Communists, or those not among the thousands arrested or assassinated, were driven out of the cities and set up rural bases under the newly emerging leader Mao Zedong. Meanwhile, Chiang set up the capital of the Republic of China at Nanjing, a former imperial-era capital on the Yangzi River that was in territory controlled by the new government—in contrast to Beijing, which, though China’s capital for most of the previous six hundred years, was dominated by one of China’s as yet unvanquished warlords. For the next decade, Chiang presided over a promising and resurgent country, one whose economy grew rapidly and that made great progress against its poverty, superstition, and backwardness. In the early 1930s, having expelled the Soviets but advised by his German officers, he undertook several campaigns to wipe out the Communists in their rural bases, and he would likely have succeeded if he hadn’t had to address a Japanese threat at the same time.