China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (43 page)

In one major respect, the congress must have been a confusing event for at least some of those attending it. On the one hand there was the conspicuously undemocratic concentration of power in the hands of one of the most illiberal Great Leaders of all time, a concentration that was itself the fruit of the ruthless suppression of any wayward thoughts or tendencies that others engaged in. To be sure, Mao’s ascendency was due in significant measure to his extraordinary leadership and to the fact that the movement under his command had not only survived but also expanded remarkably during the Japanese war. But this ascendency was also due to Mao’s extraordinary ability to outmaneuver his potential rivals for power by gathering around himself a hard core of avid supporters who saw to it that his writ was enforced. Every member of the Communist movement in Yenan knew that Mao’s commanding position was sustained by terror, repression, imprisonment, reeducation, and purges, administered by Kang Sheng’s secret internal security apparatus.

But in his speeches at the Seventh Congress, Mao made repeated and emphatic assurances that the Chinese Communist Party favored a democratic system and that it would never favor a Soviet-style one-party state. Those words “democracy” and “democratic” appeared and reappeared in every one of Mao’s statements. “
Beyond all doubt,” Mao declared in his major speech, a nearly book-length text that must have taken hours to read aloud, “the urgent need is to … establish a provisional democratic coalition government for the purpose of instituting democratic reforms,” after which “it will be necessary to convene a national assembly on a broad democratic basis and set up a formally constituted democratic government.” This, in turn, “will lead the liberated people of the whole country in building an independent, free, democratic, united, prosperous and powerful new China.”

Mao’s concrete ideas for China’s government of the future were actually vague and general enough to allow for almost any interpretation, because the “New Democracy” that he advanced in his speech—“namely a united-front democratic alliance”—would fall “under the
leadership of the working class,” a phrase that hints at the iron fist that was hidden by the rhetorical velvet glove. Mao anticipated this objection. “Some people suspect that the Chinese Communists are opposed to the development of individual initiative, the growth of private capital, and the protection of private property, but they are mistaken,” Mao assured his listeners. It’s true, he said, that “the future of incomparable brightness and splendor” is a Communist one, but, as Zhou Enlai had assured David Barrett on that plane ride to Chungking a few months previously, that was for the distant future. “So far from fearing capitalism, Communists should advocate its development in certain given conditions,” Mao said at the Seventh Congress. “Domestic capitalism” is fine; what couldn’t be allowed was “foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism.”

Continuing to correct supposed misperceptions, including those held by foreign critics of the CCP, Mao repudiated the idea that “once in power, the Communist Party will follow Russia’s example and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and a one-party system.” This is of course exactly what the Chinese Communists did after they took power in 1949, establishing a one-party system in which all dissenting opinion was banned. Within eight years of the seizure of power, the Maoists had essentially eradicated domestic capitalism, from large industries down to streetside noodle stands, and entirely eliminated private farming, one consequence of which was the world’s worst famine since the one in Ukraine in the early 1930s, which occurred when Stalin abruptly collectivized Soviet agriculture. But in 1945, Mao seemed piously to repudiate the very idea of Stalinist tyranny.

In his New Democracy speech, however, while he explicitly rejected the Soviet system for China, he also uttered phrases about “the leadership of the proletariat and of the Communist Party” that gave him cover to deny any meaningful power to any party or group that he didn’t control, and to brand as “counter-revolutionary” any idea that he didn’t approve. Even when it came to specific proposals, a long list of which he enumerated in his speech, Mao’s calls for democracy were belied by already established Communist practice. For example, he called for the “reactionary secret service” to be eliminated, meaning the Kuomintang security apparatus, but that left space for a secret service, namely
Kang Sheng’s, that was even more secretive and ruthless, though it was presumably
democratic
and
revolutionary
, unlike the KMT’s. Mao promised that he would “revoke all reactionary laws and decrees aimed
at suppressing the people’s freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, political conviction, and religious belief.” This Bill of Rights–like coda was qualified by that word “reactionary”—and, by definition, nothing the proletariat did was reactionary, certainly not the suppression of the democratic freedoms of the class enemy.

Understood, or perhaps not understood, at the time was the principle that all of these freedoms would be exercised “under the leadership of the proletariat and the Communist Party,” which would allow no checks and balances, no independent courts, no autonomous press, no ability to create organizations or to propagate views that might limit the party’s power. “Release all patriotic political prisoners,” Mao demanded, not specifying how to define “patriotic” or who would define it, though what he meant was all political prisoners held by the KMT, and none that were being held or might later be detained by the Communists. The appearance of moderation at the Seventh Congress, all that lip service paid to democracy, was aimed at discrediting China’s central government and winning popular support, while leaving the Communists exempt from antidemocratic suspicion.

There is a western school
of Maoist apologetics that attributes Mao’s later radicalism—illustrated by the
Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, the drastic collectivization of agriculture starting that year, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when Mao’s cult peaked in a kind of lunatic frenzy—to the American decision to throw its weight behind Chiang Kai-shek as China’s civil war gathered speed. Or, at least, if Mao’s domestic radicalism was not a direct product of American foreign policy, his venomous hostility to the United States, all those slogans like “Down with American Imperialism,” his intervention in the Korean War, his support of North Vietnam, his alliance with the Soviet Union, his aid to guerrilla movements in neighboring countries—all this might not have happened if only the United States had followed the advice of the China hands rather than that of Hurley, collaborating militarily with the Communists rather than giving one-sided support to Chiang. Or, barring that, at least a friendlier America would, as Davies and Service were arguing, have enabled Mao to keep his distance from Stalin.

The sequence of events in that spring of 1945 lends some substance to this argument. Mao was a practical man as well as an ideological one, and there is no doubt he would gladly have accepted help from the
United States had it been offered then, especially if that help involved bullets and guns, just as he would have accepted a deal with the KMT that gave the Communists a place in a new government while they retained control over their own armies.

But as we’ve seen, a few weeks before the Seventh Congress convened, Hurley announced at his Washington press conference that all American aid would go to the central government and none to the Communists, unless Chiang Kai-shek approved of it. The Communists made no secret of their disappointment at this news. When Service saw Mao in March, Mao had assured him that he would remain friendly to the United States even if it didn’t give arms to his troops. But only a few days after word reached Yenan of Hurley’s press conference in Washington, the
Liberation Daily
published a furious analysis written anonymously by Mao himself. Hurley had started out as a genuinely impartial mediator, Mao wrote, recalling that scene in Yenan when he and Hurley had signed their names to a five-point proposal for a Chinese unity government, but then he had “betrayed what he said.” Hurley was stating only a “personal opinion,” Mao added of his press conference declaration, but it was also “the opinion of a group of people in the United States, and it is a wrong and dangerous opinion.”

There is a passion in this statement by Mao that feels authentic, a genuine sense of betrayal. It’s the same anger that Barrett had witnessed during his long talk with Mao in Yenan a few months earlier when Mao had warned against propping up “the rotten shell that is Chiang Kai-shek.” Now he changed the metaphor. “If the United States maintains the Hurley policy,” he warned in the wake of the Hurley press conference, “the American government will be trapped inside
the deep, stinking pit of the Chinese reactionaries, and it will find itself facing the hostility of hundreds of millions of awakened and awakening Chinese people.”

That is not yet a statement of unremitting hostility. That kind of rhetoric would come later. For now, Mao still held out the hope that American policy might not continue along the lines Hurley seemed to be setting for it. Nonetheless, his open, public denunciation of Hurley marked a shift in tone, a sign of the not-very-distant future.

Things surely would have been different in the short term had Hurley not sided publicly and privately with the KMT just at that moment, but it is unlikely they would have stayed different for very long. The Hurley press conference was genuinely upsetting to the CCP; it was a
betrayal, from their point of view, of the implicit promise of American arms and aid that Hurley had made when he signed that five-point proposal with
Mao in Yenan the previous November. But more important than anything an American ambassador could do or say were events on the international stage that had a larger effect on Mao’s thinking and on his strategy for the rest of the war.

There were two such events unfolding even as Mao’s apotheosis took place at the Seventh Congress of the CCP. One was Stalin’s abrogation of the Soviet Union’s Neutrality
Pact with Japan, which was a clear signal to Mao, whether he knew of the Yalta accord or not, of the Russian intent to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria. The other was the end of the war in Europe, which, Mao knew, or at least could safely assume, would free up Soviet troops for that very military action.

The Soviet Union was the second most powerful country in the world, and it shared a thousand-mile border with China. It had guided and supported the Chinese Communist Party literally since its founding in 1921. If and when it came into the war in Asia, most likely by kicking the Japanese out of the puppet state of Manchukuo, it would be able to turn territory and arms over to Mao’s forces, which would shift the balance of power in North China to the CCP and devastatingly weaken the KMT government. Mao knew this. For him, a good relationship with the United States would have helped him to gain arms, to enhance his prestige within China, and to expand the territory under his control, especially if there were an American landing on coastal China to which the Eighth Route Army would lend its hand. Why not, under the circumstances, cultivate American goodwill? The United States was a kind of backup, a second source of help, especially on the off chance that the expected Soviet assistance didn’t materialize. Mao’s courtship of America was in this sense a defensive move, a kind of preemptory diplomacy, aimed at keeping the United States neutral in China’s domestic conflict while encouraging it to provide material assistance to the CCP.

By contrast, Mao’s obedience to Stalin was both tactical
and
strategic. Mao had a permanent need to forestall any American intervention on the side of his once and future enemy Chiang Kai-shek. But whether the United States helped the CCP or not, Mao’s primary goals were total power in China and the advance of the world revolution, and these goals ensured that his primary international allegiance was always going to be to the Soviet Union.

Mao made nine speeches at the Seventh Congress, and in all of them he reaffirmed this primary allegiance. His remarks were even more pointed in his internal speeches. In those, he stressed the idea that an alliance with the Soviet Union was indispensable to the Communist victory in China. Some skeptics among the delegates felt the Soviets had provided little in the way of material help, aside from some money, during the long years of the anti-Japanese war. Mao’s argument to them was, yes, the Communist International made some mistakes with China in the past, but its contribution was much greater than the mistakes, and without its help, there would be no Chinese Communist Party. “
Can we Chinese succeed without foreign support?” he asked rhetorically. “The Chinese revolution cannot succeed alone. The Chinese revolution must have the support of the proletariat of the entire world”—by which he meant the support of Moscow.

It was in one of his internal speeches that Mao delivered himself of a grandiloquent acclamation of Stalin’s special historical role and the requirement of obedience to it. It was the statement of a true acolyte, not that of a man simply reacting to American policy. “Is Stalin the leader of the world revolution?” Mao asked. “Of course he is.” We have to avoid saying this publicly, Mao warned, “so as to avoid the attacks of the reactionaries,” but, Mao continued, let there be no mistake: “
Who is our leader? It is Stalin. Is there a second person? No.… Our party and every member of the Chinese Communist Party are Stalin’s pupils. Of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, three are dead, and only one is alive. That is Stalin. He is our teacher.”

True, Mao said, the Communist Party had to be prepared for all eventualities, including the possibility that it would have to fight in China on its own. “We have to prepare for a situation where
the faraway water does not put out the nearby fire,” he said at the Seventh Congress. But he assured the delegates that it wasn’t going to come to that. Soviet help was on its way. “Do you believe it?” he asked. “I believe it.” Then he formed his hand into a kind of blade and held it like an executioner’s knife above his neck. “If it doesn’t,” he said, “you can chop off my head.”