China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (5 page)

Chiang did not oppose earlier Japanese aggression in China, especially the conquest of Manchuria in 1931. Chiang felt China was too weak to fight Japan, and he concentrated instead on nation building and eliminating the Communists. It wasn’t a stupid decision. Chiang understood that as long as China was divided into warring factions, it was unlikely to be strong. But as Japan continued to press for more Chinese territory, an aroused Chinese public put pressure on him to forgo the effort to eliminate his domestic rivals and to enter into a united front with them to fight Japan, which he did at the end of 1936, though unwillingly and as the result of a comic-opera deception aimed at forcing his hand.

In December that year, Chiang flew to Xian, the ancient imperial capital in China’s northwest, where he was to meet with a man known as the Young Marshal. This was
Zhang Xueliang, who had seen his share of bloody intrigue in his short lifetime. Zhang’s father,
Zhang Zuolin, was one of the more picaresque characters of the time when power in China was dispersed among a group of warlords, each with his own army, territory, and ambition to become the ruler of all of China. Known as the Old Marshal, Zhang Sr. was a thoroughly reactionary, antirepublican former bandit who, in good Chinese warlord fashion, liked to appear in a Prussian-style uniform with braids and sashes, oversize epaulets, medals, and a tassel swaying over a brimmed cap. He commanded an army of several hundred thousand men, had five wives, and for a brief time controlled Beijing. But in 1928, as the armies of Chiang Kai-shek advanced northwards in their reunification drive, Zhang was forced to retreat to Manchuria, where Japan enjoyed semi-colonial privileges, including the right to deploy a sizable military force known as the Kwantung Army—Kwantung being a name given to the part of Manchuria east of the pass dividing it from the rest of China. On his way back, Zhang was killed when a Kwantung Army soldier put a bomb under his train. The reason normally assumed for this assassination was Japanese anger at Zhang’s failure to stop Chiang Kai-shek’s forces from advancing north, but it seems equally likely that Zhang was deemed too independent at a time when Japan planned to turn Manchuria into a puppet state.

Zhang Jr. was a decadent, opium-using womanizer whom the
Japanese installed as the new warlord of Manchuria, apparently thinking he would be more pliant than his father. They were wrong. Zhang gave up opium and got serious as a Chinese political figure, supporting the Nationalists. In 1929, he invited two pro-Japanese Chinese officials to a banquet and had them executed in front of the other guests. Chiang named him commander of the renewed effort to cut the Communist cancer out of the Chinese body politic. But as 1936 wore on and the prospect of further Japanese incursions against Chinese sovereignty seemed imminent, Zhang balked at the idea of Chinese fighting other Chinese, and he opened up contacts with the Communists to plot what he would later call a coup d’état.

At the end of November, Zhang told Chiang that his troops in Shaanxi province were close to mutiny at the prospect of fighting fellow Chinese, and he proposed to Chiang that he come up from Nanjing to Xian, a couple of hours by airplane, to talk to them. Chiang agreed to go. Zhang informed Mao of the unfolding plan. Mao called it “
a masterpiece.”

Chiang arrived with his usual retainers, including his foreign minister and military advisers, staying at a hot springs resort ten miles from Xian. He spent his time talking to the officers of the army organized to march on the Communists in Yenan, telling them that only “
the last five minutes” remained to go before victory in that long campaign would be theirs. Then, in the wee hours of December 12, Zhang’s bodyguards, wearing the fur caps of Manchurian soldiers, burst into the cabin where Chiang was sleeping. They intended to kidnap him, but Chiang, wearing his nightclothes, escaped out of a window and climbed over the back wall of the compound, injuring his back when he fell. The Generalissimo spent a frigid night with a few loyal aides in a cave at the top of a nearby mountain, and in the morning he was taken into custody by Zhang’s troops.

Within hours,
Mao, in his more comfortable cave at Chinese Communist Party (
CCP) headquarters in
Yenan, was informed of the kidnapping. Overjoyed at the news, Mao wanted Chiang and his top generals put on trial and executed. He sent a cable to Moscow asking for advice on the matter from the leader of the global proletarian revolution, Joseph Stalin, expecting no doubt that Stalin would rejoice in Chiang’s elimination. Stalin was also the main source of arms and funds for the Chinese Communists, who were only beginning to rebuild their strength after the last attempts by the central government to wipe them out.

Stalin was appalled at the Chiang kidnapping and even more so at the prospect of assassinating him. Here is evidence of a certain pattern in the relations between the cautious Stalin and the more impetuous Mao. The Soviet leader’s overriding concern at the end of 1936 was the simultaneous threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In November, Japan joined with Italy and Germany to form the
Anti-Comintern Pact, directed explicitly against the Soviet Union, and this raised the prospect that the Soviets would be attacked by Germany in the west and Japan in the east. For this reason, Stalin had for months encouraged the Communists to make an accommodation with Chiang so that they could be united in the anti-Japanese fight. Stalin therefore saw this threat on Chiang’s very life as reckless and dangerous. If Chiang were eliminated, he felt, the road would be open for the pro-Japanese faction inside the KMT to take power, facilitating Japan’s ability to roll into Soviet Siberia. Stalin issued strict orders to Mao that Chiang was not to be harmed; having received these instructions,
Zhou Enlai, the Communists’ suave and skillful chief negotiator, flew to Xian and passed the message on to the Young Marshal, who found himself suddenly abandoned by his Communist ally.

A negotiation spearheaded by Zhou then ensued in which Chiang promised to call off the campaign against the Communists and to join with them in a new united front against Japan, with Chiang recognized as the undisputed national leader. When, on the day after Christmas, Zhou went to see the Gimo, the first thing he did was salute him—“
the Red Army’s first sign of obedience to the united front commander,” Chiang’s biographer Jay Taylor has written. In exchange, the Communists got a kind of de facto legalization, or at least Chiang would give up his efforts to destroy them. They would keep their own army; indeed, they’d now have a chance to substantially expand it; and they’d be able to send their representatives to the national capital at Nanjing so resistance to Japan could be coordinated.

News of
Chiang’s capture
and the formation of the
United Front quickly spread through all of China, with the result that when he left Xian and returned to his capital in Nanjing, Chiang was no longer just a popular leader; he was, as Taylor has put it, “
a national hero,” propelled to new heights of popularity and power. China was still poor, weak, and fragmented, but it was stronger, more orderly, more united, and more economically vigorous than it had been at any time since the
overthrow of the Qing dynasty a quarter century before, and Chiang was given a lot of the credit for this. The new determination to forge unity in the fight against Japan made him globally and locally recognized as China’s man of destiny, the sole figure who could lead his country in its hour of peril. And the luster endured for nearly the entire duration of the Sino-Japanese War, the four years when China resisted alone and the four years after Pearl Harbor when its chief and only real ally was the United States.

For all that time, Chiang enjoyed the almost universal conviction that he was valiantly resisting the naked aggression of a nefarious invader. This image was supported in the United States most of all by Henry Luce, the China-born son of missionaries and the founder of
Time
and
Life
, which were the most influential magazines in America. Over the years, Chiang was on the cover of
Time
ten times, more than Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, or anyone else.

Luce was far from the only passionate observer of the scene in China who saw greatness in Chiang’s character and leadership.
Hans von Seeckt, who had effectively commanded the German army during the Weimar Republic and was Chiang’s chief adviser during the
Northern Expedition, called him “
a splendid and noble personality.”
Owen Lattimore, the scholar of China who would later be accused, falsely, of being a Communist agent, called him a “
genuine patriot,” a “highly nationalistic” figure who was “certainly responsible for holding China together at the critical moment.” Claire Chennault, the commander of the Flying Tigers, told Roosevelt in 1943, in Stilwell’s presence, that Chiang was “one of the two or three greatest military and political leaders in the world today.”

Han Suyin, the novelist who would later become an unabashed acolyte of Mao, was just as unabashed in her admiration for
Chiang in the early years of the war. The reunification of China was “
due to the genius of one man, a slim, unassuming young Chinese officer” who had realized the goals of the Chinese revolution after “sixteen years of the struggle in the dark,” she wrote. Chiang, she continued, in her many-splendored prose, possessed “a will as stern as the Great Wall, as irresistible as the flood of China’s rivers.” He was “the man in whose hands the fate of our four hundred millions still is laid.” In the face of the Japanese onslaught, she continued,

Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek in one of his many appearances on the cover of
Time,
this one in August 1945. © 1945 Time Inc. All rights reserved
(illustration credit 2)

The savior-of-China, man-of-destiny image was reflected in the photographs of Chiang that appeared everywhere—schoolrooms, government offices, public squares, even, for a brief few years after the end of the war, over the massive entry gate to the Forbidden City in Beijing, long since replaced by a photograph of his great enemy, Mao. One of the standard pictures shows him in the military uniform favored by Chinese commanders in those days, with oversized epaulets, golden braids, sash and belt, and a constellation of saucer-sized medallions. His left hand is on the hilt of a sword, his shaved head and trim mustache somehow just a bit too small for all that paraphernalia. One of the covers of
Time,
this one published in 1933, has him on a white horse, in sunglasses, saluting. Other photographs show him in an elegant silk scholar’s robe, and in still others he smiles in avuncular, mustachioed fashion, the understanding, kindly, indulgent teacher of the Chinese nation.

The images were all designed to convey a sense of the dignity, wisdom, and command due the leader of China, a spiritual force, as Han Suyin put it, and, if the image is to be believed, a tranquil, confident one. Henry Luce continued to convey this image to the American public until long after
Chiang’s cause was lost. Other Americans with a more balanced, less rhapsodic vision of Chiang admired him despite his faults, and when a heavy cloud of disillusionment with Chiang took hold of many, perhaps most, in official American circles, these diehard supporters argued that his faults were being exaggerated and his virtues underplayed.

For
Albert C. Wedemeyer, who arrived in China late in 1944 as the commanding American military officer in the China theater, the astonishing thing was not how badly Chiang had done in the war but how well. Compared to Britain and the Soviet Union, he wrote, China had gotten only “a trickle of aid,” yet “
she had managed to survive as a national entity in spite of Western indifference and neglect.” Wedemeyer made no secret of his disagreement with his predecessor, Stilwell, about Chiang. “Far from being reluctant to fight as pictured by Stilwell and some of his friends among the American correspondents,” Wedemeyer later wrote, China “had shown amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan.”