He was preparing for the journey and discussing his proper policy with the State Department when the military affairs of Chiang’s government took a sudden turn for the better. Some of the Chinese soldiers who had been barred from landing in Manchuria from shipboard managed to arrive after all, by rail. In a short time they drove out the Communists occupying Hulutao. Then they marched toward Mukden, and could easily have taken possession of it had not the Russians been there. Chiang began to wonder if he should not continue to move in troops and consolidate his position in Manchuria before he went ahead with any other task. Encountered on equal ground, the Communists did not seem formidable after all: his men marched ahead.
By the middle of December, Marshall was ready to embark on his task. First detail in importance, naturally, was that long-deferred truce that was to iron out all differences between Nationalist and Red, and unify China under a democratic government. Americans were to help the Chinese shift as many troops and supplies as were necessary into Manchuria immediately; this action, it was agreed, was called for by the Cairo Conference, the Yalta agreement, and the Sino-Soviet agreement, all of which asserted that Chinese should have sovereignty there. In spite of Wedemeyer’s advice that North China be reinforced before Manchuria, Washington had come round to Chiang’s belief that Manchuria should be taken care of first—certainly before the truce was settled.
North China was not forgotten. Marshall had his orders to assist in the transport of Chinese troops there, too, but not immediately: this move was to wait on the truce. If the negotiations failed, however, Marshall was not to feel himself bound to carry on with the North China plan. The decision was left to his discretion.
In the meantime the marines were to remain in North China, and the Soviet Union didn’t like that. Byrnes explained one good reason for their retention: there were still many Japanese in the area awaiting evacuation, and Russia, if she was sincere about wishing to see a settled, unified China, would not object. But the Russians still didn’t like it. Molotov reminded Byrnes that their own troops had remained in Manchuria at Chiang’s special request: otherwise they would have gone long since. The Soviet troops were no longer necessary or even wanted in Mukden, Changchun, or Harbin; Chiang’s soldiers were waiting for them to get out so that the Nationalists could move in. The Chinese Reds moved about freely under their wing and dug in where they liked. The Russians worked at top speed, moving everything movable from the factories which had been set up in former times by the Japanese and carrying all the machinery away to Siberia. When the Nationalists at last got in, they found empty shells of buildings.
By the time Marshall arrived in Chungking, the officials were busy getting ready for the move back to Nanking. Great things were in the air: 1946 was to see the beginning of that long-deferred thing, a constitutional government. Amid these preoccupations he was glad to note that Chiang had not put aside the truce. Once again the Reds were willing to try, and had sent a deputation; once again they were haggling about the Red Army’s autonomy. Marshall had his orders; they boiled down to the old pattern. If Chiang proved unreasonable though the Reds were willing to give way, the American was to threaten to withhold all future aid. If the Reds were unreasonable whereas Chiang proved amenable, the Nationalist advance into North China was to be put into practice immediately.
Negotiations were resumed. Marshall took up where Hurley had left off, which was almost the same point where Hurley had begun: the difference was that the Reds had gained immensely in the interim. On January 10, as part of the machinery for the era of truce and coalition, the government called a “Political Consultation Conference,” or P.C.C., with a council that included Communists. Of thirty-eight members eight were Kuomintang, seven Communists, four from the Democratic League, and nineteen from the other minority groups. The council discussed the future National Assembly to write a constitution, which had been so often postponed since it was first bruited in 1936. It was agreed to hold it on May 5 in Nanking.
In theory China was free again and could make a fresh start. Actually the country was badly crippled by the necessity of carrying on what was in all but name a civil war. There were no funds to spare for reconstruction and few resources with which to combat rapidly rising inflation. Of these resources, the most substantial were the formerly Japanese-owned properties, which had been confiscated according to the rules of war, along with those that had belonged to collaborators. In addition there was Formosa or, as the Chinese call it, Taiwan, which after fifty years of intensive Japanese development had been returned to Chinese ownership, somewhat damaged by bombing but still a valuable acquisition. There was also—until the end of June—Lend-Lease, and sometime after that, to take its place, U.N.R.R.A. But U.N.R.R.A. didn’t come along in time, and once again the Chinese applied to Washington for a loan. A small one was granted, as a stopgap, but the sum of five hundred million that was requested had to wait upon events. If the Kuomintang could make it up with the Communists, said Washington, the money might be forthcoming. Until then, no.
“Many Chinese thought and said that this looked like an offer of a choice between modes of suicide,” said Hollington Tong. But, he added, “the exhausted condition of China required that the Generalissimo go along with as good grace as possible in the futile negotiations.”
There was a brief flurry over the choice of Hurley’s successor. Marshall favored Wedemeyer as the obvious man, and both the War and State departments were agreeable to this until the Reds heard of it. Then Chou En-lai made a strong protest: if Wedemeyer stayed as Ambassador, the whole truce was off. In the end Marshall appointed Dr. Leighton Stuart of Yenching University, an honest, well-meaning man, but no ball of fire. Marshall had good reason for feeling amiably disposed toward the Reds just at that time, for he had actually succeeded in arranging a cease-fire. On the face of it everything was going to be all right now; all that remained was to decide on the details of the truce.
That, however, was the stumbling block. In theory the cease-fire began: in actuality the Reds never stopped working at the war for an hour. While Marshall had every reason for thinking that his firm handling of the situation was paying dividends—at the conference table all was as reasonable and constructive as anyone could wish—the Red leaders back in North China were shipping forces across the border to key points in Manchuria. Thousands of troops passed through Dairen and Port Arthur during the first month of negotiations and bargaining, and stood ready to move into the key cities at the word of command.
On February 15 Marshall presided at the signing of what looked like an all-important agreement, to integrate the Communist army with the Nationalists. One of the greatest obstacles to accord had been the matter of proportional representation; the Reds had persistently demanded a larger number of troops compared with the Nationalists than Chiang felt it safe to maintain. Now all objections seemed to melt like icicles in summer sun: Marshall was gratified to observe that where the Nationalists were willing to cut down to ninety divisions in the first phase of a year, the Communists would be satisfied with eighteen, and after that crucial period both sides promised to demobilize further.
Everything looked so calm, and events were proceeding at such a rate, that Marshall felt safe in leaving China on March 13 to report to Washington. The main part of his mission was accomplished. It only remained to arrange a commission to oversee the Army’s amalgamation—in which, by special request of Chou En-lai, America was to play no part—before his task could be declared finished. Everyone had behaved beautifully. Soon China would be united and well on the road to rehabilitation, with friendly support from American banks making easier her climb toward the summit of true democracy. Mao and Chou would keep a stern yet just eye on Chiang: Chiang, presumably, would bow to their timely corrections and yet somehow maintain his position of superiority well enough to do the governing.
Marshall’s back had been turned just a month when the whole picture changed. Now at last the Soviet troops were moving out of Manchuria. Within a d
ay after they removed themselves from Changchun the Chinese Communists attacked, as if there had been no truce at all, and moved in. Harbin, Tsitsihar, and Szepingkai were to follow: the war restarted in full cry, with plenty of bloodshed. Marshall had to begin all over again. He came back, of course, immediately, and the strange game was taken up where he had left it, while in Manchuria the battle continued. As the Nationalists rallied the Reds seemed to give way. Again they filed out of one city after another.
Moving back to Nanking was a slow process. Much of the old capital city was badly damaged, and new quarters had to be found for the ministries. Chiang himself was one of the last to make the homeward trek, on May 1.
Determined to carry through the Manchurian commitment, he persevered with the double program of truce talk at the table and battles in the North. He may have been deluded, as the Americans were, by the success with which his army was now pushing the Reds around. Possibly he knew better; his intelligence service told him that the enemy was lying low only temporarily, and had taken possession of the great reservoir of arms left behind by the Japanese Kwantung Army. But he didn’t cry havoc. What was the use of alarming the Americans? They were already on the verge of complete discouragement. It wouldn’t take much to push them over into isolation.
Therefore, though the Reds still held all the cities along the South Manchurian Railway and had moved their capital from Yenan to Kalgan, though a number of Chinese soldiers who had fled from the Japanese into Siberia were now in Manchuria training the comrades in the use of their newly acquired Japanese arms, the situation on the whole looked promising and Chiang said nothing of fears for the future. His army held the ostensible advantage in Manchuria for another seven months.
By that time, however, Marshall had developed his own insight into conditions, and collected intelligence that showed him a dangerous state of affairs. Now he regretted the policy of aiding the Nationalists to venture into Manchuria before North China was under control. He advised Chiang not to carry on with the Manchurian campaign but to cut his losses, pull in his overextended lines, and turn his attention once more to North China, which was imperiled through neglect. It took no prophet to observe that the Reds had reverted to their former guerrilla tactics, against which the old-fashioned Chinese soldiers were not able to hold their own.
Chiang did not agree. He suspected that Marshall’s advice was not based on a detached point of view; he knew that the Reds had threatened to withdraw from the truce negotiations if the Nationalists occupied Kalgan, their stronghold. He was sure that the American was impressed by this threat and wouldn’t scruple to hold him back in order to save the conference. Chiang had had enough of being held back. The end might justify the means in the eyes of Marshall. If the Nationalists could strike quickly and beat back the Reds thoroughly, why then the prospects of peace would improve and Washington tempers would be soothed.
Besides, it was tempting. Kalgan was easy. He simply gave the command and his troops moved in. Marshall too gave commands. After all, it was up to him, according to the terms of his directive; he was to use his discretion.
“General Marshall, infuriated by this disregard of his wishes,” according to Hollington Tong, “cut off all American military aid to China. From that time for a period of eight months, all American shipments of military goods to National China were embargoed.”
The facts are not quite so clear-cut. During the next year something under a billion and a half dollars’ worth of aid went from the United States to China. But it was very slow in coming. Some of the delay was due to muddle. Some of the material got lost on the way through black marketeers—and not all of these were Chinese. Yet some delay, indubitably, was due to American policy.
While the fiction was still being preserved that the Communists were ready and willing to be integrated with Chiang’s army, they had been promised by Marshall that their integration be preceded by “a brief period of United States training and by the supply of minimum quantities of equipment.” American officers were assigned to the task and waiting in Shanghai to start work, but before any supplies reached the Reds from America—before Stilwell’s old project came to fruition, many years after he advocated it—the anomaly of such a gesture seems to have become evident to enough Congressmen to bring it to a halt.
Finally Marshall had to admit defeat. In any case he was being appointed Secretary of State. He left China on January 7, 1947, summing up his frustrations and his theory as to their causes in a statement to the President. It was all due to extremists, he said, a “dominant reactionary group,” and “dyed-in-the-wool Communists” opposed to them. (There was no more talk about their being merely agrarian reformers.) “Between this dominant reactionary group in the Government and the irreconcilable Communists who, I must state, did not seem so last February, lies the problem of how peace and well-being are to be brought to the long-suffering and presently inarticulate mass of the people of China.…”
The rot of despair had set in in Nanking; if not in Chiang’s heart, where it mattered most, among the troops. As the Communists stepped up their guerrilla activity and spread the gospel, soldiers of the Nationalist Army slipped off and joined the other side in rapidly increasing numbers. Part of their discontent may have been due to homesickness; they had been in Manchuria a long time. But other soldiers had spent months away from home without feeling that they must desert in protest. It was more than that. They were tired of war and uncertainty and repeated disappointments; they were worked on by everything they read and heard; they were tempted by the glorious picture held out to them by the Reds. Ironically, Chiang’s reforms of the past played a large part in the collapse. Under his government, schooling for the people had improved. The revolution begun by Hu Shih gave them a vernacular to use in print. A “basic Chinese” of eight hundred characters had been evolved under the Nationalist Government, and now many coolies and soldiers, whose fathers had been illiterate, could read the newspapers. What they read with their new education was mostly Communist propaganda, carefully written and toned down to be comprehensible to them.
Moreover, much of what the Communist writers alleged was true. Local government had broken down; corruption was increasing; the future was uncertain. The more grievances the people had the more eager they were to believe that it was the fault of their leaders, and that a change of government was the only way to improve matters. Workingmen of old China had seldom been receptive to such ideas because they were used to their lot and were trained to accept it—or, rather, had never been trained to expect anything else. It was different in 1947. They had learned to demand more of life, and the fact that it was the Kuomintang that had taught them this counted for nothing against all the ideas they were now getting from the Kuomintang’s foes. Most of them, of course, even more than most people anywhere, were still led, still easily deluded, still dependent on more agile brains. But they were far more ready than they had been in the old days to switch their dependencies, and the new generation of Communist-trained intellectuals were there on the spot, showing them the way to go.
In the middle of this turmoil came Wedemeyer, who had earlier gone back to the States. The general was to spend two months traveling about, finding out facts, reporting on the situation.
His attitude was wary. Much of his former friendliness for Chiang had evaporated under the erosion of Marshall’s report in January and the riots that took place in Taiwan in February. Taiwan was gaining new importance and had brought publicity of an unpleasant sort to the Kuomintang. When the island reverted to Chinese ownership, after the surrender of the Japanese, Chiang sent over a group to administer civil government, set the war-paralyzed industries going again, and generally put the place on its feet. He spotted its possibilities in case some place of refuge was needed in the future just as he had spotted the possibilities of Chungking in Szechuan years before. In the case of Taiwan he had a good historical example. Kwok Sing Ya or, as he is usually called, “Koxinga” had fled to Taiwan in 1661, when he w
as driven off the Chinese mainland by the army of the Manchus. It was Koxinga’s people who settled down and gave Taiwan its Chinese cast of countenance, gradually supplanting the aboriginals and living like the Chinese they were until the Japanese took them over and superimposed their culture.
In 1946, when the mainland Chinese began coming in—officials first, with eager merchants in their wake—the Taiwanese greeted them with mixed feelings. There were naturally the call of the past and the knowledge of their common ancestry, but there were also apprehension and the mistrust of people who had been brought up to look toward Tokyo and the Emperor, to speak Japanese as their second tongue, and fight for Japan when necessary. A lot of Taiwanese had indeed fought for Japan. And Taiwan had not come out of the war unscathed; the bombings of China’s ally, America, had been terribly effective.
The mainlanders’ feelings were much simpler. They didn’t like the Taiwanese, who had a bad reputation as dirty fighters during the war, and they were eager to make new fortunes in this island, which was by repute rich and exploitable. Followed a period of shameless carpetbagging and ruthless grabbing. The officials were not of a good stamp to begin with, and the National Government of China, over in Chungking and Nanking, was busy with other pressing matters. For the most part, Kuomintang eyes were turned toward Manchuria or Washington or Moscow. Taiwan was badly neglected and very badly treated. And there was, of course, a Communist fifth column eager and ready to work. In February a riot broke out in Taiwan, and then for a little while the world did survey the ugly scene and was shocked. Chiang removed the governor and put in a good man. There was a hasty house cleaning—it was easier to handle a small place like Taiwan than a great sprawling nation of China’s size—and soon things were being managed much better; soon Taiwan was on its way to being a model colony. But in the meantime the affair had made a noise in Washington, and Wedemeyer could not have been proud of his Chinese friends.