By the beginning of November 1945, military clashes between Nationalist and Communist troops in northern China, where Chiang’s armies were trying to displace Japanese troops who had surrendered to Mao’s forces, made prospects for a coalition government “almost hopeless” and the likelihood of a civil war all but certain.
U.S. officials in China, Russia, and Washington were convinced that the emerging struggle could expand Soviet influence in China. Kennan warned from Moscow that Stalin was pursuing “a fluid resilient policy directed at the achievement of maximum power with minimum responsibility on portions of the Asiatic continent lying beyond the Soviet border.” He saw the Soviets aiming at the reacquisition of “all the diplomatic and territorial assets previously possessed on the mainland of Asia by Russia under the Czars; domination of the provinces of China in central Asia contiguous to the Soviet frontier,” Outer Mongolia, Manchuria, and Sinkiang, where they could create a buffer against threats to “the industrial core of the U.S.S.R.”; and control in northern China, where they hoped “to prevent other foreign powers from repeating the Japanese incursion,” especially Britain and the United States.
General Albert Wedemeyer, Stilwell’s replacement in the China, India, and Burma theater, echoed Kennan’s concerns. Wedemeyer thought that Stalin’s show of support for Chiang was a charade: he did not believe that the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty of August 1945 would forestall Russian plans to establish Communist regimes in Asia. Wedemeyer wanted U.S. forces to intervene in northern China, warding off Communist control. Patrick Hurley predicted that a civil war could only occur if Moscow sanctioned and supported Mao’s ambitions to control all of China, and he had every reason to believe that this was Stalin’s plan.
The pressure for a more aggressive role for U.S. forces in China alarmed John Carter Vincent, an expert on China and chief of the Far Eastern division of the State Department, who worried about being drawn into a civil war as Chiang’s protector. He asked “whether we are not moving toward the establishment of a relationship with China which has some characteristics of a de facto protectorate with a semi-colonial Chinese Army under our direction?” One Pentagon planner complained “that ‘that Communist’ Vincent was causing trouble in China.”
At the end of November, Hurley abruptly resigned as ambassador to China without first informing the president. His letter of resignation to Truman attacked administration policy as favoring the Communists in China over the Nationalists and democracy. The fault lay with “the career men in the State Department. The professional Foreign Service men sided with the Chinese Communist armed party and the imperialist bloc of nations whose policy it was to keep China divided against herself. Our professional diplomats continuously advised the Communists that my efforts in preventing the collapse of the Nationalist Government did not represent the policy of the United States. These same professionals openly advised the Communist armed party to decline unification of the Chinese Communist Army with the National Army unless the Chinese Communists were given control.” Hurley was convinced that “a considerable section of our State Department is endeavoring to support Communism generally as well as specifically in China.”
The overt sympathy for Mao’s revolution by Foreign Service officers in China was indisputable. But it was not the result of any ideological affinity for Communism or Communist parties in Asia and elsewhere. Rather, it was the offshoot of the conviction that Chiang’s regime was doomed and that the United States would do well to establish a working relationship with the likely future governing power in China, and in addition to getting on the right side of the winning political movement, it could help reduce Soviet influence throughout China and East Asia.
Hurley’s sudden resignation and attack on administration policy enraged Truman. Although Hurley blamed Foreign Service officers and State Department officials, depicting them as at odds with the administration’s policy of coalition government in China, his criticism suggested that the White House had failed by allowing career diplomats to favor the Communists and undermine the Nationalists. Some pro-Chiang supporters in the United States, who felt that Washington was not doing enough to support the Nationalists, concluded that Truman secretly favored the Communists. “See what-a-son-of-a-bitch did to me,” Truman privately told his cabinet when learning of Hurley’s resignation and letter. He understood that Hurley’s accusations, however unfounded, could now become a political club against him.
Eager for both domestic political and foreign policy reasons to salvage the peace in China, Truman now asked George Marshall, who had just retired from the army, to mediate Nationalist-Communist differences. Marshall’s military service dated from 1901, when he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and became a second lieutenant. During World War I he was a principal aide to John J. Pershing, the commanding general of U.S. forces in France. A brilliant planner and organizer, he rose through the ranks to become Army chief of staff in World War II. Choosing Marshall to go to China was a demonstration of how much importance the White House placed on preventing a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Marshall was as iconic a figure in Washington as anyone could find. His leadership of the military in the war and his reputation for nonpartisan national service had elevated him to the stature of a national hero on a level with the most storied military leaders in American history.
FDR had considered Marshall so indispensable to the overall war effort in Washington—despite the correct, formal relationship Marshall maintained with the president to assure sufficient detachment in deciding vital strategic questions—that he decided against sending him to London to organize and command the D-day invasion of Europe. Truman thought him a most remarkable man and the principal architect of America’s victory in the war. At his retirement, Truman called him “the greatest military man that this country ever produced—or any other country for that matter.” The general’s standing with Republicans as well as Democrats gave him, Truman believed, immunity from the political attacks that Hurley’s criticism seemed likely to generate from right-wing anti-Communist ideologues toward almost anyone else the president might send to China.
Marshall’s instructions were to draw the opposing sides into a coalition government; the inducement was a $500 million grant to support a unified country’s economic and military institutions. Most U.S. representatives in China saw Marshall’s assignment as an impossible task. Marshall himself was not unmindful of the heavy odds against him. And so he made it a precondition of his mediation that the White House commit to supporting Chiang should his mission fail. He was less concerned with the domestic political repercussions of a Nationalist collapse than with a Communist advance in Asia that could threaten Japan’s stability and America’s national security.
Although Truman was not convinced that the Nationalists would produce anything resembling a democratic solution for China, he saw the alternative as politically destructive to his administration and to U.S. power in Asia. A Communist regime in China seemed certain to create a firestorm of criticism in the United States. The House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies had been raising questions since its founding in 1938 about subversive Communists in the U.S. government, who were alleged to favor “progressive” Communist regimes abroad.
During the 1944 campaign, Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey charged that Roosevelt had allied himself with the Communist Party of the United States. “Now the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal, through which they aim to control the Government of the United States,” Dewey declared in the closing days of the campaign. Some Democratic Party leaders were convinced that voters in 1944 were more afraid of Communism than of Nazism or Fascism, which seemed certain to be destroyed by the end of the war.
The tensions with the Soviets over Eastern Europe, Iran, Turkey, and Japan had put Americans on edge about Communist aggression. It was unimaginable to millions of Americans, as well as to thoughtful government officials lik
e Harriman, Wedemeyer, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, and Marshall, that China’s Communist Party could be an independent entity that would not do Stalin’s bidding. Even if they doubted this supposition, in the fall of 1945, the thought of challenging American assumptions about Communists, Chinese or otherwise, by supporting them over Chiang, a well-regarded U.S. friend, seemed like political suicide.
Yet there were reasons to believe that Mao and Chou En-lai, his brilliant deputy, were less than fixedly tied to Moscow. Early in 1945, they proposed to visit Washington for a conversation with the president, suggesting an interest in a relationship with the United States that would make them less dependent on the Soviet Union. Kennan saw reason to believe that the Chinese Communist Party bore considerable animus toward Moscow, which had used it for its own purposes rather than as a way to assure a Communist government in China. Moscow’s reluctance to provide expanded aid that might help speed a victory against the Nationalists, as well as its Treaty of Friendship with Chiang, which put pressure on Mao to reach an accommodation with him, did not endear Stalin and the Soviets to China’s Communists.
Yet in spite of Moscow’s intentions, Mao’s party had survived and grown in power on its own. Increasingly, it looked to itself in deciding what best served its interests. Long-standing suspicions of Russian eagerness to control Manchuria and other parts of China added to Mao’s determination to act as independently of Stalin’s dictates as possible.
Kennan voiced the conviction that whatever dependence China’s Communists might have on Moscow, it would not last long should Mao’s party gain control of the country. For hundreds of years, outside powers had tried and failed to rule China, Kennan observed. In time, Russia would come to the same pass: once the Communists took over the country, they would act with scant regard for Moscow’s wishes. In the climate of suspicion in the United States about communism, which had been muted by the war and had resurfaced forcefully in 1945, however, it was all but impossible for Kennan’s doubts to be heard, let alone acted upon. Unlike his February 1946 “Long Telegram” on Soviet behavior, Kennan’s prescience about Mao’s tensions with Stalin had no resonance in Washington.
There has been a long-standing argument that because of its knee-jerk anticommunism, Washington missed a chance to establish a working relationship with China’s Communists. Knowledgeable China scholars have their doubts about this assertion. The terms of the Sino-Soviet relationship were set as much, if not more, by Mao: his devotion to revolutionary principles and need to identify his party with radical change associated with Soviet communism rather than American capitalism made all the difference in shaping initial interactions between Washington and China’s Communists.
Still, had the U.S. government abandoned Chiang for Mao and his transparently more popular party in China in 1945–49, it might have made a large difference in U.S.-China relations in the 1940s and ‘50s. It is difficult to believe that a friendly America offering financial and technical aid would not have trumped the need for a U.S. ideological bogeyman. At the end of the day, as in Russia, popular sentiment always put the national interest above support for any political party. And Russia’s Communists, whose country had been a traditional exploiter of China, would have been hard pressed to convince most of China’s Communist leaders that the Soviet Union was to be trusted more than a traditionally anti-imperial America, whose opposition to European and Asian colonialism made her a more natural friend of a new China. Alas, neither America’s nor China’s better angels prevailed, and both would pay a heavy price in the future.
In going to China, Marshall believed that his mission was vital not only to China’s well-being but also to the United States and the world. “If the world wants peace,” he told a press conference, “China’s effort [at internal reconciliation] must succeed.” He noted “the vital importance to the United States of the success of the present Chinese efforts toward unity and economic stability if we are to have [the] continued peace we hope for in the Pacific.”
After Marshall arrived in China in December 1945, he refused to hear that he had accepted an impossible mission. General Wedemeyer and Walter S. Robertson, counselor at the embassy in Nanking, tried to apprise him of the difficulties. Robertson saw “no basis to hope that you could bring about a coalition government. They [the Nationalists and Communists] had no common ground for coalition, no common objective for China.” As a fellow military man, Wedemeyer tried to warn Marshall what he was up against. But Marshall dismissed his pessimism, saying, “I am going to accomplish my mission and you are going to help me.”
Although Marshall and some of his American aides would have periods of optimism over the next twelve months, it became clear to them by the end of 1946 that neither Chiang nor Mao trusted each other enough to work together for China’s larger good. When occasional upturns in the mediations occurred, even someone as cynical about their chances of achieving anything as Wedemeyer could see Marshall as a kind of miracle worker: “He is well on the way toward the successful implementation of a plan that will integrate military forces of the Central Government and the Communists,” Wedemeyer concluded three months into the mission. “All of this has been accomplished in the background of intrigue, mistrust, selfish personalities, and oriental cunning. Really a stupendous accomplishment.” Wedemeyer doubted that anyone else “in the world could have done as much in so short a time.”
The temporary gains were the result of a cat-and-mouse game between Chiang and Mao, each trying to convince Marshall and the Americans that the other side was responsible for the unfixable breach. Chiang was a masterful manipulator. He had no intention of bending to pressure from Marshall, whom he considered naive. After Marshall had been in China for a month, Chiang privately wondered, “Can it be that he [Marshall] has not yet understood the deceptive nature of Communist maneuvers? … [M]ore and more he is being taken in by the Communists. The Americans tend to be naive and trusting. This is true even with so experienced a man as Marshall.” When Marshall threatened to cut off desperately needed economic and military aid, Chiang bristled at the pressure “to appease the Communists. The fact is to appease the Communists at this time is to yield to the Soviet Union.” But Chiang would give the appearance of eagerness for a reconciliation, hoping to convince the Americans to sustain the support for him that he knew had significant backing among anti-Communist ideologues in the United States.
The forty-seven-year-old Chou En-lai, who conducted the negotiations for the Communists, was every bit as sly. Intimately familiar with the Nationalists, as someone who had been a part of the party’s inner circle in the 1920s, and with the society of Europe, where he had lived for four years from 1920 to 1924, Chou, in Henry Kissinger’s words, had a command of world affairs that was “stunning.” Kissinger described him as “urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, [and] subtle.”
Although Chou and Mao saw the Nationalists as ruthless and corrupt, interested only in holding on to power that could serve their special interests, Chou brought all his considerable skills to bear as a diplomat and defender of his party’s goals. He and Mao saw China’s freedom from foreign domination and progress toward internal development as tied to Communist control. A brilliant cosmopolite, who spoke several languages, including English, Chou was “plausible in his approach and often completely open in his conversation, he seemed capable of reaching a workable arrangement with the Nationalists.” But Chiang and most conservative supporters thoroughly distrusted him, as someone who had broken with Chiang’s party in the 1920s. As the architect of the Communist party’s famous 1934 Long March to a haven in Yenan on the Yellow River in central China, Chou was seen by Chiang as an unyielding ideologue. Worse, he considered Chou and Mao essentially agents of Russian ambitions in China.
Chiang’s refusal to reach any kind of accommodation with adversaries would eventually cost him and the Nationalists their control of China. A course of rigorous reform to weed out the corruption in his administration and a commitmen
t to economic and political change that could have partly accommodated Mao’s party and millions of suffering Chinese might have averted a civil war, sustained strong U.S. support for his government, and kept him in power.
Similarly, the Truman administration and, as much to the point, substantial public opinion in the United States could have spared itself considerable future problems if it had been more flexible about dealing with China’s Communists. Their proposal for talks with Roosevelt and willingness to engage in negotiations with Chiang’s government were in part an attempt to lull the Nationalists into delays while they gathered the military wherewithal to defeat Chiang’s armies. But it was also an indication of their antagonism to the Soviets and interest in finding an alternative to dependence on their support. A greater receptivity to Mao’s Communists in 1945 might have averted the later bloodshed between the United States and China in Korea and pressured Moscow into earlier interest in détente, including international control of nuclear weapons.
Even if such an outcome was out of reach with Moscow, it was apparently there for the taking with China’s Communists. As later events would demonstrate, Moscow and Peking were incompatible allies. Each considered the other a threat to its national security and independence. U.S. accommodation with China in the late 1940s, whether with a coalition government or a victorious Communist regime, could have put pressure on the Soviet Union and changed the early direction of the Cold War.