Revolution and Civil War, episode 24

Victory

In the last year of the war America tries to bring Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek into one government, while Roosevelt secretly promises Stalin Russia's old rights in Manchuria for joining the war on Japan. The episode follows the two leaders from the American envoy Patrick Hurley's arrival in Yan'an with a war cry, through the Communist congress that crowns Mao, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan's surrender, to Mao's six weeks in Chongqing in 1945, the first time the two men have met in nearly twenty years, and asks which of them was ready for the peace. It leans entirely on scholars.

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Last time, Mao Zedong made the Communist Party his own. From 1942 his Rectification campaign put the party through study, confession and fear, while his security chief, Kang Sheng, ran purges built on forced confessions. In March 1944 Wang Ming, Mao's main antagonist in the party, wrote to his old friend Dimitrov, once the head of the Comintern, that he wholeheartedly supported Mao as the leader of the party. And that summer the first American observers landed in Yan'an and found high morale, no defeatism and leaders who seemed approachable. Now the Americans wanted something from Mao. They wanted him in a government with Chiang Kai-shek. The man they sent to arrange it was Patrick J. Hurley. Hurley was sixty-one, a tall, boisterous, strong-headed Oklahoman. He had grown up next to a Choctaw Indian reservation, become the national attorney for the Choctaw Nation, and learned the piercing Choctaw war cry. He had won medals as a hero in the First World War and served as secretary of war under President Hoover. He was a strict Republican who disagreed with everything Roosevelt did at home, and was delighted to take on hard jobs for him abroad. Now he was Roosevelt's ambassador to China, the man who had just helped send Joseph Stilwell home. And Hurley had a theory about the Chinese Communists. The Communist leaders, as Stalin and his foreign minister Molotov had put it, were radishes, red only on the outside. Treated fairly, Hurley believed, they would happily serve under Chiang in a democratic coalition. Chiang did not want him to go to Yan'an, and gave his approval only reluctantly. On 7 November 1944 Hurley's plane touched down at the Communist base. He appeared at the top of the aircraft steps and let out a Choctaw war cry. The welcome party waiting below, Mao Zedong included, was disconcerted. Watching was Pyotr Vladimirov, a Soviet military intelligence officer posted to Yan'an as Moscow's eyes on Mao, and no admirer of his. He found the American "Well groomed and self confident," with "slightly eccentric manners." Then they got down to business. Hurley carried a five-point peace plan, and after much pulling and tugging he and Mao agreed on a revised version. The Communist leaders were impressed that Hurley had taken it upon himself to fly in, and, in the words of the American report on the visit, "cordial relations were established at once." On 10 November Mao signed the five points as chairman of the Communist Party's central committee, with Hurley signing as a witness. Read it today and it sounds wonderful. The government in Chongqing was to be reorganised into a coalition embracing all the parties fighting Japan, with a united military council. The coalition would support Sun Yat-sen's principles for a government "of the people, for the people and by the people", and guarantee freedom of the press, of speech and of assembly, and the right of habeas corpus. It even promised "freedom from fear and freedom from want." Those were two of the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt, in a speech of January 1941, had called the right of every person in the world. All the forces fighting Japan would obey the coalition government, and the supplies coming from foreign powers would be shared out fairly. And the government would recognise the Kuomintang, the Communist Party and every other party fighting Japan as legal. For Mao this was nearly everything he could have hoped for. The Communists would be the Nationalists' legal equals, and their armies would stay intact. In return, Mao gave his word, but only his spoken word, that the Communists would uphold Chiang as president and as chairman of the military council. After Hurley left, Mao was in a cheerful and joking mood. Hurley was pleased too. He thought he had made a great breakthrough. Then Hurley took the five points back to Chongqing, and Chiang turned them down flat. Chiang lamented that Mao had fooled yet another American. T. V. Soong put it more bluntly to Hurley: "The Communists have sold you a bill of goods." Chiang's position was simple. Unless the Communists put their troops under Nationalist command, there would be no place for them in any new government. The government sent back three points of its own. The Communist armies would be reorganised into the National Army and treated like any other units, the party would be made legal, and some Communist officers would sit on the military council. Hurley reversed course and backed Chiang: the Communists must merge their forces with the Nationalists before they could enter any coalition. He told Washington that in all his talks with the Communists he had insisted America would not supply or aid them, either as a party or as a rebellion against the government. Mao was scornful. Chiang, he said, "had the audacity to say that the Chinese Communist Party must hand over its troops before he would bestow 'legal status' upon it". And there, in one sentence, is the problem that would wreck every attempt at peace for years to come. The Communists would only give up their army after a coalition government was formed. The Nationalists would not form a coalition government with any party that had an army. Zhou Enlai, the Communists' envoy in Chongqing, refused to carry Chiang's position back to Yan'an, though he said the talks should go on. Chiang noticed that Zhou, the one Communist he trusted at all, no longer seemed as deferential as before. Chiang, too, played to the Americans. At the new year he promised a constitution soon, a return of government to the people, and a cleanup of his administration. At a conference that January his representative even proposed a war cabinet with Communists in it, a committee of three, American, Nationalist and Communist, to work out how to merge the armies, and an American officer to command the Communist armies until the war ended. Mao and Zhou kept charming the Americans. They asked to meet President Roosevelt, and Mao told an American colonel at Yan'an that the Communist army would serve under an American general "with no strings or conditions attached." It was working. Many Chinese who watched the Communists from outside during the war had come to see them as land reformers and patriots. That was a brand new image for a party once known mostly for its feuds and for butchering the rich. One group in America's wartime intelligence agency even proposed a major intelligence network based at Yan'an, with forward bases and seventeen teams in Communist territory. That kind of recognition would have lifted the Communists' standing higher still. And not every American agreed with Hurley. John S. Service, the American political officer who had been so taken with Yan'an, argued that America should simply tell Chiang it would arm any force that fought Japan, as it had done in Yugoslavia. The year before, Service had written to Stilwell that the Nationalists depended on American support to survive, and that "we need feel no ties of gratitude to Chiang." In March 1945 Mao told Service he could not understand the Americans. Hurley's five points had been a good start. "We don't understand why America's policy seemed to waver after a good start." Neither side of that American argument was simply wrong. If the Communists kept their own army, they would one day use it against the Nationalists. And Chiang was desperate not to let them stand as an independent power, even if that would have helped the war on Japan.

By the start of 1945 it was clear that Hitler's grip on Europe would end within months. Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill turned to finishing the war in Asia as fast as they could. In the New Mexico desert, scientists were building an atomic bomb, but nobody yet knew whether it would work. The Allied chiefs of staff told Roosevelt and Churchill they did not expect victory over Japan until the middle of 1947. So Roosevelt wanted the Soviet Union in the war against Japan. Stalin had promised it in 1943, once the war in Europe turned. Now Roosevelt wanted to be sure he meant it. On 4 February 1945 the three leaders met at Yalta, on the Black Sea, in the Crimea. Most of the talk was about Europe. But Stalin's help in Asia came with a price. He wanted the Kuril Islands, which run from the north of Japan to Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, and the southern half of Sakhalin Island. He wanted military and transport concessions in Manchuria, and he wanted Outer Mongolia kept under Soviet control. The Nationalists still claimed all of Mongolia. In short, Roosevelt gave Stalin back the rights in East Asia that Russia had lost after its war with Japan in 1904 and 1905. Those rights were above all the naval base at Port Arthur, the port of Dalian next to it, and a hand in running the railways across Manchuria. China would keep its sovereignty over Manchuria, on paper. And Stalin wanted all of this agreed without asking China first. In return, Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan no more than ninety days after the war in Europe ended. Roosevelt also got an assurance from Stalin that the Soviet Union would not actively support the Communists against the Nationalists. The deal was made in a series of secret agreements that supplemented the official record of the conference. And Roosevelt agreed not to tell Chiang about the deal until twenty-five Soviet divisions had finished moving to the eastern frontier, which would take three or four months. Roosevelt thought that somewhere down the road he could straighten it all out with Chiang. He was tired, and he wanted no more argument. And in Chongqing, at first, things looked good. Wedemeyer, the American general who had taken over from Stilwell, was optimistic, and told Washington he thought the Communist rebellion could be put down with comparatively small help to Chiang. Hurley believed the Communists' strength was greatly exaggerated. Chiang was not privy to any of the Yalta talks about China's future, but he had his suspicions. He wrote, "I hope Roosevelt isn't plotting with Churchill and Stalin against me." When he read even the public terms, he sank into gloom. "This meeting of the three leaders has already carved the seeds of the Third World War," he wrote. Roosevelt, he added, was still calling it a diplomatic victory. "This is really laughable." Rumours spread of secret clauses. Hurley flew back to Washington to find out what had happened, and after some delay Roosevelt let him see the details. Hurley was shocked by what he read. Finally, under pressure, Roosevelt met China's ambassador in Washington, admitted there was a secret accord, and showed him part of the record. When Chiang read the ambassador's report, his first reaction was outrage. China had been "sold out", and the war of resistance had been waged "in vain!" It was not really the concessions in Manchuria that hurt him. Within a year he would be ready to offer Stalin even more there. It was being disposed of without being asked. And Stalin, meanwhile, briefed Mao right after the conference. The Soviet Red Army was coming. What Stalin did not tell Mao was the price: his promise not to back the Communists. Roosevelt told Chiang about that condition. Stalin never told Mao. So Mao read the moment exactly wrong. He cabled Zhou in Chongqing to break off the talks under Hurley and come home, and called on every Communist to prepare for a hard and bloody struggle against America and Chiang. Mao's confidence rested on one belief, that the Soviet Union's entry into the war would tip the balance toward the Communists. He underestimated how pragmatic Stalin could be. On 2 April, back in Washington, Hurley held a press conference and announced that America would recognise only the National Government and have no further dealings with the Communists. Mao was furious. "For all its high-sounding language," he said, "the Hurley-Chiang racket is designed to sacrifice the interests of the Chinese people", and to "lay a mine to set off large-scale civil war in China." All through that speech he called Chiang His Majesty, and he mocked Chiang's plans for a national assembly as no better than the paper parliaments of the warlord years. Ten days after Hurley's press conference, on 12 April 1945, Roosevelt died, and Harry S. Truman became president. Truman soon told Churchill and Stalin that every agreement Roosevelt had made would be scrupulously supported. Chiang was outraged. It cut the ground from under him in any bargaining with Moscow. In July Chiang sent T. V. Soong to Moscow to settle terms with Stalin. Stalin agreed to recognise only Chiang as China's ruler, but he demanded that China accept Outer Mongolia's independence and give the Soviet Union a privileged place in Manchuria. When Truman refused to step into those talks, Chiang raged in his diary. "I didn't acknowledge Yalta. I didn't take part, I don't have responsibility for it, so why should I carry it out?" He wrote that "American diplomacy really has no center, no policy, no morals."

That spring both parties held congresses, and the Communists timed theirs to overlap with the Nationalists'. In April 1945 Chiang called the Nationalists' Sixth Party Congress, the first since 1938, which met in May. It had a liberal gloss: a move toward several parties in a national assembly, local elections, lower rents, land tax reform, and loud public attacks on corruption. Members of the Nationalist Youth Corps, led by Chiang's own son, were among the loudest critics of corruption in the party and the government, and Chiang allowed it. But foreign and independent Chinese reporters took all that candour simply as proof of how rotten things were. Behind the speeches, the Nationalist state was in terrible shape. In Henan, relief workers from the new United Nations relief agency found some seventy percent of the people in dire need in 1945, and more than two million starving. The congress also showed something darker: Chiang meant to set up committees to oversee, and limit, any move toward democracy. And yet on the battlefield that spring, Chiang's armies did something new. When the Japanese commander in China attacked into Hubei province, Chongqing sent sixty-seven divisions, 600,000 men, with American fighter-bombers overhead and Wedemeyer taking the lead. In three months they turned the Japanese back. With good commanders, modern weapons and steady supplies, the Chinese army had beaten a large Japanese force. Chiang learned to work with this American. Wedemeyer said later that when Chiang was offered honey rather than vinegar, he was willing to go along with plans in which he was mostly an onlooker. The Communists answered with their Seventh Congress, held in Yan'an from 23 April to 11 June 1945, and timed to overlap with the Nationalists' own. It was their first congress since 1928, when they had held one in Moscow, in exile from the Nationalist purge. And Mao opened it with a piece of theatre. He would not begin until, on his personal orders, Wang Ming, still claiming to be ill, had been carried into the hall on a stretcher. Wang Jiaxiang, who had once been acting head of the party's delegation to the Comintern in Moscow, had fallen ill again, and he was carried in on a stretcher too. Only then did Mao open the congress. With the two of them there, he said, "This makes our congress truly a congress of unity!" Wang Ming and Zhou Enlai were both made members of the Central Committee. But Wang no longer counted for anything, and Zhou had shown such complete submission that Mao had long since seen how useful he could be. On the opening day the tone was confident, even aggressive. Mao announced, "Our Communist Party has never been so powerful, the revolutionary base areas have never had so large a population and so large an army". He was officially acknowledged as the party's paramount leader. The process that had begun with Rectification reached its climax here. Mao chose the members of the Central Committee himself. He dominated every session, and he gave the main report, On Coalition Government, setting out his New Democracy all over again. There were 754 delegates, speaking for 1.2 million party members, and apart from Wang Ming they seem sincerely to have seen Mao as the conscience of the party. They were ready to die for him. Just before the congress, a party meeting had adopted a new official history. In it Mao had always been right, and every leader who had ever crossed him, real or imagined, had led the party astray, first to the right and then to the left. Then came a new party constitution, and Liu Shaoqi presented it. Liu was the party's master organiser, a thin, tireless Hunan man whom Mao had brought to Yan'an in 1942 to run party affairs. In his report, Liu outdid every other delegate in his unrestrained praise of Mao. The constitution itself named Mao Zedong Thought as the foundation of the party, the teaching that joined the theories of Marx and Lenin to the practice of the Chinese revolution. The phrase Mao Zedong Thought had first been put forward by Wang Jiaxiang in July 1943. Before that the party had tried out a whole string of names, the theories of Comrade Mao Zedong, the line of Comrade Mao Zedong, the path of Comrade Mao Zedong. Some of the flatterers preferred Mao Zedongism. Wang Jiaxiang's version won. It was Liu Shaoqi whom Mao had trusted with much of the work of preparing this congress, and Liu was already Mao's deputy on the Revolutionary Military Council. Chiang's congress had at least heard criticism. Mao's did not. He heard no criticism of his party, his government, his army or his policies, and the new constitution centralised power even further. Mao closed the congress with a story. He liked to lighten his heavy theory with tales like this one. A foolish old man of ancient legend, Mao said, found his way blocked by two mountains, so he started to dig them away. His neighbours laughed at him for taking on an endless task. The old man answered that if he died before he finished, his sons and grandsons would carry on. "God was moved by this," said Mao, "and he sent down two angels, who carried away the mountains on their backs." In Mao's telling, God was the masses of the Chinese people, and the two mountains were imperialism and feudalism. With the masses behind them, he asked, "why can't these two mountains be cleared away?" Meanwhile, the warmth between the Communists and the Americans was cooling. In July Stilwell's successor, General Albert Wedemeyer, wrote to Mao asking about four American soldiers and their interpreters who had parachuted by accident into Communist territory in May and been held in what the Communists called protective custody. Wedemeyer was polite about it. But the warmth of the year before was clearly gone.

Then the war ended, very fast. By the middle of 1945 Japan had been driven from its most important Pacific conquests. American bombers flying from Saipan were burning Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, and Okinawa had fallen after fighting of immense savagery. Japan's war economy was close to collapse. But the Nationalist armies, too, were close to collapse after the Ichigo offensive of the year before, and the state they fought for was riddled with corruption and inflation. In China, Wedemeyer was using Stilwell's old plans to train thirty-nine new Chinese divisions to take back the east. Chiang refused even to consider letting Stilwell come back to lead them. And Stilwell got a last revenge. At his prompting, Claire Lee Chennault, the American air commander, was recalled to America at the end of July. Most people expected the war in Asia to drag on into 1946 or 1947, and the thought of it was deeply depressing. At Potsdam, America, Britain and China called on Japan to surrender without conditions, warning that "the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." On 6 August 1945 an American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb used against people on the city of Hiroshima. It burned some 66,000 people to death in an instant. In Moscow, Japan's ambassador, Sato Naotake, had been trying to use the Soviet Union to reach a negotiated peace with America. At five in the afternoon on 8 August, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, called him in and asked him to take a seat. Then Molotov read him a statement. The Soviet government had accepted the Allies' proposal to join the war, and "from August 9, the Soviet Union will consider herself in a state of war against Japan." At one in the morning on 9 August, the Soviet Union sent its troops into Manchuria. Almost 750,000 Red Army soldiers stormed across the border. Waiting for them was the Kwantung Army, the Japanese army in Manchuria. It had seized the region in 1931 and ruled it ever since behind the puppet state of Manchukuo. But its elite units were gone, sent off to fight in China or to defend Japan itself. Within five days the Soviets were deep inside northern Manchuria and moving toward the Chinese and Korean borders. The same day the Soviets crossed the border, a second atomic bomb fell, on Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people or more. In Tokyo a few diehards still talked of fighting on, even if they had to eat grass, swallow dirt and lie in the fields. But the end was certain. The Soviet war with Japan destroyed the Kwantung Army. For the people of Manchuria it was the first of many shocks. They had lived for half a generation under Japan, which brought discrimination and occasional brutality, but also relative peace and economic growth. Now their world collapsed. After the Soviet war came six months of Soviet occupation, marked by destruction, pillage and rape. Stalin had been getting ready since the spring. On 6 April he cancelled the Soviet Union's neutrality pact with Japan, and he ordered a special unit in the Soviet Far East to prepare to move into Manchuria. That unit had a strange history. It was the Soviet 88th Brigade, made up of Chinese Communist fighters whom the Japanese had driven into Siberia in the early 1930s. They had been training for some fourteen years, waiting for the chance to go home. Now its Chinese officers, mostly Manchurian by birth, fanned out to fifty-seven places across Manchuria to take charge of city garrisons and local government. For Mao, Manchuria was the great chance. Three days before Japan surrendered, the Communist army's commander, Zhu De, ordered four armed groups into Manchuria to work with the Red Army. The largest was 100,000 troops of the Eighth Route Army under Lin Biao. Mao had finally linked up with the Soviet Red Army, a goal he had chased for nine years. Mao also sent the Communists' own Manchurian troops north, under General Wan Yi, to a home they had not seen for fourteen years. And Zhang Xuezhi, the brother of the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, led another small band of Manchurians home. The Young Marshal himself, who had once ruled Manchuria, was still under house arrest. Some of Chiang's generals urged him to bring Zhang back and give him a big role there. Chiang refused. The Communists began taking in 75,000 former Manchukuo puppet troops, thousands of jobless young Manchurians, and some of the 80,000 bandits roaming the mountains. And the Soviets began handing the Chinese Communists a huge store of captured Japanese weapons and supplies. They shipped the most modern weapons and machinery home to the Soviet Union, and kept older Japanese tanks and guns in an arsenal on the Mongolian border, to be handed over later. They also gave the Communists captured Japanese arms factories, and the Communists found several hidden arsenals the Soviets had missed. The Japanese haul in Manchuria included 925 fighter planes, 360 tanks, 2,600 cannon, 8,900 machine guns, 100,000 horses and 21,000 vehicles. Chiang, to be fair, probably inherited even larger arsenals from the Japanese south of the Great Wall. Stalin kept up the charade. In late August he assured the Americans that the Red Army, in its sweep across Manchuria, had not met any Chinese Communist forces at all. Stalin said he expected the Chinese government to send troops to take over the Manchurian cities soon.

On the evening of 10 August, Chiang Kai-shek was at dinner in Chongqing with the Mexican ambassador when he heard loud applause and then firecrackers from a nearby American military headquarters. The Japanese government had announced that it would accept the Allies' surrender terms. Chiang finished the banquet. Then he met his senior officers and sent orders to every Chinese commander: the Japanese were to surrender only to officers of the Republic of China's army. He told the Japanese commander in China, General Yasuji Okamura, to stop all military activity and take his orders from the Chinese army command. The next day he told the Communist commanders, Zhu De and Peng Dehuai, to obey their Nationalist war zone commanders and not to move their troops without orders. And on 12 August he told the Communist troops they had no authority to accept any Japanese surrender at all. On the morning of 15 August, Chiang rose at his usual early hour. "I thanked God that the mercy he gave me was so great," he wrote. "Every word in Psalm 9 is true, in my experience." Late that morning an aide brought a shortwave radio into his large, spare office and tuned it to Radio Tokyo. Chiang, who understood Japanese, listened quietly as the Japanese people heard their emperor's voice for the first time in history, telling them to bear the unbearable. Japan had accepted the Allies' terms. It was surrendering without conditions. Chiang went to a stifling hot broadcast studio to announce the news to the Chinese people. He wore a simple military uniform. His secretary was sick, so he had written the speech himself. "Our faith in justice through black and hopeless days and eight long years of struggle has today been rewarded," he declared. He gave special mention to two people, Jesus Christ and Sun Yat-sen. Chiang had been baptised a Methodist in 1930, a few years after he married Soong Mei-ling, whose family were Methodists. Most Chinese could hardly understand his thick Ningbo accent, but they knew what he was saying. Ningbo is a port city south of Shanghai, near Chiang's home town, and its dialect is very different from the speech of Beijing. He told his countrymen that the people of Japan were not their enemy, and that they should never for a moment "think of revenge or heap abuses upon the innocent people of Japan." He also spoke of the future, and in the last lines there was a warning for an enemy he did not name. "The current peace procured by our armed forces is not the full realization of eternal peace." Only when his enemies were conquered on a battlefield of reason, he said, and transformed into peace lovers, would the war's final aim be reached. The news spread by radio, by shouts and by runners through every city and town. Even villages with no radio seemed to hear within the hour. Women, men and children, a few hundred million of them, poured into the streets yelling and cheering, while Japanese soldiers stayed in their barracks in a daze. Millions upon millions of firecrackers crackled through the night and into the next day. In Chongqing, crowds mobbed the Americans in the streets, clutching at their uniforms and shouting that America was the very best. Theodore H. White, an American reporter in Chongqing, watched Chiang leave the radio studio. For a fleeting moment, he wrote, "the smooth exterior of this contemporary mandarin was punctured, the weariness and strain of the years broke through." Then it was gone, and Chiang passed through the cheering crowd, nodding but unsmiling. He had reason to be weary. By the best estimates, some 14 to 20 million Chinese had died in the eight years of war: bombed, slaughtered, drowned, starved or killed in battle. The great majority of the Chinese soldiers killed had died in Chiang's armies, not the Communists'. And yet China came out of the war in the strongest position it had ever held in the world, and weaker than it had been for nearly a century. The old privileges of foreigners, their right to live under their own laws on Chinese soil, were gone. For the first time since 1842 China was fully sovereign again, and it would sit among the Big Four in the new United Nations. But the country was hollowed out, and split between two parties that talked of compromise and seemed set for civil war. In Yan'an the mood was very different. The American observers there noted that the Communists greeted the news with a hastily organised, spiritless demonstration. People across China saw the victory as Chiang's. On paper Chiang held every advantage. He was more popular and more powerful than he had ever been, and the Americans were finishing the training and arming of thirty-nine government divisions. And yet Mao was the more optimistic of the two. Chiang had long believed, privately, that the Communist officers, soldiers and cadres were on the whole more dedicated and disciplined than his own, and it darkened even this moment of triumph. For the Communists, though, the suddenness of the end was close to a disaster. Mao had perhaps hoped the war would run on into 1946, giving the party time to build its strength. Now came the scramble for what Japan left behind. America backed Chiang. Japanese forces were to surrender only to the Nationalist armies, except in Manchuria, where they would surrender to the Soviet Union. The trouble was that most of Chiang's troops were far away in the northwest and southwest, without trucks or working railways, weeks of marching from the Japanese garrisons. So Chiang arranged with General Okamura that, until government troops arrived, the Japanese garrisons would resist any other troops who demanded their surrender. In other words, Chiang ordered the Japanese to keep fighting the Communists, through September, a full month after Japan's surrender. One of his generals, Bai Chongxi, wanted to go further and hold off the formal surrender, leaving the Japanese free to fight the Communists hard. Chiang did not go that far. So the cities stayed in Japanese hands until Nationalist troops arrived, and the Communists moved into the countryside all around them. Within a year of Japan's surrender, the Communists had grown from 57 counties to 310. In the north, Communist units attacked Japanese garrisons in smaller cities and along the railways. Some 7,000 Japanese were killed or wounded, but none of the garrisons the Communists overran surrendered to them. On the Nationalist side, the old warlord of Shanxi province, Yan Xishan, began recruiting Japanese officers and soldiers to fight the Communists. Chiang told him to stop. It would hand the Communists propaganda, he said, and the Americans would not appreciate it. Chiang had other worries too. He hoped to occupy Hong Kong and return it to Chinese rule, and the British, suspecting as much, rushed to take the colony back first. Then American planes and ships went to work. Over the next few months, American airmen and sailors carried somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Nationalist troops out of the southwest to the key points south of the Great Wall. That airlift and sealift probably stopped the Communists from taking firm control north of the Yellow River, and perhaps even north of the Yangtze. On 2 September, aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan signed the formal surrender, and firecrackers crackled across China again. Chiang had kept a daily vow for seventeen years to wipe out Japan's humiliation of China. Now he had done it, with a great deal of help. He was not happy. "Everybody takes this as a day of glory;" he wrote, "I alone feel great shame and sorrow." Stalin and Mao, he feared, could "plunge China into chaos and anarchy."

And what of Mao? On 14 August, Chiang signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. It gave the Soviets privileges in northeast China, and gave up China's claim to Outer Mongolia. Mao was shell-shocked. He had never imagined that Stalin would betray him by signing a separate agreement with Chiang. Stalin had little faith that the Communists could beat the Nationalist armies, and he did not want to waste effort on allies who would be pitting themselves against America. His overriding fear was a third world war while America was the only power with the atomic bomb. So he wanted the Chinese Communists to settle in the countryside and do nothing to provoke the Americans. Stalin told them their best hope was to negotiate a continuation of their alliance with the Nationalists. Was Mao really abandoned? Here the sources disagree. On one side, Stalin betrayed him that August: a treaty with Chiang, an order to go and talk, and no help while America was watching. On the other, Mao's later story of being left alone hides how deep the cooperation between the Soviets and the Chinese Communists ran in Manchuria from the moment the Red Army crossed the border. Either way, in public Stalin backed Chiang, and Mao had to play along. Meanwhile Chiang made his move. On the first day of peace, right after his radio broadcast, he cabled Mao an invitation to come to Chongqing and talk. Chiang's telegram said that eternal peace was on the horizon, and sincerely invited Mao to the temporary capital to discuss matters of critical importance to the nation. Mao saw it as a trick, a way for Chiang to look like the man who wanted peace. He replied that he would send Zhou Enlai. Chiang cabled back that Mao himself should come. Then on 20 August came a message from Stalin, warning that a full-blown civil war in China now would be disastrous. Mao turned on a coin. Two days later the party told all its bases that Chiang, with help from the puppets, the Japanese army and the Americans, would soon hold the big cities and the railways. The Communists would take the small towns and the villages. Mao told his Politburo: "We want to bore our way in and give Chiang Kai-shek's face a good washing, but we don't want to cut off his head." On 23 August he told them plainly that the Soviet Union, bound by its treaty with Chiang, could not help them. Mao was appalled by what he saw as Stalin's treachery. But he had to go. "I was compelled to go since Stalin insisted," he said later. Still, he would not go without protection. He held back until the American ambassador, Hurley, agreed to come to Yan'an and fly with him. Before he left, Mao wrote a circular for the party explaining that some concessions would be needed in the talks, to wreck the Nationalists' plot for civil war and to win the world's sympathy. On 28 August 1945 Mao flew to Chongqing, with Zhou Enlai, a Nationalist general, Zhang Zhizhong, and Hurley at his side. He was fifty-two years old, and it was the first time he had ever been in an airplane. At the airfield Mao smiled as he said goodbye to his wife, Jiang Qing, and the Politburo. But to Vladimirov, the Soviet officer, it was obvious he was unhappy. He walked to the plane as if "he were going to his execution." And in front of everyone, for the first time, Mao kissed Jiang Qing on the lips in public. In Chongqing that same morning, Chiang had risen at five and prayed that Mao would have a change of heart and let the country unite in peace. He told a meeting of senior officers that they would treat Mao "with friendliness and sincerity". In politics they would be generous, he said, but the merger of the armies had to be thoroughgoing and genuine. On that, there could be no compromise. That night Chiang gave a reception and a dinner for his guest. The two men had not seen each other in almost twenty years. When they met, they smiled faintly. Both had served Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party in the 1920s, when the Communists were its allies, before Chiang turned on them in 1927. Chiang despised Mao as an enemy of Chinese culture and a Soviet lackey. Mao looked down on Chiang intellectually and ideologically. But each respected the other's iron will. They could hardly have been more different: Mao drinking, expansive and funny, Chiang a teetotaller, and silent. At one point Mao raised a glass of fiery Maotai liquor and gave the ancient toast once offered to emperors: "President Chiang Kai-shek, ten thousand years!" Maotai is a strong spirit distilled from sorghum, the drink of Chinese state banquets. Mao stayed six weeks, lodged in a guest house inside Chiang's own compound. Official teams did the formal bargaining. Chiang and Mao stayed behind the scenes and met on their own at least nine times, in long private talks that were formal but always civil. Chiang pressed his points. Mao, to avoid a quarrel, was either vaguely agreeable or evasive. There were real concessions. The Communists dropped their demand for a coalition government, and agreed to a political consultative conference that would arrange elections for a national assembly. Chiang, for his part, conceded that the Communists could keep twelve divisions of their own for a time, and hold one provincial governorship, so long as they truly obeyed the government's orders and laws. At one point Zhou's team asked for forty-eight Communist divisions and sole control of five provinces and four big cities. Chiang exploded, though only in his diary. "How can there be creatures of such a base and silly nature?" Mao, for his part, told Chiang that once they agreed which areas the Communists would hold, he would pull his forces out of everywhere else. Even twelve divisions broke Chiang's own rule of one country, one army. He meant it to be temporary. Hurley sat in the middle of it all. At one point he reported to Washington that the two sides had agreed on a good deal, and differed on two points: who would appoint governors in the provinces the Communists held, and how many Communist troops would be in the peacetime army. The Communists claimed the right to choose their own governors. The government said that until there was a constitution, only the president could appoint them. Hurley told the negotiators that in his opinion "they were attempting to settle too many details". If they could agree on the basic principles, he said, the details could be worked out from them. He reported something else. "The Generalissimo had given Mao his word and pledged his character for the safe conduct of Mao" and his party, and promised to fly them home whenever they wished. And Hurley was hopeful. He wrote that "the discussion and rumors of civil war recede as the conference continues." Hurley was wrong. Even as the two men talked, both were getting ready to fight. Two days after the talks opened, American transport planes flew Nationalist troops into Nanjing and Shanghai. Chiang was sending out urgent orders to prepare large forces for Manchuria. And Truman agreed that the American navy would carry over 200,000 Nationalist troops to Manchurian ports as soon as they were ready. Soviet officers were quietly advising the Communists to send most of their troops, now about half a million, to Manchuria. Mao hardly needed telling. Manchuria, he told his colleagues, was "the golden opportunity that occurs once in a thousand years." The battle for it would decide the fate of the revolution. While still a guest in Chiang's compound, Mao ordered the main forces of the Communist New Fourth Army to move north from their bases south of the Yangtze, to block the road to Manchuria. And in public? On 18 September, at a tea party in Chongqing, Mao proclaimed that "all parties must unite under the leadership of Chairman Chiang to build modern China." On 9 October Mao came to Chiang's parlour to say goodbye. Chiang pleaded with him to give up armed force and compete on policy instead. Otherwise, Chiang told him, the two of them would go down as the culprits of history, answerable not only to their own country but "to humanity as well." Mao asked to stay one more night. They talked until nine in the evening, and Chiang wondered whether it was "remotely possible" that he had touched Mao's heart. The next day was Double Ten, the anniversary of the revolution of 1911. Mao joined Chiang for breakfast, and the talks closed with a vague but upbeat statement. Both sides agreed to build a political democracy, to unify China's armies under Chiang, and to call the consultative conference as soon as possible. The devilish details were left alone. After Mao left, Chiang walked in his garden. A settlement was not possible, he now felt sure, until Mao believed he could not hold what he had without Soviet backing. Back in Yan'an, Mao told his comrades that the agreement signed in Chongqing was "a mere scrap of paper," and he told the Soviet representative that civil war was "virtually inevitable." Within six months, he told the party in Manchuria, they had to smash Chiang's offensives and force him to recognise the autonomous status of North China and Manchuria. Both men had needed to be seen trying for peace. Both were already convinced that civil war was coming. And the six weeks in Chongqing produced no agreement firm enough to hold. So, after all the toasts and all the talk, which of them was actually ready for the peace? Neither of them was ready for a peace that meant sharing. And then, at the end of 1945, Hurley suddenly resigned, accusing left-leaning American diplomats of undermining him from within. So Truman decided to send to China the most prestigious man America had: George Marshall, the general who had just stepped down as chief of staff of the army. Next time: Marshall comes to stop a civil war before it starts. And for a few months, it looks as if he might.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 315-317, 335-336, 336-338, 338-339, 339-340, 340-342, 346-347
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 2-7, 7-9, 9-10, 240-241, 241-243, 292-294, 298-299, 301-302, 305-307, 311-313, 315-316, 316-318, 318-319, 319-321, 321-323
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), pp. 30-32, 82-84
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 336-338, 338-339
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
• United States Department of State, United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949 (the China White Paper) (1949), pp. 74-75, 106-107, https://archive.org/download/VanSlykeLymanTheChinaWhitePaper1949/Van%20Slyke%2C%20Lyman%20-%20The%20China%20White%20Paper%201949.pdf