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Revolution and Civil War, episode 25

General Marshall's Truce

In December 1945 America sends George Marshall, the general who ran its war, to stop a civil war in China before it starts, and for a few months he seems to succeed: a ceasefire, a conference on a coalition government, an agreement to merge the armies. The episode follows Marshall and Chiang Kai-shek from the Nationalist takeover of the occupied cities to the collapse of the truces in the summer of 1946 and full-scale civil war, and turns to the Communist countryside, where Mao Zedong orders land taken from landlords and given to the landless, asking whether land reform helped win the war or nearly lost it. It leans entirely on scholars, with a little of the Communists' own documents.

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Transcript

Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Mao Zedong flew to Chongqing for six weeks of talks with Chiang Kai-shek, the first time the two men had met in nearly twenty years. At the welcome dinner Mao raised his glass to Chiang with the old toast once offered to emperors, wishing him ten thousand years. And as soon as he was safely home again, Mao called the agreement they had signed a mere scrap of paper, and said civil war was virtually inevitable. This time, America tries to prove him wrong. It sends the most respected soldier it has, and for a few months it looks as if he might pull it off. But before we meet him, I want to look at what Chiang Kai-shek was doing with his victory, because the story of the next four years starts there. Japan's sudden collapse in August 1945 came as a near disaster for the Communists. Chiang used his standing abroad and his close ties to the Americans to demand that everything the Japanese held be handed over to his forces, and to his forces only. Then his soldiers fanned out across the country, carried in American ships and planes, and helped along by Japanese officers. Over the following months, American airmen and sailors moved somewhere between four and five hundred thousand government troops into the regions south of the Great Wall. That airlift and sealift probably kept the Communists from making the land north of the Yellow River their own, and perhaps even the land north of the Yangtze. The scale of the turnaround is hard to take in. In the summer of 1945, Chiang controlled less than fifteen percent of China's territory. A year later, more or less effectively, he controlled almost eighty percent. The cities came first. By early October 1945, apart from the cities of the Northeast and a few small towns on the northern borders, the Nationalists held all of urban China. And at first the welcome was real. In Shanghai, between September and late November, the crowds at the rallies went well beyond the polite homage any Chinese city paid its new rulers. The Nationalists were learning about propaganda, too. Some of Chiang's right wing advisers had studied how Hitler and Stalin did it, and how the Communists had done it during the war. So all over central and southern China, Japanese printing presses began churning out leaflets praising the Generalissimo and his vision of one united China. Generalissimo was Chiang's title as supreme commander of China's armed forces, and it was the name most foreigners knew him by. But there was a problem in the cities, and it was a problem of bodies. The small teams of party men who flew into the cities after the surrender expected troops, police and staff to follow within days. Instead, Chiang sent his armies where the Communists or local strongmen threatened, and the teams in the cities found themselves with no backing at all. The temptation was obvious. The Japanese had in effect been holding the cities for the Nationalists since August, so why not keep using them? And so, that autumn, to the dismay of the people living there, more and more Japanese soldiers could be seen in the cities doing guard duty, and even patrolling the streets. Mostly it was local party men who asked for this. Chiang agreed grudgingly. He knew the political price of using the old occupiers would be high, but he thought disorder in cities under his own flag would cost him more. On 16 December 1945, Chiang came to Beijing, his first visit to the old capital since the early 1930s. A Chinese American who was there as a boy remembered that when the government troops had arrived two months earlier, there had been looting and raping. Even so, when the Generalissimo drove into the great plaza of the Forbidden City, one hundred thousand students gave him a tumultuous greeting, and it thrilled him. He told them that in the past the Chinese had been like a pile of sand, and that this had invited their enemies in. Now they must gather under one flag, and work together. When he finished, thousands rushed forward just to touch his clothes, or to look at him. It took his bodyguards half an hour to get him to his car. Chiang kept reassuring his security men. "They are well intentioned. They mean well." Soon a huge portrait of the thin, stern Generalissimo went up over the entrance to the Forbidden City, at Tiananmen. From Beijing he flew on to Nanjing, the capital he had fled in 1937, just before the Japanese army reached it. From the plane he could see the great tomb of Sun Yat-sen. His heart "throbbed with a thousand emotions", and he thanked "Our Heavenly Father" for the "glorious victory" and his own safe return. He rode from the airport in the back of a long open car, sitting stiff and upright, through streets lined with cheering people, and tears filled his eyes. Back in his old house in the military academy grounds, he took a brush and wrote a banner naming it the Hall of Christian Victory. Chiang had been baptized a Methodist in 1930, and he spoke of his faith more and more openly as he grew older. Now, think about who came home with him. Several million people had waited out the war in Chongqing, Kunming and the other free cities, most of them government and party workers of middle or higher rank. They had lived through bombing, disease and hunger. When they came back to Nanjing, to Shanghai and to hundreds of other cities and towns, they came with a deep sense of triumph, and in many cases of entitlement. Among the hundred and fifty million who had stayed behind under the Japanese, a few had collaborated and done well, a few had resisted, and most had gone along only as far as they had to. But in the minds of many of the returning exiles, a cloud hung over every educated or well off person who had stayed. Students and teachers across the occupied areas were presumed corrupted, and made to pass Nationalist ideological tests, simple enough tests, but insulting. To run the provinces and cities, Chiang appointed mostly Kuomintang generals as governors and mayors, and most of them had not grown up in the places they were sent to govern. Under the emperors, officials were never sent to govern their own home provinces, so that they could not favour their own kin. The practice was an old Chinese tradition, but after the war it bred cronies and corruption instead. The most harmful choice of all was sending southerners to govern the provinces of Manchuria. And then came the carpetbaggers. Before any real government had been set up in the cities, trainloads of them came down from Chongqing, newcomers using their government connections to make themselves rich. The returning officials grabbed whatever they could find: factories, farms, buildings, cars, machinery, anything that could be sold or simply kept. Many officials kept their hands clean. But the government could not deal with the ones who did not, and that tore into its right to rule. Meanwhile, the people who had actually run things for the Japanese were treated very unevenly. A few were put on trial, but many officials who had worked under the occupation simply went on working under Chiang's restored government at Nanjing, often to public dismay. The most popular Chinese film of the late 1940s told the story in a way everyone understood. In it, a young couple are split up by the war with Japan. She stays with the resistance in the countryside; he goes to the wartime capital, Chongqing. In 1945 he comes to Shanghai as a high official of the returning government, already rotten, and sets up a fine house for his mistress instead of sending for his wife. When his faithful wife finally reaches Shanghai, she ends up working as a servant in the mistress's house. The film was called Spring River Flows East, and audiences did not need the allegory explained. There was money trouble too. Here the sources disagree. The people of the occupied areas had been using the puppet regime's paper money, and it had to be swapped for the government's own notes, the fabi. On the black market, the rate had climbed to about two hundred puppet notes for one, and Chiang set the official rate at that level. Fabi simply means legal tender: the paper currency of the Nationalist government. The newspaper Dagongbao wrote that people woke up one morning to find they had lost their homes and property, and that wealth built up over generations had changed hands in the blink of an eye. Later writers repeated the charge. The other side says it does not hold up. Land, houses, jewellery, gold and silver, the ways almost every Chinese family kept its wealth, were untouched by the exchange rate, and after a year of expecting Japan's defeat, few people still held much of the puppet money. Either way, people in the occupied areas came away with a grievance. Chiang knew some of this. Two months after the surrender he called in the new senior officials of Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin and scolded them for the bad discipline of the men taking over their cities. Some of the people closest to him, men who were not corrupt themselves, also warned him how fast it was spreading. But for all his ranting, Chiang thought corruption, like inflation, a secondary matter. It was bad, he thought, but not "rampant." Real action against stealing at the top would raise awkward political problems, and so in his view it could mostly wait until the country was truly united. Out in the countryside, very little changed at all. When the Japanese withdrew to their barracks and the Nationalists moved in, life in the villages and small towns went on much as before. In most places, the local elites who had dominated a county during the occupation stayed right where they were, now pledging their loyalty to their new masters. Here and there, rich families who had fled to the far west came home and took revenge on the collaborators who had replaced them. But on the whole, the counties that came back to the government in 1945 stayed remarkably calm. In the summer of 1945, Chiang had controlled less than fifteen percent of China. A year later, more or less effectively, he controlled almost eighty percent. And yet the way they handled these months would matter to their fall as much as any battle they lost. Because many people felt that instead of relief at the end of nine years of war, the government was helping itself to rights and opportunities that had belonged to them.

George Marshall
George Marshall. NASA on The Commons, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

In Washington, meanwhile, America's China policy was in turmoil. On 27 November 1945, the American ambassador in China, Patrick J. Hurley, suddenly resigned in a huff, denouncing people in his own government whom he accused of working against him. Truman decided he needed an even more distinguished envoy, someone who could reach America's goals in China before everything fell apart. And he knew exactly whom he wanted. George Marshall had been the army's chief of staff, America's top soldier, through the whole Second World War. He had just retired from the army as one of America's three most eminent generals. He and his wife Katherine had been back at their home in Leesburg, Virginia, for only a few minutes when the telephone rang. It was the President. Truman said, "General, I want you to go to China for me." "Yes, Mr. President," Marshall replied, and hung up. He wanted to break the news to Katherine after she had rested. Instead, she heard it first on the radio. Her husband had agreed to go to China and bring about a democratic coalition between the Communists and the Nationalists. That was the public task. But on 8 December, before he left, Marshall had two meetings with Truman and his secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, and they talked about what would happen if it failed. Marshall was to lean on Chiang to make reasonable concessions, and to hint that America's aid depended on it. But what if Chiang made none, the talks collapsed, and America cut him off? Then, Marshall feared, Russia would take power in Manchuria, and China would end up like Korea, split into a Communist part and a non Communist part. So the next day he spelled it out. If Chiang would not be reasonable, it would still be necessary for America, through Marshall, to keep backing the National Government. The President agreed. That line was not in Marshall's written instructions. Remember that promise. It was the card that made every threat Marshall carried a little less real. The instructions the world saw were firmer. On 15 December Truman declared that it was in the most vital interest of America and all the United Nations that the Chinese people "overlook no opportunity to adjust their internal differences promptly by methods of peaceful negotiation." He called for an end to the fighting, promised there would be no American military intervention in China's civil strife, and urged a national conference of all the main political groups, to bring them into one government with fair representation. And Marshall was authorized to tell Chiang and the other leaders, with the utmost frankness, that "a China disunited and torn by civil strife" was no place for American aid. But in the same statement, Truman called Chiang's government the practical instrument for uniting China, and said unity meant getting rid of autonomous armies, such as the Communists'. When Chiang read that, he was delighted. It was everything he had hoped for. The mission took both sides by surprise. Chiang feared that Marshall would stop him from beating the Communists by force, if it came to that. Mao, on the other hand, had been told by Stalin that Marshall was coming to carry out a Soviet and American compromise over China, and he welcomed what he took to be a change in American policy. In the Communist camp, the man who would face Marshall across the table was Zhou Enlai, who understood earnest Americans better than anyone. In internal papers, Zhou wrote that the goal in these talks was to "neutralize the United States" and to make use of America's own divisions over China. Zhou was confident that the gap between America and Chiang, and his own knowledge of how Americans thought, would let the party come out well from the collapse of the talks, a collapse he thought inevitable. On the Nationalist side, Chen Lifu, one of Chiang's most hard line advisers and the head of the party's conservative faction, saw it differently. At the start of the mission, even he conceded the point. "Marshall is too big. He will force a solution." Yet Chen also urged Chiang to turn the mission down, because if it failed, as it probably would, the Americans would blame Chiang's government, not the Communists. Chiang rejected the advice. He needed American money, guns and ships, and above all he needed American pressure on the Russians. Marshall landed at Shanghai on 18 December. Waiting for him was General Albert Wedemeyer, America's chief of staff in China, and at his hotel Marshall showed him his instructions. Wedemeyer read them and said the Nationalists had most of the power and would not give it up, while the Communists were just as determined to seize it all with Soviet help. Peace between the two, he thought, was remote. Marshall reacted angrily. He intended to accomplish his mission, he said, and Wedemeyer was going to help him. It seems Wedemeyer never again told him frankly what he thought was happening. The next day Marshall flew to Nanjing, where Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, were waiting in the Generalissimo's small two storey brick house in the army headquarters compound. Marshall arrived at Chiang's office in uniform, carrying a cane, in a tan British style overcoat with a fur collar and his army cap. Chiang was impressed. He held out his hand, and found Marshall's handshake as soft as his own. The two men had been on opposite sides of a bitter wartime quarrel, but they were alike. Both were reserved, formal and, to put it plainly, stiff. Neither had much of a sense of humour, and both prized duty, honour and discipline. Marshall, early in his time as the army's chief of staff, had asked Roosevelt to stop calling him George and stick to formal titles. Chiang would have approved. Chiang saw him as a man of honour, "a fine Christian gentleman", whom he might win over, as he had won over most of the envoys Washington had sent him. In that first meeting Marshall said both he and the President understood how hard the talks would be, and that the heart of the problem was the Communist army and its refusal to give up its independence. For Chiang, it was enormously important to hear that said again. And Soong Mei-ling was there, as she would be at every meeting. Chiang insisted on it, even when she was sick or tired and tried to beg off. She often took Marshall's side when he disagreed with her husband. Years later Marshall said that during his mission "Madame was on my side". Then Marshall flew on to Chongqing, where he set up his headquarters in a villa called Happiness Gardens. The next day he met Zhou Enlai, relaxed, engaging and sophisticated, yet unassuming. Zhou flattered America without shame. China, he said, should learn from America's democracy, its farming reforms and its industry. Marshall's reports show no sign of doubt. "This intense Communistic thing," Marshall told an interviewer many years later, "I was not aware of really in detail until I got over there after the war." That night the Chiangs gave a grand banquet for Marshall's birthday. It was another good beginning. Marshall wanted a ceasefire first. He proposed a Committee of Three to settle its terms: a senior Nationalist, Zhang Qun, a Communist, Zhou Enlai, and Marshall himself. Chiang was elated, and decided he could certainly trust Marshall. Then, to everyone's surprise, Marshall talked Zhou into letting American ships keep carrying government troops to Manchuria, and into a clause letting government forces move into Manchuria during the ceasefire to restore Chinese rule there. In just a few meetings in early January, the committee astonishingly agreed on a ceasefire, and on the outlines of a coalition government and a merged army, all on terms that favoured the government. On 13 January 1946, Chiang and Mao each ordered their armies to stop all fighting and all troop movements from midnight, with agreed exceptions, the most important being government troops moving into Manchuria. A headquarters with Nationalist, Communist and American members moved to Beijing to watch over the truce. It looked like a triumph. Look a little closer, though. Chiang and his generals thought the truce would hurt the government overall. But to keep the Americans happy and coax the Russians in Manchuria, Chiang felt he had no choice. Mao seemed willing to agree to almost anything on paper. What mattered to him was the ground. He sent another hundred and fifty thousand troops to Lin Biao, his commander in Manchuria, and ordered him to fold two hundred thousand more local fighters into his main units.

Zhou Enlai and Luo Longji at the Political Consultative Conference, January 1946
Zhou Enlai and Luo Longji at the Political Consultative Conference, January 1946. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On 10 January 1946, Chiang opened a historic conference. It was called the Political Consultative Conference, and it brought together the Nationalists, the Communists and the smaller parties to plan a new, shared government. In his keynote speech, Chiang announced that the government would immediately bring in freedom of speech, of the press, of religion and of assembly. Political prisoners, he said, would be released, and all political parties would be equal before the law from now on. There would be direct elections, from the bottom up, to every representative body, national ones included. The Kuomintang had ruled China as a one party state since 1928. It was a remarkable thing to hear its leader say out loud. The truce itself was already fraying. Almost at once, reports reached Chiang of Communist attacks in the north and in Manchuria. On 18 January, ceasefire or not, Communist troops took two Manchurian cities, among them the important port of Yingkou. Marshall's report to Washington never mentioned Yingkou. Chiang noticed, and wrote that there would have to come a point where he made his final decision about Manchuria. The Communists, of course, had their own list of Nationalist violations. And when Marshall proposed sending monitoring teams into Manchuria, the Communists said yes, and Chiang at first said no. Chiang feared the teams would bind him far more tightly than Mao, whose fast growing army in the Northeast was mostly invisible to outsiders. But saying no cost him credibility with the Americans. There was something else Chiang did not know. Marshall's code breakers could apparently read some of the Generalissimo's coded messages to his commanders in the field, so Marshall could see where Chiang was less cooperative than he claimed. The Americans could not read Zhou's messages, which went out in one time pads. A one time pad scrambles every message with a fresh random key that is used once and thrown away, and used properly it cannot be broken. Still, the conference itself went smoothly. At the end of January it passed five resolutions laying out an interim coalition government. Every party in it would recognize Chiang's national leadership, but his power would be checked. A new council would sit at the top, with half its seats for the Kuomintang, and Chiang's veto could be overridden by a five to three majority. Chiang had doubts. He told a group of party officials that the resolutions would not necessarily bind the National Assembly that was to write the constitution. But Zhou had accepted everything, and Chiang felt he had to look at least as keen. In his closing speech he praised the plan for its principles of peace, democracy, unification and solidarity. And shortly before the final vote, he issued a decree setting free "all political prisoners." Mao sent word to Marshall that the ceasefire he had arranged was fair. And he went further. "Chinese democracy," the Chairman solemnly declared, "must follow the American path." Zhou told Mao that Marshall trusted the Communists' sincerity, but was having trouble with the Kuomintang. Privately, Zhou told his secretary that Marshall reminded him of Stilwell. Joseph Stilwell was the American general who had quarrelled bitterly with Chiang during the war with Japan, until Roosevelt called him home in 1944. Across China, and in the Western press, the reaction to the agreements was euphoric. On 4 February Marshall told Truman that affairs were "progressing rather favorably." Truman proposed carrying on American aid to China, and an American advisory group of up to a thousand officers to train the new army. Chiang was less sure. Marshall, he wrote in private, thought "he knew Chinese politics very well, but ... does not." Marshall's remarks about the Communists' good intentions bothered him most. He began to fear it would be the Stilwell years all over again. Then, on 25 February, came the agreement that was meant to end China's age of private armies. Marshall, Zhou, and the Nationalists' chief political commissar, Zhang Zhizhong, agreed to shrink the two huge armies in stages and then merge them, over eighteen months, into one national army under Chiang as commander in chief, with no political commissars from either party. The telling detail is Manchuria. Until the merger, the government could keep fourteen divisions there, and the Communists only one. Mao had about thirty divisions in Manchuria at that moment. Nationwide, the plan gave the government ninety divisions to the Communists' eighteen. On paper, the Communists were giving up their army. Chiang believed they never would. Marshall, though, was delighted. He had done the impossible, at least on paper. Through the spring of 1946 he believed his plan could work: the Communists would give up their army and their territory and compete for power peacefully under Chiang, as long as Chiang kept China on the road to American style democracy. He set off on a tour of the north with Zhou and Zhang Zhizhong, three thousand miles to a dozen cities and towns. At Yan'an, the Communist capital in the hills of the northwest, the crowds cheered wildly for the American general, and he had long talks with Mao and Zhu De. The trip, Marshall said, had "most happy results." Zhu De had led the Communist armies in the field since the late 1920s. But the world outside China was changing. On 9 February, Stalin gave a speech saying the Second World War had been the inevitable result of capitalism, and that the next war would come from the same source. Truman was alarmed and angry. He was tired, he said, of babying the Soviets. In China, news spread of Soviet troops stripping the factories of Manchuria, and in the last week of February big demonstrations in Chongqing and other cities demanded that the Russians leave. Rioters sacked the Chongqing offices of the Communists' newspaper. The anger at Moscow was real, but it was Chen Lifu who organized the riots. Later, Marshall would put great weight on those few days, and say they had pushed the Communists out of their reasonable frame of mind. In March, Stalin began pulling his army out of Manchuria. At the same time, he told his Chinese comrades to act boldly and openly, and urged them to take over the Manchurian cities as fast as they could. Chiang was counting on his own armies to fill the cities the Russians left. He was wrong. The Cold War had begun, and Stalin was at last giving the Chinese Communists real help. Manchuria was becoming their base.

Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong. Chen Zhengqing (1917–1966), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

That spring, while the generals manoeuvred, the Communists made a decision in Yan'an that would reach into nearly every village they held. During the war against Japan, their land policy had been moderate. They cut rents and interest rates, but they left landlords their land. Now that changed. The new policy was to take land and give it to peasants who had none. There were three reasons, and they tell you a lot about the party that year. First, the war had shifted the balance in the villages. Peasants had grown bolder about seizing land, and in many places landlords were weaker and less able to stop them. Second, the party's own activists, especially the ones recruited during the war, expected a more radical policy the moment the war was over. And third, the leaders, Mao above all, saw what land would be worth in an all out civil war, especially in the areas the party had only just taken. The leadership had not forgotten how radical land reform had failed in the party's areas before the war with Japan. So it chose a theorist to present the policy. Ren Bishi was one of the party's leading Marxist theorists, born in 1904 in Mao's home province of Hunan, to a well off peasant family. He had studied in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and served as the party's top man in Moscow in the late 1930s, and he was a close ally of Liu Shaoqi, the party's great organizer. Together the two worked out the details of the new order. It was issued on 4 May 1946, and it is known by its date, as the May Fourth Directive. The fourth of May was already a famous date in China: the day in 1919 when students marched in Beijing against the Versailles peace settlement. It told the party's cadres that "a solution to the land question in the liberated areas is the basic historic task confronting the party". The liberated areas were what the Communists called the territory they ruled, and a cadre was a party worker who carried out its orders on the ground. How it was done mattered as much as what was done. Land was to pass from landlords, and in some cases from rich peasants, to those who had none. But it was important that the landless peasants redistribute it themselves, after mass meetings at which they denounced the landlords and stripped them of their power. To the party's leaders, breaking the landlords' power counted as much as sharing out the fields. Every meeting made allies, and enemies, and over time it tied some groups of peasants to the Communist cause. Mao explained why. When peasants only got their rents cut, or settled old scores, the old village bosses survived. When they took the land themselves, they destroyed those bosses as a class. And taking another man's property tied the peasant to the party by the consequences. He knew exactly what would happen to him if the Nationalists came back. But the directive was double edged. Alongside the call for revolution, it warned against the bloody excesses of the early 1930s. In principle, no land was to be taken without compensating its owner. Industry and trade were to be protected, and the land of middle peasants left alone. Even among big landlords, cadres were to tell the despotic ones from the rest, and shield the rest from attack. The reason was the united front, Mao's strategy of keeping progressive landowners and businessmen on the party's side. So the order told village cadres to unleash the poor, and also to keep them on a leash. In the middle of a civil war, it was not going to be easy to do both.

By then the war in Manchuria had already begun in earnest. Chiang's troops retook the city of Changchun and sent Lin Biao's army into a rapid retreat. Over lunch, his general Bai Chongxi urged him to keep going and take Harbin, the great city of the far north, three hundred miles from the Russian border. Chiang hesitated. He was afraid Marshall would be unhappy. In the end he authorized his commander, Du Yuming, to attack across the Songhua River. Lin Biao's quick retreat convinced Chiang that only a third of the Communist army were good troops with good Japanese weapons. Incredibly, he came to believe his forces had all but crushed the Communists' main strength. Two of his armies, the New First and the New Sixth, chased Lin Biao across the Songhua River to a line only sixty miles from Harbin. Marshall, meanwhile, had been radioing again and again for an immediate ceasefire. When Chiang finally came back to Nanjing on 3 June, Marshall tore into him for breaking not only their earlier agreements but Marshall's personal trust. Chiang called the whole thing a misunderstanding. The two men talked for three hours. Chiang was impatient, tapping a finger quickly on the arm of his red leather chair. Then, with little pressure from Marshall, he agreed to stop all "advances, attacks or pursuits" by his troops in Manchuria for fifteen days. In return, the Communists would have to prove their sincerity, by agreeing to end the fighting everywhere, and by carrying out the February agreement to reorganize the armies, without delay. And Chiang told Marshall that this would be "his final effort at doing business with the Communists." That night, back at his residence, Chiang wrote in his diary that he worried how much damage this wrong headed American could do to his government. He was sure by now that Truman was on his side. But Marshall, he believed, was a holdover from Roosevelt's time, and like the late president, he was quite willing to put the Nationalists at risk to strike a deal with the Communists. The next morning Chiang met his commanders. He did not expect the ceasefire to last, he told them, unless Mao decided his party had already taken enough of a beating. The preparations for war should continue. His generals were to avoid direct clashes for now, but the forces in southern Manchuria and in Shandong were to improve their positions. He did not think the Americans would push too hard, as long as his generals did not behave stupidly. Marshall, for his part, was surprised and delighted. For the first time in months he felt there were grounds for optimism, and he told his staff that it was a hell of a problem, but they would lick it yet. The truce took effect on 7 June. That same day, Zhou Enlai borrowed Marshall's personal plane and flew to Yan'an, for the first of a series of summer meetings that would decide the Communists' strategy for the war. So the American mediator's own plane carried the Communist negotiator home to plan the party's war. I'll let you sit with that for a moment. As ordered, General Sun Liren halted his advance and pulled back south of the Songhua River. Years later, Chiang wrote that this ceasefire sapped his army's morale, and was the beginning of the government's debacle in Manchuria. It is not clear he was right. Even if his troops had taken Harbin, the Communists held almost all of the hinterland, and could have slipped away into it, or even into Russia. In any case, the truce did not hold for long. Three hours after it began, government commanders in five zones reported Communist attacks. When fifty thousand Communist troops surrounded the port of Qingdao in Shandong, Chiang asked for American ships to carry government troops there. Marshall refused. On 29 June, Marshall concluded he had no basis for further negotiations. He warned Chiang that if the government tried to settle things by force, the American public would judge that it had plunged China into chaos. And, he said, the Generalissimo was following the lead of his army officers, as Japan had done, to its ruin. What happened next depends on whose diary you read. According to Marshall, his words had a tremendous effect on the Generalissimo, who quoted the Bible and "almost wept." Chiang's own record mentions no tears of his. It does record that when he told Marshall he would call a National Assembly in October to hand power back to the people, the American "was almost moved to tears." Marshall used the same strong words with Soong Mei-ling, who reported back to her husband that the general had been impatient, rude, very insulting, and arrogant. Chiang told Marshall he had made every concession he could. And he began planning a full scale offensive between the Yellow River and the Great Wall.

Li Xiannian Chen Yi Siege of Qingdao Fall of Kalgan Andong Dabie Mountains Yan'an Jiangsu Qingdao Zhangjiakou Dandong Nationalist armies Communist armies
The civil war begins, 1946-06. Map drawn by Then and There from the episode's sources, on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines and rivers
Communist troops in the Battle of Siping, 1946
Communist troops in the Battle of Siping, 1946. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In June 1946, a new, full scale civil war broke out in China. On paper, it was hardly a contest. The Nationalists had four point three million troops. The Communists had one point two million officers and men. Chiang launched a broad attack along the whole front, from Shaanxi in the west to the Pacific coast in the east, and kept up the war in Manchuria too. Whenever he met his advisers, he told them that to use force first was the only way to beat the Communists. Mao saw it coming. On 19 June he told two of his generals, Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping, that Chiang had made up his mind to wage total war, and that it would be hard to stop. If the Communists won big victories, Mao said, they could bargain for peace. If their victories only matched their losses, they still might. But if the Nationalists won, there would be no hope of peace at all. Deng Xiaoping, a small, tough political commissar from Sichuan, would one day rule China himself. In 1946 he was one of Mao's field commanders. In late July the Politburo, the party's small ruling committee, adopted Mao's plan: hold on to Manchuria and extend it, defend the north, and pull out of the places in central and southern China that could not be defended. Its watchwords came from the war against Japan: mobile warfare, and bases in the countryside. In late June, Chiang's armies attacked about forty thousand Communist troops in the Dabie mountains, between Hubei and Anhui provinces, under a local commander named Li Xiannian. Li was a forty year old former carpenter who had grown up in Hubei. He had built strong local support, and he was a constant threat to the government's lines of communication and to the city of Wuhan. He tried to hang on. Mao ordered him out. Through July and early August, under constant attack from the air and on the ground, what was left of Li's army struggled west toward Yan'an. Fewer than half of his men got there. The government's losses were negligible. Mao turned his fury on America. The ceasefire, he suspected, had only been cover for the Americans to resupply the Nationalists. On 7 July, Yan'an charged that America was trying to take over Japan's position in China and turn the country into a colony of American imperialism. His attacks on Washington that summer were fiercer than anything the party had said about the Americans since the war began. And yet Mao still believed ordinary Americans could be won over, and that they might push their government to cut off Chiang. In August, Nationalist planes bombed Yan'an. In August, in a speech marking a year since Japan's surrender, Chiang told the nation what the war was about. The Communist Party, he said, was no ordinary party. It had its own army and its own government, and taxed the people it ruled. "We must not permit another state to exist within our state," he said, "nor permit a private army to operate on the side of the national army." That autumn the war turned on a city called Zhangjiakou, a hundred and fifty miles from Beijing, the gateway through which both sides moved men in and out of Manchuria. Zhou Enlai warned that if it fell, there would be a total national split. Marshall, furious with Chiang, told him he would ask Truman to call him home, and that evening he actually sent the message. Chiang quickly offered a ten day truce, and Marshall withdrew his request. But Chiang fully expected the Communists to say no, and they did. Zhou called the package a demand for surrender. On 10 October, China's National Day, Chiang gave a conciliatory speech, promising to keep seeking peace through mediation. That same day, his troops stormed into Zhangjiakou. The Communists lost about a hundred thousand men, and their forces at Yan'an were cut off from Manchuria. Chiang now predicted that the government would finish off the Communist armies in five months. By late October, even Marshall's patience with Zhou had run out. When Zhou rejected another proposal that Chiang had accepted, Marshall told him that his mind was so closed there was little point in arguing. The Americans had warned Chiang that his campaign was overambitious, that stretching his lines so far would expose them to guerrillas and could plunge China into economic chaos. He went on anyway. For a while, it looked as if he was right to. In the first months of the war the Communists had to abandon a hundred and five cities and towns. In the last six months of 1946, they lost a hundred and seventy four thousand square kilometres of territory. And in the villages they left behind, the old order came back with a vengeance. Peasants who had taken land were punished, and sometimes killed, by the returning landlords. Landlord militias followed the government troops back in, took back their fields, and killed thousands of peasants. The local cadres were caught, or ran away, or renounced the party. That October, with the war going his way, Chiang and Soong Mei-ling flew to Taiwan, their first visit ever to the island. Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for fifty years, and was handed back to China at the end of the war. They were deeply impressed by its peace, security and progress. Ninety percent of its industry was back to prewar production, and most of the big factories, once Japanese property, were now run by the new provincial government. Remember that visit.

Back in the Communist north, the land question had become a matter of life and death. In early 1946, as the peace process fell apart, Mao had insisted that radical land reform was the key to the party's survival. And as the war began, raw class struggle went back to the top of the party's agenda. Rural elites were stripped of their property, and sometimes attacked. The heart of it was the meeting. Peasants were encouraged to pour out their grievances at gatherings called speak bitterness meetings. Local cadres prepared them carefully, but they also set off outbursts nobody had planned, old wounds and grudges that energized whole villages. Here is one of them, in a village in Shanxi, in 1946. At the meeting that mattered most, the first to speak was the village head, the landlord's own cousin, and because he was family his words carried extra weight. "In the famine year," he began, speaking straight to the landlord, "my brother worked for your family. We were all hungry. We had nothing to eat." He said they had tried again and again to borrow grain, and the landlord had watched them starve without pity. Then a militiaman stood up. His voice shook as he told how he had rented land from the man. "One year I could not pay the rent. You took the whole harvest. You took my clothes. You took everything." He broke down sobbing, and a dozen others jumped up shouting, naming the dead, demanding that the landlord speak. The landlord had no answers. He could not utter a word. And when the peasants saw that he could not answer, they realized they had him cornered, that they had already won. Many who had been too afraid to open their mouths found themselves shouting in anger, without a thought for what might come after. What came after was often violence. Meetings like these were a kind of political theatre, where landlords, rich peasants, suspected enemy agents, or anyone else in the party's way were humiliated before a crowd. Because everyone in that crowd knew their own fate depended on how eagerly they accused, the meetings often ended in severe beatings or murder. The party said the violence came from the peasants' own anger. But the Communists often encouraged it, as part of taking the land. The methods came straight from the party's own wartime purges: victims made to wear placards or caps proclaiming their guilt, made to kneel, kept from sleep. In one Shanxi village, the people went to a landlord's courtyard at night, built bonfires against the cold, and counted his grain. They found only a quarter of what they believed he owed them. So they beat him until he told them where he had buried forty silver dollars, under his kang. They dug it up, and the money stirred everyone up, and they beat him again. In much of north China, a family slept on a kang, a raised platform of brick or clay heated by a fire underneath. He led them to another hundred. No one believed that was the end of it, and they beat him again, while some of the militiamen began to heat an iron bar in the fire. In western Shandong, in the summer of 1947, cadres launched a second round, re-examining every family's class in village after village. In the frenzy that followed, rich and middle peasants became fair game for any kind of attack, including execution. In one county, Sanghe, more than a thousand people were beaten to death. Some of the killing came from simple arithmetic. Even when every landlord in a village had been stripped, there often was not enough land to go around. So did land reform help the Communists win, or nearly make them lose? Here the sources disagree. On one side: the party knew that many peasants feared the Nationalists would come back, and would rather not stand up for the Communists in public. Land reform made them choose. A peasant who had taken land had to keep fighting for it, because if the Nationalists returned, he might be killed. In that sense, villages that had been through land reform were committed to the revolution. And the party set up a give and take with the peasants, heavy in what it demanded, but with a measure of fairness and justice that earlier rulers had never offered. On the other side: radical land reform did help the party survive in parts of north China in 1946 and early 1947, but on balance it probably did the Communists as much harm as good. As it went on, the party lost allies among rich and middle peasants, and the chaos of the terror got in the way of the war effort itself. The party's own people saw the danger. As early as the autumn of 1946, local cadres complained that the new policy wrecked the deals they had made with the wealthy families on whom the safety of their bases depended. In January 1947, Ren Bishi, the man who had drafted the policy, complained that the party was making too few friends in the countryside, and far too many enemies. In August 1947, Liu Shaoqi reported that leftist excesses had cost the party dearly. Village cadres were beaten and imprisoned by their own neighbours, and some cadres warned that soon no one would dare to be a cadre at all. Mao would not let the policy go. He kept calling for flexibility, and reminding his colleagues of past mistakes. But he would not treat land as mere tactics. "The battle for China," he told the Politburo, "is a battle for the hearts and minds of the peasants." By late 1947, though, even Mao was having serious doubts. He worried the party was losing too many potential allies, and that the work teams could not tell one kind of village from another. To Mao, in the end, land reform had to serve the purposes of war. And he learned in time that in the new areas the party took, cutting rents and settling debts was as far as it could safely go, a lesson that would make the coming conquest of central and southern China much easier.

Parade at Yan'an airfield welcoming Marshall, Zhang Zhizhong and Zhou Enlai, March 1946
Parade at Yan'an airfield welcoming Marshall, Zhang Zhizhong and Zhou Enlai, March 1946. Chinese Soviet Republic, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And what of George Marshall? In January 1947, after a year in China, Marshall was called home. Within weeks he became America's secretary of state. With Marshall gone, Chiang felt far freer to act, and in the first weeks of 1947 he was sure that both his party and the country were moving in the right direction. He had ordered a survey of what the foreign newspapers were saying about China, and he noted with glee that the main papers in London, New York and Paris agreed with his view of things. In mid January he told his commanders that military spending would have to come down in the months ahead. Some of his generals, especially those fighting in the Northeast, began to worry that he thought the war already won. Chiang knew better than that, at least on paper. He wrote again and again in his diary that wars are won more by politics than by battles. His real worry, he told his eldest son in letters, was that his party could not meet the demands of ruling China. And as his associates' behaviour after the Japanese surrender had shown, he had a great deal to worry about. So let's take stock of what Chiang had when the war with Japan ended. His party held the state, with all its power to tax, to conscript and to appoint. His government was recognized at home and abroad, mostly because of his standing as the leader who had resisted Japan. And it had treaties with both America and the Soviet Union. His armies had taken every major region south of the Great Wall, to the disappointment of his enemies and the surprise of many foreigners. The Communists, meanwhile, still had their main forces out in the northwest, on the edge of the country, outgunned, and barely present in the cities where China's industry was. The outcome was not decided in 1945. The civil war that followed is, first of all, the story of how the Nationalist leaders, by their own decisions, threw away most of the advantages they had then, with a great deal of the responsibility resting on Chiang himself. His choice to settle things by force in 1946 put a strain on his government's money, and on his foreign friendships, that neither could bear in the long run. And by refusing to bend to American pressure for talks in 1946, he weakened his most vital alliance just when he would need it most. As for Marshall, he and Truman had wanted the best of both worlds. They wanted America kept out of China's civil war, and they wanted a united, friendly, non Communist China, Manchuria included. That meant asking Mao to give up his ideas, his army, his territory and his Soviet neighbour, all to serve as a junior partner under Chiang. It was never going to happen. Later, at a meeting of his generals in Beijing, with his armies dying in Manchuria, Chiang would leap from his seat in anger and say it out loud. "It was Marshall," he said, "this American, who lost us and lost China." He had meant to occupy only a small part of Manchuria, he told them, but Marshall's words and actions had led him to send his best armies deep into it. That was Chiang's verdict, in defeat. By the end of 1947 the military balance had already shifted in the Communists' favour. And the first cracks did not open on the battlefield. Next time, the Nationalist state begins to come apart behind the front. On Taiwan, police try to seize a widow's cigarettes, and set off a rising. On the mainland, prices run out of control, and students march against hunger and civil war. And Chiang's armies march into the Communist capital at Yan'an, only to find that Mao has gone.

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