As the eight-year Sino-Japanese War entered its final year, there was hope in Washington that Chiang Kai-Shek could unify the country and somehow come to common cause with the Chinese Communist Party. Both Chiang and Mao Zedong had assiduously avoided using their troops in the fight against Japan, because both knew they would need them for the inevitable civil war that would follow. The country was in disastrous condition, described as a place of "medieval destitution" upon which war and famine inflicted approximately 25 million deaths. That a civil war was coming and that the communists would win was obvious to the State Department's 'China Hands', the young men born in-country to missionary parents and not tainted with Washington's delusional faith in Chiang. In 1943, John Davies wrote, "The Communists are in China to stay. And China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs." As has so often been the case in US foreign policy, we had hopes and expectations that were incompatible with the culture of the foreign country and certainly, with the facts on the ground.
In late 1944, FDR's newly appointed Ambassador to China, Gen. Pat Hurley, met with both Mao and Chiang in an attempt to establish a coalition government. In three thousand years, China had never had a peaceful power struggle and the concept of power-sharing was totally foreign to both parties. Hurley was a Republican politician, lacking in international experience and incapable of listening to the State Dept. staff, the vast majority of whom recommended that we come to some accommodation with Mao. Eventually, Hurley gutted the staff in China and with FDR's backing went all in for Chiang-Kai-Shek. The end of the war meant that "the United States and the Communists would no longer have a common enemy, and its disappearance would strip away the incentive to cooperate, leaving behind many reasons for each to see the other a mortal foe."
In August of 1945, Chiang appeared to have the upper hand. He controlled the central government and had 39 American-equipped divisions. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria (Japan's puppet state Manchuko) changed the strategic balance. A Red Army was now in China. The 1.5 million Soviet troops in Manchuria slowly confiscated the Japanese assets for reparations, prohibited both American and central government access and began supporting the CCP. Better led, better organized, highly motivated and supported by Stalin, the CCP began to prevail. The US options were to withdraw, support Chiang, or intervene. We chose to continue to support Chiang, and after Hurley quit in a mercurial outburst, sent in George Marshall as Ambassador. His task was to avoid a Chinese civil war. In January 1946, he engineered a cease fire between the two sides. It quickly fell apart. Chiang's hard-right colleagues could never accept power sharing with the CCP. Both Stalin and Mao continued to lie, deceive and mislead the US about their intentions, which were to establish a Soviet-style dictatorship in China. Although it would take three more years, China was lost. "There was no doubt that, whoever lost it, China's emergence as a communist country closely allied to the Soviet Union and aiding revolutionary movements elsewhere in Asia was a tremendous defeat for the US."
The basic premise of this book is that any accommodation with Mao would have been better than the outright enmity that led to Korea and Vietnam. It seems to me that accommodation would have been awfully difficult in 1945, and immediately thereafter. The lines were being drawn between the Communist bloc and the rest of the world. The China lobby in the US, led by Henry Luce of Time Magazine, was staunchly in the camp of the national government. On the other hand, continually backing Chiang and then spending decades trying to justify that support caused immeasurable damage to this country. It led to McCarthyism, Red scares, FBI abuse, the need to not 'lose' Vietnam - all for a man who Joe Stillwell called 'Peanut' and who was, in the end, an incapable failure. The author's conclusion is that the US did not lose China. Stalin and Mao won it and there is nothing we could have done to alter the course of history. Notwithstanding the B +, this book is an arduous tough read.
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