I flew to Yenan aboard a rattling old U.S. Air Force C-47 transport, one of the Executive Headquarters’ planes, in a two-and-a-half-hour flight that took us over the Shensi Mountains to the edge of the Gobi Desert. Maneuvering through twisting mountain passes, we bypassed a Tang dynasty pagoda atop a hill and bumped to a hard landing on an airstrip in a narrow valley. Members of the U.S. Army Observer Group, famed as the Dixie Mission, and Chinese officials were on the airstrip to meet this monthly supply aircraft. In a jeep we forded the murky Yen River, a tributary of the Yellow River, and driving into Yenan entered the compound of the U.S. Army Group, where I was to be quartered. The compound had been hollowed out of the adjacent loess hill and was enclosed in an earthen wall. It encompassed a row of cavelike living quarters with a mess hall and a recreation center named after Captain Henry C. Whittlesey, a former member of the Dixie Mission. Whittlesey, a talented writer, had been captured and executed by the Japanese in February 1945 after he and a Chinese photographer entered a town thought to be secure. A Chinese Communist battalion was destroyed in great part when it was deployed against the Japanese in a failed effort to rescue the pair. The remains of the photographer were found in a cave many years later, but not those of Whittlesey. The members of the Dixie Mission, originally eighteen military officers and diplomats, had their living quarters and offices in the cave structures, which were actually tunnels with whitewashed clay walls about eighteen feet long lined with stone blocks and a wooden frame window at the entrance. Light bulbs powered by the compound’s generator dangled from the arched ceiling. Charcoal braziers provided meager heat. The size of the Dixie Mission had been recently cut back to a small number of army liaison officers, and the Chinese were using some of the empty cave dwellings as guest rooms. I was assigned to one of them and slept on a straw mattress resting on wooden planks supported by sawhorses.
The compound fronted on a city in which thousands of people dwelled in small houses on the valley floor while others occupied some ten thousand caves dug out of the hillsides. Once a thriving ancient walled city, Yenan had been almost entirely destroyed in 1938 by Japanese bombing. The Communists brought it back to vibrant life by making it their headquarters, expanding the community with hospitals, a university, a radio station, and a large open wooden amphitheater in which traditional Peking Opera and other performances were staged. Apart from the peasants bringing their produce into the city, everyone on the streets and in the government buildings wore similar padded blue cotton tunics and trousers, and leather-soled sandals or cloth shoes. Unlike in Peking, there were no beggars on the streets. Pausing at the little shops along the streets, I encountered students from every part of China. As many as 100,000 cadres had been trained in the Central Communist Party School in the valley and sent out to organize party cells in the countryside. Evenings I watched the cave dwellers, some twenty thousand of them, mainly workers in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) apparatus, bearing flickering kerosene lanterns—there was no electricity except for that supplied by generators at the American compound or in the hospitals—wend down the hillsides to the wood and stone buildings on the valley floor to attend political meetings and performances by theatrical groups. There was a Saturday night dance at which Mao himself and a mix of officials and ordinary folk would prance to American tunes played by a small string orchestra. Mao, said to be ill, was not at the dance I attended. When the weather was mild, the dances would take place in a grove of trees called the Peach Orchard.
Soon after I arrived in Yenan, I was at a dinner attended by the top leaders, one of whom was Liu Shaoqi, general secretary of the Communist Party, second in power to Mao and Zhu De, commander in chief of the newly organized People’s Liberation Army (PLA), a force then of about a million troops comprising the legendary Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army, and the Democratic Forces of Manchuria. Mao Zedong was not there, and my promised interview with him never materialized. I was told that he was ill and under the care of two Russian doctors, Orlov and Melnikov. Members of the Dixie Mission surmised correctly that the doctors were also being used by Mao for liaison to Moscow. Mao also had the medical attention of an American doctor, George Hatem, known to the Chinese as Dr. Ma Haide, with whom I had very useful conversations. Hatem, a personable, dark-eyed man of Lebanese origin who wore the usual cotton clothes except for a black beret, arrived in China during the war against Japan at the age of twenty-three after receiving some medical training in his native Lebanon and Europe and attending pre-med school in the United States. He traveled to Yenan with Edgar Snow, stayed on to work in public health, married a Chinese girl, Zhou Sufei, became a Chinese citizen, and joined the Communist Party. When I met him, he was a senior staff member of the Norman Bethune Memorial Hospital, named after a much celebrated Canadian who journeyed to China in 1938 during the war against Japan and provided medical assistance with meager equipment and supplies to Communist troops at camps in remote areas.
Mao was absent from all the events which I attended. While I was told simply that he was ill, I speculated that he had retreated into isolation, possibly suffering one of his bouts of depression to which he had been subject over many years. It was said that he was most prone to these depressions when his political and military fortunes ebbed. He was living in a small wood and mud-plastered house with his third wife, Jiang Qing, and their eight-year-old daughter, Li Na. I saw Jiang Qing only once. One night there was a performance in the Peking Opera House of yang-ko peasant dances. In the yang-ko—literally the “seedling song dances”—the performers did chain-step folk dances while singing ideological-themed songs. Jiang Qing was there seated in the front row beside Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, and other members of the Central Committee. I sat in the row behind them. I had seen photographs of Jiang Qing before her marriage to Mao when she was a glamorous, bejeweled movie actress: her hair long, eyebrows penciled thin, and lips heavily rouged. The woman seated beside Liu wore glasses, no makeup, her hair cut in a bob, and she was dressed like the others in a cotton tunic padded against the November chill, baggy trousers, and a black cap. She was chatting gaily and applauding the performance. Although seated with the notables, she was not at the time in the inner circle of political leadership. She was active in Yenan’s cultural life but in the main simply Mao’s attentive housewife. She was restricted to that role by the party leaders, who never quite approved of Mao’s marriage to this woman with a risqué Shanghai past replete with prior marriages and affairs. Recalling that scene in later years, I thought there was far more theater in the front row than on stage. Two decades later, Jiang Qing would become the driving force in the Cultural Revolution and locked in a power struggle with Liu Shaoqi, who was seated at her side on that theatrical evening in Yenan. Their struggle ended for both in turn in imprisonment and ghastly deaths.
Three months prior to my arrival in Yenan, I was told that Mao had granted an interview to the sixty-year-old leftist American writer Anna Louise Strong, one of his most fervent admirers. He received her on the earthen terrace in front of the cave he used as an office. The cave had been enlarged into a three-room apartment with white plastered walls and a brick floor. The interview, published eventually in Strong’s monthly Letter from China and in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, became probably the most quoted interview ever given by Mao to a journalist. When Strong asked Mao about the possibility of the United States employing an atom bomb in a war with the Soviet Union, he replied: “The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons.” When I toured China in 1971 I recalled that interview with ironic amusement. The “paper tiger” had become more real to Mao following his furious ideological split in the early 1960s with Nikita Khrushchev. The Chinese were feverishly building air raid shelters, which I was shown in China proper and Manchuria, against the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. They were also girding for the possibility of a Russian strike at Lop Nor in Xinjiang Province, where they were testing their own atom bomb.
My dinner with the Communist leadership in Yenan, despite an abundance of toasts with mou-t’ai, a clear 120-proof liquor distilled from fermented sorghum, was a very gloomy affair. It was punctuated with denunciations of the deceitful Chiang Kai-shek and to my discomfort expressions of disillusionment with the United States. They saw the United States moving toward greater intervention on behalf of the Nationalists. Zhou Enlai, who ranked with General Zhu De behind Mao and Liu Shaoqi in the party hierarchy, was returning shortly to Yenan from Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital, bearing details of yet another American aid program for the Nationalist government. Zhou had been recalled to Yenan by Mao after talks with Chiang on the formation of a coalition government, conducted in Chungking by General Marshall, had ended in total failure. Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) Party had reneged on an agreement reached earlier for a constitutional framework which would have provided for a degree of autonomy for the provinces, thus assuring the Communists continued political dominance in the areas which they currently held. Chiang had also refused to pull Nationalist troops back to the positions of January 13, 1946, specified under the terms of the cease-fire negotiated by Marshall. The breaking point had been the Nationalist seizure on October 11 of Kalgan, which I had just visited. Prior to Fu Tso-yi’s seizure of Kalgan, Zhou had asked Marshall to warn the Nationalists: “If the Kuomintang government does not instantly cease its military operations against Kalgan, the Chinese Communist Party feels itself forced to presume that the Government is thereby giving public announcement of a total national spilt, and that it has ultimately abandoned its pronounced policy of peaceful settlement.”
Marshall, frustrated and impatient with the deadlock in the negotiations, would leave China in January complaining that both Chiang and Mao had sought to exploit his mediation efforts for political and military advantage. As recorded in the so-called White Paper on China, reviewing events from 1944 to 1949, published by the U.S. State Department in August 1949, President Truman had sent a message to the Generalissimo before Marshall’s departure deploring the lack of progress in the negotiations. In denouncing extremists of both the Kuomintang and Communist parties, Truman said:
The firm desire of the people of the United States and of the American government is still to help China achieve lasting peace and a stable economy under a truly democratic government. There is an increasing awareness, however, that the hopes of the people of China are being thwarted by militarists and a small group of political reactionaries who are obstructing the advancement of the general good of the nation by failing to understand the liberal trend of the times. The people of the United States view with violent repugnance this state of affairs. It cannot be expected that American opinion will continue in its generous attitude toward your nation unless convincing proof is shortly forthcoming that genuine progress is being made toward a peaceful settlement of China’s internal problems.
The criticism in the Truman message was directed in the main at the Generalissimo’s government. However, except for a brief freeze on arms deliveries to facilitate the Marshall negotiations on a coalition government, there had been no interruption in the American military and economic aid program for the Nationalist government. Truman was bowing to the pressure being exerted on him for continued aid to Chiang Kai-shek by the Republican Party and the China Lobby, an American citizens’ group committed to support of the Nationalists. While Zhou Enlai was still in Chungking negotiating on the creation of a coalition government, the Truman administration concluded an agreement for the sale of war surplus equipment and supplies to the Nationalist government at a fraction of their procurement value of $900 million. Marshall was unable to persuade Zhou Enlai that the surplus was essentially of a “civilian type,” an obvious misrepresentation of the nature of most of the matériel. In the bitterest and most denunciatory terms, I was told by the Communist leadership at my dinner with them that this latest aid program was final proof that the United States was committed to unilateral support of Chiang Kai-shek. It was a breaking point in relations with the United States that would not be mended until the visit of President Richard Nixon to China in 1972.
From V-J Day to the time that I arrived in Yenan, apart from the latest transfer of surplus war matériel, the United States had provided the Nationalist government with more than $800 million in military aid under the 1941 Lend-Lease Act. This included funds for the transport in September 1945 by the U.S. Air Force of three Nationalist armies to cities in East and North China to take the surrender of the Japanese forces. At that time, the Nationalists possessed an estimated five-to-one superiority over the Communists in combat troops, a practical monopoly of modern heavy equipment and transport, as well as an unopposed air force. The bulk of Japanese military equipment, enough to arm forty divisions, had fallen to the Nationalists in the regions below the Great Wall. By the end of December 1945, under Lend-Lease, the United States was completing delivery of equipment for thirty-nine army divisions and twenty-five air force squadrons. Although the war against the Japanese had been fought based on the concept of a United Front of the Nationalists and Communists, Chiang had vetoed American plans to provide aid to Mao Zedong’s forces. The Communists were scheduled to receive equipment for the training of ten divisions as part of the creation of a new national army of sixty divisions, but the Generalissimo refused to allow the delivery of any of this equipment prior to the integration of the Communist troops into his own forces. As a consequence, the Communists never received any aid from the United States. As noted in the State Department’s White Paper on China: “With respect to the United States military aid programs, General Marshall was placed in the untenable position of mediating on the one hand between the two Chinese groups while on the other hand the United States government was continuing to supply arms and ammunition to one of the groups, namely the Nationalist Government.”
Prior to the November collapse of the Marshall negotiations in Chungking, the Communists had high hopes for some kind of understanding and material aid from the United States. Mao saw the Marshall mission as the insurer of his party’s interests in any coalition arrangement with Chiang Kai-shek. In February, in an interview in Yenan granted John Roderick of the Associated Press, Mao had praised President Truman, saying that he had made a major contribution to Sino-American friendship. In his book Covering China, Roderick quoted Mao as having said that he stood ready to form a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek and to demonstrate goodwill he would hold his own socialist program in abeyance. He said that China must have a long period of peace in which to rebuild its war-torn economy and during that time there could be controlled capitalism and socialist democracy in order to create the economic and financial base for socialism. By professing this moderate approach, Mao obviously was reaching out to Truman in much the same way that he had sought an accommodation with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was Roosevelt who had put an end to the isolation of the Yenan government. Acting on a recommendation of John Paton Davies, a Foreign Service officer at General Stillwell’s headquarters, Roosevelt in February 1944 messaged the Generalissimo stating that he wished to send an observer group to the Communist areas to facilitate the flow of intelligence information about Japanese operations in North China and Manchuria. The Generalissimo reluctantly gave his qualified assent, and on July 22, 1944, the U.S. Army Observer Group, commanded by Colonel David D. Barrett, and comprising both military personnel and State Department officers, landed in Yenan. Arrival of the Observer Group was a historic event in that it opened Mao’s blockaded headquarters to international contacts, a succession of journalists, and any other visitors he saw fit to invite. The only prior official American contact had been that of Captain Evans Carlson, the famed U.S. Marine leader in Burma of Carlson’s Raiders, who in 1938 had dodged Japanese troops to make an arduous overland trip to Yenan. The Observer Group collected and transmitted intelligence on Japanese operations and reported on Communist military and political activities. Relations were close with Mao and other Communist leaders who occasionally visited the Observer quarters to be entertained by American movies. Films starring Charlie Chaplin and the Laurel and Hardy comic twosome were favorites. Huang Hua served initially as Mao’s liaison to the group.
In January 1945, Mao used the Observer Group to make his first direct approach to Washington. He had resisted suggestions by Stalin that he oust the Americans from Yenan. In early January, Colonel Barrett was reassigned to the China Combat Command in Kunming, and his subordinate, Major Ray Cromley, an air force intelligence officer, became the acting chief of the Observer Group. On January 10, at the request of Zhou Enlai, Cromley sent a message to General Albert C. Wedemeyer, commander of the China Theater Headquarters in Chungking, for relay to Washington. It proposed a visit to Washington by a Communist mission. Cromley’s message stated: “Mao and Zhou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at the White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.” If no invitation was forthcoming, Mao asked that the proposal remain secret. In proposing the visit to Washington, Mao intended to put forward the Communist position as regards his negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek. He was also seeking military and economic aid in the war against the Japanese.
In talks with John Service of the State Department and other members of the Observer Group, Mao had not hidden his political agenda. He was willing to enter into a coalition government with Chiang’s Kuomintang, as long as he retained a measure of military and economic autonomy in the provinces he presently controlled. It was his undisguised conviction that eventually his party would become the sovereign power based on “the will of the people.” Mao may have thought that he had an opening to the president. When Roosevelt was reelected in November 1944, Mao sent him a congratulatory message. Roosevelt replied that he looked forward to “vigorous cooperation with all the Chinese forces” against the common enemy, Japan. Mao was fascinated by American technological achievements and economic power, and Cromley had the impression he was thinking of the possibility of negotiating a long-term trade and technical assistance arrangement for the regions under his control. Mao, like Liu Shaoqi and later Zhou Enlai, the latter two in conversations with me, dwelled on the theme that China and the United States were natural economic partners, indicating that the Chinese had no desire to be solely dependent on aid from the Soviet Union. A Washington visit would have been Mao’s first trip abroad.
In April 1946, the Observer Group was reduced in size, and Cromley departed puzzled by the lack of a reply to Mao’s message. There was still no reply when I arrived in Yenan and was told about Mao’s overture. Cromley, who eventually returned to his prewar job as a Pentagon reporter for the Wall Street Journal, did not get an explanation until 1972. Barbara Tuchman, the distinguished American historian, after learning from members of the Observer Group about the secret Mao message to Roosevelt, located the pertinent memoranda in official American files, had the papers declassified, and wrote an article about the exchanges in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations. She found that in the absence of General Wedemeyer, who was on a visit to Burma, the Mao message had gone directly to the American ambassador in Chungking, Patrick J. Hurley, an Oklahoma businessman appointed by Roosevelt. The ambassador was new to Chinese politics and had quarreled with Mao in a fumbled attempt to negotiate with the Communist leader on a coalition government. The ambassador also by chance saw a message on the following day from Zhou Enlai asking Wedemeyer not to reveal Mao’s message to Hurley, since he did not “trust his discretion.” Hurley, an ardent support of Chiang Kai-shek, had held up the Mao message. He accused the members of the Observer Group, particularly Colonel Barrett and John Service, of plotting on behalf of the Communists behind his back to the detriment of the Nationalist government. Apart from the secretive transmission of Mao’s message, the ambassador cited in particular a contact with the Communists made by Colonel Barrett. On instructions of Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, General Robert B. McClure, Barrett had approached the Communists to ask their cooperation in a projected American military operation. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a paratroop division was to be sent to China to take part in an attack on the Japanese islands. The operation involved the establishment by the parachute division of a northeastern beachhead on the China coast in Shantung Province which was under the control of the Communist general Chen Yi. The Communists were asked to provide the initial logistic support when the paratroopers landed. Barrett was assured by the Communists that they would cooperate, although the colonel came away from the exploratory talks not sure that the Communists had the logistical capability to fully support such an operation involving twenty-eight thousand American troops. The Barrett approach to the Communists had not been cleared with Hurley, although the colonel had been assured by McClure this had been done. When I met Barrett years later, he was still bitter about Hurley’s complaint, which had also led to quashing his projected promotion to brigadier general.
Roosevelt became aware on January 14, 1944, of the Mao proposal but only vaguely in the context of a message from Hurley in which the ambassador strongly advised the president against military cooperation with the Communists, which he said would be destructive of the Nationalist government and American policy in China. Seeking a solution to the China deadlock and acting on Hurley’s advice, rather than inviting Mao, Roosevelt decided to attempt to persuade Stalin to lend his support to the Nationalist government, believing this would pressure the Communists to enter a coalition government with Chiang. At the Yalta Conference, which opened on February 4, Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill entered into a secret agreement with Stalin under which he would sign a Treaty of Alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Stalin received in return concessions in Manchuria and, in disregard of traditional Chinese territorial claims, recognition of the so-called independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic (Outer Mongolia, formerly a part of the Chinese empire, whose government, established in 1924, was subservient to the Kremlin). It was the first move by the Soviet dictator in a double game for expansion of Soviet power in Asia which dismayed not only Chiang Kai-shek but also Mao. In March, Mao and Zhou were still expressing to members of the Observer Group their desire for cooperation with the United States, but the channel closed with Roosevelt’s death the next month. Truman made no effort to follow up, despite Mao’s fulsome praise of him as a friend of China. At Hurley’s instigation, the China specialists of the embassy staff and those attached to Wedemeyer’s military command, who had differed with the ambassador on policy, were sent home. At a critical juncture in the formulation of China policy, the U.S. government was thus deprived of the advice of its most experienced State Department officers, experts such as John Service and John Paton Davies. Hurley effectively closed the sole channel of communication between Mao and Washington.
Barbara Tuchman contended that, if the channel had not been closed and had Roosevelt extended an invitation to Mao and reached an understanding with him, the Chinese Civil War might have been ended at once. She also concluded:
If, in the absence of ill feeling, we had established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and suspicion of us to make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have been no Korean War. From that war rose the twin specters of an expansionist Chinese Communism and an indivisible Sino-Soviet partnership. Without those two concepts to addle statesmen and nourish demagogues, our history, and our present and our future, would have been different. We might have never come to Vietnam.
I concur with Tuchman in her thesis that a Korean War might have been averted, or at least that Mao might not have undertaken the massive Chinese military intervention so destructive to General Douglas MacArthur’s forces. The approach to Roosevelt presented one of several opportunities to open a channel between the Communists and Washington, which, if materialized, could have resulted in an exchange that would have had a bearing on the course and duration of the Indochina wars, given the influence that Mao was able to exert as the principal foreign supporter and donor of military aid to the Indochinese Communists. In 1949, I reported from Communist-occupied Nanking on the last such opportunity, which was never exploited, prior to the Nixon visit to China in 1972. At the time of the visit, the United States was still locked with China in the costly decades-long military stalemate in Korea and the Nixon administration had decided to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in keeping with the policy of “Vietnamization,” the turning over of all combat ground operations to the South Vietnamese army.
Several days after my dinner with the Communist leadership, Liu Shaoqi granted me a lengthy interview at the Wangchiap’ing military compound on the floor of the valley, which housed party and army offices. We met at a rough, long table on wooden saws about which were seated other members of the Central Committee. They were lean men dressed in black caps and loosely fitted cotton tunics, deeply bronzed by years in the field resisting the Japanese and battling the Nationalists. Liu, a gaunt gray-haired man, about forty-seven years old—his precise age was never made public—smoked his Great Wall cigarettes continually during my interview, and his frequent cough was indicative of his tubercular condition. Regarded as the most likely successor to Mao, Liu was second only to Mao as the leading theoretician of the party. He was the author of the core text How to Be a Good Communist, based on a series of lectures he had given in Yenan in 1939. He had studied earlier in Moscow at the University of the Toilers of the East.
Speaking through a translator, Liu told me that China must pass through a stage of “New Democracy” on the road to socialism and Communism. He said socialism was still something for the “rather far future.” Perhaps it was for the American ear, but he professed to be an admirer of the revolutionary changes carried out by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, adding that China was learning from their experience. To build an economic and social foundation for the attainment of socialism, he said, the Communist Party was reaching out to all sectors of Chinese society and democratic groups. He said the aim was to “unite China under correct leadership into an independent, democratic, peaceful, and prosperous nation.” In the new China envisioned by Liu, obviously the “correct leadership” would be that of the Communist Party.
In his comments Liu was borrowing from Mao’s essays in On New Democracy, published in 1940, and On Coalition Government, a further elaboration of the concept of New Democracy, which was published in 1945. I was presented with a copy of the latter, issued in coarse grass paper, in which Mao said the “New Democracy” he envisioned would be valid for “several dozens of years.” In fact, twenty years later, reporting from Hong Kong on the Cultural Revolution, I detailed how Mao had abandoned the concept of embracing diverse sectors of Chinese society including democratic groups and turned to the rigid Stalinist strategy of eliminating any potential opposition through class struggle.
When in Yenan I was told that the “New Democracy” was already being practiced in the principal Communist base territory, the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region, of which Yenan was the capital. In the land reform program, landlords with small landholdings who were deemed enlightened and cooperative were tolerated as well as so-called middle peasants, the comparatively well-off farmers who tilled their own land. However, I learned later that with the intensification of the Civil War, the Central Committee had embarked on a more radical agrarian policy. To secure its hold on contested rural regions, the Central Committee had in May 1944 issued a decree that sanctioned more extensive redistribution of landlord holdings to gain the more active support of poorer peasants, who made up the majority of the rural population. In subsequent travel in regions occupied by the Communists, I came upon cases where local Communist cadres had gone beyond the license of the May mandate and were violently disenfranchising landlords of their land and other possessions. The poor peasants, in gratitude for the gifts of the confiscated land, repaid the PLA with army recruits, provision of supplies often delivered on their backs, and other support in military operations.
At the interview in the Wangchiap’ing compound, I asked Liu Shaoqi if he would be looking to the Soviet Union for large-scale aid and diplomatic backing. Around the table there were quick exchanges of glances and secretive smiles and only ambiguous replies. Manifest was their discomfort about the extraordinary double game that Stalin was playing out in Manchuria. This ambiguity in relations would escalate in the next years to violent confrontation.
Stalin’s power play began on August 9, 1945, in the last days of World War II, when he declared war on Japan. His troops invaded Manchuria and accepted the surrender of the Kwangtung Army, consisting of 400,000 Japanese troops and 275,000 Chinese puppet troops of the satellite Manchukuo state established by the Japanese in 1932. On August 14, in keeping with the secret agreement at Yalta, Stalin concluded a Treaty of Alliance with Chiang Kai-shek recognizing his regime as the sole legitimate government of China. Truman had strongly urged the Nationalists to sign such a treaty, as the president recounted in his memoirs, because he felt it essential to bring the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, a move he thought, by shortening the war, would spare the lives of thousands of American soldiers. In return for signing the treaty with the Chiang Kai-shek government and entry into the war against Japan, Stalin gained control in Manchuria of the commercial port of Dairen; use of Port Arthur, known in Chinese as Lüshun, as a naval base; and joint control of the key Eastern and South Manchurian railways. Alarmed by the Soviet treaty with the Nationalist government, a Communist delegation headed by Liu Shaoqi traveled to Moscow to plead for renewal of Stalin’s support. The Soviet Union was seen as the only possible source of support to balance what Washington was providing Chiang Kai-shek. The Soviet dictator, fulfilling his trade-off with Chiang Kai-shek, advised Liu to pursue a political strategy akin to that of the European Communist parties. He urged Liu to enter into a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek but also suggested that compromise would give the Communists time to consolidate their forces for any future contention with the Nationalists. Pressured by Stalin, Mao reluctantly went to Chungking on August 28, 1945, to negotiate with Chiang. He returned ailing and exhausted to Yenan on October 11 after the negotiations with Chiang deadlocked.
During Mao’s absence in Chungking, the Soviets flew Zeng Gelin, commander of a small Chinese Communist task force in Manchuria, with their Russian advisers from Mukden to Yenan, where they met with Liu Shaoqi, who was in control of the party and military during Mao’s absence. The Russians told Liu that they intended to allow the Nationalists to take over the major cities of Manchuria, including Harbin, Ch’angch’un, and Mukden, now known as Shenyang, in keeping with the treaty that Stalin had signed with Chiang, but the Communists could operate freely elsewhere in the northeast, implying they would receive Soviet assistance. Based on this report, the Central Committee decided that Manchuria could fall into its grasp if its troops were free to maneuver in the countryside against the Nationalist-held cities. The committee saw conquest of Manchuria as key to victory in the Civil War. With Mao’s approval, Liu immediately diverted eighty thousand troops of the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, with a large number of political cadres, northward.
To lead the Manchurian campaign, Liu turned to General Lin Biao, one of the PLA’s most accomplished field commanders and writers on military doctrine. It put Lin Biao on a ladder to eminence that would eventually culminate in the 1960s when Lin would be promoted as Mao’s official successor, only to come later to a violent end. Lin’s rise to eminence and his mysterious downfall have a storybook quality. Lin graduated in 1925 from Whampoa Military Academy during the first KMT-CCP United Front. But unlike many of the newly minted officers, Lin became a protégé of Zhou Enlai, the political tutor at the academy, rather than of Chiang Kai-shek, the commandant. At the age of twenty, Lin became a colonel in the Nationalist Army, but in the aftermath of the KMT-CCP split in 1927, he defected to the Communists. Mao gave him command of the First Red Corps of the Red Army, and in 1924 he led the vanguard troops on the 8,000-mile Long March to Yenan. There, at the age of twenty-eight, Lin became president of the Red Army Military Academy and gave a series of lectures published as Struggle and War and Revolution that became Communist military doctrine much like Mao’s essay On Protracted War. He also became a devastating guerrilla fighter, jolting the Nationalists into putting a price of $100,000 on his head. In 1937, at the Battle of the Ping-hsing Pass, where his division defeated Japanese troops, the young commander suffered a severe chest wound. To convalesce he was sent to the Soviet Union, where he studied military science.
To carry out the mission, given to him by Liu Shaoqi, of preparing a Manchurian offensive, Lin Biao led a vanguard of 30,000 troops to join the guerrillas already operating in Manchuria. The Communist reinforcements moved into Manchuria through the northwestern corridor of Chahar and Jehol provinces and also from Shantung to ports on the coast of Manchuria’s Kwangtung Peninsula.
Stalin’s exchanges with Mao and Chiang did not divert the Soviet dictator from pursuing his reach for the spoils of Manchuria. While withdrawing his main occupation force, which consisted of some 300,000 troops, in May 1946, he asserted Soviet rights to “trophies of war of the Red Army,” and his forces stripped the region’s Japanese-built factories, transporting their machinery by rail to Siberia. Touring the region, the American Pauley Mission estimated in its November 1946 report to President Truman the value of the Russian take at about $900 million. Typically, as I found when traveling in Manchuria in 1971, at the huge Kirin hydroelectric project the Russians had hauled away six of the eight turbines.
While the Russians took with them much of the heavy Japanese military ordnance, they abandoned arsenals containing substantial quantities of light arms and munitions. To assure Communist advance access to these depots, the Russians delayed the debarkation of Nationalist troops into Manchuria through the ports of Dairen, Hulutao, and Yingkou. In the opposing race for the surrendered Japanese spoils, the U.S. Air Force in September flew 26,000 Nationalist troops aboard two hundred Douglas C-54 Skymaster transports into Nanking and Shanghai and then a further 5,000 troops into Peking. As Truman noted in his memoirs, the operation was accelerated to forestall a move by the Communists to take the surrender of the Japanese at all towns and cities within their reach. But before the airlifted Nationalist divisions could drive north to take possession of the Manchurian cities, the Communists pounced on Japanese arms depots at Harbin, Mukden, and other sites before retreating to the countryside. However, Stalin delayed until 1947 the turnover to the Communists of the largest cache of Japanese weapons, including tanks and heavy artillery, stored at the Russian base at Manchouli in Manchuria. The Russians had appropriated these weapons at a Japanese depot south of Mukden with the apparent intention of eventually transporting them to the Soviet Union. In yielding these arms Stalin seemed to put aside earlier doubts about whether the Communists were capable of defeating the Nationalists in the Civil War and decided to render more substantial aid to Mao. He also may have become concerned about continued American military aid to Chiang’s forces and the possibility that a total Nationalist victory might provide the Americans with bases in proximity to his eastern borders. The acquisition of the Japanese weaponry was of critical help to the Communists in their conquest of Manchuria. The troops, commanded by Lin Biao, had been equipped prior to acquisition of the Japanese arms mainly with crude Chinese manufactured weapons along with a motley collection of old European arms. Apart from supplying Lin Biao with the Japanese arms, the principal assistance given the Communists by the Russians was in the transport of PLA troops on the Manchurian railways which the Russians had retained under their control. While Lin Biao prized the military help given to him by the Russians, he stood by helplessly while they were looting the Manchurian industrial complex.
As I was leaving Yenan in late November, it became increasingly evident that the Communist leadership was bracing for a long struggle with Chiang Kai-shek. Three Nationalist army groups, comprising 250,000 men, had advanced within striking distance of Yenan. Bolstered by American military aid, Chiang was enjoying an overwhelming superiority in troops and equipment, including his unopposed air force. His troops numbered about 2.6 million men, while Communist forces totaled about 1.1 million. Four months after my departure from Yenan, the Maoist leaders and their followers, heavily outnumbered by advancing National divisions, abandoned their long-held stronghold.
Before leaving Chungking, Zhou Enlai obtained a promise from Marshall that American transports would evacuate all Communist political representatives from Nationalist-held territory if peace negotiations were not resumed. On February 27–28, in an operation dubbed “Catfish,” the U.S. Air Force returned Communist officials and their families to Yenan from Peking, Chungking, Nanking, and Shanghai. As the last evacuation aircraft departed Yenan, American pilots observed Communist troops blowing up the airstrip to deny use of it to advancing Nationalist columns. As Huang Hua recalls in his Memoirs, published in 2008, the party’s Central Committee met and decided to disperse leaders, central organizations, and schools to the various bases held by the Communists. Mao, Zhou Enlai, and General Peng Dehuai, the deputy commander in chief of the army, would go to a remote county in northern Shensi to “carry on the war of liberation in the whole country.” On the morning of March 19, the Nationalist First Division descended from the heights above undefended Yenan and took possession of the city that was by then empty of Maoist adherents. Mao, who had been sheltering with other leaders out of fear of Nationalist air raids in a gully behind the Peach Orchard, left Yenan in a jeep with Jiang Qing and their daughter escorted by a small contingent of bodyguards for the northern Shensi mountains, where he set up a new headquarters in the small village of Chengyangcha to plan his counteroffensive in the intensifying Civil War.