On my return to Nanking from the Huapei Plain in January 1949, I found the Nationalists and their supporters cowering in despair as they awaited a Communist onslaught. On Christmas Eve, Chiang Kai-shek had attended services at the Song of Victory Church, which his wife established for Christian members of the government. He sang carols in his guttural native Chekiang accent. The next morning he told subordinates he would announce his resignation on Chinese New Year’s Day. There was reason enough for him to depart. Nationalist military strength had been reduced to 1.5 million troops, of which 500,000 were service troops, while the Communist armies swelled by Nationalist defections were now estimated by Western analysts at 1.6 million, virtually all combat effectives. In Washington Madame Chiang had found the doors shut when she arrived to plead for additional financial aid to rescue Nationalist China from its runaway inflation. In December 1947, the Truman administration had proposed a $1.5 billion program of aid over four years, but the Congress had reduced it to $338 million when it passed in April 1948. Following the shock of the fall of Mukden, Truman reminded Madame Chiang that the United States had already provided $3.8 billion in aid, much of it military equipment which was now in the hands of the Communists. Dean Acheson, who was shortly to succeed the ailing Marshall as secretary of state, shared the general skepticism and disillusionment with the Generalissimo. After General Barr’s experience, there was no interest in Chiang’s proposal that American officers, perhaps General Douglas MacArthur or General Mark Clark, join in staff direction of the Nationalist war effort.
On Chinese New Year’s Day, the Generalissimo was driven in his Cadillac out of the Great Peace Gate to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum on a slope of Purple Mountain. Standing at the foot of the stairs, I watched Chiang, in army uniform, cane in hand, mount the white stone steps to the tomb of the founder of the Chinese Republic. At the entrance, Chiang bowed three times before the white marble statue of the seated Sun Yat-sen. Emerging from the tomb, the Generalissimo paused and looked out over his walled capital for the last time. Then, saluting and nodding to soldiers massed before the tomb, he walked down the steps leaning heavily on his cane, reentered his limousine, and sped back to the Heavenly Palace, where he issued his resignation statement. He named Li Tsung-jen as acting president but in fact did not surrender the key levers of military and financial power. A few days later, on January 22, he flew to Fenghua, his birthplace, a picturesque town in Chekiang Province near the southern coast. Ostensibly, the Generalissimo had retired in Confucian humility to the life of a country squire. In reality, he was feverishly preparing his retreat to Taiwan, one hundred miles off the Fukien coast. While planning to leave Li Tsung-jen behind to face the Communists, Chiang denied him control over the bulk of the armed forces. For military support, Li could count only on General Pai Chung-hsi, the Central China commander, based in Hankow, who commanded 350,000 troops. When Li pleaded for additional resources to defend the Yangtze River line, Chiang rebuffed him. The Generalissimo meanwhile ordered the transfer to Taiwan of the air force, the navy, and the best army divisions, commanded by generals personally loyal to him. American military aid shipments en route were diverted to the island. The government’s reserve of gold and silver bullion and other foreign exchange, as well as thousands of ancient art treasures collected from leading museums, were shipped surreptitiously in a convoy of cargo vessels to Taiwan.
To secure the Taiwan redoubt, the Generalissimo clamped tighter military and police control over the restive 8 million Taiwanese. At the end of World War II, the Allied command transferred authority over the island, which had been a Japanese colony for fifty years, to the Chiang government pending conclusion of a peace treaty. The Nationalist troops sent to occupy the island accepted the surrender of the Japanese and then indulged in an orgy of looting. Nationalist officials seized public enterprises and land for their personal use. In protest, the Taiwanese, in February and March 1947, staged public demonstrations demanding that the governor, Ch’en I, who had been appointed by Chiang, immediately take action to restore order and curb corrupt officials in his administration. Ch’en’s response to the appeals was to summon additional troops from the mainland to repress the demonstrators. Between 10,000 and 20,000 Taiwanese were massacred, including several thousand of the island’s political and cultural elite. Reacting to the shock abroad, Chiang ordered Ch’en I executed in punishment for his excesses, but the Taiwanese population remained hostile to the mainlanders.
As Communist armies regrouped for a crossing of the Yangtze, I became aware of a strange game of secret diplomacy and political intrigue in play, involving the Soviet Embassy in Nanking. The action swirled about the lonely figure of the American ambassador, J. Leighton Stuart.
In November 1948, before leaving for Pengpu, I had called upon Ambassador Stuart in his villa on the edge of the compound housing the embassy chancery. What prompted my request for a talk was a visit to the political section of the chancery, where I was told privately by members of the Political Section that the ambassador was at bitter loggerheads with his embassy’s minister-counselor, Lewis Clark. In the sitting room of his villa, over cups of jasmine tea, responding to my delicately put questions, Stuart told me that despite the opposition of his embassy officers he was actively continuing to seek a peace settlement that would bring Mao and Chiang into a coalition government and stop the killing in the Civil War. Stuart spoke more as the missionary he was before his appointment as ambassador than as a functionary obliged to comply with Washington’s bidding. The policy he was pursuing was at cross-purposes with the instructions given the embassy by General Marshall, the secretary of state.
In December 1945, when Marshall arrived in China on his mediation mission, he had arranged for Stuart’s appointment as ambassador, replacing Patrick Hurley, so as to make use of Stuart’s knowledge of the country and personal influence with the Chinese. Stuart, born in China, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was then president of Yenching University, a missionary-supported school on the outskirts of Peking, often referred to as the “Harvard of China.” Yenching faculty and students revered the seventy-year-old Stuart, a thin spare man with dark cavernous eyes under heavy eyebrows, as a saintly figure. Appointed ambassador, Stuart worked closely with Marshall in his failed effort to bring about a peace settlement based on a coalition government. Two months after the general’s departure from China in January 1947, there was a switch in White House policy that threw Stuart into despair. In the wake of the Communist takeover of government in an internal coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, President Truman’s pursuit of coalition government in China had become a painful political embarrassment, and the policy was abandoned. Marshall, who had become secretary of state, specifically instructed the Nanking embassy in August to dissuade the Chiang government from seeking a coalition. He told the embassy to impress upon the Nationalists “the pattern of engulfment which has resulted from coalition government in Eastern Europe.” Despite these instructions, Stuart continued to explore the possibilities of coalition government, turning at times to the Soviet Embassy, which, as he told me, encouraged him to believe that Russian help in peacemaking might be forthcoming. In October, Marshall virtually reprimanded Stuart, instructing him to tell the Generalissimo that his mediation proposals were his own and did not have the approval of the State Department.
When I spoke to Stuart in November, he was bent on searching for ways to persuade the Generalissimo to retire so that Li Tsung-jen, then vice president, would assume full power and make peace with the Communists. Stuart’s only ally in American Embassy circles was Philip Fugh, his longtime Chinese secretary and confidant, whom he regarded as an adopted son. I became friendly with Fugh, a friendship that continued with him and his family for many years. Fugh’s influence with the ambassador, who was often operating independently, was deeply resented in the embassy chancery. Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, after a visit to China on a presidential fact-finding mission in July 1947, speculated that Fugh was a spy. He retracted the damaging aspersion years later. Fugh was Stuart’s principal contact with Li Tsung-jen, the acting president. In early January, Fugh met with Chang Chi-chung, a skillful political intriguer who was Li Tsung-jen’s key intermediary in peace negotiations with the Communists and his contacts with the Soviet Embassy. Secretly, Chang had been in touch with Zhou Enlai, with whom he had an old personal tie. Fugh told Stuart that he had been informed by Chang that the Russians were advising the Communists to halt at the Yangtze. The Soviet historian Ledovsky does not believe that Stalin told Mao specifically not to cross the Yangtze but certainly cautioned him against further advances, which might invite American military intervention. Stalin certainly had something to gain by leaving China fragmented. Apart from the concessions he had wrung from Chiang Kai-shek in Manchuria, he was being further tempted by Chang Chi-chung, who traveled to Sinkiang to negotiate an agreement that would have given Moscow special trading rights, bringing the Central Asia province under Soviet influence. Mao would later make reference to Stalin’s double-dealing at a secret Central Committee meeting in 1962, saying: “This was in 1945, when Stalin tried to prevent the Chinese Revolution by saying there should not be a civil war and that we must collaborate with Chiang Kai-shek. At that time we did not carry this into effect, and the revolution was victorious. After the victory they again suspected that China would be like Yugoslavia and I would become a Tito.”
In seeking Russian assistance for negotiation of a peace settlement, Stuart had directly, and through Chang Chi-chung, contacted the Soviet ambassador, General N. V. Roschin, several times. Some of these contacts, I learned, were not reported to the State Department. Roschin repeatedly expressed interest in a mediation effort. On January 10, 1949, Stalin sent to Mao a Nationalist memorandum, apparently forwarded to him by Roschin, in which the Li Tsung-jen government requested Soviet mediation in the Civil War. Stalin asked Mao for his comment on a reply which he had drafted implying his own interest in a peaceful solution to the Civil War and his concern about the possibility of American military intervention. Mao was said, according to Chinese archival sources, to have immediately rejected the idea of Soviet mediation. Nevertheless, Stalin seems to have persisted. On January 23, Li Tsung-jen informed Stuart that he had reached a tentative understanding with Roschin for Russian intercession. The Soviet price was a pledge that Li would maintain China’s strict neutrality in any future international conflict, eliminate American influence from China to the greatest extent possible, and establish a new basis for effective cooperation between China and the Soviet Union. When Li asked for Washington approval of this negotiating approach, the State Department told Stuart to reject the idea as “incredible.”
At this juncture, the Nationalists suffered another military disaster. General Fu Tso-yi, who had become the commander of the Peking-Tientsin defense line in North China, had secretly been in contact with General Lin Biao, whose troops were closing in on Peking. Seeking to avoid a destructive Communist assault on the old imperial capital, Fu asked a Yenching University professor to arrange a contrived surrender by Fu that would not allow Chiang to paint him as a traitor. Lin Biao acceded with a face-saving siege of the old capital during which the Communists pumped a few 75-mm shells into the city, mostly duds, so as not to damage its historical monuments, and a Communist regiment marched in unopposed on January 23. Prior to surrender of the city, the tale is told, which I was never able to confirm, that Lin Biao decided that it might be necessary to breach the city’s thick sixty-foot-high wall by blasting open the western segment in the ancient Chinese sector with artillery fire. But before commencing the bombardment, his command is said to have consulted with a noted archaeologist at Tsinghua University, which is located just outside Peking, to determine whether any historic landmarks would be destroyed. The expert replied that valuable Ming architecture would be demolished and suggested a more vacant target area elsewhere along the wall.
The Generalissimo had violently opposed the surrender, but Li Tsungjen, as acting president, was in agreement. Li sent an envoy to meet with the Communists in Peking, but the envoy, Ho Ssu-yuan, a former mayor of Peking, was kidnapped and killed by the Nationalist secret police. Li was reputed to have also been a target for assassination, but he escaped. After the surrender of Peking, Fu Tso-yi was rewarded by Mao with a ministerial position in the new Peking administration. The twenty-five Nationalist divisions under Fu’s command were absorbed into Communist armies.
On March 2 the Nationalist cruiser Chungking, donated a year earlier by Britain and the pride of the navy, slipped away from its mooring at Shanghai and defected to the Communists. Nationalist bombers found it off the Manchurian port of Hulutao on March 20 and sank it.
Beleaguered on all sides, Li Tsung-jen sent a delegation to Peking on April 1 to negotiate for peace. On its arrival, the Communists handed it an “Agreement on Internal Peace,” which stipulated eight conditions tantamount to complete surrender. When Li Tsung-jen received the document in Nanking, the acting president rejected it, asserting that the terms would give the Communists “military control of the entire nation.” Chang Chi-chung, the head of the Nationalist delegation, then defected to the Communists.
At midnight April 20 the Communist ultimatum expired, and in an “Order to the Army for the Country-wide Advance,” Mao Zedong and Zhu De, the army commander in chief, signaled to their forces that the moment had arrived for the crossing of the Yangtze and the envelopment of Chiang Kai-shek’s capital. The order stated: “After the People’s Liberation Army has encircled Nanking, we are willing to give the Li Tsung-jen Government at Nanking another opportunity to sign the Agreement on Internal Peace, if that government has not yet fled and dispersed and desires to sign it.” On April 22, even as Communist troops embarked on the crossing of the Yangtze, Li Tsung-jen, accompanied by General Ho Ying-chin, the temporary premier of government, and General Pai Chung-hsi, went to Hangchow from Nanking for a conference with the Generalissimo, who had flown there from his Fenghua retreat. Li Tsung-jen pleaded for defense of the south by falling back on his native Kwangsi and Kwangtung. In a joint communiqué the conferees pledged unity and a “fight to the end” with Ho Ying-chin empowered to exercise unified command over the armed forces. But for Chiang the conference was only a delaying tactic. He was intent only on preparing Taiwan as his fortified refuge, where he had already transferred 300,000 troops as well as air and naval units. When the Hangchow conference ended, Li Tsungjen and Ho Ying-chin boarded a plane for Nanking, not realizing that it was the eve of the fall of their capital.