The Atlantic and Its Enemies

present himself as the genuine reformer, and was accepted as such by many foreigners; he went out of his way to emphasize that he would not discriminate too far and his lieutenant, the then young Deng Xiaoping, announced that ‘our policy towards the rich peasants is to encourage their capitalistic side, though not the feudal one’ (‘rich’, ‘capitalist’ and ‘feudal’ being entirely relative terms). The Kuomintang, by contrast, counted as corrupt and tyrannical; the wayward and vainglorious Chiang Kai-shek — his mausoleum in Taiwan must count as the greatest ever monument to failure — did not impress. Besides, the Chinese Communists were given a great shot in the arm when the Soviet Union intervened in the Far Eastern war.

At Yalta Stalin had been given the Far Eastern railway and two major ports in Manchuria (presented as reparations from Japan) in return for the promise to intervene. When the atomic bombs were dropped, the invasion occurred, and Soviet troops moved into the north-east; they swept all before them. Stalin as ever played both sides. He recognized, and had an alliance with, the Kuomintang government because it had in effect ceded Outer Mongolia to him and because he thought he could manage it. But he also helped Mao. The Communists took areas only a hundred miles north-west and north-east of Peking, secured the northern half of Korea, and took over Manchuria, which had coal, iron and gold, with giant forests and over two thirds of China’s heavy industry; it also had a border with Siberia that was well over a thousand miles in length. The Russians at once gave Japanese weapons stocks to the Red Chinese, who also conscripted troops from the puppet Japanese government in ‘Manchukuo’ (along with the titular emperor, who ended up as a gardener in the palace of his ancestors).

The sequel showed how well Chou En-lai had understood the weakness of the West. Chiang’s best troops were in Burma and southern China and he could get them north only in American ships — and the Americans insisted on negotiations with Mao. In late August Mao did go to Chungkin (he insisted on the American ambassador’s accompanying him, as an insurance against an air accident) for six weeks followed by a treaty that the foreign embassies wanted. Chiang and Mao even met over a breakfast. But as soon as Mao was back in Yenan in October 1945 he started operations in Manchuria. At the turn of 1945-6 matters did not go well for the Communists — Chiang Kai-shek’s troops had had experience of fighting the Japanese and once they came north gave a good account of themselves, thousands of Communist troops deserting. The Soviets left Manchuria in early May 1946, and Mao made an initial error of trying to hold the cities, whereas his real strength lay with the peasants. The Nationalists did well, chasing the Communists to the north; at one stage Mao even planned to give up Harbin and retreat into Siberia. But in Jonathan Spence’s account the rush into Manchuria was a mistake: Chiang should have concentrated on building up China south of the Great Wall, not on a complicated adventure into territory where the Communists had ready Soviet support. However, Chiang was desperately anxious for victory, and at the same time unwilling to use his tanks and heavy weaponry; he neglected the countryside and mismanaged Manchuria when he ran it in 1946-7. Kuomintang finances went into an inflationary spiral, and even the Shanghai business people were alienated, while troops deserted for want of proper pay.

The Communists were in effect also saved by the Americans. President Truman did not want a fight over China, would grant dollars, would help with shipping, but believed he could insist on the Chinese co-operating. He sent George C. Marshall in December 1945 — a hugely respected man, who had some knowledge of the country from service there in the twenties. He took against Chiang Kai-shek because of his relatives’ corruption and his own dissolute doings (although Chiang had become a Methodist and a reformed character), and a subsequent American envoy, though more sympathetic, was a buffoon. To the American professionals, Mao and Chou had little difficulty in portraying themselves as efficient popular-front democrats, and Marshall himself was impressed when he saw them at work in Yenan, in March 1946. In any case, at this moment the Americans had enough on their plate. Europe was by far the greatest problem, but in Asia they faced one conundrum after another: what were they to do with Japan; the Philippines had to be sorted out; Korea was a muddle; the British, still influential, feared what a Nationalist government might do in Hong Kong. The last thing that the Americans wanted to see was a Chinese civil war, and for a time Marshall accepted what Mao told him. He stopped the Nationalists at a decisive moment. Chiang might have destroyed the Communists in Manchuria but on 31 May Marshall told him not to go on: Chiang Kai-shek was getting American aid — $3bn in all — and he was in no position to defy Marshall. Truman wrote to Chiang, admonishingly, and under American pressure the Nationalists set up an assembly that wasted time and attracted endless criticism for sharp practice: the Americans making exactly the same mistake as they were to make in Vietnam twenty years later, of assuming that democracy Western-style needed to be introduced at once. A truce was proclaimed, just as Mao prepared to abandon Harbin and the railway link to Siberia.

The upshot was that the Communists were left in control of Manchuria, an area twice the size of Germany, and they used these four months to consolidate their hold over it, using Japanese weaponry supplied by the Russians (as well as Japanese prisoners of war who even served as flight instructors). They took over 900 aircraft, 700 tanks, 3,700 guns and much else, together with 200,000 regular soldiers, and North Korea, which the Russians had occupied, was also a useful asset for Mao. In June 1946, when matters were going badly, he was able to send his wounded and his reserve materiel there, and when the Nationalists split Manchuria in two, North Korea was the link between the Communists in the north and the south, who would otherwise have been divided. The other decisive Soviet contribution was the remaking of the railway, which was linked up with Russia again in spring 1947. In June 1948 when Mao was preparing for his final push into all of Manchuria a Russian railway expert, Ivan Kovalev, supervised the work — over 6,000 miles of track and 120 large bridges. This was all done in very great secrecy and not even acknowledged in Party documents, where the general line was that the Communists romantically had only ‘millet plus rifles’. Soviet help was decisive, though it came at a grotesque price: the export of food from a starving country.

When Marshall imposed his ceasefire in June 1946 the Nationalists were greatly superior, with over 4 million troops to Mao’s 1.25 million; and they expelled the Communists from most of their strong-holds in China proper, with Nanking again the capital. In October 1946 Chiang Kai-shek did attack Manchuria but by then the Red bases had become too strong and Mao’s chief general, Lin Biao, proved to have much military talent (it was also the hardest winter in living memory, and his troops were made to carry out ambushes in fearful cold, at ?40 degrees: they lost 100,000 men from frostbite). In January 1947 Marshall left China and it was the end of American efforts at mediation.

The collapse in China was astonishingly rapid, given the size of the country. The Kuomintang had become demoralized; some even of the senior commanders were secretly working for the Communists (using contacts from Whampoa, dating back to its Soviet period, when Chou En-lai had been head of its political department). In April 1947 Mao did win two surprising victories near Yenan as the Nationalist commander sent his troops in the wrong direction, or lost them to intensive shelling in a narrow valley; he even lost his base with all reserve supplies. A first-class artillery park fell to the Communists (now ‘People’s Liberation Army’) and Yenan was mainly retaken by them. East-central China was thus lost by spring 1948. There was another strange choice as commander for Manchuria, a man whom the Americans had supported as a liberal (he seems to have fought well in Burma) but, when appointed, he let Mao know, via Paris, and then failed to secure his line of retreat. Only 20,000 of half a million Kuomintang troops managed to escape from Manchuria, and that man lived on untouched in Mainland China until his death in 1960. Lin Biao was now free to move south for the Peking-Tianjin campaign, reckoned to be the second decisive one of the Civil War — again encountering a general who seems to have been surrounded by agents, perhaps including his daughter. This general had lost faith and in any case did not want to see Peking destroyed; he was on the edge of a breakdown, slapping his own face. But he kept his command, even though his forces were outnumbered two to one by Lin Biao’s 1.3 million men. Tientsin fell in January 1949 — the third-largest city in China. This general too went on to collaborate with Mao until his death in 1974.

At the same moment there was a great fight going on, this time for the heartland of China north of Nanking, the Nationalist capital. By mid-January 1949 Mao had taken the whole country north of the Yangtze, where four fifths of the Nationalist troops had concentrated: the way was open to Nanking and Shanghai and the Nationalists were in utter collapse. Here, a pattern built up that had been seen ever since the Russian Whites had imploded in 1919; the pattern was detectable again in Vietnam and even, in 1978, in Iran. There was vast corruption, food- hoarding, mismanagement of the currency (in this case an absurd exchange rate for the Japanese puppet government’s currency and a ridiculously variable rate for the dollar, which allowed speculators to make small fortunes just by moving from town to town). Enormous American imports were profitably sold off, as in Vietnam later on, and an investigation into Chiang Kai-shek’s in-laws reckoned that $380m had been illegally converted. On top of everything else there was American criticism of inadequate democracy, whereas the central point about Mao was a pitilessness that the Nationalists could not emulate, as when he starved out a Manchurian city in summer