AMERICA DID BACK MAO

BY SABOTAGING CHINA'S NATIONALISTS

Welcome to my new newsletter which from now on will be my main source of reporting and analysis of the economic and political realities of our world as I see them. I hope you will read more about why I am doing this and what I hope to accomplish HERE. But I thought the best way for you to understand is to show you my first column below.

James Carter has written a catchy and intriguing new book on China. The title says it all: What if the U.S. Had Backed Mao in WWII. It Almost Happened.

The book goes on to tell of the so called “Dixie Mission” (a name lifted from behind the lines Union efforts in the U.S. Civil War). In July 1944, nine members of the U.S. Army Observation Group landed in Yan-an where Mao and the remnants of the rebel Communist Party were holed up after their Long March of 1934-35 to escape from Chinese President Chiang Kai Shek’s armies (only 36,000 of the initial communist army of 86,000 made it). The location was chosen because it was relatively close to the Soviet Union which was supplying Mao. The mission of the Americans was to size up the Communists to determine if they might be a possible second Chinese ally of the U.S. against the Japanese.

Behind this concept lies an ocean of claims and counter claims. It is important to understand certain facts. An important one is that Chiang Kai Shek was not only the globally recognized head of state of China but one of what was known during WWII as the Big Four (Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Chiang). Carter rightly reports that the U.S. supplied Chiang, but he fails to mention that circumstances and strategy gravely limited the amount of supply. There was no Lend Lease for Chiang as there was for Churchill and no U.S. aircraft carriers to prevent Japanese landings in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Vietnam as there were to protect Australia from invasion. America had no land or sea contact with China. Even air freight was limited because it had to “go over the Hump” of the Himalaya’s from India to western China where the Chinese army was.

The U.S. did not dispatch officers like General Eisenhower to Chiang as it did to the UK. Rather as the key U.S. liaison with Chiang it sent a general who could easily have won the title for world’s greatest curmudgeon. He did speak Chinese, but his nickname said it all. “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell. He and Chiang developed an intense mutual dislike. One might blame that on Chiang who was not a charmer himself, but even Franklin Roosevelt could stand to be with him (Stillwell) for only a limited time. So, no matter how you cut it, the U.S. was not doing a lot for China. It was just not top priority.  

On top of that key FDR officials, who later were determined were working for the Soviets, actively threw sand in the gears of U.S. aid to Chiang.  These include Treasury official Harry Dexter White and FDR chief economic advisor Laughlin Currie, and several officials in the State Department.

If Chiang has been able to follow up his rout of the Communist army by following it to Yan-an, he would easily have destroyed it and none of us would know the name Mao. But the attack on China by the Japanese in mid-1937 dramatically changed the game and saved Mao’s skin. Chiang’s army was not match for the Japanese in terms of equipment, training, and leadership.

When the Japanese invaded, Chiang sent 600,000 soldiers into the fight, but he was seriously outgunned and lost 200,000 of his best soldiers. He retreated first to Wuhan and then to ChongQing. Although he lost most of the battles, he dispelled the Japanese dream that it could conquer China in three months, and he tied up millions of Japanese troops who might otherwise been sent into battle against the Allies. Indeed, Chiang’s troops suffered more casualties and tied down far more Japanese troops than the U.S and its allies.

Although they claim to have been active and effective against the Japanese, the Chinese Communists did virtually no fighting. As Zachary Keck notes (The Diplomat, 09/04/14), between 1937 and 1945 there were 23 battles in which both sides employed at least one regiment. Mao’s forces were not a main part of any of them. In January 1940, Zhou Enlai sent a secret message to Stalin reporting that over one million Chinese had died in 1939 but only 3 percent of these had been Communist party troops.

In this discussion it is important to understand that Communist was not a dirty word in Washington in 1944. The Soviet Union was an ally. Under Secretary of the Treasury had close relations with many Soviet officials. In 1937, leftist journalist Edgar Snow’s adulatory book, Red Star Over China, painted Mao and the Chinese Communist Party as not being communists but merely peace loving “agrarian reformers.”

The Dixie Mission’s key player, John Service had been born to missionary parents in China, was fluent in Chinese, was cognizant of corruption in Chiang’s government, and seems to have obtained an impression of the Chinese Communists similar to that of Snow. This may been helped by the fact his two roommates in China were both Soviet agents[RA1] .  He argued for U.S. support of the Communist army and closer U.S. relations with it. In doing so, he clairvoyantly forecast that the communists would defeat Chiang’s nationalists in a battle for China. Of course, he ultimately proved to be correct, but perhaps for reasons he could not have forecast.

Mao was saved by none other than then U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall (yes, the Marshall Plan Marshall). At the end of the war, Japan had about two million troops in China. Who took their surrender was politically extremely important. Stalin rushed trucks and weapons to Mao who was positioned in Northeast China near Manchuria and large concentrations of Japanese troops. Conversely, Chiang’s armies were in the Southwest and needed transport to get to the north for the taking of surrenders. The U.S. dragged its feet a bit in getting the necessary airplanes to Chiang and Mao enjoyed early success in seizing territory. But by late October 1945 Chiang’s troops had reversed the tide and were making rapid gains. They, after all, were battle hardened from fighting the Japanese while the Communist troops had waited the war out. By mid-November, Mao and company were on the run.

Then, just as Japan had saved Mao in 1937, President Harry Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall saved him in November 1945. Marshall undertook a mission to China and essentially compelled Chiang to back off and form a coalition government with the Communist Part on condition that if he did not do so, U.S. aid would be halted. At the time, Marshall said he was not aware of any Soviet aid going to Mao. Later fact finding has demonstrated that Marshall was either dishonest, or did not read his intelligence, or was just incredibly naïve.

With U.S. support restricted and under enormous pressure, Chiang formed the coalition government with Mao which effectively promoted Mao to equal status and provided him with a wide access to power and materials. The civil war ended in 1949 with, as John Service had predicted, a communist victory. But Service could not have know how incredibly helpful Marshall would be to Mao.

But that was not the end of the story. In fact, one might credit Marshall with enormous foresight. Because Mao and his communists proceeded literally to destroy the country and even to try to destroy its culture. The forced starvation, the torture, the loss of human life, the cynicism, the corruption of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao after 1949 were far far worse than anything Chiang Kai Shek might have dreamed in his cruelest moments.

By 1972, China was far down and virtually out. Worse, it was involved in cross border shooting and conflicts with Soviet army units, and China was not at all prepared to go to war with the Soviets. For their part, the Soviets were sounding out the Washington of the Nixon era about how it might react to a Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear weapons installations. Now Mao is literally looking down the barrel of a big Soviet gun.

But his rabbit foot appears one more time. None other than Henry Kissinger (Henry the K) rides to his rescue. Kissinger had long considered himself a kind of latter day Metternich and sought to orchestrate a global concert of nations as Metternich had orchestrated the Concert of Europe that maintained a mostly peaceful balance of power in Europe between 1815 and 1914. Kissinger told the Soviets not to dare considering a strike on China and then hurried to Beijing to normalize U.S.-China relations, imagining that America’s major potential enemy was the Soviet Union and that by doing a deal to align China with the U.S., he would dramatically shift the global balance of power in America’s favor.

In fact, he gave away the store in return for some access to Chinese intelligence on a Soviet Union that was going to collapse in twenty years. I was a leader of the first U.S. trade mission to China in the fall of 1982. It was such a poor country. No stop lights in the capital city of Beijing. No cars. Everyone riding black bicycles and wearing black Mao suits. No buildings higher than ten stories. No restaurants. Poor. Dirt poor.

Kissinger encouraged American business to invest in China, transfer technology to China, and make money from what will be a growing market. His Kissinger Associates became a high paid consulting firm introducing American business leaders to the big wigs of Beijing. He encouraged U.S. corporations to fire their workers and take advantage of the cheap Chinese labor that had no unions and no environmental protections.     

Smart though he may be, Kissinger never understood what he was dealing with in China. It had never been and did not want to be a “power” in the Metternichian sense. It saw itself as the Middle Kingdom, the center of the earth, the rule of all under heaven. It had had a few bad years, but thanks to America, to leaders like Stillwell, FDR, Marshall, Truman, Kissinger, and Nixon, the bad years would be over.

On the shoulders of these leaders the Globalization Gang took over. Not only were we going to recognize China and trade with it, we were going to transform it into what former W. Bush administration official Robert Zoellick called: “a responsible stakeholder in the liberal, rules based global system.” Bill Clinton led the effort to bring China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), saying that for China to control the Internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.” He also forecast that the then $80 billion U.S. trade deficit with China would be cut in half by bringing Beijing into the WTO. Today it is around $400 billion. Xi Jinping promised President Obama he would not militarize the South China Sea. But then he militarized it while Obama watched.

Carter has it wrong. The question is not what might have happened if the U.S. had backed Mao. It is what might have happened if it had not backed Mao.