The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret

Author:John Pomfret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Mission Impossible

On November 26, 1945, barely an hour after assuring President Truman that he would be returning to China, Patrick Hurley announced his resignation as ambassador, alleging, in a scathing letter that he read aloud at the National Press Club, that State Department officials were siding “with the Communist armed party and at times with the imperialist bloc against American policy.”

At a cabinet meeting that day, Truman was livid. “See what the son of a bitch did to me,” he exclaimed. Responding to allegations of Communist infiltration from Hurley and other prominent Republicans, Truman ordered an investigation of federal employees, resulting in the formation of Loyalty Boards throughout the government. The president also called George Marshall, who was six days into retirement as army chief of staff, and ordered him “to go back and finish the job in China that Hurley left.”

In November 1945, George Catlett Marshall, the architect of the Allied victory in World War II, was a five-star general and a national icon. Truman called the sixty-five-year-old hero “the great one of the age.” Five days before Marshall’s plane touched down in Shanghai on December 20, 1945, Truman issued a statement explaining that America’s goal was “a strong, united and democratic China.” This required the Nationalists to end their monopoly on power and institute “a broadly representative government.” The Communists should be allowed to enter the government on the condition that they somehow merge their units into the Nationalist army.

It is truly amazing that Truman could believe that Marshall, one man with a puny staff, a limited understanding of China, and no army, was going to stop Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong from continuing a decades-old war for control of China. But Americans had always thought that they had a special way with the Chinese, and the ill-fated Marshall Mission fit neatly with the American expectation of a “blitzconversion” of China, in this case into a multiparty democracy with a free press, an independent judiciary, and a united army. In reality, Marshall’s mission was doomed from the start; he was supposed to forge a democracy, but not one that would ultimately threaten Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. As Chiang observed of American diplomats and their schemes, “They talk a great deal but really do very little, even to the extent of making a bold beginning but then settling for a weak conclusion.”

When they heard that Marshall would mediate, the Nationalists were worried. Yan Xishan, a liberal-minded warlord in central China, predicted that Marshall’s intervention would simply give the Communists time to gain strength. For their part, Mao and Zhou Enlai were elated and, true to Yan’s analysis, welcomed the effort as a chance to prepare for war.

The Communists did their best to impress Marshall with their eagerness to cooperate. Their spies planted bogus intelligence to convince the Americans that they were serious about peace. In 1946, Communist agents infiltrated the office of an OSS officer in the US Consulate in Shanghai. The operatives plied the officer with phony reports

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