Who “Lost” China?

The most iconic moment in the long, dramatic story of Chiang-Kai Chek is the incident at Xi’an in December 1937. As it is generally remembered, Chiang was fighting Mao’s Communists, instead of resisting the Japanese invaders. He was invited to Xi’an to confer with his associate warlords, who then took him prisoner and forced him to buy his freedom by meeting with the Communists and sealing a pact with them, forming a united front to actively fight Japanese aggression. This alliance continued until Japan’s defeat in 1945, when Chiang turned on the Communists, starting the Chinese Civil War, which ended in his own defeat and retreat to Taiwan. Except – that’s not what happened. Or so Frank Dikotter tells us, in Red Dawn over China – or rather, shows us, with detailed documentation from the Chinese Communist archives.

In fact, in the “Xi’an Incident” of Dec. 1936 Chiang was treacherously captured and badly injured trying to escape, by Zhang Xueliang, “the Young Marshall”, a third player for leadership of China, but an indecisive figure who wavered between Chiang, Mao, Russia, Japan, and his own ambitions. Moreover, upon Chiang’s capture Mao at first strongly rejected a coalition with Chiang to resist Japan, and urged Chiang’s immediate execution, lest the opportunity be lost. And in fact, during the period of Mao’s “Long March” when his army was dwindling to nearly nothing, Chiang was building and training the large army that he would use to confront the Japanese invasion. Chiang was saved by the personal intervention of Stalin, who countermanded Mao’s order for Chiang’s execution and ordered Mao to join Chiang’s coalition. (This was followed by cordial discussions with Zhou Enlai who had, with Mao, just been urging Chiang’s immediate execution - or did Chiang flatly refuse to speak to Zhou?) Why? Stalin had just saved Mao’s forces from extinction with aid after the “Long March”, but he saw Chiang’s Nationalists as a better bet to distract the Japanese, occupy their attention, and avoid war with them as long as there was a chance of war with Germany. Meanwhile, the inclusion of the Communists in Chiang’s government was also a worthwhile proximate goal.

How can the myth be so wrong, and yet so persistent – and terribly destructive in subsequent history? The simplest answer is to look at this book’s author. Who is Frank Dikotter? A Dutch historian, fluent in Chinese and Russian, he has extensively studied the Chinese archives from the Maoist period, some which few others have been granted access to and some that have been long published but little-used, and he has written numerous books revealing their contents to Western scholarship. The facts are incontrovertible – “… the ‘Great Leap Forward’ was the largest mass murder in all human history”. Yet the reception of Dikotter’s reporting has been full of controversy, to the point of calling it “fraud”. Why? Simplest answer: those with a political agenda accuse Dikotter of having a political agenda. The myth of Mao and Chiang took on a powerful life of its own long ago, and the real question is whether the new access to the true facts will, or can, change that.

Remember, the winners write history, and Mao’s China has propagated the version of the story glorifying himself over 90 years. From the beginning, language has been a major barrier to understanding, particularly during WWII and before, when it was very difficult for Western journalism to get a clear picture of what was going on in China. There were few Western journalists in China before and during WW II, and very few who knew any Chinese, and none perhaps who were actually fluent. Yet from this tiny number of voices came several books that resonated with the American mind. Edgar Snow’s 1937 Red Star Over China made Snow (and Mao) world-famous, and Theodore White’s 1946 Thunder Out of China propagated the story of Chiang’s corruption and incompetence just in time to rob him of Truman and Marshall’s support, who stopped all aid to him at the decisive moment of the Chinese Civil War. They all had the experience of visiting Mao in his distant hideaway in Yan’an, where he showed them a Potemkin village of happy order and told them everything about himself that he wanted them to know. Meanwhile they saw the chaotic war, poverty, and suffering of Chiang’s China without much understanding of what was actually happening, including the gigantic military contest with Japan, a struggle on the scale of the German invasion of Russia, ultimately fought by the Nationalists alone, without any significant material aid from outside – except from Russia. (Another example is the efforts by both Mao and Japan to create hyperinflation in Nationalist China, destroying the economy by printing huge quantities of unbacked Nationalist currency). Third, a general leftist sympathy in Western journalism made it receptive to Mao’s version, but it was also powerfully influenced by General Joseph Stilwell, war hero and America’s chief intermediary with China in WW II, who had a visceral hatred of Chiang, and, this reviewer would argue, a deep-seated antipathy for Chinese culture.

Stilwell seems like a hopeless choice for any diplomatic mission. Angry, sarcastic, egotistic, he seems to have been unable to cooperate with anyone. Yet this persona played well with the American people after his defeat as Chinese commander in Burma. Like MacArthur, his ego made him incapable of admitting defeat, and so like MacArthur he became an American hero at a desperate time. He may well have been a good combat general, but lacked the ability to be a theater commander, or had any strategic sense. His real war was with Chiang over control of the Chinese army, meanwhile ignoring its desperate, successful defense against the Japanese. His lever was control over American aid; but with the Chinese seacoast and the Burma road closed, this really amounted to very little. At first, Roosevelt backed him in his demand for what amounted to a coup d’etat, giving him complete control over the Nationalist military. FDR threatened an end to Lend Lease aid, then Chiang called his bluff, and he removed Stilwell at Chiang’s formal demand in 1944. Today, most know Stilwell through his own voice; T. H. White edited his autobiography The Stilwell Papers in 1948, and Barbara Tuchman gave this heroic version of his story a powerful new currency in her immensely popular 1971 Stilwell and the American Experience in China – albeit written with no Chinese language facility or use of Chinese archives.

But where the American journalists tended to sympathize with Mao’s communism, Stilwell did not, necessarily. But, with American society in general, he shared a deep cultural antipathy for the Chinese. Americans saw themselves as rational, efficient, and moral, and Chinese culture as corrupt, inefficient, and cowardly. Communism – scientific, disciplined, idealistic – seemed to be a way of Westernizing the Chinese overnight and turning them into effective fighting allies. Certainly, this is how the Communists portrayed themselves to us. (This is very similar to how Tito portrayed himself to his Western supporters, versus his nationalist rivals, the Cetniks).

Dikotter is also very good at showing us the nature of revolution in Mao’s China, which closely resembles the “collectivization of agriculture” and Ukrainian “Holodomor”, as well as Mao’s own later “Cultural Revolution,” pitting levels of the peasantry, the landless, and the self-supporting (“kulaks”) against each other, murdering the latter and conscripting the former en masse. He gives us a lot of military history, but the book would benefit greatly by somewhere giving us a clear outline of the military narrative to refer to – frankly, it’s often confusing. But one of the most important things about this book is its explanation of the predominant role of Russia in this story.

Bolshevik Russia and the Republic of China’s first leader Sun Yat-sen had a close, sympathetic relationship from the beginning, and Russia provided early, crucial support when the Nationalists were getting it from no one else. But what about the Chinese Communists? The Russians were simultaneously organizing a Chinese communist party on Bolshevik lines, to play a role inside the Kuomintang, and recruiting Mao, Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, and Deng Xiaopeng as their proteges. Mikhail Borodin ran the Communist party in China and directed these efforts from 1923 to 1927. Throughout the entire pre-war period and WW II, Russia supported both elements, Mao and Chiang, whether as parts of a single organization, as cooperating leaders of rival organizations, or openly at war with each other. And whatever aid they both received from outside, it was always from Russia – never anyone else. To Stalin, both sides had their uses. Even more complicated, while a reasonably united and strong China served Russia’s interests versus Japan and Germany, Russian had its own very long-term imperialistic interest in China’s border regions. By the 1920’s Russia managed to control Mongolia, historically a Chinese possession, and managed to hold onto it – in spite of its alliance with communist China. Between the wars Russia made efforts to infiltrate Sinkiang, then withdrew in deference to the Chinese.

But the real prize was Manchuria, which Russia controlled and developed in the late 19^th century, without annexation from China. The Russo-Japanese War was largely fought there. Japan felt itself entitled by its victories to much Manchurian territory at the peace conference, and was deeply embittered when it was denied them. Both Russia and Japan continued to develop their portions of Manchuria in the 1920’s; and in 1929 Russian forces in Manchuria invaded China and attacked Chiang’s armies in response to Chiang’s drive to reestablish control of north China. But in the 1930’s Stalin preferred to see the Japanese army hopelessly tied down in China, and sold Russian interests to Japan, paving the way for the Japanese occupation and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, a mirror image of Russia’s own Mongolian puppet. Then, during W.W. II, Vice President Henry Wallace demanded in person that Chiang agree to the Russian occupation of Manchuria postwar. Stalin used this opportunity to invite Mao’s forces into Manchuria, where he armed and equipped them for the coming civil war with Chiang. Then, on 31 May 1946, Gen. George Marshall “…presented Chiang with an ultimatum. . . Chiang was to stop attacking the communists or the US would stop supplying him. This saved the CRA and the communists, who had been on the point of abandoning Harbin, the capital of Manchuria”. (McCauley, Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1949, p. 182). The subsequent communist victory put China under the control of Stalin’s protégé Mao, giving him a tremendously powerful ally to engage against the US in Korea in 1950.

In short, this is a very important and fascinating book that is required reading, perhaps most of all for those who will disagree with it, including those who still accept the myth of the corrupt and incompetent Chiang. And perhaps the time is long past for denying or excusing the atrocities of Stalin and Mao, but perhaps the time has arrived for seeking to understand the psychological appeal of their rule, and their great popularity at their own time, which indeed persists today. Why did people at the time embrace and act out the self-created myths of these totalitarian leaders? Was their violence and ruthless power itself a major part of their appeal, as it seems to be in Putin’s Russia today? Plainly political mythology has a life and power of its own, and is a worthy subject of historical study in its own right

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Our Reviewer: Robert P. Largess is the author of USS Albacore; Forerunner of the Future, and articles on the USS Triton, SS United States, the origin of the towed sonar array, and the history of Lighter-than-Air. He has contributed book reviews to ‘The Naval Historical Foundation’ (http://www.navyhistory.org) and The International Journal of Naval History (http://www.ijnhonline.org). His earlier reviews here include, Nathaniel Lyon’s River Campaign of 1861, Korea: War without End, Exterminating ISIS, Admiral Canaris, Armies Afloat: How the Development of Amphibious Operations in Europe Helped Win World War II, The Spy in the Archive, Origins of the Cold War 1941–1949, Questioning the Carrier, A Poisoned Chalice, Deterrence and Denial: The Historic Power of Fleets in Being, and Globemaster Down.

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Note: Red Dawn Over China is also available in paperback, audio, & e-edition.

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