Mao and The Albatross: A Lost Chance in China?
Introduction:
The period of collaboration between the Communist Party of China and the United State Armed Forces during the 2nd World War is a period that is often forgotten due to being overshadowed by decades of Cold — and not so cold — war following the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Those who are vaguely aware of the collaboration likely put it down to a case of strange bedfellows who had no natural affinity for each other and had only been forced together by circumstance of sharing a common enemy. The actual attitudes of both parties have not frequently been examined, nor are many non-specialists aware of the depth of their collaboration via. the U.S. Army Observer Group in Yanan, also known as the “Dixie Mission”.
Conventional wisdom is that Mao Zedong was only interested in cynically deceiving the United States as a tactical maneuver when they were able to offer him war materials or an edge in his conflict against Chiang Kai-Shek. The reality is that Mao consistently stated his belief that the United States was a necessary ally in the post-war reconstruction of China, and key China hands believed these sentiments to be genuine. Mao’s program of “New Democracy” advocated a multi-class coalition government and not the planned economy that was ultimately established when this policy failed in the run up to the Korean War.
Despite allegations by the Chiang regime and American anti-Communists that the Communist Party of China was a Soviet puppet, relations between Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were marked by mistrust, and the Soviet leadership urged the Chinese Communists to mend their relationship with the National government, not to pursue a leftist policy that conflicted with American geopolitical interests. In January 1945 Mao attempted to get permission to go to the United States to personally negotiate with President Roosevelt for a closer relationship, and the placement of Communist forces under American military command.
This paper examines the conditions that briefly made a substantive alliance between the United States and Chinese Communists seem like a realistic option to members of both parties, as well as evaluating some of the factors that nipped this hope in the bud. The scope of this work is international relations and not revolutionary strategy. This paper deals with the trends that pushed Mao and the Americans together in the context of Mao’s political program and growing American concerns about the increasingly corrupt, authoritarian, and ineffective Chiang regime. It does not deal with the question of whether an alliance between Mao and the United States would have been desirable or disastrous from the standpoint of the interests of Chinese and world Socialism.
The rise of an avowedly Communist regime in October 1949 in China marked a major escalation of the Cold War and loomed large over considerations of U.S. foreign policy for much of the second half of the 20th Century. Conventional wisdom claims that “only Nixon could have gone to China,” because only a conservative Republican president could associate himself with the Chinese Communists to regularize relations without committing political suicide. The task here is not to take from Nixon one of the few events of his presidency that observers widely celebrate, but this conventional wisdom is not correct. Not only had Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered to negotiate with Mao Zedong prior to his seizure of power throughout the entire country, he embedded a small number of U.S. troops in the Communist headquarters of Yenan from July 1944 to March 1947. The United States Army Observation Group, colloquially known as the “Dixie Mission”, initially sought to gauge the fighting capabilities of the Chinese Communist forces, to install weather sensing equipment, and rescue downed U.S. airmen in the area, but it would come to far exceed its original orders, and become something akin to an unofficial diplomatic intermediary between the Roosevelt administration and the Chinese Communists.
Why would Roosevelt have any interest in collaborating with a Communist rebel group that only controlled a small portion of the Chinese front fighting against Japan? American China policy was long dedicated to maintaining the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist regime. Indeed, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the upper echelons of his staff consistently pursued this line, with the effect that a number of critical appraisals of the Chiang regime never crossed the president’s desk.1 Figures in the State Department may have wished to keep Roosevelt in the dark about the difficulties of the Chiang regime, but Roosevelt went around them and kept an informal team of advisors, including his fixer Thomas “the Cork” Corcoran and economic advisor Lauchlin Currie.
Roosevelt sent Currie to China for fact-finding missions on behalf of the president multiple times, leading to Roosevelt developing doubts about the competency of Chiang, and the ability of his government to conduct the war.2 On 15 January 1944, political attaché John Paton Davies wrote a memorandum encouraging sending a U.S. observer mission to the Communist base areas.3 General Joseph Stilwell forwarded this recommendation to Washington, and President Roosevelt assented to the idea. Chiang Kai-shek refused to entertain the possibility of a U.S. Mission at Yenan, but he reluctantly agreed following the visit of Henry Wallace in June 1944.4
Stilwell and high-ranking China hands in the diplomatic services had already concluded that the Kuomintang not only was corrupt and acted in a way abhorrent to American diplomatic ideals, but also it was less interested in fighting Japan than in crushing the Communists.65 The participants in Dixie came not only to agree with this analysis, but to see the Communists as a viable political and fighting force that might actually have a chance at seizing power. Colonel David D. Barrett and Foreign Service Officer John S. Service were not ideologically sympathetic to the Communists, but they warned their superiors that the Communists were going to play an important role in China’s future, and to continue to side with the Kuomintang against them would threaten the future of American interests in China.
What was the situation prevailing in the Kuomintang areas that led these career diplomatic and military officials to favor an alliance with the Communists? On October 10, 1944, Service sent a memorandum to General Stilwell describing the reasons for his opinion. “The Kuomintang Government is in crisis,” he wrote. “Recent defeats have exposed its military ineffectiveness and will hasten the approaching economic disaster.” Moreover, “Chiang has lost the confidence and respect of most of the American-educated, democratically minded liberals and intellectuals.“ Service advocated that the U.S. government openly announce that it would negotiate with any forces in China willing to fight Japan, and made it clear to the Chinese public that it was Chiang who had been an obstacle to the unification of anti-Japanese forces. It was necessary to “plan on eventual use of the Communist armies and this cannot be purely on Kuomintang terms.”6
Service’s memorandum was unusual in its boldness, but not in its content. On December 9, Davies wrote that Chiang had maintained clandestine communications with Japanese forces through former Kuomintang officials who had surrendered and joined the puppet Chinese regime. According to Davies, there was no possibility of Chiang overtly surrendering to Japanese forces, but that he was trying to create an informal “non-aggression pact” because “[the] Communists are his principal foe.” Davies claimed that the Japanese were cooperating with Chiang in this unofficial peace. “The destruction of the Chiang regime would only tip the balance of power in China in favor of the Communists,” he explained, “whom the Japanese regard as greater enemies than Chungking.”7 Even Ambassador Clarence Gauss and Consul General William Langdon raised the alarm that Chiang had lost the support of liberals inside and outside the Kuomintang with Dr. Sun Fu and Soong Ching-ling, the son and widow of Sun Zhongshan, describing the Chiang regime as moving in the direction of fascism.8
A confounding factor in American attitudes towards the Chinese Communists revolved around how to understand their movement. The most hawkish of anti-communists insisted that Mao Zedong’s party was nothing more than a Soviet puppet and, regardless of its stated goals, was secretly working to build a copy of the Soviet Union on Chinese soil. Others, like some among the China hands, believed that they were not Communists at all, but “agrarian reformers.” Some scholars have retroactively judged this debate in the context of the policies Mao ultimately followed after the Communist victory in the Civil War as representing the inevitable. The proper question is not whether Mao was really a Communist, but what he believed the goals of a Communist should be in early to mid-20th Century China. To answer this question more conclusively, and establish if there was any real contradiction between Mao’s policies and U.S. foreign policy goals, requires examining the evolution of Mao’s ideas about the character of the Chinese revolution, and to put them in the context of the wider Communist movement.
Marxist Views of China
Marxists had long considered China as an important venue in the future of their movement. The Qing empire had ceased to uphold the power and prestige that had characterized China for most of its history, and had instead faced repeated economic and military incursions from Western powers. Karl Marx celebrated the Taiping Rebellion in 1856 as a revolutionary response to this intrusion, stating that:
the oldest and the most unshakable empire in the world has in eight years by the cannon-balls of the English bourgeoisie been brought to the eve of a social revolution which will certainly have the most important results for civilisation. When our European reactionaries in their immediately coming flight across Asia finally come up against the Great Wall of China, who knows whether they will not find on the gates which lead to the home of ancient reaction and ancient conservatism the inscription, ‘Chinese Republic — liberty, equality, fraternity.9
Though Marx is sometimes interpreted as rigidly determinist, thinking every society must progress through the same stages of economic development as western Europe, this illustrates that he actually believed that countries outside the west did not necessarily have to follow the same trajectory.
Some Socialists, the Narodniki, believed that Russian Peasants could themselves build socialism based on the “Mir” the traditional peasant commune. Similar ideas held by non-Marxist Socialists in China influenced figures beyond explicitly socialist circles, including Sun Zhongshan.10
The Russian Mensheviks argued that the coming Russian Revolution was a “bourgeois revolution” and that the task of working-class parties was to support middle-class liberals, who would lead a movement that would culminate in installing a liberal democracy, and the development of capitalism, with socialist revolution being a possibility far in the future.11 Instead of expecting these liberals to overthrow the Tsar and allow capitalism to develop in Russia, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin argued for the “Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry.”:
The democratic revolution is a bourgeois revolution. The slogan of a Black Redistribution, or “land and liberty” — this most widespread slogan of the peasant masses, downtrodden and ignorant, yet passionately yearning for light and happiness — is a bourgeois slogan. But we Marxists should know that there is not, nor can there be, any other path to real freedom for the proletariat and the peasantry, than the path of bourgeois freedom and bourgeois progress. We must not forget that there is not, nor can there be, at the present time, any other means of bringing Socialism nearer, than complete political liberty, than a democratic republic, than the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.12
This “democratic dictatorship” would not be socialist because the peasants have an interest in private ownership of land, but it would carry out a number of far-reaching reforms in favor of the working class, putting Socialists in a strong position to agitate for socialism.
Despite believing that they were not fighting for an immediate socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks did not share the belief of the Mensheviks that Russia would require a long period of capitalism after its “bourgeois revolution”. This would depend on the working class in other countries. The democratic revolution in Russia, Lenin speculated, could “enable us to rouse Europe; after throwing off the yoke of the bourgeoisie, the socialist proletariat of Europe will in its turn help us to accomplish the socialist revolution”13
A third position, very much the minority, was one Leon Trotsky held, who had remained outside both major factions. Trotsky agreed with the Bolsheviks that the working class would lead the Russian Revolution with the support of the peasants, but he had a different view about what the working class’s seizure of power would mean for the course of the upheaval. According to Trotsky, Russia was an economically underdeveloped country, but this underdevelopment was not evenly distributed. Feudal landlords existed in parts of the country, but in some of the major cities the situation was very different.
By the start of the 20th Century, foreign investment had built gigantic factories in Russia using the latest technology and created a politically sophisticated working class that was increasingly drawn towards socialist politics and militant labor unionism. Trotsky was president of the Petrograd Workers’ Council [Soviet] during the 1905 Russian Revolution, and had seen how that uprising had started with strikes putting forward simple economic demands, but over time had become increasingly radical, with rank-and-file workers advancing comprehensive demands for political rights, and workers’ control of industrial operations. To Trotsky, this showed that the working class in power would not stop at creating a democratic republic, but would organically pass on to socialist policies. This idea would be a key part of what would become known as Trotsky’s theory of “Permanent Revolution”.14
Following the February Revolution that overthrew the Russian monarchy, Lenin introduced his “April Theses” in which he adopted a position very similar to Trotsky’s, calling for “[not] a parliamentary republic … but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.”15
Theses passed at the 2nd Congress of the Comintern confirmed this political orientation. “The Communist International should arrive at temporary agreements and, yes, even establish an alliance with the revolutionary movement in the colonies and backward countries,” it declared, “But it cannot merge with this movement.”16
Despite this remaining the position of all Communists until the death of Lenin, the position would find itself a victim of the political struggle within the Soviet Union, with disastrous results for the young Chinese Communist Party. In line with Joseph Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country”, and as part of the campaign against Trotskyism, the Soviet Communists repudiated this line in favor of one similar to what the Mensheviks had promoted in the Russian context. In China, this meant that the Communists must join and do everything possible to support the Kuomintang who would lead the democratic revolution, with socialist revolution only being possible in the distant future.
Chiang Kai-shek’s massacre of Communists and other left-wing members of the Kuomintang starting on 12 April 1927 destroyed the highest layers of Communist leadership and many lower-ranking leaders led to the countryside. During the 1930s a factional struggle over several issues would break out within the Chinese Communist Party, with the Soviet Union supporting Wang Ming, who held to the pro-Kuomintang position that Stalin advocated. The other faction, ultimately successful, was that of Mao Zedong. Mao had no fundamental disagreements with the Stalinist line on the nature of the Chinese revolution. He had been one of the first Communist Party leaders to join the Kuomintang in the 1920s, and still supported an alliance with it, but he did not believe that it was feasible to continue working inside it because of the hostility of the Chiang leadership to the Communists. Mao favored an alliance with the Kuomintang wherever possible, but with the Communists also operating independently, especially among the peasants. Mao won the faction fight with Wang Ming despite the latter’s Soviet backing because Wang’s policies continued to get Communists killed at the hands of the Kuomintang. Relations between Mao and Stalin would continue to be strained until the Korean War.17
Mao’s Program
In 1940, Mao put forward his own original theory on the role of Communists in the Chinese revolution. His thesis of “New Democracy” continued to deny that a socialist revolution was possible in China. In some ways, it resembled an attempt to reconcile the official Comintern line with Lenin’s pre-1917 position of the “Democratic Dictatorship”. Instead of the Kuomintang leading the Chinese democratic revolution, a “Bloc of 4 classes” comprised of the workers, the peasants, the intelligentsia, and the “national bourgeoisie” would carry out the revolution together. This coalition would destroy feudalism in China and allow for an extended period of capitalist development. Its economic policy would be that of a mixed economy in which the state-owned banks and vital industries were owned by the state, but protected and encouraged private property.18
Mao continued to distrust Chiang Kai-shek, but he did not write off the possibility of the Kuomintang or one of its factions taking part in the “New Democratic” coalition. In 1948, a faction of the Kuomintang, in fact, did split from the main party organization and took part in the founding of the People’s Republic of China(PRC). This “Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee” continues to be one of the eight legal non-Communist parties in China, albeit with very little actual power. Communist leaders stylized the new state as a “People’s Republic” and not as Socialist or Soviet to highlight the alleged multi-class nature of the new regime. The original executive of the PRC comprised Mao as chairman, and six vice-chairs, among whom were three Communists, Soong Ching-ling and Li Jishen for the Kuomintang, and Zhang Lan for the China Democratic League.19 The proclamation of the new state was preceded by the Communists putting out a call for all opponents of the Kuomintang to participate in the formation of a new government:
All democratic parties and groups, people’s organizations and social luminaries speedily convene a Political Consultative Conference, discuss and carry out the convoking of a People’s Representative Assembly to establish a Democratic Coalition Government.20
Critics may look at the fact that this government gave a majority to the Communists and infer that it was a farce to placate non-Communists who would otherwise oppose the regime and that Mao always intended to replicate the Soviet model. However, Mao’s words, as well as actions, demonstrate otherwise. The early economic policy of the People’s Republic of China did not follow a general plan so much as it responded to crises as they arose. Non-Communist members of the government, such as Zhang Lan, advocated nationalization of the banks, but the Communist majority made multiple attempts to prop up the private banking industry before finally carrying out nationalization in response to a crisis of hyperinflation.21
Mao admitted in private that he may have exaggerated the time that the PRC would need to continue capitalist policies, but he still estimated a period of over a decade.22 By 1952 his position had changed, primarily due to two factors. The coalition government aimed to protect private property, but made an exception for “bureaucratic capital” which nominally referred to property schemers obtained corruptly, but practically meant the property of unreformed Chiang Kai-shek loyalists. Originally assumed to be a small proportion of the national economy, the confiscation actually led to the state seizing the majority of some industries. In response to this unexpected outcome, Mao advocated new investment in light industry and even privatization, but quickly sidelined these plans because of another factor, the beginning of the Korean War, as the state took responsibility for those industries required to sustain its intervention in the conflict.23 Following this experience, Mao was forced to revise his prognosis.
When Mao’s On New Democracy and On Coalition Government were republished they were substantially changed in order to give many of its postulates the opposite meaning of what Mao had previously argued. The 1940 edition of On New Democracy spoke of a “joint dictatorship of all revolutionary classes of China” that would inaguarate many years of capitalism and enact Sun Zhongshan’s Three Principles of the People. The 1951 edition would pretend that Mao had always predicted “the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes of China headed by the Chinese proletariat,” and that the revolution “will then be carried forward to the second stage, in which a socialist society will be established in China.” This falsification of the historical record has led to confusion about Mao’s pre-1949 views among both scholars, and those who adhere to Maoist politics.24
A “Lost Chance”?
Scholars such as Chen Jian have argued, probably correctly, that there was no real chance to save the relationship between the United States and the Chinese Communists after they already had gained an upper hand in the civil war,25 but it would be a mistake to generalize this conclusion to the period of the Dixie Mission. In 1949 and for some time before, it had become clear that the Communists were no longer the underdogs that they had been in 1944 and 1945. At the time of the Dixie Mission, the Communists were under the pressure of a Kuomintang blockade and, while they had some successes to their name, victory was far from certain in their confrontation with the Chiang regime. In this context, U.S. recognition not only would be in line with Mao’s ideological leanings, but also would have meant a substantial material improvement in their situation, and gaining an ally capable of providing protection from Kuomintang forces betraying them.
Another assumption underpinning American reluctance to deal with the Communists was the belief that they were little more than Soviet puppets. The Soviet leadership always had expressed concern for the well-being of the Chinese Communists and provided some aid even before the civil war. However, relations between Mao and Stalin actually were quite strained, and Moscow’s priority since 1924 had been exerting influence on the Kuomintang and not in fomenting Communist revolution.26
If Mao was convinced that the revolution would be capitalist, this was all the more true of Stalin, who originally had authored this theory. To Stalin, Mao was an insubordinate upstart. In a conversation with Milovan Đilas, Stalin said the Chinese Communists “agreed with us in word, but in deed they did it their own way when they got home.”27 Mao, in turn, viewed Stalin as someone who had made important contributions to the cause of communism, but who was willing to sacrifice the interests of Chinese communism to improve the position of the Soviet Union. Stalin ostensibly viewed the Chinese as equals, but, in reality, was treating China with the same contempt that it had received from other European countries. In a 1958 speech discussing the period, Mao reflected on his differences with Stalin:
The Chinese revolution won victory by acting contrary to Stalin’s will. The fake foreign devil [in Lu Hsun’s True Story of Ah Q] ‘did not allow people to make revolution’. But our Seventh Congress advocated going all out to mobilize the masses and to build up all available revolutionary forces in order to establish a new China. During the quarrel with Wang Ming from 1937 to August 1938, we put forward ten great policies, while Wang Ming produced sixty policies. If we had followed Wang Ming’s, or in other words Stalin’s methods the Chinese revolution couldn’t have succeeded. When our revolution succeeded, Stalin said it was a fake. We did not argue with him, and as soon as we fought the war to resist America and aid Korea, our revolution became a genuine one [in his eyes].28
This observation shows that even two decades later, Mao continued to resent Stalin’s attempt to impose his own policies on the Chinese Communist leadership. The reference to the “imitation foreign devil” of Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q is a reference any literate Chinese person of the time would have recognized as dripping in venom for foreigners intervening in Chinese affairs, as well as those like Wang Ming, who assisted in these efforts.
In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s 20th Party Congress speech in 1956, Mao usually avoided open criticism of Stalin, with the defense of Stalin’s legacy becoming a key part of Mao’s attempt to win over foreign Communist support in his dispute with the Soviet leadership. This lends credence to the idea that this speech represents Mao’s real opinion and not a deliberate misrepresentation of the past. He had made a very similar observation a year before in a directive to the party on journalistic work:
Why did the Chinese Revolution meet with success? It was because the Third International was dissolved…The Second International was revisionist, and the Third International was very good at the beginning, but it became dogmatist later. Among the leaders of [the Third International,] Stalin and [Nikolai] Bukharin were not very good.29
That Mao made this critique consistently despite Stalin’s prestige, and even dared linked him with Bukharin, the leader of the Soviet right-opposition who was killed during the purges, implies that this likely represents his honest opinion.
In August 1944, Major General Patrick Hurley arrived in Chongqing as Roosevelt’s personal envoy to Chiang Kai-shek. Roosevelt’s concerns about the Kuomintang regime had continued to grow, and Hurley, renowned for his vanity, believed that he could by the force of his personality stitch together an agreement for unity between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Roosevelt chose Hurley because he owed him a political favor, and not because of his qualifications. He was extremely ignorant of very basic facts about China. This lack of knowledge did not deter Hurley, however, who proudly stated in regard to his Chinese hosts that “they’re just like Mexicans and I can handle Mexicans.”30 According to Carole J. Carter:
Hurley’s belief in “personal diplomacy” made him a poor choice to deal with the delicate and complex situation that existed in China. The comment “When I think I can risk telling the Generalissimo a dirty joke, I’ll feel I’m getting somewhere” reflected his style. His war whoops led the Communists to brand him a buffoon, an impression he reinforced by calling Chiang “Mr. Shek” and Mao Tse-tung “Moose Dung.” For their part, the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] gave him the code name “Albatross.”31
Hurley had a keen mind for military affairs and his larger than life personality and “cowboy” aesthetic endeared him to many who served alongside and under him, but it did nothing to reassure political and diplomatic men, even non-traditional ones like the Communist leaders. Hurley appears to have taken from his military experience the importance of bold initiatives, while forgetting that every commander must also study the lay of the land.
The task would have been difficult even for someone significantly more competent in relation to China. Chiang Kai-shek did not want to give any concessions, and Mao knew this but took part to maintain goodwill with the United States. When Hurley visited the Dixie Mission and received the Communist proposal of their minimum demands for collaboration, Hurley surprised the Communist delegation. He insisted that the demands were too modest, and offered to rewrite the proposal himself in a way that he believed would be fair and acceptable to both sides. Deserving quotation at length, the 5-point proposal Hurley wrote stated the following:
The Government of China, the Kuomintang of China and the Communist Party of China will work together for the unification of all military forces in China for the immediate defeat of Japan and the reconstruction of China.
The present National Government is to be reorganized into a Coalition National Government embracing representatives of all anti-Japanese parties and non-partisan political bodies. A new democratic policy providing for reforms in military, political, economic and cultural affairs shall be promulgated and made effective. At the same time the National Military Council is to be reorganized into the
United National Military Council consisting of representatives of all anti-Japanese armies.
The Coalition National Government will support the principles of Sun Yat-Sen for the establishment in China of a government of the people, for the people and by the people. The Coalition National Government will pursue policies designed to promote progress and democracy and to establish justice, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association, the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances, the right of writ of Habeas Corpus and the right of residence. The Coalition National Government will also pursue policies intended to make effective those two rights defined as freedom from fear and freedom from want.
All anti-Japanese forces will observe and carry out the orders of the Coalition National Government and its United National Military Council and will be recognized by the Government and the Military Council. The supplies acquired from foreign powers will be equitably distributed.
The Coalition National Government of China recognizes the legality of the Kuomintang of China, the Chinese Communist Party and all anti-Japanese parties.32
On the surface level, these demands seem entirely fair and do not give the Communists any inherent advantage over any other party in the country. The basis of cooperation is the democratic political program of Kuomintang founder Sun Zhongshan supplemented by the U.S. bill of rights, not communism. However, the fact that Hurley believed these demands would be acceptable to Chiang is probably a product of his lack of knowledge about Chinese politics. He believed Chiang could be placated by the Communists making ideological concessions to the Kuomintang, but these ideological concessions would have come at the price of undermining his government, which even many of his allies now admitted was maintained through dictatorship.
The Communists readily accepted this offer and expressed some amount of hope that Hurley actually could deliver, but they remained skeptical that Chiang would accept anything close to the level of rapprochement and democratic reform that would be necessary to put the proposal into action. They turned out to be correct. Hurley had led the Communist leadership to believe that Chiang had already agreed to many of the demands when this was not actually the case.33 Kuomintang foreign minister T. V. Soong described the demands as Hurley having been “sold a bill of goods” and stated plainly that the Kuomintang government “will never grant what the Communists have requested.” Chiang refused point-blank to sign the document, and later proposed his own three points that provided a watered-down version of the Communist demands, but all civil liberties enshrined in the deal were to be “guaranteed, subject only to the specific needs of security in the effective prosecution of the war against Japan.” The Communists took this to be a Chiang ruse to appear to the Americans to be willing to concede to democratic reform, but that this exception would mean the de facto continuance of the Kuomintang as a dictatorial regime on the grounds of it being necessary for the war effort.34
Mao’s theoretical views led him to support moderation in political and economic matters, and his relations were not great with the Soviet Union. However, is there any reason to think that Mao was willing to cooperate for any significant length of time with the United States, either as part of a coalition with the Kuomintang, or independently? Mao had a nuanced and contradictory appraisal of the United States. Both Mao’s avowed Marxist anti-imperialism and his youthful training in left-wing Chinese nationalism likely made him skeptical of Western powers who he considered imperialists who had no concern for China itself, but only what they could extract from it for their own benefit. The long-term American support for the Chiang regime could have done nothing to dissuade Mao from this opinion. Despite this, Mao made repeated statements regarding his admiration of the democratic rights American citizens enjoyed, and his belief that the United States was the foreign nation most able to help China modernize its economic and political systems.
It was not out of the question that Mao could have been lying deliberately about his attitude toward the United States to gain some kind of temporary advantage. If taken at face value, however, his statements align completely with his theoretical views and the political line that he had been advocating for several years. This does not require a belief that Mao was a committed democrat who believed the United States had a superior form of government to the Soviet Union. Mao was unquestionably a Communist and preferred a Soviet-style government to liberal democracy, but such a regime was not a possibility in China according to his then current understanding of Marxism. If it was inevitable for China to go through a stage of capitalist democracy, and this would require significant amounts of foreign investment, the United States may have looked like a more trustworthy partner than the United Kingdom or other European countries that had imposed colonialism on China and its neighbors.
An American-style government in China, if it were possible, also potentially would have looked quite good to the Communists compared to the Chiang dictatorship, which they at this point had no guarantee that they could overthrow. An American-style bill of rights like that contained in Hurley’s version of the Communist proposal would have allowed the Communists to operate openly in all parts of China and to better organize to take power in the future, whether through democratic or undemocratic means. For Mao, continued U.S. involvement in China might be the best guarantee that the Kuomintang actually would respect such a deal. Multiple people reported pro-American comments from Mao and other Communist leaders, and believed them to have been genuine. Following General Hurley’s first meeting with Mao Zedong, Dixie Mission commander Colonel David Barrett had a conversation with Zhou Enlai about whether he thought the Soviet Union or the United States to be a more democratic society. Zhou responded that he believed the Soviet Union to be “the most democratic country in the world,” but that “we know that it may take a hundred years for us to attain this state of democracy. Meanwhile,” Zhou added, “we would be extremely glad if we could enjoy the same sort of democracy you do in the United States today.”35
On August 23, 1944, John Service carried out an interview with Mao Zedong in which Mao shared his thoughts on the potential for a coalition with the Kuomintang and what he believed would be the future of relations between China and the United States. According to Mao, the Communists did not want a civil war. The avoidance of an internal conflict depended on the influence of foreign powers. Mao urged the United States to put pressure on Chiang to introduce democratic reform. Mao also advocated for Every American in China to talk more consistently about democracy. Every “American soldier in China should be a walking and talking advertisement for democracy,” Mao explained. “After all, we Chinese consider you Americans the ideal of democracy.” He stated that there was no reason for antagonism between the Americans and Communists. “We hold to the Manifesto of the First Kuomintang Congress,” Mao declared. “This is a truly great and democratic document and Sun Yat-sen was no Communist.”36
Mao concluded with a general plea for American help, stating that the goals of the Chinese Communist Party were for liberal reform, and not communism, and that both China and the United States had common interests:
Even the most conservative American businessman can find nothing in our program to take exception to. China must industrialize. This can be done — in China — only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital. Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar. They fit together, economically and politically. We can and must work together. The United States would find us more cooperative than the Kuomintang. We will not be afraid of democratic American influence — we will welcome it… America does not need to fear that we will not be cooperative. We must cooperate and we must have American help. This is why it is so important to us Communists to know what you Americans are thinking and planning. We cannot risk crossing you — cannot risk any conflict with you.37
Mao’s statement that he believed American influence on post-war China would be entirely benign may have been more or less genuine, but his observations make it clear that he expected the United States to remain a major player in the region in the future, and he wanted to stay on their good side.
Unfortunately for Mao, regardless of whether these sentiments were sincere, Chiang’s unwillingness to give meaningful concessions derailed the discussions Hurley sponsored. Equally disastrous for the negotiations, an incidental development within the American forces in China destroyed the rapport between Hurley and the Communists. Hurley always had favored the Kuomintang, but he appears to have believed earnestly he could work out a settlement acceptable both to Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists. Hurley would reconsider in response to the revelation that the OSS had been operating at the Dixie Mission, and that some of its operatives, along with other American officials, had entered independently into negotiations with the Communists.
The Communists, seeing a more promising path toward working with the United States, held off on sending Zhou Enlai for more negotiations with the Nationalists and instead held discussions with Lieutenant Colonel Willis Bird of the OSS. Bird did not offer to bypass the Kuomintang, and clarified that his offer was contingent on the agreement of top officials in both the U.S. and Chinese governments. But he was willing to lay out explicit plans of collaboration and to write out an agreement on exactly what type and quantity of arms and munitions he could give the Communists, while Hurley offered only vague promises. According to Carolle J. Carter, General Zhu De’s response to Bird’s caveats about requiring Kuomintang approval was that “whether or not they received one rifle or one round of ammunition, the people of North China looked upon the United States as their best friend and upon General Albert C. Wedemeyer as their commander in chief, whose military orders they would follow if he chose to give them.”38
Barrett and Davies were not involved in the OSS negotiations but had met also without Hurley’s knowledge, with the Communist leadership on behalf of General Robert McClure to request that the Communists assist with supply and logistics if the United States were to land paratroopers in Northern China following victory in Europe. Intercepted information about these talks was intercepted Kuomintang agents, with Soong blowing the affair up into an accusation that Barrett had “offered the Chinese Communists an American paratroop division.”39 This news infuriated Hurley because he perceived it as maneuvering behind his back, and he harassed General Wedemeyer into withdrawing his recommendation to promote Barrett to brigadier general. Joseph Paton Davies was reassigned to Moscow for his role in the affair. Hurley drunkenly challenged General McClure to a fistfight, with Wedemeyer breaking it up because he feared that McClure could easily kill Hurley “with a single blow.”40
It was not clear that Hurley ever learned of Bird’s mission while it was in progress, but on January 10, 1945 a telegram arrived in Chongqing from Zhou Enlai. Zhou requested that the U.S. delegation transmit news to Washington that he and Mao were willing to travel to the United States to negotiate with the president directly to discuss cooperation to fight Japan. Hurley did not pass this letter directly to Washington, but held it for several days, and then buried it several pages deep in a report to the president along with a note in which Hurley made the following claim:
Certain officers of his command formulated a plan for the use of American paratroops in the Communist-held area. The plan provided for the use of Communist troops led by Americans in guerrilla warfare. They predicated the plan on the United States and the Communist Party reaching an agreement and completely bypassing the National Government. American supplies were to be furnished directly to the Communist troops, which gave the Communists exactly what they wanted, recognition and Lendlease supplies for themselves and [the] destruction of the National Government.41
It is not clear if Roosevelt ever saw the note about the desire of the Communist leadership to meet with him, but Hurley’s note is unlikely to have reassured him about the potential of such a venture.
Hurley either did not realize or ignored, that all offers that other American officials had made to the Communists had been contingent on the consent of the Kuomintang government. Hurley did not see the willingness of the Communists to meet with Roosevelt as a sign of goodwill toward the United States, but as an indication that there was a conspiracy among some sections of the U.S. military and State Department to sabotage his efforts to bring together the Kuomintang and Communists, and that this conspiracy wanted to shift U.S. support to the Communists against the national government. Senator Joseph McCarthy later used this claim to persecute several China hands and to accuse them of deliberately working with the Communists against the United States. Its more immediate impact, however, was that Hurley no longer approached negotiations with the Communists in good faith. He already had removed John S. Service and John Paton Davies from China, meaning that there was now little chance of dissenting voices reaching Washington, and the Communist proposal to travel to meet the president had no chance of approval.42
The odds were always against a rapprochement between the Communists and the Kuomintang, and direct recognition of the Communists would not be an easy sell for anyone, even for someone as stubborn as Roosevelt. Mao and Zhou were willing to meet directly with Roosevelt, and it is worth asking whether this might actually have happened if Hurley had not buried this in response to a bruised ego over an imagined conspiracy. Such a meeting changing the trajectory of China-U.S. relations still would have been a long shot, but the same was true of Nixon’s meeting with Mao almost three decades later.
Nixon and Mao could bypass ideological conflict to come to the table based on a recognition of shared economic interests. At the time Mao asked to meet Roosevelt in January 1945, he claimed he had no ideological conflict with the United States. Even if Mao secretly held more reservations about the United States than he publicly admitted, he compromised with Nixon, and may very well have been willing to do so with Roosevelt, when he had a much weaker bargaining position than he did as leader of the PRC. These negotiations may have succeeded, or they may have failed, but they did not even receive a chance to produce either result. American officials doubled down on a policy that was an absolute failure, a result which those Americans who were most knowledgeable about China repeatedly had warned was bound to be the outcome.
The anti-Communist obsessions of a relatively narrow group of American officials, combined with more moderate voices falling victim to the gambler’s fallacy, kept the United States in China committed to propping up a failed state instead of pursuing better options. American policymakers substantially ignored not only the Communists, but even reformists like Sun Fo, in favor of the Chiang dictatorship. The “loss” of China therefore should be a warning to those policymakers who would allow an ideological crusade to substitute for concrete analysis of any given situation.
Endnotes
1 Lynne Joiner, Honorable Survivor: Mao’s China, McCarthy’s America, and the Persecution of John S. Service (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 39.
2 Ibid, 25.
3 Memorandum by the Second Secretary of Embassy in China ([John Paton] Davies). Foreign Relations of the United States. [hereafter FRUS, 1944. China (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1967), 6: 696, Document 256.
4 Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists, 1944–1947 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021), 11.
5 U.S. Department of State, The China White Paper, August 1949: Orig. Issued as United States Relations with China : With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 210.
Charles F. Romanus, China-Burma-India Theater: Stilwell’s Command Problems (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 385.6 John Stewart Service, Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service (New York: Random House, 1974), 162–166.
7 Memorandum by the Second Secretary of Embassy in China ([John Paton]Davies), 8 December 1944, FRUS,1944, 6: pp 1433–34, Document 523.
8 The Ambassador in China([Clarence]Gauss) to the Secretary of State, 27 March 1944, Ibid, 838, Document 315; Consul General at Kunming ([William] Langdon) to the Secretary of State, 14 July 1944, Ibid, pp. 1008–11, Document 384.
9 Karl Marx “Review: January-February 1850,”
Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue, 18 April 1850.10 Sun Yat-sen, The Three Principles of the People (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
11 Ziva G. Garcia, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 37.
12 Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works. IX. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 112.
13 Ibid., p. 82.
14 Leon Trotsky, “The Permanent Revolution: What Is the Permanent Revolution?,” Marxists Internet Archive, 1931, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr10.htm.
15 Vladimir Lenin, “Aprel’skie Tezisy,” Pravda, 26, April 7, 1917.
16 Quoted in John Riddell, To The Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 1190.
17 Gregor Benton, “The ‘Second Wang Ming Line’ (1935–38),” China Quarterly 61 (March 1975):61–94.
18 Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” Marxists Internet Archive, 1951. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm.
19 Mao Zedong, “Proclamation of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China,” Marxists Internet Archive, October 1, 1949, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1949/10/01.htm.
20 Ibid; Gerry Groot, Managing Transitions: The Chinese Communist Party, United Front Work, Corporatism and Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2004), 48.
21 Ibid, p 36; John Peter Roberts, China: From Permanent Revolution to Counter-Revolution (London: Wellred, 2016), 339.
22 Sheng Hu, A Concise History of the Communist Party of China: Seventy Years of the CPC (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 436–437.
23 Roberts, Permanent Revolution, 326.
24 Ibid., 313; Wang Fanxi, Mao Zedong Thought (Historical Materialism Books, 2021), 47.
25 Chen Jian, “The Myth of America’s ‘Lost Chance’ in China: A Chinese Perspective in Light of New Evidence,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (January 1997): 77–86,
26 Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan, 20.
27 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1962), 141.
28 Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956–1971 (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 102–103
29 Mao Zedong, The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976: January 1956-December 1957 (New York: Armonk, 1986), 805–806.
30 Quoted in Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan, p. 131.
31 Ibid., 132.
32 Revised Draft by the Chinese Communist Party Representative, Undated, FRUS,6:pp. 1361, Document 492.
33 Memorandum of Conversation[Yenan], 8 November 1944, Ibid, pp. 1342, Document 490.
34 Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan, p. 254–256.
35 Quoted in David D. Barrett, Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944 (Berkeley, CA: Center for China Studies, University of California, 1979), 65.
36 Ibid.
37 Quoted in Service, Lost Chance in China, 307.
38 Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan, 146.
39 Ibid., 294.
40 Ibid., 143–44.
41 Ibid., 149
42 Ibid., 131.
