Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (87 page)

The Berlin blockade was nevertheless a decisive event because it obliged the Western Allies to sort out their ideas and take long-term decisions. It led them to rationalize the
fait accompli
of a divided Germany and set about the creation of a West German state. Its constitution was written by February 1949, adopted in May and came into effect in the autumn. Such a Germany would have to be rearmed, and that meant embedding it in a formal Western defence structure. Hence on 4 April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington by eleven democratic powers. The assumption behind American policy was that there were only five regions on earth where the sources of modern military strength were found: the USA itself, the UK, the Rhine—Ruhr industrial area, Japan and the Soviet Union. The object of American policy must be to ensure that the Soviet leaders were limited to the one they held already. The geopolitical philosophy of ‘containment’ had been outlined in an article, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, published in
Foreign Affairs
, July 1947. Though signed ‘X’ it was in fact by George Kennan. It postulated that Russia, while anxious to avoid outright war, was determined to expand by all means short of it; and that America and her Allies should respond by ‘a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’, involving ‘the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points’.
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The Berlin crisis provided the impetus to give this containment philosophy practical shape.

In February—March 1949 a group of State Department and Defence officials drafted a document called ‘National Security Council 68’, which laid down the main lines of American foreign and defence policy for the next thirty years.
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It enshrined the proposition that America, as the greatest free power, had moral, political and ideological obligations to preserve free institutions throughout the world, and must equip herself with the military means to discharge them. She must provide sufficient conventional as well as nuclear forces – a resolve confirmed on 3 September 1949, when a B29, on patrol at 18,000 feet in the North Pacific, produced positive evidence that the Russians had exploded their first nuclear device at the end of August.
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The atomic monopoly was over and America must now settle down to the long haul of covering large areas of the world with her multi-purpose military protection, ‘
NSC
-68’ noted that Soviet
Russia devoted 13.8 per cent of its
GNP
to arms, as against America’s 6–7 per cent. If necessary America could go up to a figure of 20 per cent. The document was finally approved in April 1950. It represented a historic reversal of traditional American policy towards the world. Gradually it produced military commitments to forty-seven nations and led American forces to build or occupy 675 overseas bases and station a million troops overseas.
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It would be a mistake, however, to give American policy a logic and global coherence it did not actually possess. There was never a master-plan; more a series of makeshift expedients, with huge holes and gaps and many contradictions. It was rather like the British Empire in fact. Moreover, like that empire, it was not all set up at the same time. While the Americans, with some success, were laying down the foundations of West European military and economic stability in 1948–9, their roseate vision of the Far East, conjured up in the light of their stupendous victory in 1945, was dissolving. Here again they were made to pay dearly for Roosevelt’s illusions and frivolity. Roosevelt’s emotional attachment to China was unlike anything he felt for any other foreign nation. To him, China was not a problem; it was a solution. He considered it one of the four great powers, which ought to and could become the chief stabilizing force in East Asia. Once America was in the war he worked hard to convert this vision, or illusion, into reality. Stalin laughed. Churchill fumed: ‘That China is one of the world’s four great powers’, he wrote to Eden, ‘is an absolute farce.’ He was prepared to be ‘reasonably polite’ about ‘this American obsession’ but no more.
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Roosevelt brought China into the Big Four system; though, characteristically, he left it out when convenient, above all in the vital Yalta secret treaty over Japan, which let the Russians into Manchuria. Afterwards, perhaps feeling guilty, he saw Chiang Kai-shek: ‘The first thing I asked Chiang was, “Do you want Indo-China?” He said: “It’s no help to us. We don’t want it. They are not Chinese.’”
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The notion of Chiang as the architect of East Asian post-war stability was absurd. He never at any stage of his career effectively controlled more than half of China itself. He was a poor administrator; an indifferent general. As a politician he lacked the sense to grasp that what China needed was leadership which combined radicalism with patriotic fervour. Moreover, he knew little, and cared less, about the peasants. His ideal partner therefore was Mao himself, with his peasant following and his radical nationalism. Mao had worked with Chiang before and was willing to do so again; though after the Long March had established his paramountcy in the Communist movement his terms were higher. In February 1942 he began his first big ideological campaign: ‘rectification’ he called it, to
cure the
CCP
of barren abstract Marxism and make it aware of Chinese history. In 1944 he praised American democracy and said ‘the work we Communists are carrying on today’ was essentially the same as that of ‘Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln’.
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But while Mao moved to the centre, Chiang veered off to the Right. In January 1941 his
KMT
forces murdered 9,000 of Mao’s troops south of the Yellow River. Thereafter the two Chinese groups fought separate wars against the Japanese, neither of them very effective. Often they fought each other. In late 1943 Chiang published
China’s Destiny
, in which he denounced Communism and liberalism as equally bad for China and held up the conservatism of Confucius as the ideal. The text was so hostile to the West that it had to be censored when it appeared in an English version. In 1944 the Americans worked hard to bring Chiang’s and Mao’s troops together, with a coalition
KMT—CCP
government and a joint army command, supplied and financed by America. Chiang turned it down. Mao was enthusiastic, and in October was in the curious position of openly defending the Anglo-Saxons against Chiang’s attacks, a passage he later cut from his collected works.
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When the war ended, efforts were again made by the Americans to bring about a coalition. But Chiang insisted Mao disband his army. Stalin thought the demand reasonable. His advice to Mao was ‘join the government and dissolve [the] army’ since ‘the development of the uprising in China has no prospect’.
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Mao refused. He would take the number two role but he would not abase himself (and risk execution too). He had already started his own ‘personality cult’ with his April 1945 Party Constitution, which insisted ‘the Thought of Mao Tse-tung’ was essential to ‘guide the entire work’ of the party and praised him as ‘not only the greatest revolutionary and statesman in Chinese history but also the greatest theoretician and scientist’. Most of this was written by Mao himself.
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Mao was an ambitious romantic who had had a good war and wanted to better himself in the peace. Chiang was the man in possession who could not bear the idea of an eventual successor, especially one with intellectual pretensions. Hence there was no historical inevitability about the Chinese Civil War. It was a personal conflict.

Nor was the outcome of the war due to deep-rooted economic and class forces. The great majority of China’s vast population played no part in it, from start to finish. It is true that Mao had some success in mobilizing peasant energy and discontent for his purposes. But this was due in part to the
KMT’S
highly successful literacy programme, which by 1940 had reached most of the villages. It is true, too, that some peasants feared a victory by Chiang because they associated him with landlordism. But Mao did not lead a crusade to ‘give’ the
people their land. In the areas where he was strongest they already had it. The estate system was not as widespread as outsiders believed. Land was worked by its owners in four-fifths of the north, three-fifths of central China, and half the south.
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In most places the main issue was not ownership of land, but who could provide security and peace.

In short, the Civil War of 1945–9 was the culmination of the war-lord period of instability introduced by the destruction of the monarchy. Success was determined throughout by the same factors: control of the cities and communications, and the ability to hold together armies by keeping them paid, supplied and happy. In the circumstances of the post-war period, Mao proved a more successful war-lord than Chiang, chiefly by keeping his armies out of the urban economy. If any one factor destroyed the
KMT
it was inflation. Inflation had become uncontrollable in the last phase of the Japanese Empire, of which urban China was a salient part. In 1945 in Japan itself, paper currency became worthless and a virtual barter-economy developed. The disease spread to the Chinese cities and up the great rivers. Chiang’s regime, when it took over in the last months of 1945, inherited an underlying hyper-inflation and failed to take adequate steps to kill it. The Americans were generous in money and supplies. Chiang had been eligible for Lend-Lease and got it in considerable quantities. He received a $500 million economic stabilization loan and a total of $2 billion in 1945–9. But once the Civil War began in earnest and brought the hyper-inflation to the surface again, American assistance proved irrelevant. Chiang’s government was not only incompetent; it was also corrupt. Inflation created military weakness and military failure produced yet more inflation.

Chiang compounded the problem by denying it existed. His strength declined slowly in 1947, rapidly in the first half of 1948. In Peking, prices multiplied five times from mid-September to mid-October. The
Peiping Chronicle
recorded Chiang’s comment: ‘Press reports of recent price increases and panic buying were greatly exaggerated … during his personal inspection of Peiping, Tientsin and Mukden he saw nothing to support these allegations.’
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Yet in Manchuria and North China inflation had brought industry to a virtual standstill. Many workers were on hunger-strike, provoked by a chronic rice-famine. The American consul-general in Mukden reported:

Puerile efforts have been made towards price control and to combat hoarding … the results … have been largely to enforce requisitioning of grain at bayonet-point for controlled prices and enable the resale of requisitioned grain at black market prices for the benefit of the pockets of rapacious military and civil officials.
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In Shanghai commodity prices rose twenty times between 19 August and 8 November 1948, and on the latter date alone, rice jumped from 300 Chinese dollars per
picul
(133 pounds) in the morning to 1,000 at noon and 1800 by nightfall.
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Hundreds died in the street every day, their bodies collected by municipal refuse trucks. Chiang put his son, General Chiang Ching-kuo, in charge as economic dictator. His ‘gold-dollar’ currency reform – there was nothing gold about it – changed hyper-inflation into uncontrolled panic, and he alienated one of Chiang’s most faithful sources of support, Shanghai’s gangster community, by squeezing $5 million (US) out of them for his own ‘war chest’.
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Granted the principles of war-lordism, the economic collapse was reflected in army strengths. In summer 1948, in secret session, the
KMT
parliament was told that in August 1945 their army had been 3.7 million strong with 6,000 big guns. The
CCP
forces had then numbered 320,000, of which no more than 166,000 were armed. But Red units were accustomed to live off the land and scour the towns.
KMT
troops were paid in paper which, increasingly, did not buy enough food to feed them. So they sold their personal weapons and any other army equipment they could obtain. The officers were worse than the men and the generals worst of all. By June 1948 the
KMT
army was down to 2.1 million; the
CCP
army had risen to 1.5 million, equipped with a million rifles and 22,800 pieces of artillery, more than the
KMT
(21,000); virtually all these weapons had been bought from government troops. The Americans, who had supplied Chiang with $1 billion worth of Pacific War surplus, thus equipped both sides in the conflict.
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There was a series of clear Communist victories in the closing months of 1948, culminating in the decisive battle of Hsuchow at the end of the year. By December virtually all Manchuria and North China was in Mao’s hands. Tientsin fell in January 1949 and Peking surrendered. Hsuchow cost the
KMT
400,000 casualties. But of these, 200,000 prisoners, unpaid and hungry, were immediately integrated in the
CCP
army, with 140,000 US rifles. On 1 February 1949, the US Army Department reported that the
KMT
had possessed 2,723,000 troops at the beginning of 1948 and less than 1,500,000 at the end, of which half a million were non-combatants. In the same period the
CCP
forces had swollen to 1,622,000, virtually all combat-effective. At this point, though Chiang was already preparing to evacuate to Taiwan (Formosa), Stalin was still advising Mao to settle for a division of China, with a
CCP
North and a
KMT
South.
Chiang did not give Mao the chance for he rejected proposals for a compromise. In April 1949 Mao crossed south of the Yangtze and took Nanking the same month. By October he controlled all of mainland China and had restored, after a fashion, the precarious unity of imperial days.
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