Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Chiang Kai-shek was a man of considerable ability and experience, and may not himself have been involved in the corruption of his regime, but he was deeply involved personally with cliques and gangs of persons whose chief aims were to profit from their public positions and from their close associations with Chiang and to resist, by any means, efforts to reform or strengthen China which might reduce their opportunities for corruption. These relationships, in 1945, in some cases had continued for almost twenty years. American aid and the contributions of the Chinese themselves disappeared in the network of corrupt and mutually beneficial relationships which were spread throughout the system and which made it impossible for the Chiang regime to provide a decent living for the people of China or even to defend itself against possible enemies, internal or external. Arms and supplies from abroad were dissipated, vanishing in one way or another, sometimes forever; but on other occasions they turned up subsequently in the hands of guerrillas or of the Communist enemies of Chiang’s regime. An enormous and incompetent army drained from the peasants, at low prices, large requisitions which were sold, usually for private profit, at high prices into urban black markets. In the two years following the defeat of Japan, $1,432 million in American assistance to China vanished in one way or another, and at the end the Chinese Army and the Chiang regime was weaker than ever.

In spite of this weakness and waste, the Nationalist government refused to obey American advice either to reform or simply to consolidate itself in the parts of China it still controlled. It was determined to destroy the Communist regime, especially when Mao began to take steps to consolidate the buffer area which he and Stalin wished to establish in northwestern and northern China. This determination became a panic to prevent the Russian forces in Manchuria from turning over that rich area to the Communist units. The Soviet forces there, after looting the area under the guise of reparations from Japan, began to withdraw early in 1946. By a simple process of informing Mao and not informing Chiang of their withdrawal schedules, they ensured that the abandoned areas should be occupied immediately by Communist forces. The United States, which had been engaged in evacuating three million Japanese from China, moved fourteen Nationalist Chinese armies, most of which had been trained and equipped by the United States, to North China and Manchuria to block the Communist takeover. After the defeat of the Communist forces in the north, however, the Nationalists, contrary to American advice, attempted to crush the Communist forces everywhere. They did succeed in capturing the Communist capital of Yenan in March 1947, but, as the effort continued, their own forces were dispersed and defeated, while the Chinese forces, supported by disgruntled peasants, took over much of rural China.

General Marshall, on a mission from President Truman, spent much of 1946 in China. At first he hoped to work out some kind of coalition regime which would stop the civil war by taking Communists into the Chiang government in a minority role. Because this was not acceptable to either side, Marshall, and later (1947) General Wedemeyer, tried to get Chiang to reform and to consolidate in the areas he still controlled. Promises were free, but efforts to carry them out were insignificant. In an attempt to force the Nationalist government to stop the civil war and carry out the American program of reform, consolidation, and coalition with the Communists, an American embargo on arms shipments to China existed for eleven months, from August 1946 to July 1947. Unfortunately, this was just the period in which the Communists were expanding their forces with captured Japanese arms obtained from the Russians and with large acquisition of earlier American arms shipments to the Nationalists which were corruptly allowed to go to the Reds. To stop this and to stop the wastage of Nationalist troops by incompetent leadership, it would have been necessary to allot at least 10,000 American officers to Chiang’s forces, attached to every unit down to company level. Neither side wanted to do this, as the problems of language translation, of inability to enforce recommendations, or to overcome personal Chinese resentment against such interference by foreigners were almost insuperable.

Marshall, in 1946, became convinced that the Nationalist regime was hopeless and that it could overcome the Communists only if the United States took actual control by American personnel and fought the Communists with American troops. He was unwilling to do this because he felt that the Chinese would resent it themselves, and it would make impossible any American effort to save Europe from direct Soviet control. Since there could be no question that Europe was more significant by an immense margin, he made the choice, represented by the Marshall Plan, to save Europe. He did not regard the Chinese position as total loss because he was convinced that any Chinese regime, Nationalist or Communist, would find it almost impossible to create a strong and prosperous China. General Wedemeyer, whose report was submitted to Washington in 1949, agreed with General Marshall about the corruption and incompetence of the Chiang regime and the hopeless state of its future prospects, but felt that large American aid and control should be extended, as a method of delaying the Communist advance. However, Wedemeyer, unlike Marshall, gave less consideration either to Europe or to political possibilities in Washington.

The policy adopted in the Truman Administration was something of a compromise between the Marshall and Wedemeyer recommendations. On the whole, the administration secretly adjusted its outlook to the hopelessness of the Chiang regime and its future, but it did continue assistance by appropriating $400 million in Chinese aid in 1948. The inability of the Chiang government to make any substantial use of such aid continued to be revealed in 1947-1949. The printing of paper money for the government’s expenses continued until the Chinese paper dollar became almost valueless. In August 1948, a new yuan currency replaced the previous Chinese dollar at a rate of one yuan to $3 million, but the new money was decreased in value by deflation as the old had been.

The abuse of the Chinese people continued, under guise of a general mobilization against the Communists, and the war efforts against the latter were used as a cover for terroristic elimination of any groups who showed less than wholehearted support of the Chiang regime and its corrupt procedures, regardless of how anti-Communist such groups might be. American military advice and training was continually disregarded or ignored, the best troops being thrown piecemeal, under incompetent and corrupt generals, against Communist forces. In this way 300,000 men, including the best of the American-trained divisions, were wasted in Manchuria and North China in September to November 1948.

On November 6th the American military mission decided unanimously that the situation could not be saved without the use of American ground forces and that “no amount of military assistance would save the present situation.” At mid-January 1949, the main field armies north of the Yangtze were destroyed by Communist forces. By that time, Mao’s successes were going far beyond the limits expected or hoped for by Stalin, but the latter’s efforts to slow up the Communist advances were disregarded. Soviet agents from central Asia took over Sinkiang Province, but in China itself Mao’s advance was quite independent of Russian control, since it could be financed from Chinese areas already controlled and could be fought with weapons captured from National forces to add to the captured Japanese weapons obtained from Soviet sources earlier.