CHINA 1945
Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice
Richard Bernstein
Alfred A Knopf; 445 pages; $30
"To err is human. To blame someone else is politics." Hubert H Humphrey's aphorism came to mind as I was reading China 1945, Richard Bernstein's excellent history of United States policy toward China at the end of World War II. The comment is particularly apt when intractable problems provide myriad paths to failure but no clear right answer - and the civil war in China after Japan's surrender was just such a problem. (Today, think of Syria.) The debates over China policy were acrimonious and personal, and this was several years before Joseph McCarthy lent his name to sneering political assassination.
Mr Bernstein, a student of Harvard's John King Fairbank and a former New York Times reporter, covers China's political context in 1945 like a scholar, but maintains his journalist's eye for human drama. In 1945 American officials in China were trying to achieve three impossibly conflicting aims: prevent a civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang regime and Mao Zedong's Communist Party; keep the United States out of any civil war that might occur; and stop the Communists and their Soviet backers from seizing control of northern China from Chiang's government, a World War II ally. The third aim could not be accomplished without violating the second. But the second could not be seriously violated because America was, understandably, tired of war.
So that left preventing civil war. Even before Japan surrendered, United States officials were trying to persuade Chiang and Mao to cease hostilities and establish a coalition government. Mr Bernstein convincingly deems this mission doomed, though it was headed in 1946 by George Marshall, the greatest American statesman of his generation. Chiang was politically beholden to factions that could never allow sustained compromise with Mao's Communists; and Chiang himself was bullheaded. Mao was a radical ideologue and manipulator who viewed cooperation with rivals in the same way as his role model, Joseph Stalin.
Marshall's eccentric predecessor, ambassador Patrick J Hurley, was deluded in believing that with his Oklahoma horse sense and lawyerly acumen he could broker a lasting coalition government. But in late November 1945, he abruptly resigned in frustration, publicly blaming Foreign Service Asia experts like John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service for undercutting his efforts. Hurley complained that they had unfairly criticised Chiang's government while coddling the Communists, and scandalously accused them of disloyalty to him and their nation (apparently in that order of importance).
There are no unalloyed heroes in Mr Bernstein's story. While hardly traitors, Davies and Service were guilty of serious analytic misdemeanors. They naïvely advocated accommodation of the Communists because they believed that Mao's revolutionary movement was more democratic and nationalist than it actually was.
Even if Mao had entertained a temporary deal with Chiang in the late 1940s, however, he was not one to keep promises or share power. After all, he purged and tortured many of his loyal followers once he "liberated" China. No pragmatist, Mao pursued a radical agenda that left more Chinese dead than even the Japanese imperialists did. And Mr Bernstein could have taken his critique of these American officials' analysis one step further. When Mao finally broke with the Soviets in the late 1950s and 1960s, as some American officials predicted in 1945 that he would, he did so not because he was forsaking the Stalinist model. Quite the opposite. Mao accused Stalin's successors - Khrushchev and Brezhnev - of insufficient support for international revolution and excessive compromise with the United States.
My main objection to Mr Bernstein's book is a quibble concerning part of its subtitle: "America's Fateful Choice". Right-wing critics blamed Truman for "losing China" to the Communists by being insufficiently supportive of Chiang. After Vietnam, left-wing academics lamented that there had been a "lost chance" for friendship with Mao, if only Washington had seized it. Mr Bernstein's subtitle suggests he will take a position in this tired debate. But he correctly rejects both positions. If any foreigners lost China to Communism, it was the rabidly anti-Communist Japanese imperialists who undercut Chiang's legitimacy and created space for revolution. And no amount of accommodation could have turned Mao into a trusted American ally in the 1950s.
Truman chose an ineffective middle road: side with Chiang, but not too much. Mr Bernstein blames American domestic politics for this diluted policy, and there is some truth to that. But Truman had no better option. He gave Chiang a fighting chance to secure his own country without dragging a war-weary America into a huge civil conflict on the Soviets' doorstep, and Chiang failed. Direct American intervention would have been the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet simply abandoning wartime allies to insurrection would have harmed Washington's reputation for resolve.
More important, indifference to Communism's spread in China would have undercut the administration's domestic effort to mobilise support for Cold War strategies in geostrategically more important places like Europe, Japan and West Asia. Truman's options were "bad", "worse" and "terrible". Truman wisely chose "bad". Not all global problems have American solutions, and often the best policy choice is to manage and minimise costs. Moderation in the defence of liberty is no vice.
Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice
Richard Bernstein
Alfred A Knopf; 445 pages; $30
"To err is human. To blame someone else is politics." Hubert H Humphrey's aphorism came to mind as I was reading China 1945, Richard Bernstein's excellent history of United States policy toward China at the end of World War II. The comment is particularly apt when intractable problems provide myriad paths to failure but no clear right answer - and the civil war in China after Japan's surrender was just such a problem. (Today, think of Syria.) The debates over China policy were acrimonious and personal, and this was several years before Joseph McCarthy lent his name to sneering political assassination.
Mr Bernstein, a student of Harvard's John King Fairbank and a former New York Times reporter, covers China's political context in 1945 like a scholar, but maintains his journalist's eye for human drama. In 1945 American officials in China were trying to achieve three impossibly conflicting aims: prevent a civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang regime and Mao Zedong's Communist Party; keep the United States out of any civil war that might occur; and stop the Communists and their Soviet backers from seizing control of northern China from Chiang's government, a World War II ally. The third aim could not be accomplished without violating the second. But the second could not be seriously violated because America was, understandably, tired of war.
So that left preventing civil war. Even before Japan surrendered, United States officials were trying to persuade Chiang and Mao to cease hostilities and establish a coalition government. Mr Bernstein convincingly deems this mission doomed, though it was headed in 1946 by George Marshall, the greatest American statesman of his generation. Chiang was politically beholden to factions that could never allow sustained compromise with Mao's Communists; and Chiang himself was bullheaded. Mao was a radical ideologue and manipulator who viewed cooperation with rivals in the same way as his role model, Joseph Stalin.
Marshall's eccentric predecessor, ambassador Patrick J Hurley, was deluded in believing that with his Oklahoma horse sense and lawyerly acumen he could broker a lasting coalition government. But in late November 1945, he abruptly resigned in frustration, publicly blaming Foreign Service Asia experts like John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service for undercutting his efforts. Hurley complained that they had unfairly criticised Chiang's government while coddling the Communists, and scandalously accused them of disloyalty to him and their nation (apparently in that order of importance).
There are no unalloyed heroes in Mr Bernstein's story. While hardly traitors, Davies and Service were guilty of serious analytic misdemeanors. They naïvely advocated accommodation of the Communists because they believed that Mao's revolutionary movement was more democratic and nationalist than it actually was.
Even if Mao had entertained a temporary deal with Chiang in the late 1940s, however, he was not one to keep promises or share power. After all, he purged and tortured many of his loyal followers once he "liberated" China. No pragmatist, Mao pursued a radical agenda that left more Chinese dead than even the Japanese imperialists did. And Mr Bernstein could have taken his critique of these American officials' analysis one step further. When Mao finally broke with the Soviets in the late 1950s and 1960s, as some American officials predicted in 1945 that he would, he did so not because he was forsaking the Stalinist model. Quite the opposite. Mao accused Stalin's successors - Khrushchev and Brezhnev - of insufficient support for international revolution and excessive compromise with the United States.
My main objection to Mr Bernstein's book is a quibble concerning part of its subtitle: "America's Fateful Choice". Right-wing critics blamed Truman for "losing China" to the Communists by being insufficiently supportive of Chiang. After Vietnam, left-wing academics lamented that there had been a "lost chance" for friendship with Mao, if only Washington had seized it. Mr Bernstein's subtitle suggests he will take a position in this tired debate. But he correctly rejects both positions. If any foreigners lost China to Communism, it was the rabidly anti-Communist Japanese imperialists who undercut Chiang's legitimacy and created space for revolution. And no amount of accommodation could have turned Mao into a trusted American ally in the 1950s.
Truman chose an ineffective middle road: side with Chiang, but not too much. Mr Bernstein blames American domestic politics for this diluted policy, and there is some truth to that. But Truman had no better option. He gave Chiang a fighting chance to secure his own country without dragging a war-weary America into a huge civil conflict on the Soviets' doorstep, and Chiang failed. Direct American intervention would have been the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet simply abandoning wartime allies to insurrection would have harmed Washington's reputation for resolve.
More important, indifference to Communism's spread in China would have undercut the administration's domestic effort to mobilise support for Cold War strategies in geostrategically more important places like Europe, Japan and West Asia. Truman's options were "bad", "worse" and "terrible". Truman wisely chose "bad". Not all global problems have American solutions, and often the best policy choice is to manage and minimise costs. Moderation in the defence of liberty is no vice.
© The New York Times News Service 2014