Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [111]
Roosevelt’s aura as a man with sympathy for the oppressed had penetrated the remotest corners of the world. In Christ Stopped at Eboli Carlo Levi tells how, on entering a hovel in a miserable village in God-forsaken Calabria, he was confronted on the wall by a crucifix, a picture of the family’s absent son, and a picture of Roosevelt. While it is doubtful if, apart from propaganda posters of the four Allied chiefs, the American President appeared on any private walls of Yenan, he was present in the minds of the leaders. On Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944, Mao sent him a message of congratulation and received a reply in which Roosevelt said he looked forward to “vigorous cooperation with all the Chinese forces” against the common enemy, Japan. If not definitive, this was at least an opening.
The American observers in Yenan found their hosts intensely curious about the United States, anxious to learn what they could of means and techniques, especially military, developed by the Americans. Mao, according to Major Cromley, “would grab intellectually anything about the United States that anyone could tell him.” He and his colleagues had been impressed by the steady advance of American forces in the extraordinarily difficult campaign across the Pacific, and they realized it was this that would be the main force in the defeat of the Japanese homeland. In the real world in which they now had to make their way, the United States with its money, its resources, and its current presence in Asia was the country they had to deal with—for the interim.
“We can risk no conflict,” Mao told Service, “with the United States.” They were not concerned about adulteration by a rival ideology because they were confident of the ultimate victory of their own. They wanted American recognition of what they had accomplished and were capable of accomplishing, and thus recognition as a major party, not an outlaw. They wanted to acquire belligerent status as a party to the coming Allied victory so that they could not be ignored in the arrangements for post-war China, nor in the organization of the United Nations. And certainly they had in mind that an American connection would help them to meet that none-too-welcome day when the heavy tramp of the Soviet Union should enter Manchuria. In short, they wanted to find out at the source whether, if Chiang continued to refuse coalition, there was “any chance,” as Mao asked Service, “of American support of the Chinese Communist Party.” They wanted to know where they stood.
The governing factor was that in their own minds they fully expected to succeed to the sovereignty of China. Here lay the problem which in the Communists’ relation to the United States eventually became the shipwreck rock. The Communist view of it was made explicit by Mao as early as August 1944: “For America to give arms only to the Kuomintang will in its effect be interference because it will enable the Kuomintang to oppose the will of the people of China.” While this may have been a subjective judgment of the will of the people, it was more realistic than otherwise, and recognized as such by American observers whose duty was to assess the evidence. As “the only group in China possessing a program with positive appeal to the people,” reported John P. Davies, second secretary of the Embassy, who was attached as political officer to the Theater Command, the Communists were the first group in modern Chinese history to have “positive and widespread popular support.… China’s destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs.” He thought this was a consideration that the United States in seeking to determine policy should keep in mind.
The tenor of advice by our career officers both in China and the State Department at this time was that unqualified support of Chiang Kai-shek was not the best means of achieving unity in China. By encouraging in Chiang a false sense of his own strength, it made him intransigent to compromise and therefore more likely to precipitate