The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [124]
As the postwar political map of China was being drawn, both Mao and Chiang scrambled to expand the areas over which they had effective control. Mao’s forces moved quickly to accept the surrender of Japanese military units in the north and replace them as the governing group. Fearful of China establishing a second enormous Communist state, the U.S. tried to contain the area of Communist control by airlifting Chiang’s troops to key cities in northern China, where they could accept and claim credit for Japanese surrenders. The stage was now set for a showdown between the CCP under Mao and the KMT under Chiang.
In an attempt to avert civil war, the U.S. government tried to negotiate peace between the two sides. U.S. ambassador Patrick Hurley arranged talks between Mao and Chiang, but after the talks failed, Hurley resigned his post in disgust. President Harry Truman then dispatched as his special representative to China General George C. Marshall, America’s World War II army chief of staff, future secretary of state, and author of the Marshall Plan, which many would later credit for saving much of Europe from communism. In China Marshall managed to negotiate a temporary cease-fire, but even as both sides discussed the terms of implementation, they were busy preparing for further war. The cease-fire ended in the summer of 1946, after the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria and Chinese Communist troops moved in.
Even at this late date, the Kuomintang, the de jure governing party of China because of its control of China’s major cities, seemed to be the stronger contender for national power. Poor leadership, however, had eroded the people’s trust in the Republic. When the Nationalists reclaimed the capital of Nanjing from the Japanese, they failed to punish officials known to have collaborated with the occupiers. Many Chinese believed that the collaborators escaped justice because of their influence within the Nationalist regime. There were also charges that the Nationalists had retained property expropriated by the Japanese instead of returning it to the original owners.
In addition, the Nationalists behaved despotically when Japan was obligated to return Taiwan, an offshore island originally named Formosa by the Portugese, that the Qing dynasty had ceded to Japan in 1895. Under the pretext of confiscating Japanese holdings, the Nationalists indiscriminately seized native homes and businesses. “When a Chinese with some influence wanted a particular property, he had only to accuse a Formosan of being a collaborationist during the past fifty years of Japanese sovereignty,” one Taiwanese observed. When news organizations began to publish such grumblings of discontent, the KMT, rather than address the problems provoking the discontent, chose to arrest a number of local news reporters, editors, and publishers who had brought the issue to light. Many Taiwanese natives now complained, in private, that the “dogs” (the Japanese) had left, but the “pigs” (the Nationalists) had replaced them. On February 28, 1947, simmering hatred of the Nationalists exploded into a serious uprising on the island. KMT reinforcements dispatched from the mainland brutally crushed the rebellion, in the process slaughtering thousands of Taiwanese.
Political unrest in Taiwan and elsewhere was only a fraction of Nationalist China’s concerns. The country was teetering on the brink of economic collapse. During the war, as inflation spiraled out of control, the government had inflicted heavy taxes on farmers and forced them to sell grain at fixed prices. In the immediate postwar years, many