The Chinese Communist Party‘s primary deception is to play the democracy card. To welcome the U.S. military observation team, the Liberation Daily devoted an editorial to celebrate America’s national day, praising democratic America and its advocacy of natural human rights and the dignity of freedom, claiming that the CCP is a companion of democratic America and that the CCP seeks the same thing as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. Mao told Xie Weisi, “Every American soldier in China should be a living advertisement for democracy. He should talk about democracy to every Chinese person he meets.” [5] Mao’s fake cry for democracy was nothing more than a public relations ploy to deceive the United States into accepting and assisting him, while also serving the triple purpose of glorifying the Communists, discrediting the state government, and distancing the United States from the Republic of China.
In accordance with the customs of the civilized world, Xie Weisi, Davis and others naturally thought that Mao’s words as the Communist Party chairman could not be taken at face value and were considered to be his sincere confessions. Moreover, they originally believed that the National Government was corrupt and incompetent and refused to reform, and that the CCP, unlike the Soviet Union, was nothing more than a land revolutionary. Therefore, when they heard Mao’s democratic lies, they seemed to have met a soulmate and were convinced. But they ignored the fact that even though the Kuomintang was dictatorial, the Communist Party could still operate in the National Unification Area, and its Xinhua Daily was openly published in Chongqing. In Yan’an, however, there was no trace of the National Unification Area.
It is even more ironic that while they were praising the Communist Party as if it were a whole new China,[6] Yan’an was undergoing a hellish purge and a god-making campaign, the infamous “Yan’an Rectification”. Tens of thousands of Party members were falsely accused of being Kuomintang agents or anti-Party and anti-Maoists, and were severely beaten, imprisoned, tortured, and nearly a thousand driven mad, killed, or executed. Mao Zedong had not yet ascended the throne, but had already become an unbeatable Communist tyrant. In fact, those Americans who accuse the National Government of one-party dictatorship do not understand what true totalitarian tyranny is. Compared to Mao, Chiang Kai-shek’s so-called “dictatorship” is nothing!
In addition to believing the CCP’s lies, the U.S. military observer group is also accustomed to interpreting the phenomena of totalitarian societies through the eyes of an open society, smugly drawing all kinds of childish and ridiculous, even almost idiotic, conclusions. For example, if you don’t see police on the streets of Yan’an, you assume that the communist zone is safe and peaceful,[7] while in fact the Yan’an prison is overcrowded with political prisoners. The absence of beggars around the compound led to the assumption that the Communist Party’s economic policy was superior,[8] while in fact the Communists relied mainly on opium cultivation and drug trafficking for their livelihood. The Communists’ so-called “anti-Japanese” taxes added to the already abject poverty of the people of northern Shaanxi, and some local peasants were so angry that they cursed Mao Zedong to be struck by lightning.
Most outrageous of all, Xie Weisi, based on the Communists’ expanding territory in the liberated areas, mistakenly believed that the Communists were the result of their fierce attacks on The Japanese, and thus deduced that the Communists were sincere in their resistance to Japan. He writes, “The Communists understood that if they went all out to win the war against Japan, it would dramatically improve their standing on the domestic as well as the international stage, and therefore the Communists were sincere in their resistance to Japan.” [9] Xie Weisi mistakenly thought that the CCP was normal Chinese. However, the CCP belonged to the Yellow Russian alternative, they did not care about the Japanese, but expected to use the Japanese army to destroy the national army more often, so they would never go to actively resist Japan. Many of the so-called liberated areas of the Communist Party were seized from the Nationalist Army. Their enemy was the Nationalist government, not the Japanese invaders. As Mao Zedong said, we must take down China this Time against Japan.
Coincidentally, Vladimir Vladimirov, the Soviet liaison officer, was also stationed in Yan’an at the time, carrying out the same task as the U.S. Army Observation Group, i.e., to assess the results of the Communist resistance. As “one of our own,” his report was the exact opposite of that of the American outsiders: the Communist troops on the front lines everywhere had been instructed not to provoke the Japanese and had retreated to safety. Despite this, the battle reports came in frequently. Communist leaders were also able to leave their units for long periods to join the rectification campaign in Yan’an. He also discovered that prior to the arrival of the U.S. observation team, Mao instructed the Communist forces to significantly revise the Communist war reports for the U.S. observation team to access. What’s more, he learned that the Communists were secretly communicating with the invading Japanese army, exchanging information and cooperating against the anti-Japanese National Government. [10] In short, the darkness and nastiness hidden beneath the shiny surface of a totalitarian society cannot be discovered or explained by normal people using the logical reasoning of a civilized society.
Fortunately, there are still a few sober people in the U.S. government. They had illusions about the Chinese Communist Party, but did not pander to it as the Xie Weisi’s did, such as General Hurley, President Roosevelt’s special envoy and ambassador to China.
Before Hurley’s arrival in China in August 1944, the Allies were already winning in Europe, while the Japanese were still attacking hard in China, and their “Operation No. 1”, which opened the north-south line of communication, was causing heavy casualties to the Nationalist Army, which had been struggling for seven years, and threatening the American airfields in southwest China used to bomb Japan. A distraught Roosevelt, anxious to defeat Japan, urgently needed to turn the tide of the war in China and cooperate with the U.S. Army’s island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, which was approaching the Japanese mainland. He sent Hurley to China to urge the Communists to unite against Japan. After all, in Roosevelt’s view, the Communists must have been patriots too, and the Communist army was an available anti-Japanese force.
During Hurley’s visit to Yan’an in November of the same year, Mao Zedong repeated the same old story, blaming the deterioration of the war situation on the imminent defeat of the Nationalist army and the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist government, and gloatingly predicting that the Japanese would advance into Sichuan and that the collapse of the Nationalist government was imminent. But Hurley was naive but not confused, and he immediately retorted that the National Army had been fighting alone for nearly eight years, suffering great sacrifice and attrition, and had still recently made brilliant gains in northern Burma. As far as he knew, most of the U.S. aid went to the battlefield in northern Burma, and the National Army in the interior received very little, and did not have many corrupt resources. With the characteristic American bluntness, he rebuked Mao to his face with the enemy who hated China an argument that was echoing the enemy’s views, putting Mao on the spot and touching the nail. [11]
Due to inexperience and gullibility, Hurley rashly signed the five agreements modified by Mao, Mao put China only one government, one army, the communist army when accepting the command of Jiang, the chairman of the committee changed to, the Communist Party formed a joint government, the national army and the communist army equal access to the military council. But once Hurley understood it, he firmly supported the National Government’s three counter-proposals, namely, to reorganize the Communist army and put it under the National Government’s jurisdiction; to recognize the Communist Party’s status as a legitimate political party; and for the Communist Party to embrace the Three Principles of the People. In fact, these three items were all promised by the Communist Party before after the Xi’an Incident, but were still rejected by the Communists.
According to Bao Ruide’s report, Mao Zedong was uncharacteristically angry when talking with him, repeatedly losing his temper, shouting that he would never give in, jumping to his feet and cursing Chiang Kai-shek as a “son of a bitch” who should have been removed from power long ago. [12] Mao Zedong finally showed his true face as a rogue in front of the U.S. Army observation team. Hearing this, Hurley became more wary of the Chinese Communist Party and insisted that the U.S. must support the Anti-Communist Nationalist government and transfer Xie Weisi and others out of China. Hurley was not a “China man”, but he had no lack of common sense, intuition and sense of justice, and saw through the Chinese Communist Party more than a China man.
After the Japanese surrender, the U.S. Army Observation Group, which was reluctant to leave Yan’an, was ignorantly used by the Communists to help their rebellious government on several occasions.
On August 18, 1945, Far East Allied Commander-in-Chief MacArthur issued Surrender Order No. 1, designating that Japanese troops in the Republic of China (except Manchuria) and in Vietnam north of 16 degrees north could only surrender to the National Government represented by Commissar General Chiang. Before that, Mao Zedong, who was eager for the civil war, had already issued seven orders for the Communist army to attack extensively, forcefully surrender to Japan, expand the liberated areas, and occupy all cities and major transportation routes that could and must be occupied. But the problem was that most of the communist leaders were still in Yan’an at that time, far away from their respective troops. So on August 25, Mao stole a U.S. Army observation team’s military plane and smuggled Lin Biao, Chen Yi, Liu Bo Cheng, Deng Xiaoping and other communist army leaders to the airport in Licheng, Shanxi, to prepare for landing and transfer to the front line of the civil war, saving months of land trekking. Later, Nie Rongzhen and Xiao Ke went to the Jinchaji region, and Zhang Wentian and Gao Gang went as far as the northeast, all leaving Yan’an on American planes. [13] The Communists always said that the U.S. helped Jiang Zhongzheng transport troops to fight the civil war, but in fact the first U.S. military planes transported precisely Mao’s Communist rebels.
The U.S. military observation team’s experience in Yan’an showed that the Chinese Communist Party was not true to its word, had other plans, and was not credible; the “Chinese Tong” was naive, shallow, self-righteous, and not reliable. Unfortunately, the U.S. failed to recognize these two valuable lessons, and Marshall, assigned by Truman to China and a (semi-)Chinese generalist, still failed to think outside the box of his previous policy toward China and continued to misjudge the CCP, which resulted in the accomplishment of the CCP’s ambitions and the death of his allies’ future.
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