An essay in universal history

7. AMERICA, JAPAN AND CHINA

Perhaps Truman’s greatest achievement in his overall strategy of “saving the world for democracy” was democratizing Japan – even if he despised the Allied occupying forces’ Supreme Commander (or “Supreme Being”, as the Japanese jokingly called him¹⁰⁰), the vain and authoritarian General MacArthur. The manner in which he did it, however, was a portent of problems to come.

The Emperor Hirohito, still the nominal leader of the defeated Japanese, was granted immunity from having to stand trial for war crimes (of which he was undoubtedly guilty) in exchange for declaring that he was not a god, but human after all.¹⁰¹ Then he blessed the introduction of a democratic constitution – a constitution composed not by any Japanese or group of Japanese, but exclusively by MacArthur’s men. As Sebestyen writes, “MacArthur had ordered the Japanese to come up with a new ‘modern, democratic framework guaranteeing freedom for all’. As the US Constitution was so central to the American way of life, he told the Japanese to prepare a comparable document. Many weeks later, the deeply conservative ministers and courtiers of the Royal Household produced a draft in which the Emperor was ‘supreme’ and sovereign, offered no votes for women and no universal suffrage, and kept power in the hands of the nobility. MacArthur rejected it, along with a not-so-veiled threat in saying that there were Allied nations, and many people in Washington, who wanted to remove the Emperor and put him on trial. He himself, he said, ‘was not omnipotent’ – a rare admission for MacArthur – and if the Japanese politicians were not ‘more cooperative’, the other Allies might get their way, even against SCAP [Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers]’s wishes. They had ten days to make up their minds or he would produce a ‘radical’ new constitution. At the same time he ordered his second-in-command, General Courtney Whitney, to prepare a team of Americans to write a new document under which the Emperor would become a constitutional monarch, and American-style individual freedoms would be enshrined in law.
“The Japanese Government thought MacArthur was bluffing. At 10 a.m. on the day of the deadline, 13 February, accompanied by his senior officers, General Whitney went to the home of the Foreign Minister, Shigeru Yoshida, who was waiting with his own aides and the man who had written the preferred Japanese version of the constitution, the Professor of Jurisprudence, Juji Matsumoto. According to Whitney’s own vivid account, the Japanese delegation began to explain why they wouldn’t change their draft. Whitney interrupted, pushed aside the Matsumoto document, and said: ‘The draft… you submitted to us the other day is wholly unacceptable to the Supreme Commander as a document of freedom and democracy.’ He drew out fifteen copies of the American draft and left them on the table. Then at ten past ten he left the room and walked ‘into the sunshine of the garden… fortuitously, just at that moment an American plane passed overhead.’ Fifteen minutes later, Jiro Shirasu, one of the Professor’s aides, went outside to ask Whitney a question. The Colonel [sic] observed that ‘we are here enjoying the warmth of atomic energy’. It was a deliberately unsubtle comment and resulted in ‘an important psychological shift’.
“At 11 a.m. Whitney went back inside the house and told the Japanese clearly what would happen next if they did not immediately accept SCAP’s terms. The position of the Emperor ‘would be reviewed’ and the Americans would put their draft constitution to a referendum. As MacArthur was at that time far more populat in Japan than the governing class that had taken the people into a disastrous war – the very people in the room – the people were bound to vote yes. It was a brutal tactic but it worked. The Japanese delegation accepted, but not before asking ‘if they were about to be taken outside and shot’…”¹⁰²
Norman Stone writes: “Initially American policy in Japan was muddled and naively punitive. Japan sank into a morass of epidemic, starvation, black marketeering and crime that was worse than Germany’s: inflation reached 700 per cent in so far as there were goods with prices to be inflated. Then, in 1948, the American learning curve made its usual advance: Japan would have to be run not according to American New Deal principles, but according to her own patterns. Besides, there was a serious enough Communist presence in Japan, and by 1948 there was an even more serious Communist presence just over the water, in China. An equivalent of Konrad Adenauer, Yoshida Shiegeru, emerged in politics, with a clean record, and the Americans cooperated. In December 1948 Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor, saw that Japan would have to be the American industrial ‘powerhouse’, now that China was falling to the Communists, and he sent a banker, Joseph Dodge, to produce a (rough) equivalent of Ludwig Erhard’s plans for West Germany: currency stabilization, resistance to union wage demands, trade credits and a very low exchange rate for the yen against the dollar. The Korean War, breaking out a few months later, created a demand for Japanese goods and services, and injected $5,500 million into the economy. As with Germany, the new programme went together with relaxation of war criminals’ imprisonment; some were quietly rehabilitated and restored to the bureaucracy, and one (Shegemi-tsu Mamoru) even became foreign minister. All of this needed a regularization of Japan’s international position, i.e. a peace treaty, and discussion of this was in the air in 1950 (although formal negotiation only started in 1951, ending that same year with a San Francisco Treaty that not only gave the Americans several bases, but also foreshadowed Japanese rearmament).”¹⁰³
And so, after six-and-a-half years the American occupying forces left Japan, leaving it as a stable and prosperous democracy, apparently cured of its fascist-totalitarian tendencies. This was undoubtedly the greatest achievement of the Pax Americana. At the same time, the Japanese had undoubtedly bee “forced to be free”, to use Rousseau’s phrase, which was contrary to the principle of the Atlantic Charter agreed by Roosevelt and Churchill that all the peoples of the world should be free to choose their form of government. It would not be the first time that American power would enforce freedom on largely unwilling peoples around the globe… Clearly,if the choice was between being forced to be free by the Americans and being forced to be slaves by the Soviets, then the Japanese made the right choice in deciding to surrender to the American Navy rather than to the Red Army… But the contradiction with liberal theory was evident – and this contradiction between ends and means, liberal theory and liberal practice has continued to haunt the West to the present day.
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And yet, on the other side of the Sea of Japan, in China, there took place arguably its greatest failure. “On the day after Japan’s surrender,” writes Martin Gilbert, “from his base in Yenan, Mao Tse-tung had ordered his troops to advance ‘on all fronts’ and to disarm all Japanese troops they encountered. He was determined not only to establish a Chinese Communist presence in Manchuria, but to extend Communist authority as widely as possible beyond the areas of China already under Communist control. So successful was he in overrunning large areas of northern China that the Nationalist troops [of Chiang Kai-Shek] could only be moved by air between the cities they controlled. At the end of August, Mao Tse-tung went to Chungking to negotiate with the Nationalists. But although some form of negotiations continued for a year and a half, it soon became clear that there would no outcome, no solution, and no prospect but that of civil war…”¹⁰⁴
Norman Stone writes: “As soon as Mao was back in Yenan in October 1945 he started operations in Manchuria. At the turn of 1945-6 matters did not go well for the Communists – Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops had had experience of fighting the Japanese and once they came north gave a good account of themselves, thousands of Communist troops deserting. The Soviets left Manchuria in early May 1946, and Mao made an initial error of trying to hold the cities, whereas his real strength lay with the peasants. The Nationalists did well, chasing the Communits to the north; at one stage Mao even planned to give up Harbin and retreat into Siberia. But in Jonathan Spence’s account the rush into Manchuria was a mistake; Chiang should have concentrated on building up China south of the Great Wall, not on a complicated adventure into territory where the Communists had ready Soviet support. However, Chiang was desperately anxious for victory, and at the same time unwilling to use his tanks and heavy weaponry; he neglected the countryside and mismanaged Manchuria when he ran it in 1946-7. Kuomintang finances went into an inflationary spiral, and even the Shanghai business people were alienated, while troops deserted for want of proper pay.
“The Communists were in effect also saved by the Americans. President Truman did not want a fight over China, would grant dollars, would help with shipping, but believed he could insist on the Chinese co-operating. He sent George C. Marshall in December 1945 – a hugely respected man, who had some knowledge of the country from service there in the twenties. He took against Chiang Kai-shek because of his relatives’ corruption and his own dissolute doings (although Chiang had become a Methoidst and a reformed character), and a subsequent American envoy, though more sympathetic, was a buffoon. To the American professionals, Mao and Chou had little difficulty in portraying themselves as efficient popular-front democrats, and Marshall himself was impressed when he saw them at work in Yenan, in March 1946. In any case, at this moment the Americans had enough on their plate. Europe was by far the largest problem, but in Asia they faced one conundrum after another: what were they to do with Japan; the Philippines had to be sorted out; Korea was a muddle; the British, still influential, feared what a Nationalist government might do in Hong Kong. The last thing the Americans wanted to see was a Chinese civil war, and for a time Marshall accepted what Mao told him. He stopped the Nationalists at a decisive moment. Chiang might have destroyed the Communists in Manchuria but on 31 May Marshall told him not to go on: Chian Kai-shek was getting American aid - $3bn in all – and he was in no position to defy Marshall. Truman wrote to Chian, admonishingly, and under American pressure the Nationalists set up an assembly that wasted time and attracted endless criticism for sharp practice: the Americans making exactly the same mistake as they were to make in Vietnam twenty years later, of assuming that democracy Western-style needed to be introduced at once. A truce was proclaimed, just as Mao prepared to abandon Harbin and the railway link to Siberia.
“The upshot was that the Communists were left in control of Manchuria, an area twice the size of Germany, and they used these four months to consolidate their hold over it, using Japanese weaponry supplied by the Russians (as well as Japanese prisoners of war who evern served as flight instructors). They took over 900 aircraft, 700 tanks, 1,700 guns and much else, together with 200,000 regular soldiers, and North Korea, which the Russians had occupied, was also a useful asset for Mao. In June 1946, when matters were going badly, he was able to send his wounded and his reserve materiel there, and when the Nationalists split Manchuria in two, North Korea was the linke between the Communists in the north and the south, who would otherwise have been divided. The other decisive Soviet contribution was the remaking of the railway, whish was linked up with Russia again in spring 1947…. Soviet help was decisive, though it came at a grotesque price: the export of food from a starving country.
“When Marshall imposed his ceasefire in June 1946 the Nationalists were greatly superior, with over 4 million troops to Mao’s 1.25 million; and they expelled the Communists from most of their strongholds in China proper, with Nangking again the capital. In October 1946 Chiang Kai-shek did attack Manchuria but by then the Red bases had become too strong and Mao’s chief general, Lin Biao, proved to have much military talent (it was the harshest winter in living memory, and his troops were made to carry out ambushes in fearful cold, at -40 degrees: they lost 100,000 men from frostbite). In January 1947 Marshall left China and it was the end of American efforts at mediation.”¹⁰⁵
It was also the end of Chiang’s push for victory; after this, his troops collapsed remarkably quickly, and in October, 1949 the whole of China except Taiwan came under the rule of Mao’s Communists.
On January 7, 1947, General Marshall’s report on his year-long mission to China was published. He had tried, but failed, to force the Communists under Mao into coalition with the Nationalists under Chiang. The reason, he said, was the distrust between the two sides, and in particular the Nationalists’ belief that “co-operation by the Communist Party in the Government was inconceivable, and that only a policy of force could definitely settle the issue”.¹⁰⁶ Of course, Communist propaganda also played its part in the Americans’ decision to stop aid to Chiang. Mao successfully deceived the American public through gullible and deceitful journalists that he was more a social-democrat or Robin Hood character than a real Communist. Another important factor was the corruption of the Nationalist government…
These considerations help us to understand the Americans’ decision. Nevertheless, in view of what happed only a few years later – the Communist conquest of the whole of China – it must be considered a tragic mistake. A decisive intervention with “boots on the ground” on the Nationalists’ side in 1946 might well have destroyed Mao’s Communists once and for all.
And how much blood and suffering that would have prevented! Already in the first two years of Communist rule, according to Kenneth Scott Latourette, between 3 and 5 million peo were executed. “Most of this was by shootings in large groups which the public were encouraged or required to attend. In despair untold thousands had committed suicide. Many suffered from mental breakdown. Class consciousness was created and nurtured and with it class hatred. Mass hysteria was fomented. A strict censorship of the printed page and the radio was enforced.”¹⁰⁷
However, intervention would have been very difficult. The Americans were already over-stretched in Asia, and still had many divisions tied down in Europe. Moreover, the Soviets supported Mao, and were supplying him with weapons captured from the Japanese in Manchuria. True, Stalin still officially recognized Chiang - the Soviet ambassador was the only representative of the major powers to see him off from Canton into exile in Taiwan. But it is unlikely that Stalin would have allowed Mao to be defeated completely: his strategy was to keep the Chinese communists dependent on him for their survival, while weakening the Americans in a long and fruitless war in China similar to what they were later mired in Vietnam.
The mention of Vietnam, where a nationalist form of communism eventually triumphed over capitalism, leads us to perhaps the most important reason why China eventually fell to the communists. Already before the end of the Second World War, it was becoming clear that a powerful reaction against the old colonial powers – Britain, France and Holland – was setting in. Their victory in 1945 temporarily stabilized their power, but not for long. India was liberated from the British in 1947, and Indochina and Indonesia from the French and Dutch respectively – but not before bitter nationalist wars. This nationalist wave was no less powerful in China, which had been humiliated and exploited by the western colonial powers since the early nineteenth century, leading to the fall of the Chinese Empire in 1911. But the Kuomintang regime of the inter-war years, though officially “nationalist”, was still closely linked with the West and infected with the western diseases. For those Chinese who sought a real purging of western influence and interference, Communism was a more attractive alternative. The irony is, of course, that Communism was a western doctrine whose champions, the Russians, had been one of China’s colonial predators in Tsarist times. Nevertheless, Chinese anti-colonialism was more sincere than that of the Americans, who tried to push the British and the French to give up their colonies but whose ideological and cultural kinship with them was obvious.