Mao gained a lot by going to Chongqing. He talked to Chiang as an equal, “as though the convicts were negotiating with the warders,” one observer remarked. Foreign embassies invited him not as a rebel, but as a statesman, and he played the part, behaving diplomatically, and laughing off a pointed challenge from Churchill’s no-nonsense envoy General Carton de Wiart, who told Mao that he did “not consider that [the Reds] contributed much towards defeating the Japs,” and that Mao’s troops only “had a nuisance value, but no more.” Even when put on the spot in a tough face-to-face encounter with the US commander in China, General Albert Wedemeyer, about the murder and mutilation by the Reds of an American officer called John Birch, Mao showed aplomb. And he kept his cool when Wedemeyer told him, with more than a hint of a threat, that the US was planning to bring atomic bombs into China, as well as up to half a million troops. By appearing conciliatory, Mao scored a propaganda victory.
The peace talks lasted forty-five days, but the whole episode was theater. Mao went around exclaiming “Long live Generalissimo Chiang!” and saying he supported Chiang as the leader of China. But this meant nothing. Mao wanted China for himself, and he knew he could only get it through civil war.
Chiang also knew that war was inevitable, but he needed a peace agreement to satisfy the Americans. Although he had no intention of observing it, he endorsed an agreement that was signed on 10 October. And this behavior brought benefits, at least in the short term. While Mao was in Chongqing, US forces occupied the two main cities in northern China, Tianjin and Peking, and held them for Chiang, and started to ferry his troops to Manchuria.
After the treaty was signed, Chiang invited Mao to stay with him for the night; and the next day they had breakfast together before Mao departed for Yenan. The moment Mao’s back was turned, the Generalissimo gave vent to his true feelings in his diary: “The Communist Party is perfidious, base, and worse than beasts.”
WHEN MAO RETURNED to Yenan on 11 October he immediately started military operations to keep Chiang’s army out of Manchuria. Lin Biao was appointed commander of the Red forces there. Tens of thousands of cadres had already been dispatched, coming under a new Manchuria Bureau whose leaders the Russians flew secretly from Yenan to Shenyang in mid-September.
Mao ordered troops deployed around Shanhaiguan, at the eastern end of the Great Wall. His forces had occupied this strategic pass from China proper into Manchuria in cooperation with the Soviet army on 29 August. He asked the Russians to take care of the seaports and the airports. With Russian encouragement, CCP units posing as bandits fired on US ships trying to land Chiang’s troops, in one case shooting up the launch of the US commander, Admiral Daniel Barbey, and forcing him back out to sea.
The US 7th Fleet finally had to dock at Qinhuangdao, a port just south of Manchuria, and one of Chiang’s best armies disembarked. On the night of 15–16 November it stormed the Shanhaiguan pass. Mao had called for a “decisive battle” and told his troops to hold out at the pass, but Chiang’s divisions simply swept through them. Mao’s forces disintegrated so overwhelmingly that one Nationalist commander lamented proudly that “we don’t even have enough people to accept all the arms being surrendered.”
The Communist forces had no experience of trench warfare, or of any kind of modern warfare. As guerrillas, their first principle, as laid down by Mao himself, was “retreat when the enemy advances.” And that is what they did now. Chiang’s armies, on the other hand, had fought large-scale engagements with the Japanese: in Burma, they had put more Japanese out of action in one campaign than the entire Communist army had in eight years in the whole of China. The Nationalist supremo in Manchuria, General Tu Yu-ming, had been in command of major battles against the Japanese, whereas Mao’s commander, Lin Biao, had taken part in one single ambush in September 1937, eight years before, since when he had hardly smelled gunpowder. By studiously avoiding combat with the Japanese, Mao had ended up with an army that could not fight a modern war.
The Reds had been in some frontal engagements during the Japan war, but mostly against weak Nationalist units. They had not faced the cream of Chiang’s forces, who, as one top Red commander wrote to Mao, were fresh, well-trained, “US-style troops,” and battle-ready.
The CCP troops were not only badly trained, but also poorly motivated. After the Japanese war, many just wanted peace. The Reds had been using a propaganda song called “Defeat Japan so we can go home.” After Japan’s surrender, the song was quietly banned, but the sentiment — let’s go home — could not be quenched as easily as the song.
