Mao: The Unknown Story

The Young Marshal’s American pilot, Royal Leonard, has left a description of a worldly man: “My first impression … was that here was the president of a Rotary Club: rotund, prosperous, with an easy, affable manner … We were friends in five minutes …” After inheriting Manchuria when his warlord father (“the Old Marshal”) was assassinated in June 1928, the Young Marshal placed his domain under Chiang’s central government, while remaining its chief until Japan invaded it in 1931. He then retreated into China proper with 200,000 troops, and was subsequently given various important posts by Chiang. He had an apparently intimate relationship with Chiang and his wife. Thirteen years the Generalissimo’s junior, he was fond of saying that Chiang was “like a daddy to me.”

But behind the Generalissimo’s back, the Young Marshal plotted to supplant him. Having governed a land larger than France and England together, it irked him to be Chiang’s subordinate. He aspired to rule all of China. To this end, he had earlier made approaches to the Russians and had tried to visit the Soviet Union when he was in Europe in 1933, but the Russians were very wary and turned him down. Only four years earlier, in 1929, Stalin had invaded Manchuria and fought a brief war against him after he had seized the Russian-controlled railway in Manchuria. Moreover, the Young Marshal had expressed admiration for fascism, and was friendly with Mussolini and his family. In August 1935 a statement put out from Moscow under the name of the CCP called him “scum” and a “traitor.”

But once he was appointed Mao’s warden later that year, Moscow performed a U-turn. The Young Marshal had become worth courting. He could make the CCP’s life easier and, more importantly, help them link up with Russian supplies. Within weeks of Mao arriving in the northwest, Russian diplomats were deep in talks with the Young Marshal.

He traveled to Shanghai and Nanjing, the capital, to meet the Russians in secret. To cover his tracks, he wove a camouflage of frivolity. He had a reputation as a playboy, and happily played up this image. One day, his American pilot recalled, the Young Marshal got him to “fly the plane in a vertical bank, one wing in the street, past the windows of the Park Hotel where his friends lived. We passed within ten feet of the façade, the noise of the motor rattling the panes like castanets.” This flamboyant show was staged outside the hotel room where one of the Young Marshal’s girlfriends was staying. “Perhaps this will make you smile,” the Young Marshal, aged ninety-one in 1993, chuckled to us. “At that time, Tai Li [Chiang’s intelligence chief] tried everything he could to find out my whereabouts, and he thought I went to have a good time with my girlfriends. But in fact, I was doing deals …”

The Young Marshal made clear to the Russians that he was ready to form an alliance with the Chinese Reds and engage in “decisive struggle against the Japanese”—i.e., declare war on Japan, which Chiang had not done. In return, he wanted Moscow to back him to replace Chiang as the head of the country.

This package contained extremely attractive features for Stalin, including the one thing the Kremlin boss most wanted — for China to wage all-out war against Japan. Japan had been encroaching on China since 1931, and had been nibbling away ever since. After annexing Manchuria, Tokyo set up another puppet regime in part of northern China in November 1935, but Chiang had been avoiding all-out war. Stalin was anxious that Tokyo might turn north and attack the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s goal was to use China to steer Tokyo away from the Soviet Union by dragging the Japanese into the vast interior of China and bogging them down there. Moscow worked hard to fan sentiment in China for such an all-out war with Japan, while keeping its own agenda under wraps. It took a hand in major student demonstrations; and its many agents, particularly Mme Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek’s sister-in-law, formed pressure groups to lobby Nanjing for action.

Chiang did not want to surrender to Japan, but nor did he want to declare war. He thought that China had no realistic chance of winning, and that taking on Tokyo would lead to his country’s destruction. He opted for a very unusual limbo — neither surrendering nor fighting a full-scale war. He was able to hang on in this state thanks to China’s size, and the fact that the Japanese were only encroaching gradually. Chiang may even have harbored the hope that Japan would soon turn on Russia and leave the rest of China alone.

The Young Marshal’s proposal suited Stalin, but Stalin did not trust him. Nor did he believe that the former Manchurian warlord was capable of holding China together to fight such a war. If China lapsed into internecine strife, it would facilitate the Japanese conquest — and, a fortiori, redouble the Japanese threat to the Soviet Union.