Last night I finished John F. Melby's The Mandate of Heaven: Record of a civil war CHINA 1945-49 with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson (University of Toronto Press, 1968). I was visiting the University of Toronto and (as is common for a university history department) there was a box with a bunch of books that professors were giving away.
At first I thought this was a strange book. There are around 25 chapters that begin with Melby summarizing what happens in the time period to be discussed, followed by his diary entries during that time.
What makes his diary entries relevant is that Melby was a high-ranking diplomat in the United States Embassy in China (Chungking 1944-45, Nanking 1946-48). So he had access to many of the main actors in the drama of the fall of the Kuomintang government and the eventual victory of the Chinese Communist Party.
Melby comes across as a sensitive liberal humanist. He's obviously used to travelling in elite circles but his reflections on the ordinary people he meets are generally free of condescension and, with regards to the Chinese, entirely free of racism. I said that I thought this a strange book at first, because it was so personal. But it turned out to be the sort of literary style of history that I find makes the subject easiest for me to grasp. In his round-about way, Melby's musings provide the context in which so many ideas were circulated and policies made.
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| CCP Troops reach the Forbidden City (photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson) |
The story of the defeat of the KMT is this: China had fallen behind the West militarily by the 19th Century and European imperialists took advantage of their power to humiliate and exploit this once great empire. The last emperors of China had been the Manchurians. Their inability to resist the West had led to their overthrow in 1911. But with the fall of the Manchus, China split up into various warlord kingdoms. Japan had been similarly abused, but because it had always been a weaker and poorer entity than China, it was merely a sideshow to the Europeans, and, moreover, the Japanese were more capable of realizing the importance of seriously learning from other cultures. (Until it was too late, China's rulers regarded the Europeans as troublesome barbarians whom they would somehow triumph over in the natural order of things.) Japan's example of imitating/absorbing Western knowledge and building up its industrial, economic and military strength served as an example for Chinese intellectuals.
Eventually the Chinese Nationalist Party formed along Western lines under Sun Yat-Sen and dedicated itself to uniting and modernizing China in order to restore their autonomy. (The Nationalists were the Kuomintang/KMT.) The KMT was successful in eventually uniting China through the party's own military-political power, and by making deals with the warlords, the mandarin class and the new business class. These were the sorts of people whose position depended upon the economic exploitation of the vast majority of the population who were peasants. It was only Mao, in opposition to the dogmatic Marxism of both the Russians and the CCP who saw the obvious reality that revolution in China depended on the peasants. The KMT's leader from the late-1920's to, ... well, forever, but they had to flee mainland China for the island of Taiwan/Formosa in 1949 was Chiang Kai-Chek. And he was able to hold the rickety alliances of the KMT (warlords, fascist party members, capitalists and intellectuals) together, while mainly depending on the KMT's fascist wing.
Chiang's wife was Sun Yat-Sen's sister-in-law. Her brother was T.V. Soong. He was the KMT's finance minister during the 1940's. Educated in the United States (like his sisters) he used his position to become very wealthy. Melby spends a lot of time on the massive corruption of the KMT, stating at one point that almost one-third of the over $3 billion dollars that KMT-ruled China got from various international sources in the 1940's disappeared into the hands of the party's leadership.
During the 1930's and the 1940's, Chiang was forced to stop his policy of extermination against the CCP and fight alongside them to defeat the Japanese. The war against Japan increased the prestige of both the CCP and the KMT. On top of that, the CCP's fighters, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) likewise rose in the estimation of the peasantry. In China, soldiers had traditionally been treated as the scum of the earth both by their officers and by the society they lived in. In return, they often lived up to the part, looting and raping and killing wherever they went. The KMT treated their soldiers abysmally for the most part whereas the CCP treated them as comrades and Mao instructed them to treat the peasants with respect. The peasants were the sea that the PLA fish swam in. As well as not molesting the peasants, PLA soldiers paid for what they needed, helped with the harvest and basically gave a good accounting of themselves
The war gave the CCP access to captured Japanese weapons as well as US military supplies. Their land-reform policies were supremely attractive to the peasantry. When the war ended the CCP was far more powerful than they had been before the war. There was no way that Chiang could immediately go on the offensive against them. The country was exhausted from the war and did not want to renew fighting with a civil war. Fighting did resume but the population did not appear to be happy about it.
The USA was the dominant foreign power in China and everywhere else in the world. The USSR had its own rebuilding to do. It had civil relationships with both the CCP and the KMT. Stalin did not think it realistic that the CCP would come to power in the then foreseeable future. Truman sent former Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, to construct some sort of political arrangement between the CCP and the KMT. Neither side bargained honestly but the KMT (still in power) was the most duplicitous. Eventually, Chiang decided he could dispense with diplomacy and bring a military solution to the situation. General Marshall (rightfully as it turned out) told Chiang that this was nonsense. He was overextended. Sustained fighting would be ruinous. The CCP had all the advantages in the north.
Here's Wikipedia's summary of part of the situation:
Although General Marshall stated that he knew of no evidence that the CPC was being supplied by the Soviet Union, the CPC was able to utilize a large number of weapons abandoned by the Japanese, including some tanks. When large numbers of well-trained KMT troops began to defect to the Communist forces, the CPC was finally able to achieve material superiority.[57][58] The CPC's most effective political reform was its land reform policy. This drew the massive number of landless and starving peasants in the countryside into the Communist cause.[59] This strategy enabled the CPC to access an almost unlimited supply of manpower for both combat and logistical purposes; despite suffering heavy casualties throughout many of the war's campaigns, manpower continued to grow. For example, during the Huaihai Campaign alone the CPC was able to mobilize 5,430,000 peasants to fight against the KMT forces.[60]
...
Using the pretext of "receiving the Japanese surrender", business interests within the KMT government occupied most of the banks, factories and commercial properties, which had previously been seized by the Imperial Japanese Army.[54] They also conscripted troops at an accelerated pace from the civilian population and hoarded supplies, preparing for a resumption of war with the Communists. These hasty and harsh preparations caused great hardship for the residents of cities such as Shanghai, where the unemployment rate rose dramatically to 37.5%.[54]
Hyperinflation meant those employed in the Kuomintang forces lost the purchasing power of their pay.[62]: 204 This resulted in corruption and the embezzlement of supplies which disappeared into the barter economy.[62]: 204 Ordinary Kuomintang soldiers were often malnourished and desertion was common.[62]: 204
The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. About 50,000 US soldiers were sent to guard strategic sites in Hebei and Shandong in Operation Beleaguer. The US equipped and trained KMT troops, and transported Japanese and Koreans back to help KMT forces to occupy liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas.[54] According to William Blum, American aid included substantial amounts of mostly surplus military supplies, and loans were made to the KMT.[63] Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.[54]
Social-economic relations in the Chinese countryside had been murderous. Peasants living on the margins of existence were exploited to the last penny (or whatever) by landlords and usurers. A lifetime of hardwork could count for nothing with a small run of bad luck and entire families would fall into destitution. Elites were merciless in getting their cuts. When the CCP took over an area, the tables were turned and the peasants often used the opportunity to exact violent retribution.
The People's Republic of China would show that (even with their occasional mistakes) socialism would organize China's resources better than the feudal and feudal-capitalist systems that had prevailed before them. During the Chinese Civil War of the late-1940's, they showed the superiority against the ossified, selfish leadership of the KMT. The PLA's motivated soldiers, backed by the masses of the peasantry prevailed against the bankrupt, corrupted KMT and their half-starved, demoralized troops.
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| Wealthier Chinese frantically trying to buy gold with their depreciating paper currency. Shanghai, 1948. |
What made me want to write a separate post about this book (I'll add this entry to my page about my readings for 2023 later) is the way that Melby disparages the Chinese liberals and intellectuals for their ineffectual activism in the struggle for China's future. Time and time again he writes admiringly of their personalities and their ideals, sympathizes with and laments their plight, while criticizing them for their unrealistic aims and their failure to organize. When they do pull off some inter-party coup or force some principles' inclusion into some constitutional document somewhere, Melby explains that it only amounted to all theatre and empty words.
It was the KMT with their single goal of national unification and the restoration of China's autonomy, and then the CCP with their goal of socialist revolution, and their mutual agreement to employ violence and dedicated zeal to their ideals who would prevail against these gentle intellectuals and Confucian bureaucrats.
Which isn't to say that Melby preferred either the KMT or the CCP. For the most part he feared and loathed both of them. Because Melby was himself a liberal intellectual. Here's Wikipedia:
In December 1945, he recorded his assessment of the two sides in his diary:[14]
He faulted U.S. policy in his diary in June 1948 as the communist victory neared: "All the power of the United States will not stem the tides of Asia, but all the wisdom of which we are capable might conceivably make those tides a little more friendly to us than they are now."[12]
Melby himself would be on the receiving end of McCarthyism. T.V. Soong used his financial resources and his political contacts built up over years of China helping the USA to fight the Japanese to get right-wing Republicans to unite around the shit-for-brains idea that China was lost because of communist sympathizers in the State Department. Melby's romantic relationship with Lillian Hellman (which cooled to a friendship over the years) became the reason for his own purge from the USA diplomatic corp for decades:
In the early 1950s, at the height of anti-communist fervor in the United States, the State Department investigated whether Melby posed a security risk. The investigation began in September 1951, a week after ex-communist Martin Berkeley told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Hellman had attended an organizational meeting of the Communist Party in 1937. Initially, the issues Melby was asked to address were minor.[27] Then in April 1952, the department stated its one formal charge against Melby: "that during the period 1945 to date, you have maintained an association with one, Lillian Hellman, reliably reported to be a member of the Communist Party." Based on unverified testimony from informants that she was a member of the Communist Party, along with her participation in many communist-front organizations and left-wing advocacy groups, Melby's suitability for government service was questioned, and when Melby appeared before the department's Loyalty Security Board, he was not allowed to contest Hellman's communist affiliation or learn the identity of those who informed against her, only his understanding of her politics and the nature of his relationship with her, including detailed discussion of their occasional renewal of their physical relationship. He never promised to avoid contact with Hellman, but allowed that he had no plans to renew their friendship.[28]
In the course of a series of appeals, Hellman testified before the Loyalty Security Board on his behalf. She offered to answer questions, but the board was not prepared to hear testimony about her politics, which it had already determined on the basis of an FBI investigation. She was only allowed to describe her relationship with Melby. She testified that she had many longstanding friendships with people of different political views and that political sympathy was not a part of those relationships. She described how her relationship with Melby changed over time and how their sexual relationship was briefly renewed in 1950 after a long hiatus: "The relationship obviously at this point was neither one thing nor the other: it was neither over nor was it not over."[29] In summary, she said that:[30]
After seven hearings, the State Department dismissed him on April 22, 1953. As was its practice, the loyalty board gave no reason for its decision.[31] The entire process went unnoticed by the press. Melby later credited his good relations with the press: "I think among newspapermen there was a kind of conspiracy to protect me."[32]
In December 1960, as the Kennedy Administration took shape, Melby tried to have his security clearance restored, encouraged by the appointment of Dean Rusk, who was familiar with his State Department work, as the new Secretary of State. His longtime friend Averell Harriman was becoming ambassador-at-large. Robert F. Kennedy blocked their efforts. Appeals to State Department officials responsible for administrative matters failed, as did the advocacy of Pennsylvania Senator Joseph S. Clark Jr. on Melby's behalf. HUAC maintained a list of persons it considered ineligible for government employment that overrode State Department views. Melby dropped these efforts in 1966, when he moved to Canada.[33]
Harriman urged Melby to press the issue once again in 1977 at the start of the Carter administration, and Richard Holbrooke lent his support. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie restored Melby's security clearance in December 1980 and hired him to work as a consultant on the Sino-Vietnamese Conflict for several months.[34]
It is ruthless ideologues who often hold power. People stupid enough, or fanatical enough to say anything, to believe anything, to fearlessly contradict themselves, to shamelessly debase themselves, who ofteh rise to power. And it is the sensitive, intellectual, artistic types, ... those who can see both sides of an argument, those who are willing to admit they are wrong and who are often afraid to act because they might be wrong, who are thrown aside.
And this is the fatal flaw in liberalism. Corrupt, right-wing autocracy loses China. Corrupt, right-wing autocracy loses Vietnam. Corrupt right-wing autocracies in the Philippines. Throughout Latin America. In Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan. Mobutu in Zaire (now the Congo). The Duvaliers in Haiti. The puppet government in Afghanistan that fell to the Taliban in 2021.
In the end, Melby was just as ineffectual as China's libeals. Liberals seem to believe that the best they can do is to ameliorate the worst barbarisms of capitalist exploiters and fascist psychopaths. They're like "How can we help ordinary US-Americans access healthcare without pissing-off the greedy monsters of the private healthcare sector?" The answer, of course, is that they can't. And thus we have "Obamacare."
They're like: "How can we improve conditions for peasants in developing countries without alienating their rapacious landlords, plantation owners, and other assorted scumbags? How can we do this while simultaneously suppressing the violent revolution that wants to eradicate the parasites we're allied with?" The answer is that they can't.
Moreso, many liberals become corrupted by their association with scumbag oligarchs. They come to enjoy the nice restaurants, the expense accounts, the dinner parties, the private planes, the revolving door between business and government, the nice clothes, ... all of it. And, like scumbag Tony Blair, or Barack Obama, or the Clintons, they become indistinguishable from the creatures they thought they could persuade to act better.
To mask their failure, liberals will hide behind the phrase: "It's complicated." But it really isn't. They can't solve problems because they don't want to. Sure, it's "complicated" to try to square a circle. But that's because it's impossible. It's a waste of time. It's a fake attempt at a solution.
In the 1940's, capitalism was on the ropes. It had obviously been ripping-off the majority of people in industry and agriculture. It's ideals were discredited in the Great Depression and by the mobilizing of resources by the state in WWII. The trade union movement was at the height of its power. Left-wing ideas prevailed throughout the culture. But the capitalist ideology fought back and, through the development of "public relations" or "propaganda" or brainwashing since the 1920's, this dog-shit ideology is in the ascendent. The fact that it is entirely discredited is of no real significance because the absence of an alternative has given us "zombie neo-liberalism."
Neoliberalism is dead…again. It died the first time in the aftermath of the Great Depression and Second World War, in the heady days of the Marsh Papers, Beveridge Report and New Deal, when it seemed that profit and high wages could coexist, that endless growth would benefit just about everybody. It stayed dead for several decades, during which democracy flourished, inequality declined, but came back in full vigour after the economic upheavals of the 1980s.
Neoliberalism was again pronounced dead after the Dotcom bubble burst around 2002 and even deader after the financial meltdown of 2008. Books announcing its demise can be purchased cheap in bookstore bargain bins.
And now, post-pandemic, in the midst of “build back better” commitments here, in the U.S. and Europe, neoliberalism is yet again being pronounced dead. Just how many lives does it have or, as some have begun to wonder, is it more like a zombie wreaking havoc long after its demise because we haven’t figured out how to take it out of its misery, our misery.
I guess that's what I wanted to say. I thought I'd be more profound. At the moment I'm tired and this is just an entry on my blog.
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