A compelling account of his bid to save China from civil war and communism
The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947. By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan.W.W. Norton & Company; 496 pages; $28.95.
GEORGE MARSHALL’S name is immortal, for ever attached to the visionary plan for rebuilding Europe that he oversaw as America’s secretary of state in 1947-49. By then, as chief of staff of the army, he had already been, in Winston Churchill’s estimation, the true “organiser of victory” in the second world war. A new book recounts what he did between winning the war and securing the peace: he spent a year in China, trying to save it.
He failed, leaving behind a bloody civil war followed by communist dictatorship. “The China Mission”, an account of the debacle by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, a former diplomat, is both a compelling portrait of a remarkable soldier and statesman, and an instructive lesson in the limits of American power, even at its zenith.
As Allied victory curdled into cold war, this was a pivotal if little-known episode. The question of “Who lost China?” fed McCarthyite conspiracy theories, which smeared even towering war heroes like Marshall. Yet, as Mr Kurtz-Phelan makes clear, his embassy started in late 1945 in a mood of great optimism, founded largely on veneration of the man himself. It is 200 pages into the story before any of its characters voice anything other than awe for its hero. Harry Truman called him the “greatest military man” ever.
Even his main Chinese interlocutors respected him. They were Chiang Kai-shek, China’s prickly and reserved leader (that page-200 critic) and Zhou Enlai, the urbane but two-faced Communist representative. The Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists had formed a fractious front against the Japanese occupation. At first, Marshall’s efforts to maintain that unity and prepare for elections and multiparty democracy went well. He even secured Zhou’s agreement to aborted plans for an “elementary school” for Communist soldiers, to train them for a merger with American-supplied Nationalist forces. As much as losing the country to the Communists, America may have wasted the chance offered by this incipient detente for a different relationship with “Red China”.
The book hints at reasons for the grim outcome. One is that, for once, Marshall was not up to the job. He made blunders. In May 1946 he lent Chiang his own aircraft to fly from Nanjing to north-eastern China for four days, to stop Nationalist troops fighting the Communists. Chiang stayed 11 days, leading the offensive himself. Communist propaganda saw proof of America’s duplicity and imperialism.
But Marshall’s mission, probably impossible anyway, also exhibited three habitual flaws of American foreign policy. First, he was not immune to “the great American faith in the curative power of his country’s form of government and persuasive power of his country’s example”. In China, this meant an inability to grasp its sheer complexity and the aims of the two big parties. Second—and as later wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have attested—America has been slow to accept “the near-impossibility of resolving somebody else’s civil war”.
The third lesson concerns the difficulty of achieving consensus in America itself. Marshall had to contend with a “very large group…opposed to practically anything outside of the United States”. The idealistic ambition behind his mission had triumphed over the isolationists. Today the loss of that idealism seems as poignant as Marshall’s failure.