Chapter 2
Return to Prisoners of Liberation: Four Years in a Chinese Communist Prison
Chapter 2
Rick: As we chugged along on the bus back to Yenching, I too was storming inside. The people in the university would be really suspicious of us now that we had not been given exit permits, and I recoiled at the idea of having anything to do with them. What excuses could I give and how could I keep up the pretense any longer? Dell seemed to think we should try to go on with our studies as though nothing had happened, but I was in no mood to putter around translating texts on ancient Chinese philosophy. My only thought was to get back home and into uniform. All during the retreat of the Marines down to Wonsan and Hamhung I had hardly been able to leave the radio. My hatred for everything Chinese smoldered in me like a small volcano and, though it might mean a firing squad in the end, I was determined to find some means of retaliation.
Even before the end of 1948, when the Chinese Communists had entered Peking, I had formed certain opinions about them through extensive reading and talks with a number of well-informed people, including personnel in the State Department, who looked on them primarily as
nationalistic agrarian reformers. I could not agree with the interpretation advanced by the China lobby group in the United States that the Chinese Communists were puppets of Moscow. There was no evidence to show that they had received any significant material assistance from the Soviet Union since the failure of the first revolution in the 1920’s. Furthermore, it was clear to us that one of the dominant forces shaping Chinese society was an intense nationalism.
Ever since the anti-foreign Boxer uprising in 1900, any government in China which associated itself too closely with foreigners was bound to incur the enmity of the Chinese people. It was Chiang’s subservience to the United States which as much as anything else had turned the weight of public opinion against him, and whatever government replaced his regime would have to take this into consideration.
Moreover, though the leaders of the Chinese revolution called themselves Communists, there were factors in Chinese society which made me feel that this designation was not applicable, at least not in the Soviet sense. In the first place, the very nature of the Chinese revolution had come to differ considerably from that of the Russians. The latter had based their revolution primarily on winning over the support of a rather strong urban working
class. In China, on the other hand, since the working class was very small and rendered almost completely impotent by Chiang’s anti-labor repression, the Chinese Communists had had to confine their activity from the 1930’s on largely to the countryside. Their chief source of strength, therefore, lay in the peasantry, seventy percent of whom were either landless or possessed so little land that they were reduced to unspeakable poverty. It was the demand
of the peasants for land which had been the principal revolutionary force in China throughout its entire history. Mao Tse-tung and his group, by making it the focal point of their attack, were able to build up a great mass movement and eventually lead the revolution to a successful conclusion.
However, the peasant, as a small property owner, was by his very nature fundamentally opposed to communism per se and its philosophy of collectivism. Moreover, I had thought other aspects of Communist policy, such as general economic control, equality of the sexes, and the
elimination of superstition, were bound to come into conflict with Chinese traditional ways of thinking and therefore meet with considerable opposition on the part of the peasants.
The two revolutions also differed in that the Chinese Communists had made a special point of winning the support of the small but influential middle class, the businessmen and intellectuals. Due to China’s backwardness these people enjoyed almost a monopoly on the experience and technical know-how mandatory for the running of a modern state. Because of the Nationalists’ corruption, suppression of democratic rights, and subservience to foreign interests, this group had more and more come to support the Communists. However, since most of them had been trained in the West, they were inclined to be Western-oriented in their thinking.
For this reason, I, along with many people in the State Department and others familiar with China, felt that if the Communists were to retain any mass support at all in China they would have to confine themselves in the countryside primarily to simple agrarian reforms and in the cities to a Western-type democratic revolution. Otherwise, they would lose the support of both these elements and eventually go the way of the Nationalists.
This theory was further supported by the fact that the Communists themselves spoke in terms of creating what they called a “new democratic society” which would permit capitalism to exist for some time before attempting to move on to socialism. It seemed to me then that this preservation of capitalism would probably bring the Chinese Communists more and more into ideological conflict with the leaders of the Soviet Union and thus, as the demands of Russian imperialism began to be felt, an irrevocable split would follow. Moreover, since only our country was capable of providing the vast amount of economic and technical aid necessary for reconstructing China’s broken economy, not to mention its future industrialization, I felt that as soon as the bitter issues created by American support of the Nationalists were resolved it would be only natural for the Chinese Communists to incline toward friendly relations with the United States.
Having become absorbed with this line of reasoning, I was inclined to look on them rather favorably. This impression was heightened by my first actual contact with them. During the siege of Peking, I made two trips through the battle lines from Tsinghua into the city to give information to the American Consulate. As a Chinese student and I were making our way back through the lines to Tsinghua after my second trip, a battle suddenly broke out in full force over our heads. When artillery shells began landing all around us, we jumped off our bicycles and sought the shelter of the ruts in the road.
We were pinned down for some time, but when a short lull came in the firing I fetched my brief case, which contained among other things a few hundred silver dollars and a bundle of registered mail for the university, and suggested that we leave our bicycles behind and start wriggling our way up the road toward the Communist positions.
After what seemed ages we reached our goal. We were taken by a few soldiers to a small house nearby where we were offered a drink of water. The troops were all wearing enormous fur hats, which indicated their Manchurian origin, and seemed quite friendly when they asked us where we were going. The mere mention that I was a teacher at Tsinghua appeared to dispel any doubts they may have had about me but they were curious about my nationality.
Their friendly attitude did not change on hearing that I was an American. In fact, one of them, patting his Tommy gun, laughed good-naturedly, “American weapons are really terrific!”
“And that bandit Chiang Kai-shek makes an excellent supply sergeant,” joked another. “These all came through him.”
Their boyish faces beamed with delight as they had me look at the American stamp on their guns, which had been captured from the Nationalists. One of them noticed my brief case and wanted to know what it contained. I opened it for them to see. They looked at the money, which must have seemed a fortune to them, but touched nothing and quickly handed the brief case back to me.
As I was leaving I told them where we had abandoned our bicycles and asked them to tell the local people that we would give a reward to anyone returning them to us at Tsinghua after the battle was over. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than three of the soldiers, running like deer, took off under fire across the fields. In a matter of minutes, they were back again, half carrying, half rolling our bicycles with them. My bike was loaded with canned food and other supplies I was taking to Tsinghua, and they insisted that I check to make sure everything was intact. A three-pound can of corned beef hash must have dropped off on the way and they would have gone back to look for it if I had not put my foot down.
I felt I ought to repay them in some way but they wouldn’t accept even a cigarette, not to speak of money. Their eyes flashed with pride as one said, “We are the People’s Liberation Army. It is our duty to serve the people. If we were to accept anything, that would reflect on the revolution.”
This same incorruptibility called forth our anger a few weeks later, when we found ourselves unable to bribe or wheedle our way past the guard when returning to Tsinghua after our trip into the city following the end of the siege. Yet at the same time we could not help but respect their honesty and enthusiasm for the revolution. Feeling as I did, I could see no conflict between this admiration for the Communists’ good qualities and my position as an intelligence officer desirous of maintaining American influence in China.
In the first few months of 1949 after the Communists took over Peking there were numerous signs which led me to believe that the rapprochement I had envisaged might well be possible. Acheson’s initial attitude of “wait until the dust settles” gave some hope that the State Department was ready to adopt a rather flexible stand.
Through my contacts at Tsinghua, I learned that a number of well-known liberals, basically pro-American in their outlook, were to be given high positions in the new government when it was formed. In talks with some of these men I was assured that China would not only want American recognition but also would need vast amounts of American material to help in its economic reconstruction. These assurances were given credence by energetic efforts on the part of the new authorities right after they took control of Peking and Tientsin to start trade moving again.
During 1949 the United States, in spite of difficulties resulting from an absence of diplomatic relations and a Nationalist blockade, continued to monopolize about 70 per cent of China’s trade. This situation was brought to an end only with the institution of the embargo policy and freezing of Chinese assets by the United States after the entry of the Chinese into the Korean war in late 1950.
Moreover, American institutions in Peking such as Yenching University and Peking Union Medical College were allowed to continue their operations as before.
Mao Tse-tung’s speech on a democratic dictatorship delivered on July 1, 1949, dealt a crushing blow to my theories. Although I was incapable then of fully comprehending the significance of Mao’s speech as a basic program for the development of new China, the one thing which did strike home to me was his statement that in its foreign affairs China would incline toward the Soviet Union. Caught up as I had been in the cold war hysteria of the
Truman era, by the time we went to China in 1948 I had already started thinking in terms of a Third World War and categorically putting anyone who sided with the Soviet Union in the position of the enemy.
This reaction to Mao’s speech revealed the inconsistency in my former outlook which had denied any conflict between my admiration for the achievements of the Chinese Communists and my desire for the return of American influence there.
Now that they were no longer going to follow the line laid down by the United States, those very achievements which I had formerly admired seemed only to make them a more dangerous enemy. From then on they could do nothing right in my eyes. What I had felt formerly to be an estimable plan to educate China’s illiterate 85 percent of the population I could now look upon only as a diabolical plot to indoctrinate these masses even further in anti-American, pro-Soviet ideologies. The lack of corruption among the Communists was no longer a laudable thing but an insidious means of increasing their control over the country. The attempts of the People’s Government to improve living standards became a means to trick the people into following blindly the dictates of their new rulers.
In such a frame of mind I could readily concur with the feeling expressed by everyone around the Consulate in Peking that the time for fencing with the Communists was over and now it was a question of open political warfare.
In the months following I joined in the battle which was centered around China’s Western-oriented, liberal intellectuals. Over the years these liberals, under Chiang Kai-shek’s tyrannic regime, had gravitated toward close cooperation with the Communists. After the Democratic League—the largest of their liberal organizations— was outlawed by Chiang in the autumn of 1948 they became completely allied with the Communists in a united front to overthrow Chiang’s Nationalists. With liberation they were naturally included in the plans for a coalition government sponsored by the Communists. Still, there were many basic contradictions between these people with their concepts of Western bourgeois democracy and the Marxian Communists. It was also quite obvious that, though they were to be given some voice in the new government, the leadership of the new state would be in the hands of the Communist Party.
The State Department, hoping these contradictions would sharpen with the actual assumption of political power, launched its big campaign in the summer of 1949 to separate these liberal intellectuals from the Communists and, by uniting them with so-called reform elements among the Nationalists on Formosa, to patch together a “third force.” At that time these “reform” elements within the Nationalist Party were led by such persons as K. C. Wu, former Mayor of Shanghai, and the American-trained general, Sun Li-jen. Both of these men have been ousted by Chiang Kai-shek since then.
In conjunction with this campaign to win over the liberal intellectuals, American intelligence personnel in China expended a great deal of effort in attempting to discover any possible dissident elements within the Communist Party itself who might fit in with this “third force.” I was asked especially to note in my reading and conversations with Chinese any references to such people as Chen Shao-yii (Wang Ming), a party leader of the 1930’s who had opposed the line followed by Mao Tse-tung.
In July, 1949, the director of the U.S. Information Service in Peking approached me. After a violent tirade against Mao Tse-tung’s speech, he asked me to arrange a secret meeting for him with one of the leaders of the Democratic League, who was a professor at Tsinghua. I was a little
uneasy about exposing myself by such open anti-Communist activity but I did visit the professor and he finally agreed to a meeting in an out-of-the-way place for lunch. However, the professor was more sensible than I had been, for the USIS director told me later that the man had not appeared himself, sending a substitute instead.
The State Department also increased its propaganda efforts, especially in the direction of alleged Soviet imperialism in Manchuria. To a certain extent this propaganda proved successful, especially after the announcement of the trade agreement between the North East Administrative Area (Manchuria) and the Soviet Union later in the summer of 1949. However, when I suggested to several professors at Tsinghua that, in the face of a general food shortage throughout China, exporting of grain hardly seemed to China’s advantage one of them quickly replied, “It is true we could probably use that grain at home, but at this time we need machinery and railway equipment even more to get the rest of our economy running again. These things don’t drop from heaven, you know, and your government certainly shows no inclination to help us.” In August the State Department, in its White Paper on American relations with China, openly called for “the democratic individualism of China” to reassert itself and “throw off the foreign yoke” and expressed the determination of the United States government to “encourage all developments in China which would now and in the future work toward this end.” (See State Department White Paper, United States Relations with China, p. xvi.) Thus, Washington clearly announced its intentions of continuing to interfere in China’s internal affairs by fostering the subversion of any government the Communists and their allies set up.
In Peking our immediate task was to sound out the reactions of our hoped-for allies. Since at Tsinghua I was in the very midst of the liberal intellectuals, my activity became even more important. During the summer of 1949, after our first year’s teaching in the university, Dell and I had thought of moving to a more comfortable and convenient place in the city but we were persuaded to give up the idea because it would be difficult for the Consulate to get information about what was going on at Tsinghua unless we were there.
I began visiting various professors and inviting them to dinner, as well as pumping my foreign friends and informants among the students. It soon became evident that the White Paper had been a colossal mistake. The Chinese press was able to use it as the basis for an extensive countercampaign, and petitions against it were circulated throughout the universities. Originally many of the intellectuals had remained sitting on the fence and had refused to commit themselves openly concerning the new regime, but now that the State Department had put them on the spot they were forced to take a stand. They were furious at being placed in the limelight and resentful at being treated as pawns in what they considered a sordid political game.
Moreover, the numerous statements which appeared in the American press that we had “lost” China brought forth many bitter comments.
One of my professors in the history department at Tsinghua, who had spent many years teaching in the United States, remarked sarcastically when I mentioned the subject, “What right have those people to assume that China was theirs to lose? It’s time some of your people realized that this country belongs to us Chinese and is not the property of some group sitting in Washington or London.”
I too felt a frustrated annoyance with the White Paper and the cries of “having lost China,” not because I disagreed with them per se but because they served only to alienate the very people we were trying to win over. This same feeling of frustration increased all through the following year as every major move made by Washington with regard to China seemed to undermine what little good will we had left there. The American policy of nonrecognition, instead of detracting from the prestige of the People’s Government, succeeded only in uniting the Chinese people and increased their suspicions concerning the motives of the United States.
President Truman on January 5, 1950, might have done a great deal toward restoring some respect for the United States by the Chinese people when he declared:
The United States has no predatory designs on Formosa or any other Chinese territory. The United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges or to establish military bases on Formosa at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilizing its armed forces to interfere in the present situation. The United States government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China….
Unfortunately, there were two things which caused the Chinese to be very suspicious. Time magazine very obligingly pointed out that the words “at this time” were deliberately added to provide an opening for a change in this policy whenever it might become convenient, making the whole Truman statement sound like nothing more than a propaganda move to counteract the effect of negotiations then going on between Mao Tse-tung and the Soviet government in Moscow. But even more devastating was the fact that only five days later, on the 10th, the Army announced in Philadelphia it was loading over three hundred tanks, armored cars, and half-tracks on board a Turkish freighter for shipment to the Nationalist forces on Formosa.
What little hope remained for an improvement in Sino-American relations was completely snuffed out by events which took place shortly after this.
Early one morning in mid-January, 1950, the Peking authorities tacked a notice on the gates of the American and other Western Consulates stating that the property which had been seized by the foreign powers for stationing of troops and building of barracks under the Boxer Protocol of 1901 was to be returned to China.
After some deliberation, the other foreign consulates—the British, French, and Dutch— gracefully handed over the property. (The Russians had voluntarily handed theirs over during Mao Tse-tung’s trip to Moscow.) Only Washington chose to make an issue of the matter. At home there was deliberately created the false impression that the Chinese were taking over the Consulate itself instead of merely the barracks land. At the same time the State Department sought to exert pressure on the Chinese by threatening to withdraw all diplomatic personnel from China.
The Chinese remained unmoved by any threats, however, and after a few days the Consulate evacuated the barracks. Shortly afterward, all American diplomatic personnel received orders to close up their offices and leave.
For those of us around the Consulate in Peking this decision seemed like the worst case of cutting off our nose to spite our face. The United States was not only leaving itself without any trained observers in China but, more important, its position was completely indefensible in the eyes of even heretofore friendly Chinese. The Boxer Protocol has always been looked on by the people of China as the greatest insult in their history. That we should take such an extreme step as withdrawing our diplomatic personnel in an attempt to preserve the provisions of this treaty was inconceivable from the point of view of practical international politics.
Our feeling of pessimism was further increased during those weeks before the Consulate’s withdrawal in April by the final realization that our hopes of seeing a general economic collapse which would force the Chinese to seek American aid had failed to materialize. This was made especially clear to us by the stabilization of prices and the beginning of an over-all economic recovery in March and April, 1950.
The gulf which had been created between us and our Chinese acquaintances by the deterioration of Sino-American relations was further deepened by a growing divergence of views on the ideological level.
At the time of liberation, Marxism was little understood by the ordinary Western-trained Chinese intellectuals. Even afterward, in spite of their great interest in the new ideas and regular attendance at the university-wide lectures and departmental discussion meetings, the professors at Tsinghua remained rather superficial and academic in their understanding of Marxism. They continued to look upon the West as their main source of intellectual and spiritual inspiration. Many of them were quite openly contemptuous toward the new philosophy. After all, having mastered the best that the West had to offer, what could they learn from a bunch of uncouth Communists who had none of the social graces and hardly shoes to put on their feet?
However, by the late spring of 1950 perceptible changes in outlook were taking place which made very conspicuous a big difference between us and the Chinese, both the old
die-hards and those who were absorbing the new. The contrast was brought out very clearly one evening when we invited two old faculty friends and their wives to dinner.
Mr. and Mrs. Wu arrived first and sat talking with us about their experiences in the United States, where Mr. Wu had spent several years teaching at Harvard during the war. I was just about to ask him some questions about my research when the door was thrown open and in walked Mr. Jao, with his usual air of polished eagerness. Mrs. Jao came trailing along behind him.
As we took their coats, we heard Wu say to him mildly, “I didn’t see you at the faculty conference today.”
Jao waved his hand with an air of brushing aside a trivial matter. “I was busy in the library all afternoon. I think I’ve found the earliest reference to the sweet potato in China. It first appeared in Fukien; you know . . .”
For the next few minutes, the sweet potato dominated the conversation, until Jao decided to launch off on one of his other great discoveries. In an effort to bring the conversation up to within the last century, Dell mentioned that she had been studying some contemporary poetry and asked Jao if he had read any of it.
With a snort, Jao replied, “Did you say ‘contemporary’? Hmmm, I think ‘temporary’ would be more appropriate. Fifty years from now, no one will ever hear of it.” His cultivated Oxford accent emphasized even more strongly his contempt for China’s new poets.
We all laughed and then Wu said in his soft-spoken voice, “Some of it’s not so bad, and they are trying to write something the people can understand.”
“Bah, the people don’t understand poetry anyway!”
The announcement of dinner cut short any reply Wu was about to make and the conversation moved on to other channels.
After dinner I asked Jao if he were attending any of the political discussion groups. “Discussion!” he exclaimed. “That’s no discussion; it’s a talkathon. What they call logic is sheer nonsense. Why, it would make Aristotle turn over in his grave. That goes for all this Marxist thought. There’s absolutely nothing in it. Puerile, that’s what it is, puerile.”
As the laughter subsided, Wu smiled slowly and said, “I don’t know. I’ve come to think that there is something in it. “I was surprised to hear Wu say this, for, with his conservative, scholarly manner, he seemed the last person in the world to be inclined toward communism. I asked him what he meant.
“Well,” he replied, “I have come to feel that the development of human society has not been as haphazard, unpredictable, and unintelligible as a superficial glance at history would make it appear. The Marxists claim that there are certain basic laws which govern this development and that by understanding them mankind may begin to shape its destiny. The history of the revolutionary movements in the Soviet Union and China during the past
thirty-odd years would certainly seem to bear them out. In any case, of one thing I am certain— it becomes possible for the great mass of ordinary people to live a decent life only when every man takes an interest in what is going on around him and assumes an active part in political affairs.”
“But one doesn’t have to live in a Communist society to take an active part in the country’s affairs,” I interposed quickly.
“I’m not too certain about that,” he replied. “The United States is supposed to be the most advanced type of what is known as bourgeois democracy, and yet you know what it is like there. For the average person political activity is limited to casting a vote every two or four years,
and even the man he votes for is limited to one of two parties and is picked in your notorious smoke-filled rooms by professional politicians and people with enough money to have influence. What you actually have is very little democracy for the masses of the people themselves.”
“Well,” I said, “at least we have two parties and we can choose between the lesser of two evils.”
“Yes,” he replied, “you can pick either Truman or Dewey, but what’s the difference? Even their programs are the same. Besides, whether it is one party or a dozen, the question is whether that party expresses the desires of the vast majority of the people. You are forgetting that though the Communists constitute the leading party in China our government is made up of a coalition of parties often representing very different points of view. But what is more important is that in our country today, except for landlords and those who were highly connected with the Nationalists, everyone is encouraged to take an active role in political life whether he has any connections with some party or not.”
By this time, I was beginning to feel a little warm. “Do you think these people all agree with the policy of simply following blindly after the Soviet Union?”
“I wouldn’t say we were blindly following the Soviet Union or anyone else,” broke in Mrs. Wu. “It is true that we are trying to learn from the Soviet Union because they have had more experience in developing a backward country like ours, but China is standing on its own feet now, which is something it never could do before.”
“I simply don’t understand what there is to be learned from those barbarians,” grumbled Jao.
“The point is,” said Wu, “we Chinese always used to look up to the United States as a model on which to pattern our country, but many of us have come to see now that that is nothing but an idle dream. The period since the Japanese war has shown us all too clearly that we can never expect any real help from the United States in building up an independent China. The American policy since liberation has proved one thing— though the American people may wholeheartedly sympathize with us, unless the entire China lobby in Washington can maintain their special privileges here they’ll do everything they can to destroy us.”
I thought it was time to change the subject, so I asked Jao whether he was going to accept the chair which Oxford had been offering him for the past two years.
Jao shook his head slowly and said, “No, I don’t think so. I don’t always agree with Wu, but this is my country. There’s a lot going on and I’d rather like to stick around and do my bit.”
After Wu and Jao left I had an uncomfortable feeling that, though they were progressing at different rates of speed, they were moving in the same direction while Dell and I were going the opposite way.
Those last days of June, 1950, marked the beginning of the final divergence in our paths, and at the same time the new and dangerous turn in Sino-American relations made our position in China even more difficult. The barrage of anti-American propaganda and the ridicule engendered by the defeats of the American “paper tiger” in Korea made it almost impossible for me to curb my temper and hold my tongue. I found my blood running hot and constantly exposed myself in arguments with Chinese acquaintances.
My frustration was eased temporarily in the days following the Inchon landing when American forces moved rapidly north, and I had begun to feel almost jubilant. At least we could no longer be called a “paper tiger.” However, even in that moment of seeming triumph our personal prestige had been dealt another devastating blow. For the Chinese government had placed Dell and me in a dangerous and embarrassing position by refusing to allow us to return home. Well, if that was the way they wanted it . . . With my contacts at Yenching and Tsinghua I probably could still collect information which might be of value to our side. It was not much, but it might help some to even the score.