How China lost its freedom and became an enemy

During World War II, the government of China was anti-Communist, and was an ally of the U.S. in fighting the Japanese. A few years after the war, the government was defeated by the Communists, and became an enemy of the USA. How did this happen?
In his book “China 1945”, Richard Bernstein describes the American relationship with the Chinese nationalists and with the Chinese Communists. Several U.S. China experts visited the Chinese Communists in their stronghold in the north, and many were duped by the Communist protestations that they (the Communists) loved democracy. Stalin (the leader of Communist Russia) told an American emissary that the Chinese Communists were really “radishes”, red on the outside but not on the inside. Both Russia and the Chinese Communists had a motive to lull the USA into a false sense of security about the Communists, until victory was achieved.
The American president, Franklin Roosevelt (or FDR), was naive about Stalin, a man who ended up responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians. FDR told Churchill “I think that if I give him (Stalin) everything I can and ask him for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
The leader of the anti-Communist majority of China’s land mass was Chiang Kai-shek. The U.S. over his strong objections was maintaining cordial relations with Mao (the Communist leader) and Mao’s forces in Yenan.

While Chiang’s troops were closing in on Japan’s forces in Burma and Yunnan, American representatives were talking by candlelight to Mao and his lieutenants about the struggle with Japan. There was animated discussion of intelligence sharing, of American arms and training for Communist forces, of Communist help to American paratroopers in the north and to a Normandy-styles landing of American troops on China’s coast. Most of all there were solemn vows to avoid civil war in the future, and to work together to promote a united and democratic China.

If Japan had not attacked China prior to WW-II, China would probably not have fallen to the Communists. Chiang’s China put up a fight against Japan for 8 years. This was unlike other countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, which fell quickly to the Japanese, or European countries like France that fell quickly to the German armies. China resisted Japan alone in the 4 years before Pearl Harbor, during which the U.S. continued to supply Japan with oil and iron. Chiang had to contend with Japan, but he also had to divert forces to face the Communists.
By the fall of 1944, Chiang’s army had taken over a million casualties and had for seven years tied down a million of Japan’s best troops, most of whom would have been deployed against the Americans if China had surrendered.
At one point Chiang’s forces had almost defeated Mao’s forces, but amazingly, by 1945 the bedraggled remnants of the Communist armies had grown into a large armed force. Mao had built his refuge in the Northwest into a de facto independent state with some 90 million people within it.

Chiang’s greatest fear was that as soon as the war was over, the Chinese Communists would combine with the Soviet Communists in a concerted effort to overthrow him. This is why he kept four hundred thousand of his best troops on a long front in the north blockading the Communists, to the puzzlement and fury of FDR and many other Americans.

By the fall of 1944, China was exhausted, its armies decimated, its people demoralized, disoriented and desperate, its economy in ruins, and its government, led still by Chiang Kai-shek, discredited by the depredations it had been powerless to prevent. Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians had died, many millions more were displaced, reduced to penury and desperation. Numerous cities were literally smoldering ruins.

Bernstein also says that many of Chiang’s troops were starving.
Another problem was that Chiang was a dictator, and Chinese who believed in democracy were sometimes fooled in thinking that the Communists were a better alternative.

Communist propaganda referred in distressed terms to secret police intimidations, the imprisonment of dissidents, the suppression of student protests and the harassment of journalists, but Mao’s future actions as the godlike leader of China were to show very little concern for these things, or for civil liberties in general. Mao’s ambition wasn’t for China to be democratic, it was to be China’s Stalin, to seize total power, which he already had done within the Communist party.

Chiang Kai-shek did start implementing real Democratic reforms, though some of his allies undermined them. Most likely, if the Communists had not won power, China would have evolved into a democracy.
The Americans helped Chiang, but not to the utmost. For instance, Chiang asked the United States to transport two more Chinese armies to the Manchurian battlefield, but the American on the scene, General George Marshall, refused, explaining to US president Truman that the Americans had already transported 228,000 government troops and that to move more “would be tantamount to supporting… a civil war.”
Apart from Americans who strove for a unity government between Communists and Nationalists, there were Americans who argued that the U.S. should not support the nationalists at all, because the nationalists were bound to lose.
There were Americans who thought the Chinese Communists were idealistic agrarian reformers, and there were Americans who saw the situation realistically, which was that the Chinese Communists were true believers in their ideology. Mao venerated Stalin, Lenin, and Marx.
At the end of the war, when the atom bomb was dropped, and also after the German surrender, Stalin sent over a million Russian soldiers into Manchuria and drove the Japanese out. Occupying this territory helped him in turn aid the Chinese Communist forces in North China. In 1949, the Communists won all of China.
It is interesting that the Russian Communists themselves would probably not have come to power without the destruction within Russia caused by the German armies in World War I, and that in turn the Chinese Communists would probably not have come into power without the destruction caused by the Japanese armies in eight years that ended only when World War II ended.
Bernstein does not think that the U.S. ultimately could have saved the nationalists, at least without a huge military commitment that the American public would not have been willing to make.
Still, it is interesting how the Americans (such as President Truman) thought they could take two groups with totally incompatible goals (the Communists and the nationalists) and make them share power. This was a delusional belief.