Assignment: China - The Chinese Civil War

you chyna 1945 with the surrender of Japan world war ii came to an end but the civil war between john kai-shek's Chinese nationalists and Mao Zedong's communists a struggle dating back to the 1920s that had only been suspended during the battle against the Japanese was about to resume see more topping had been entranced with China since high school he was 25 and just out of the US Army when he met the Asian editor of the wire agency I NS the international news service in the Philippines and he offered me a job as a as a stringer there's a part-time correspondent and peeking I got on an aeroplane and my title at that point was a chief correspondent for North China and Manchuria my salary with $50 a month seeking both to prop up jonn's nationalists and avoid all-out civil war US president Harry Truman sent America's most distinguished General George Marshall to mediate John Roderick had worked for The Associated Press in the US before the war drafted in 1942 he was sent to China as soon as he left the military he rejoined the AP in Chongqing John's wartime capital there he got to know the Communists key envoy in the negotiations jo-ann lie when you're with them in chunk a as I was many times later at dinner or otherwise he always concentrated on you you may take one quick glance around the room the restaurant you might be in then he just concentrated on you made you feel important Henry Lee Berman was appointed the New York Times China correspondent in 1945 he was equally impressed with Joanne lie but at a conference of American China hands nearly 40 years later concluded Joe's charm was just a show to win over Western reporters Joe ally is one of the greatest people I've ever in terms of his his charm but his mental ability is scaled and one of the most important thing of all I think is the fact he was one of the world's greatest backers 25 year-old Roy Rowan had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent but leaving the army he couldn't find a reporting job so strong was the lure of China however that Rowan took a position with the UN's relief and rehabilitation administration or Unruh in Shanghai a city like no other it was just a while you know sort of a cacophony of various noises and sounds and lights and neon I mean I was overwhelmed landing there would with Audra with the United Nations relief and rehabilitation administration stuck in this little hotel called the Great Eastern on Nanking Road nicknamed the greased turn as we called it and it was really a whorehouse that they Rowan's job was to escort UN relief convoys often putting him right in the middle of the conflict I read trucks and even the railroad trains full of supplies were being were being attacked all the time by both nationalists and comments that the nationalist fraternity it was communist in the Communist Party it was nationalist but our trucks were constantly being commandeered neither Mal's communists nor jeong's nationalists were serious about a political compromise Phil Potter covered the Marshall mission for the Baltimore Sun these two parties had total mistrust of each other and there was no way possible in which they could be brought together by General Marshall or anybody else Chiang kai-shek was not going to give the Chinese Communists any part in the government that's why I wrote the story he thought he could win by military means but as Marshall continued his fruitless efforts at mediation the Communists allowed American reporters access to yen on their headquarters in the remote northwest Joe and Lai helped get permission for john roderick to go joe and i was instrumental in this so a month after i'd become a foreign correspondent I had this plum assignment which was to go to Yale on and meet the Chinese calmness between late 1945 in early 1947 John Rodrick spent seven months in Yunnan in almost daily contact with Mao and other communist leaders I saw malpractice a commit in the small downtown area you went for dinners or Lance's or things that I thought he was a type of person there was an inner strength in him stubbornness a kind of a superior intelligence about him during the conversation he'd talked about many things about the Marshall mission about what the future of China and things like that and so and so on and now signal 2 rodrick a desire for good relations with the United States later he asked me with somebody like Montgomery Ward our Sears be willing to come to China to start a meal all the business because he said China was so big and the communication so bad there should be one of the wonderful thing when he interviewed Mao Zedong Mao Zedong was was eager to come to an understanding with with the United States it was able to make an arrangement whereby his dispatches were were transmitted on the communist radio and picked up by the AP monitor in San Francisco there was so much anti-communist feeling in the United States and and that this this interview did not got the attention that it deserved also in yen on at that point was Sydney rittenberg a young American trained in Chinese by the US Army working like Roy Rowan for the UN relief agency but the left-wing rittenberg supported the Communists and was often asked to translate for Mao and other top officials they were very open to Americans that point they were open to conversations I think the main thing was the point that they were making at the time to all and sundry was the legitimacy of their regime they had at the time they had areas around 100 80 million population in China scattered areas in mainly in North China but the Nationalists still controlled the cities where most American reporters were based Rutherford poets spent time in Shanghai for United Press International we all lived in Broadway mansions a big apartment house complex and we hook went to our separate bureaus and we had telephone service of sorts too short to Tokyo but primarily I filed Tokyo by telegraph not all their time was taken up with the big story there was a Reynolds packet of the United Press at one point he he did a story which got me a lot of queries like other correspondents about the discovery of human headed spider when this story about the human headed spider appeared I got a cable from the international news service saying okay but don't file unless you can find the spider with two human heads after six months in Beijing the international news service transferred topping to the nationalist capital Nanjing where he soon took a better-paying job with the AP Nanjing was where he met Audrey running a student at Nanjing University and the daughter of a Canadian diplomat I went to school in a rickshaw from the Canadian embassy to the Nanking University and every morning you'd see corpses lying on the roads and winter they froze to death and some of them had mats over them and said but people didn't want to claim them because they couldn't afford so and they were beggars all over the streets the homeless and starving filling the streets hyperinflation rampant corruption all undercut Jean kai-shek support in the countryside and in the cities and I was in Shanghai covering Shanghai what was happening there reporting on the on the poverty in the and the contrast of life and so on how we lived in the in the Broadway mansions a very luxurious hotel and blow us in the Sam pans with the poor of China you know drinking the water from the muddy canals and living their lives out in extreme poverty fed up with corruption in the relief effort Roy row and quit his job and was having a drink at Shanghai's famous peace hotel before returning to the US I was standing at the bar and sort of you know didn't know what the hell I was going to do I didn't have a lot of money and I was going to home and have to look for a job and I was standing next to this gentleman bill gray it turned out and we got talking grey was the time-life bureau chief in China he asked Rowan to write a piece about what he'd seen in the countryside a month later Rowan was the Life magazine China correspondent the reason they were so much of a hurry for me to get back was what things were pretty active but to John Purcell was then the life correspondent and he evidently had refused pretty much to go into the combat areas Rowan had no such qualms he teamed up with photographer Jack burns from his UN days Rowan had connections with the American pilots flying for John's Civil Air Transport or c80 many of them were veterans of general Claire Chennault famous flying Tiger squadron during world war ii when i went back as a correspondent the first thing i did was to go out the little airport with a cat with a shot of air transport headquarters was and see some of my old pilot buddies and and realize because it couldn't make it you couldn't telephone to taiwan or sue joe or even beijing it could telephone maybe today if you were lucky but the only way you could find out what was going on was to fly around with these guys and just hopscotch around the country and with no particular destination in mind other than there's somewhere where it was where was a war going on life and time were the two leading American news magazines both had been founded and were run by Henry Luce born in China of missionary parents deeply conservative and a committed supporter of John kai-shek and the Nationalists in 1945 Luce had fired times star war time China correspondent Theodore White for critical coverage of the Nationalists White had collaborated with fellow time correspondent Anna Lee Jacobi on a book called Thunder out of China warning that the unpopular and corrupt Grohmann dong was in danger of losing to the Communists in the u.s. their message fell on deaf ears it was impossible to convince people look that the Communists were going to win the war there wasn't any feeling in this country that there was anything wrong with the Kuomintang government but they weren't honest Christian Democrats that they weren't beloved by their people and would win a well-deserved triumph with no trouble at all Jacobi recalled an episode in which an interview she did with John kai-shek was completely rewritten by times variant ly anti-communist foreign editor Whittaker Chambers I had an interview with John kai-shek once the next week came Time magazine with several pages of an interview with full of questions I did not ask and with answers which john kai-shek did not give massively anti-communist diatribe anti-communist stories which were not true I would never have asked those questions and Jung Kai shek in spite of his hatred of Communists would never have given those answers Whittaker Chambers had sat in New York and made up dialogue to put in the mouth of the head of one of our allies Roy Rowan and Jack Byrnes tried to ignore Luce as much as they could we were well aware of what Bruce's position on China Jack and I were well aware of it however we didn't think about it much because one we were interested in seeing action indeed it was the thrill of covering combat as much as being in China that drew Roe into the country you get a high out of this I mean it's like alcohol or where you're you're you build up to a level of excitement and then winter when it's no longer there when you you feel it you feel a big letdown but they couldn't avoid losses influence a report on a battle south of Shanghai where burns photographed nationalist troops who decapitated the Communist commander and mounted his severed head on a wall was never published nor was this feature on refugees with nowhere else to go forced to seek shelter in a mortuary the flaws of the Nationalists and frustration not always getting reports on the issue published shape the way many American correspondents came to view the Communists there was a great deal of admiration among correspondents for the Communists and we had had such close acquaintance with the nationalist officials nationalist forces and we'd seen that the extent to which they were infected with with corruption the general feeling at that point was that we were looking at the Chinese communist forces essentially as as reformers anybody that was well informed in Nanking at the time realized that the Communist victory was inevitable they were going to win no matter I mean there we were the diplomats and the nationalists living like Maharaja's great parties every night people were starving in the streets I'm driving home one night from a party with the nationalist officer in one of these great black car and I people on the streets were eating grass and I said oh this is such a terrible situation you know and I can't stand it and it must be worse for you as a Chinese and he said we don't consider them people and I thought well you know no wonder there's a revolution in retrospect I think that a lot of the a lot of the criticism of the woman died but based on the fact that a lot a lot of people were living at home and died areas and could see what what was going on what was happening and communist areas we know anything about indeed with the collapse of the Marshall mission the civil war escalating in the u.s. clearly on John kai-shek side mouthes forces were no longer so welcoming to American reporters and see more topping discovered when he tried to cross into communist territory at a roadblock we encountered communist guerrillas and that was the closest call I had a one of them was pointing a machine gun the tommy gun at me and kept yelling at me who are you and I could see his fingers on the trigger of the the machine gun and so they took me as a prisoner meanwhile with the help of Henry Luce Roy Rowan got an interview with John kai-shek shocka shocka did not grant interviews to the press but because of loose he agreed to see us in Virginia madam the bottom served as the interpreter he tried to convince us that he had things well at hand they had big wall maps and pointers and you know doing the old dog and pony show for us about where the Nationalists were made sure where the Communists but however they were going to had a very very good defense set up and so forth Manchuria or northeast China was the country's industrial heartland and a key agricultural base the Communists and nationalists had been fighting over it for months having heard John kai-shek's confident boasts Rowan and Byrnes set out on a China air transport or cat plane for the Manchurian city of Mukden today's Shenyang to see the situation for themselves so we went right from that reading wood with chalk I shake up one of one of those cat plays went up there and then found us didn't we just as soon as we landed we could see everybody was trying to get the hell out of town to evacuate anybody with anybody troop trains were going by nationalist soldiers hang on the outside all over the engine moving south the Communists were at the city gates in downtown Mukden at the US consulate they found American diplomat Angus Ward a larger-than-life figure who had been ordered by Washington to stay on and establish contact with the triumphant communist forces the epitome of an international spy foot several languages Chinese Russian very imposing he took pictures of him talk to him I guess for an hour and he finally you can hear deeply hear gunfire he finally said you better get your asses out the airport and luckily for us a cat had can't always kept one played at all these airports the weather where there was fight anyway on and to get their last guys out their own guys Rowan and Byrnes got the last flight from muck dens chaotic Airport they realized they had an exclusive no one else knew the city had fallen it was a story even Henry loses Life magazine couldn't ignore Rowan and Byrnes got a five page spread but US diplomat Angus Ward was imprisoned in his consulate by the victorious communist troops held hostage for 18 months before being allowed to return home it wasn't only in North China that John kai-shek's Authority was unravelling Doak Barnett was the China correspondent for the Chicago Daily News as Mukden fell he took a trip from Shanghai through southern China stopping up all along the way from Shanghai to Kent Island we got often we saw an enormous number of people all kinds and at the end of that trip I wrote a long piece saying there's just no basis really resistance anymore there's no basis unparticles the officials we met had lost total confidence in the ability of the regime to survive the intellectuals had lost total confidence and ordinary people had lost total cotton resilient boomded being hold back from central China just dumped off three and it was that more than it was a blossom movement as far as I was concerned I mean it's just clear that politically there was no basis anymore with the Communists in control of the north the battle for central China began hoping to cover it see more topping went to a town called bungu where he spent Christmas 1948 holed up in a Jesuit mission I would report to Harold melts who was nine King about what was happening and so on and the and on Christmas Eve after I had filed one of my last reports Harold milks wrote a brief story saying that Seymour topping is is the loneliest man in the Associated Press this Christmas Eve by now Audrey Ronning whose father Chester remained the senior Canadian diplomat in Nanjing had been evacuated back to Canada and I was walking down the street one rainy night and with some friends going to a movie and I kicked over a newspaper that was on the street so and it went into the gutter I went I picked it up was the Vancouver Sun and on the front page there was a little box and perhaps the loneliest man in the world tonight is Seymour topping the loneliest man in the world this Christmas Eve was Seymour - offering who's in the a monastery in punku-- and I thought oh my I better write and answer his letters soon after the two were married what became known as the weihai campaign in central China lasted 65 days it involved over a million men the biggest land battle since World War two and it was a decisive victory for the Communists that morning in January of 1949 on on the battlefield of the Y hi I knew it was all over the Chiang kai-shek there was not a conflict among the press at all on the nature of the conflict we knew that the Nationalists were done that they had done it done themselves in in many ways there was no hope for the Nationalists and there was impossible the United States to turn the tide I was positive by this time that the Nationalists could not prevail as though no way that so much corruption so many of the generals were going into combat and selling their arms and taking the payrolls and depositing it back into their own bank accounts in Shanghai not too long before it was over in China roost called her back throat lots of it all the way back for much it's a long way to go from lunch especially when flying prop planes I told him what was happening I told me it was gone actually he was deeply deeply hurt or unhappy by what I told no question about it in early 1949 john kai-shek fled to Taiwan in April the Communists occupied his capital Nanjing I decided that I would try to cover the actual taking of the city so I picked up a friend of mine a Chinese correspondent his name was Bill Guang of the French news agency Agence france-presse in my Jeep which I was driving the AP drape we decided to meet the Communists coming in the Northwest gate they were exhausted they had been fighting so we took off and we went to a telegraph office and and build one and I quickly wrote some some things and we flipped a coin as to who would file first and go on bill Guan one and and I wrote a shortest detailed dispatch when when his bills three word despatch Reds tec-9 King reached the desk of the of the AFP in Paris they waited for his the rest of his material and my dispatch was immediately put out by by the AP and it gave me a world beat on the fall of the of the city the next communist target was Shanghai we want to do a big essay the last days of Shanghai and then we worked like crazy on it and and we got wonderful stuff French club people kind of ignoring the war going on with their cocktails and their tennis and the log bowls out of the middle of the racecourse with the Brits and the and we shot all of this the night clubs of the house bars down on the waterfront and the execution of the black marketeers and the suspected agents that take them out back of the railroad station and shoot him in the head we spent a month doing this this was a big this is going to be our big finale we did this what I thought was a big wonderful essay they never used it life never used it the Nationalists put up a note virtually no fight when they got right down to contact I saw the Nationalists I saw the retreating down tanking road I saw them crossing over the garden bridge and a lot of it and discarding their uniforms and the wine poo and trying to buy civilian clothes and and they were by this time there was a lot of smoke rising off in a Busan area and I saw the the the boys of the road ragers it all disappeared Rowen got out on one of the last lights to lead the city I had this feeling that this here was this great wonderful wild crazy city and I've ever looking down on the river and everything and thinking you know I'll never come never come back here again never be able to come back here again you

Channel: USC U.S.-China Institute

Views: 138,768

Keywords: Civil, War, assignment, china, mao, kmt, kuomintang, chinese, communist, party, ccp, usc, us-china, institute

Id: Jfhjq8oBBCQ

Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2012