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Arms in Manchuria. The Chinese Reds had fought a thoughtful war against Japan. They avoided direct battle, conserved their strength to use against Chiang. When the Russians opened the door of Manchuria to them after V-J day, they had a renewable arsenal.
The U.S. sent a succession of special envoys, including General George C. Marshall, to mediate between Chiang and Mao Tse-tung. U.S. mediation merely succeeded in holding up Chiang's forces for nine months in 1945-46 while the Reds dug in.
When the Communists seized Changchun, Harbin and Tsisihar, Chiang ordered an all-out offensive. Was he wrong? Was a "military solution" (in the language of U.S. experts in China) ever possible? Or should Chiang have admitted Communists into his government—while allowing them to keep separate, Red-commanded army divisions?
The difference between Chiang Kai-shek and a Western European, such as the late Jan Masaryk, was that Chiang never believed that his Communists were "different." He had known them too long, had sensed better than many men in the West that there was no position of neutrality one could take with Communists. Mao Tse-tung had put it very well: "To use the word 'neutral' is to do nothing but cheat oneself . . ."
Sunrise to Sunset. Chiang had counted on sustained U.S. aid. He had not got it. By last week, in addition to the territory Chiang had lost to the Reds (two-fifths of China), the Nationalists had suffered troop casualties of perhaps 1,800,000 men —a third of them lost as prisoners and turncoats since last July.
Chinese respected the Gimo's indomitable will, his stubborn national pride, but they had a sharp sense, that he—and they —had failed. One measure of that failure, some of them felt, was the performance of Chiang's own Whampoa Academy generals. Said one Chinese bitterly last week: "They are old and tired; in 20 years they have passed from the sunrise to the sunset." Some had turned carpetbagger. In one instance, soldiers defending Mukden watched a planeload of payday currency signed over to an army general and flown back to his bank in Shanghai. The government now knew that it did not have to tolerate abuses like that. It showed that it could learn: at Suchow this week, for the first time since the Japanese war, the troops were paid in silver. Morale, eyewitnesses reported, "bounded up."
Another measure of failure was hoarding and civil corruption. Chiang had called in son Ching-kuo (TIME, Sept. 20) to take charge of harsh drives against black markets in Shanghai. But the drive bogged down, Chinese said, when Chiang's police discovered hoarded goods in the godowns of David Kung, son of Banker H. H. Kung and nephew of Madame Chiang. The Shanghai press screamed for action, but a few days later David Kung with Madame Chiang visited the Gimo. The case was still "under investigation."