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Rethinking the Chongqing negotiations

Concession-making, the trust/distrust paradox and the biased mediator in China’s first post–World War II attempt at peace

While the GMD–Soviet negotiations over Manchuria continued to be a focus of increased international attention, it was the Chinese Nationalist–Communist negotiations that drew most concern domestically. In autumn 1945, World War II and China’s war against Japan had barely ended. At this point, the race for territorial recovery after the Japanese surrender between the GMD and the CCP was about to trigger a new round of civil war in China. To avert this, Mao and his men from their headquarters in Yan’an were invited to attend the highly anticipated peace talks with Mao’s arch rival Chiang and top-ranking GMD officials in Chongqing in late August. During his stay in Chongqing, Mao sent his negotiators to attend most official meetings while he stayed aloof from the gruelling negotiations held behind closed doors. Except for holding private talks with Chiang, Mao maintained appearances on most public occasions. He endeavoured to lobby senior government officials, leaders of the minor parties, and non-partisans in personal talks and informal meetings.¹

In late September, when the negotiation had already passed the halfway mark, one of the minor party leaders, Jiang Yuntian, was invited for a private talk with Mao. When the pair met, Mao revealed that the negotiation had so far been disappointing: disagreements on the armed forces ratio of the two rival armies and the authority of the CCP-held areas had created an impasse. Although a private meeting with Mao might have been a godsend to Jiang, he did not treat Mao with adulation. On the contrary, Jiang unreservedly criticised the political ethics of the two major parties, including their relentless pursuit of military power and carving up of territories for self-serving purposes. For Jiang, this wheeling and dealing was merely delaying the inevitable.²

Throughout the meeting, Jiang Yuntian created some embarrassing moments that Mao found difficult to ignore, despite his clever quips and buffoonery. On one occasion, Jiang asked Mao if he would relinquish military power in favour of a democratic political system akin to that of Western countries. Mao did not respond directly, instead replying, ‘Just think that if I can rely solely on my political skills to assume power, why do I have to bear the financial burden of maintaining hundreds of thousands of troops?’³

An awkward alliance

Mao’s response to Jiang Yuntian’s query provides a critical reflection on the relationship between the GMD and the CCP, which had been based on talking peace and making war since the 1920s. Previous research has been devoted to the military conflict between the two parties: the civil war from 1927 to 1936, the simultaneous internal strife amid their wartime alliance against Japan, and the CCP’s military and base (Liberated Areas) expansion during the war with Japan from 1937 to 1945.⁴

However, little attention has been paid to each party’s efforts to reduce tension. In particular, the survival of their awkward wartime united front from 1937 to 1945 has been considered as either a miracle or a patriotic act.⁵ Existing historical records show that there was no miracle: in an attempt to avoid a split, high-level officials, negotiators and army officers from both parties engaged in countless negotiations and side conversations. These negotiations were tough because the major differences between the two parties on issues including political ideologies, the autonomy and expansion of the CCP’s Liberated Areas, and the armed forces were too significant for a comprehensive resolution.⁶

From 1937 to 1943, both parties had proposed a range of local stop-gap arrangements either to defer the crisis or to stop the fighting from spreading. These temporary measures included sending a civilian commissioner (zhuanyuan 專員) to the key conflict zone,⁷ separating the two forces via demarcation of war zones on a case-by-case basis,⁸ the redeployment of troops⁹ and promoting bilateral liaison between the parties.¹⁰ Many of these creative conflict management approaches were implemented either partially or not at all. However, as Wise argues, the principles and concepts from previously failed plans became the precedents for subsequent negotiations.¹¹

In other words, the two disputed parties had been negotiating to cut a large and complex issue into smaller and more manageable units at a time when a comprehensive resolution of their ongoing conflict was still remote. While the ‘fractionating’¹² approach made both parties focus on small and separate issues rather than their major differences, it helped China avert a full-blown civil war during its conflict with Japan. As long as the leaders of the two parties still believed a weak united front was better than a total split, China lived to fight another day. In the end, China achieved a bitter victory over Japan amid a conflict-laden GMD–CCP wartime cooperation.

The United States—China’s major wartime aid program provider and the most important ally of the GMD government—was increasingly apprehensive about the negative impact of infighting on China’s war effort. As a result, the United States offered to facilitate a comprehensive reconciliation between the two parties.¹³ The US intervention, however, resulted in futile mediation attempts in late 1944 by Patrick J. Hurley, the presidential emissary and later the US ambassador to China. A crucial part of the US government’s action plan was to sustain Chiang’s rule.¹⁴ From the CCP’s perspective, this approach rendered Hurley a biased mediator. For the CCP, the United States was a capitalistic country, one that would recognise the GMD as the only legitimate government of China.¹⁵

As one of the main purposes of Hurley’s mission was ‘to unify all the military forces in China’ against Japan,¹⁶ his mediation approach was fairly ambitious. It forced the leaders of both parties to settle their differences over the most contentious issues in their relationship—such as political power sharing and the command of troops—where the room for concessions had been very narrow.¹⁷ It is therefore not unexpected that the US-brokered negotiation was deadlocked from the outset before it broke off in February 1945.¹⁸ Hence, when the Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945, the hostile negotiation situation meant that the two parties were unable to resolve their issues, with the surrender exacerbating the difficulties.

Japan’s surrender rekindled the civil war between the CCP and the GMD, as both parties asserted the right to claim Japanese-occupied territories in China. Making use of their enhanced military might, the CCP intensified the campaign for territorial expansion in order to achieve a satisfactory post-war settlement.¹⁹ The bulk of the GMD forces, on the contrary, were still deployed in south-west China in the immediate aftermath of the war. They were placed at a significant disadvantage in the race for territorial recovery against the CCP, which was based in rural areas close to Japanese-controlled territories in eastern and northern China—the nation’s political and economic centre.

When the victory over Japan was already in sight in June 1945, the CCP’s regional bureaux were instructed to intensify the campaign for territorial expansion in order to achieve a satisfactory post-war settlement.²⁰ On 11 August, Yan’an issued the first directive to its forces respecting surrender of Japanese armies. The order asserted the CCP’s right to accept enemy surrender independently. As it turned out, this was only the first of seven instructions Yan’an delivered to its armies on the eve of Japan’s surrender. Yan’an’s Seven Orders of the Day directed the CCP forces to take control of, or make troop movements into, the strategically important provinces in North China and Manchuria.²¹ If the CCP forces acted according to these orders, the entire nation, except the GMD’s wartime power base in south-west China, could have been under their control.

For Chiang, the situation was certainly not good, but it was not entirely hopeless. In North China, for instance, the GMD commander Fu Zuoyi maintained well-trained cavalry from his Hetao region of the Yellow River garrison in the province of Suiyuan.²² The provincial ruler Yan Xishan and his armies in Shanxi were strong supporters of Chiang’s government.²³ In early October, around 20,000 US Marines landed on China’s east coast and took control of Beiping (known as Beijing after September 1949) and Tianjin before airlifting Chiang’s troops into the two cities.²⁴ All these Nationalist armies showed growing resolve to scramble for control of territories against the Chinese Communists, but they needed urgent troop reinforcements to counter the continued influx of their enemies.

Military uncertainty created chaos. Some GMD-aligned militia groups had entered the Japanese-occupied areas without prior authorisation from Chiang’s government. The unauthorised troop movement by the two opposing Chinese parties prompted the Japanese to register a complaint with Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur stating that forces from both Yan’an and Chongqing had created confusion. This meant that the Japanese armies had difficulty surrendering according to the terms and conditions stipulated in the Potsdam Declaration. The Japanese complaint was made against both parties, but the embarrassment of receiving a complaint from a defeated nation was reserved for Chiang’s regime.²⁵ The GMD was losing the race for territorial recovery, even on paper. Not surprisingly, Chiang tried to persuade Mao to visit Chongqing and settle their differences via negotiation.

Chiang sent three consecutive invitations to Mao for a summit meeting. Mao finally agreed on 24 August 1945.²⁶ Some believe that Mao accepted Chiang’s invitation because of foreign pressure, particularly advice from Stalin.²⁷ Others contend that Mao met Chiang mainly because of domestic considerations and that he was more concerned about US, rather than Soviet, attitudes.²⁸ Mao, however, admitted that he agreed to negotiate due to all major powers disapproving of a civil war in China.²⁹

Foreign pressure might have had an impact on Mao’s decision-making, but the growing dilemma of the CCP’s military strategy towards the end of World War II was also a contributing factor that prompted Mao to seek a modus vivendi with Chiang. For instance, the CCP’s force-concentrated offensives against the GMD armies were subject to local resentment even before the Japanese surrender. Force concentration was important to Mao’s guerrilla army to win significant battles against the GMD. While a guerrilla army may concentrate large forces for a specific operation, the concentrated guerrilla units should disperse swiftly upon completion of an operation.³⁰ The CCP’s case nevertheless shows that once battles intensified, there was no guarantee of how soon the fighting would end; the concentrated army units had to seize food from peasants within the warring lands to replenish the armies’ dwindling food supplies.

In a large-scale military conflict against the GMD in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, which took place just months before the Japanese surrender, the CCP amassed an army of nearly twenty thousand men in an area that extended over 250 square kilometres at the Tianmu Mountain (approximately 80 kilometres west of Hangzhou). The combat lasted for five months from February to June 1945, but the local peasant economy was ruined in the first three months of fighting. In the campaign’s final stage, the food source of the poorest farm labourers was wiped out completely after they yielded to the CCP troops’ extortion demands. A report written by the campaign’s CCP commander reveals that the depredation caused by food seizures had a profound negative impact on the civil population, dealing a gargantuan blow to the mass-based revolution for communism.³¹ The operations of CCP forces in 1945 show that a peace deal was needed for the Chinese Communists: Mao did not simply go to Chongqing on Stalin’s order to humour the Americans.

The stalemate

Shortly after Mao agreed to meet Chiang, he wrote a carefully worded letter to Wedemeyer. Wedemeyer and his team provided military intelligence analysis in support of the US Embassy in China, but were not involved in Hurley’s mediation between the CCP and GMD.³² As Wedemeyer played no part in the negotiations, Mao’s letter was written in reply to Ambassador Hurley’s request to visit Yan’an. It essentially demanded that Hurley come to Yan’an and escort Mao to Chongqing in the same plane.³³ Mao might not have been worried that Chiang’s secret agents would assassinate him in mid-air, as Chang and Halliday have suggested.³⁴ But Mao’s assurance-seeking from the Americans (who were biased towards the Nationalists) regarding his safety in Chongqing shows the advantage a partial peace-broker possesses over the least favoured side in peace negotiations.³⁵ In the CCP’s case, the United States unquestionably sided with the GMD. Mao certainly would not have treated Hurley as an ally, but the American had more leverage (e.g. in the form of military aid) over Chiang and was less likely to misrepresent the intention of ‘their side’.

Accompanied by Hurley and the GMD negotiator Zhang Zhizhong, Mao and his party arrived at Chongqing on 28 August 1945 on a US military aircraft.³⁶ Such an arrangement further confirmed the American’s role as the negotiation’s facilitator, and, in particular, Hurley’s position as a mediator. Hurley adjusted his approach as soon as the negotiations commenced. He acted as a passive peacemaker and allowed the negotiators from both parties to enter direct talks. While being a respectful third party for most of the negotiations, the American was apprised of the talks’ progress by both parties.³⁷ As the analysis of this chapter unfolds, it reveals that Hurley was not sent to China only to collect and provide information.

Mao’s arrival marked the beginning of a six-week-long summit between the two disputed parties. The peace talks took place on two levels. One level comprised summit meetings in which Chiang and Mao met in face-to-face discussions. Chiang and Mao met on no fewer than ten occasions during the latter’s visit, but only six were private discussions. The rest of the meetings consisted of informal discussions during social functions, courtesy calls and photo opportunities.³⁸ At another level, the most effective representatives from each party held rounds of negotiations behind closed doors.

Chiang dispatched a team of four to lead the negotiations. They were Zhang Qun, Wang Shijie, Zhang Zhizhong and Shao Lizi. While all four were prominent members of the GMD, Zhang Qun was also a strong supporter and loyal friend of Chiang.³⁹ Wang, Shao and Zhang Zhizhong had been regular participants in the two-party peace talks. Ultimately, Foreign Minister Wang attended only the pre-negotiation discussions, leaving for an overseas diplomatic assignment just before formal negotiations began.⁴⁰

Mao sent his deputy Zhou Enlai as chief negotiator. Zhou’s role was supported by Wang Ruofei. Wang had been negotiating with the Nationalists in Chongqing with Zhou since 1944. Wang had once been arrested, ferociously interrogated by Chiang’s secret agents, and imprisoned for more than five years at notorious GMD prisons. During his trials and imprisonment, Wang stubbornly resisted authority even when threatened at gunpoint. Wang’s uncompromising stance towards the Nationalist law enforcers was applauded by his fellow inmates.⁴¹ When he applied the same attitude at the peace talks, it caused some trouble for Zhou.

Although Chiang and Mao sent experienced negotiators to set the stage for bargaining, both parties held firm, showing no sign of making early concessions. Chiang, who was keen to recover lost ground in his race for territorial recovery against the CCP, intended to play tough, particularly on military issues.⁴² Mao, on the other hand, unveiled his negotiation policy to his comrades before departing for Chongqing. He even indicated that he was prepared to make negotiation trade-offs with the GMD.⁴³ However, as Mao had stepped up his war talk against the GMD towards the end of the war, he was in no mood to ingratiate himself with Chiang.⁴⁴

The CCP interlocutors took the initiative and, in the meeting held on 3 September, made a rather aggressive opening bid.⁴⁵ Two extremely controversial and divisive topics existed within the proposal. On issues concerning the post-war army reorganisation, they demanded that the CCP retain an army of forty-eight divisions. In seeking recognition of the Liberated Areas, they presented the GMD with a fait accompli. Zhou and Wang requested that CCP officials be appointed, among other crucial local government positions, as the administrative heads of five major provinces in North China on the grounds that they had already seized an unassailable position in these provinces.⁴⁶ In political settlement parlance, the CCP considered territorial power-sharing (e.g. delegation of a central government’s power to local groups who declare rule of a particular geographical area) as one of its preferred mechanisms for resolving conflict.⁴⁷

The danger of the fait accompli tactic is that it might push the opponent’s loss aversion to an extreme position.⁴⁸ From the CCP’s perspective, however, Zhou merely presented indisputable facts to the Nationalists.⁴⁹ Seething with rage after discovering Zhou’s proposal, Chiang threatened to make it available to the public. That move would certainly have derailed the negotiation before it had started, but Chiang soon changed his mind after seeking counsel from his negotiators.⁵⁰ However, he did not stop Wang Shijie from writing a personal letter to Mao, pleading for a compromise.⁵¹

According to some scholarship, acknowledging and engaging with the pre-existing territorial claims of local armed groups is a useful tool for risk mitigation in peace negotiations. This is because a non-state actor may think it unnecessary to negotiate with a central government over the issue, as it would already have established de facto control over the territories.⁵²

However, Chiang did not view Zhou’s extreme claims as a compromise mechanism that would resolve the peace talks’ central sticking points. Chiang’s negotiators rejected Zhou’s two major demands outright, claiming that the Liberated Areas were now irrelevant and that the maximum number of CCP armed forces divisions to which the government could give consent was twelve.⁵³ From 4 to 11 September, the negotiators engaged in four feisty debates, but failed to make headway in ending the military stand-off.⁵⁴ The CCP negotiators called for a rational and equitable reorganisation of all armed forces nationwide, and they were firm on their forty-eight division demand. The GMD representatives argued that this number was excessive for a standing regular army in peace time. They insisted that their twelve-division offer was the best the CCP could obtain.⁵⁵ Chiang and Mao therefore needed to resolve the stalemate face to face.

The game changer

Chiang and Mao held a constructive meeting on 12 September. Mao promised a further reduction of his army to twenty-eight divisions.⁵⁶ The offer was by far the biggest concession since the negotiations had begun. Mao’s abrupt reversal of his position might have been surprising, but it can be viewed as a strategic concession to break the impasse.

First, Mao did not specify how long it would take to reduce his armies to the number he proposed. Given the size of the CCP military, Mao could have been discussing a topic for the distant future. Second, the CCP regular forces could be used as fully fledged guerrillas operating in small units, thanks to their outstanding deployment capabilities. Conversely, the CCP guerrilla teams could conduct regular or mobile warfare after proper force concentration and enhancement in both organisation and weaponry.⁵⁷ Once these forces played havoc with the Nationalists, their whereabouts and exact numbers would be undetectable, let alone subject to decommissioning. Mao could have reduced the official numbers in his regular armies without reducing the actual quantity of his troops.

Of course, even the smallest change in force deployment would affect Mao’s military strategy, but this could not possibly outweigh the benefits for his negotiation game plan. For Mao, the official figures of active army divisions and the actual number of troops in an army unit were different things. No matter how he decided to organise them, he would not give them away easily. ‘The arms of the people, every gun and every bullet, must all be kept, must not be handed over’, Mao emphasised.⁵⁸

The actual number of the CCP forces is interesting. The CCP representatives started the negotiations claiming they had a regular force of 1,200,000 men (more than eighty army divisions), using this to support their demand to retain at least forty-eight divisions.⁵⁹ Historical evidence, however, shows that the CCP leaders had different versions of the account regarding the actual number of their armed forces.

A CCP Central Committee directive in July 1944 stated that it had only 470,000 regular (fewer than forty army divisions) and 2,100,000 militia troops. Notably, the same directive stated specifically that the current policy of army streamlining was still in force. Regional commanders were instructed to maintain the existing size of the regular army for one year before considering any aggressive army expansion program.⁶⁰ Astonishingly, when the CCP leaders negotiated with the Americans in a bid to obtain US arms in December 1944, they claimed they had an army of 650,000 men and a militia force of 2,500,000 combatants.⁶¹ In September 1945, the CCP negotiators required statistical data to support their claim of a one-million-plus army. Their comrades in Yan’an passed on the numbers they needed—the CCP had a staggering 1,270,000 regular troops.⁶²

For the GMD, the figures provided by the CCP were palpably spurious. According to the statistical figures provided by the GMD Board of Military Operation (junlingbu 軍令部) on 20 February 1945, the CCP had a standing army of 619,800 men, out of which only 434,780 were properly trained and organised.⁶³ Therefore, from the GMD’s perspective, the CCP was using a ‘highball’ negotiation tactic (an outrageous bid that was impossible to justify),⁶⁴ and they questioned the validity of the CCP’s claim from the start. Zhang Zhizhong queried, ‘How it is possible that your army expands so quickly?’⁶⁵ Questions of this kind put Zhou and Wang Ruofei on the spot, and they tried to avoid discussion of issues related to their forces’ complement. It would have been awfully embarrassing for them if they were forced to clarify that the CCP had not incorporated the surrendered Japanese puppet troops (i.e. the Collaborationist ‘Chinese’ Army) into its army.⁶⁶ As of September 1945, Yan’an initiated a new round of army expansion. The mobilisation of Japanese puppet forces to join the CCP regular army was one of the program’s main components.⁶⁷

The Nationalists’ query demonstrates the risk of using a ‘highball’ offer in negotiations. As it intends to push the opening offer of the other party closer to or beyond the resistance point, the opponent might abandon the negotiations, deeming them a waste of time.⁶⁸

While the Nationalist negotiators tried to undermine the credibility of the CCP’s forty-eight army division opening bid, Mao’s twenty-eight division offer, by contrast, instantly made their strident pronouncements seem weak. Mao did not ask Chiang to accept his concession on a quid pro quo basis, but this was not necessary. The timing and size of Mao’s concession had automatically pressured Chiang to reciprocate with a sizeable cut of his 350-plus army divisions.⁶⁹ In a worst-case scenario, if Chiang did not respond commensurately, Mao could walk away from the commitment with good reason.

Mao had made a significant concession in one jump. This decisive move imbued him with a moral superiority and allowed him to claim that the twenty-eight-division plan was the best and most reasonable final offer: one he must stick to. A moral victory would give Mao an edge in winning ‘the sympathy of … the middle-of-the-roaders within the country’, which was what he had originally planned.⁷⁰

Mao’s strategy of using one significant concession to place his party in an unassailable negotiating position was also employed by his negotiators against their American counterparts headed by Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Kissinger soon learnt the lesson from the Chinese that, even though a concession might look significant initially, it actually amounted to less than a string of piecemeal concessions. In his memoirs, Kissinger used the term ‘pre-emptive concession’ to describe this particular negotiating approach he learnt from PRC interlocutors in the 1970s.⁷¹

At times, negotiators need to shape their own rules for tactical battles. For the Nationalists, the reality was that even a partial decommissioning of Mao’s highly flexible armies was a long shot, but if they could entice Mao to deploy some of his elite troops in the guerrilla theatres of operation and let him win the propaganda battle—the CCP had made genuine attempts to reduce its armed forces—a full-scale civil war might be delayed, if not averted. Soon after Mao made the concession, Shao urged Zhou to send the remaining CCP troops outside the government-endorsed quota to open up wasteland and complete construction projects.⁷² Shao’s idea was tantamount to an implicit approval that the CCP could keep its excess forces as station troops.

Mao’s commitment to reconciliation was short-lived, however. He reneged on his offer soon after by sending Zhou to inform Zhang Qun that the number of army divisions he intended to retain was forty-eight, not twenty-eight.⁷³ In other words, the promise Mao made in his previous meeting with Chiang was nothing but a glitch. Existing civil war records do not provide direct evidence for the reasons behind Mao’s abandonment of this commitment, but the usually tight-lipped Wang Ruofei revealed some hints about the answer. Wang told Zhang Qun that the difficulty for them to commit to a more cooperative approach was that they would have a hard time persuading their comrades in Yan’an to accept it.⁷⁴

The withdrawal of commitments is not uncommon in negotiation, but the party who reverses a commitment must plan it carefully. In Mao’s case, it was not the retraction of his commitment but the way he and his associates handled the situation that did the damage. Importantly, they did not give Chiang any indication that the conditions under which Mao’s commitment applied had changed before calling it off. Neither did they take the time to let the issue die silently, and Mao also failed to send his eloquent deputies to deliver a more prudent restatement of his commitment (e.g. by establishing more conditions).⁷⁵

From Chiang’s perspective, Mao lost all credibility when he abandoned his promise. Chiang’s diary shows that he was offended by Mao’s act. Chiang later noted that he sought punishment of the Chinese Communists in a most severe manner.⁷⁶ Chiang’s expression, in addition to the overblown anti-Communist rhetoric recorded in his diaries during that period, provided a niche for some writers to claim that Chiang had come close to arresting Mao in early October 1945.⁷⁷ Although forgiveness was not the forte of either man, they held at least five more meetings afterward, before Mao departed on 11 October. However, either these meetings were mere courtesy calls or both men engaged in discussions without making commitments.⁷⁸

A night with Ambassador Hurley

When the level of significance of the Mao–Chiang talks decreased, Zhou went to see Hurley on 18 September, before the latter departed for Washington. Zhou told Hurley that if he was leaving, Mao would like to leave before him. Hurley went to Chiang and swiftly secured Chiang’s reassurance regarding Mao’s safety in Chongqing.⁷⁹ Although Mao was considering walk-away alternatives, the leverage had just tilted in the CCP’s favour. The CCP’s intelligence agents had obtained information that Chiang’s negotiators had, among other concessions, been prepared to accept a CCP army of sixteen infantry divisions.⁸⁰

Although Zhou was informed of his opponents’ next move, he needed to manoeuvre tactfully in order to gain more from the bargain. Zhou made his move on 19 September. He offered to cut five more army divisions and reduce the CCP’s demands on local governments. He also pledged to cede eight minor Liberated Areas, mostly in southern and eastern China where their positions were vulnerable to Nationalist attack. According to Zhou, the Communist forces from these areas would be redeployed northward from their present positions in roughly two phases. In geographical terms, the CCP would allow the GMD to take control of the territories stretching south from the Lanzhou–Lianyungang railway in the north, in exchange for Chiang’s cooperation in letting the CCP establish a stranglehold on North China.⁸¹ Zhou’s concession complied with a well-conceived negotiation trade-off plan developed by Mao before the negotiations began.⁸²

To make the deal more attractive to the Nationalists, Zhou promised that when the phased redeployment was completed, the CCP armed forces would withdraw from some of the major base areas, including the one in northern Jiangsu Province.⁸³ The Communist base in Jiangsu had been an important base area for the CCP since 1941. In the autumn of 1945, the CCP forces took most of the country towns in that region after the Japanese surrender. The CCP’s northern Jiangsu base controlled a vast rice production region situated in the Yellow River – Huai River plain of that coastal East China province. Importantly, it was geographically connected with the other two major CCP base areas in the provinces of Shandong and Anhui and posed a direct threat to the Nationalists’ political and economic centre at the Nanjing–Shanghai–Hangzhou triangle. In other words, northern Jiangsu was situated in a strategically significant position that the two belligerent sides wanted to get their hands on.⁸⁴

Zhou did not offer any clue as to when the proposed two-phase withdrawal would begin and be complete. If the relationship between two parties continued to improve, the Nationalists could take Zhou’s proposal as nothing but conciliatory gestures. However, the Yan’an leadership instructed its armies—only one week after Zhou delivered his proposal—to maintain a preclusive control of territories north of the Yangtze River in both Jiangsu and Anhui provinces.⁸⁵

The Nationalists were compelled to reciprocate Zhou’s concessions. During the meeting on 21 September, Zhang Zhizhong conceded begrudgingly that a CCP army of sixteen divisions was acceptable. Simultaneously, Zhang also proposed to negotiate a final deal on the actual number of the CCP troops, sending a message to Zhou that the GMD was open to bargaining. Zhang’s reciprocal concessions indicated that the give-and-take process was finally underway for both parties.⁸⁶

Just when Zhou had the situation well in hand, Wang Roufei lost his temper at this key moment. On one occasion, he described the GMD regime as a ‘Mussolinian government’ and a ‘Hitlerian government’. On another occasion, he simply issued an invitation to war, yelling: ‘In that case, it would be better for the central [government] to annihilate all the armies of our party!’⁸⁷ The timing of Wang’s hot-tempered outburst could not possibly have been worse as it occurred when the peace talks had just swung in the CCP’s favour. The negotiations were adjourned after Wang’s indiscreet remarks.⁸⁸ Recounting these events in a public report made in 1946, Shao did not mention Wang’s role in the meeting, but stated that the situation was so tense that the entire negotiation almost broke down.⁸⁹

The tactical use of aggressive behaviour is deemed unacceptable by some scholars for ethical reasons, as it may backfire on the aggressor;⁹⁰ ratcheted-up calls for war in peace talks are perceived similarly. In Wang’s case, he would have preferred to maintain the momentum rather than forcing an adjournment, because his party had already detected the concession pattern of their rivals. In general, if the adversary’s concession patterns are detectable, negotiators will normally prolong proceedings to gain an advantage.⁹¹ Wang, however, chose to let his emotions run wild, and the negotiations teetered on the edge of breakdown.

Zhou had no choice but to take the fight to the GMD. He began to spread news about the negotiation deadlock to various interested parties, including the media,⁹² but such an approach (‘even the bystanders don’t agree with you’) ran the risk of further annoying his already angry opponents.⁹³ In Yan’an, the CCP leaders, believing that Chiang would use his armies to intimidate them into capitulation, prepared to fight fire with fire. They telegraphed Mao on 26 September, requesting him to stop the negotiations and return.⁹⁴ Mao decided to stay, but the negotiations were in a shambles.⁹⁵

The use of military force was more direct than peace talks. From Chongqing, Mao sent a message to his generals, who were at that time battling the GMD forces under Yan Xishan in south-eastern Shanxi over the previously Japanese-occupied territories. The localised civil war had started in late August when the leaders of both parties were ready to enter peace talks. In mid-September, the CCP forces gained the upper hand in the combat and placed a large group of GMD troops under siege.⁹⁶ Mao’s message stated: ‘The more battles you win, the safer we are here and the more initiative we have in negotiations.’⁹⁷ Mao’s generals did as he instructed, and the fighting continued unabated. Nowadays, this ‘whipsaw’ approach is dubbed ‘Fight, Talk, Fight, Talk’.⁹⁸

As military confrontations gained momentum and the atmosphere of conciliation could no longer be sheltered by the peace talks, Hurley could not continue as a passive peacemaker. He decided to intervene and bring the negotiations back on track. He went to see Chiang on the night of 21 September, before his departure for Washington. In a negotiation situation, when a party considers making a larger concession, a mediator biased in its favour has the credibility to convince it that the compromise is necessary and all its losses will be compensated in a favourable final settlement.⁹⁹ As the United States was a key supporter of Chiang’s government, Hurley succeeded in persuading Chiang to accept a compromise: extending the upper limit of the CCP armed forces to twenty army divisions in exchange for the CCP withdrawing its bid for provincial governments in North China. When Hurley brought Chiang’s plan to the Chinese Communists, Zhang Qun waited for the outcome in a room next to the meeting venue. It turned out to be a long night for Zhang, as Hurley’s meeting with the CCP representatives did not end until the next morning.¹⁰⁰

Chiang’s overwhelming response sent clear messages to both Mao and Hurley. First, while he agreed to make concessions, he did not change his anti-Communist stance, and the CCP could not regard his final offer as a weakness to be exploited. Second, Chiang’s trust in his American ally would not be sustained unless Hurley delivered a deal to his satisfaction.

Hurley ventured into a very different bargaining environment in his meeting with the Chinese Communists. He did not have the same leverage to influence Mao as he did with his ally Chiang. Besides, biased mediators may be unable to communicate effectively with the less ‘friendly’ disputant, thereby affecting their mediation approach.¹⁰¹ As discussed, a partial peace broker can be a reliable third party for the least favoured disputant on some occasions. However, biased mediators can also provide less critical information to the disputant they are prejudiced against simply because they are allied with the other disputant.¹⁰² In the CCP’s case, Mao might have trusted Hurley to look after his safety in Chongqing, knowing that Chiang was constrained by the United States. However, he may not have trusted Hurley to provide reliable information about the negotiation (e.g. Chiang’s bottom line), knowing that the American was motivated to secure a favourable deal for Chiang. While the coexistence of trust and mistrust is not uncommon in negotiations,¹⁰³ both Hurley and Mao needed to manage this paradox when they met.

During his meeting with the Chinese Communists, Hurley acknowledged that military and governance arrangements were the two key issues that had not yet been agreed upon; the reason was that both parties were ‘attempting to settle too many details’.¹⁰⁴ According to Hurley’s own account, he did not do anything that other mediators would not have done under the circumstances. First, he managed the exchange of offers for both parties but let their leaders have the final say. Second, he tried to shift the bargaining situation by urging the two disputants to secure an interim deal on ‘basic over-all principles’ and work out ‘the details’ in the next stage of the negotiations.¹⁰⁵ Hurley claimed that Mao accepted his advice: Mao assured him that the peace talks would not break down and that he would not reject Chiang’s offer, although his party would like to consider it thoroughly before deciding.¹⁰⁶

Nevertheless, Mao and his associates were completely dissatisfied with Hurley’s approach. A PRC source claims that Hurley put a great deal of pressure on the CCP negotiators during the meeting.¹⁰⁷ Hurley is also criticised for ignoring that the core of the disagreements actually originated from those matters he regarded as ‘the details’.¹⁰⁸ Mao was irritated. ‘The American government, Wedemeyer and Hurley treated us very badly’, said Mao, venting his frustrations after he returned to Yan’an.¹⁰⁹

Mao’s comment inflamed a deep-set antipathy towards Hurley in some quarters. While Mao’s secretary Hu Qiaomu remembered Hurley’s act as ‘despicable’ (beilie 卑劣),¹¹⁰ a recent study describes the American’s attitude as ‘truculent and unreasonable’ (manheng 蠻橫) and claims that he ‘flew into a rage’ (shengse juli 聲色俱厲) when he attempted to intimidate Mao into submission.¹¹¹ Admittedly, Hurley did not develop a good reputation for being well behaved. He was reportedly short-tempered and rough in his language when he had heated exchanges with a disobedient subordinate, John Paton Davies, a second secretary of the US Embassy, in January 1945.¹¹² The report seems to support the critics, who offer a damning case against Hurley: the American was desperate to report to the president about the peace talks’ progress in a way that looked positive, to obscure the failure of his mission in China.¹¹³

Criticism of Hurley at the time (from Hu’s memoirs) included a hard-hitting broadside against him for ignoring the obvious and arguing the reverse. Knowing that both parties had already come close to issuing a joint communiqué, he threatened that as long as no agreement was reached on the Liberated Areas, no official announcement would be made. According to Hu, Mao talked to Hurley with great forbearance and defended his party’s core interests without anger. Consequently, Mao succeeded in stopping Hurley from sabotaging the negotiations.¹¹⁴ In the end, however, Mao agreed—under duress—to reduce his troop numbers to twenty army divisions.¹¹⁵ Hurley was severely criticised for his unfair bias against the CCP.

After a long adjournment, the negotiations resumed on 27 September 1945, in the wake of Hurley’s intervention. Both parties started the discussion with some very positive dialogue, but Wang Ruofei was conspicuously quiet throughout the meeting. The two parties quickly moved on to discuss the technicalities of army reorganisation and unresolved issues about the CCP’s Liberated Areas.¹¹⁶ This progress indicates that both parties were ready to settle most of their differences regarding the armed forces numbers, and an agreement was not too far away.

The two parties also made strides towards agreement on political issues. Zhou had proposed a multiparty political consultation peace forum (later the Political Consultative Conference [PCC]) in early September to discuss issues of political structural reform, including the re-election of all delegates to the GMD-manipulated state legislative body: the National Assembly (Guomin dahui 國民大會).¹¹⁷ The matter had been discussed for almost a month, and both parties had come very close to striking a deal. While the Nationalists believed that the existing delegates to the National Assembly should be considered valid, with no comprehensive re-election necessary, they agreed to expand the number of delegates in addition to those already elected. After several rounds of negotiations, Zhou showed empathy for the Nationalists’ position on these issues.¹¹⁸ In late September, the two parties were able to reach an agreement in principle that the Nationalists would take the necessary steps to convene the PCC. Leaders of the minor parties and non-partisan politicians were also invited to contribute.¹¹⁹

The negotiation had an intriguing twist on 5 October. The GMD acknowledged and engaged with the CCP’s territorial claims for the first time since the negotiations had begun. As a compromise, Zhang Zhizhong offered to endorse a CCP-nominated administrative inspector (xingzheng ducha 行政督察) to govern a cluster of adjacent, CCP-held, counties. The ‘inspector’ would be sent as a civilian commissioner to the area.¹²⁰ Zhang’s proposal shared some key similarities with the one Zhou had proposed in 1939.¹²¹ The conceptual clarity both parties achieved on the subject from previous negotiations in 1939 prompted Zhou’s instant, albeit partial, approval. Zhou stated that the idea would be useful in northern Jiangsu and Anhui, but was not viable in those provinces already under the CCP’s tight control. However, the two parties did not seek practical ways to make Zhang’s plan work, particularly in those two provinces Zhou deemed most amenable to resolution.¹²² From the CCP’s perspective, Zhou could not accept Zhang’s plan because it would place limits on the CCP local authorities below the provincial level.¹²³ At the end of the meeting, Zhou promised to convey Zhang’s plan to Mao.¹²⁴ Zhou’s statement seemingly indicated to the Nationalists that he did not have the authority to make agreements. This ‘calculated incompetence’ approach would have made negotiations more difficult and therefore lengthier.¹²⁵ At the negotiating table, however, things often take longer than participants expect.

Although the meeting did not resolve the territorial dispute instantly, the Zhang–Zhou exchange of ideas suggests that local solutions to a nationwide problem were possible. The challenge for the two belligerents was that they must find the courage to pick up where they had left off during their anti-Japanese alliance and activate the ‘fractioning’ approach to manage their prolonged and intractable disputes. Conversely, if the two parties were not ready to accept creative options to resolve their dispute, Zhang’s plan would only represent fractured ideas.

Just when the interlocutors of both parties started to consider partial solutions to a series of broad and complicated issues, their political leaders urgently needed a result. On 8 October 1945, the two disputants reached consensus on a CCP-drafted summary of the negotiations and consented to a signed agreement.¹²⁶ Zhang Zhizhong’s talk with Mao pithily expressed the state of mind of both party leaders. Soon after the agreement was finalised, he told Mao: ‘We can’t afford not to publicize this [agreement], since you came here with great honour, [we] have to produce something.’¹²⁷ The agreement would be signed on 10 October, the National Day of the ROC.

Tragedy at the eleventh hour

While the two belligerent parties tried their best to foster a conciliatory atmosphere before the agreement was signed, an unexpected incident almost derailed their efforts. On 8 October, a high-speed hit-and-run traffic incident and subsequent shooting involving a GMD army officer in north-west Chongqing resulted in the death of Zhou’s staffer Li Shaoshi. The suspect vehicle was Zhou’s official car, but Zhou was not in the car when the fatal incident occurred. The vehicle was fired upon when its driver, who was allegedly a ‘new’ employee of the Eighteenth Group Army office (the CCP’s liaison office in Chongqing), failed to stop after it inflicted grave injury on a GMD soldier who was on the side of the road. Li was a passenger in the vehicle, and succumbed to gunshot wounds inflicted by one of the ‘warning’ shots from a GMD army officer trying to stop the rampaging car. The driver mysteriously went missing after the incident.¹²⁸

Adding to the seriousness of the incident was the identity of the shooting victim. Li was the son-in-law of senior GMD left-wing leader Liao Zhongkai. Liao had been assassinated by suspected inner-party rivals in 1925. Li’s death therefore sent immediate shock waves across Chongqing, and speculation increased that it was an assassination.¹²⁹ This was a serious and complicated criminal case because it involved multiple felony offences in addition to the celebrity status of one of the victims’ family. To the great chagrin of conspiracy theorists, both parties colluded to minimise the incident. They quickly accepted the result of a rapid investigation to ensure that Li’s tragic passing would not hinder successful signing of the agreement.¹³⁰ Although the key person of interest—Zhou’s driver—remained at large, a CCP representative swiftly crushed all rumours on 11 October, stating that Li’s death was a sad accident.¹³¹ As Hu Qiaomu recalled, the two parties were most concerned about a fiery last-minute breakdown of the negotiations.¹³²

On 10 October, the two parties signed the ‘Summary of the conversations between representatives of the [National] Government and of the Chinese Communist Party’—more commonly known as the ‘Double Tenth Agreement’. It did not provide a comprehensive agreement to resolve all disputes between the two parties. Rather, it was an interim accord proposing mechanisms for further negotiations. First, it confirmed that the PCC would be convened as a peace forum. The PCC would be a multiparty political conference, made up of representatives from the two major parties, minor parties and non-partisans. It would meet as a consultative body to discuss issues concerning democratisation of the government and the nation’s military problems. The agreement stated that unresolved issues regarding the convocation of the National Assembly also would be brought before the PCC for settlement.¹³³ In other words, the PCC would discuss the unresolved issues where the Chongqing negotiations had left off. The problem was that the GMD had already announced at its Sixth National Congress in May 1945 that the National Assembly would be convened on 12 November 1945 to pass the constitution.¹³⁴ This issue will receive further attention in chapter 4.

Another critical component of the Double Tenth Agreement was that the CCP would cut its forces to between twenty-four and twenty divisions, pending adoption of a future army nationalisation and reorganisation program. It also stated that the CCP troops deployed in eight scattered areas would be either demobilised or redeployed to other areas, such as the territory located to the north of the Lanzhou–Lianyungang railway line. The show of readiness to reduce the size of its military and concede territories constituted the most significant CCP concessions in the treaty. A key clause in the agreement tried to cultivate an open-ended environment for resolving the territorial power-sharing issues, with a declaration that negotiations on the unsettled issues surrounding the Liberated Areas would be continued.¹³⁵

Notably, the agreement made no mention of the CCP’s proposal regarding provincial governments in North China and the Zhou-proposed CCP troop withdrawal from northern Jiangsu. As will be discussed later in the book, when the relationship between the two parties went from bad to worse in 1946, the question of northern Jiangsu and the dispute over the redeployment of the CCP forces in Hubei sucked the two parties into the cauldron of a full-blown civil war.

The agreement was signed just after the frenzied fighting in Shanxi ended on 8 October with a CCP victory, which inflicted heavy casualties on the GMD troops.¹³⁶ To counteract the poor impression conveyed by the spectacle of the two belligerent parties fighting in one place while signing a peace deal in another, Nationalist officials alleged that the battle was the result of Yan Xishan’s own decision and had nothing to do with the negotiations.¹³⁷ Mao left immediately after the agreement was signed, but Zhou and Wang Ruofei continued the negotiations with their GMD counterparts.

‘Thank God, amen’

China’s modern history would be barren without the GMD and CCP’s waging of war and quest for peace. The two deadly enemies might have had ‘long-term plans’¹³⁸ to eliminate each other, but at the precipice, they cooperated. They formed an alliance against Japanese invasion, although bloody skirmishes continued unabated. The two parties therefore cut their intractable conflicts into smaller segments, to gain short-term or alternative solutions and sustain their weak alliance, thwarting a full-blown civil war. After World War II, the Chongqing negotiations set the stage for interlocutors and mediators to negotiate peaceful cooperation at a time when China was edging towards a more fateful round of infighting.

The reality around the negotiating table in post-war Chongqing was that there were no quick fixes for entrenched disagreements between the two antagonists. It is, then, not surprising that Chiang and Mao started the negotiations with a hard-nosed approach. But once the two paramount leaders played a role in the negotiations, if they did not want to abandon the talks altogether, they had few options except to strive for incremental progress. ‘No concession indicates a deadlock’,¹³⁹ and neither man wanted to risk his reputation being besmirched through a stalemate, regardless of their initial intent to enter discussions.

The case of the Chongqing negotiations supports the observation that political actors’ ‘true intention’ is a matter of uncertainty. Many factors may influence actors’ decision-making, and decision-makers can always change their minds.¹⁴⁰ This chapter shows that the interaction dynamics in the negotiations pushed the two belligerent participants to make concessions, even though these were likely to be small pieces of a bigger puzzle and did not guarantee a comprehensive agreement.

Chiang’s anti-Communist mindset did not stop him from allowing his negotiators to find interim compromises, notwithstanding his initial refusal to engage with the CCP over its territorial power-sharing demands. Mao’s talk with Chiang led to a watering down of the proposed division numbers of the CCP army. Mao’s twenty-eight-division proposal would have been a game changer in the negotiations not only because the actual impact on his forces would be negligible but also because of the advantage it would gain by propelling Chiang into reciprocating without pushing him to the extreme. In this sense, Mao’s revocation of his concession makes an interesting case in history. From a theoretical perspective, Mao must have overvalued the concession he once offered and severely undervalued what he could gain in return, because he recanted his commitment to cut the CCP armies down to twenty-eight divisions even before Chiang could reciprocate.¹⁴¹ Mao remains a forerunner of the ‘pre-emptive concession’ approach employed by the PRC negotiators decades later, which gained recognition from Kissinger.

Kissinger was one of the great American negotiators in the 1970s. His sound appreciation of the idea Mao had once advocated back in 1945 is just one example showing that the legacy of the Chongqing negotiations is more significant than previously thought. Mao botched his withdrawal of commitments in his high-level talks with Chiang, but he and Kissinger would have agreed that it is often the failed person who is the pioneer in new undertakings.

Many famous negotiators in history have been controversial, and Hurley was perhaps a leader of this class. The major interest of this chapter, however, is his approach to negotiation, not his personality. During the Chongqing peace talks, Hurley intervened when the negotiations veered off track. As a third-party mediator, he encouraged both parties to stay on, accept an interim deal and strive for breakthroughs via multiple negotiations in the hope that an all-out war could be avoided. That was basically the approach that Mao meekly agreed to in a media interview.¹⁴² Hurley was criticised by some for being too passive¹⁴³ and by others for being too opportunist.¹⁴⁴ These assessments seem to encapsulate Hurley’s problems. The American was aware from the beginning that although he had the power to induce his ally Chiang to make concessions, a hardline anti-Communist like Chiang would make concessions only out of expediency. As he could only persuade Chiang of the expediency of a peace deal with the CCP, Chiang’s trust in him was highly conditional. To broker a deal, Hurley also needed to exert strong and consistent pressure on his CCP clients, but the US government did not have the necessary means to apply such pressure effectively.¹⁴⁵ When Hurley did that, his use of high-pressure tactics ran the risk of infuriating Mao, notwithstanding that mediator pressure on disputants has been recognised as a useful way to resolve conflicts.¹⁴⁶ Hurley’s predicament explains the reason mediators often prefer incremental progress,¹⁴⁷ and seek to identify opportunity in every difficulty.

Hurley has been scrutinised, particularly for his meeting with Mao. On the basis of existing historical evidence, Hurley exerted third-party coercion when he talked to Mao. Whether Hurley overstepped his authority as a mediator will continue to be controversial. While Hurley, Mao and even Chiang struggled to manage the trust/distrust paradox in their relationships, the reality was that Mao relied on Hurley for his personal security in attending the peace conference. When the negotiations hit a deadlock, he reaped the benefits of the powerful but biased American mediator in forcing Chiang to make a concession—a daunting task he was unlikely to accomplish alone.

Mao, like Chiang, was compelled by Hurley to agree on a preliminary resolution of reducing the CCP armed forces to twenty army divisions, willingly or unwillingly. This figure was certainly lower than the twenty-eight-division plan Mao initially proposed and ultimately chose to retract, but it allowed Mao to put a positive spin on his peace efforts. ‘Kuomintang propaganda has been saying that the Communist Party is just scrambling for guns. But we have said we are ready to make concessions’, Mao declared, on a high note.¹⁴⁸ According to a CCP account, the leaders of the minor parties shifted their support to the Chinese Communists only when Mao accepted the twenty-division proposal.¹⁴⁹

When the negotiations approached closure and leaders of both parties were pursuing military solutions, negotiators sought partial solutions to their unresolved territorial conflicts. Zhang Zhizhong’s ‘administrative inspector’ solution was a thoughtful move in the way that it acknowledged the territorial claims of his opponent via a creative repurposing of his opponent’s old idea. Zhou did not give Zhang’s plan his full support, but their exchange of ideas confirmed the availability of peaceful alternatives. Wang’s emotional outburst and Zhou’s use of calculated incompetence, however, show that the emotional toll was probably too high for the parties to put their bloody past behind them and consider creative peaceful alternatives. To paraphrase Geoffrey Blainey, if the two parties rejected these alternatives, one can only assume that they preferred war.¹⁵⁰

The Double Tenth Agreement merely promoted an open-ended environment for further negotiations on territorial power-sharing disputes. Some scholars have clearly been disappointed by this. For example, Pepper characterises the treatment of the Communist Liberated Areas question in the agreement as ‘a key issue on which not even superficial agreement could be reached’.¹⁵¹ Negotiations could not remain open-ended forever; nevertheless, territorial disputes are often too messy to be resolved immediately. Elements of open-endedness in agreements give disputants and mediators breathing space to manage their competing interests cumulatively.¹⁵² Given that Chiang’s and Mao’s troops were still engaged in battle when the agreement was about to be signed, formalising the unsettled Liberated Areas problem in the accord seems to have been more practical than pursuing an early settlement.

The peace talks stumbled into their second phase on 20 October 1945, further complicated by the rapidly deteriorating military situation in North China. War is commonly launched by politicians in order to serve their political goals; however, once a war has commenced, the nature of war serves itself, and its initiators must struggle to manage it.¹⁵³ China’s military situation in late 1945 seems to confirm this view. Although urgent military issues were at the forefront and centre of the negotiations, both parties reached a consensus only on the proportional representation in the PCC. The multiparty peace forum subsequently held in 1946 would be attended by thirty-eight representatives from five different groups. They were the ruling GMD, the CCP, the anti-Communist Youth Party, the Democratic League (a coalition of major elements of the left-wing minor parties later formed an alliance with the CCP) and independent politicians.¹⁵⁴

The two parties failed to break the deadlock over military issues through negotiation. The Nationalists insisted on government troop movements into Japanese-occupied territories, but the Chinese Communists saw this as an invasion of their territories. The GMD called for an immediate withdrawal of all CCP troops from the lines of communication, but CCP representatives bluntly rejected this.¹⁵⁵ The two parties soon reached stalemate in their negotiations.¹⁵⁶ Zhou flew back to Yan’an on 25 November,¹⁵⁷ but he told the Americans that he would be back when the PCC was convened.¹⁵⁸

Chiang sent out urgent requests to Hurley for his early return,¹⁵⁹ but as chapter 4 shows, when Hurley departed for the United States on 23 September, his career in China also ended. The US diplomats soon discovered that things would not improve unless they sent someone with authority from Washington to China who could force the leaders of the two parties to agree on a cessation of hostilities.

Back in Yan’an, Mao delivered a report about the negotiations to the cadres. His private talks with Chiang were not mentioned. Rather, Mao emphasised their recent military victory in Shanxi, the combat readiness of the Liberated Areas, and communism’s rise in a global context. Mao noted the concessions they had made in the final agreement, but for him, these were designed to ‘frustrate the Kuomintang’s plot for civil war’.¹⁶⁰ Mao spared no effort to ramp up the war-like rhetoric. ‘If they [the GMD] attack and we wipe them out, they will have that satisfaction; wipe out some, some satisfaction; wipe out more, more satisfaction; wipe out the whole lot, complete satisfaction’, he asserted.¹⁶¹ The blood-drenched battlefield soon proved that Mao’s patter was no joke. Chiang, on the other hand, had maintained his personal antipathy towards Mao at a peak since the negotiations began. He could not hide his joy after learning that Mao had received an angry lecture from Wedemeyer over the involvement of CCP troops in the murder of the US intelligence officer John Birch.¹⁶² ‘Thank God, amen’, Chiang noted.¹⁶³