Conclusion

Knowledge about negotiation is timeless. This book has demonstrated that modern negotiation literature can help us better comprehend China’s post-war struggle between peace and war. But the dialogue between the present and the past is a two-way street in the study of history. Understanding the history of past peace efforts can influence present-day conflict resolution strategies. The futile peace attempts, made between 1945 and 1947, to find a settlement that would end the Chinese Civil War encourage us to reimagine those gruelling negotiations and mediations beyond a simple binary of success and failure. Any negotiation can lose momentum, reach a deadlock or collapse. Nevertheless, principles, verbal commitments and even the most minor areas of agreement may set the foundation for future negotiations, no matter the outcome of current ones.

Scholars John L. Graham, Lynda Lawrence and William Hernández Requejo use ‘the way forward is in the rearview mirror’ as a metaphor highlighting the importance of contemporary legacies of past negotiations.¹ Three facets of negotiation were highlighted in the GMD–CCP negotiations during the civil war: (i) making concessions and pushing for a deal; (ii) the difficulties in overcoming impasses in political, military and territorial power-sharing disputes; and (iii) managing biased mediators. These became shared knowledge for the many negotiators that followed, explaining why it was imperative for the PRC interlocutors to have access to archival negotiation records when preparing for meetings with their counterparts after 1949.²

The Americans’ quest for an effective mediation strategy to end the Chinese Civil War within the framework of the US–GMD alliance is a major theme of this book. While the American lead mediators attempted to influence the GMD–CCP peace talk outcomes, they took various measures to ensure that their mediation efforts were accepted by all parties involved in the civil war, and not only their Nationalist allies. The measures included ensuring the CCP negotiators’ safety, adopting unanimous approval as the consent threshold in the tripartite truce supervision system and issuing public statements calling for the two warring parties to reach a settlement. None of these measures, however, had more chance of success than talks at the table; from here, the American mediators could convince the two opposing sides that they were offering impartial, rational advice and facilitating a mutually beneficial and integrative agreement.

Hurley’s discussion with Mao regarding the CCP’s commitment to reduce the size of its armed forces, albeit unpleasant, was crucial to the outcome of the Chongqing peace talks. While both belligerent parties were seeking an agreement to end the Mao–Chiang summit, it was Hurley’s direct talks with Mao that leveraged into the latter’s concession. Marshall did not conceal his biased mediation stance when he proposed Nationalist troop movement in Manchuria as a key term of the January ceasefire. Marshall’s truce proposal convinced his ally Chiang, but it was Marshall’s participation in the mediation meetings that helped the Chinese Communists determine that the ambiguous ceasefire agreement met their own need for free troop movement in Manchuria. In other words, this rare intersection of interests between the two parties—the key to the CCP’s conditional acceptance of the Marshall truce—was becoming manifest at the bargaining table.

Marshall attempted to use American aid to generate more influence on both sides ‘behind the table’—this was not as successful as his ‘at-the-table’ approach. His plan to offer military assistance to the CCP in the name of training programs was abandoned after Chiang’s protests. Marshall departed for Washington in March 1946 to organise a substantial loan to the GMD, as this book discusses. Once Marshall left the negotiating table, he was unable to manage the pace of negotiations and made timely modifications against initial offers, as he had done so skilfully in the January truce.

When Marshall returned, the military situation in Manchuria had deteriorated to a point that compromised both his mediation position and ceasefire implementation mechanism. The arms embargo that Marshall imposed to curtail Chiang’s military ambition can be seen as an overuse of a ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach in peace mediation: Chiang refused to soften his tough negotiation stance even though the embargo damaged his forces. The Americans were forced to end the embargo as it punished only their GMD ally. This policy reversal, and Marshall’s futile attempt to offer military aid to the CCP, substantiated the argument that material strength can be a powerful leverage for mediators to increase the likelihood of success, but it is not always beneficial.³

The American mediators’ attempt to achieve peace in post-war China further demonstrates that resolving conflicts with all parties involved in a negotiation remains the most effective way to achieve positive outcomes in conflict resolution. This is perhaps the rationale behind Marshall and Stuart’s motivation to rekindle the Committee of Three meeting through talking to each party separately and calling for informal tripartite meetings, even when hopes for peace were almost dashed by the continued escalation of fighting. The Americans’ attempts to mediate a peaceful settlement of the Chinese Civil War failed in 1947, but their belief in achieving outcomes at the bargaining table, while acknowledging behind-the-table options, has influenced the strategies of generations of American negotiators, including Henry Kissinger and, more lately, Donald Trump.⁴

Chiang Kai-shek was a risk taker. At times, his risk-taking behaviour converged with some of his more innovative ideas on Nationalist appeasement with the Soviets over Manchuria, as this book illustrates. Chiang was well known for having a conservative leadership that included elements of nationalism, sovereignty and legality, and it was these that restricted him from taking a more robust approach to Soviet and CCP activities in north-east China. This profoundly affected the GMD’s effort in the civil war, as it was incapable of winning the war by military means alone against the CCP armies’ rapid force concentration and dispersal.⁵

While the nation-wide civil war raged, the situation on the Manchurian battlefield changed with amazing rapidity. The CCP continued its domination of the major shipping routes from Shandong Peninsula to the Liaodong Gulf. In mid-1946, the GMD leaders planned air strikes against the commandeered small craft ferrying CCP combatants to Manchuria. The Americans, concerned about the safety of US Navy vessels, rejected this plan.⁶ The GMD armies then tried to establish a quarantine line cutting through the southernmost tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, in order to seal off the CCP penetration by taking the considerable risk of mistargeting the Soviet garrison in the Lüshun–Dalian zone. With Soviet support, the resilient CCP fighters continued to hinder the GMD’s efforts to stop them bringing in troop reinforcements.⁷ In April 1947, the CCP was capable of sending combatants from the Shandong Peninsula to debarkation ports in the Liaodong Peninsula via a huge flotilla of more than a hundred yachts.⁸ The fast-improving CCP sealift capabilities indicated that the tide of the civil war had turned in its favour. Manchuria soon became the main CCP base for the counteroffensive against the GMD.⁹

After suffering a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the CCP, the GMD armies retreated into a few large Manchurian cities, where they were isolated and surrounded by CCP forces by the end of 1947.¹⁰ The quagmire the Nationalists faced in Manchuria came with huge financial costs. The Nationalists had to grapple with the logistic nightmare of transporting a massive amount of rice monthly from China proper to feed its armies in the north-east.¹¹ The Manchurian railway network also inflicted heavy financial losses on the GMD government. As sections of railway close to the northern border were in CCP hands, GMD–Soviet cross-border trade was virtually non-existent. Manchurian railways lost 2.5 billion CCNE per month by the end of 1946,¹² or a loss of 26 million CCNE per day, according to a source obtained by the Americans in early 1946.¹³ This is a far cry from what was intended. Given that agreements of joint ownership and operation of the Chinese Changchun Railway in the Sino-Soviet treaty had fallen apart after the Soviets withdrew, Moscow was justified in not meeting its treaty commitment to share such losses with the GMD.¹⁴ Zhang Jia’ao correctly observed, at the end of 1946, that the GMD’s unsustainable military spending and economic losses in Manchuria would invariably trigger a currency downfall.¹⁵ As is known, a sharp devaluation of currency in China in 1948 ultimately sank the nation into a total economic collapse in 1948 and 1949.¹⁶

While the prospect of the civil war looked grim to the GMD, its dispute with the Soviets over Dalian continued to unleash animosity. The Soviets allowed the Nationalists to send only a limited number of police to take over the city’s local government.¹⁷ The Nationalists, however, were not interested in any takeover without the presence of a strong GMD armed force. In mid-1947, the Nationalists acknowledged that it was not in their best interests to resume the exercise of sovereignty over Dalian. This was because the administrative takeover could not stop CCP forces from entering Manchuria. Besides, Dalian was no longer the perfect entry port to Manchuria for GMD troops, as some vital port equipment had already been removed by the Soviet forces.¹⁸ In August 1947, the GMD government unilaterally declared the closure of Dalian’s port to all foreign ships. Given that the GMD had no control over the area where this injunction had been introduced, the declaration was merely provocative political rhetoric that yielded little gain.¹⁹ The Soviets rebuffed the GMD’s unilateral act through an assertive communiqué in which they severely critiqued the GMD government’s delay in implementing the agreement concerning Dalian.²⁰

The GMD–Soviet dispute over Dalian finally faded when both sides severed diplomatic relations in 1949, after the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in the wake of its defeat in the civil war.²¹ However, resentment between the two governments lingered. In 1952, after a nearly three-year diplomatic campaign in the United Nations,²² the GMD government succeeded in pushing the United States to pass a General Assembly resolution. This concluded that the Soviet Union had ‘failed to carry out’ the Sino-Soviet treaty.²³ In the aftermath of the GMD’s diplomatic success, Chiang Kai-shek signed off on a presidential directive abolishing the Sino-Soviet treaty.²⁴ The GMD-controlled Taiwanese media declared a victory for national dignity and the moral foundation of anti-imperialism,²⁵ making it an astonishing feat for Chiang’s pro-Western regime at the height of the Korean War.

In November 1946, the United States signed the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation with the GMD government. This treaty essentially granted the US free access to Chinese markets and opened most Chinese ports to US merchant vessels.²⁶ US businesses, however, struggled to enter the Manchurian market even after Soviet troop withdrawal. Historical documents show that unspecified large US companies had tried to import bristles and perilla oil from Manchuria in 1946, but no Chinese exporter accepted the orders, simply because the risk of doing business in the war zone was too high.²⁷

Taking advantage of the GMD’s foreign policy mishap, the CCP worked to establish economic ties with the USSR. In 1946–47, the Soviet Union was experiencing a devastating famine and urgently needed food imports.²⁸ CCP leaders quickly seized the opportunity by offering exports of Manchurian agricultural products to the Soviet Union. The two parties finally struck a barter deal by the end of 1946 for exports of Manchurian grains to the USSR.²⁹ Once started, the CCP–Soviet cross-border trade in Manchuria gathered pace quickly, as grain exports to the Soviet Union increased to 8 per cent of the total grown in CCP-ruled areas in 1947.³⁰ In exchange, the Soviets offered consumer goods such as salt and fabrics to the CCP; later, Lin Biao’s Manchurian field forces started to obtain Soviet-made trucks (e.g. the GAZ-AA 1.5 tonne light truck). These Soviet military vehicles played a key role in making Lin’s armies the most mobile CCP forces during the Chinese Civil War.³¹ The close economic ties justified the favourable reports of the CCP-controlled media in Dalian about the Soviets, despite atrocities committed by the Red Army (e.g. theft and rape) against the local population.³² From 1947/48 onwards, the Soviet Union became the largest trading partner of the CCP regime, ushering in a new era of Sino-Soviet economic relations.³³

Despite the various setbacks, Chiang Kai-shek remained motivated. After the opening of the National Assembly in late 1946, the office of the assembly’s secretariat hosted an opera to welcome delegates. This featured the maestro of Beijing Opera, Mei Lanfang. Jiang Yuntian attended the opera as one of the delegates who had defied the CCP’s boycott calls. Upon arrival, he was ushered to a premium seat where he met Chiang, who was quite upbeat. Chiang felt that the passing of the constitution in the assembly he controlled would help the CCP realise its lofty socialist goal. Chiang asked: ‘Well, why wouldn’t they agree?’ Jiang did not give Chiang any accolades. He insinuated that the Nationalist one-party rule was the barrier to democratic peace. The conversation ended with a displeased Chiang departing the opera prematurely. Jiang regretted his inability to communicate his despair about the death of peace in China more effectively to Chiang.³⁴ There was no immediate cure for Jiang’s sadness, because he was one of the peacemakers from the minor parties who had been forced to pick a side in the civil war they had once tried desperately to avert. No one can win a peace that someone else has lost.