IT Is not everyone who can land in a foreign country without a passport. I do not mean to say there is anything to boast about in the accomplishment, but at least it is indicative of conditions in the Far East that I landed in China, not once, but twice without being asked to show my American passport.

　　The first time, in 1933, I did not have one. I was then an Able-Bodied Seaman on the "President Johnson," an ancient hulk of a ship, built in 1904, with wooden decks that leaked. I had ten cents in my pocket, but being then just twenty-three and of a romantic nature, I jumped ship in Hongkong determined to see the Orient. I planned to stay two weeks, but learning to like the country, remained nine years.

　　The second time, I really had a passport, but I never used it. We had anchored off Tangku, dirty port of entry for Tientsin after a miserable forty-two-day trip across the Pacific. It was December 1946, and the Chinese dollar, like the temperature, was falling fast, so that the ordinary civilian was not only cold, but hungry, being unable to exchange worthless paper money for either fuel or food. We were not surprised then when a suave customs official, having boarded us from a launch and having announced that he could not possibly take us ashore, as it was against regulations, confided in the same breath that he was the father of many children and was loath to see them starve. His story was long, but lacking in the customary Chinese nuances, so that we quickly grasped his point. When he saw we understood him well, his manner underwent a change and he brusquely demanded from me a leather jacket (whichhe did not get). He also demanded two hundred American dollars and a gold wrist watch (which he did get) from one of our passengers who had a trunkful of dyes that he valued at one thousand dollars (though I believe they were actually worth fifteen thousand on the dye-short Tientsin market). Then this father of seven, forgetting his customs regulations unceremoniously, dumped us ashore in an empty North China field where neither we nor he would be inconvenienced by any customs or immigration formalities.

　　That, without any exaggeration, was exactly how I returned to China, after a four-year absence; and that was the first indication I had that the officials of Chiang Kai-shek were still the same old masters of the art of squeeze that they always had been.

　　Fortunately for us, some American troops bivouacked in the area pitied our condition and took us off to their headquarters in Tangku. There was, if I remember rightly, a company of them guarding a dump of ammunition that was scattered in the fields in the heart of Communist militia country. The soldiers were homesick and disgusted, believing they were being made the suckers for an American policy of which they did not approve. Evidence that their fears were not entirely groundless can be gleaned from the fact that several months later, when they were about to leave China, Communist militia, believing the ammunition was to be handed over to Chiang Kai-shek, attacked the dump, wounding several GIs. American authorities, highly insulted, announced that since the militia had been so premature, the ammunition would not be dumped in the sea, as planned, but would be given to Chiang Kai-shek. This way of spanking the Communists fooled nobody, as nearly everyone was of the opinion that the Americans would have given the ammunition to the generalissimo anyway.

　　Leaving the homesick Americans at Tangku, I passed through Tientsin to Peiping, entering the crenelated battlements of the Tartar City on the last day of 1946. I had last seen Peiping under Japanese occupation and had left the city in 1939 in company with Colonel Joseph W. Stilwell and his family. Stilwell was then on his way home to report to G-2 with whom he was at loggerheads for their refusal to put much credence in his reports about the rising menace of Japan and the need to give the Chinese help.

　　That was all long ago, and I only mention it because in 1945, just after the surrender of Japan, when he was still in Okinawa, General Stilwell requested permission of China to pay a last visit to Peiping, but Chiang Kai-shek, making much of an old feud, denied him entrance, so that Stilwell returned home and shortly thereafter died without ever having had the opportunity of seeing again the city he so much loved.

　　Had he been able to come back with me now, he would have found Peiping in outward appearance little changed. Under the cold and sparkling North China sky, the former capital still glittered with all its old fascination and wonder, and in many imperial parks gaily dressed boys and girls skated on frozen moats so that it was impossible to believe in the China of grinding poverty, civil war and revolution beyond the curving palace roofs. Already, many Old China Hands had returned to the hutungs and, picking up the threads of their former lives, had immolated themselves in quiet gardens, living once again the old lazy life, seemingly quite unaware of the historic drama that was being played in the blood-stained fields of China beyond the city's insulating walls.

　　In 1936, I had seen ten thousand of these students, defiant of the gendarmes' clubbings, parade through the Tartar City shouting in a mighty chorus: "Resist Japan! Reject the demands of Japanese imperialism for the separation of North China." Now, at the end of 1946, beneath these same ancient walls, I was to see another generation of students, undoubtedly the political and spiritual descendants of the first, raise once again the old nationalistic banners and go marching through the streets, but this time they shouted: "GI go home! We are free now. Down with American imperialism!"

　　The remarkable thing about these two demonstrations was not that they were both made by Peiping students, not that they were both against foreign countries, but that they were both made in defiance of the wishes of the Chiang Kai-shek government. Ten years - two generations of students - and yet both were proclaiming the freedom of the nation in opposition to its leader! There was a lesson here for anyone who had the eyes to read it.

　　One did not have to be an international spy to discover that many Chinese intellectuals in Peiping, outside of government circles, believed that America was primarily responsible for the continuance of the civil war in China because she was arming Chiang Kai-shek. Nor did one have to be a prophet to conclude that the longer American troops stayed on Chinese soil the easier would it be for the Communists to sell their propaganda line to the people that Chiang Kai-shek had become a tool of the United States.

　　Because of these and many other factors, the whole American effort to bring about a truce in China's civil war was then crumbling rapidly, and no one seemed to know what to do about it - least of all the American officers of the Executive Headquarters in Peiping. These officers had set up shop in the Rockefeller-founded Peiping Union Medical College and gone to work with such a feverish energy that admiring Chinese scholars soon nicknamed Executive Headquarters the Palace of Ten Thousand Sleeping Colonels.

　　Whether the colonels slept or not is somewhat immaterial, for by early 1947 the so-called truce in China's civil war had become little more than a ghastly legend. And while Communist representatives were hobnobbing with Chiang Kai-shek's officials in Nanking, Shanghai and Peiping, the soldiers of both sides were ripping one another apart on the fields of Manchuria and North China.

　　"At the top they drink toasts to one another, but here we plunge the white sword in and drag the red sword out." So went an ancient Chinese saying. Probably it characterized the situation in China in January 1947 better than anything else.

　　The tragic irony of this farce was not entirely lost on the head of the American truce mission, George Marshall, and in the middle of January 1947, he admitted failure, packed up and went home, leaving behind him a bitter statement which, in effect, said: "a pox on both your camps."

　　After Marshall's statement, no clairvoyance was needed to see that China's already full-fledged civil war would become an all-out conflict for control of the Asiatic continent. Because the routes might be closed at any moment, I decided to go immediately into the Liberated Areas.(1)