840.50 UNRRA/3–1745
Report by the Second Secretary of Embassy in China (Service)63
Summary: Communist leaders in Yenan are considering the establishment of a relief and rehabilitation organization for all areas under [Page 286] their control, i. e., most of occupied China. Completion of plans will probably be delayed. But if a coalition government is refused by the Central Government, the Communists will thus hope to deal directly with organs such as UNRRA to avoid the Kuomintang’s use of relief as a political weapon. End of Summary.
Preliminary steps have been taken at Yenan to establish a central body for handling relief and rehabilitation matters for all the areas now controlled by, or to be recovered from the Japanese by, the forces of the Communist liberated areas.
These areas now include practically all of occupied China outside of the Japanese occupied cities and communication lines. As the war progresses, it is likely that they will continue their recent growth and eventually take in the cities.
The present proposal is that this body will be made up of representatives of the various liberated area governments (14 in all) who are already concerned with relief and public health work in their respective areas. It would take some months for these representatives to assemble in Yenan and the organization will probably keep a skeleton, decentralized form.
Actually no definite decision on the formation of the body seems to have yet been reached. Preliminary discussions in Yenan were conducted under the chairmanship of General Chou En-lai. There is general agreement that such a general relief organization is desirable, if only to survey the relief requirements. But the urgency of other matters (the negotiations with the Kuomintang, the impending Party Congress, etc.) and the feeling that outside relief is not going to be able to reach the Communist areas on any important scale for some time to come, seems to be partly responsible for the present delay.
Another important reason, however, is the desire to await further clarification of the political situation in China. If the Kuomintang agrees to form a coalition government, such an organization will be unnecessary and its creation now might be an exacerbating factor in the negotiations between the two parties. But if the Kuomintang refuses all compromise, persisting in its present policy of instituting constitutional government through a purely Kuomintang National Congress, there will be a tendency toward separation between the two camps. The Communists expect that the Central Government will then try to use relief as a political weapon against them.
By such time, the Communists will probably have some form of separate government of the areas under their control. They will refuse the authority of the Central Government in those areas. Such a relief organization will then become the agent of that government in seeking foreign assistance and working with Allied relief organizations.
[Page 287]The problems that such a development will present to such organizations as UNRRA do not need to be spelled out. It is interesting and perhaps significant that although the various governments of the liberated areas are already in substantive control of by far the greater part of occupied China, they have not yet been contacted by either American or Chinese agents of UNRRA in any attempt to investigate and survey the relief and rehabilitation needs of those areas.
- Received in the Department about April 27.↩