Restless Empire (42 page)

The attack across the line that divided the two Korean regimes took place in the evening of 25 June 1950. Soldiers of the Korean Communist army rapidly moved south. With the Soviets boycotting the UN Security Council, President Truman immediately got a resolution through authorizing the use of force to support South Korea. But there was little that at first could be done to stop Kim Il-sung’s offensive. By August the remaining Korean anti-Communist forces and their US advisers were hemmed into a small area around the southeastern coastal city of Pusan, with the rest of the country in Communist hands. But on 15 September, US amphibious landings at Seoul’s port city of Inchon broke the Korean Communist offensive by splitting their forward divisions in two halves and then defeating them in the south before moving north into what had been the Soviet occupation zone. Pyongyang, the capital of Kim Il-sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), fell to US and allied UN troops on 19 October. Mao’s regime suddenly had a serious problem on its hands.

Under intense pressure from the Soviets and the Korean Communists, the leadership of the CCP deliberated for more than a week about how to act. Chinese troops had already been moved to the border with Korea after the war broke out and were ready to intervene. But Mao had a political problem. Most Chinese wanted peace after almost fifteen years of war. Even the majority among Mao’s colleagues on the ruling body of the Communist Party, the Politburo, were at first against intervention. Lin Biao, the civil war hero whom Mao had in mind to lead the Chinese troops, was so much against the prospect of another war, this time with the most powerful military machine in the world, that he refused to take up the post and and left Beijing. But Mao had made up his mind even before the US northward offensive began. As the US troops marched toward the Chinese border, the Chairman saw the situation in black and white: “We have to enter the war,” he told his colleagues. “To enter the war will be very rewarding; not to enter the war will be extremely harmful.”
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Mao wanted to show solidarity with the Korean Communists and thereby solidify China’s standing within the world movement. He also believed that it was important both for the domestic and regional policies of his new regime that China be seen as willing to fight its enemies. It was not the fear of a US attack on his own country that helped Mao convince his colleagues: He won the day in the Politburo in the name of international solidarity, national pride, and his own position as China’s leader.

The Korean War at first went well for the PRC in military terms. With some of their troops already in position on the south bank of the Yalu river, they had a strategic advantage over the Americans. The UN soldiers were unprepared for the wave after wave of Chinese Communist troops who came against them and were soon driven back to the former demarcation line between the two Korean regimes. But inside China the domestic consequences of the war were dire. War-weary PLA soldiers—some of whom had walked all the way from Manchuria to South China—were transported back to the north to fight in an unpopular
war abroad. The United States Navy, meanwhile, intervened as soon as the war broke out to shelter the remnants of the GMD regime on Taiwan, postponing indefinitely a reunification that most Chinese had thought was imminent. The country’s economy was redirected toward war, and few of the benefits that people had expected to come from the end of domestic strife materialized. For the CCP the war meant that socialism in China was born in even more poverty than what the party had expected. But the results of the conflict in Korea—a messy stalemate that basically confirmed the status quo ante—brought distinct benefits for the Communists as well. They were able to show that new China could stand up to the mightiest country on earth and hold it to a draw, which was a boon for their nationalist credentials. They firmed up their alliance with the Soviets, in spite of occasional complaints about Moscow’s limitations in its wartime assistance to the PRC and the DPRK. But most importantly the war against the United Nations forces helped the party leaders do something they had long craved: destroy that wish to be part of a wider world that many Chinese cherished.

W
HEN IT CAME TO POWER
, the CCP represented a form of government that China had never seen before. The party was disciplined, inward-looking, and directed by a charismatic leader. It did not allow for any reference points outside the party and feared and resented any outside influence on its policies, domestic or foreign. The party had constructed a pseudo-Marxist version of Chinese history in which everything in the past inevitably led to the assumption of power by the CCP: All that had happened in China and to China since the Qing’s first trouble with foreigners in the 1830s was a preparation for Communist rule, and the new regime was the logical consequence of, as Chairman Mao put it, the Chinese people having stood up. The concept of liberation was (and is) central to this version of Chinese history: The Communists had liberated China from foreign rule and its domestic supporters. Of course, China had been ruled by a nationalist, and
at times xenophobic, government under Chiang Kai-shek for more than twenty years and many Chinese wanted to be associated with foreign teachers, partners, or lovers. But the new regime set out to destroy China’s links with the rest of the world in a comprehensive and deliberate manner, believing that its rule would never be safe as long as any major foreign influence, outside the party’s Soviet links, remained in China.

The CCP’s first step was to get rid of foreigners who remained in China. At first, this seemed an easy task for the party. So many had already left during the civil war. Those associated with business and trade would soon leave of their own accord, because the new government would not give them any chance to operate with a profit in new China. In terms of numbers the CCP turned out to be right: The vast majority of foreigners left China voluntarily or were easily deported in 1950–1951. The problem was usually with foreigners who had lived in China for most of their lives and were running hospitals or schools. In order to drive these out, the CCP had to resort to political pressure on their Chinese associates, colleagues, or friends, and have them publicly attack their foreign acquaintances as “running dogs of imperialism” or “bloodsuckers of the Chinese people.” Even after such campaigns a minority of long-term foreign residents in China, mostly missionaries, chose to stay.

The second step was to attack the businesses or organizations with which foreigners were directly associated. The CCP government levied large fines on businesses that had part foreign ownership until the foreign ownership ended. In some cases foreign-owned enterprises were confiscated outright or accused of wartime collaboration with the Japanese and seized. Such accusations were particularly resented by foreigners who had spent years in Japanese prison camps and chose to remain in China after the war. Foreign-influenced aid organizations were more difficult to target. The YMCA, for instance, was kept on in light disguise as a state institution after the foreigners and Christians
who were involved in running it were driven out. In other institutions, doctors, teachers, and missionaries were accused of financial irregularities, sexual deviation, or espionage to whip up campaigns against them so they could more easily be expelled. The CCP urged its cadre to try to alienate foreigners and the Chinese who worked with or associated with them, so that these Chinese, who often had important expertise, could more easily be brought to work for the government after the foreigners had been got rid of.
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The third step in Communist antiforeign campaigns involved attempts to limit access to foreign books, films, and products. This activity proved much more difficult than getting rid of the foreigners, to the point that party activists in several cities were close to despair even after the nationalist argument could be fully brought to bear during the Korean War. Purging unwanted foreign books from libraries and bookshops was not particularly difficult, although it had to be carried out at night to prevent curious onlookers. The problem was that texts the CCP wanted to get rid of had a tendency to reappear in bookstalls and secondhand shops. Living without American movies turned out to be hard, especially for city youngsters, who went to great lengths to save illegal copies and show them privately. Though some girls reveled in dressing in Mao uniforms as a symbol of joining the cause, those who had had access to imported stockings, perfume, or lipstick seemed to miss these products to the point of being willing to buy them from various smuggling operations. But with book imports censored, publishing houses, record companies, and film studios taken over by the government, and lipstick smugglers publicly executed, the CCP gradually got things under control.

The antiforeign campaign’s fourth step was the use of terror and imprisonment. Some foreigners who refused to leave were arrested, and some spent years in labor camps. Chinese who refused to reform their behavior or views, or who thought that China’s self-imposed isolation was idiotic or criminal, or who simply had foreign links or
foreign education, were “struggled against” in public sessions, where they were accused by their fellow citizens, beaten up, and sent to prison or to the camps. The party wanted to set an example through such people, by forcing them to conduct self-criticisms and recant their foreign ways. In some cases, even with serial offenders, the party wanted to retrain them so that they would become good citizens of the PRC, serving the people. The worst offenders—for instance, a young man who read aloud in English from the American Declaration of Independence, or a young woman who wondered when the CCP would allow multiparty elections—were executed.

The reason why these antiforeign campaigns succeeded was not just the combination of terror, nationalism, and the burden of history. It was first and foremost because the new regime organized the lives of Chinese citizens in ways that had never been seen before. Through neighborhood committees and informants the state found its way into all parts of life, even inside families and close friendships. Regions of the country that had not seen much central state presence for a hundred years found themselves regimented along the same lines as everywhere else. And there is little doubt that the CCP was carried forward by the enthusiasm of the great majority of Chinese for the reconstitution of the state and for the social reforms that were carried out. The regime did much to improve the position of women, by abolishing arranged marriages and the economic or sexual exploitation of young girls. Factory workers got set working hours and increases in pay. Peasants could break free of generations of abuse by landlords. Campaigns against opium use and prostitution were widely hailed, also outside China, and the CCP’s literacy campaigns, modeled on the Soviet experience, were the most successful the world had ever seen. It did not matter much, most people thought, that jazz records or jazz musicians disappeared, or that the regime—to better coordinate its campaigns—set all of the country on the same time zone (Beijing Time), forcing farmers in the far west to get out of bed at two a.m. to start their day. It was all to create
a new China, modeled on the Soviet Union, of “cleaning house before entertaining guests,” as Mao Zedong put it.

Soviet advisers who served in China during the 1950s have often described the PRC approach to Moscow as “schizophrenic,” meaning, presumably, incoherent and delusional. Though this is a grossly exaggerated critique of an alliance that worked well for more than ten years, there is something to the Soviet criticism. The Chinese Communists wanted Soviet aid and wanted to copy Soviet models. But they were afraid of any Soviet influence within the Chinese Communist Party itself and therefore wanted to prevent, for instance, unsanctioned personal contacts between Soviets and Chinese in China. The CCP’s problems with wanting to copy the Soviet Union while wanting to screen itself off from Soviet influence were compounded by the fact that the party was split on how direct and immediate the lessons from the Soviets could be. From the very beginning of the PRC, leaders like Liu Shaoqi (Mao’s second in command in the party) and Zhou Enlai (the Chinese prime minister), as well as planners and specialists who had worked with the Soviets in Manchuria or been trained in Moscow, saw the Soviet Union as the China of tomorrow. Chairman Mao, on the other hand, and some of his old comrades in the military and in the party, wanted Soviet aid and Soviet examples but believed that they had to go through a process of vetting to fit the CCP’s specific intentions. While Mao spoke often and dearly about the need to make foreign constructs serve Chinese purposes what he really was afraid of was Soviet control of his party’s political processes.

In spite of the CCP leaders’ dissonant views about their relations with the Soviet Union, there is no doubt that they wanted and needed Soviet aid. Nor is there any doubt about the genuine admiration the Chinese Communists showed for Soviet military achievements, political organization, and technology. The key was Soviet modernity. The cadre who visited or read about the Soviet Union saw in it a state that was modern and strong but not imperialist and therefore not inimical to
China. People who had criticized Western modernity in its capitalist form, as seen for instance in Shanghai, but who still found the technologies, products, and culture of advanced capitalism alluring, could in the Soviet experience find a modernity to be proud of. The terrible human cost of Stalin’s socialism—the targeted hunger campaigns, the mass killings, the labor camps—members of the CCP wrote off as imperialist lies, or, at the worst, the necessary price to pay for human progress. By the late 1940s, to most members of the Chinese party, it was not the real Soviet Union that mattered as much as an idealized image of it, a kind of future China, prosperous, strong, and just.