Authors: Odd Westad
While improving the conditions for national minorities, the CCP leaders insisted that the new China was to be a unitary, not a federal state. Their entire political genesis dictated that aim: The CCP had been born as a reaction against imperialist designs to break up China. The party leaders firmly believed that with the right kind of policy everyone who lived within Chinese territory could be made to feel and think Chinese, as part of a Chinese socialist state. The resistance and distrust the party was met with as it tried to penetrate regions that in effect had been self-governing for more than two generations—Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and parts of the Southwest—convinced CCP leaders even further that Soviet advice was urgently needed. The Chinese party had to get the theory right, and found—rightly to some extent—that Marxism possessed a reservoir of thinking on nationalities issues that could be relevant to China’s concerns. Winning the minorities for socialism while curbing Han chauvinism and the majority’s lack of sensitivity toward the national needs of “less developed peoples”—these were the tasks the CCP leaders proclaimed as keys to creating a new China.
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The Soviet advisers who came to China in December 1949 did not expect much understanding from the Chinese side of the “advanced principles of Marxism” in handling national minorities. Because many of the most important minority groups—Mongols, Koreans, and the peoples of the northwest—lived in the Sino-Soviet borderlands, some of these Soviet experts had observed Chinese relations with the minorities first hand before coming to the PRC, and their experiences prepared them for the worst. Soviet experts often misinterpreted Chinese eagerness to learn as ignorance. Meanwhile, the Chinese suspected that the Soviets wanted to maintain their influence among China’s minority peoples even after the PRC had been set up. But overall the Chinese leaders viewed the Soviet Union as holding the solution to one of China’s major problems and insisted that CCP cadre should learn from Soviet advisers and extensively study Marxist literature on the topic.
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Both Chinese Communists and Soviets were driven by a desire to categorize and label, to count and register, alongside the mission to civilize and transform. Each minority had to be discovered again. The ways that ethnicity had been seen in the past were not suited for a socialist state. The debates in the 1950s on which groups should have the status of recognized minorities on a national scale were fierce and deeply ideological, centering on what constituted a “people” in socialist terms. The debate was even more heated because all sides appealed directly to the views expressed by Stalin in his 1913
Marxism and the National Question
. The CCP’s own past visions of China’s different minorities also played a major role in the policies it recommended. The Communist relationship with Tibetans and Muslims had not been easy in the 1930s and 1940s. Many Communists saw the traditional leaders of the communities as sworn enemies of their political project. Their preferred policy, supported by Chinese ethnographers, was to carry out revolutions
within
these groups, through locating and empowering their oppressed peasants, landless workers, and slaves. Soviet advisers generally agreed with this policy, but urged caution and stressed the need for long-term planning in carrying it out. There were clashes early on, in 1951 and 1952, in which Chinese leaders—including quite a few with at least some experience in working in minority areas—argued that the Soviets themselves had not shown much caution in carrying out revolution within minority areas in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviets, on their side, suspected some of the Chinese Communists of being Han chauvinists, who wanted to subsume all minorities within a greater Han Chinese people.
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Preexisting links between the Soviets and some of the groups on China’s border complicated the encounter between Soviet and Chinese nationalities policies. The Chinese political leaders at the center were from the very beginning of their rule torn between the perceived need to learn from Soviet political and academic theory on these thorny questions and the desire to advance Chinese, and not Soviet, predominance
inside China’s borders. Reading through the top-level conversations on nationalities’ questions, I have the sense that the Chinese interlocutors often consciously replaced examples from minorities along the Soviet border with those from minorities of the interior (or other borders, such as the Tibetans) when discussing policy with the Soviets. But while sometimes embarrassing to both sides—and often inconvenient—the Soviets in China understood CCP sensitivities with regard to the border issues and underlined their desire to help the Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Mongols living in China find their place within the new Chinese community of peoples.
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Sometimes these policies could have unintended consequences. The CCP’s insistence on “re-cataloguing” its inventory of ethnic groups after their long period of relative autonomy in the early twentieth century made for surprising results in the 1950s. In the great counting of peoples, local agency sometimes combined with the intricacies of Stalinist theory to give opportunities for assertion to groups that had never had such opportunities before. Even though the breakdown into fifty-six nationalities that resulted was haphazard and, in some cases, a mere product of decisions made in Beijing rather than regionally, it still meant that some groups that had never had their own institutions recognized suddenly found themselves as one of China’s peoples, with representation all the way up to the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. Communist political repression could hit at anyone within China’s borders, but recognition as a separate nationality gave some degree of protection from the most vicious aspects of PRC political campaigns, at least up to the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966.
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T
HE
CCP’
S VIEW OF THE OUTSIDE
world was formed by that of the Soviet Union in its Stalinist phase. The party members felt a deep sense of insult at the exploitation of China by the Europeans, Americans, and Japanese. To this negative mix was added the experience of
the Korean and Indochina wars, which lent a strong feeling of living in a dangerous neighborhood and of being on the frontline in assisting other Communist parties liberate their countries. At the center of the threats against China, according to the CCP, stood the United States. Given US support for the PRC’s Guomindang enemies both before and after their flight to Taiwan and the bloody warfare against the United States in the Korean War, this enmity should come as no surprise. But if one considers the contribution of the United States to China’s development in the prewar era and the crucial support it had given during the war against Japan, the absolute priority put on American villainy may seem remarkable. Two major factors in this animus were the centrality the Soviets gave to the United States as its enemy and the problems the CCP had with rooting out the admiration and curiosity many urban Chinese had for things American.
The Chinese Communists saw themselves as being at the forefront of a global battle against imperialism and capitalism, in an alliance of Communist parties led by the Soviet Union. Even if the party leaders feared any outside influence within their own party, they were eager to find their place as the closest brother-in-arms of the Soviets on the global scene and as the main socialist country in Asia. Mao and his lieutenants welcomed the thaw in international relations that Stalin’s successors initiated toward the West, because they viewed it as a welcome respite after many years of war. The Chinese and the Soviets both supported the partition of Vietnam and acted together to prevent Kim Il-sung from planning a new war on the Korean peninsula. For the Chinese these were temporary necessities in an ongoing conflict with the United States and the West. The close coordination with the Soviets also helped promote China as the most respected of the Soviet Union’s allies, appealing both to CCP nationalist sentiment and to Mao’s ego.
The CCP had supported Ho Chi Minh’s Communist-led Vietminh movement in their battles against a French reoccupation of Indochina since 1945. Throughout the postwar period Mao had emphasized to
Stalin that Vietnam (and not, for instance, Korea) was the CCP’s foreign strategic priority. After 1949, supporting the Vietminh was given higher priority than even preparing for the takeover of Taiwan. The reasons were obvious. In Vietnam, the Communists stood a real chance of winning, in which case the group that was closer to the CCP than any other foreign Communist party would come to power. PRC support for the Vietminh was stepped up during the Korean War, with Chinese military advisers filling key positions in the Vietnamese forces up to and during the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. During the battle itself, in which the Vietminh routed the French, Mao sent off strategic advice to General Vo Nguyen Giap as he would have done to his own generals in the field in Korea. When the peace arrangements for Indochina were agreed to at Geneva, the PRC was a proud participant at the conference. The Chinese agreed with the Soviets that some form of temporary division line was necessary to secure peace in the region. They helped push the reluctant Vietnamese to accept a settlement. Zhou Enlai told Ho that it would be wise to cease hostilities with the French and consolidate control now, and look to extend the Communist zone later. Referring to left-wing French premier Pierre Mendès-France, Zhou said to Ho, “We should do our best to support the Mendès government, so that we can prevent the warlike elements in France from overthrowing [it].”
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The same moderate attitude informed China’s approach to other Third World countries. Guided by the USSR’s new emphasis on peaceful coexistence as a means of winning postcolonial regimes as allies in the struggle against the West, China signed on to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, basically committing to equality of nations and noninterference in international affairs. China attended the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations in 1955, praising the principles of nonalignment (from the West, of course, not from the Soviet Union). Secret Sino-Soviet foreign policy planning emphasized that one should support nationalist Third World regimes such as Nehru’s in India, Sukarno’s in Indonesia, and
U Nu’s in Burma, while preparing the Communist parties of such countries to take power. Moderation, the way Mao understood it, was a tactical tool while readying the world for revolution.
The PRC had another reason for a moderate approach to the West in the mid-1950s. Mao and Zhou Enlai hoped that the United States would give up its protection of Taiwan, either because they tired of Chiang Kai-shek or as a result of a grand compromise with the Soviet Union. In 1954, however, the PRC shelled the GMD-held islands next to the Chinese mainland coast, Jinmen and Mazu (Quemoy and Matsu), to remind the Americans that it had not given up on recovering the Chinese islands that were still outside its control.
T
HE RELATIONSHIP OF THE
PRC to the outside world cannot be understood without mention of the seemingly endless series of campaigns the Communist leaders invented for their fellow citizens. In the end, the biggest campaign, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, would almost consume the Communist Party itself. But up to then the victims were real or imagined enemies of the regime, or party members who were suspected of thinking differently. The campaigns, patterned on Stalin’s policies of the 1930s, created a sense of constant crisis and combat, which helped radicalize politics within the CCP. These policies also helped create a society where all kinds of foreign associations were dangerous. For example, in 1958 a seventeen-year-old girl was sent to the labor camps for telling a friend that “shoe polish made in the United States is really good.” The accusation against her was “worshipping and having blind faith in foreign imperialist things.”
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As soon as it gained power, the party set out to erase all real or potential opposition to its rule. Its ruthlessness in doing so far outdid anything seen in China since the early and mid-Qing campaigns against its enemies. For the Qing, the enemies deemed ripe for extermination were mostly groups they defined as non-Chinese. For the CCP, however,
the victims were fellow Chinese, most of whom would never have lifted a chopstick against the party’s rule. Enemies were defined as those who “oppose proletarian dictatorship, attack the foreign policies of the government, and attack the movement of liquidation of the counter-revolutionaries.”
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The campaigns started as soon as victory on the battlefield was in sight in 1949 and sped up after the Korean War began. In May 1951 Liu Shaoqi explained to the party faithful that
Once the gongs and drums of resisting the United States and assisting Korea begin to make a deafening sound, the gongs and drums of the land reform and suppression of counter-revolutionaries become barely audible, and the latter becomes much easier to implement. Without the loud gongs and drums of resisting the United States and assisting Korea, those of the land reform (and counterrevolutionary campaigns) would make unbearable noise. Here a landlord is killed and there another is beaten; there would be fuss everywhere. . . . Things would then become difficult.
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The effects of the large-scale killing that took place during these early campaigns have often been underestimated in our views of China’s international policies. Far from being more lenient than the Soviet Union in the treatment of domestic enemies, as some have believed, the PRC became a throwback to the height of Stalin’s terror, with quotas set in each province for how many counterrevolutionaries should be found and shot. Mao stipulated that the target be 0.1 percent of the population, but in some provinces local Communist enthusiam for killing far exceeded this figure. “Collaboration with imperialism” headed the list of capital crimes, which also included the offense of illegal border crossing. In Guangdong province more than 10,000 people were executed in April 1951 alone. By the end of May 1951 the south central region (Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, and Guangxi provinces) had executed 200,000. It is impossible to calculate how many Chinese died or were sent to labor camps during the first five years of Communist
rule, but the Chinese historian Yang Kuisong finds that the figure was much higher than the 700,000 killed and 2.5 million arrested that Mao admitted to in 1957. A reasonable estimate is somewhere between four and five million deaths, with more than half of these being executions, for the 1949–1955 period.
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