Restless Empire (46 page)

By the late 1950s, the party’s policies began to turn ever further to the left. The population was scared into obedience to such a degree that immediate submission to the latest party directive seemed the natural order of things, even to people who had fought against oppression or imperialist control in the 1930s and 1940s. Actions taken out of fear—the denunciation of a friend, the attendance at a public execution—were often justified by nationalist pride or ideological loyalty that seemed extreme even to Soviet observers. Most Chinese—way beyond the Communist Party—
wanted
to believe in the new regime and in its plans for a rapid transformation of the country into a modern, efficient state. Even though people’s thought processes are always complicated in these kinds of situations (what accounts for more—fear, pride, or nationalism—is as hard to say in Mao’s China as it was in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union), there is no doubt that the willingness to sacrifice for the common good, a notion always strong in China, came into play among victims and perpetrators. There was in the 1950s a genuine belief that terror and extreme discipline were necessary to create a new China. Some Soviet advisers found it frightening that just as Moscow was moving out of the Stalinist mode of terror, China seemed to be moving toward it. As the surviving Soviet camp inmates were returning from Siberia, the Chinese camps started to fill up, in northern Manchuria and in the far west, in Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjing, where the camps still are. In some cases Chinese prisoners fled across the border to the Soviet Union. They were promptly sent back.

G
IVEN WHAT
M
AO’S
C
HINA
was trying to do and the methods it was willing to use, it was to be expected that foreign reaction
would be divided. In the United States, the terror, the close alliance with the Soviets, and the sense of futility and loss in the American decade-long support for China came together to construct a view of the country as the most vicious son of the depraved Communist family of nations. The US sense of unfulfilled expectations for China was particularly strong and helped feed a McCarthyist hysteria that blamed left-wing Americans for China “going Communist.” The subtext of many of these accusations, often against leading US experts on Asia, was racist. The Chinese could not possibly have decided for Communism themselves; they would have had to be pushed into accepting it by American Reds and Soviet evildoers. Many Americans feared that the Chinese, a bit like children, having accepted the Communist creed, would take it to extremes both domestically and internationally.

After a period of openness to the outside world, China was back where it had been around 1900 in terms of its foreign relations. “Red China,” the US Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Walter Robertson claimed, was “hostile, aggressive, and building up its military capabilities. . . . By every standard of national and international conduct [it was] under its present regime . . . an outlaw nation.”
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Whereas the Qing had been a failed regime that increasingly allowed its people to interact with the world, the CCP was attempting to close its people in, prevent travel and contacts, except with the Communist states, and even there under strict control. The lack of knowledge about what was really going on inside China helped fuel Western paranoia. Because it was an Asian country, which in the Western mind predisposed it to collectivism, it was seen as succeeding in implementing Communism even in areas where the Soviets had failed. It was aggressive toward the world, as shown in Korea, and was preparing aggression in Southeast Asia, a region key to Western interests, which another Asian nation, Japan, had tried and failed to dominate in the previous decade. In the longer run, when China’s power had expanded, what would prevent even the Japanese from joining up with the winning alliance in Asia?

These kinds of nightmarish visions helped prevent an effective American policy toward China in the 1950s. Instead the three administrations that followed Truman’s employed an increasingly stale approach, based in part on fear of domestic political repercussions, to their China policies: economic embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and support for the GMD on Taiwan. In a way, US policies made Mao’s job easier. The CCP leaders
wanted
to isolate China and were afraid of any foreign influence within the country. When the British Labour government tried to recognize the PRC in 1950, Mao would have nothing of it until London had closed down all of its representation on Taiwan. And when Conservative British Prime Minister Anthony Eden himself wanted to come to China to break the ice in February 1955, Mao bragged to the Soviet ambassador that “the PRC intentionally gave an answer that meant Eden would refuse to come.” When the Eisenhower administration showed a less belligerent approach to China in 1959, the Chairman immediately interpreted it as an attempt to subvert the country from the inside. Mao told his aides that US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles “wants to change a country such as ours. He wants to subvert and change us to follow his ideas. . . . Therefore, the United States is [still] attempting to be aggressive and expansionist with a much more deceptive tactic. . . . In other words, it wants to keep its order and change our system. It wants to corrupt us through peaceful evolution.”
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Race played an important role in how the outside world viewed new China, and in how China viewed the world. The American leaders (and the Europeans to a lesser extent) were concerned that China as a nonwhite country stood a better chance than European Communists in seducing and subverting countries in Asia and Africa that were emerging from colonialism. In a mirror image, the Soviets, from Stalin on, thought that the Chinese could and should act in Third World contexts where it would be more difficult for the Soviets themselves to operate. Many Third World leaders in the 1950s saw China as a potential ally—its presence at Bandung was crucial in this regard—or even as
representing a non-European variant of socialist development that they themselves wanted to follow. For Mao Zedong, all of these approaches were problematic. He agreed with Moscow that China had a particular role to play in the Third World on behalf of world Communism, but not that it stood for a specific model. It stood for Marxism-Leninism, pure and simple. China wanted global influence, but the Americans, according to the Chairman, were chasing ghosts if they believed that China would involve itself deeply outside the socialist camp. And finally the CCP welcomed Third World radicals to Beijing and would be happy to develop relations with them, but on the clear understanding that Marxism-Leninism was the only possible solution to the ills of the developing world. There was no third way, and China in ideological terms most definitely did not want to develop one.

The CCP’s views on religion also created difficulties in how others saw China. During 1950 all Christian missionaries were expelled, and their medical and educational institutions taken over by the state. Some foreign missionaries were incarcerated, including an American Catholic bishop, James E. Walsh, who spent twelve years in prison. Almost all of the Chinese Catholic hierarchy was arrested. The archbishop of Guangzhou, Dominic Deng Yiming, was held for twenty-two years. Ignatius Cardinal Gong Pinmei spent thirty years in a labor camp. Christian denominations were broken up and reorganized into “patriotic” religious organizations. Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist or Muslim leaders in Xinjiang, Gansu, or elsewhere in China fared little better. For the Chinese government these persecutions were ways of controlling the country. But for many foreign fellow believers of those persecuted in China, the actions of the CCP made them loathe and distrust the Chinese regime.

Overall the views held in the outside world of China in the early phase of Communist rule may have been uninformed but not necessarily wrong. China had embarked on an experiment that had a tremendous human cost and that would ultimately fail. But foreigners
criticizing the PRC made some Chinese even more convinced that they had to persist in their course. To them, the most important thing was that Maoism was Chinese, and that the Communist Party had succeeded in uniting the country and given the majority of its people a sense of purpose. After one hundred years of state weakness, China seemed finally to be building a state that would provide its people with a good standard of living and be respected in the outside world. For most Chinese in the 1950s that was enough to know.

O
N ITS OWN TERMS
, the CCP had reason to be proud of its achievements during the 1950s. It had fought the United States to a standstill in the Korean War. It had carried out comprehensive campaigns against its domestic enemies, had collectivized agriculture and nationalized all key industries, and had, with massive Soviet assistance, completed the First Five Year Plan of production with satisfactory results. Within the fields emphasized in the Plan—iron and steel manufacturing, coal mining, cement production, electricity generation, and machine building—growth had been significant, at around nine percent per year. Even so, the leadership, and Mao especially, were still worried about the future. In spite of showing growth in output, agriculture could not keep up with industrial expansion or even the increase in population. There were signs that even industrial growth was slowing toward the end of the period. And, most importantly, Mao and some of his advisers were not satisfied with China’s overall growth, because they felt that the country had so much ground to cover before catching up with the advanced nations. By 1956 a wedge in terms of policy was starting to develop between Mao and some of the younger members of the leadership on the one hand and more traditional Marxist leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, on the other. The former stressed innovation and speedy transformation in the economy, while the latter emphasized the need to rely on the Plan and learn from the successes and mistakes in the Soviet experience.

In February 1956 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shocked all those around the world who had drawn inspiration from the Soviet Union. In a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, he revealed at great length the extent of Stalin’s terror. Khrushchev’s revelations unsettled the CCP leadership, as it did Communists everywhere. Mao’s own first reaction, however, was that the condemnation of Stalin improved his own chances of becoming the ultimate arbiter of Communist doctrine in Asia and eventually around the world. As he later told the Soviet ambassador, to him Stalin’s death had been like getting out of a straitjacket. The CCP leaders liked Khrushchev’s insistence that Stalin had promoted “Russian chauvinism” in relations with other parties, from Yugoslavia to China. Hereafter the CCP would be freer in setting its own policies and in moving faster toward socialism. But the Chairman grew increasingly concerned after workers in Poland and Hungary attempted to overthrow their Communist regimes later in the year, using the revelations of the Twentieth Congress as evidence that Communism could not work. Mao and many Chinese leaders began sensing that the Soviet criticism of Stalin’s infallibility and the cult of the individual could be directed against the CCP and its cult of the Chairman. “You see what Stalin’s mania for greatness led to,” Khrushchev had said. “He completely lost touch with reality.”
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In China, Mao wanted to make sure that such a verdict could not be passed on him.

The Polish and Hungarian events in the autumn of 1956 marked the first time the CCP gave advice to the Soviets on key foreign policy issues. Mao warned the Kremlin that an armed intervention in Poland would be seen as a case of “serious big-power chauvinism, which should not be allowed in any circumstances.”
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But after Communists were lynched in the streets in Budapest, the CCP came to support, indeed urge, a Soviet invasion there. By the end of the year, Soviet and Chinese Communists alike were attempting to rebuild their badly dented authority. According to a Chinese statement much lauded by the Soviets,

The sole aim of socialist democracy is to strengthen the socialist cause of the proletariat and all the working people, to give scope to their energy in the building of socialism and in the fight against all anti-socialist forces. . . . Criticism should be made only for the purpose of consolidating democratic centralism and of strengthening the leadership of the Party. It should in no circumstances bring about disorganization and confusion in the ranks of the proletariat, as our enemies desire.
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The ghost of Budapest frightened the CCP leaders with some reason. In the autumn and winter of 1956, China itself saw open opposition against the CCP’s policies and its lack of democracy for the first time since 1949. In many provinces public demonstrations for better conditions for workers, more democracy, and freedom of speech were observed and reported on by the secret police. A report to the Politburo noted that some of these rallies were even joined by party members, who helped chant “‘we will fight to the end’ and ‘[we will] denounce the low ranking [officials] and then turn to the higher ones.’ A few workers were even heard to proclaim, ‘As [we] see, there’s no other way for us than learning lessons from Hungary!’”
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When the party, on the defensive, decided at Mao’s suggestion to launch a campaign for greater openness, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, it was precisely to identify its opponents and later destroy them. By the end of 1957, hundreds of thousands of “bourgeois rightists” had been arrested and sent to labor camps.

In foreign policy, too, the late 1950s was an unstable period. As Mao struggled to regain the initiative within China through driving the revolution toward a more radical phase, he also set new and more aggressive policy aims in international affairs. This was the time, Mao thought, for a Communist offensive against the United States and its allies throughout the Third World. Washington had spurned the moderation of the socialist camp. Hungary and the continued “occupation” of Taiwan showed how the United States would treat what it perceived
as Communist weakness. Visiting Moscow on his second and last trip abroad, Mao exhorted his hosts to confront imperialism. “It is my view,” the Chairman said, “that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two winds in the world today, the east wind and the west wind. There is a Chinese saying, ‘Either the east wind prevails over the west wind or the west wind prevails over the east wind.’ It is characteristic of the situation today, I believe, that the east wind is prevailing over the west wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism are overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism.” There was no reason to fear a war with the imperialists, Mao said: