Read The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Online
Authors: Frank Dikötter
But even those who survived the terror with their reputations intact now lived in fear. The party had no compunction in executing innocents, so innocence was no guarantee of survival. The unpredictable nature of the campaign was of course the very basis of terror, as nobody could be quite secure in thinking that they were beyond reproach. Formerly close communities drifted apart, leaving people isolated and fearful of each other. By the time the campaign was over, a breakdown in normal human relationships was noticeable. As Robert Loh observed: ‘During the persecution, friend had been made to betray friend; family members had been forced to denounce each other. The traditional warm hospitality of the Chinese, therefore, disappeared. We learned that the more friends we had, the more insecure our position. We began to know the fear of being isolated from our own group and of standing helplessly alone before the power of the State.’
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Society became more regimented, even for party members. In the months following the assassination of Huang Zuyan, sentinels started appearing at major government offices. Searches became more common. Li Changyu, who became a party member in January 1951, remembers: ‘In those days there were ad hoc guards at the office doors of high-level leaders, and a guard had to be posted at the gate whenever a large-scale meeting was to be held. Anyone entering the meeting place was searched, and if a weapon was found the high alert went up all around.’
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In the first year of liberation people could wander at will into different government organisations, or drop in to visit friends. But much tighter security regulations soon appeared everywhere. Esther Cheo noted:
Almost overnight each government organisation took on its own autonomy. We had to sign a paper at the gate and be questioned what our business was. The insistence on secrecy grew to ludicrous lengths. It was impressed upon all of us that there were spies everywhere. We were issued with identity cards, badges and more identity cards together with photographs. I still have them now, a little faded but clear enough to see my name, my place of birth and my rank. We became suspicious of strangers and each other, so that it was no longer comfortable to see each other, because it would mean a long report back on what we talked about and why. One became insular and only stayed within one’s own place of work, lived among one’s own fellow workers, shared the same dormitories, ate in the same canteens.
Erstwhile friendships faded away. Visitors stopped coming. People turned inward, leading increasingly blinkered lives. A mass exodus of all foreigners further deepened the country’s insularity.
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The Festival of the Dead, according to the lunar calendar, falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. A ceremony is traditionally held for those wandering ghosts who have not yet found their way to the next world. In 1951 the occasion came on 17 August, but instead of celebrating the festival with lanterns, songs and plays, in Beijing groups of people loitered on the streets, waiting for something to happen. They were unsure quite what to expect. There were obvious preparations for an execution, as groups of vehicles made their way towards the Bridge of Heaven, where most killings usually took place. When the formal procession finally arrived, onlookers were taken aback by what they saw. The first carriage, filled with armed soldiers, was followed by a jeep with a foreigner standing in the back. Tall and erect, with a long white beard, his hair brushed back, he peered into the distance with his hands bound together. Another jeep carried a Japanese man, also tied up and forced to stand. Several more vehicles followed, full of police officers who were laughing and apparently enjoying themselves. According to Radio Peking, the streets were thronged with people who shouted ‘Down with imperialism! Suppress counter-revolutionaries! Long live Chairman Mao!’ According to the sister-in-law of one of the condemned as well as the British embassy, the crowds were uncomfortably silent.
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Antonio Riva and Ruichi Yamaguchi were the first foreigners to be sentenced to death in communist China. Riva, an Italian pilot who had relocated to Beijing in the 1920s to train the nationalists, and Yamaguchi, a Japanese bookseller, were convicted in a one-hour trial of a plot to murder the Chairman. The conspirators, so the state media trumpeted, had planned to fire mortar shells at a reviewing stand outside Tiananmen Gate during National Day celebrations. Several other foreigners received long prison sentences as part of the conspiracy. The Italian bishop Tarcisio Martina, aged sixty-four, head of the Roman Catholic diocese of Yixian in Hebei province, was imprisoned for life (he was expelled in 1955 and died a few years later).
The evidence hinged on a mortar seized from Riva’s house and a drawing from Yamaguchi’s notebook. The Stokes mortar was a non-functional part of an antique from the 1930s which Riva had found in a pile of junk outside the Holy See legation. The drawing was a map of Tiananmen Square commissioned by the Beijing Fire Department, to whom Yamaguchi was selling firefighting equipment. The ringleader of the imperialist plot was an American serviceman named David Barrett, who had simply been a neighbour to both men but had moved out a year earlier. ‘I never at any time . . . attempted to assassinate or contrive the assassination of anyone,’ he protested from Taiwan at the time of the trial. Twenty years later Zhou Enlai, the premier from 1949 onwards, apologised to him and invited him back to China. The whole affair was a fabrication designed to frighten the foreign community and scare local people away from any association with outsiders.
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After they had been executed in the capital, Riva and Yamaguchi were quietly buried in the outskirts of the city, on a farm that looked no different from any other, except for wooden markers and a few headstones scattered among broad fields of melons and vegetable marrows. Most of the graves were overgrown with vegetation, but here and there the markers were newer and could still be spotted. This was one of the burial sites for counter-revolutionaries executed at the Bridge of Heaven. Riva’s wife, determined that her husband should be buried in a Catholic cemetery, eventually managed to wrestle his body back from the Public Security Bureau. His improvised coffin of thin wood was exhumed and the body placed in a proper coffin. On a clear day with a stark blue sky, the coffin was loaded from the field on to a mule cart and covered with a black cloth marked with a white cross. After a five-hour trek along rutted roads covered in dust, the cart reached the Zhalan Cemetery, shaded by the green foliage of cypresses, pines and poplars. The premises had been given to the Jesuits in 1610 by the Ming emperor Wan Li to receive the body of Matteo Ricci. Here Antonio Riva was finally laid to rest. In the following years the Jesuits would be denounced and expelled. In 1954 the grounds of the cemetery were taken over by the Beijing Communist Party School. For good measure, most of the graves were vandalised during the Cultural Revolution. Only a few remain today, hidden from view.
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Matteo Ricci was an Italian Jesuit who arrived in China in 1583 and adopted the language and culture of the country in order to spread the Catholic faith. The first foreigner to receive permission to remain in the imperial capital in 1601, he spent the rest of his life teaching, translating and befriending leading scholars in Beijing. Other missionaries soon followed, but few were allowed to stay in the empire. Foreign traders – Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, British – were confined to a small area outside the city walls of Guangzhou after 1757. Only in the wake of the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1858–60 did more substantial foreign communities gain a foothold in the empire, living in concessions under foreign administration in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Tianjin. Foreign residents were subject to the extraterritorial jurisdiction of their own courts. They could buy land and houses in the treaty ports and travel in the interior for business purposes. After the Treaty of Shimonoseki concluded in 1895 they could also build factories and manage workshops.
Some of these ports were transformed into beacons of modernity. In Shanghai, a quiet weaving and fishing town before 1842, a massive urban infrastructure appeared that rivalled the very best internationally, ranging from sewerage systems, port installations, communication networks and insurance facilities to hospitals, banks and schools. First the Russians and later the Japanese developed Dalian, changing it from a small fishing town into a major deep-water port in Manchuria.
Many of the best local enterprises were also established in the concessions, often with foreign partners in order to obtain security of persons and property. The historian Hao Yen-p’ing has written about a ‘commercial revolution’ at the end of the nineteenth century, as local compradors and foreign entrepreneurs joined forces to pursue new opportunities created by free trade. Bills of exchange eased credit, the money supply grew with Mexican dollars and Chinese paper notes, the volume of trade expanded on international markets and global communications underwent a revolution. Local merchants often dominated these new synergies, financing as much as 70 per cent of all foreign shipping.
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But the real boom came after the fall of the Qing empire in 1911. Within less than a decade the number of foreign residents in the Republic of China trebled to well over 350,000. Even as the concessions were retroceded to China – some in 1918, the last few in 1943 – the foreign influx continued. Many lived insular lives, their existence revolving around the expatriate community. But just as many settled and laid down roots in the country. Whether British, French, American or Japanese, entire families could be established in the country for generations: in many cases treaty-port life was home, regardless of whether or not much contact was established with local people. Many settler families had children, and not all of these were sent to boarding school, as English, American, French, German and Japanese schools in China maintained their own national curricula. Many children born of missionary parents or business people grew up in China, some becoming bilingual and profoundly attached to their adopted country. As the historian John K. Fairbank noted, ‘treaty-port cemeteries are filled with foreigners who understood China well enough to live and die there’.
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The government itself was fully aware of the role of foreigners as conduits of cultural and technological transfer. Leaders like Yuan Shikai and Chiang Kai-shek used a stream of experts, including League of Nations technicians, Japanese legal advisers, German army officers, British construction engineers, French postal personnel and American transportation experts. In the first few years of the republic alone, among the most prominent advisers were Ariga Nagao, prominent international jurist; George Padoux, expert on public administration; Henry Carter Adams, standardiser of railway accounts; Henri de Codt, writer on extraterritorial jurisdiction; William Franklin Willoughby, noted political scientist; Frank J. Goodnow, legal adviser; and Banzai Rihachiro, military expert. At less eminent levels, many foreign employees contributed to the country’s modernisation, ranging from engineers, clerks, accountants and lawyers to teachers and translators.
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There were also many thousands of missionaries in republican China who were active in religion, medicine and education. Christianity was the country’s third most important faith with close to 4 million followers. Missions were behind several hundred middle schools and thirteen colleges and universities, including Hangchow Christian University, Lingnan University, the University of Nanking, St John’s University, Shanghai University, Shantung Christian University, Soochow University and Yenching University. One reason why missionary activities increased dramatically in the early twentieth century is that so many links were forged with domestic forces of reform, whether in educational reform or public health:
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‘‘Young China” of the 1910s and 1920s was frequently the product of missionary schools,’ writes the historian Albert Feuerwerker, whether they were urban reformers, leading journalists or professional sociologists. Missionaries were also present, as early as 1919, in all but a hundred of the 1,704 counties in China and Manchuria, many speaking the local dialect and living in close contact with the local population.
Over 100,000 European refugees also ended up in China, starting with more than 80,000 White Russians after 1917, followed in the 1930s by some 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. They brought with them knowledge, experience and expertise, further enriching the social fabric of republican China. They ran a whole range of businesses, from beauty parlours to pastry shops and kosher restaurants. Some acquired Chinese citizenship.
The cumulative effect of these waves of immigration was that some of the cities along the coast of China, from Beijing in the north to Guangzhou in the south, were as cosmopolitan as their counterparts in Europe or the United States. Shanghai had a bigger foreign population than any other city except New York.
The first sign that not all foreigners would be welcome under the new regime came from Shenyang, taken over by the People’s Liberation Army in October 1948. From the roof of the American consulate, Elden Erickson watched the soldiers marching down the streets. ‘I remember there was an old lady that they just shot and went right on. They saw us looking over the top of the building and they started shooting at us.’ Acting on advice from Stalin, a few weeks later the communists threw a cordon around the consulate building. The American consul Angus Ward and his staff were held under house arrest for a year, accused of using the consulate as headquarters for espionage. All communications were cut off. ‘Passers-by were even arrested for waving greetings,’ Ward remembered. Water, light, heating and medicine were denied. Buckets of water had to be carried in as temperatures dropped to 40 below zero. Every day anti-American demonstrators paraded around the building shouting slogans and waving placards. In November 1949, Ward and four other members of his staff were finally arrested and put on trial for ‘inciting a riot’. A day after the United States had appealed to thirty nations, including Russia, their sentences were commuted to immediate deportation. By the end of December 1949, after forty hours in an ice-cold carriage with all windows stuck wide open, they reached Tianjin, where they were handed over to American diplomats.
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