The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (21 page)

By the end of 1952 dozens of foreign missionaries languished in prison, many with their hands and feet in chains. Close to 400 were officially expelled that year, while various forms of pressure forced over 1,000 more to leave. A further purge of any remaining church influence came in the summer of 1953. A year later all but one Protestant missionary had left the country. A further fifteen were detained and about to be expelled. Three hundred Catholic missionaries were still in China. Seventeen of these were in prison, sixty were under interrogation and thirty-four were on their way out of China. The others would soon follow.
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Even before the People’s Republic had been formally established, the Soviet Union was everywhere. ‘Pictures of Soviet leaders are almost as prominent in public places in Peiping [Beijing] as those of Chinese communist leaders,’ reported Doak Barnett in September 1949. Russian and Chinese flags flew side by side on landmark buildings. Sino-Soviet Friendship Associations opened with great fanfare in all major cities. Streets were named after the Soviet Union. The main road in Harbin was called Red Army Street, while people walked through Stalin Avenue in the middle of Changchun. In Shenyang visitors were greeted with the view of an enormous granite-mounted Red Army tank in honour of the Russians who had liberated Manchuria from Japanese imperialism. Translated Soviet literature appeared in bookshops, railway stations, schools and factories. Some were textbooks for the Chinese Communist Party. Newspapers and radio went to great lengths to pledge allegiance to the Soviet Union, follow Moscow on foreign policy and praise Stalin as the leader of the socialist camp. In Beijing a gigantic Soviet exhibition was staged ‘to introduce systematically the great socialist construction of the USSR’.
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The Soviet presence expanded dramatically after Mao’s statement on 30 June 1949, the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, that China should ‘lean to one side’. ‘The twenty-eight years’ experience of the Communist Party’, he declared, ‘have taught us to lean to one side, and we are firmly convinced that in order to win victory and consolidate it we must lean to one side.’ Between the side of imperialism and the side of socialism there was no third road. Neutrality was camouflage. Mao had a word for those who believed that China should approach Washington and London in search of foreign loans: his word was ‘naive’. ‘The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it.’ As
Time
commented a few weeks later, ‘In this statement was just about all the world needed to know about the past, present and future attitudes of the Chinese Communist Party.’ That same month Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s dour second-in-command, was sent to the Soviet Union to hold meetings with top ministers and visit a whole range of institutions. He saw Stalin on six occasions. After two months he returned to China with hundreds of advisers, some of them travelling on his train.
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For the previous twenty-eight years the Chinese Communist Party had depended on Moscow for financial support and ideological guidance. From the age of twenty-seven, when a Comintern agent handed him his first cash payment of 200 yuan to cover the cost of travelling to the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, Russian funds transformed Mao’s life. He had no qualms about taking the money, and used Moscow’s support to lead a ragged band of guerrilla fighters to ultimate power. The relationship had its ups and downs. There were endless reprimands from Moscow, expulsions from office and battles over party policy with Soviet advisers. Stalin constantly forced Mao back into the arms of his sworn enemy Chiang Kai-shek. Moscow openly favoured Nanjing, even after the nationalists had presided over a bloody massacre of communists in Shanghai in 1927. For the best part of a decade, Chiang’s troops relentlessly hounded an embattled Mao, forcing the communists to find refuge in a mountain base and then to traverse some 12,500 kilometres towards the north in a retreat later known as the Long March. But even the Long March was funded by Moscow, as the Comintern contributed millions of Mexican silver dollars. Without these funds the communists would not have got very far.
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At the end of the Second World War, Stalin, always the hard pragmatist, signed a treaty of alliance with the nationalists. But he also secretly helped Mao, handing over Manchuria to the communists in 1946. During the civil war Stalin stayed on the sidelines, warning Mao to beware the United States, which supported Chiang Kai-shek, now recognised as a world leader in the fight against Japan.

Even when victory seemed inevitable in 1949, Stalin remained suspicious of Mao. Prone to discerning enemies everywhere, Stalin wondered whether Mao might emulate Tito, the Yugoslav leader who had been cast out of the communist camp for his opposition to Moscow. Stalin trusted no one, least of all a potential rival who in all probability harboured a long list of grievances. Aware of the need to earn his master’s recognition, Mao spared no effort vociferously to condemn Tito. ‘Stalin suspected that ours was a victory of the Tito type, and in 1949 and 1950 the pressure on us was very strong indeed,’ Mao later recollected. In a show of adulation, he tried to present himself and his party as true communists and sincere students of the Soviet Union, worthy of its assistance.
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Despite his allegiance to Stalin, Mao resented the way he had been treated by Moscow in the past. But he had nowhere else to turn to for support. In 1949 his regime desperately needed international recognition as well as economic help to rebuild the war-torn country. Mao first declared the policy of ‘leaning to one side’ and then sought an audience with Stalin. Several requests were rebuffed. Then, in December 1949, Mao was finally asked to come to Moscow.

Fearful of enemy attacks, Mao travelled in an armoured car with sentries posted every hundred metres along the railway lines. Even before he crossed the border he was irked by Gao Gang, the man in charge of Manchuria. Rumours had it that portraits of Stalin were more common in the region than those of the Chairman himself. Months earlier Gao had visited Moscow and signed a trade agreement with Stalin. When Mao realised that Gao was sending gifts to Stalin in a carriage attached to the Moscow-bound train, he had it uncoupled and returned the tribute.
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This was Mao’s first trip abroad, and he was visibly nervous, pouring with sweat as he stalked up and down the platform in Sverdlovsk during the long train journey. In Moscow the Chairman was given the cold shoulder. Mao expected to be welcomed as the leader of a great revolution that had brought a quarter of humanity into the communist orbit, but within the Soviet sphere for several months now a shroud of silence had been placed over the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin, two of Stalin’s henchmen, greeted Mao at Yaroslavsky Station but did not accompany him to his residence. The Chairman gave a speech at the railway terminal, reminding his audience how the unequal treaties between Tsarist Russia and China had been abolished after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, a broad hint referring to the treaty signed between the nationalists and the Soviet Union five years earlier as a result of the Yalta accords. Stalin granted Mao a brief interview that day, flattering and praising him for his success in Asia, but also teasing him by feigning ignorance of the real reason for his visit. Five days later, Mao was treated as a guest of honour among many other delegates who had travelled to Moscow to celebrate Stalin’s seventieth birthday.
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But then Mao was whisked off to a dacha outside the capital and made to wait several weeks for a formal audience. Meetings were cancelled, phone calls never returned. Mao lost patience, ranting about how he was in Moscow to do more than ‘eat and shit’. Stalin was wearing down his guest, insisting that the Yalta accords were binding – including Soviet control over the ports of Port Arthur and Dalian as well as the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria.

Zhou Enlai came to the rescue, but even with his diplomatic skills it took another six weeks to reach an agreement. Russia insisted on keeping all the concessions that the nationalists had been forced to make at the end of the Second World War. Anastas Mikoyan and Andrey Vyshinsky were brutal negotiators, laying down their conditions in blunt terms. While they agreed to return the ports and the railway by the end of 1952, they insisted that their troops and equipment be allowed to move freely between the Soviet Union and Manchuria as well as Xinjiang. Mao was also quickly disabused about Mongolia, which he viewed as just another part of the Qing empire to be reclaimed by the People’s Republic of China. The independence of Mongolia, arranged by Stalin and accepted by Chiang Kai-shek in 1945, was beyond debate. Zhou also had to concede exclusive rights on economic activity in Xinjiang and Manchuria. Rights to mineral deposits in Xinjiang were granted for fourteen years. Mikoyan repeatedly badgered Zhou for ever higher quantities of tin, lead, wolfram and antimony, all to be delivered by the hundreds of tonnes a year to the Soviet Union. When Zhou meekly countered that China did not have the means to extract such large amounts of special metals, Mikoyan cut him off by offering help: ‘Just say what and when.’
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On 14 February the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance was finally signed, but all Mao obtained was $300 million in military aid over five years. For this modest sum Mao had to throw in major territorial concessions, so heavily reminiscent of the unequal treaties concluded with foreign powers in the nineteenth century that they were contained in secret annexes. China also agreed to pay thousands of Soviet advisers and technicians high salaries in gold, dollars or pounds. As the historian Paul Wingrove notes, ‘Mao’s victorious, independent, revolutionary state was being treated in much the same way as the captive territories of Eastern Europe, from which the Soviet Union also extracted the standard tariff in exchange for services of “experts”.’ And in an echo of the extraterritorial rights that had been abolished under Chiang Kai-shek in 1943, none of the Russians would be subject to Chinese law. Mao’s hands were tied. China was weak and needed a strong protector as international positions were hardening in an unfolding Cold War. The treaty provided just that, extending the Soviet Union’s protection in the event of aggression by Japan or its allies, in particular the United States. But despite all the fanfare around the treaty, Mao and Zhou must have left Moscow feeling aggrieved at how they had been treated.
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New foreigners started arriving in 1950, flocking to Beijing, Shanghai and other cities by the hundreds, some with their families, others on their own. These were the Russian advisers and technicians. At first they formed new communities in the old concessions, but soon they dominated the foreign scene. In Shanghai they were concentrated in a special compound in the city’s most luxurious suburb, several kilometres west of town. A beautiful, unspoilt area with landscaped parks and opulent villas where foreigners shot duck, played golf and strolled along the creeks, the garden city of Hongqiao was soon requisitioned by the military. Foreigners were expelled, Russians moved in. Residents in the area were given twenty-four hours’ notice of the requisitioning of their property and ordered to move out. ‘Those who objected were forcibly evicted, and their furniture was carried out and placed in trucks.’ Technicians, pilots, fitters and others working at the airport, built in the area in 1907, occupied the vacant properties. Sentinels guarded the compound day and night. A bamboo fence went up, tall and solid. Locals soon referred to the area as the Russian Concession.
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In every major city Russian advisers were isolated from the local population and quartered in closely guarded compounds. In Guangzhou the island of Shameen, where foreign companies and consulates had built stone mansions along the waterfront, became the centre of official life. Russian advisers were billeted in the Canton Club, once an exclusive domain for British members with private gardens, tennis courts and a football field. In Tianjin some took up quarters in the Jubilee Villas on London Road, where armed guards with tommy guns patrolled the entrance. Others stayed in the old Soviet consulate, where the facilities were updated with a three-metre brick wall topped by electrified barbed wire.
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Russians were rarely seen, except when they came out on shopping expeditions, sullen-looking, wearing long leather coats, wide-bottomed trousers, leather boots and large-brimmed felt hats. ‘When they enter a shop all other customers are asked to leave.’ Their very high rate of pay, combined with restrictions on the export of currency, meant that they tended to buy luxury goods that were too expensive for the general population. ‘The Soviet experts were seen everywhere in the Shanghai shopping area; they avidly bought up all the American and European watches, pens, cameras and other luxury imports which were still available but which no Chinese could afford,’ noted Robert Loh. Soon they were spotted snapping up antique furniture, Oriental carpets, Limoges porcelain and other objets d’art, loaded by the crateful at the airport to be sent back to the Soviet Union.
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By October 1950, as China was about to enter the Korean War, the Soviet presence included some 150,000 soldiers and civilians. In Port Arthur, where Stalin had a naval base and port privileges, the Russians had an army numbering 60,000. Along the railways linking the port to Vladivostok were another 50,000 troops, most of them railway guards. There were air force units in the north of Manchuria. Everywhere in China batches of uniformed men arrived as army and air force instructors.

But the Soviet reach went well beyond the military. Thousands of civilian technicians helped build roads, bridges, factories and industry all over the country. In the ministries in Beijing, hundreds of them shadowed their local counterparts, coaching them in Soviet ways. The largest group – 127 specialists – was in the Ministry of Higher Education.
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