The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (22 page)

The flow went both ways, as one delegation after another visited the Soviet Union. A few were trade missions, but most went to learn the techniques of running a one-party state. Wang Yaoshan and Zhang Xiushan, for instance, spent four months touring the Soviet Union with a large delegation to study political organisation, from the training of urban cadres to the composition of the Central Committee in Beijing. Zhou Yang, vice-minister of culture, headed a team of fifty that inspected every aspect of propaganda, filing no fewer than 1,300 formal questions during their three-month stay, which included six visits to the newspaper
Pravda
. In every domain – from state security, city infrastructure, cadre training, economic construction and ideological work to heavy industry – China was copying the Soviet Union.
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Trade with the Soviet Union shot up, a trend accelerated by the Western blockade during the Korean War. As China had limited foreign currency and gold reserves, it also paid for loans through exports. The basic trade pattern was the exchange of credit, capital goods and raw materials for special metals, manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Pork was bartered for cables, soybeans for aluminium, grain for steel rolls. Since the supply of such metals as antimony, tin and tungsten was limited, most Chinese exports to the Soviet Union consisted of agricultural commodities, ranging from fibres, tobacco, grain, soybeans, fresh fruit and edible oils to tinned meat. Soon the vast majority of exports were destined for Moscow.
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As ‘Learn from the Soviet Union’ became the motto, cadres and intellectuals studied Stalin’s
The History of the All-Union Communist Party: A Short Course
. It was read like the Bible. Russian became compulsory in schools. One British woman living with her Chinese husband at Xiamen University noted: ‘Training camps and training centres were established and Russian became the first foreign language (actually the only foreign language) in all schools at various levels. On the education front every minute detail was copied from the Russians without discrimination, even the lunch hour was pushed back to three in the afternoon in order to ensure the practice of having six classes in succession in the morning.’
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The Sino-Soviet Friendship Association – with its 120,000 branches – distributed books, magazines, films, lantern slides and plays, as well as generators, radios, microphones and gramophones to spread the message. Dozens of exhibitions were organised on themes from ‘Soviet Women’ and ‘Soviet Children’ to ‘Construction in the Soviet Union’. Even news in Chinese originated from the Soviet Union, as TASS, the official Soviet news agency, rapidly became the main source of information. As everybody was told again and again, ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is our Tomorrow’.
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7

War Again

Liberation had come with the promise of peace. In 1949 most of the population had welcomed the People’s Liberation Army with a mixture of relief and wariness, hoping that they would be allowed to go about rebuilding their lives, families and businesses after more than a decade of warfare. Mao instead threw his people into a prolonged war in Korea in October 1950.

At the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin not only wrangled secret concessions on Manchuria from Roosevelt, but also negotiated over the joint occupation of Korea, which had become a Japanese colony in 1910. The Korean peninsula extends for about 1,000 kilometres southwards of Manchuria, from which it is divided, for the greatest part, by a natural border formed by the Yalu River. In the extreme north-east, not far from Vladivostok, is a border of less than 20 kilometres with the Soviet Union. The Red Army marched into the northern half of the Korean peninsula in August 1945 with almost no resistance, halting at the 38th parallel for the American troops to arrive from the south. The Russians installed Kim Il-sung as the head of their provisional government.

Born in 1912, Kim could barely speak Korean. His family had settled in Manchuria when he was still a young boy. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1931, carrying out guerrilla raids against the Japanese north of Yan’an. In 1940 he was forced to flee across the border into the Soviet Union, where he was retrained by the Red Army, rising through the ranks to become a major by the end of the Second World War.

When he arrived in Pyongyang on 22 August 1945, Kim had been in exile for twenty-six years. He immediately supported Mao, sending tens of thousands of Korean volunteers and wagonloads of military supplies across the border to help the communists fight Chiang Kai-shek in Manchuria. Kim also used Soviet advisers to build up the Korean People’s Army. Stalin equipped it with tanks, lorries, artillery and small weapons. But Kim was bound by his protector, unable to send his troops south to attack the American-backed Syngman Rhee without the permission of the Soviet Union. Kim had to watch in frustration as Mao took over China, bringing a quarter of humanity into the socialist camp while Korea remained partitioned.
1

Kim pushed repeatedly for an assault on the south, but Stalin was in no rush for an open conflict involving the United States. Yet by the end of 1949 Stalin started to waver. The Americans had not intervened in the Chinese civil war and had all but abandoned Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan. In discussions with Mao, who was in Moscow in late 1949, Stalin suggested moving some of the Korean troops in the People’s Liberation Army back across the Yalu River. Mao agreed, and sent over 50,000 veterans back to North Korea. Then, in January 1950, the United States indicated that Korea no longer fell within its defence perimeter in the Pacific. Kim badgered Moscow again on a number of secret trips to Moscow. Stalin now went along with the idea of an assault on the south, but was wary of becoming entangled in a costly adventure. He refused to commit any troops: ‘If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.’ In April Kim went to see Mao.
2

Mao, in turn, needed Stalin. He could not invade Taiwan without the requisite sea and air power, which had to come from Moscow. And he could hardly deny the Koreans the opportunity to unify their own country now that most of China stood under one flag. Mao pledged to support Kim with troops if the Americans entered the war.
3

Military deliveries to North Korea from the Soviet Union jumped dramatically, including tanks and planes. Russian generals took over planning for the attack, setting the date for 25 June 1950. Under the pretext of a border skirmish, a comprehensive air and land invasion with a massive force of North Korean troops was launched. The south was ill prepared, with fewer than 100,000 soldiers. Alarmed at calls for a march north to overthrow the communists, the Americans had deliberately denied Syngman Rhee armour, anti-tank weapons and artillery heavier than 105 mm. His troops crumbled within weeks.
4

President Truman acted rapidly, warning that appeasement would be a mistake and vowing to repel the North Koreans. On the day of the invasion, the United Nations passed a resolution committing troops to support South Korea. The Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been boycotting proceedings since January over Taiwan, was expected to return to the Security Council and vote against the resolution, but Stalin told him to stay away. Two days later tacit agreement was received from the Soviet Union that American intervention would not lead to an escalation. Stalin did nothing to prevent Western involvement in the conflict. He alone knew that Mao had made a commitment to sending troops to Korea. Perhaps he hoped that China would destroy large numbers of Americans in the conflict.
5

Truman ordered US troops based in Japan to assist South Korea. Determined to fight global communism, the president obtained $12 billion from Congress for military expenditure. Soon American soldiers were joined by troops from fifteen UN member nations, including Great Britain and France. In August the tide turned, as the United Nations counter-offensive retaliated with tactical superiority in tanks, artillery and air power. General Douglas MacArthur reached the 38th parallel in October 1950. He could have stopped there, but so confident was he that Mao would never dare to enter the conflict that he decided instead to push all the way to the Yalu River, ignoring the most basic security concerns of the People’s Republic.

On 1 October Stalin wired Mao a message asking him for five or six divisions to assist the North Koreans. He suggested that they be called ‘volunteers’ to maintain the pretence that China was not formally involved in the war. Mao had already moved some of his troops up to the border and the next day he asked them to ‘stand by for the order to go into [Korea] at any moment’.
6

The Chairman spent the following days convincing his senior colleagues to back him. Only Zhou Enlai offered cautious support. Lin Biao, who had won the day in Manchuria during the civil war, feigned illness to turn down command of the troops. The other leaders, including Liu Shaoqi, strongly opposed entering the war, fearing that the United States might bomb the country’s cities, destroy its industrial base in Manchuria and even drop atomic bombs on China. Marshal Nie Rongzhen recalled that those who opposed the decision felt that after years of warfare ‘it would be better not to fight this war as long as it was not absolutely necessary’. Peng Dehuai only reluctantly agreed to assume command of the offensive after a sleepless night tossing and turning on the floor of his hotel room in Beijing, as the bed was too soft for comfort. ‘The tiger always eats people,’ he explained, ‘and the time when it wants to eat depends on its appetite. It is impossible to make any concessions to a tiger.’
7

Mao took a huge gamble. He hoped that America would not expand the war to China for fear of provoking the Soviets. He was also convinced that the Americans had no stomach for a prolonged war and would be no match for the millions of soldiers he was prepared to throw into the conflict. He believed that he would have to fight the Americans at some point, all the more so since Truman had sent the Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan at the start of the Korean War. Fighting the imperialists in Korea would be easier than launching an amphibious assault on fortress Taiwan. Most of all, a hostile Korea on the Manchurian frontier would represent a serious security threat to the People’s Republic.

There was also quiet rivalry with Stalin. Korea was the arena where Russia and China were competing for dominance over Asia. Stalin was ahead of the game, having so far gone to great lengths to keep the Chinese communists out of North Korea. But once Russia’s satellite forces started to disintegrate, Mao was ready to march in from Manchuria, reverse the rout and assume the leadership of the communist camp in Asia.

But Mao sought to extract a price from the Kremlin, and on 10 October 1950 sent Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao to negotiate with Stalin in his Black Sea dacha. Stalin committed ammunition, artillery and tanks, but reneged on an earlier promise to provide air cover, as the planes would not be ready for another two months. Stalin even wired Mao to let him know that China did not have to join the war. But Mao persisted: ‘With or without air cover from the Soviet Union,’ he replied, ‘we go in.’ Zhou Enlai buried his head in his hands after he read the cable. On 19 October, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops surreptitiously began entering North Korea.
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The Chinese troops took the United Nations forces by complete surprise. The United States had very little information about what was going on inside China, and most of its covert military presence in the country had collapsed by September 1949. But a report cabled to Washington on 19 October by the military attaché in Hong Kong, based on information provided by Chen Tou-ling, the former general manager of the China Air Transport Corporation, warned that 400,000 troops were massed on the border and primed to cross into Korea. The Dutch Foreign Ministry, using information gathered by its embassy in Beijing, also provided the Americans with detailed intelligence on an imminent invasion of Korea. These warnings were ignored.
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So convinced was General MacArthur that China would never enter the fray that when reports came in of PLA troops crossing into Korea, he flew his Douglas C-54 Skymaster over the Yalu River – at considerable risk to his own safety. He saw nothing. The 130,000 troops under Peng Dehuai’s command were hard to detect, marching under cover of night without any of the usual mechanised activity or wireless traffic that could have revealed their presence.

They attacked out of the blue on 25 October, wiping out several South Korean regiments, but retreated into the mountains as suddenly as they had appeared. General MacArthur brushed the incident aside, interpreting these early probes as evidence that the Chinese were few in number and reluctant to fight. On Thanksgiving Day, in bleak and blustery weather, he began a final push to end the war and bring American soldiers ‘Home by Christmas’.

The Americans fell into what one historian has called ‘the largest ambush in the era of modern warfare’.
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On 25 November, MacArthur’s men were struck by massive numbers of hidden soldiers. Their bugles blaring, drums, rattles and whistles adding to the din, screaming Chinese troops appeared in the middle of the night, shooting and throwing grenades. They instilled sheer terror in the United Nations forces. Wave after wave of ferocious assault groups hurled themselves on to gun positions, trench lines and rear areas. The onslaught almost instantly changed the course of the war, forcing the Americans into a headlong retreat southwards. The communists recovered Kim Il-sung’s capital Pyongyang on 7 December.