Restless Empire (41 page)

As we have seen, the CCP’s stance of moderation and its appeal to the nation were only one side of its wartime development. The other was an institutionalization and internalization of a specific line of thinking that later was called Maoism and Mao Zedong Thought. During harsh wartime conditions, new recruits to the party and senior members both had to go through intense ideological training in a political curriculum designed by the Chairman himself. The key parts of it were a mixture of the writings of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and the study of a Mao-centered version of the CCP’s history. Through a tough rectification campaign, in which the new party leadership tried to stamp out all forms of independent thinking, Mao’s canon and the Chairman himself increasingly took center stage. It became what historians, drawing on Western theology, have called a logocentric movement with strong sectarian and charismatic traits.
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Mao’s emphasis on self-sufficiency, courage, sacrifice, and the power of the human will replace some of the elements of Marxism in the CCP of the 1940s. Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s trusted lieutenant, summed it up at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, the first one in more than seventeen years: “Mao is not only the greatest revolutionary and statesman in Chinese history, but also the greatest theoretician in Chinese history.” Ironically, as the party’s public image became more moderate and popular, its internal line became increasingly
esoteric and utopian, with immense consequences for China’s relations to the rest of the world.

T
HE END OF THE WAR
against Japan came suddenly in August 1945, with the US nuclear attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet entry into the war. At the beginning of the month the Japanese imperial army was advancing toward Chongqing, the GMD wartime capital in western Sichuan province, and the CCP, despite its political operations behind enemy lines, found it difficult to fulfill its strategic aims of moving into Manchuria and central China. At the end of August the situation was turned almost entirely upside down. Japan had capitulated. With US aid, Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were moving fast to take over the cities, the railway lines, and the main towns and junctions in all parts of the country that had been in Japanese hands. US commanders instructed all Japanese forces to hold their positions until Chiang’s representatives arrived. In Moscow, the GMD government had struck a deal with the Soviets that would deliver Manchuria into Chiang’s hands in return for economic and military base concessions to the USSR. The Chinese Communists had been completely shut out of the peace settlement and were being pushed both by Moscow and by Washington to reach a negotiated settlement with the GMD.

August 1945 was probably the darkest moment in Mao Zedong’s political life. All of the visions he had drawn up at the party’s Seventh Congress had come to nothing. Mao had expected a continued expansion of CCP power, which would have enabled the Communists in the postwar era to achieve autonomy for the territory they controlled and the ability to compete politically with the GMD elsewhere. Instead he had to force the party to accept negotiating with the GMD from a position of weakness and to make concessions to Chiang just to avoid being attacked by GMD troops. The much-vaunted postwar era of Comunist power was fast shrinking into about as much influence as the
party had held in 1937, and with far fewer avenues of expansion. Mao believed that it was the international situation that was responsible for his setback and regretted the lack of emphasis the party had put on understanding international affairs. He saw the United States as responsible for his defeat. But he also viewed Stalin’s role with skepticism and doubt.

Chiang Kai-shek had been enormously successful with his international alliances but always disliked his allies’ attempts at influencing Chinese politics. He had no use for the mediation mission, led by former US chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, that President Harry Truman sent to China in December 1945. In spite of Marshall’s best efforts, Chiang continued to put military pressure on the CCP whenever the negotiations between them were stalling. As the price of peace, the GMD wanted the full incorporation of all CCP forces into the government army and access for government officials to all CCP-held areas. When the Soviets tried to prolong their occupation of Manchuria in order to wrest further economic concessions from the GMD, Chiang used his alliance with the United States to pile diplomatic pressure on Moscow. Despite Marshall’s genuine attempts at mediation, it was clear to Chiang that as Soviet-American tension increased elsewhere in the world, Washington saw his government as a key ally.

The summer of 1946, as the world was sliding toward a Soviet-American Cold War, was the time of decision in China. Under pressure from both the United States and Britain, Stalin had ordered a full Soviet withdrawal from Manchuria in late spring, arming CCP forces while leaving. With the Soviet troops gone and with Stalin no longer insisting on negotiations with the GMD, Mao ordered his troops to resist the government’s advance into Manchuria and to fight for “every inch of territory.” The CCP hoped that the Soviets would help supply and train the party’s military forces so that they could hold their own against the numerically and technically superior GMD troops. But first and foremost, they hoped that the Communist military could survive the initial
onslaught of the government army, prepared, equipped, and assisted by the United States.

T
HE
C
HINESE CIVIL WAR
, which lasted from mid-1946 to the beginning of 1950, defined China’s foreign relations for more than a decade. It cemented the alliance between the Chinese Communists and Soviet Union, an alliance in which Moscow increasingly became not only the CCP’s main international supporter but also its concrete model for how a Communist state could be built. The war revealed to the United States the weakness of its position in China, in spite of all the assistance it had provided to the country and its government. And the war’s outcome helped provoke an anti-Communist backlash inside the United States that would last for half a generation. But most importantly the civil war showed the weakness of the Chinese body politic and the desperate search of most ordinary Chinese for some order and stability in their lives, which they believed that only a strong, unified, and modern state could provide.

The military development of the war, and its international implications, are easy to present. In the beginning, in 1946 and 1947, the GMD went on the offensive, pushing the CCP out of almost all of its territory south of the Great Wall, including the Communist wartime capital Yan’an, which fell in March 1947. The CCP was battered, but survived. And then began an astonishing turnaround. In late 1947 the Communist armies, now called the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), counterattacked in Manchuria and began reorganizing in north China. By autumn 1948, the GMD had lost Manchuria as well as its own best armies. In the spring of 1949 the PLA crossed the Yangzi river. Beijing fell in January, the capital, Nanjing, in April, and Shanghai in May. Guangzhou and the south were conquered by October. By December 1949 the GMD was defeated in Sichuan and kept fighting on the mainland only in limited zones in the far west and south. Xinjiang was conquered, with Soviet assistance, by April 1950. In October 1951
the PLA entered the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and all of former Qing China—except Outer Mongolia, which had its own socialist regime, and Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek prepared his last stand—was in Communist hands.

Why did the Communists win the civil war, and what role did China’s international affairs play in their victory? The Communists won because they made fewer military mistakes than the government, and because Chiang Kai-shek—in his search for a powerful, centralized postwar state—antagonized too many interest groups in the country. As a party, the GMD was weakened by the drubbing it had got during the war against Japan. Meanwhile, the Communists became masters of telling different groups of Chinese exactly what they wanted to hear and of cloaking themselves in Chinese nationalism. Only they themselves, they insisted, were the bearers of the fate of the nation. Chiang was lampooned as a stooge of imperialism. Internationally, the United States could have postponed GMD China’s collapse by offering more aid, but they could not have prevented it. The gradual increase in Soviet assistance enabled the CCP to go on the offensive, but it did not determine the outcome of the civil war. General Marshall summed it up well in 1947 when he told the Chinese ambassador that Chiang “is faced with a unique problem of logistics. He is losing about 40 percent of his supplies to the enemy. If the percentage should reach 50 percent he will have to decide whether it is wise to supply his own troops.”
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While the United States gave the GMD government more than $1.9 billion in assistance between 1945 and 1950, equaling more than $40 billion in today’s money, it could neither control its policies nor determine China’s political trajectory.

On 1 October 1949, at Tian’anmen Square in Beijing, in his heavy Hunan accent, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. It was a cold and clear autumn day. The Chairman’s voice was thin and shrill; he was ill and felt faint, and perhaps the significance of the occasion overcame him. Instead of a memorable
inaugural-type speech, Mao simply listed his closest comrades and the positions they would hold in the new government. A week earlier, however, he had outlined the program for CCP rule in a speech to the People’s Consultative Conference, a body with nonparty membership that the CCP kept on through Soviet insistence, even though Mao himself had wanted to get rid of it. The Chairman was triumphant: “We have defeated the reactionary GMD government backed by U.S. imperialism.”

Our work will go down in the history of mankind, demonstrating that the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind. And that was due entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments. For over a century our forefathers never stopped waging unyielding struggles against domestic and foreign oppressors . . . now we are proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China. From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world and work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilization and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom. Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up.
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Nine weeks after setting up his new state, Mao left Beijing to meet with Stalin in Moscow. It was the Chairman’s first-ever trip abroad. His delegation was well received by the Soviet leader. But Mao was horrified to find that Stalin did not plan for a comprehensive new agreement on bilateral relations with the PRC, preferring instead to work within the format of the treaty he had signed with the GMD government in 1945. Only significant pressure from the Chinese and from some of Stalin’s own advisers brought the Soviet leader around. On 14 February 1950, after Mao had spent two months in Moscow and the Beijing leadership was becoming increasingly desperate, the two countries
signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, in which the Soviets pledged to defend China from attacks by “Japan and her allies” (meaning the United States) and provide military and civilian assistance. They also agreed to transfer to China, free of charge, their concessions in Manchuria obtained in 1945. In return the Chinese agreed to set up a number of joint stock companies, owned in halves by each country, on everything from food canning to aviation, to accept the independence of Outer Mongolia, and to prevent any country but the Soviet Union from operating in Manchuria and Xinjiang. Mao had got the treaty he desired, providing security and assistance. But his nationalist pride had suffered sharply in the process, as his wish to be dealt with as an equal by the Soviets had gone unfulfilled.

To the Communists, their almost miraculous victory in the civil war had confirmed their view of themselves as China’s men of destiny. They had conquered the country and would now set out to cleanse it of its ills. They had a charismatic leader in Mao Zedong. The goodwill and prestige they enjoyed among most groups of Chinese at home and abroad were unlike anything enjoyed by any Chinese government after the fall of the Qing. Internationally, they had broken with Western imperialism and allied themselves with the Soviet Union, as they had always aimed to do. History was on their side, in spite of the uncertainties many of them had as to how to run a modern state. It would come together in the end, their leaders told them, as long as imperialist attacks could be avoided and the Soviet Union would continue its support.

T
HE
CCP
LEADERS
, busy building their new state, could not have foreseen the trouble that would soon come from the empire’s edges. Korea had been divided into a US and a Soviet occupation zone at the end of World War II, and the two parts of the country soon saw competing regimes. The new PRC had cordial, but not close, relations with the Korean Communists, who held power in the northern part of
the country under Soviet tutelage. The Korean War was not a war of the new CCP regime’s choosing, even though it in the end decided to fight. It was Stalin who in the spring of 1950 gave the go-ahead to the Korean Communist leader Kim Il-sung to reunify his country by force, just as Mao Zedong had done in China. The Soviets had kept the government in Beijing updated as the plans progressed, and Mao had given his blessing to the venture in May. But there were no plans for direct Chinese participation, even though Mao suspected that things might not work out quite as easily as Kim and his Soviet advisors were telling Stalin. The Soviets were aware of the CCP’s hope for a period of peace for China, and Stalin may have picked the timing of the Korean War precisely as a way of testing the Chinese Communists’ loyalty to him and to the Soviet Union as the leader of world Communism. In spite of the Moscow agreement, Stalin continued to see the CCP as a party of intellectuals and peasants, without the working-class component that would make it into a real Communist party.