The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (23 page)

Without air cover, his supply lines dangerously extended and without adequate provisions of food and ammunition, Peng Dehuai pleaded for a halt along the 38th parallel, but Mao was determined to press on. Seoul, capital of South Korea, was taken during the Chinese New Year in January 1951. By now a devastating blow had been dealt to the United States. Truman declared a State of National Emergency, telling the American public that their homes and nation were ‘in great danger’.

Mao’s prestige was greatly enhanced, but the cost to his own soldiers was enormous. The fighting took place in extreme weather, with temperatures plummeting to minus 30 degrees Celsius, made worse by freezing winds and deep snow. Most troops had no padded shoes. Some wore thin cotton sandals and a few even went barefoot, wrapping rags around their feet before going into battle. Blankets and jackets were burned out by napalm. Whole units froze to death, while frostbite attacked the hands and feet of many troops. Up to two-thirds of all soldiers also suffered from trench foot, which sometimes resulted in gangrene. Starvation was widespread, as the supply lines were hopelessly stretched and under constant fire from prowling enemy aircraft. In some companies one in six men suffered from night blindness caused by malnutrition. Dysentery, among other diseases, was common, and was treated with opium. After the exhilaration of the first few weeks, morale was low, as the men were physically exhausted by the work they were made to do. Some were so worn out that they committed suicide.
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Soon the troops ran out of steam. They were able to sustain themselves into the early months of 1951 by capturing arms and supplies from the retreating enemy. Soldiers learned to eat C rations. Li Xiu, a propaganda officer, remembered that the soldiers quickly took to American biscuits. ‘Without the American sleeping bags and overcoats we captured, I am not sure we could have gone on.’
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The tide soon turned. On 26 December 1950, General Matthew Ridgway arrived in Korea to take command of the American forces as MacArthur’s subordinate. In the first weeks of 1951 he regrouped the United Nations forces and counter-attacked, first cautiously probing his opponent’s determination before launching more robust offensives, creating fields of fire with carefully deployed men and firepower that mauled the Chinese troops. He called his strategy the ‘meat grinder’, slowly pressing forward with devastating artillery and tanks, shattering the enemy again and again. Mao refused to retreat, wiring orders that his troops counter-attack instead. In the first two weeks of February alone, Ridgway inflicted an estimated 80,000 casualties.
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Peng Dehuai rushed back to Beijing in February, confronting Mao in his bunker at Jade Spring Hills over the massive losses caused by reckless warfare. The Chairman listened, but was too enthralled by his own fantasies of victory over the capitalist camp. Peng was told to hold the line and to expect a long war. On 1 March Mao cabled Stalin, proclaiming his determination to wear down the enemy in a protracted war: ‘In the last four offensives, we have sustained 100,000 casualties among combatants and non-combatants of the People’s Volunteer Army, and we are about to replenish the troops with 120,000 soldiers. We are prepared for another 300,000 casualties in the next two years, and we will furnish another 300,000 troops.’
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On the American side, General MacArthur toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons. He even briefly contemplated invading China, but was sacked by President Truman in April 1951. Ridgway, who replaced him, now assuming overall command of all United Nations forces in Korea, refused to go further than the 38th parallel.

A stalemate emerged in the summer of 1951. Armistice talks began in mid-July, but were broken off by the communists. Stalin slowed down negotiations to bring the war to an end, as he had little to gain from peace. He was keen to see more American troops destroyed in Korea, and probably not unhappy to have a potential rival locked into a costly conflict. But Mao also repeatedly rejected peace proposals. As he had indicated to Stalin even before a stalemate was reached, he was prepared for the long term. The longer the war lasted the more ammunition, tanks and planes he could badger out of the Soviet Union. The Chairman used the war to expand his army and build up a first-class arms industry, all with Soviet help.
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The pretext Mao used to justify dragging his feet at the negotiating table was that the Americans held some 21,000 Chinese prisoners of war, most of whom refused to return to China. Held in camps in South Korea, they tattooed their bodies with anti-communist slogans to prevent forced repatriation. Some wrote letters with their own blood. ‘The POWs cut open the tips of their fingers and use them as fountain pens,’ a Red Cross delegate reported. ‘I saw a number of these letters in question. It is an awesome sight.’ Mao demanded the return of every single prisoner of war, and Stalin encouraged him in his hardline position.
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So the war lasted another two years. The battle lines barely changed, but the casualties were enormous. Trench warfare forced many soldiers to spend weeks buried inside foxholes, tunnels and shelters from which they could emerge only at night. Bodies, shells and garbage were everywhere, but there was hardly any food or water. Soldiers sometimes drank the moisture that dripped from rocks. Captain Zheng Yanman remembered an attack in October 1952: ‘There were about one hundred soldiers inside the tunnels, remnants of six different companies and ranging in age from sixteen to fifty-two. About fifty of the men were wounded, and they had received no medicine or medical assistance. They were lying around, some of them dying, and nobody seemed to care. In one of the shelter holes there was a pile of more than twenty bodies.’ Soldiers who deserted were executed on the spot.
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Many of the soldiers were former nationalist troops who had surrendered during the civil war. Mao had few qualms in consigning them to their deaths in Korea. In fighting the communists in Xuzhou three years earlier, some of them had been obliged to shoot unarmed villagers, used as human shields by the communists. Now they were made to exhaust the enemy’s bullets in one wave after another, as flesh and blood was hurled against modern armament. An American machine-gunner described what happened as he countered headlong night attacks by massed Chinese infantry: ‘We could see them tumbling down like bowling pins,’ he wrote. ‘As long as the flares were up we never had trouble finding a target.’
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Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought about a quick armistice, but the cost of the stalemate had been prodigious. From July 1951 to the ceasefire on 27 July 1953 millions of soldiers and civilians died. China sent some 3 million men to the front, of whom an estimated 400,000 died. Despite the terrible human cost, Korea was Mao’s personal victory. He had pushed for war when his colleagues had wavered. His gamble paid off. China had brought the world’s most powerful nation on earth to a standstill. China had stood up.
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The war had lasting domestic consequences. The official line on how the conflict had started in June 1950 was that the South Koreans, incited by American imperialists, had attacked the peaceful North Koreans in an act of flagrant aggression. People from all walks of life in China met this explanation with a mixture of disbelief, incomprehension, fear and outright panic. Many could not help but wonder how the campaign launched into the south had proceeded with such efficient military planning and dispatch. In Shanghai students and professors openly asked what the North Koreans were doing in the south. Fears were rife about an impending cataclysm with the United States. Rumours spread like wildfire. In Shenyang, close to the Korean border, talk of the start of a Third World War did the rounds: ‘The United States have entered the war, the Third World War has started!’ In Nanjing some people were so anxious that they phoned the
People’s Daily
to ask if a new world war had begun. Anxiety over war went in tandem with hopes for a return to the old order. ‘The Soviet Union has already surrendered unconditionally, now the war criminal Mao Zedong will be arrested!’ it was whispered in Manchuria, while others announced the impending collapse of the regime: ‘The Americans and Chiang Kai-shek have already recaptured Hainan Island, Lin Biao has been sacrificed!’
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The threat of a nuclear conflagration created deep anxiety, which official propaganda on imperialism’s impending collapse scarcely dented. In October 1950, as the United Nations troops approached the Yalu River, Mao’s grandiose description of American imperialism as nothing more than a paper tiger was quietly mocked in Shanghai. Some opined that if the United States was a paper tiger, China was not even a pussycat.
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Fear of an impending invasion reached fever pitch. People worried about bombs being dropped on cities and the enemy entering Manchuria. In Shenyang thousands took to the roads in panic. Over 1,200 workers abandoned their posts at the First of May Factory, while one in five absconded from the Municipal Tool Factory. Teachers, doctors, students, even party members scrambled on to trains to escape south, convinced that the end was nigh. Those who stayed behind hoarded food, clothes and water. Messages of opposition to the party appeared in schools, factories, offices, hospitals and dormitories, scribbled on walls, etched into the furniture, scrawled even on to kettles in canteens. Some were concise: ‘Beat the Soviet Union’. Others were long diatribes against communism.
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The party responded with a campaign of terror. But in November 1950 it also tried persuasion through a campaign called ‘Resist America, Aid Korea, Preserve our Homes, Defend the Nation’. Mass meetings were held in every school and factory, while propaganda in newspapers, magazines and the radio tried to whip up the population in a furore against the enemy. Not a day went by without some stirring denunciation against the United States in the
People’s Daily
or other state-controlled publications. The
South China Daily
, for example, trumpeted its utter contempt for America:

This is a country which is thoroughly reactionary, thoroughly dark, thoroughly corrupt, thoroughly cruel. This is the Eden of a few millionaires, the hell of countless millions of poor people. This is the paradise of gangsters, swindlers, rascals, special agents, fascist germs, speculators, debauchers, and all the dregs of mankind. This is the world’s source of all such crimes as reaction, darkness, cruelty, decadence, corruption, debauchery, oppression of man by man, and cannibalism. This is the exhibition ground of all the crimes which can possibly be committed by mankind. This is a living hell ten times, one hundred times, one thousand times worse than any hell that can possibly be depicted by the most gory of writers.
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Zhou Enlai himself set the tone, becoming an eloquent spokesman for the Hate America Campaign, and never tiring of denouncing the imperialist plot to enslave the world. Mao Dun, minister of cultural affairs and prominent novelist, announced that ‘Americans are veritable devils and cannibals.’ Returned students from America were made to publish recantations, including denunciations of bestialism and depravity. Cartoons and posters portrayed President Truman and General MacArthur as serial rapists, bloodthirsty murderers or savage animals. Loudspeakers persistently blared forth the same slogans and speeches. ‘Even inside the house with all the windows closed,’ noted a Beijing resident, ‘you hear the constant, unchanging music and the speeches, and if you open the windows you are nearly deafened by the noise.’ Calculated vituperation and genuine outrage were hard to disentangle in these endless tirades, but the message was clear enough: people had to hate, curse and despise the imperialists.
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Everything was carefully orchestrated from above. A central directive dated 19 December 1950 specifically ordered that feelings of admiration and respect towards the United States should be changed into ‘Hate America, Despise America and Look Down on America’.
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This goal was to be accomplished not just by relentless propaganda, but also through renewed study sessions and mass rallies. Many were disorganised. In one Shanghai university, the faculty and the entire student body were given ten minutes to dress and assemble at the campus square one wintry day in 1950. Printed banners were thrust into their hands with messages such as ‘Down with the Soft-Worded, Cloak-and-Dagger Lies of the American Imperialists’ and ‘Protest against Austin’s Shameless Lies’. ‘Everyone was asking what it was all about, but no one seemed to know,’ explained Robert Loh. ‘We were told to shout the slogans printed on the banners. Thereupon we were marched for five hours all through Shanghai.’ Back at the university they were made to listen to a fiery speech from the party secretary. Only then did they understand that they had just participated in a spontaneous demonstration against a speech by Warren Austin, the American representative on the United Nations Security Council. Thereafter they were called out at regular intervals to protest against imperialist lies. ‘We rarely knew what the issue was until we read the story of our “voluntary demonstration” in the papers.’
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These were university students, but ordinary people who tried to pursue their own lives in the midst of ferocious campaigns against ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘tyrants’, ‘evil gentry’ and ‘landlords’ found the Hate America Campaign even more confusing. In Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu, rallies in support of the war took place almost every week in the early spring of 1951, although some of those who marched against America still had no idea what the campaign was all about – despite countless leaflets, speeches and propaganda films. Those who refused to participate were fined or labelled as members of a secret society. Despite these threats, people were apprehensive, as rumours circulated that women who turned up might be sent to Korea to cook meals for the soldiers. In Guangzhou, where patriotic parades of half a million people were held, ignorance was widespread. In one power plant where the local Propaganda Department tested more than a hundred workers on their knowledge, one in six did not know where their ally was and more than a quarter had never heard of Kim Il-sung. Propaganda seemed barely to penetrate parts of the countryside. In one village in Shixing county, sixty women enrolled in a literacy class did not know whether ‘Korea’ was the name of a place or a person.
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