Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  WHEN IT CAME TO POWER, the CCP represented a form of government that China had never seen before. The party was disciplined, inward-looking, and directed by a charismatic leader. It did not allow for any reference points outside the party and feared and resented any outside influence on its policies, domestic or foreign. The party had constructed a pseudo-Marxist version of Chinese history in which everything in the past inevitably led to the assumption of power by the CCP: All that had happened in China and to China since the Qing’s first trouble with foreigners in the 1830s was a preparation for Communist rule, and the new regime was the logical consequence of, as Chairman Mao put it, the Chinese people having stood up. The concept of liberation was (and is) central to this version of Chinese history: The Communists had liberated China from foreign rule and its domestic supporters. Of course, China had been ruled by a nationalist, and at times xenophobic, government under Chiang Kai-shek for more than twenty years and many Chinese wanted to be associated with foreign teachers, partners, or lovers. But the new regime set out to destroy China’s links with the rest of the world in a comprehensive and deliberate manner, believing that its rule would never be safe as long as any major foreign influence, outside the party’s Soviet links, remained in China.

  The CCP’s first step was to get rid of foreigners who remained in China. At first, this seemed an easy task for the party. So many had already left during the civil war. Those associated with business and trade would soon leave of their own accord, because the new government would not give them any chance to operate with a profit in new China. In terms of numbers the CCP turned out to be right: The vast majority of foreigners left China voluntarily or were easily deported in 1950–1951. The problem was usually with foreigners who had lived in China for most of their lives and were running hospitals or schools. In order to drive these out, the CCP had to resort to political pressure on their Chinese associates, colleagues, or friends, and have them publicly attack their foreign acquaintances as “running dogs of imperialism” or “bloodsuckers of the Chinese people.” Even after such campaigns a minority of long-term foreign residents in China, mostly missionaries, chose to stay.

  The second step was to attack the businesses or organizations with which foreigners were directly associated. The CCP government levied large fines on businesses that had part foreign ownership until the foreign ownership ended. In some cases foreign-owned enterprises were confiscated outright or accused of wartime collaboration with the Japanese and seized. Such accusations were particularly resented by foreigners who had spent years in Japanese prison camps and chose to remain in China after the war. Foreign-influenced aid organizations were more difficult to target. The YMCA, for instance, was kept on in light disguise as a state institution after the foreigners and Christians who were involved in running it were driven out. In other institutions, doctors, teachers, and missionaries were accused of financial irregularities, sexual deviation, or espionage to whip up campaigns against them so they could more easily be expelled. The CCP urged its cadre to try to alienate foreigners and the Chinese who worked with or associated with them, so that these Chinese, who often had important expertise, could more easily be brought to work for the government after the foreigners had been got rid of.6

  The third step in Communist antiforeign campaigns involved attempts to limit access to foreign books, films, and products. This activity proved much more difficult than getting rid of the foreigners, to the point that party activists in several cities were close to despair even after the nationalist argument could be fully brought to bear during the Korean War. Purging unwanted foreign books from libraries and bookshops was not particularly difficult, although it had to be carried out at night to prevent curious onlookers. The problem was that texts the CCP wanted to get rid of had a tendency to reappear in bookstalls and secondhand shops. Living without American movies turned out to be hard, especially for city youngsters, who went to great lengths to save illegal copies and show them privately. Though some girls reveled in dressing in Mao uniforms as a symbol of joining the cause, those who had had access to imported stockings, perfume, or lipstick seemed to miss these products to the point of being willing to buy them from various smuggling operations. But with book imports censored, publishing houses, record companies, and film studios taken over by the government, and lipstick smugglers publicly executed, the CCP gradually got things under control.

  The antiforeign campaign’s fourth step was the use of terror and imprisonment. Some foreigners who refused to leave were arrested, and some spent years in labor camps. Chinese who refused to reform their behavior or views, or who thought that China’s self-imposed isolation was idiotic or criminal, or who simply had foreign links or foreign education, were “struggled against” in public sessions, where they were accused by their fellow citizens, beaten up, and sent to prison or to the camps. The party wanted to set an example through such people, by forcing them to conduct self-criticisms and recant their foreign ways. In some cases, even with serial offenders, the party wanted to retrain them so that they would become good citizens of the PRC, serving the people. The worst offenders—for instance, a young man who read aloud in English from the American Declaration of Independence, or a young woman who wondered when the CCP would allow multiparty elections—were executed.

  The reason why these antiforeign campaigns succeeded was not just the combination of terror, nationalism, and the burden of history. It was first and foremost because the new regime organized the lives of Chinese citizens in ways that had never been seen before. Through neighborhood committees and informants the state found its way into all parts of life, even inside families and close friendships. Regions of the country that had not seen much central state presence for a hundred years found themselves regimented along the same lines as everywhere else. And there is little doubt that the CCP was carried forward by the enthusiasm of the great majority of Chinese for the reconstitution of the state and for the social reforms that were carried out. The regime did much to improve the position of women, by abolishing arranged marriages and the economic or sexual exploitation of young girls. Factory workers got set working hours and increases in pay. Peasants could break free of generations of abuse by landlords. Campaigns against opium use and prostitution were widely hailed, also outside China, and the CCP’s literacy campaigns, modeled on the Soviet experience, were the most successful the world had ever seen. It did not matter much, most people thought, that jazz records or jazz musicians disappeared, or that the regime—to better coordinate its campaigns—set all of the country on the same time zone (Beijing Time), forcing farmers in the far west to get out of bed at two a.m. to start their day. It was all to create a new China, modeled on the Soviet Union, of “cleaning house before entertaining guests,” as Mao Zedong put it.

  Soviet advisers who served in China during the 1950s have often described the PRC approach to Moscow as “schizophrenic,” meaning, presumably, incoherent and delusional. Though this is a grossly exaggerated critique of an alliance that worked well for more than ten years, there is something to the Soviet criticism. The Chinese Communists wanted Soviet aid and wanted to copy Soviet models. But they were afraid of any Soviet influence within the Chinese Communist Party itself and therefore wanted to prevent, for instance, unsanctioned personal contacts between Soviets and Chinese in China. The CCP’s problems with wanting to copy the Soviet Union while wanting to screen itself off from Soviet influence were compounded by the fact that the party was split on how direct and immediate the lessons from the Soviets could be. From the very beginning of the PRC, leaders like Liu Shaoqi (Mao’s second in command in the party) and Zhou Enlai (the Chinese prime minister), as well as planners and specialists who had worked with the Soviets in Manchuria or been trained in Moscow, saw the Soviet Union as the China of tomorrow. Chairman Mao, on the other hand, and some of his old comrades in the military and in the party, wanted Soviet aid and Soviet examples but believed that they had to go through a process of vetting to fit the CC
P’s specific intentions. While Mao spoke often and dearly about the need to make foreign constructs serve Chinese purposes what he really was afraid of was Soviet control of his party’s political processes.

  In spite of the CCP leaders’ dissonant views about their relations with the Soviet Union, there is no doubt that they wanted and needed Soviet aid. Nor is there any doubt about the genuine admiration the Chinese Communists showed for Soviet military achievements, political organization, and technology. The key was Soviet modernity. The cadre who visited or read about the Soviet Union saw in it a state that was modern and strong but not imperialist and therefore not inimical to China. People who had criticized Western modernity in its capitalist form, as seen for instance in Shanghai, but who still found the technologies, products, and culture of advanced capitalism alluring, could in the Soviet experience find a modernity to be proud of. The terrible human cost of Stalin’s socialism—the targeted hunger campaigns, the mass killings, the labor camps—members of the CCP wrote off as imperialist lies, or, at the worst, the necessary price to pay for human progress. By the late 1940s, to most members of the Chinese party, it was not the real Soviet Union that mattered as much as an idealized image of it, a kind of future China, prosperous, strong, and just.

  By the late 1940s the CCP had two kinds of members. The leaders were hardened Communists of the 1920s, people who had fought for their party and seen friends die for it. They had internalized the Mao-centered loyalty, the deep sense of isolation and danger, and the willingness to purge dissent. They had been through the rectification campaign of 1942–1943, intended to weed out all opposition to Mao’s leadership of the party. They had organized the first CCP labor camps for landlords, bourgeois elements, and political opponents during the civil war. They knew and approved of the methods Stalin had used to solidify Soviet power north of the border. The other group were recent recruits to the party, many of them young and from the cities. Some had left their bourgeois families to join the Communist cause. All had dedicated themselves to the party, but they had little experience of it. The party leaders needed them and their expertise but never trusted them fully and were afraid they could pollute the hard-won purity of the Communist Party. The process of practical learning from the Soviet Union, the CCP leaders believed, would create the means by which to integrate the newcomers and keep them gainfully employed.

  The Sovietization of the CCP, which started in 1945 when party cadre began working directly with Soviet Communists in Manchuria and lasted for fifteen years, meant learning how to build a state and a ruling party. Mao and his followers had no intention of taking over and using the state the GMD had constructed. They wanted a new state, built on the pattern of the Soviet Union, a full break with China’s earlier history and with the Chinese state that had come into being after the 1911 revolution. Even the leaders who were most dedicated to learning from the CCP’s own history realized that it did not prepare them for building a modern state. By 1949 all of the plans for a socialist China were drafted based on Soviet models and with Soviet expert assistance. From city planning to agricultural reform, from cultural institutions to labor camps, from nationalities policies to foreign policy, the new socialist state that the CCP wanted to build was to be modeled on the Soviet experience. Its capital city, which the party in 1949 decided would be Beijing, was to be fully refashioned in Soviet style. The earliest Communist plans for the city simply superimposed the Great Stalin Plan for Moscow of 1935 on the already existing old Ming grid. The link to the Soviet Union was intended to be the largest transfer of foreign knowledge into China ever and to enable the new regime to break with China’s troubled past in a quick and streamlined manner.

  Some foreign observers in 1949 thought that the PRC faced a choice in terms of its foreign policy. Some Americans even believed that China might become an independent power rather than be close to the Soviet Union. They would have been rather shocked to find how total the orientation toward working with the Soviets was inside the CCP in the late 1940s. In foreign policy terms, the question was not whether to agree or not agree with Soviet positions, but how to find out enough about Soviet thinking to ensure a fast and full CCP compliance. There was the question of Yugoslavia, for example. There in the spring of 1948 Stalin very quickly moved from approval to condemnation, accusing the Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito of resisting Soviet orders. CCP foreign affairs personnel were desperate to keep up with current thinking in Moscow, especially since Tito’s party had been the only East European party the CCP had independent relations with. As soon as Stalin’s castigation of Tito became fully known to the CCP, Mao—out his temporary dwelling in the town of Xibaipo—issued a proclamation using the exact phrases the Soviet leader had used in his condemnation. When Yugoslavia recognized the PRC in 1949, the new Chinese foreign ministry was ordered to send the letter of recognition back. The Chinese Communists were in no mood to deviate from Stalin’s point of view on any issue, domestic or diplomatic.

  THE SINO-SOVIET ALLIANCE was to have a deeper impact on China than any other alliance in the country’s modern history. So far it has taken other foreign influence more than thirty years, since the 1970s, to try to move China away from its Soviet heritage, but only with limited success. Education, defense, government, and party institutions, all seem very Soviet in style still, even after decades of so-called opening and reform.

  Why did the Soviet experience fasten itself so deeply in China? One reason is the core value the Soviet project represented for the Chinese Communist Party. It was, after all, the basis on which the party had been founded. Another is the breadth and depth of the encounter with the Soviet experience. Not only did Soviet aid to China become, in relative terms, history’s biggest foreign assistance program from one country to another, but it also came at a time of unprecedented expansion of the Chinese state: Tens of millions of Chinese who had limited experience with foreign models first encountered them through Soviet plans, Soviet experts, or Soviet education.

  Stalin’s ideologically based distrust of the CCP prevented the civilian assistance program for China from becoming fully functional, but his successor Nikita Khrushchev knew no such boundaries. On the contrary, Khrushchev made a deepening of the alliance with the PRC a cornerstone in his rise to power after Stalin’s death in 1953. To Khrushchev China was an obvious ally: It was a large, neighboring country, led by a dedicated Communist party that wanted to emulate the Soviet experience. To the new leader, Stalin’s hesitancy with regard to the CCP stood as an example of the old boss’s increasing madness. No sane person, Khrushchev liked to stress to his colleagues, would forgo such an opportunity. Khrushchev’s own first major foreign visit was to China, in 1954. To Mao as well as to ordinary Chinese it meant a lot that the new Soviet leader came to Beijing instead of the Chinese going to pay homage in Moscow. It showed the importance the new Kremlin leaders attached to China and the respect they had for their CCP counterparts. Even more importantly, Khrushchev promised much more Soviet assistance to China, both civilian and military, than Stalin had ever dreamed of giving. One-third of all projects under the first Chinese Five Year Plan were to be built and paid for by Soviet or East European assistance. By 1955, sixty percent of China’s total trade was with the USSR.7

  It is hard to overestimate the significance of total Soviet Bloc assistance to the Chinese Communists between 1946 and 1960. Without it, the first steps toward the modern China that the CCP envisaged would have been impossible. The total economic assistance, including loans, was about $3.4 billion (US) from 1946 to 1960 in 1960 value (which is about $25 billion today). This is, on average, a little bit less than one percent of the Soviet GDP year by year. In reality, the transfers for 1954 to 1959 were much higher than this, in value as well as percentage-wise. This sum does not include technology transfers, salaries for Soviet experts in China, or stipends for Chinese students in the USSR. Even if we subtract the roughly eighteen percent that came from Soviet allies and around fifteen percent that was, over t
ime, paid back by the PRC, we are still dealing with a vast program of resource shifting with significant effects for both countries.8

  By the mid-1950s, Soviet advisers were attached to all Chinese ministries, regional and provincial governments, and major industrial enterprises. Soviet experts advised on every aspect of life in new China—from working with youth and women, minorities, soldiers, teachers, and engineers, to education, science, mining, military training, and general fitness. The Soviet advisers generally worked well with their Chinese counterparts. To the Chinese, in spite of the CCP’s attempts at preventing too enthusiastic fraternization, the Soviets were models for what they themselves wanted to become: educated, dedicated, and efficient. To the Soviets, the Chinese honored them and their experience by wanting to model their new state on the Soviet Union. There were plentiful conflicts over food, sex, hygiene, or status, the usual elements of cultural clashes. But the significance of what the advisers were doing usually overrode the problems that arose, despite attempts by propriety-obsessed party commissars from both parties to magnify any difficulty that arose. For most of the decade the Sino-Soviet alliance worked well and fulfilled the purpose that both countries aimed at: to create the most powerful anti-Western alliance the world had seen since the rise of the Ottoman empire.