by Odd Westad
These kinds of nightmarish visions helped prevent an effective American policy toward China in the 1950s. Instead the three administrations that followed Truman’s employed an increasingly stale approach, based in part on fear of domestic political repercussions, to their China policies: economic embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and support for the GMD on Taiwan. In a way, US policies made Mao’s job easier. The CCP leaders wanted to isolate China and were afraid of any foreign influence within the country. When the British Labour government tried to recognize the PRC in 1950, Mao would have nothing of it until London had closed down all of its representation on Taiwan. And when Conservative British Prime Minister Anthony Eden himself wanted to come to China to break the ice in February 1955, Mao bragged to the Soviet ambassador that “the PRC intentionally gave an answer that meant Eden would refuse to come.” When the Eisenhower administration showed a less belligerent approach to China in 1959, the Chairman immediately interpreted it as an attempt to subvert the country from the inside. Mao told his aides that US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles “wants to change a country such as ours. He wants to subvert and change us to follow his ideas. . . . Therefore, the United States is [still] attempting to be aggressive and expansionist with a much more deceptive tactic. . . . In other words, it wants to keep its order and change our system. It wants to corrupt us through peaceful evolution.”35
Race played an important role in how the outside world viewed new China, and in how China viewed the world. The American leaders (and the Europeans to a lesser extent) were concerned that China as a nonwhite country stood a better chance than European Communists in seducing and subverting countries in Asia and Africa that were emerging from colonialism. In a mirror image, the Soviets, from Stalin on, thought that the Chinese could and should act in Third World contexts where it would be more difficult for the Soviets themselves to operate. Many Third World leaders in the 1950s saw China as a potential ally—its presence at Bandung was crucial in this regard—or even as representing a non-European variant of socialist development that they themselves wanted to follow. For Mao Zedong, all of these approaches were problematic. He agreed with Moscow that China had a particular role to play in the Third World on behalf of world Communism, but not that it stood for a specific model. It stood for Marxism-Leninism, pure and simple. China wanted global influence, but the Americans, according to the Chairman, were chasing ghosts if they believed that China would involve itself deeply outside the socialist camp. And finally the CCP welcomed Third World radicals to Beijing and would be happy to develop relations with them, but on the clear understanding that Marxism-Leninism was the only possible solution to the ills of the developing world. There was no third way, and China in ideological terms most definitely did not want to develop one.
The CCP’s views on religion also created difficulties in how others saw China. During 1950 all Christian missionaries were expelled, and their medical and educational institutions taken over by the state. Some foreign missionaries were incarcerated, including an American Catholic bishop, James E. Walsh, who spent twelve years in prison. Almost all of the Chinese Catholic hierarchy was arrested. The archbishop of Guangzhou, Dominic Deng Yiming, was held for twenty-two years. Ignatius Cardinal Gong Pinmei spent thirty years in a labor camp. Christian denominations were broken up and reorganized into “patriotic” religious organizations. Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist or Muslim leaders in Xinjiang, Gansu, or elsewhere in China fared little better. For the Chinese government these persecutions were ways of controlling the country. But for many foreign fellow believers of those persecuted in China, the actions of the CCP made them loathe and distrust the Chinese regime.
Overall the views held in the outside world of China in the early phase of Communist rule may have been uninformed but not necessarily wrong. China had embarked on an experiment that had a tremendous human cost and that would ultimately fail. But foreigners criticizing the PRC made some Chinese even more convinced that they had to persist in their course. To them, the most important thing was that Maoism was Chinese, and that the Communist Party had succeeded in uniting the country and given the majority of its people a sense of purpose. After one hundred years of state weakness, China seemed finally to be building a state that would provide its people with a good standard of living and be respected in the outside world. For most Chinese in the 1950s that was enough to know.
ON ITS OWN TERMS, the CCP had reason to be proud of its achievements during the 1950s. It had fought the United States to a standstill in the Korean War. It had carried out comprehensive campaigns against its domestic enemies, had collectivized agriculture and nationalized all key industries, and had, with massive Soviet assistance, completed the First Five Year Plan of production with satisfactory results. Within the fields emphasized in the Plan—iron and steel manufacturing, coal mining, cement production, electricity generation, and machine building—growth had been significant, at around nine percent per year. Even so, the leadership, and Mao especially, were still worried about the future. In spite of showing growth in output, agriculture could not keep up with industrial expansion or even the increase in population. There were signs that even industrial growth was slowing toward the end of the period. And, most importantly, Mao and some of his advisers were not satisfied with China’s overall growth, because they felt that the country had so much ground to cover before catching up with the advanced nations. By 1956 a wedge in terms of policy was starting to develop between Mao and some of the younger members of the leadership on the one hand and more traditional Marxist leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, on the other. The former stressed innovation and speedy transformation in the economy, while the latter emphasized the need to rely on the Plan and learn from the successes and mistakes in the Soviet experience.
In February 1956 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shocked all those around the world who had drawn inspiration from the Soviet Union. In a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, he revealed at great length the extent of Stalin’s terror. Khrushchev’s revelations unsettled the CCP leadership, as it did Communists everywhere. Mao’s own first reaction, however, was that the condemnation of Stalin improved his own chances of becoming the ultimate arbiter of Communist doctrine in Asia and eventually around the world. As he later told the Soviet ambassador, to him Stalin’s death had been like getting out of a straitjacket. The CCP leaders liked Khrushchev’s insistence that Stalin had promoted “Russian chauvinism” in relations with other parties, from Yugoslavia to China. Hereafter the CCP would be freer in setting its own policies and in moving faster toward socialism. But the Chairman grew increasingly concerned after workers in Poland and Hungary attempted to overthrow their Communist regimes later in the year, using the revelations of the Twentieth Congress as evidence that Communism could not work. Mao and many Chinese leaders began sensing that the Soviet criticism of Stalin’s infallibility and the cult of the individual could be directed against the CCP and its cult of the Chairman. “You see what Stalin’s mania for greatness led to,” Khrushchev had said. “He completely lost touch with reality.”36 In China, Mao wanted to make sure that such a verdict could not be passed on him.
The Polish and Hungarian events in the autumn of 1956 marked the first time the CCP gave advice to the Soviets on key foreign policy issues. Mao warned the Kremlin that an armed intervention in Poland would be seen as a case of “serious big-power chauvinism, which should not be allowed in any circumstances.”37 But after Communists were lynched in the streets in Budapest, the CCP came to support, indeed urge, a Soviet invasion there. By the end of the year, Soviet and Chinese Communists alike were attempting to rebuild their badly dented authority. According to a Chinese statement much lauded by the Soviets,
The sole aim of socialist democracy is to strengthen the socialist cause of the proletariat and all the working people, to give scope to their energy in the building of socialism and in the fight against all anti-socialist forces. . . . Criticism should be made only
for the purpose of consolidating democratic centralism and of strengthening the leadership of the Party. It should in no circumstances bring about disorganization and confusion in the ranks of the proletariat, as our enemies desire.38
The ghost of Budapest frightened the CCP leaders with some reason. In the autumn and winter of 1956, China itself saw open opposition against the CCP’s policies and its lack of democracy for the first time since 1949. In many provinces public demonstrations for better conditions for workers, more democracy, and freedom of speech were observed and reported on by the secret police. A report to the Politburo noted that some of these rallies were even joined by party members, who helped chant “‘we will fight to the end’ and ‘[we will] denounce the low ranking [officials] and then turn to the higher ones.’ A few workers were even heard to proclaim, ‘As [we] see, there’s no other way for us than learning lessons from Hungary!’”39 When the party, on the defensive, decided at Mao’s suggestion to launch a campaign for greater openness, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, it was precisely to identify its opponents and later destroy them. By the end of 1957, hundreds of thousands of “bourgeois rightists” had been arrested and sent to labor camps.
In foreign policy, too, the late 1950s was an unstable period. As Mao struggled to regain the initiative within China through driving the revolution toward a more radical phase, he also set new and more aggressive policy aims in international affairs. This was the time, Mao thought, for a Communist offensive against the United States and its allies throughout the Third World. Washington had spurned the moderation of the socialist camp. Hungary and the continued “occupation” of Taiwan showed how the United States would treat what it perceived as Communist weakness. Visiting Moscow on his second and last trip abroad, Mao exhorted his hosts to confront imperialism. “It is my view,” the Chairman said, “that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two winds in the world today, the east wind and the west wind. There is a Chinese saying, ‘Either the east wind prevails over the west wind or the west wind prevails over the east wind.’ It is characteristic of the situation today, I believe, that the east wind is prevailing over the west wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism are overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism.” There was no reason to fear a war with the imperialists, Mao said:
If worse came to worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain. Imperialism would be destroyed, and the whole world would become socialist. In a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more. We Chinese have not yet completed our [socialist] construction, and we desire peace. However, if imperialism insists on fighting a war, we will have no alternative but to make up our minds and fight to the finish before proceeding with construction.40
The international meeting of Communist leaders whom Mao addressed sat in shocked silence as the Chairman’s remarks were translated. One young Russian delegate who was present in the hall that night later told me that to him it was as if Stalin had come alive again. He did not cherish the thought, or that of half the world’s population perishing.
After returning from his politically disastrous trip to the Soviet Union, Mao began considering how China could make a great leap forward, intensifying production in heavy industry and in agriculture at the same time. In Moscow, Mao had boasted that China’s economy would overtake Britain’s in fifteen years. As he began discussing new production aims with his colleagues in the spring of 1958, he pushed for increased quotas in most parts of the economy. Other leaders, cowed by Mao’s prestige, optimism, and revolutionary spirit, were eager to tell him that China could outdo the British in steel production in seven years, some said five or even three years. Obsessed with steel as the constructor of modernity, Mao told them that China needed to make its great leap into the future, to show doubters within the country, the Soviets, and the imperialists, what socialist man was capable of. It was a world of struggle, the Chairman insisted, and China had to catch up quickly or be annihilated.
BY THE LATE 1950s, China and its foreign relations were transformed from what they had been a decade before. The Communists had introduced a new political and economic order, patterned on that of the Soviet Union. Most of the ties with the rest of the world that had been built cautiously and gradually over the previous century had been severed and those who represented them had been killed, sent to labor camps, or otherwise silenced. China’s isolation was going to get a lot worse as Mao began putting in place policies that would lead to a break with the socialist countries as well. But the foundation for China’s isolation was laid in the 1950s, when socialism was first constructed.
It is not difficult to understand why the CCP opted for a break with the international orientation of the late Qing and Republican eras. Its own foreign experience was limited, having spent twenty years fighting the GMD in the Chinese countryside. Based on its reading of history, the party saw past foreign involvement in China as purely negative. From more modern times, it copied the full break that USSR had had with the West since its founding. It did not understand that this break, from Lenin’s perspective, had been forced on the country by relentless Western hostility rather than actively sought. But most importantly the isolation of the PRC came from the sectarian aspect of CCP politics. The party was extremely disciplined, narrow-minded, and inward-looking, with Mao as an increasingly prophet-like leader for whom no constraints existed. Together with the continued ideological hostility shown by the United States, Japan, and Western Europe toward new China, the CCP blend of isolationist policies and attitudes ensured that the new state would grow up outside any internatonal framework except the one created by its alliance with the USSR.
Many Chinese hoped for more interaction with the outside world in the future—reconnecting with relatives and friends outside the PRC, on Taiwan, in Hong Kong or Macao, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora. But they had enough pride in their country’s achievements to create mass support for the CCP’s hatred of foreign things and ideas. As the Chinese learned more about the CCP’s use of mass executions and labor camps, most simply hid the party’s excesses from outsiders. They believed that these methods, though terrible, could be justified in the building of a new and modern China, which, eventually, would be able to meet the rest of the world on equal terms. Some may even have believed that China was in the process of surpassing other countries in the competition for modernity. They were in for some big shocks in the decade that followed.
CHAPTER 9
CHINA ALONE
DURING THE 1960s, China went through a period of isolation and increasing irrelevance in international affairs. Its break with the Soviet Union drove the country away from its few remaining international contacts. The radicalism and eccentricity of Mao’s policies at home and abroad made China look like what we today would call a failed state, a chaotic, self-referential, and extreme polity with few links to the outside world. Although there were small offshoot groups of so-called Maoists in industrialized countries (even in places such as New Zealand or Norway), they were more about social protest than Mao’s doctrines, and never got close to real political influence. And in the Third World those movements China supported became fewer and increasingly isolated. China’s leaders expected them to conform closely to their own domestic policy preferences whatever twist or turn Chinese politics took during these tumultous years. Even for those who sincerely wished to remain China’s allies, the task was not easy.
The self-centeredness of China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—the campaign that Mao Zedong launched in 1966 to radicalize Chinese politics and destroy perceived enemies—knew almost no bounds. The Chinese were led to believe that only China possessed the right road to revolution and that the country therefore was the enviable center of all human development, that it carried the key to the future. This key was the person of Mao Zedong and the political road he devised for China. Mao’s own obsession, after the failure of the Great Leap, was t
o create a new generation of Chinese who were not held back by what he saw as convention and conformity, including ethics, family, and friendship, and therefore could dedicate themselves fully to carrying out the revolution even after he himself was gone. They should be ruthless, strong, and brave, uncontaminated by foreign or bourgeois influence, and able to take losses on China’s road to full Communist development. Mao’s new dream was a China entirely purged of its past, its people a blank slate on which a superior form of modernity could be inscribed. He saw a road to a bright future, paved with the corpses of those who had erred or simply got in the way. Mao’s final ladder to paradise, his Cultural Revolution, rose among heaps of bodies, the way Stalin’s and Hitler’s had done in the past and Pol Pot’s would do in the future.
China’s isolation in the 1960s was largely self-imposed, but it did not have to be this way. After its break with the Soviets, China received considerable goodwill in the Third World, mainly for racial reasons. It was seen as a progressive anticolonial Asian power, and the break with the (European) Soviets initially made China more attractive as a partner for Third World radicals. The war with India in 1962—an unnecessary war, if ever there was one—held many of the more moderate Asian and African regimes back from working closely with the Chinese. But as late as 1964 or 1965 China could shine on the Third World stage, as it did through Premier Zhou Enlai’s visit to African countries or the agreement to help build a railway between Tanzania and Zambia. By the late 1960s, however, China had turned away from these achievements, and most of its Asian and Third World potential was gone. Formerly radical countries from Ghana to Indonesia turned to the right and expelled the Chinese representatives. Even North Korea sided firmly with the Soviets, though it continued to receive Chinese aid—with great schadenfreude, one must assume. By 1970 only one Chinese alliance was fully intact, that with North Vietnam, and that would collapse, with a vengeance, as soon as Saigon collapsed in 1975. The PRC was dangerously isolated—mostly by choice, it should be added—and its increasingly frenzied regime reckoned that war, this time with the Soviets, was right around the corner.