In 1923, the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, meeting at its Third Congress, followed the instructions of the Comintern to ally itself with the KMT by joining it as individuals, so that they would be members of both parties simultaneously. The formation of this first United Front, in other words, was an early example of Moscow’s decisive guidance in the CCP’s relations with the larger and more powerful Nationalist Party, guidance that continued virtually uninterrupted through the Communists’ seizure of power in 1949.
The Comintern’s task was to create a cadre of professional revolutionaries to be the vanguard of the proletarian cause, and it helped not just with ideological training but also in very practical ways. During the wilderness years of the CCP from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, when its leaders were often on the run from the KMT secret police, some thirty of their children, including two of Mao’s sons, were sheltered in Shanghai by what was called the International Society for Aid to Revolutionaries, which had been set up by the Comintern as part of its program to foster Communist parties abroad. When the shelter was closed down, Stalin personally arranged for the Mao boys to travel to the Soviet Union. There they were known as young “heroes” who had reached “the shores of socialism,” and that’s where they spent almost the entire war. Mao’s daughter, known as Jiao-jiao—later Li Na—spent her entire childhood in the Soviet Union and could barely speak Chinese when she returned to the motherland after the Communist takeover. There were more than a hundred such children, the offspring of dedicated Chinese revolutionaries who studied in Moscow, or worked there for the Chinese branch of the Comintern, or who went back to “make revolution” in China itself, leaving their children behind. Among them: a son and daughter of Liu Shaoqi, a daughter of Zhu De, an offspring of Lin Biao, and many others, all of them hosted by the International Society for Aid to Revolutionaries.
We know of this from a searing memoir written by Sin-Lin, who was brought up in the Soviet Union until she was thirteen, not knowing who her parents were until she was sent back to China in 1950. The Chinese children lived in a home with the children of revolutionaries from other countries—Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Spain, Bulgaria, and many others—singing a song called “Hymn of the Interhouse Children” (“In our hearts protest burns / Like a flame of anger in the darkness”) and learning to love Stalin, who, they were taught, was “the great leader of the international proletariat.”
When leading Chinese Communists or their family members became seriously ill, they went to Moscow for medical treatment. Among them were two of Mao’s wives, He Zizhen and Jiang Qing, and, in 1939, Zhou Enlai, after he broke a bone in his elbow falling from a horse. Membership in this society was like membership in a cult. It was all-encompassing, exclusive, all-consuming. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Chinese Communists in Russia were swept up in the Stalin purges of 1938 and dispatched to the Gulag. In many instances these people were informed on by other Chinese Communists; it was a foreshadowing of the savage infighting that was to take place in China itself. Sin-Lin, whose father spent seventeen years in a Siberian work camp, believes that Kang Sheng’s later persecution of fellow Communists whom he had known in Moscow in the 1930s was aimed at covering up his own earlier role informing on Chinese revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. When the teenage Sin-Lin asked her mother, a dedicated revolutionary, how “the Great, Glorious, and Correct Party” of Stalin could have perpetrated such an injustice, her reply was: “What you are talking about is only individual incidents that represent zigzags in the revolution, they cannot eclipse all of socialist construction in the Soviet Unon; they can’t blacken the entire international communist movement.” There is no evidence that the Chinese Communists ever protested to the Soviets the disappearance of their members into the Soviet prison camp system, from which hundreds never emerged. One can only speculate on the reason for this, but most likely Mao and senior cadres like Kang Sheng did not want to acknowledge that such practices were an essential part of the movement to which they belonged.
The very language of Chinese Communism, its symbols and modes of discourse, the style of its propaganda, its wood-block prints, its notions of socialist realism, its central committees, politburos, congresses, and plenums, its newspapers and ultra-serious theoretical journals, its specialized vocabulary of internal debate and struggle, its invention of an entire lexicography of ideological labels, all of them newly minted isms, like “left adventurism,” “right opportunism,” “deviationism,” “dogmatism,” “subjectivism,” “empiricism,” “revisionism,” as well as the “correctness” of the party line, and, later, the boilerplate of adulation that victorious revolutionaries such as Mao, the Korean Kim Il Sung, the Romanian Nicolae Ceauşescu, and the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh used in their own cults of the godlike genius-leader—all of this was nurtured and supported by an encyclopedia of terms, concepts, beliefs, and techniques transplanted from the original Russian, the success of the Bolshevik revolution having made the Soviet Union, in the eyes of countless oppressed and colonized people, a pathbreaker toward a radiant future—“the shores of socialism,” a promised land.
Again, given China’s later and complete break with the Soviets and the country’s ferocious attachment to its national independence, it requires a strong historical memory to resurrect the era of obedience to an outside authority. But in those decades when China’s revolutionaries sought to imitate and emulate the Soviets’ magnificent success, the relations between Moscow and the Chinese Communists were the relations of authority and compliance inside a church of the great cause, where a pope-like ruler issued edicts, based on a secular scripture whose truthfulness was guaranteed by a combination of the sacred and the infallibly scientific, or at least informed by the superiority of dialectical materialism over other modes of analysis.
It isn’t by some weird coincidence that after the deaths of the great revolutionaries Lenin, Mao, Ho, and Kim, their bodies were embalmed and placed on view for public veneration, like the fragments of the Buddha’s body or relics of the Christian saints. The origin of the practice lies in the Russian Orthodox veneration of the saints wherein it was believed that spiritual purity triumphed over the decay of the flesh; the Communist adoption of that notion was that the supreme leaders of the revolution would live eternally in the ultimate triumph of pure Communism. Nobody believed in this semi-religion—though he wouldn’t have called it that—more than Mao.
One of the strongest appeals of Marxism-Leninism was the explanation it offered for the powerlessness of the internationally dispossessed, an explanation that fit perfectly with Chinese national grievances and aspirations. This explanation was advanced by Lenin’s extremely influential idea of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, an idea that was no doubt instilled into students at places like the University of Toilers of the East. In advanced capitalism, wealth became concentrated in the hands of a few monopolies; the subsequent impoverishment of the working class led these monopolies, which controlled their governments on behalf of the ruling class, to seek raw materials, cheap labor, and markets for their products wherever they could throughout the world. This explained in persuasive, easy to understand, and, to an extent, truthful—if somewhat mechanistic—terms everything the young revolutionary needed to know about China’s condition going back to the Opium War and the beginning of what the Communists in China still call the Hundred Years of Humiliation. After all, what was the Opium War but the armed effort of the monopolistic and greedy British East India Company to ensure a market in China for its Indian opium? Lenin’s theory explained the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, Japan’s naked aggression, the decadent and privileged, servant- and concubine-rich lifestyles of the foreigners in China, who were exempt from Chinese law and whose missionaries conveyed the message that Chinese beliefs and customs were inferior to foreign beliefs and customs. Deeply embedded in the thinking of China’s early revolutionaries and patriots was this conviction that imperialist exploitation and profiteering was the final bulwark of the bourgeois
ie in its life-and-death struggle with the international proletariat.
In the self-contained, sealed-off world of Communist ideology, much that was viewed in the rest of the world as benign or certainly inoffensive was construed to be wickedly conspiratorial. Around the time of the CCP’s founding, the major world powers, including the United States, Japan, and Britain, attended a conference in Washington whose main result was a set of agreements limiting the size of one another’s navies. Seen by the treaty makers as a hard-won victory in the effort to prevent an arms race and the outbreak of another world war, these Washington treaties were castigated by the Chinese Communists as an imperialist “robbery” that “will compel 400 million Chinese people to enter into slavery under the new international trust.”
An interpretation like that would, if Americans had known of it, have been difficult for them to understand. They had, in general, a benign view of themselves and an especially benign view of themselves when it came to China. Americans have always felt that their “open door” policy, first formulated at the end of the nineteenth century when other countries were forcibly extracting colonial privileges from China, was consistent with the idealistic American impulse to help remake China as a Christian democracy. When, for example, China was forced to pay a huge indemnity to the imperialist powers after its defeat by them in the Boxer Rebellion of 1898, the United States put the funds it received into an educational trust for bright Chinese students to study in America.
But for a Chinese of the first half of the twentieth century, American intentions were not always seen in so favorable a light. In 1915, while war raged in Europe, Japan imposed its notorious twenty-one demands on China, pressing China to agree to a host of concessions, from giving Japan control of the Manchurian railways to allowing its Buddhist preachers to proselytize in China. The weak Chinese government acceded to these demands, setting off massive protests, especially by students. A few years later, in the wake of World War I, the victorious Allies wrote into the Versailles peace treaty a clause awarding Japan control of the German colony of Qingdao in Shandong province. Chinese intellectuals responded to this new insult with a four-year period of protests and self-examination known as the May Fourth Movement, which powerfully engaged the minds of intellectuals, including those who would soon found the Communist Party. For them, the spectacle of the supposedly benign United States agreeing to give hated Japan control over Chinese territory validated the suspicion that the “open door” was an American euphemism for maintaining its share of the China market.
This view of America was one of the main points of difference between the CCP and the KMT. Both parties wanted to achieve full independence for China by eliminating extraterritorial privileges in the treaty ports. Chiang Kai-shek always suspected, correctly, that British policy was not to help China become strong and independent but to keep it weak and tethered to the West, so Britain could preserve its empire, including Hong Kong and its extraterritorial compounds in Shanghai and elsewhere. But, especially after the break with the Communists in 1927, the KMT became increasingly tied to the United States even as it constituted itself, in Communist eyes, as the party of the landlords and the big capitalists. Chiang and the rest of the Kuomintang were as patriotically committed to full Chinese independence as the Communists; nonetheless, they grew closer to the United States as time went by, and many of its leading figures were educated not in the University of Toilers of the East but in American universities. Chiang himself was a convert not to Marxism-Leninism but to Methodism; his glamorous wife went to Wellesley; his brother-in-law and prime minister, T. V. Soong, was an alumnus of Harvard; his finance minister, H. H. Kung, a graduate of Oberlin College and the Yale Law School. China’s government ministries were heavily populated by English-speaking graduates of American universities. Theodore H. White organized a Harvard Club in Chungking in 1940 and, he later wrote, it “included a larger proportion of the high officials of Chiang Kai-shek’s government than a Harvard Club would have in John F. Kennedy’s Washington.” Chiang was open to missionary activity in China and to big business, and he failed before the outbreak of World War II to eliminate the extraterritorial privileges in the treaty ports—such things as immunity from prosecution in Chinese courts and foreign-run police forces—that were so injurious to Chinese pride. And so, as the KMT came to seem ever more an American acolyte, it lost its anti-imperialist credentials.
Nobody in the Chinese Communist leadership went to Harvard, Wellesley, or Yale. There were no private or public links, no sentimental old school ties, and few religious affiliations connecting senior Chinese Communists with the United States. The Communists always held anti-imperialism as a central tenet, along with their interpretation of global politics as a series of “contradictions” among the imperialists themselves or between them and the colonized world.
The anti-imperialist credo showed itself in large things and small, in the political and the personal. Illustrating the last of these, in 1937, Mao’s wife, He Zizhen, became infuriated when she caught Mao in a flirtation with a comely actress known as Lily (her real name was Wu Guangwei), who was introduced to him by the leftist American journalist Agnes Smedley. One night, during a quarrel with Mao, He Zizhen turned her wrath against Smedley, accusing her of being an “imperialist”—later, when she complained to other party leaders, she called Smedley an “imperialist procuress”—while asking Mao, “Are you really a communist?”
Mao most definitely was a Communist, and while his observance of what was supposed to be superior Communist morality was inconsistent, his vision of American imperialism was unchanging, and it was one of the things that made his friendly attitude toward the United States a temporary departure, a tactical move. The classic Chinese Thirty-Six Stratagems for Waging War and Politics includes the ploy known as “Hide the knife behind a smile.” The aim of it is to ingratiate yourself with your enemy when you need to keep him at bay, confuse him, or, to use the Marxist-Leninist terminology, exploit the “contradictions” between him and other enemies, to prevent them from combining against you. Once Mao was in power, the approved jargon changed to a kind of bombastic boilerplate about “American imperialism” and its “running dogs” that, while rhetorically ridiculous, represented his default ideological position. His belief in the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of revolutionary authority was also permanent. The war caused both Stalin and Mao to relinquish ideological goals, to hide the knife for a while, so that ideological goals could be achieved later.
Even before the Japanese war, Mao consistently demonstrated obedience to this principle. During the Xian Incident of 1936, when, as we’ve seen, Mao’s initial impulse upon hearing of the Xian kidnapping was to put Chiang, the man he’d been calling a “traitor,” on trial, with his execution the most likely result, Stalin told Mao to agree to a United Front instead. Mao obeyed, and a few months later he made a public self-criticism, admitting that he had been wrong and Stalin right.
According to the historian Michael M. Sheng, who has examined Chinese records unavailable to earlier researchers, Mao and Stalin did, as Service suspected, use a radio contact to communicate with each other during the war, and this contact was more important than Service believed. The radio was a secret, inherited from the earlier days of Comintern influence. It had fallen into disuse during Chiang’s encirclement campaigns against the Communists, but it was restored at Mao’s behest in 1936 and it remained in place for the entire war. In 1940, Zhou Enlai, after his sojourn in the Soviet Union for medical treatment, brought back to China a set of radio transmitting equipment and two sets of codes—for example, the phrase “remote place” meant Stalin—to make the Moscow-Yenan connection more reliable. The radio connection in Yenan was referred to as an “Agriculture Department,” and put under one of Mao’s most trusted lieutenants. The man who translated Stalin’s messages to Mao, Shi Zhe, wrote in his memoirs decades later that Mao kept total control over the files of these messages, keeping them in his residence where nobody else had
full access to them. The files were burned at Mao’s orders in 1946, probably so that Stalin’s close, everyday involvement in the CCP’s affairs, at a time when he was supposedly being “correct and circumspect” toward China, would remain secret and any suggestion that the CCP was a Soviet proxy could be avoided.
Zhou Enlai also brought $300,000 with him from Moscow, one of numerous financial contributions that the Soviets secretly made to the CCP over the years, which both added a measure of influence and control and belied the Soviet pretense of non-interference in China’s internal affairs. Even after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and Stalin was plunged overnight into a desperate struggle for survival, the money flow to the CCP continued. Pantsov and Levine cite in particular a document unearthed from Soviet archives showing that on July 3, 1941, a bit more than two weeks after the German onslaught began, $1 million was released for assistance to the CCP central committee, and $1 million in 1941 was a great deal of money.
The pattern for the entirety of World War II and, indeed, until after the CCP’s seizure of power in 1949 remained one of close consultation, cooperation, and agreement between Russia and China’s Communists. For the entire length of the Sino-Japanese War, Stalin’s greatest fear in the east was of a Japanese attack, a sort of renewal of the war of 1905 extended from Japan’s Manchurian base into Soviet Siberia. To prevent that, Stalin wanted the strongest possible China, and the strongest possible China was one led by Chiang Kai-shek with the Communists cooperating with him. Stalin understood that the Communists were not yet capable of taking power. They had barely survived Chiang’s annihilation campaigns against them in the early and mid-1930s, and their forces, now bottled up in their fortress in northern Shaanxi province, were small and badly armed compared to those of the central government. The best option under those circumstances was to support the Kuomintang and to do nothing that might anger its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, or to push him into a peace deal with Japan, which would free the Japanese to turn their attention to Russian Siberia.
China 1945 Page 26