On 2 August 1951, Beijing secretly passed a new resolution ordering the expulsion of all foreigners except for those under arrest. By the end of the summer the foreign community had no illusions left. The only place where foreigners could still be seen in significant numbers was Tianjin. The once thriving port of northern China had become the only official exit for foreigners leaving the country. Even residents of Shanghai now first had to take a train to Tianjin before boarding a ship. The city was crowded with people waiting for transportation. Once glamorous hotels stood as forlorn remnants of decayed glory, their rooms occupied by a few anxious foreigners. In one of these, an abandoned red-and-gold ballroom led to a smaller dining room with dying flowers on the tables. Strips of paper that had been glued on the windows as a precaution against air raids during the civil war had not yet been removed.27
Shanghai had been emptied of its foreign population by the end of 1951. In Beijing too, a once thriving foreign community was broken and destroyed. When thirty-six people convened for Christmas dinner at the British embassy, the gathering included not only all diplomatic staff, but the entire British community in the region.28
Two years later came the turn of other foreign population groups. First some 25,000 Japanese held since the end of the war were repatriated. Then came 12,000 White Russians. Many were reduced to complete destitution and ‘died as a result of the bitter cold, hunger and sickness’. Their mass expulsion started at the end of the year.29
In 1926 an ominous shadow was cast over the Christian churches during the unrest in the Hunanese countryside. Thrilled by the revolutionary violence, a young Mao Zedong reported how local pastors were paraded through the streets, churches looted and foreign missionaries silenced. Although the unrest soon abated, foreign missionaries continued to be targets in communist-controlled areas in the 1930s and early 1940s. During the civil war, advancing communist troops confiscated church property, closed down mission schools and persecuted or killed dozens of local and foreign believers.
In July 1947 guerrilla fighters seized a Trappist monastery in Yangjiaping, a remote valley north of Beijing, burning down the cloister and interrogating, torturing and sequestering its resident monks. In January 1948, in the middle of the winter, six of the monks were handcuffed, chained and escorted on to a makeshift platform, their white habits infested with lice and encrusted with blood. A frenzied crowd surged forward as the victims were jostled to their knees. A local cadre read out the verdict: death, to be carried out immediately. One by one, as the shots rang out, they collapsed next to each other. ‘Their lifeless bodies were dragged to a nearby sewage ditch and dumped into a heap, one on top of the other.’ A few months later twenty-seven other monks, most but not all local, had died of maltreatment. Nobody knows how many Protestant and Catholic missionaries were killed in China between 1946 and 1948, but estimates range up to a hundred.30
Half of the more than 4,000 Protestant missionaries evacuated their stations before liberation. Some had spent years of internment in Japanese concentration camps and were wary of the communists. Others left due to poor health and old age. But well over 3,000 Roman Catholic missionaries were ordered to stay at their posts. Missionaries held extremely diverse views, from the austere and solitary Trappists who eschewed material possessions and avoided all idle talk to the more reform-minded members of the YMCA, involved in welfare activities in the cities. Hopes of working alongside the communists sustained a few. Others viewed any such co-operation as ‘compromising with the Devil’.31
For about a year the decision to remain in China seemed justified. Foreigners were registered, schools infiltrated, hospitals inspected, religion denounced and Christians interrogated, although many missionaries remained optimistic. Nevertheless the signs were not good, even though the pressures were far from uniform. ‘The coils are tightening daily,’ noted Bishop John O’Shea half a year after the communists entered his diocese in south Jiangxi. Like other foreigners, missionaries were subjected to all sorts of restrictions. Some became virtual prisoners in their own missions, forbidden to leave the compound. And increasingly the communists took over these buildings for quartering military troops, storing grain or holding public meetings, step by step squeezing many missionaries out of their premises.32
Economic pressures were also applied in the form of rent, taxes and fines, an experience missionaries shared with other foreigners. The government was ‘taxing them on a ruinous scale’, wrote the Vatican of its missions in mid-1950. One by one they had to close their doors.33
Then came the Korean War. A month after China had entered the conflict in October 1950, arrests of foreign missionaries began. In mass trials and frenzied demonstrations they were accused of espionage and subversive activity. Protestant missionaries left in droves. By the end of 1951 no more than a hundred remained in China.34
But the Roman Catholics, who received their orders from the Vatican, were enjoined by the apostolic delegate, Antonio Riberi, to resist at all costs. Despite the trials, parades and denunciations, over 2,000 missionaries kept their ranks closed to any form of official infiltration. The arrest of the Italian bishop Tarcisio Martina in September 1950 for involvement in the plot to kill Mao Zedong was used as a pretext to banish the Holy See from China. Even before Martina had been thrown in gaol for life, Riberi was placed under house arrest, subjected to nightly visits and frequent interrogations by the police for several months. In September 1951 he was expelled for ‘espionage activities’. Communist soldiers escorted him from Nanjing to the Hong Kong border. Throughout the journey vociferous campaigns were organised, with loudspeakers placed at street corners and railway stations, in hotels and restaurants – all blaring out propaganda denouncing the papal delegate as a ‘lackey of foreign imperialism’.35
Mao himself was intrigued by the Vatican, especially its ability to command allegiance across national boundaries. The tenacity of the Catholics perturbed him. But even more suspect was the Legion of Mary, known in Chinese as the ‘Army of Mary’ (Shengmujun), prompting the communists to fear that it might be a military formation. Many of their members, threatened with imprisonment, steadfastly refused to sign confessions renouncing alleged ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities. On 14 August 1951 the Public Security Bureau ordered the organisation to be destroyed ‘within a year’.36
Two days after Riberi had been paraded in Shanghai on his way to Hong Kong, a squad of eleven police officers with sub-machine guns arrested Aedan McGrath, the envoy of the Legion of Mary. Before McGrath was locked up, his watch, rosary beads and religious medals were confiscated. The laces of his shoes and the buttons on his trousers were removed. He was forced to stand naked for hours on end. Several months later he was transferred to Ward Road Prison, a solid gaol built by the British in 1901 where his cell had no bed, no chair, no window, nothing at all except a bucket. Food was slopped into a ?lthy square tin and passed through the bars twice a day. He endured countless interrogations, accompanied by sleep deprivation and naked exposure to the biting cold of winter. After thirty-two months he was finally brought before a tribunal where his crimes were read out to him. Two days later he was released, escorted on to a train and expelled from China.37
Others were not so lucky. In December 1951 the sixty-year-old Francis Xavier Ford of the Maryknoll Society, an American Roman Catholic bishop, was accused of ‘espionage’ and ‘possession of weapons’. He was never brought to trial. He was paraded in some of the villages where he had done mission work since 1918, his neck bound with a wet rope that almost choked him as it dried and shrank. The mob beat him with sticks and stones till he was knocked to the ground. He died in prison and was buried on the outskirts of Guangzhou.38
In many cases entire groups of missionaries were arrested in carefully targeted raids. In Qingdao, Shandong, twenty-seven brothers of the Society of the Divine Word were rounded up on 3 August 1951, sent to gaol and expelled two years later. While the missionaries were under investigation, the police carried off their chalices, ves
tments and other sacred objects. Cemeteries were desecrated, graves opened, altars removed, floors dug up and pillars demolished in the search for hidden weapons and radio transmitters. When nothing was found, pieces of junk, from bits of wire to old rosaries, were collected and presented as evidence of radio equipment. Medicine was called poison. The paranoia was contagious, as some missionaries began losing their bearings after months of harsh imprisonment, ceaseless interrogations and outlandish accusations. In Lanzhou, Father Paul Mueller refused to eat, thinking his food was poisoned, and claimed the guards used death rays against him. He died of an untreated infection in prison.39
Even those who left of their own accord were harassed. When Adolph Buch, a French priest who began his career as a Vincentian missionary in China in 1906, decided to pack his bags and leave in October 1952, he took with him a collection of butterflies he had gathered in his spare time over the years. They were confiscated by customs officials. ‘They accused me of wanting to send my collection to the States, to be sent back laden with germs.’ When the eighty-seven-year-old man shuffled across the Lowu Bridge into Hong Kong, he also came without his hearing aid, as it was illegal to take any mechanical devices out of the country.40
But many allegations were far more sinister. As the regime liquidated hundreds of mission hospitals, some of the foreigners in charge were accused of mistreatment and arrested on trumped-up charges. After a dying woman had been brought to the Luoyang Catholic Hospital, her husband begged the doctor to operate, despite repeated warnings that the operation had little chance of success. Weeks later local cadres pressured the man to bring charges against Father Zotti, the director of the hospital, who was sentenced to one year in prison and a further year under house arrest. Many similar cases followed.41
Wild accusations of wilful murder also accompanied the seizure of over 250 missionary orphanages. After liberation, relatives or strangers brought severely ill children to these homes. The sisters in charge could not save all of them. In December 1951 five nuns were paraded through jeering crowds in the streets of Guangzhou, accused of having murdered over 2,116 children in their care. The court proceedings, held in the red-walled Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, were broadcast for hours on end in five languages. Then the shrill, emotional voice of the prosecutor read the indictment, including charges of inhuman treatment and illegal sale of children. In between inflammatory speeches, several witnesses were brought forward, including children sobbing into the microphones, their words lost in tears and shouts from the crowd. At the climax of the show trial, two of the nuns were condemned to prison, the others to immediate expulsion from China.42
A week later two French nuns and a priest were beaten with sticks as they were forced to dig up the decomposing bodies of babies they were alleged to have killed in another orphanage. The excavation went on for twelve hours a day for twelve days, armed guards making sure that they worked without respite. Further up north, in Nanjing, the Sacred Heart Home for Children had earlier been labelled a ‘Little Buchenwald’, its sisters also accused of deliberately neglecting, starving, torturing children and selling them into slavery. Similar incidents, all carefully orchestrated, also occurred in Beijing, Tianjin and Fuzhou.43
By the end of 1952 dozens of foreign missionaries languished in prison, many with their hands and feet in chains. Close to 400 were officially expelled that year, while various forms of pressure forced over 1,000 more to leave. A further purge of any remaining church influence came in the summer of 1953. A year later all but one Protestant missionary had left the country. A further fifteen were detained and about to be expelled. Three hundred Catholic missionaries were still in China. Seventeen of these were in prison, sixty were under interrogation and thirty-four were on their way out of China. The others would soon follow.44
Even before the People’s Republic had been formally established, the Soviet Union was everywhere. ‘Pictures of Soviet leaders are almost as prominent in public places in Peiping [Beijing] as those of Chinese communist leaders,’ reported Doak Barnett in September 1949. Russian and Chinese flags flew side by side on landmark buildings. Sino-Soviet Friendship Associations opened with great fanfare in all major cities. Streets were named after the Soviet Union. The main road in Harbin was called Red Army Street, while people walked through Stalin Avenue in the middle of Changchun. In Shenyang visitors were greeted with the view of an enormous granite-mounted Red Army tank in honour of the Russians who had liberated Manchuria from Japanese imperialism. Translated Soviet literature appeared in bookshops, railway stations, schools and factories. Some were textbooks for the Chinese Communist Party. Newspapers and radio went to great lengths to pledge allegiance to the Soviet Union, follow Moscow on foreign policy and praise Stalin as the leader of the socialist camp. In Beijing a gigantic Soviet exhibition was staged ‘to introduce systematically the great socialist construction of the USSR’.45
The Soviet presence expanded dramatically after Mao’s statement on 30 June 1949, the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, that China should ‘lean to one side’. ‘The twenty-eight years’ experience of the Communist Party’, he declared, ‘have taught us to lean to one side, and we are firmly convinced that in order to win victory and consolidate it we must lean to one side.’ Between the side of imperialism and the side of socialism there was no third road. Neutrality was camouflage. Mao had a word for those who believed that China should approach Washington and London in search of foreign loans: his word was ‘naive’. ‘The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it.’ As Time commented a few weeks later, ‘In this statement was just about all the world needed to know about the past, present and future attitudes of the Chinese Communist Party.’ That same month Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s dour second-in-command, was sent to the Soviet Union to hold meetings with top ministers and visit a whole range of institutions. He saw Stalin on six occasions. After two months he returned to China with hundreds of advisers, some of them travelling on his train.46
For the previous twenty-eight years the Chinese Communist Party had depended on Moscow for financial support and ideological guidance. From the age of twenty-seven, when a Comintern agent handed him his first cash payment of 200 yuan to cover the cost of travelling to the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, Russian funds transformed Mao’s life. He had no qualms about taking the money, and used Moscow’s support to lead a ragged band of guerrilla fighters to ultimate power. The relationship had its ups and downs. There were endless reprimands from Moscow, expulsions from office and battles over party policy with Soviet advisers. Stalin constantly forced Mao back into the arms of his sworn enemy Chiang Kai-shek. Moscow openly favoured Nanjing, even after the nationalists had presided over a bloody massacre of communists in Shanghai in 1927. For the best part of a decade, Chiang’s troops relentlessly hounded an embattled Mao, forcing the communists to find refuge in a mountain base and then to traverse some 12,500 kilometres towards the north in a retreat later known as the Long March. But even the Long March was funded by Moscow, as the Comintern contributed millions of Mexican silver dollars. Without these funds the communists would not have got very far.47
At the end of the Second World War, Stalin, always the hard pragmatist, signed a treaty of alliance with the nationalists. But he also secretly helped Mao, handing over Manchuria to the communists in 1946. During the civil war Stalin stayed on the sidelines, warning Mao to beware the United States, which supported Chiang Kai-shek, now recognised as a world leader in the fight against Japan.
Even when victory seemed inevitable in 1949, Stalin remained suspicious of Mao. Prone to discerning enemies everywhere, Stalin wondered whether Mao might emulate Tito, the Yugoslav leader who had been cast out of the communist camp for his opposition to Moscow. Stalin trusted no one, least of all a potential rival who in all probability harboured a long list of grievances. Aware of the need to earn his master’s recognition, Mao spared no effort vociferously to condemn Tito. ‘Stalin suspected
that ours was a victory of the Tito type, and in 1949 and 1950 the pressure on us was very strong indeed,’ Mao later recollected. In a show of adulation, he tried to present himself and his party as true communists and sincere students of the Soviet Union, worthy of its assistance.48
Despite his allegiance to Stalin, Mao resented the way he had been treated by Moscow in the past. But he had nowhere else to turn to for support. In 1949 his regime desperately needed international recognition as well as economic help to rebuild the war-torn country. Mao first declared the policy of ‘leaning to one side’ and then sought an audience with Stalin. Several requests were rebuffed. Then, in December 1949, Mao was finally asked to come to Moscow.
Fearful of enemy attacks, Mao travelled in an armoured car with sentries posted every hundred metres along the railway lines. Even before he crossed the border he was irked by Gao Gang, the man in charge of Manchuria. Rumours had it that portraits of Stalin were more common in the region than those of the Chairman himself. Months earlier Gao had visited Moscow and signed a trade agreement with Stalin. When Mao realised that Gao was sending gifts to Stalin in a carriage attached to the Moscow-bound train, he had it uncoupled and returned the tribute.49
This was Mao’s first trip abroad, and he was visibly nervous, pouring with sweat as he stalked up and down the platform in Sverdlovsk during the long train journey. In Moscow the Chairman was given the cold shoulder. Mao expected to be welcomed as the leader of a great revolution that had brought a quarter of humanity into the communist orbit, but within the Soviet sphere for several months now a shroud of silence had been placed over the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin, two of Stalin’s henchmen, greeted Mao at Yaroslavsky Station but did not accompany him to his residence. The Chairman gave a speech at the railway terminal, reminding his audience how the unequal treaties between Tsarist Russia and China had been abolished after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, a broad hint referring to the treaty signed between the nationalists and the Soviet Union five years earlier as a result of the Yalta accords. Stalin granted Mao a brief interview that day, flattering and praising him for his success in Asia, but also teasing him by feigning ignorance of the real reason for his visit. Five days later, Mao was treated as a guest of honour among many other delegates who had travelled to Moscow to celebrate Stalin’s seventieth birthday.50
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Page 15