The War Against the Working Class

by Will Podmore

  After the war, Chiang’s Kuomintang [KMT] still ran most of China. But the Chinese people increasingly opposed Chiang’s gangster rule. In 1946-47, there was an upsurge of working class action in the cities, particularly by women workers, for more pay, better conditions and shorter hours, and against inflation, unemployment and civil war.10 There were 1,700 strikes in Shanghai alone. Across the country, the peasants sought land reform. There were also significant student struggles.

  In response, the US 7th Fleet ferried KMT troops to north China. The United States Air Force, in the largest airlift in history, transported KMT troops to Shanghai, Nanking and Peiping. US General Wedemeyer declared his ‘determination to keep the fifty-three thousand marines operating on behalf of the Nationalists in north China’.11 But the Chinese people chose to reject the KMT and to support the revolutionary forces. Schaller summed up, “The collapse of the American-supported regime in China resulted not from Soviet-American collusion but from essentially internal causes, only compounded by incredible American bungling.”12 Despite the US state’s huge intervention, the Chinese people freed their country from imperial and feudal oppression, in an epic struggle for freedom.13

  The 1949 revolution

  In April 1949, People’s Liberation Army forces crossed the Yangtze River, to free Shanghai. American journalist Jack Belden wrote, “The crossing of the Yangtze – like the crossing of so many other river barriers in history, from the Rubicon to the Rappahannock or the Rhine – may stand as a decisive date in world history. … the day which sounded the death knell of imperialism in Asia. The crossing of the Yangtze rang down the curtain on an era of history. … Gone was the era of gunboat diplomacy, gone the treaty port concessions, gone the specially conceded naval bases, the military missions, the ill-disguised interference in Chinese affairs.”14

  The Chinese people’s revolution restored unity and independence to China. British economic historian Angus Maddison summed up, “The establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 marked a sharp break with the past. It provided a new mode of governance, a new kind of elite and a marked improvement on past economic performance.”15 Once ‘the sick man of Asia’, China now awakened as a modern nation-state with full national independence.

  Stalin generously acknowledged, “True, we, too, can make a mistake! Here, when the war with Japan ended, we invited the Chinese comrades to reach an agreement as to how a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-Shek might be found. They agreed with us in word, but in deed they did it their own way when they got home: they mustered their forces and struck. It has been shown that they were right, and not we.”16 In June, the Soviet Union offered China a $300 million loan. It also offered technical and educational aid, help to build and supply ships, and training for sailors and pilots. By contrast, the US government at once imposed sanctions on China, trying to strangle the new state at birth. In 1949, just 8 per cent of China’s trade was with the socialist countries; by 1952, 87 per cent. President Truman said on 5 January 1950, “The United States Government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China. Similarly, the United States will not provide military aid and advice to the Chinese forces on Formosa.”17 He broke both pledges within six months.

  Faced with the huge task of rebuilding China in 1949, no government could have left the job to market forces. Every country which has industrialised, including Britain and the USA, has used the state to protect industry, because infant industries are unprofitable in the short and perhaps even medium term.18 So the new Chinese government chose to develop a wide range of industries and rejected the World Bank’s advice to put textiles first.

  Land reform ended the abuses of the feudal system. It destroyed the landlord-gentry class that had ruled China for 2,000 years. The landlord could not get an income directly from the land, but the peasant could cultivate the land without the landlord. But the landlords did not yield power peacefully. Their Kuomintang agents committed acts of terrorism and sabotage, killing communist officials, ‘perhaps as many as 40,000’ in 1950.19 To assist them, the CIA in 1950 dropped 212 agents into Manchuria. Within days, 101 had been killed and the other 111 captured. Chiang’s planes bombed Shanghai, killing more than 500 people. Yet “the vast majority of China’s 2 million landlords, while they may have lost their estates, survived the land reform.”20

  In June 1949, just after the communist victory, speculators manipulated silver dollar quotations on Shanghai’s currency exchange, pushing food and energy prices up threefold. On 10 June, the new government closed down the currency exchange and arrested a large number of speculators, widely popular moves.

  In China, as in Russia, the small scale of private farming, based on individual household work, prevented both the use of farm machinery and investment in irrigation, conservation and infrastructure. The people had to end this ownership structure in order to modernise farming. They created mutual aid teams, working collectively, and set up producers’ cooperatives, where land, implements and cattle were pooled, then they created socialised cooperatives, with collective land ownership.

  As Chun Lin observed, “[T]he lack of thoroughgoing land reform is a major developmental obstacle in large parts of the postcolonial world. The fact that China has done a great deal better – in meeting basic needs, alleviating poverty, raising the general standard of living, and giving political recognition to the social standing of labor and the common people (as in the Maoist legacy) – is an awesome testimony. It carries a universal implication: By transforming ‘feudal’ structures and relations, land reform, broadly defined to also include cooperative farming, eradicates backward and reactionary social power while empowering hitherto subjugated and marginalized classes. In so doing it can be a decisive promoter of economic growth and social development. … historical evidence has amply vindicated the superiority of revolutionary paths in transforming large, poor, agrarian, illiterate, and patriarchal societies.”21 This programme was highly effective: by 1958, agricultural production was 185 million tons, up from 108 million tons in 1949. It also won huge popular support.

  With the land reform, the government gave peasants full rights at meetings freely to criticise and impeach all cadres of the government and peasant organisations, and full rights to remove and elect all cadres.22 Peasants had a more accountable and more honest local leadership than before the revolution and they made more decisions about their daily lives than ever before.23

  From the start, the new government worked to end discrimination against women. It gave women the rights to divorce and to own land. It banned the practice of abandoning wives and children and gave all children, male and female, the right to be cared for and to inherit property from their parents. It banned foot-binding, child-bride marriages, forced widowhood chastity, mercenary and arranged marriages, the trafficking of women, and wife-beating.24 The government also worked to end discrimination against China’s minority peoples. China’s minorities made real gains in education, poverty reduction, population growth and public welfare.25

  China experienced very rapid mortality decline during the 1950s. The death rate fell from 20 per 1,000 in 1949 to 10.8 in 1957. Xihze Peng summed up, “This monumental achievement to a large extent was attributable to the cessation of warfare, a reduction in the degree of extreme poverty, and great improvements in health care.”26

  Tibet

  Nearly every government in the world, including the US government, recognised Tibet as part of China: “The Government of the United States has borne in mind the fact that the Chinese Government has long claimed suzerainty over Tibet and that the Chinese constitution lists Tibet among areas constituting the territory of the Republic of China. This Government has at no time raised a question regarding either of these claims.”27 In 1949 and 1950, the United Nations rejected claims that it should recognise Tibet as independent and that it should condemn ‘Chinese aggression’.

  Mao said that ‘Chinese’ meant ‘all thos
e who live in the territory of China’.28 Xinhua News Agency stated that “the Tibetan people are an integral part of the Chinese.”29

  In May 1951, the Dalai Lama’s court signed an Agreement with China accepting that Tibet was part of China. On 24 October, the Dalai Lama telegraphed the Chinese government, “The local government of Tibet and the Tibetans, lamas, and the entire Tibetan people unanimously support this agreement.”30 Subsequently, China tried to turn Tibet’s feudal land-owning class into agents of gradual modernisation, but the landlords fought all attempts at reform. In 1958, Khampa tribesmen, ‘trained in Colorado by the CIA’, and directed and armed by the CIA and MI6, rose in revolt.31

  The Dalai Lama’s court then reneged on the 1951 Agreement. Ever since, the Dalai Lama has refused to recognise China’s sovereignty over Tibet. From 1959 to 1971, the CIA covertly paid the Dalai Lama $180,000 a year and gave his cause another $1.5 million every year. After the 1951 Agreement, Tibetan life expectancy increased from 36 years to 67 by 2003 and rates of infant mortality and poverty steadily fell.32 Far from suffering ‘genocide’, Tibetans have doubled in number in the last 50 years.33 The USA still officially recognises Tibet as part of China, but the US Congress and the Presidency unofficially backed the campaign for Tibet’s secession. US strategists also backed Uighur separatists, who called for ‘Xinjiang independence’ and called on the Uighur people to carry out ‘violent struggle’ ‘as in the fight against Japanese aggression’.

  Development

  China was always keen to use foreign technology. In 1950-51, the Soviet Union and China worked together to set up metal manufacturing plants, civil aviation and shipbuilding in China. On 31 December 1952, the Soviet Union transferred to China all her rights in the Chinese Eastern Railway and its subsidiary enterprises. Mao thanked Stalin for this ‘tremendous contribution to railway construction in China’.34 Soviet credits amounted to 3 per cent of China’s state investment between 1953 and 1957.

  In its first five-year plan (1953-57), China aimed to build 694 large industrial enterprises. 156 of these were Soviet aid projects, ‘one of the largest transfers of technology in history’.35 They included 52 energy enterprises, 20 metallurgical companies, seven chemical plants, 24 mechanical processing plants, three light industry factories and 44 military enterprises. The Cambridge History of China states, “The importance of Soviet technical assistance and capital goods would be difficult to overestimate. Its effort to transfer design capability has been characterized as unprecedented in the history of the transfer of technology. Moreover, China appears to have received the most advanced technology available within the Soviet Union, and in some cases this was the best in the world. In the iron and steel industry, the most important sector of Soviet assistance, the Soviets during the 1950s built and operated the world’s best blast furnaces.”36 China, like Eastern Europe’s countries, paid Soviet specialists the same salaries as their own specialists.

  The government tried to balance the need to develop heavy industry with due attention to light industry and farming. Consumer goods output rose by 29 per cent a year during 1950-2 and by 13 per cent a year during 1953-57. Foodgrain output grew by 7 per cent and by between 2.9 and 3.7 per cent over the two periods. Both grew faster than the population. In 1953-57, national income grew by 8.9 per cent a year, farm output by 3.8 per cent a year and industrial output by 18.7 per cent a year. Wages rose 30 per cent in real terms, peasant income by 20 per cent. Life expectancy rose from 36 in 1950 to 57 in 1957, as against poor countries’ average of 42.

  State-led defence industrialisation was a priority to safeguard China. The US threat of first use of nuclear weapons during the Korean War drove China’s nuclear programme in the 1950s. The US government posed a constant threat. For example, on 27 July 1953, a US F-86F Sabre pilot shot down a Soviet civilian Aeroflot Il-12 over China, killing all 21 people on board.37 Chiang’s defeated troops, many of whom had fled to Burma after 1949, also posed a threat. The CIA used them to launch attacks on China from 1950 to 1959. Chiang’s forces on Taiwan conducted naval raids against the mainland and sent in agents. In 1958, the USA sold Taiwan modern missiles, increasing the threat of a US-backed attack on China and forcing China to switch resources to defence.

  The British government built an intelligence-gathering site in Hong Kong in the 1950s which operated until the 1980s. Western aircraft regularly intruded into China’s airspace to generate electronic intelligence responses from China’s defences.

  The British Empire left no agreed boundaries in the Indian subcontinent, leaving these problems to the newly independent successor states to solve. In 1960, China reached border agreements with Nepal and Burma, in 1963 with Pakistan, and also with Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam and Laos. As Premier Zhou Enlai had pointed out in 1953, “We are the ones who advocate resolving all international disputes through peaceful consultation and negotiation, and the other side is the one who insists on the use of force or hostility in resolving conflicts.”38 Of Asia’s countries, only India refused to negotiate, claiming that its borders with China were already defined and were therefore non-negotiable.39 But its claim line, the McMahon Line, based on a British diplomat’s forgery, was never a legal border.40

  In August 1959, India started a border war with China.41 Indian patrols crossed the border at Longju and attacked Chinese border guards. Yet Khrushchev claimed that China ‘started the war’.42 In September, Khrushchev visited the USA for talks. The talks covered China, among other issues.43 Afterwards, he lied that the talks ‘had not touched on issues involving third countries’.44 Khrushchev tried to turn the Warsaw Pact against China, an act that the Sino-Soviet alliance prohibited.45

  In October, after a more serious clash on the Kashmir-Xiangkiang border, the Chinese government ordered a 20-kilometre withdrawal of Chinese guards all along the border and asked India to do likewise. The Indian government refused. China sought negotiations; India demanded unilateral Chinese withdrawal from all territory claimed by India.46 In April 1960, Zhou Enlai met President Jawaharlal Nehru in an attempt to negotiate but was rebuffed. On 3 October 1962, China again sought negotiations. India instantly rejected this proposal. At this time, US forces were attacking Vietnam, Chiang Kai-Shek was threatening to invade China, and the Soviet Union was turning hostile, so the Indian government reckoned that China would not risk a war. On 4 October, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, secretly approached Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State, who approved India’s attack.47 On 9 October, Indian forces attacked Chinese border guards.48 China repulsed the attack, then withdrew its forces.

  In early 1959, the Soviet government broke its 1957 agreement to provide China with modern military technology. In June 1960, Khrushchev publicly criticised all China’s domestic and foreign policies. On 25 July, he ended all Soviet aid and ordered the 1,400 Soviet scientists and engineers who had been working in China to leave by 1 September, tearing up their contracts. (The Soviet Ambassador in Beijing had warned Khrushchev that unilateral termination of these agreements ‘would be a violation of international law’.) They took with them the blueprints of the industrial plants they had been planning to build. Two-thirds of the projects were left unfinished.

  Natural disasters and recovery

  1959, 1960 and 1961 were years of record natural disasters in China. In July 1959, the Yellow River flooded in East China, killing about two million people. In 1959, the harvest was 175 million tons, down from 1958’s 250 million tons. In 1960, drought and other bad weather affected 55 per cent of the country’s farmland. Some 60 per cent of the farmland in the north received no rain at all. 1960’s harvest was 142 million tons.49 But even during this period, China was growing more than 50 per cent more grain per head than India and the nutritional level was higher than India’s.50

  Between 1961 and 1965, China bought a total of 30 million tons of grain from Australia, France, Sudan, Burma and Canada at a cost of $2 billion.51 As Henry L
iu pointed out, “More would have been imported except that US pressure on Canada and Australia to limit sales to China and US interference with shipping prevented China from importing more.”52 For example, in March 1962 the US government stopped the International Trading Corporation of Seattle from selling 10.5 million tons of wheat and barley to China.53

  The poor quality of the 1953 census, which was based largely on random samples, made it impossible to number the population accurately and opened the door to wild claims about famine deaths. The 1953 census claimed that China’s population had risen from 450 million in 1947 to 600 million in 1953, figures both suspiciously round. The 1960s censuses found that tens of millions of Chinese had ‘gone missing’, compared with the 1953 figure. But this claim was worthless, since it was most unlikely that the 1953 figure was accurate.

  As Utsa Patnaik observed, “[T]he ‘missing millions’ totalling 27 millions in the population pyramid during 1958 to 1961 have been identified with ‘famine deaths’. The problem with this is that not only the people who were actually living and who died in excess of normal numbers are included in the missing millions, but so are all those hypothetical persons included, who were never born at all and who ‘should’ have been born if the birth rate had not fallen. This is not a common-sense definition nor is it a logical definition of famine deaths: for, to ‘die’ in a famine, a minimum necessary condition is to be born in the first place.”54 Wim Wertheim agreed, “Often it is argued that at the censuses of the 1960s ‘between 17 and 29 millions of Chinese’ appeared to be missing, in comparison with the official census figures from the 1950s. But these calculations are lacking any semblance of reliability.”55 Population deficits based on projected birth and death rates may be many times the real death rate.