IT WAS NOT just in Europe that the end of the Second World War led to a new reckoning and a new beginning. In Asia, too, the tide was turning and new political currents were coming to the fore. In 1947 an exhausted post-war British government began divesting the country of its over-extended empire, starting with colonial India.
Elsewhere in Asia, other governments found that – as in Europe – their assumption that they could revert to the pre-war status quo and return to power as before, relying on a mixture of corruption, cronyism and repression, was no longer a given. As in Greece and Yugoslavia, left-wing resistance movements, which had fought against invaders and in the end defeated them, felt they had earned the right to decide the political shape of what came next. And in Asia, none felt more entitled to a part of the new peace than the Chinese Communist forces led by Mao Zedong.
Mao had first led his Communist insurgents to challenge the Republican government of Chiang Kai-shek in 1927. It was an ideological split between Mao’s Communists and Chiang’s Nationalists that ended five years of earlier collaboration and launched China’s protracted on–off civil war. In 1937 the two sides put aside their differences to forge an uneasy common front against Japan, which had launched a full-scale invasion of China, occupying parts of it. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, this Sino-Japanese war merged into the greater conflict of the Second World War. But in 1946, one year after the Japanese surrender, China’s civil war resumed with renewed vigour, this time with the balance of power shifting in favour of the Communists.
By 1946, ‘Liberated Zones’ controlled by Mao included one-quarter of mainland China’s territory and one-third of its population, including many important towns and cities. His People’s Liberation Army (PLA) numbered 1.2 million troops and a further 2 million under arms in militias. He could draw on further support from millions of desperate peasants who he promised would get their own land once the war was over.
By contrast, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party of China) armies, overstretched and weakened by the Second World War, lacked the same unity and resolve. The United States government, already alert to the Soviet Union’s inroads into Europe and under pressure from the pro-Nationalist ‘China lobby’ in Washington, was concerned about another major world power ‘going red’ and poured in billions of US dollars of military aid and despatched tens of thousands of US troops including Marines to train, equip and transport KMT forces and to guard strategic sites.
But not all officials in Washington saw Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces as the best bet. In 1946, after an abortive US attempt to broker a ceasefire in China, the US Secretary of State, General George Marshall, assessed that the Nationalists were unlikely to win the civil war. His successor, Dean Acheson, warned against predicting events ‘until the dust settles’ and referred to Chiang Kai-shek’s government in a document on US China policy as ‘a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale’.
On their side, the Chinese Communists enjoyed some Soviet support, but Moscow also signed a Treaty of Friendship with Chiang Kai-shek after the Second World War, apparently believing that the Nationalists were more likely than Mao and his largely peasant army to keep the peace inside China and on the Soviet Union’s south-eastern border. Whether Stalin underestimated Mao or conversely was wary of him as a potential Communist rival is unclear. But Mao’s forces did benefit from captured Japanese weaponry, supplied in part by the Soviets, and over the next four years the People’s Liberation Army slowly won the upper hand.
By the spring of 1949, a succession of decisive campaigns had resulted in astronomical casualties on both sides, but had allowed the Communist forces to capture the KMT’s capital, Nanjing. With the Nationalists on the back foot, the focus of the civil war moved to the city known as ‘the Paris of the East’ – Shanghai.
The largest and wealthiest city in China, Shanghai had a population of six million people and accounted for about a third of the country’s economy. It had been under Japanese occupation, but control reverted to the Nationalists after the war, a major prize that Chiang Kai-shek could not afford to lose. It was also a trophy that Mao Zedong and his People’s Liberation Army were determined to take, as they edged towards their goal of turning China into a Communist state.
By May 1949, the prime concern for many residents of Shanghai was the terrifying economic collapse under the corrupt and incompetent KMT government. The unemployment rate in the city already stood at over 37 per cent. For these people, the notion of Mao Zedong’s Red Army taking over the city did not seem such a bad prospect.
What they did not see was what life was like out in the countryside, where Communist officials and the People’s Liberation Army had already taken control and were confiscating private property as part of a promise to redistribute land. Impoverished peasants were encouraged to vent their anger and take revenge on ‘rich landlords’ at public meetings. One estimate suggested that, between 1947 and 1952, as many as 2 million so-called landlords may have been executed and land redistributed to some 300 million peasants.
The Nationalists, still nominally in control of Shanghai, knew that they were heavily outnumbered. But they mistakenly assumed that too much was at stake in global politics for them to have to fight Mao’s army alone. They believed that if they could hold out against an initial attack, Western allies were bound to intervene with a counterattack to prevent a Communist takeover of such an important stronghold. So their plan was to station forces to defend the city and wait for help to come, and if necessary fall back on an escape by sea, torching the city behind them.
But the People’s Liberation Army pre-empted them. In mid-May, it moved in with a pincer movement that took over the city’s suburbs and cut off any escape route by sea. What’s more, the Nationalists, perhaps cynically without regard for life or perhaps to avoid panic, had neglected to tell the population to evacuate the city. When residents learned of their leaders’ plan to torch the city and flee, they were outraged. They organised themselves to protect buildings, banks and other parts of crucial infrastructure. Some Nationalist commanders still managed to escape by sea, but many were blockaded by Communist forces and had no option but to surrender. Within days, the city centre was in Communist hands.
The fall of Shanghai was an important victory. It paved the way for the pivotal moment just a few months later, in October 1949, when the Nationalist hold on China finally crumbled and Mao Zedong proclaimed a new People’s Republic of China, the PRC. China was now the most populous Communist nation on earth.
In Washington, there was consternation, and a blame game began over who had ‘lost’ China. The pro-Nationalist ‘China lobby’ argued that the fight against Communism had gone global, and the United States and its allies now faced not just one but two great Communist powers in Europe and Asia: Soviet Russia and Red China.
But some US officials mused that perhaps Mao Zedong would turn out to be an independent-minded ‘Asian Tito’ and that, like Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Tito, also a former guerrilla fighter, he would resist being pulled into the Soviet orbit. Dean Acheson argued that an American rapprochement with Mao’s government might help drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union.
As a short-term prospect, that looked unlikely. Already, in a speech on 30 June 1949, Mao had unequivocally aligned Communist China with its Soviet ‘Big Brother’, dismissing Britain and the United States as capitalist imperialists and declaring that ‘we must lean to one side … Sitting on the fence will not do … The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it.’ In December 1949, he accepted an invitation to meet Stalin in Moscow, and during his two-month stay there they worked out a new common strategy, including a ‘division of labour’ to promote world revolution in both Europe and Asia.
They also signed a Sino-Soviet Treaty, which appeared to be a deliberate echo of the treaty to establish NATO, just signed by the Western Allies. As with NATO, this was a mutual defence pact in case of attack on one of its members, forging a new defensive link between the world’s two global Communist powers.
By now, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists had established a government-in-exile on the island of Taiwan, where they had fled the previous year. Mistakenly, they hoped that it would be a temporary stronghold until foreign support arrived to help them take back the mainland. In fact, the exile would be more or less permanent. Communist China would still be in charge of the mainland more than 65 years later, outlasting the Soviet Union, in time growing in stature to challenge even the United States for global clout.
And in the Cold War decades to come, and the post-Cold War years that followed too, the clash of titans – American, Russian, Chinese – would become triangular, a story of shifting alliances and tensions that encompassed the globe, as each played one off against the other.
In 1949 Eddy Hsia and his family were living in the remote countryside south of Shanghai, where they had moved several years earlier to escape the worst of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War.
After the war, many of the KMT government officials were corrupt, and their corruption spread all over China. So they gradually lost the people’s support and confidence, and that was one of the main things that promoted the Communists’ success. I didn’t know much about the situation – I only knew that the Communists were coming. At that time, I had heard so much about the bad side of the Communists, I just wanted to be away, so I went to Canton and then to Taiwan. I did not have my family with me; I was alone.
The Communist forces, wherever they went, their first so-called struggle was against the landlords, and they killed a lot of landlords. Some were real landlords. Some just owned a small piece of land, but they classified them as landlords. They killed them, without justice, without trial. They had the right to kill whoever they wanted. People were afraid of the Chinese Communists. So we knew, if they came, we’d better escape.
Some things I try to forget. My mother was killed by Communists. She was considered a member of a landlord’s family. But that was not true: she did not have any land herself. We were not rich people, but we had some land in the countryside, in a very remote village up in the mountains. There was no highway; you had to get there on foot. In the remote countryside, you cannot have anything like a rich farm – it’s impossible. The Communists just wanted to kill as many people as possible, for whatever reason they could find. So then definitely I had my personal hatred about the Communists. She was an innocent woman. Why did they kill her? She did not do anything wrong. She was just a housewife. She was killed, shot. One bullet. During those years, when the Communists killed someone, they asked the family of the people they killed to pay for the bullet. I cannot understand, I cannot forgive, I cannot forget.
When I arrived in Taiwan, I had no family, no support, no job. So what could I do? I joined military service. We did not know how long we would stay in Taiwan – maybe three months, and then we’d go back to mainland China. At that time, people would say, ‘Maybe at most a year, you’ll be back to mainland China.’ I remember some of my relations also went to Taiwan from Shanghai. And their parents told them to enjoy their holiday in Taiwan: ‘When the Communists settle down, you can come back.’ Nobody realised the Communist government would be in place for ever.
Betty Barr Wang was born in Shanghai in 1933; her father was a missionary teacher from Glasgow, and her mother was from Texas. Her future husband, George, was also born in Shanghai, in 1927, and was working in a newspaper office in May 1949 as the Communist forces approached the city.
After 1945, in a way we were just enjoying the victory over the Japanese, so we didn’t know there was a civil war. The first time I heard there was a civil war was in October 1946, and during 1947 things got worse and worse. I knew a driver who had been punished by the Kuomintang: he was a driver for the government, but he was accused of carrying somebody who was a Communist Party member. He was imprisoned and lost his wife and child. The aim of the civil war was to liberate the people from the Nationalist government.
Things were so bad under the Nationalists, mainly because of the extreme inflation. For example, there’s a photograph of my mother holding a tray with a huge pile of cash on it – this was a month’s salary – before they had to rush to the bank with it to buy silver or dollars to preserve the value of it.
I had to change my salary into silver coins or US dollars. Every month when we got our salary, our office allowed us to go out for half an hour or so because we had to change our salary into silver coins or US dollars through the black market in the street, because if we took our banknotes home, by the time we arrived in the evening our salary value was cut in two.
That created great uncertainty and so I think people thought anything must be better than this. At that time, I was a teenager attending an American school in Shanghai, and so I really was not very aware of what was going on. Except that in 1948–9 our school year began with quite a number of students, and many left during that year because people were afraid of what was going to happen when the Communists came. The Communists were coming down from the north – Peking was already in the hands of the Communists, and there were stories circulating. There were many rumours, but nobody really knew what was going to happen.
At the end of May 1949, we were taking our final exams. One morning, we got up and looked out on to the street and we saw one lone, young PLA soldier wearing rubber shoes, holding a rifle, standing there, guarding our school.
The first time I saw a PLA soldier, he seemed to be like an officer, and he just told people, ‘Don’t stand near the road, just stand inside of the pavement, otherwise you might be killed.’ So to me it was not like fighting, it was like making a film. I crossed the road to the other corner, hoping to see more clearly. By the time I got to the middle of the road – whooo! – a bullet over my head!
A small number of people were afraid, but they were the upper class. But all our neighbours welcomed the liberating army. They arrived about ten o’clock in the morning and, when I went home in the evening, the soldiers were sitting on the pavements. They never bothered the neighbours. The only thing they asked for was fresh water. They were so polite.
The PLA soldiers made a very good impression on the local people when they arrived in the city. The North China Daily News, the English-language newspaper at that time, had several articles about the good behaviour of the soldiers.
I saw the victory parade. Before it took place, some of my father’s students, boys in a boys’ secondary school, came to my father and said, ‘Mr Barr, can we please borrow your hat and your walking stick?’ He said, ‘Certainly, with pleasure.’ We went to watch the parade and I can remember it to this day. It was a very long procession and suddenly coming along in this very long procession were two figures: one was Uncle Sam, and one was John Bull; they were being caricatured at that time by the Chinese Communists. And there on the head of John Bull was my father’s hat, and he was carrying my father’s walking stick. So we saw them go by, and after the parade my father’s students came back and returned them and said, ‘Thank you very much, Mr Barr.’ Up to that point, they were not thinking of him as an imperialist enemy; they liked him, and they admired him. Personal relationships endured, in spite of big movements.
The first thing the Communists did was set up a monetary committee to get rid of the speculators and stamp down on inflation. So people felt their money was safe, and the majority of people loved the new government. Our living standards were certain now.
Within a few days, the problem of inflation was solved, so they had planned it all.
I was in Shanghai for the first year after the Communist victory, until the spring of 1950. A lot of missionaries and businessmen stayed at first, because nobody knew what was going to happen, and so my parents stayed until late 1952. There was a point, they told me later, when they were denounced by the Chinese teachers in the school, who surrounded their house and shouted slogans. But that was about the worst thing that ever happened.
My parents were given a farewell banquet, Chinese-style, when they left. My mother told the story of how, with great ceremony, a big melon was brought in – usually it had soup inside and had a Chinese dragon carved intricately on it. This time, it was carved with the words ‘Down with the American imperialists’, and they put it on the table right in front of my mother.
Because the Communist Party wanted to run the city, they had to educate people to know what their aims were. Mainly they wanted people to understand their policy, and their policy was just one sentence: Serve the people wholeheartedly. At first, only those working in government offices had re-education.
I was taking pipe-organ lessons in the Anglican cathedral, and suddenly we heard a plane overhead. My teacher was very frightened, so we went down into the crypt to hide. It was the Nationalists, coming to bomb the city. Shanghai was blockaded, so no ships could get in to bring imported food and goods like that. That was very difficult for the city, and gradually there were no more imports and exports, and therefore the foreign businesses had to close down, and therefore the foreigners gradually left.
The whole country was blockaded. The main idea of the bombings was to destroy the power stations. The Nationalist slogan was that the Communist Party would only hold Shanghai for three months. China has only 7 per cent of the world’s land, yet China had to support 25 per cent of the world’s population. Without enough cultivatable land and without enough fresh water, how could China grow enough rice to support the people? For a long time, China had to import rice from south-eastern countries. So once the country was blockaded, there was starvation. It was nothing to do with who was leading the country – it was the blockade. So, just think how difficult it was for the new Communist leaders of Shanghai to ensure that the people had enough food. There was a song praising Mao Zedong, and I came to understand why people sang this song.
You pray that you will go to heaven. I am in heaven. When I was a child, my mother often sighed, ‘Oh, they are so lucky, [they] don’t have to worry about clothing and food.’ Now everywhere in China, even the poorest area, do they worry about these two things? No. So that’s why we are in heaven. But not many people in the West understand this.
As I see it, yes, many unhappy things have happened since 1949, but I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and what George is talking about is the raising of so many people out of poverty. I think it’s 500 million. It’s an astonishing thing that has happened in China, in spite of unhappy things which have happened, and we feel that many Westerners don’t give credit to the Chinese government for that.
Liliane Willens was a 21-year-old of Russian descent, who was born and raised in Shanghai.
I was born in Shanghai in 1927. My parents had met in Shanghai, as they had both fled separately from the Bolshevik revolution, my father from Kiev and my mother from Siberia. They knew that Shanghai was controlled by the three powers – the British, the Americans and the French – and they felt safe. My two sisters and I were born there, we lived in the French concession, and we went to a French school. There was no reason to learn Chinese; we all lived in a bubble. In 1924 the USSR had denationalised all those who had fled Russia, so we were stateless.
During the Second World War, we lived through three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation, and when they left there was euphoria. But Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was very dictatorial and very repressive. China was helped by the Americans, but when the money was received it went into the pockets of the Chiang Kai-shek clique. Things were getting to be very difficult in Shanghai at that time. There was utter corruption. There was poverty. When I was riding my bicycle to go to school we used to see straw bundles: these were children who had died of famine or starvation or cold during the night.
Things had deteriorated to such a point by 1948 that many foreigners had left and many Chinese with passports had emigrated. People heard about the Communists, a little propaganda: that they were very good, they were very decent, they never robbed the peasants. So it got to the point where people were waiting for the Communists to come. We believed that they were not Soviet Communists, they were agrarian Communists.
The People’s Liberation Army walked into Shanghai on 25 May 1949, and things started changing. For the first six months, from May to October, it was a honeymoon. The new government was saying, ‘We are here to help you. We are here to make a better life for you.’ This was the first time in 5,000 years of Chinese history that the government ever did something for the people. There was entertainment in the streets – the soldiers were parading, there was dancing for the public. The only thing you couldn’t do was walk behind a soldier when they walked in the streets, because you had to always walk in front.
I was quite shocked to see that they were poorly dressed, because I had seen the Kuomintang soldiers all equipped by the USA with guns and beautiful uniforms. They were poorly dressed and very quiet, walking in singing ‘Down with imperialism’. And also when they were tired they slept on the sidewalk and they didn’t take anything from the people. These were peasant boys, gawking, walking around. I remember seeing one in front of a store with refrigerators; they didn’t know what a refrigerator was. There was a joke going around that when they washed their rice they washed it in the toilet. There was total illiteracy; I think 85 per cent of the Chinese population was illiterate.
They were very smart when they walked in. First, there was re-education. They realised nobody could read, so they had free comic books in the streets. This is how it started, little by little: ‘We are here to help you. We are your family. Forget about Confucius; Communism is your family now.’ The propaganda was very strong, very serious: ‘You better behave.’
When Mao declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949, the USSR recognised the PRC the following day and things started changing. The laws became more restrictive. You had no right to criticise the People’s Republic or Communism. They were very shrewd about saying: ‘If you have properties, we’d like you to register them.’ This was a ploy: during the Chiang Kai-shek era, it had been very difficult to collect rent, but if the properties were registered they could collect rent and taxes.
We still had a nanny in our house, and they wanted her to report on what was happening in our house. Every week, she had to attend a propaganda meeting. She told us about an ambulance arriving at a house – they had been into the house and shot a Kuomintang follower, but they didn’t want anyone to know, so they carried the body out on a stretcher as if they were collecting someone who was sick.
You had posters of the good Communist soldier stomping on the belly of the – usually American – imperialist. I saw one rather scary situation where they had demonstrations, and they had a show trial of a so-called guilty party. Usually, their crime was to have been a Kuomintang spy, or you had criticised Communism. And the cadres were there, telling the people, ‘He’s guilty, he’s guilty,’ and they yelled, ‘Hit him, hit him,’ and you knew that person would be found guilty, given a dunce’s hat and then taken away and probably shot. The big word was ‘Fear’ – fear settled in the country.
The Chinese were very proud. Finally, the country was united. No foreigners out there, no more fighting, the warlords had disappeared, and you had one country – and it was China. First time. So there was a lot of pride at the beginning, no question about it. And then fear replaced pride.
Things were tightening. And that was the first time I realised what it means not to have freedom: it’s like you no longer can breathe. And you can’t talk about freedom which you have in England and elsewhere unless you lose it. It’s like love: unless you fall in love, you don’t know what love is.