The Second World War, so important for Communist parties coming to power in Europe, was crucial also in China. It weakened Chiang Kai-shek immensely, for his Kuomintang had borne the brunt of the fighting against the Japanese. The Communists had played a relatively modest part in the resistance to the foreign occupiers of their country. A higher priority for them, and for Mao Zedong in particular, had been to prepare for the coming struggle with the Nationalists for control of the entire Chinese state. The Communists had strengthened their power base to such an extent that in 1937, when the war with Japan began, they controlled areas whose population totalled only four million people, and had then 100,000 troops under their command, whereas by 1945, when the war ended, that had grown to command of territories comprising over ninety-five million inhabitants, by which time there were 900,000 soldiers in the Chinese Red Army.1
At the Yalta meeting in Soviet Crimea in February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill had readily agreed with Stalin that the USSR should enter the war against Japan.2 Stalin, who had his eye on territorial gain, was eager to do so. In fact, the Soviet Union took possession of the Kurile Islands – known in Japan as the Northern Territories – and in the twenty-first century they remain a serious bone of contention between Russia and Japan. As the Pacific war entered its last stage, Soviet troops advanced into Manchuria.3 The Chinese Communists linked up with the Soviet forces and were able to hold on to Manchuria, in spite of the efforts of Chiang Kai-shek to dislodge them. Between 1946 and 1949, the Communists gradually extended their territorial control to other parts of China, eventually taking the major cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Although the Kuomintang claimed the mantle of nationalism, they produced no solutions to the country’s problems, whereas the Communists appeared to be reasserting national dignity and providing a vision of China’s future.4 Many young revolutionaries of Mao’s generation had viewed Marxism-Leninism as a doctrine which pointed the way to ending China’s economic and political backwardness and would put a stop to the humiliation at the hands of foreigners which their country had suffered throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.5 The Chinese Red Army’s role in fighting the Japanese, even though very limited in comparison with that of the forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, was significant in northern China, and it succeeded in adding a patriotic and national hue to the Communists’ class struggle. This was partly a result of their effective propaganda, which made the most of the several battles in which they did engage. Most of the operations under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were local guerrilla raids to seize land not garrisoned by the Japanese or their Chinese auxiliaries.
The social order the CCP set out to destroy, and to replace with new social and political relations, was one vastly more entrenched than that which any European Communist parties had to contend with. Although there had been changes in landholding over time, it was a class structure that had existed in major respects for some 3,000 years.6 But no matter how sharp a break with national tradition the Communists represented, there was an appeal to national solidarity and to patriotic aspiration in Mao Zedong’s words, used on more than one occasion, and most notably around the time of the foundation of the Chinese People’s Republic. The Chinese people, he said, had ‘stood up’.7
Conventional Marxist views on social class were problematic in the Chinese context. Even before 1917 there had been some interest in them on the part of a small minority of Chinese intellectuals. It was, however, the Bolshevik revolution in that year which aroused interest in Leninism. After the incorporation of the Chinese Communist Party into the Comintern in 1922, both plentiful advice and material assistance were offered to the Chinese party by Comintern and Soviet advisers, but their orthodox Marxist-Leninist theoretical emphasis on the working class was inappropriate to Chinese conditions. In Russia also – though not to the same extent as in China – the peasantry had been by far the largest social stratum at the time of the revolution. Nevertheless, in Russia it was the city battleground that mattered most, especially St Petersburg, and workers played a significant role in the revolutionary struggle. In its doctrine, as well as in political practice, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union kept the peasantry firmly in a subordinate place. Even when Soviet leaders and ideologues stopped speaking about ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, they replaced that phrase by ‘the leading role of the working class’. In China, in contrast, the Communists got nowhere until they substituted the peasantry for the proletariat, thereby standing orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory on its head.8 Although there had been a gradual growth in the urban population of China during the first half of the twentieth century, at the time the CCP came to power in 1949 it stood at only some 57 million out of a total population at that time of around 550 million people.
The war of resistance to the Japanese took a tremendous toll on China. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops struggled for eight years against a ferocious Japanese fighting force. The Communist army, deploying guerrilla tactics, suffered less severe losses than did the Nationalists. Having undertaken fewer major campaigns in the last years of the war, their troops were, as a result, much fresher than Chiang’s.9 Following the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945, the two sides of the Chinese resistance set about establishing their authority in different parts of the country in readiness for a resumption of their civil wars, which had been interrupted by the Japanese invasion. Chiang’s troops were able to operate in most of the area south of the River Yangtze, while the Communist stronghold was in the north. There they controlled much of the countryside, although the Kuomintang succeeded in occupying the cities.10 An attempt to bring the Nationalists and Communists together in a coalition was brokered by the United States, and backed (at least for appearance’s sake) by Stalin. After hostilities had been resumed in full measure between the Nationalists and the Communists, Mao was persuaded to take part in talks with Chiang Kai-shek. Fighting between the Kuomintang and the Communists continued, as in August 1945 Mao flew in an American plane to Chongquing for what turned out to be forty-five days of talks with Chiang. He was accompanied, at his own insistence, by the American ambassador, since his distrust of the Nationalists was such that he did not rule out an attempt to arrange an accident. In the light of Chiang’s dependence on the United States for the supply of armaments, the company of a high-ranking American was a useful insurance policy for Mao. There was deep distrust between Chiang and Mao, and each had every intention of achieving total victory in the continuing civil war. However, Chiang, in particular, had to go through the motions of seeking a compromise agreement with his Communist rivals. This was partly a result of his reliance on American support.11 It also reflected the fact that public opinion in China was strongly against the civil war and in favour of national reconstruction. The meeting ended on an ostensibly constructive note with an agreement to hold a political consultation conference and to recognize all political parties. However, almost immediately both sides resumed their struggle for territorial control, with the conflict intensifying in 1946.
The civil war lasted until 1949. In 1947 the Communist military forces were renamed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and by 1948 they had gone beyond guerrilla fighting to fielding armies with large units, using artillery, mostly of Japanese origin, which had been handed over to them by their Soviet allies. Mao Zedong headed the Revolutionary Military Committee, although the commander-in-chief of the PLA was a more professional military man, Zhu De.12 A combination of redistribution of land to win peasant support, ideological conviction, strong party discipline, impressive organizational capacity and military prowess brought the Communists to power. The Nationalists were so heavily dependent on conservative regional power-brokers and large landholders that it was impossible for them to compete with the Communists in the area of land reform. They were also much more internally divided and suffering from the loss of their leading military professionals. Over 100,000 officers were among the Kuomintang troops lost in the Sino-Japanese war.13 Chiang Kai-shek also made some serious errors. After the defeat of the Japanese, demobilization of the Chinese army had proceeded apace, with no provision for the demobilized soldiers to earn a new livelihood. Moreover, the Chinese puppet forces who had fought as auxiliaries of the Japanese were also disbanded, and the CCP did not hesitate to recruit large numbers of these former soldiers who had been trained by the Japanese to a higher level of military skill than their own troops.
Neither the Soviet Union for the Communists nor the United States for the Kuomintang was an entirely wholehearted ally. Mao’s troops undoubtedly benefited from the Soviet capture of Manchuria after they had entered the war. This enabled the Chinese Red Army to join up with their Soviet counterparts, after which the Soviet army departed to their side of the border. The Communist forces also benefited from a vast supply of captured Japanese arms which the Soviet Union handed over to them. However, Stalin was more cautious than Mao and seemed content for the Chinese Communists to control only the north of China, and to be in no hurry to attempt to wrest control of the south from Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin and Chiang had reached an understanding whereby China would recognize (Outer) Mongolia as an ‘independent’ state, though it was essentially a Soviet satellite, rather than lay any claim to a unified Mongolia. Yet in November 1948, a time when the Communists were gaining ground on the Nationalists in the civil war, Stalin urged Mao Zedong to consolidate their existing northern gains, leaving the south to Chiang Kai-shek’s administration.14 Mao disregarded the advice. In conversation with a group of Bulgarian and Yugoslav party leaders (which included Dimitrov from Bulgaria but not Tito from Yugoslavia) in Moscow in February 1948–just before the Soviet – Yugoslav rupture – Stalin admitted that the Soviet leadership had been wrong and the Chinese Communists right in believing that they could take power in the whole country. He said: ‘True. We, too, can make a mistake. Here, when the war with Japan ended, we invited the Chinese comrades to agree on a means of reaching a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek. 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 we were not.’15
On the other side of the political divide, the United States also urged restraint. While generally supportive of the Kuomintang, the Truman administration persuaded the Nationalists to seek an armistice in June 1946, just as they were on the point of capturing the Chinese city closest to the Russian border, Harbin. The Chinese Communist forces in the area, under the command of Lin Biao, were given a much-needed respite. In an effort to end the fighting, the United States even introduced an embargo on supplying arms to China, which harmed the Nationalists more than the Communists. Ultimately, however, the outcome of the civil war was determined by the differing ability of the leadership of the two Chinese armies to inspire their forces and to mobilize support within the society. In 1949, when the Communists finally established their ascendancy, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the outcome.
Although all these factors – not least Mao’s skilful, and ruthless, leadership – played a big part in the Communists’ successful capture of power in mainland China as a whole in 1949, there were also deeper-rooted conditions for their success. China, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, had been a country experiencing dire poverty. The Nationalists had failed to produce a programme for alleviating it. Moreover, corruption in their ranks, both at the local level and within Chiang Kai-shek’s family circle, aroused widespread resentment. Immediately after the war there was hyper-inflation. Whereas in 1937 one American dollar was the equivalent in value of 3.42 yuan (the unit of Chinese currency), by 1945 it had become 1,705 yuan to the dollar and in August 1948 the US dollar was worth a startling 8.6 million yuan. The Nationalist government brought in a new yuan that month, attempting to peg it at four to the American dollar. By mid-May 1949, one dollar purchased 22.3 million new yuan.16 The Kuomintang could find no answer to this massive problem, which was tackled by the Communists in their earliest years in power.
While Soviet support for the Chinese Red Army was significant, China remained a very different case from the East European countries discussed in the previous chapter. Notwithstanding Stalin’s help, the coming to power of the Chinese Communists was essentially an indigenous movement, comparable with that of Yugoslavia rather than the Communist takeovers in, say, Hungary or Poland. In Yugoslavia and China, Soviet troops played a supportive role in recapturing territory (in the former case from the Germans, in the latter from the Japanese), but in both countries the local Communists’ ability to generate domestic support was more decisive. And while Soviet military aid was of great help to the CCP after the Second World War in the Pacific ended, it had also been given in substantial quantities to Chiang Kai-shek while his army was fighting the Japanese.
Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Leadership
The rise of the Chinese Communist Party and the rise of Mao Zedong are closely interlinked, however absurdly exaggerated Mao’s achievements were to become during the cult of his personality, which he promoted when in power. He emerged from the Long March as the de facto leading figure in the party, although it was only during the Second World War that this was made official. Well before the war, he was recognized in the Soviet Union as the leader of China’s Communists. The book by the American journalist Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, highly sympathetic to Mao, was published in the USSR in Russian translation in 1938. In 1939 a glowing biography of Mao was published in Moscow, and in the same year a Soviet brochure was devoted to the two vozhdi of the Chinese people, the second vozhd’ being Zhu De, the military head of the Chinese Red Army.17* Mao’s leadership was institutionalized when he became Chairman of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party in 1943, and his topmost position was ratified at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945.18
Mao had an up-and-down relationship with Stalin long before he met him for the first time in 1949. He recognized the Soviet leader, however, as the ultimate authority within the international Communist movement. He was aware that Stalin’s control over the Comintern and his prestige among Communists worldwide, including China, was such that he had it in his power to bestow on someone else the accolade of leader of the Chinese Communists. The person concerned would then be accorded that status not only by a sufficient number of Chinese party members but also by the Comintern, and thus the whole Communist movement internationally. In the light of this knowledge, Mao was especially wary of China’s representative at the Comintern, Wang Ming, who, by virtue of that post, spent most of his time in Moscow until the Comintern was wound up in 1943. Wang really did aspire to the top post in China and so was viewed by Mao as a deadly rival. What is more, he also had a cautious supporter in Moscow in the head of the Comintern administration, Georgi Dimitrov, who had adopted as his child Wang’s young daughter.19 Stalin, though, was the ultimate arbiter of the leadership of non-ruling Communist parties and he took a less rosy view of Wang Ming than did Dimitrov. Wang at one stage seriously blotted his copybook with Stalin. When one of the Chinese warlords with links to the Communists captured Chiang Kai-shek in 1936, Stalin was furious that Wang Ming’s response had been to propose a telegram suggesting that Chiang be killed – or so, at least, Stalin was informed.20 Stalin saw Chiang as integral to his plans for a united front against the Japanese.
At midnight on 14 December 1936, Dimitrov received a telephone call from Stalin in which the Soviet leader asked: ‘Who is this Wang Ming of yours? A provocateur? He wanted to file a telegram to have Chiang Kai-shek killed.’21 For a Comintern official to be called a ‘provocateur’ by Stalin was normally a prelude to a death sentence, but Wang Ming, with Dimitrov’s support, survived.22 In discussion in the Comintern, Wang was frequently dismissive of Mao Zedong’s qualities as a leader, but Stalin, for all his reservations about Mao, combined grudging respect for him with continuing suspicion of Wang Ming. A recent scholarly article in a Russian journal (based on a study of Comintern documents) is even entitled ‘How Stalin helped Mao to become leader (vozhd’)’.23 Stalin appears to have come down firmly in favour of Mao in 1938. A delegation of the Chinese Communist Party to the Comintern was told by Dimitrov, echoing the preferences of Stalin: ‘You must convey to all that they must support Mao Zedong as the vozhd’ of the Communist Party of China. He is hardened in the practical struggle. There is no need for such people as Wang Ming to fight for the leadership.’24 Stalin’s wishes and his strong doubts about Wang Ming clearly prevailed over Dimitrov’s personal friendship with Wang.
More generally, Stalin’s policy, until the moment when the Communists succeeded in gaining power throughout the whole of China, was to urge caution on the Chinese party, for he had welcomed the part played by Chiang Kai-shek’s army in the war against Japan and saw him as a counterweight to British imperialism. Chiang had the additional advantage, in Stalin’s eyes, of uneasy relations with his American allies. During the war Stalin wanted the Chinese Communists to maintain their alliance with the Kuomintang and to concentrate more on fighting the Japanese. Both then and in the civil war which followed, Mao and the Chinese Communists pressed ahead regardless with their domestic political agenda of supplanting the Nationalists entirely. Victory came quicker than even they expected. Stalin, looking ahead to an eventual Chinese Communist victory, in April 1948 urged Mao to be cautious also in the early period of Communist rule. Having in mind the East European example – of genuine coalition giving way to pseudo-coalition, and, in due course, to Communist monopoly of power – Stalin emphasized the need for a broad-based government after eventual victory in the civil war. He wrote to Mao: ‘It should be kept in mind that after the victory of the people’s liberation armies of China – at least, in a post-victory period for which the duration is difficult to define now – the Chinese government, in terms of its policy, will be a national revolutionary-democratic government, rather than a Communist one.’25 That, he continued, would mean a necessary delay in nationalization and confiscation of properties from large, middle and small landowners. In the meantime the Chinese Communists pressed on with the military struggle, and in February 1949 they took Beijing. In October of that year they gained control of the last major city in the south, Guangzhou. Chiang Kai-shek appealed to the United States for more aid, but to no avail. He had little option but to leave with what remained of his government and army for the island of Taiwan.26
The Soviet Model and Communist China
Though prepared to acknowledge the pre-eminence of the Soviet Union as the world’s first ‘socialist state’, which he combined with prudent respect for the authority of Stalin, Mao regarded himself, not without reason, as a better judge of conditions on the ground in China. His disregard for Stalin’s advice from time to time did not at this stage cause any crisis in the relationship between Soviet and Chinese Communism because the outcomes of Mao’s policies were sufficiently positive from a Soviet point of view. The war in the Pacific had ended with the defeat of Japan – albeit thanks more to the Americans and to Chiang Kai-shek’s army than to Mao’s forces – and in 1949 the Communist Party did come to power throughout China. Mao moved somewhat faster than Stalin had recommended in 1948, but the extent to which the system constructed by the CCP was a copy of what existed in the USSR could not but be pleasing to the Soviet leader. Although some China scholars would argue that even in the early stages of Communist rule there were significant differences from, as well as similarities to, the Soviet system, a Russian historian convincingly contends that what was constructed in China was ‘the Soviet model of political, social and economic development’ and goes on to describe what were, indeed, fundamental features they had in common: ‘the undivided power of the strictly centralized and hierarchical Communist Party, the unbounded cult of the party leader, all-encompassing control over the political and intellectual life of citizens by the organs of public security, state seizure of private property, strictly centralized planning, priority given to the development of heavy industry, and huge resources devoted to national defence’.27
Mao had irritated Stalin from time to time by his unorthodox doctrine as well as by a number of his initiatives when Stalin was urging caution. But while Mao, for his part, undoubtedly had reservations about Stalin, he had taken care, even in the 1930s, to present himself to emissaries from the Soviet Union as the devoted pupil of the vozhd’ in the Kremlin. Thus, when a Soviet documentary film-maker, Roman Karmen, came to China in the spring of 1939 to make a film about him, Mao posed with a work by Stalin in his hands, studying it intently, and making sure that Stalin’s picture was clearly displayed to the camera. Karmen was able to report to Moscow on the warmth with which Mao spoke of Stalin.28 It was, however, as late as December 1949 when Mao met Stalin for the first time. The visit was timed for the celebration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, which had the effect of overshadowing Mao’s arrival. The Chinese Communists had come to power just two and a half months earlier, and that event was welcomed in Moscow as evidence of the onward march of Communism – in a country, moreover, of great international significance. Yet if anyone were to judge by the Soviet press coverage, they would have been forced to conclude that of the two occurrences, the Communist Party’s accession to power in the world’s most populous state was a less momentous occasion for celebration than Stalin’s reaching his three score years and ten.
Mao over the years had taken care to discredit potential rivals within the party or make them dependent on him. When the Communists came to power in China, there were, nevertheless, talented individuals of high prestige apart from Mao in the country’s leadership. One such person was Liu Shaoqi. While Mao was the undisputed top leader, with his power base in the party, Liu, who in the civil war with the Nationalists had operated skilfully in the ‘white areas’ behind enemy lines, occupied second place. Third in the ranking order was the head of the government administration, Zhou Enlai, who combined that post with the office of foreign minister.29 A party veteran of great ability, who had on occasion opposed Mao in the early 1930s, Zhou’s instincts were to soften some of the more extreme of Mao’s policies. Like Anastas Mikoyan, a similarly intelligent and flexible long-serving member of the Soviet Politburo under Stalin and Khrushchev, Zhou was content never to seek the top post. (In this respect he differed from Wang Ming.) Thus he was able to stay in the leadership of the party over four decades at the price of sharing responsibility for costly mistakes and bloody repression. Remaining committed to the Communist cause he had embraced in his youth, Zhou Enlai accepted the twists and turns of Mao’s leadership just as Mikoyan accepted his subordination to Stalin. (In the Soviet Union, still more than in China, to do so or not to do so was a matter of life or death.) Commenting on Mao Zedong’s ‘glaring contradictions’, a leading specialist on Chinese politics, Lowell Dittmer, has written that while Mao was ‘absolutely determined to have his own way and crush all opposition, he was sneeringly contemptuous of those (like Zhou Enlai) who fawned on and flattered him’.30
Yet in spite of these unequal and uneasy relationships, during the years in which the Chinese Communists consolidated their state power – from October 1949 until the mid-1950s – the ruling elite remained stable. The great majority of Central Committee members elected at the Seventh Congress of the party in 1945 who were still alive in 1956 were re-elected at the Eighth Congress in that year.* Elite unity then contrasted with later turmoil, but the Leninist principle of democratic centralism within the party worked to its advantage as it consolidated power. In political practice this meant projecting a monolithic image to society, based upon the strict discipline and steeply hierarchical organization which prevailed within the Communist Party. There was also at that time genuine agreement in the CCP that Soviet experience provided the model of how to build socialism, although that ‘model’ itself had varied over time – from Lenin’s New Economic Policy to Stalin’s compulsory collectivization of agriculture and the introduction of five-year plans of economic development. The Chinese Communists, in the early years of rule, tended to look to the Soviet experience of the late 1920s when considering economic development but to the political institutions of the consolidated Soviet political system.31
Among the slogans disseminated by the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1950s was ‘The Soviet Union of today is our tomorrow.’32 Remarkably, as late as January 1956, Mao declared that the Chinese Communists had merely elaborated on Soviet achievements.33 During this period of constructing a Communist system, as Frederick Teiwes observes, Soviet influences affected the policy of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society in a variety of complex ways. Teiwes continues: ‘In some senses the process was beyond the control of Party leaders, but more fundamentally it reflected their conscious choice. And when those leaders – or a dominant group of them – saw the need to break away from the Soviet path after 1957, it was well within their capabilities to do so, even though many Soviet influences inevitably remained.’34
The sheer breadth and immense population of the Chinese state, and the size of its Communist Party, put it in a very different category from the Soviet-imposed regimes of east-central Europe when, just a few years after Stalin’s death, serious differences with the Soviet leadership began to emerge. During the CCP’s first years in power, however, there was a large measure of accord between the two largest Communist parties in the world.
The Communist parties in Eastern Europe whose path to power had at least something in common with that of the CCP were those of Yugoslavia and Albania, for in both cases it was Communist armies which won an essentially military victory, in which national liberation from foreign occupation and social and political revolution went hand in hand. Another, and especially significant, common feature was that, in spite of the importance that armies played in all three victories, the supremacy of the Communist Party was preserved. Mao put the point clearly as early as 1938: ‘Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.’ When the CCP came to power this principle was strictly adhered to. The party first secretary in each region was, as elsewhere in the Communist world, the most authoritative figure within that territory, and in every Chinese region except one – the Central-South, where the post was given to Lin Biao, one of the most successful commanders in the Chinese Red Army – that office was held by a civilian political figure.35 Like Communist parties in Eastern Europe, the CCP rapidly increased its membership during the period in which it was coming to power, expanding from some 2.8 million members in 1948 to about 5.8 million in 1950. The speed with which the party more than doubled in size meant that many of the new recruits lacked knowledge not only of Marxist-Leninist ideology but even basic literacy. They were, moreover, joining the winning side, which meant that those who had taken part in the long struggle against the Nationalists were unsure how genuine was the new recruits’ commitment to the Communist cause.36
The Korean War and Internal Crackdown
Initially, many Kuomintang local officials were left in their posts, for the Communists did not have sufficient cadres to fill all of them. The new Communist government succeeded in bringing the rampant inflation under control, partly by taking over the banking system and thus gaining control over the issuing of credit, partly by controlling the supply of goods and paying people mainly in commodities, such as grain and oil. The inflation rate was quickly brought down to 15 per cent annually.37 In its early days, Communist rule evoked enthusiasm in a large part of Chinese society. In the words of John King Fairbank:
Here was a dedicated government that really cleaned things up – not only the drains and streets but also the beggars, prostitutes, and petty criminals, all of whom were rounded up for reconditioning. Here was a new China one could be proud of, one that controlled inflation, abolished foreign privileges, stamped out opium smoking and corruption generally, and brought the citizenry into a multitude of sociable activities to repair public works, spread literacy, control disease, fraternize with the menial class, and study the New Democracy and Mao Zedong Thought. All these activities opened new doors for idealistic and ambitious youth.38
If much, though by no means all, of this was positive, the darker side of Communist rule did not take long to emerge. Maintaining strict control over political behaviour and over access to information, while introducing revolutionary change in social and political relationships, led logically to physical repression and party dictatorship. It is probable that the period of relative tolerance of non-Communist strata within the society was even briefer than it might otherwise have been because of China’s entry into the Korean War. This was a sharply ideological struggle as well as a conflict which was costly in terms of soldiers’ lives. Three million Chinese troops took part, and estimates of those killed vary between 400,000 and a million, with little credence accorded the official figure of 152,000 dead, given by the Chinese authorities at the time.39 Among those killed in Korea – in an American bombing raid – was Mao Zedong’s eldest son, who was working as a Russian translator for the Chinese commander in the Korean War, Peng Dehuai.40 The Soviet Union did not overtly take part in the war, but it provided massive assistance to the otherwise poorly equipped Chinese and North Korean forces, sending clandestinely air crew, advisers, and large-scale deliveries of military technology.41
We now know, through perusal of documents from the Soviet archives, that the Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, persuaded Stalin that he could prevail quickly in a war to incorporate the south in a united Communist Korea, and that Stalin gave him the go-ahead to plan an attack. When initial successes by the North Koreans were reversed by American resistance, Stalin expressed the hope, and expectation, to Kim Il-sung that Chinese ‘volunteers’ would come to the North Koreans’ rescue.42 Mao, however, hesitated to commit Chinese forces to the conflict, citing, in a message to Stalin of 2 October 1950, the longing for peace in China after so many years of war. Mao also faced serious doubts in the Chinese Politburo about disturbing the reconstruction of their country and worries that they might be exposing China to direct attack by the United States (with the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 fresh in their minds).43 In mentioning some of his difficulties to Stalin, Mao may also have been strengthening his bargaining position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union with a view also to consolidating his ascendancy over his Politburo colleagues. He had to ensure that there would be sufficient covert military support from the Soviet Union to compensate for the technological backwardness of the Chinese armed forces. The Chinese Communist leadership, with Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao sent to Moscow for a meeting with Stalin, stressed the importance of Soviet air support if the Chinese were to take part in the war. In a letter he wrote on 4 October 1950, delivered to Mao a day later, Stalin pressed the Chinese to send troops to Korea – a minimum of five or six ‘volunteer divisions’. He argued that China would not receive the international recognition it craved through ‘passive temporizing and patience’, and he was even ready to risk world war, involving the United States (though he did not believe that would be the outcome) for the sake of preventing defeat of the Communists in Korea. Stalin wrote:
One can suppose, that the USA, despite its unreadiness for a big war, could still be drawn into a big war, which in turn would drag China into the war, and along with this draw into the war the USSR, which is bound with China by the Mutual Assistance Pact. Should we fear this? In my opinion, we should not, because together we will be stronger than the USA and England, while the other European capitalist states, without Germany which is unable to provide any assistance to the United States now, do not present a serious military force. [The passages in italics are Stalin’s handwritten amendments to the typed draft of the letter.]44
In the same letter, Stalin said he took Mao to be saying that the presence of bourgeois parties in the Chinese coalition meant that they would be able to exploit discontent in the country against the Communist Party and its leadership in the event of war. He said that he understood Mao’s ‘predicament’, but reminded him that he had earlier declared his readiness to send troops to Korea. Stalin managed to imply that he thought Mao was showing signs of backtracking and displaying insufficient revolutionary solidarity. Indeed, Mao later was to say that Stalin suspected he was a second Tito and trusted him only after he had intervened in Korea.45 Three days after Mao received Stalin’s letter, and after what he said were three sleepless days and nights, he gave a secret order for Chinese ‘volunteers’ to cross the Korean border. Thus, Chinese participation in the Korean War began – with the aim, in Mao’s words, of resisting ‘the attacks of U.S. imperialism and its running dogs’.46
It may be that Mao’s hesitation was partly because he did suspect that, in addition to the danger of a wider conflict, Chinese participation in the Korean War – with the diversion of funds and loss of life it would necessarily entail – would sharpen opposition to the new regime at home and engender greater domestic turmoil. However, he saw that there would also be opportunities to be exploited. External threat could help consolidate domestic control, and by taking the fight to the Americans, Mao would strengthen his prestige among Communists internally. He was certainly ready to make use of heightened tension as an excuse for cracking down on even potential opposition. The number of executions of their own citizens by the Chinese Communists increased sharply after the Korean War began. Estimates of the number of people executed in China between 1949 and 1953 vary greatly – between a low of 800,000 and a high of five million. The great majority of the executions were after Chinese troops entered Korea in October 1950. The number imprisoned or intimidated by the authorities was many times more.47 Ideological pressures on incorrect thinking–‘thought reform’ – also began in earnest in 1950. It has been persuasively argued that it was a combination of deliberately deployed terror and paternalism which enabled the Chinese Communist Party to succeed where the Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s had failed with their strategies of mobilization and indoctrination.48 The state would give material support to those who co-operated with the new rulers, while dealing ruthlessly with its opponents. Exhibitions devoted to the activities of counterrevolutionaries were set up, at which those who had been accused of such crimes would explain the nature of the counter-revolutionary threat, express penitence, and say how grateful they were to the authorities for pointing out the error of their ways.49
Merely to abstain from counterrevolutionary activity was soon to be far from enough. The trigger for attacks on intellectuals who were sitting on the fence and not wholeheartedly embracing the goals of the Communist Party was a film, The Life of Wu Xun, which was released in December 1950. It portrayed a nineteenth-century philanthropist who rose from being a poor beggar to becoming a wealthy landlord, after which he used his fortune not only to create schools for the poor but also to persuade the imperial government to join in that endeavour. The film was popular and had been well reviewed. However, from the spring of 1951 it was ferociously attacked on the initiative of the Film Steering Committee of the Ministry of Culture. A possible instigator of the criticism was Jiang Qing, a recently appointed member of that committee, who became Mao’s fourth wife. Soon newspapers were devoting a quarter of their pages to denouncing The Life of Wu Xun. The fundamental political error of the film had been to suggest that progress could be achieved through idealistic reformism rather than revolutionary class struggle.50
A dichotomous way of thinking has been characteristic of orthodox Communist doctrine.51 This means that, in essence, there are only two sides in the struggle – the forces of revolutionary progress and the forces of reaction. There can be no ‘third way’. This the film-makers were told in no uncertain terms, and the message was quickly spread to intellectuals as a whole. Artists, writers, university academics and schoolteachers were among those who were forced to take part in mass meetings at which they had to discuss the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao, denounce their former thinking, engage in self-criticism and face the criticism of others. Whereas landlords and overt opponents of the revolution were imprisoned or executed, the purpose of the thought-control campaign was to retain the abilities of educated people but to completely reshape their thinking in conformity with the new ruling ideology. At the same time the Chinese educational system was restructured along Soviet lines, which meant giving high priority to practical subjects – engineering and the natural sciences – and dismantling liberal educational programmes which had produced highly educated generalists (albeit a small minority of the total population).52
A series of campaigns characterized the period between 1951 and 1953. In 1952 the ‘Three-Anti’ campaign was quickly followed by the ‘Five-Anti’ project. The focus of the ‘three’ was on corruption, waste and bureaucratism, and the ‘five’ referred to bribery, tax evasion, stealing state property, cheating on government contracts, and stealing governmental economic data.53 The social targets of the campaigns were urban officials, especially those engaged in financial management, and capitalists. An earlier campaign in 1951 had led to the arrests of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and ‘spies’.54 Alongside these campaigns, the leadership had set about constructing a Communist system in a relatively orthodox manner, giving priority to the nationalization of heavy industry, between 70 and 80 per cent of which was state-owned by the end of 1952 (with some 40 per cent of light industry in state ownership by then). In the meantime, the Communist Party had removed the party cards of about 10 per cent of the members who had joined in recent years, but had added new recruits, so that by the end of 1953 membership stood at 6.5 million.55 What all this meant is that so long as Stalin was alive – he died in March 1953–the Chinese Communist system, notwithstanding the party’s distinctive path to power, was developing in recognizable and acceptable ways for the arbiters of ideological and organizational rectitude in the Kremlin. Mao, so far as the rest of the international Communist movement was concerned, had not yet become a ‘Maoist’.