Chapter 13: The Early Decades of the PRC
(See the accompanying visual images for this chapter in Angel.)
The Pacific War ended unexpectedly in August 1945, owing mainly to the introduction and use of atomic bombs. At the time of Japan’s surrender, vast numbers of Japanese soldiers occupied Chinese territory. Local Chinese warlords, Jiang’s GMD, and Mao’s CCP immediately began maneuvering to obtain the arms and equipment of these Japanese soldiers, and sometimes even to use the soldiers themselves as part of their fighting forces. As the jockeying for better field position began, Jiang’s GMD enjoyed vast numerical superiority. In August 1945, Jiang’s forces included 1,620,000 well-armed soldiers, 2,080,000 poorly-armed soldiers, 6,000 artillery pieces, and a small navy and air force. Jiang also benefitted from the bulk of U.S. training and logistical assistance. By contrast, Mao’s CCP forces included approximately 200,000 well-armed soldiers, 150,000 poorly-armed soldiers, 600 artillery pieces, no air force or navy, and almost no outside assistance (the Soviet Union, for example, recognized Jiang’s GMD as China’s government). Less than three years later, by June 1948, the GMD and CCP armies were roughly equal in size and equipment, and momentum and motivation were on the side of the CCP (figures based on Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, Second Edition [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999], p. 483). How did Jiang manage so quickly to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
Without going into all the complex details of the matter, here are a few basic points. First, China was a mess from its many years of war. There were no centralized institutions, there was no standard currency, and infrastructure was in decay in many areas. Moreover, even Jiang’s well-armed soldiers were often poorly trained and motivated, as we have seen with respect to their performance in the field when fighting Japan. Obviously the existence of most of these basic structural problems was beyond Jiang’s control, but how he reacted to them was. Jiang’s U.S. military advisors urged him to be cautious. Many suggested he remain at his old capital of Nanjing, consolidate his strength, establish strong institutions of government, good military training, etc., and then gradually advance northward. All advised against stretching his forces too thin over too wide an area. Jiang was unwilling to take this slow, methodical course to power, and instead insisted that U.S. planes airlift his forces to all of China’s major cities, including the cities of the northeast. Jiang’s insistence on occupying Manchuria and nearby parts of NE China proved to be a major tactical blunder.
Jiang also proved inept at managing the institutions of government. Especially problematic was currency stabilization and reigning in corruption. Corruption and brutality on the part of GMD commanders and officials engendered resentment toward Jiang’s government throughout China. Owing in large part to the GMD habit of printing more money whenever it was short of funds, hyperinflation set in. In Shanghai, for example the wholesale price index for September, 1948 was 106. Five months later, in February 1949, it was 40,825. In just one month, from January 1949 to February 1949, the cost of living index in Shanghai went from 6,825 to 52,113 (Spence, Modern China, p. 479). Basic goods were in short supply in all the major cities, and by the start of 1949 the economy had, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. Until 1948, Jiang could generally count on China’s wealthy citizens for at least grudging support. The economic collapse of 1948 and 1949 caused most of these Chinese to give up on the GMD. They did not necessarily turn to the CCP, but they stopped supporting the GMD.
Although the United States generally supported Jiang, until 1948 it pursued a diplomatic goal of trying to cause Jiang and Mao to reconcile their differences and join in a united government. U.S. special envoys Patrick Hurley and (alter) George Marshall repeatedly brought the two sides together for meetings, but ultimately failed. Hurley seems to been oblivious to the real situation and repeatedly expressed the view that the GMD and CCP were similar to Republicans and democrats in the U.S. Later, he blamed his failure on alleged “disloyalty” of U.S. State Department personnel. Marshall, by contrast, quickly realized the situation was beyond the power of diplomacy to alter. Early in the Civil War, many U.S. observers in China came to understand the situation and provided accurate reports to their bureaus in Washington. Here, for example, is a summary of the situation from the U.S. consul in Mukden (NE China) in a May 1947 telegram to the State Department:
There is good evidence that apathy, resentment, and defeatism are spreading fast in nationalist ranks causing surrenders and desertions. Main factors contributing to this are Communists ever mounting numerical superiority (resulting from greater use [of] native recruits, aid from underground, and Korean units), National [GMD] soldiers discouragement over prospects [of] getting reinforcements, better solidarity and fighting spirit of Communists, losses and exhaustion of Nationalists, their growing indignation over disparity between officers enrichment and soldiers’ low pay, life, and their lack of interest in fighting far from home among ‘alien’ unfriendly populace whereas Communists being largely natives are in position of fighting for native soil). (Quoted in Spence, Modern China, p. 473.)
The condensed language of the telegram touches on almost all of the main issues. Later, in the frenzied atmosphere of the McCarthy years of the early 1950s, State Department officials who had provided such spot-on assessments were condemned as “Communists” and “defeatists,” and many were forced out of their jobs. During this shameful period of U.S. history, blind ideological fervor trumped reality and professional competence. The same would be true of China from the late 1950s through the late 1960s, as we will see.
Despite numerical inferiority in 1945, Mao enjoyed many advantages. His soldiers were seasoned veterans from fighting Japanese armies; they were well disciplined, and well motivated. Wherever CCP armies went, they took care to win over the loyalties of the peasants in surrounding areas who proved to be a valuable base of material support and intelligence. Early in the fighting, CCP armies took over the extreme NE parts of Manchuria and adjacent areas to the west, establishing a base at Harbin. From there, they methodically consolidated their strength and moved southward. The typical strategy was to surround GMD-controlled cities and enlist the aid of local peasants who, among other things, would refuse to sell food for use in the city. Sometimes the city would fall from a direct CCP military assault, but as CCP power grew, many GMD commanders surrendered with little or no fight. With every collapse of a GMD city, Mao’s forces obtained more supplies and equipment, often freshly shipped from the United States. As the cities fell, CCP officials attempted various economic stabilization measures. Some worked and some did not, but through trial and error CCP cadres were able to devise an array of effective economic policies that they would later put to use in stabilizing the entire country.
The years 1948 and 1949 saw one defeat after another for the GMD. By October, 1949, Guangzhou (Canton) had fallen, and all major cities were in CCP hands. Anticipating defeat, Jiang had been preparing the island of Taiwan as a location for his final retreat. In November 1949, the last GMD outpost on the mainland fell. Taiwan became the self-proclaimed “Republic of China.” Meanwhile, on October 1, 1949, Mao had formally declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China with its capital in Beijing.
Even before the formal creation of the PRC, land reform began in CCP-controlled areas. This process was often violent, as landlords were brought before hastily-assembled “courts” of villagers and condemned for various abuses. Their land was then re-distributed among local peasants and other displaced people (wounded soldiers, for example). Many of these landlords (probably a million or more) died in the process of land reform. The violent aspect of land reform was the result of direct encouragement by party cadres who sought to put class struggle into concrete terms, in large part to nurture a sense of class consciousness among the peasantry. By the end of 1950, China’s elite rural gentry had largely vanished.
In the cities, the pace was slower and more cautious. Initially, the CCP focused on currency stabilization and provision of basic necessities. Gradually, it began to turn its attention to wealthy urban elites and business owners. This segment of society came under increasing pressure to “confess” its past class-based and economic “crimes” and to pay restitution. Often this restitution was so large as to drain away nearly off of the elites’ wealth. Gradually party officials became part of every private company, and during the middle of the 1950s wholly private enterprise was abolished. All business enterprises in China were therefore either state-owned or partially state owned. This situation contributed to centralized economic planning, and in 1953 the CCP devised and implemented a Soviet-style 5-year plan for China that emphasized the development of heavy industry.
During the early months of the PRC, the U.S. State Department prepared for dealing with the new Chinese government. For example, expecting Taiwan to fall, in the near future, it drafted an advance statement about this event. Statements by leading U.S. generals and officials defined American strategic interests in a way that excluded Taiwan and any other Chinese territory. At the very top, Mao was waiting for overtures of friendship from the Truman administration and Truman was waiting for the same from the PRC. Then, in June 25 1950 this relatively placid state of U.S. – Chinese relations turned tense when North Korea invaded South Korea.
Early in the war, when North Korea had the upper hand, Mao’s anti-American rhetoric was muted. As the tide of battle turned and the U.S, forces counterattacked effectively, the level of anti-American rhetoric increased. Mao also called for Chinese volunteers to aid their Communist brethren in North Korea. As U.N. (mainly U.S.) forces pushed into North Korea continued moving north, a large Chinese army assembled at the border of North Korea. U.S. commanders paid little attention to these Chinese forces. Mao seems to have been reluctant to take the plunge into war, but several of his top officials seem to have persuaded him to do so, and the “volunteers” entered the fight on October 13, 1950. The Chinese army fought effectively if not efficiently (casualty rates were horrific among Chinese forces), pushing the UN forces south of Seoul by the start of 1951. A counter-attack by the UN forces pushed the battle lines slightly northward, to approximately the point they had been at the start of the war. China never published official casualty statistics owing the “volunteer” nature of its army in Korea, but estimates range between 700,000 and 900,000, many of whom died (owing in part to poor medical facilities). By comparison U.S. casualties were about 160,000, including about 54,000 deaths.
The Korean War had several major consequences for China and U.S.-Chinese relations. First, the U.S. 7th fleet sailed in to guard Taiwan. From this time on, Taiwan’s survival was assured, and it became a U.S. ally. Moreover, until the 1970s, the United States recognized Taiwan as “China.” The war set the U.S. and China on an antagonistic course that would last for decades. In the United Sates, the war helped usher in McCarthyism and obsessive talk of the “loss” of China. Within China, the war prompted military reorganization as the reality of the high casualties became apparent to army commanders. The war also stimulated anti-rightist purges of various kinds. One result was that nearly all foreign businesses and other organizations that had remained in China after 1949 were forced to close and send their personnel out of the country. The war removed any possibility that China might develop in a democratic direction. Moreover, China’s break with the U.S. pushed it into the Soviet orbit, at least temporarily, because the Soviet Union was the only practical source of military and technical aid.
After the war, China’s leaders focused on economic development, and the 5-year plan ending in 1958 proved moderately successful. By the late 1950s, however, there many structural problems in Chinese society had become apparent, Chinese-Soviet relations had began to deteriorate, and China remained largely isolated from world markets and flows of technology. In 1957, against considerable resistance within the party, Mao decided that the power of China’s intellectuals was underutilized. Moreover, Mao saw rigid, bureaucratic ways of thinking as stifling innovation within the party. In this context, he launched the so-called “Hundred Flowers” campaign. The idea was to encourage intellectuals to criticize the party and society and to use the resulting dialogue to developed new ideas. Apparently, however, Mao did not anticipate that the resulting critique would be as severe or as thorough as it was.
Unleashed to speak their minds, students and intellectuals all over China poured out angry denunciations of the party in the form of articles, posters, speeches, and rallies. Party leaders were taken by surprise and quickly retreated from the position of free intellectual exchange. Indeed, Mao himself had the words of his February 1957 speech launching the campaign altered after the fact to make his endorsement appear hedged and qualified. The backlash began in June, and heads began to roll (figuratively, and, in a few cases, literally). In retrospect, the Hundred Flowers campaign seems like a clever ploy on Mao’s part to lure anti-party intellectuals into the open, although there is no evidence that Mao had such intentions originally.
The turmoil of the Hundred Flowers campaign presaged greater shakeups to come. Regardless of the details, these shakeups were in part the result of indecision and infighting within the ranks of the CCP leadership. The first economic issue to cause major dissention was the question of agricultural productivity. The harvest figures for 1957 were disappointing, and Mao blamed this situation not on structural problems with Chinese agriculture, but on corruption within party ranks. Mao accused local CCP cadres, for example, of underreporting harvest levels so that the communes they supervised would thus pay fewer taxes, leaving more resources available for the enrichment of the cadres. Around this time, Mao also began to talk in public of his theory of “continuing revolution.” As the name implies, Mao advocated constant shakeups of society to combat complacency and to re-instill in each generation a sense of revolutionary ardor. Mao’s views were in direct conflict with those who advocated careful state economic planning and a gradualist approach to solving major problems.
Starting in 1958, at Mao’s urging, a series of reforms that would soon be called the “Great Leap Forward” began. The basic idea was to put all of society on a military footing and to attach the problem of production as one might attack an enemy in warfare. Until this time China’s agriculture centered on fairly small cooperatives. These cooperatives began to be combined into huge agricultural communes. Moreover, these communes were ideally supposed to be self-sufficient. In addition to farming, for example, they provided for the education of their members and even engaged in industrial enterprises. Backyard steel furnaces, for example, became all the rage in many parts of China as the Great Leap proceeded.
Did it work? It seemed to at the time because high production figures and euphoric reports of improvements in standards of living came pouring into Beijing. It was all an illusion, but the rhetoric of this illusion was self-sustaining for months, and, in some cases, even years. For example, local party cadres did not dare report actual production figures. Instead, they sent ever more inflated reports to Beijing. In reality, the situation in the countryside was getting worse, not better, but few central government officials dared to look too closely at actual conditions or to convey a more realistic assessment to Mao. One exception was Peng Dehuai, head of the People’s Liberation Army. Peng understood precisely how disastrous the Great Leap reforms had been, and he explained these details in a private letter to Mao. Mao reacted by publishing the letter and accusing Peng of disloyalty and reactionary tendencies. Peng was soon fired, and the message was clear: blind loyalty to Mao and his idealistic ideological vision was required of all officials regardless of actual conditions. Mao was forcing China’s government to live in a dream world and the results for China’s peasants would be disastrous:
The average amount of grain available to each person in China’s countryside, which had been 205 kilos in 1957 and 201 kilos in 1958, dropped to a disastrous 183 kilos in 1959, and a catastrophic 156 kilos in 1960. In 1961 it fell again—to 154 kilos. The result was famine on a gigantic scale, a famine that claimed 20 million lives or more between 1959 and 1962. Many others died shortly thereafter from the effects of the Great Leap—especially children, weakened by years of progressive malnutrition. In the China of 1957, before the Great Leap began, the median age of those dying was 17.6 years; in 1963 it was down to 9.7. Half of those dying in China that year, in other words, were under ten years old. The Great Leap Forward, launched in the name of strengthening the nation by summoning all the people’s energies, had turned back on itself and ended up devouring its young. (Spence, Modern China, p. 553.)
We now know that in some parts of the Chinese countryside, starving peasants were forced to turn to cannibalism. During this awful period, however, the official line from the government was that all was well in the countryside, and foreign China experts generally accepted such pronouncements without question.
At what point Mao began to realize the truth is hard to say with certainty, but at the time he never admitted to having been in error. Instead, he gradually backed away from direct management of government policy and allowed the country’s bureaucrats to ease up on the more extreme aspects of the Great Leap. Slowly, in 1963 and 1964, the countryside began to recover. But Mao was not finished wreaking death and destruction on his country. Indeed, bigger upheavals were just around the corner.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
The disastrous consequences of the Great Leap caused Mao to retreat partially from the government inner circle. Whatever his activities, he lived a life of great luxury, living in several places and traveling at will in a private train and often accompanied by enthusiastic young women eager to be in the presence of the great man. Among ordinary people, Mao’s reputation was sterling. Among the CCP bureaucrats, however, it was tarnished. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that Mao would end up turning to his base of support—ordinary people—to shake up the party bureaucracy rather than risk losing personal power in governing China. The results were in many ways worse than those of the Great Leap, and their effects were especially apparent in the cities.
The Great Proletarian Cultural revolution took place between 1966 and 1976, with 1966 and 1967 being the time of the greatest chaos. During those two years, even large cities like Shanghai became paralyzed at times and the army had to intervene to maintain some semblance of order. The direct agents of this chaos were young people who styled themselves as “red guards.” The main instigators of it were Mao, Jiang Qing, one of his wives, and Lin Biao, head of the PLA. Each had a slightly different, but overlapping agenda. Mao sought to reinvigorate his influence by weakening the established party bureaucracy. Thus, in the spirit of continuous revolution, he invited the proletarian masses to rise up and purge the party of disloyal and corrupt elements. Sounding much like an odd inverse of Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, Mao claimed that China’s Communist party was riddled with secret Capitalists and right wingers. He called on the masses to discover and root out these counter-revolutionary elements. They did so with a vengeance, exacerbated by the pent-up frustrations of China’s repressed young people.
Young revolutionaries from all over China converged on the big cities, especially Beijing to hold mass rallies. Mao’s personality cult was everywhere to be seen. Indeed, he had become the national idol, an object of veneration and worship, above and beyond the fray of ordinary politics. China’s youth subordinated themselves ritually and psychologically to the Mao-god and set to work tearing down the corrupt society around them. In many places, they did an excellent job, bringing entire cities to a halt.
The manner in which the Cultural Revolution played out varied from locality to locality. In some places, the party leadership managed to retain control. In many places, however, party bureaucrats could do nothing in the face of the angry mobs. Groups of red guards dragged mayors, governors, cabinet ministers, and many lesser officials from their homes and offices, and subjected them to all manner of physical and psychological abuse. Many died in the process. Even China’s head of state, Liu Shaoqi, could not escape being purged. At the level of ordinary people, the Cultural Revolution was a time for settling scores. Rural villagers turned on each other, often with fatal results for those on the losing side. In the cities, different factions of red guards began to fight each other, each claiming the highest ideological purity.
At the point of greatest chaos, Lin Biao directed the army to step in and send many of these unruly red guards out to the remote countryside to “learn from the peasants” though labor. Some high school and university students voluntarily did the same. Posters celebrated this process as glorious, harmonious, and beneficial to all. In fact, farmers typically resented the disruption and strain that these inexperienced young people caused, and the urban red guards quickly found out how hard agricultural life really was. Indeed, many of them died in the course of their “re-education” in the countryside.
In the meantime, red guards remaining in the cities (and to a lesser extend in the countryside) shifted their attacks from living people (there being relatively few party officials still in office who might serve as targets) toward cultural icons. In the name of destroying the “Four Olds” (old culture, customs, habits, and thinking), they began to destroy temples, shrines, and other outward signs of classical culture. Confucius’ mortuary temple in Qufu, for example, came under the sledgehammers of the young revolutionaries. Fortunately for China’s material culture, Jiang Jieshi had done a fairly thorough job of looting cultural treasures and shipping them to Taiwan in the last years of his power on the mainland. If Jiang had not stolen them, China’s youth in the late 1960s would almost certainly have destroyed them. It was a pathetic situation. As China moved into the 1970s, its infrastructure was in ruins, its material cultural heritage largely demolished, its government ineffective and demoralized, and its people psychologically exhausted (not to mention dead in many cases). Universities and many other schools had all but ceased to function. In retrospect, many Chinese and others refer to the Cultural Revolution era as a “lost generation.”
Particularly disturbing for ordinary people was the fall of Lin Biao, who died in 1971 under mysterious circumstances. In the late 1960s, Lin was set to be Mao’s successor, but as he became too powerful, Mao eliminated him. Undoubtedly, Mao could not bear the idea of anyone succeeding him. The Cultural Revolution is a classic example of the disastrous effects of attempts to change a society too quickly and too radically, especially when combined with a personality cult.
Zhou Enlai was one of the few top CCP officials to survive the Cultural Revolution unscathed. Both he and Mao died in 1976, and Jiang Jieshi died the year before. Soon thereafter, Jiang Qing and other leading instigators of the Cultural Revolution who were still alive were arrested. They were eventually convicted of various offenses, and Jiang reported to have committed suicide in prison in 1993. In the post-Mao years, Chinese society moved, fitfully, in the direction of the pursuit of economic prosperity and of greater integration with the worldwide economy. There were numerous stops and starts in this process, and increasing economic prosperity was generally not matched by increasing political freedoms. The overall standard of living for most urban Chinese rose steadily in the 1980s and 1990s. China’s economy is a major force in the world, and China is slowly beginning to assert commensurate geo-political and military influence as well. Many severe structural problems remain Chinese society, and pollution has become a severe problem in many places. Regardless of how China ends up dealing with its domestic and foreign problems (relations with Japan, for example), it will play an increasingly strong role in world affairs. Throughout most of human history, China was a powerful, technologically-advanced empire—often the most advanced society on earth. The twentieth century was an exception to this general situation, but the twenty-first century shows every indication of being more typical.