A History of China (79 page)

The Korean War was devastating for China. Deaths of soldiers, together with the diversion of financial resources to provide supplies for the military, were obvious results, but other consequences also harmed the country. China became isolated, as many countries, especially the USA, refused to grant ­diplomatic recognition to the new administration in Beijing. They maintained that the regime in Taiwan was the real government of China. The Chinese communists were unable to trade or have economic relations with many countries, forcing them to rely on the Soviet bloc for commerce and investment. Such lack of harmony with the West, particularly the USA, contributed to the prolongation of a cold war, which led to serious misconceptions on both sides. Chinese fears of a military attack resulted in the squandering of limited financial resources to build up a military force and sophisticated weaponry. The Chinese government also used the impasse to whip up hysteria about alleged US belligerency.

Simultaneously, anticommunist hysteria, partly due to a media and government campaign about the USA’s “loss” of China to communism, struck the USA. Congressional committees investigated Chinese specialists in the Department of State as well as the so-called Old China Hands to lay blame for what was held to be failure in China. In the early 1950s, some of the ­leading government experts on China and east Asia, including John S. Service (1909–1999), O. Edmund Clubb (1901–1989), and John Paton Davies ­(1908–1999), had their security clearances revoked and left government employment. Congressional committees also targeted Owen Lattimore (1900–1989), John K. Fairbank (1907–1991), and other nongovernment employees who had criticized Chiang Kai-shek’s government and had advocated a policy of moderation toward the Chinese communists. Supporters of Chiang in the academic community joined in the denunciations of these ­university faculty members as sympathetic to the Chinese communists. The bitterness of these struggles created a damaging rift in the field of Chinese studies. Owen Lattimore, arguably the greatest expert on China’s borderlands, eventually left the USA and developed a program of study on east Asia at Leeds University in Britain, while John Fairbank, a pioneer in the study of modern China, remained at Harvard University, whose administrators ­generally supported him. In short, both communist China and the USA were hurt by these actions.

In the early 1950s, the communists had to recover from the Japanese invasion, the civil war with the Guomindang, and the Korean War, and could not ­undertake radical policies. They first had to deal with the most pressing ­problems, some of which were not controversial. Foremost among these were infrastructure repairs, restoration of law and order (which entailed control over prostitution, secret societies, gangs, narcotics, gambling, and other criminal activities), establishment of such basic services as electricity and running water, and an increase in agricultural production to meet the population’s needs. Public health was one of the critical difficulties that the government tackled. It initiated a Four Pests campaign, directed at rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Killing of sparrows proved counterproductive because these birds served as predators for more harmful species of insects. Nonetheless, better sanitation, access to clean water, vaccinations, and training of medical personnel reduced the levels of infectious and parasitic diseases.

The status of women was still another difficulty that the communists immediately tried to alter. The Marriage Law of 1950 forbade female infanticide, arranged marriages, domestic abuse, and discrimination against women in the labor force. The effects of the law in the early 1950s were decidedly mixed. The government-controlled press acknowledged the persistence of arranged marriages and domestic abuse as late as the 1960s. Communist media also documented unequal wages for women in many enterprises, reluctance of many managers to hire women, and the paucity of crèches and child-care ­facilities, which were an impediment for women seeking employment. Simultaneously, the right of divorce led to dislocations. The communists, who still relied on the traditional household as the basic economic unit, were stunned by the dramatic increase in applications, mostly by women, for divorce. In 1954, the government quietly issued instructions to judges to seek to reconcile couples and to limit the granting of divorces to the most egregious instances of domestic abuse or to irreconcilable differences. Some progress was made in improving the position of women, but extraordinary changes, especially an increase in the number of women in the labor force and the strengthening of their economic rights, would be delayed. The government did not have the resources to provide nationwide care for children, nor did it seek an immediate challenge to traditional social practices, which might have generated considerable opposition. Advocates of moderate and incremental change dominated the government and were averse to disruptive and radical transformations.

On the other hand, the government initiated a series of campaigns directed at the populace. A Three-Anti campaign against waste, corruption, and bureaucratization was initiated; it was especially directed at Communist Party members who sought to use their honored status for their own profit. Many such cadres were perceived to be not entirely reliable. Shortly thereafter, the government initiated a Five-Anti campaign consisting of measures against tax evasion, fraud, bribery, purloining of state property, and theft of economic secrets. Most of the population avidly supported these efforts, which, in theory, offered a sharp contrast to Guomindang policies. Urban dwellers were particularly supportive of these movements, which served as models for future campaigns. The government used the media to announce the campaigns, which were then discussed in workplaces and educational institutions. “Spontaneous” mass rallies, which Communist Party cadres frequently organized, galvanized the people in a region and often resulted in abusive treatment of those labeled as anticommunists, who, at this time, were mostly members of the bourgeoisie or owners of large enterprises. The crowds and the cadres demanded confessions and criticized the alleged miscreants. To be sure, some were criminals or saboteurs or spies, but many were simply identified as bourgeois and had not committed any crimes. They merely derived from the wrong social class. These attacks spilled over into the remaining foreigners in China, especially foreign Christian missionaries, who were accused of spying and criminal activities. Most left the country, but a few were forced to confess and then imprisoned.

Regular efforts to establish a government accompanied these disruptive demonstrations and other activities. The Communist Party naturally ­dominated the top positions in government, and support from the People’s Liberation Army, which had played an important role in the victory over the Guomindang, also was critical for anyone seeking power. The Central Committee of the party would devise policy, while the State Council, composed of such functional ministries as foreign affairs, justice, agriculture, finance, and education, implemented them. Economic planners were vital in these ministries, as the Communist Party pledged to increase production and to be more successful in economic development than the capitalist countries. Local government did not shift dramatically from the traditional Chinese system. China was divided into the basic traditional unit of provinces. However, Beijing and Shanghai had their own municipal governments and were not part of the provincial administration.

The major deviation from the past was the establishment of autonomous regions in the so-called minority nationality areas. The government eventually identified fifty-six such nationalities, with one – the Han, or ethnic Chinese – constituting about ninety-five percent of the population. The fifty-five others were a curious blend of religious, ethnic, or culturally distinct groups whose identification related to political agendas. For example, the Hui were ethnically Han people except that they were Muslims and were classified as such to distinguish them from ordinary Chinese. Most of the minorities resided in specific regions, but the Hui were scattered throughout the country. The government identified Turkic and Southeast Asian-related groups and further subdivided them, possibly to prevent unity between them. The minorities in southwest China were less troublesome to the government than those in the north. The northern groups – the Mongols, the Turkic and Iranian peoples of Xinjiang, and the Tibetans – had written languages, age-old cultural heritages, and strong senses of ethnic identity and had often clashed with Chinese dynasties over the centuries. The southwest had witnessed conflicts over Chinese expansionism but did not pose the same threats as the north’s incursions or even conquests of China.

These ethnic groups and indeed the Han (or ethnic Chinese) had abiding faith in a variety of religions. Like other Marxist political parties, the Chinese communists perceived of religion as part of the social superstructure and designed to facilitate exploitation of the lower classes. According to this interpretation, the feudal and capitalist elites used temples, monasteries, churches, mosques, and religious experience in general to deflect the masses from focusing on economic bondage. Once such exploitation ended, religion would wither away. Yet the government needed to supervise religious organizations, and, within a few years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it established a Chinese Buddhist Association and a Chinese Islamic Association and appointed reliable clerics and imams to coordinate and maintain control over these religions. The People’s Republic of China actively promoted ­atheism in schools, the media, and propaganda. In its radical phases, the government initiated campaigns against religious organizations. It eventually targeted Tibetan Buddhism, Islam (especially in Xinjiang), and Christian house churches, the latter because they met secretly and were thus viewed as subversive. Believing that many clerics were traitors, young people at various times damaged monasteries and temples, destroyed ritual objects, and burned down mosques and churches. Nonetheless, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity ­survived, challenging the view that religion was an ephemeral part of the superstructure.

Despite the disturbances caused by the mass campaigns and the accompanying purges of some leading governors, including a certain Gao Gang ­(1905–1954), the chief official in Manchuria, the government adopted relatively moderate policies until 1958. It followed the Soviet model of a reputedly rationally based Five-Year Plan. Planners did not make radical or absurd claims about increases in production. Again following the Soviet model, the planners focused on the growth of heavy industry and extraction of stiff taxes on agriculture to provide capital for the expansion. This may not have been the optimal strategy, but it was certainly not bizarrely irrational, as some later plans would be. Soviet experts and advisers arrived and promoted the efforts at industrialization. To be sure, the Five-Year Plan from 1953 to 1958 did not increase industrial production as much as the planners had predicted. Their policies in agriculture were similarly moderate, save for the rather demanding tax burdens. As early as 1952, they started to encourage formation of mutual-aid teams in which peasants would contribute their land and labor and would receive rewards based on the amount of land they owned. Starting in 1955, they pressed peasants to develop agricultural producers’ cooperatives, which entailed even greater collaboration among peasants. In this new organization, peasants would be paid for their work, not on the basis of their land holdings. They would become, in Marxist terms, semiproletarians. In theory, the land still belonged to them, but they did not receive rewards based on the profits from their own land. To compensate for their losses, they received small private plots of land, the produce of which they could consume or sell. The government’s rationales for encouraging or compelling peasants to join cooperatives were efficiency and potential for greater production. Larger and contiguous plots of land would facilitate the use of machinery and fertilizer, which would presumably lead to increased harvests. Politics was secondary to economics. The thrust of these organizational reforms was pragmatic, not ideological. Planners embraced the logic of increased production.

Part of the communist leadership’s emphasis on rapid growth was due to isolation from the rest of the world. The USA, one of the world’s major powers, not only had no relations with them but also granted diplomatic recognition to Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. Although China and the USSR were allegedly allies, the sources of tension between them stretched back to their first contacts in the 1920s. The USSR had acted as the big brother in the relationship but often considered its interests as paramount. Similarly, China’s relationship with India was unstable because of territorial disputes. Japan appeared to be strongly linked to one of China’s principal enemies, the USA. Facing such difficulties with the great powers, the Chinese sought to curry favor with the so-called Third World. Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai’s attendance at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 was a pivotal event. Zhou attempted to bond with the preeminent leaders of the world’s nonaligned countries, stressing his view about the USA’s imperial ambitions in Asia. Zhou and the Chinese communists would now align themselves with the underdeveloped countries in Asia, the Middle East, and African lands still under Western colonial administration. They often opted to side with the anti-imperialist and antiforeign groups in these countries, which in some cases meant supporting revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the existing governments. This view eventually led to disputes with the USSR, which counseled direct diplomatic relations with ­governments and labeled China’s willingness to support guerillas and revolutionaries “adventurist.” Chinese communists appeared to be following the Trotskyite position of fostering world proletarian revolution rather than accommodation with the bourgeois states. From then on, the Western countries treated China as a pariah, which contributed to its isolation.