China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (36 page)

Mao believed in this as well, and he therefore knew that his ultimate goal and Stalin’s were the same. His eventual seizure of power in China would, as he was famously to put it later, enable the east wind to prevail over the west wind, or, in less metaphorical language, for the global proletarian revolution to triumph over bourgeois capitalism, especially as represented by the United States.

“The principal and fundamental experience the Chinese people have gained is twofold,” Mao said in a speech on June 22, 1949, just before taking control of all of China, summing up the forty years since the overthrow of the
Manchu dynasty and the twenty-eight years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Internally, we have learned to “arouse the masses,” Mao said. “Externally,” he continued, we must “
ally ourselves with the Soviet Union, with the people’s democracies, and with the proletariat and the broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front.”

This is the context
in which both Mao and Stalin engaged in wartime relations with the western allies. The goal was not friendship with the United States. It was to sustain a necessary arrangement until conditions changed. The Communists of both the Soviet and Chinese variety understood the natural anti-Communist impulses of the United States, and they therefore strove to neutralize those impulses. They strove to persuade the Americans to support the CCP’s wartime aims, namely by pressuring the Kuomintang to accept a coalition government and giving the Communists arms to use in its guerrilla war against Japan. If the
United States could do those two things, then afterward, as Pantsov and Levine have written, “
the CCP would be able to ‘
squeeze’ Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters out of positions of power and next, by maneuvering among the Kuomintang left and the liberals, ultimately seize power.”

Mao’s moderate policy, including his amicable outreach to the United States, was in this way entirely consistent with his and with Stalin’s long-term revolutionary goals. His friendly talks with the members of the Dixie Mission, his moderate, pro-democratic statements to journalists, his offer to support an American landing on Chinese soil—all of this was undertaken not just with Stalin’s approval but also on his orders. These orders, moreover, were identical to the orders that Stalin gave to Communist parties elsewhere in the world—to take the kind of “progressive” stands that would attract the support of liberal intellectuals and induce western leaders to believe in their non-threatening moderation. This explains Mao’s public championship of China’s small democratic parties and the CCP’s demand for the release of political prisoners and an end to KMT spying on Chinese citizens. This masquerade as the party of human rights and democracy in China was part of the longer-term scheme, and it was convincing.

Of course, Mao had no intention of establishing a regime of civil rights and democratic institutions once he came to power, nor did Stalin intend to keep his promise of turning Manchuria over to central government forces. In every case in the world where Communist parties took power, the mask was soon dropped and the real totalitarian face of the Stalin-nurtured regimes was revealed. Davies was right to say that the CCP had started out as an instrument of Moscow’s policy of world revolution; where he was wrong was to assume that this policy had been permanently abandoned as a result of the war.

In a way, the CCP’s efforts to portray itself as moderate and democratic recapitulated a famous episode from the past. During the
first United Front, between 1923 and 1927, Stalin’s plan, as he put it in a secret speech to party members, was for Chiang to be “
squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away.” Chiang’s preemptive strike against the Communists in 1927 foiled that plan. Now, in 1945, the plan was operational again, and this time it was going to succeed.

The influence of the
Soviet Union on China’s Communists dates to the very origins of the Chinese Communist Party, when a group of leftist
Chinese intellectuals,
Mao among them, founded it in 1921.
Comintern advisers were dispatched to China to supervise and to provide funds. They schooled the fledgling Chinese Communists in the style of discourse, the tone of propaganda, and the mode of analysis that went by the name
Marxism-Leninism. They also provided it with its main source of money. The Kuomintang, which had formed only a few years earlier, was also organized along Marxist-Leninist lines and with the guidance of Soviet advisers, but when Chiang Kai-shek violently parted company with the CCP in 1927, he also parted company with Moscow. He sent its advisers packing and turned elsewhere for money and support, leaving the CCP as the only party in China to be closely supervised and funded by the Comintern.

The relationship between the Russians and the Chinese Communists from then on involved something far broader and deeper than mere advice, money, and moral support. It was an entire cultural and political transmission. It was a vocabulary, a manner of analysis known as
dialectical reasoning, a set of practices, and a grand, preoccupying, thrilling political vision involving the triumph of the progressive forces of history over exploitation and reaction. Mao never departed from that vision from the time he became a charter member of the party in 1921 until his death fifty-five years later. When he made his lean-to-one-side speech in June 1949, Mao attributed his imminent success to what he regarded as the superior tools of Marxism-Leninism, the brilliance and promise of which had burst on the world with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. “
Communists the world over are wiser than the bourgeoisie,” he said, celebrating the twenty-eighth anniversary of the CCP’s founding. “They understand the laws governing the existence and the development of things. They understand dialectics and they can see farther.”

Many of the early Communists, though not Mao himself, studied in Moscow at the
Communist University of Toilers of the East, which was set up by the Comintern in 1925 to instruct revolutionaries from the colonized countries—and semi-colonized countries like China—in the theory and practice of Marxist revolution. One alumnus of this university was
Liu Shaoqi, who was, until Mao cruelly jettisoned him in 1966, Mao’s right-hand man, in charge of the Communist Party organization and one of the masterminds of the
Rectification Campaign of 1942 to 1944.
Deng Xiaoping, later China’s paramount leader, attended briefly in 1926 before he moved to a sister school, half an hour’s walk from the Kremlin, created also by the Comintern, in 1921, specifically to educate a
corps of future Chinese revolutionaries. During his years in Europe in the early twenties, Zhou Enlai, who was on the executive committee of the Chinese Communist Party European branch, recruited Chinese youths on work-study programs in France to go to Moscow to attend these two universities. In this way and others, Moscow had the attributes of a practical training ground and a spiritual mecca for Chinese Communists as it was for other Communists, from Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, and Korea.

In 1923, the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, meeting at its Third Congress, followed the instructions of the Comintern to ally itself with the KMT by joining it as individuals, so that they would be members of both parties simultaneously. The formation of this first United Front, in other words, was an early example of Moscow’s decisive guidance in the CCP’s relations with the larger and more powerful Nationalist Party, guidance that continued virtually uninterrupted through the Communists’ seizure of power in 1949.

The Comintern’s task was to create a cadre of professional revolutionaries to be the
vanguard of the proletarian cause, and it helped not just with ideological training but also in very practical ways. During the wilderness years of the CCP from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, when its leaders were often on the run from the KMT secret police, some thirty of their children, including two of Mao’s sons, were
sheltered in Shanghai by what was called the
International Society for Aid to Revolutionaries, which had been set up by the Comintern as part of its program to foster Communist parties abroad. When the shelter was closed down, Stalin personally arranged for the Mao boys to travel to the Soviet Union. There they were known as young “heroes” who had reached “the shores of socialism,” and that’s where they spent almost the entire war. Mao’s daughter, known as Jiao-jiao—later
Li Na—spent her entire childhood in the Soviet Union and could barely speak Chinese when she returned to the motherland after the Communist takeover. There were more than a hundred such children, the
offspring of dedicated Chinese revolutionaries who studied in Moscow, or worked there for the Chinese branch of the Comintern, or who went back to “make revolution” in China itself, leaving their children behind. Among them: a son and daughter of
Liu Shaoqi, a daughter of
Zhu De, an offspring of
Lin Biao, and many others, all of them hosted by the International Society for Aid to Revolutionaries.

We know of this from a searing memoir written by
Sin-Lin, who was
brought up in the Soviet Union until she was thirteen, not knowing who her parents were until she was sent back to China in 1950. The Chinese children lived in a home with the children of revolutionaries from other countries—Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Spain, Bulgaria, and many others—singing a song called “Hymn of the Interhouse Children” (“
In our hearts protest burns / Like a flame of anger in the darkness”) and learning to love Stalin, who, they were taught, was “the great leader of the international proletariat.”

When leading Chinese Communists or their family members became seriously ill, they went to Moscow for medical treatment. Among them were two of Mao’s wives, He Zizhen and Jiang Qing, and, in 1939, Zhou Enlai, after he broke a bone in his elbow falling from a horse. Membership in this society was like membership in a cult. It was all-encompassing, exclusive, all-consuming. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Chinese Communists in Russia were swept up in the Stalin purges of 1938 and dispatched to the Gulag. In many instances these people were informed on by other Chinese Communists; it was a foreshadowing of the savage infighting that was to take place in China itself. Sin-Lin, whose father spent seventeen years in a Siberian work camp, believes that Kang Sheng’s later persecution of fellow Communists whom he had known in Moscow in the 1930s was aimed at covering up his own earlier role informing on Chinese revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. When the teenage Sin-Lin asked her mother, a dedicated revolutionary, how “the Great, Glorious, and Correct Party” of Stalin could have perpetrated such an injustice, her reply was: “
What you are talking about is only individual incidents that represent zigzags in the revolution, they cannot eclipse all of socialist construction in the Soviet Unon; they can’t blacken the entire international communist movement.” There is no evidence that the Chinese Communists ever protested to the Soviets the disappearance of their members into the Soviet prison camp system, from which hundreds never emerged. One can only speculate on the reason for this, but most likely Mao and senior cadres like Kang Sheng did not want to acknowledge that such practices were an essential part of the movement to which they belonged.

The very language of Chinese Communism, its symbols and modes of discourse, the style of its propaganda, its wood-block prints, its notions of socialist realism, its central committees, politburos, congresses, and plenums, its newspapers and ultra-serious theoretical journals, its specialized vocabulary of internal debate and struggle, its invention of an
entire lexicography of ideological labels, all of them newly minted isms, like “left adventurism,” “right opportunism,” “deviationism,” “dogmatism,” “subjectivism,” “empiricism,” “revisionism,” as well as the “correctness” of the party line, and, later, the boilerplate of adulation that victorious revolutionaries such as
Mao, the Korean Kim Il Sung, the Romanian Nicolae Ceauşescu, and the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh used in their own cults of the godlike genius-leader—all of this was nurtured and supported by an encyclopedia of terms, concepts, beliefs, and techniques transplanted from the original Russian, the success of the Bolshevik revolution having made the Soviet Union, in the eyes of countless oppressed and colonized people, a pathbreaker toward a radiant future—“
the shores of socialism,” a promised land.

Again, given China’s later and complete break with the Soviets and the country’s ferocious attachment to its national independence, it requires a strong historical memory to resurrect the era of obedience to an outside authority. But in those decades when China’s revolutionaries sought to imitate and emulate the Soviets’ magnificent success, the relations between
Moscow and the Chinese Communists were the relations of authority and compliance inside a church of the great cause, where a pope-like ruler issued edicts, based on a secular scripture whose truthfulness was guaranteed by a combination of the sacred and the infallibly scientific, or at least informed by the superiority of dialectical materialism over other modes of analysis.

It isn’t by some weird coincidence that after the deaths of the great revolutionaries Lenin, Mao, Ho, and Kim, their bodies were embalmed and placed on view for public veneration, like the fragments of the Buddha’s body or relics of the Christian saints. The origin of the practice lies in the Russian Orthodox veneration of the saints wherein it was believed that spiritual purity triumphed over the decay of the flesh; the Communist adoption of that notion was that the supreme leaders of the revolution would live eternally in the ultimate triumph of pure Communism. Nobody believed in this semi-religion—though he wouldn’t have called it that—more than Mao.

One of the strongest appeals of Marxism-Leninism was the explanation it offered for the powerlessness of the internationally dispossessed, an explanation that fit perfectly with Chinese national grievances and aspirations. This explanation was advanced by Lenin’s extremely influential idea of imperialism as the last stage of
capitalism, an idea that was no doubt instilled into students at places like the University of Toilers
of the East. In advanced capitalism, wealth became concentrated in the hands of a few monopolies; the subsequent impoverishment of the working class led these monopolies, which controlled their governments on behalf of the ruling class, to seek raw materials, cheap labor, and markets for their products wherever they could throughout the world. This explained in persuasive, easy to understand, and, to an extent, truthful—if somewhat mechanistic—terms everything the young revolutionary needed to know about China’s condition going back to the
Opium War and the beginning of what the Communists in China still call the
Hundred Years of Humiliation. After all, what was the Opium War but the armed effort of the monopolistic and greedy
British East India Company to ensure a market in China for its Indian opium? Lenin’s theory explained the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, Japan’s naked aggression, the decadent and privileged, servant- and concubine-rich lifestyles of the foreigners in China, who were exempt from Chinese law and whose missionaries conveyed the message that Chinese beliefs and customs were inferior to foreign beliefs and customs. Deeply embedded in the thinking of China’s early revolutionaries and patriots was this conviction that imperialist exploitation and profiteering was the final bulwark of the bourgeoisie in its life-and-death struggle with the international proletariat.