China

D1

a

The Nationalist and Communist Revolutionary Movements

After Yuan outlawed the KMT parliamentary party in 1913, Sun Yat-sen worked to build the revolutionary movement, eventually establishing a KMT base in Guangzhou. Sun’s ideas became more anti-imperialist during this period. In speeches and writings he stressed that China could not be strong until it rid itself of imperialist intrusions and was reconstituted as the nation of the Chinese people. Other forms of revolution also attracted adherents. Marxism gained a following among urban intellectuals and factory workers in China, particularly after the success of the Communists in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1921 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was organized in Shanghai.

During the warlord period after the death of Yuan Shikai, most Western powers dealt with whichever warlord had control of Beijing and ignored the revolutionaries. By contrast, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union), through the Comintern (an international Communist organization), offered to help the Chinese revolutionaries. Believing that the KMT had the best chance of succeeding, the Comintern instructed CCP members to join Sun Yat-sen’s KMT. In 1923 Sun agreed to accept Soviet advice in reorganizing the crumbling KMT party and army and to admit Communists into the KMT as part of a united-front policy.

Despite Sun's death in 1925, the rejuvenated KMT launched the Northern Expedition in 1926 from its base in Guangzhou. The expedition, an attempt to rid China of warlords and reunify the country under KMT rule, was led by the young general Chiang Kai-shek, who had been trained in Japan and Moscow and had been in charge of the KMT’s military academy. Communists aided the advance of Chiang Kai-shek's army by organizing peasants and workers along the way. However, the alliance between the two groups was fragile because the KMT drew its strength from wealthy intellectuals and landowners, while the Communists advocated redistribution of wealth. In 1927, as the KMT army approached Shanghai, Chiang ordered members of the Green Gang, a Shanghai underworld gang, to kill labor union members and Communists, whom he feared were becoming too powerful. The alliance ended, and the KMT began a bloody purge of the Communists.

From 1927 to 1937 the KMT under Chiang ruled from Nanjing. Chiang's foremost goal was to build a strong modern state and army. He employed many Western-educated officials in his government, and progress was achieved in modernizing the banking, currency, and taxation systems, as well as transportation and communication facilities. However, China remained fragmented. While a small, Westernized elite and an industrial force developed in the cities, the vast majority of people were poor peasants in the countryside. The rural economy suffered from continued population growth and from the collapse of some local industries, such as silk production and cotton weaving, due to foreign competition. Chiang's highest priority was not improving the lives of peasants but gaining full military control of the country. Many regions remained under warlords, the Communists controlled some areas, and the Japanese were encroaching in North and Northeast China.

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The Chinese Communists had gone underground after they were purged from the KMT in 1927 and had organized areas of Communist control. The most successful group settled in the countryside near the border between Jiangxi and Fujian provinces in an area they called the Jiangxi Soviet. From there, the group mobilized peasant support and formed a peasant army. One of the top leaders of the Jiangxi Soviet was Mao Zedong. Mao was from a peasant family in Hunan but was educated through the new school system. After graduating from a teacher’s college in Hunan, he went to Beijing, where he became involved with Marxist discussion groups. In the 1920s, when most of the early CCP members were organizing workers in the cites, Mao worked in the countryside, developing ways to mobilize peasants.

Chiang’s army attempted four extermination campaigns against the Jiangxi base, all of which failed against the Communists’ guerrilla tactics. In the fifth campaign in October 1934, the KMT encircled the base. Eighty thousand Communists broke out of the KMT encirclement and started what became known as the Long March. For a year, the Communists steadily retreated, fighting almost continuously against KMT forces and suffering enormous casualties. By the time the 8,000 survivors had found an area where they could establish a new base, they had marched almost 9,600 km (6,000 mi), crossing southern and southwestern China before turning north to reach Shaanxi province. This triumph of will in the face of incredible obstacles became a moral victory for the Communists. For the next decade the CCP made its base at Yan’an, a city in central Shaanxi.

Although the KMT had forced the Communists to flee, they still faced a major threat from Japan. In 1922 Japan had agreed to return the former German holdings in Shandong to China, but it continued to expand its dominance in Manchuria. In 1931 the Japanese retaliated for an alleged instance of Chinese sabotage by extending military control over all of Manchuria. Chiang Kai-shek knew his armies were no match for Japan’s and ordered the KMT to withdraw without fighting. In 1932 Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo in Manchuria and made Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, its chief of state. Early in 1933 eastern Inner Mongolia was incorporated into Manchukuo.

As Japanese aggression intensified, popular pressure mounted within China to end internal fighting and unite against Japan. Chiang, however, resisted allying with the Communists until late 1936, when he was kidnapped by one of his own generals. During his captivity at Xi'an (Sian) in Shaanxi Province, Chiang was visited by Communist leaders, who urged the adoption of a united front against Japan. After his release, Chiang moderated his anti-Communist stance, and in 1937 the KMT and CCP formed a united front to oppose Japan.

D1

b

Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II

In July 1937 the Japanese tried once again to extend their territory in China. Chiang resisted, and Japan launched a full-scale offensive (see Second Sino-Japanese War). Chiang’s forces had to abandon Beijing and Tianjin, but his troops held out for three months in Shanghai before retreating to Nanjing. When the Japanese captured Nanjing in December, they went on a rampage for seven weeks, massacring more than 100,000 civilians and fugitive soldiers, raping at least 20,000 women, and laying the city to waste.

By late 1938 Japan had seized control of most of northeast China, the Yangtze Valley as far inland as Hankou, and the area around Guangzhou on the southeastern coast. The KMT moved its capital and most of its military force inland to Chongqing in the southwestern province of Sichuan. Free China, as the KMT-ruled area was called, contained 60 percent of China’s population but only 5 percent of its industry, which hampered the war effort. In 1941 the United States entered World War II after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Thereafter, American advisers and aid were flown to China from Burma, which enabled Chiang to establish a number of modern military divisions. However, the bulk of China’s 5 million military troops consisted of ill-trained, demoralized conscripts.

During the first few years after the Japanese invasion, some genuine cooperation took place between the CCP and the KMT. However, animosity between the groups remained, and the cooperation largely ended after the KMT attacked the CCP’s army in 1941. From then on, although both sides continued to resist Japan, they concentrated more on preparing for their eventual conflict with each other. The KMT imposed an economic blockade on the CCP base at Yan’an, making it impossible for the Communists to get weapons except by capturing them from the Japanese. Defeating Japan was left largely to the United States, which was fighting the war in the Pacific.

During the war period, the Communists made major gains in territory, military forces, and party membership. They infiltrated many of the rural areas behind Japanese lines, where they skillfully organized the peasantry and built up the ranks of the party and their army (known as the Red Army). The CCP grew from about 300,000 members in 1933 to 1.2 million members by 1945. While in Yan’an, Mao Zedong had time to read Marxist and Leninist works and began giving lectures at party schools in which he spelled out his versions of Chinese history and Marxist theory. Whereas neither Marx nor Lenin had seen significant revolutionary potential in peasants, Mao came to glorify peasants as the true masses. During these years, Mao also perfected methods of moral and intellectual instruction and party discipline, which involved close discussion of assigned texts, personal confessions, struggle sessions (meetings in which people were publicly criticized and punished for past offenses), and dramatic public humiliations.

The KMT emerged from the war in a weakened state. Severe inflation had begun in 1939, when the government, cut off from its main sources of income in Japanese-occupied eastern China, printed more currency to finance the mounting costs of wartime operations. Despite substantial U.S. economic aid, the inflationary trend worsened and official corruption increased. The financial problems also caused a loss of morale in the KMT armed forces and alienation of the civilian populace.

After Japan surrendered in 1945, bringing World War II to an end, both the CCP and the KMT were rearmed, the KMT by the United States and the Communists by the Soviet Union. The Soviets had accepted the surrender of Japanese troops in Manchuria and turned over large stockpiles of Japanese weapons and ammunition to the CCP.

D1

c

Civil War

Shortly after Japan’s surrender, civil war broke out between CCP and KMT troops over the reoccupation of Manchuria. A temporary truce was reached in 1946 through the mediation of U.S. general George Catlett Marshall. Although fighting soon resumed, Marshall continued his efforts to bring the two sides together. In August 1946 the United States tried to strengthen Marshall's hand as an impartial mediator by suspending its military aid to the KMT government. Nevertheless, hostilities continued, and in January 1947, convinced of the futility of further mediation, Marshall left China. The United States resumed aid to the KMT in May. In 1948 military advantage passed to the Communists, and in the summer of 1949 the KMT resistance collapsed.

The KMT government, with the forces it could salvage, sought refuge on the island of Taiwan. Until his death in 1975, Chiang Kai-shek continued to claim that his government in Taiwan was the legitimate government of all of China. Meanwhile, on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong, as chairman of the CCP, proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing.

D

2

The People's Republic

The new Communist government, a one-party state under the rule of the CCP, brought an end to the long period of Western imperialist involvement in China. Regions within the country’s historic boundaries that had fallen away since the overthrow of the Manchus were reclaimed, including Tibet and Xinjiang in western China (see Tibet: Reincorporation into China; Xinjiang Uygur Automomous Region: History). China established alliances with the countries of the emerging Socialist bloc. In 1950 China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) signed a treaty of friendship and alliance, and in supplementary agreements the Soviets gave up their privileges in Northeast China. During the Korean War (1950-1953), Chinese troops aided the Communist regime of North Korea against South Korean and United Nations forces. China also aided the Communist insurgents fighting the French in Vietnam, and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai played an important role in negotiating the 1954 Geneva Accords that ended the hostilities known as the First Indochina War.

D2

a

Transformation of the Economy and Society

During the first few years of Communist leadership, the new government reorganized nearly all aspects of Chinese life. To revive the economy, which had been disrupted by decades of warfare, the CCP adopted measures to curb inflation, restore communications, and reestablish the domestic order necessary for economic development. The government also orchestrated campaigns and struggle sessions to mobilize mass revolutionary enthusiasm and remove from power those likely to obstruct the new government. In the 1951 campaign against individuals who had been affiliated with Kuomintang (KMT) organizations or had served in its army, tens of thousands were executed and many more sent to labor reform camps.

The CCP made fundamental changes to society. New marriage laws that prohibited men from taking more than one wife and interference with remarriage by widows assured women of a more equal position in society. Women also received equal rights with respect to divorce, employment, and ownership of property. The CCP made every effort to control the spread of ideas. Through the press and through schools, the government directed youth to look to the party and the state rather than to their families for leadership and security. The CCP assumed strict control over religion, forcing foreign missionaries to leave the country and installing Chinese clerics willing to cooperate with the Communists in positions of authority over Christian churches. Intellectuals were made to undergo specialized programs of thought reform directed toward eradicating anti-Communist ideas.

Government takeover of businesses undermined the power of the urban-based capitalists who had gained influence under the KMT. To make use of their expertise, however, the government often enlisted previous business owners to manage companies. The government’s first five-year plan, initiated in 1953 and carried out with Soviet assistance, emphasized the expansion of heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods.

Through the progressive socialization of Chinese agriculture (making ownership of land collective, not individual or family), the landowning elite was eliminated, the source of its income and influence abolished. As the CCP took control of new areas, it taught the peasants in those areas that social and economic inequalities were not natural but rather a perversion caused by the institution of private property. Wealthy landowners were not people of high moral standards but were exploiters.

To create a new communal order where all would work together unselfishly for common goals, the Communists first redistributed property. Their usual method was to send a small team of cadres (party administrators) and students to a village to cultivate relations with the poor, organize a peasant association, identify potential leaders, compile lists of grievances, and organize struggle sessions. Eventually the inhabitants would be classified into five categories: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and hired hands. The government then would confiscate the holdings of landowners, and sometimes land owned by rich and middle peasants, and redistribute it more evenly. The wealthy also endured struggle sessions, which sometimes led to executions of landlords. This stage of land reform resulted in the creation of a castelike system in the countryside. The lowest caste was composed of the descendants of those labeled landlords, while the descendants of former poor and lower-middle peasants became a new privileged class.

Agricultural collectivization followed land reform in several stages. First, farmers were encouraged to join mutual-aid teams of usually less than 10 families. Next, they were instructed to set up cooperatives, consisting of 40 or 50 families. From 1954 to 1956 the Communists created higher-level collectives (also called production teams) that united cooperatives. At this point, economic inequality within villages had been virtually eliminated. The state took over the grain market, and peasants were no longer allowed to market their crops.

The reorganization of the countryside created a new elite of rural party cadres. Illiterate peasants who kept the peace among villagers and exceeded state production targets had opportunities to rise in the party hierarchy. This created social mobility far beyond anything that had existed in imperial China, which had only provided advancement opportunities to educated peasants. Another byproduct of the reorganization of the countryside was the extension of social services, because collectives throughout the country coordinated basic health care and primary education for their members.

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