The Dragon, the Lion, and the Eagle

Chinese-British-American Relations, 1949-1958

Qiang Zhai

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774848
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and the subsequent conclusion of the Sino-Soviet Alliance Treaty destroyed the old balance of power in East Asia and introduced new forces into the international system. These developments had important implications for Great Britain and the United States, both of which possessed significant interests in the region. Drawing on previously classified British and American documents and private papers, Qiang Zhai compares the respective policies toward the recognition of China and that country's representation in the United Nations; China's entry into the Korean War; the Geneva Conference of 1954; the Quemoy-Matsu crises of 1954-55 and 1958; and Chinese threats to Taiwan and Tibet. He carefully analyzes the objective of dividing the Sino-Soviet alliance as a goal of Anglo-American policies and uses recently available Chinese Communist materials—including inner-party documents, diaries, memoirs, and biographies by and about former Chinese leaders, generals, and diplomats—to reconstruct Chinese foreign policy initiatives and responses to Western challenges. With its unique international and comparative dimensions, this study allows the first clear view of early Cold War history from the Chinese as well as Western perspectives. Washington and London differed widely in their assessments of Beijing's intentions and capabilities, as reflected in their respective policies toward recognition and containment of China. Zhai examines the mutual influences and constraints—distinct strategic concerns, divergences in political structures, public opinion, interest groups, and diplomatic traditions, as well as the perceptions and idiosyncrasies of the top policymakers—that affected Anglo-American relations and shows how consideration of each others reactions further complicated their policy decisions. This study in international history and comparative analysis avoids the tunnel vision so common in explorations of bilateral relationships by structuring the narrative around the initiatives and responses of each of the countries to events that were inherently multilateral in character.

1	Perception and Alliance: The CCP’s Foreign Policy in 1949

THE BACKGROUND OF CHINESE COMMUNIST LEADERS

Born at the turn of the twentieth century when China was in a ferment of antifeudal and anti-imperialist movements, most of the CCP leaders were imbued with a strong sense of nationalism and revolutionary spirit. They were determined to shed the humiliation China had suffered at the hands of foreign imperialists, to “save the motherland,” and to restore the country to the status of a world power. They found themselves drawn into the vortex of a burgeoning revolution. Their formative experiences were Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Revolution of 1911 and its failure, the Paris Peace Conference and Japan’s humiliating treatment of China, the May Fourth Movement, and, most significantly, the Russian October Revolution. These events were to have enormous effects on their later perceptions and foreign policy-making.

Communism in China was born out of the nationalist movement. Those young Chinese intellectuals who sought answers to China’s problems in Marxism and Leninism were also motivated by existing social and economic circumstances, which helped to make the Communist cause a popular one. China was very much a peasant country, and the endorsement of the rural population was to prove essential for the Chinese Communist movement. The Chinese Communist leaders were Marxist and nationalist at the same time. The party’s road to victory was full of twists and turns. Setbacks, sacrifices, and defeats in the course of party history made its leaders tough, pragmatic, and perseverant.

Many of the CCP leaders had educational backgrounds higher than those of ordinary Chinese, and some of them had even studied abroad. Before 1917, they had been exposed to various intellectual trends current in China. Mao’s reading covered a wide range from Chinese reform thinkers such as Kang You wei and Liang Qichao to translated foreign works such as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and writings by John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu. Mao told Edgar Snow that when he was a student at the Changsha Normal College between 1912 and 1918, his mind was “a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and Utopian Socialism.” It was the Bolshevik Revolution that finally attracted him. “The salvos of the October Revolution,” Mao later wrote, “brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems.”¹

Zhou Enlai was also a voracious reader of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. In September 1917, he went to Japan hoping to learn how to save and rebuild China. At the time, he thought that militarism might be a way out, but he was soon to be disillusioned. World War I was raging, and Japan, determined to make the most of it while the other powers were preoccupied in Europe, stepped up its aggression against a weak China. Zhou very much resented Japanese militarism. He plunged into anti-Japanese rallies and demonstrations staged by Chinese students in Japan. Zhou was first introduced to Marxism in a serious way in Japan through reading Studies of Social Problems, a journal edited and published in Tokyo by Professor Kawakami Hajime of the Imperial University, who first brought Marxist teachings to Japan. It was also in that country that Zhou learned about the October Revolution. He shared the general excitement and tried to comprehend what the dictatorship of the proletariat meant. He read John Reed’s The Ten Days That Shook the World and immersed himself in the press, reading all he could lay his hands on about developments in the world’s first socialist regime. He began a serious study of the principles underlying this world-shaking occurrence and finally became a Marxist three years later when he was a work-study student in France.²

Before 1949, except for Zhou Enlai and a few others, most of the Chinese Communist leaders had not had much experience in foreign affairs. Mao himself had never traveled abroad before his visit to Moscow early in 1950. For many of his other comrades, a spell in the Soviet Union represented their only overseas excursion. When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, a majority of the party’s politburo members had spent some time either as students or as visitors in Russia. Among the thirteen members of the politburo elected at the first plenary session of the Seventh Central Party Committee in June 1945, only Mao, Gao Gang, Peng Zhen, and Peng Dehuai had not studied in the Soviet Union. Both Liu Shaoqi and Ren Bishi had enrolled in the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow in the early 1920s. After returning to China, Liu began his political career as a major CCP labor organizer and Ren became one of the most important leaders of the Communist Youth League. Later, Ren Bishi, Chen Yun, and Kang Sheng served as CCP representatives to the Com intern in the 1930s. After brief study in the United States, Zhang Wentian went to Moscow in 1926, where he attended Sun Yat-sen University and taught at the Lenin School. Lin Baiqu was also a graduate of Sun Yat-sen University (1930) and taught politics at the Far Eastern Industrial University at Vladivostok. Gao had forged close ties with the Russians when he was the head of the party’s Northeast Bureau in Manchuria. Therefore, a majority of the CCP leaders in 1949 had close connections with the Soviet Union, but their experiences overseas were unbalanced and almost completely confined to Russia.³

The lessons of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Soviet history had a profound influence on these people, building images that shaped their perceptions and reactions to external stimuli. For instance, in the wake of the defeat of the Nanchang Uprising in 1927, Zhu De used the analogy of the Russian Revolution to encourage his remnant troops not to lose heart: “After the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution, some ‘dregs’ remained, who later became the backbones of the October Revolution. Our present situation resembles the Russian Revolution of 1905. So long as we retain some people, we can play a great role in a future revolution.” In a speech to the Shenyang workers’ representatives on January 5, 1949, Chen Yun said: “Not until after the three Five-Year Plans following the success of the October Revolution did people’s life in Russia begin to change for the better with each passing day. After we win the victory over the Nationalists in the country, we must also work hard and engage in large-scale construction before our children can enjoy the fruit of a comfortable life.”⁴

THE CCP’s VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES

Both Marxist ideology and historical experience shaped the basic assumptions about the United States held by CCP decision makers in the postwar decades. As students of Marx and Lenin, they had a rather rigid opinion of America. To them, Washington was the leader of the reactionary camp in the world, which was “against the Soviet Union, against the People’s democracies in Europe, against the workers’ movements in the capitalist countries, against the national movements in the colonies and semi-colonies and against the liberation of the Chinese people.” Washington harbored a wild scheme for “converting China into a U.S. colony.”⁵

As believers in Marxist dialectical materialism and historical materialism, Mao Zedong and his lieutenants were convinced that imperialism represented the decadent and dying phase of capitalism and would be replaced by communism, which constituted the highest stage of social development. Therefore, they kept telling their people that American imperialism, although momentarily powerful and frightening, was, in fact, weak and vulnerable in the long run because it did not reflect the trend of history and lacked popular support. Furthermore, it was constantly threatened by political and economic crises. Its difficulties were historically inevitable and determined by its capitalist system.⁶

In an analysis of the post-World War II international situation, Mao elaborated this idea most graphically: “People’s democratic forces” within America “are getting stronger every day.” “The economic power of U.S. imperialism,” Mao continued, “is confronted with unstable and daily shrinking domestic and foreign markets. The further shrinking of these markets will cause economic crises to break out.” Wartime prosperity in America was “temporary” and U.S. strength was only “superficial and transient.” “Irreconcilable domestic and international contradictions,” Mao concluded, “like a volcano, menace U.S. imperialism every day.… This situation has driven the U.S. imperialists to draw up a plan for enslaving the world, to run amuck like wild beasts in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world.”⁷

Imperialist forces, Mao reasoned, tended to take precisely those actions that would lead to their own doom, to paraphrase a Chinese saying, “lifting a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet.” The stress on the long-term and inherent weaknesses of U.S. imperialism also informed Mao’s well-known metaphor that America was a paper tiger.⁸ Although this characterization of the United States reflected Mao’s ideological convictions, it also served as a psychological device to boost morale when the CCP was still in a weak position in its struggle to win national power. Resembling Lenin’s previous description of imperialism as a “colossus with clay feet,” Mao’s paper tiger thesis constituted the most vivid example of the Chinese concept of despising the enemy strategically but taking full account of it tactically.

To the Chinese Communists, U.S. imperialism had committed aggression against China ever since the mid-1840s. America had been one of the first Western powers to force China to cede extraterritoriality and to open ports for trade and missions. It participated in the eight-power Allied expedition to suppress the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and later supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in the civil war against the CCP.⁹

After the end of the Marshall Mission in China in early 1947 and the total eruption of civil war in which America supported the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalists), the CCP drew bitter lessons and abandoned illusions about American neutrality in Chinese internal conflict.¹⁰ In the world arena, the United States and the Soviet Union became increasingly locked in a Cold War confrontation. In this context, Mao made a series of speeches clarifying the CCP’s position in the emerging bipolar world. The basic tenets of Mao’s theory were the “two camps” and the “intermediate zone.” Mao viewed the postwar world as divided into two hostile camps represented by the United States and the Soviet Union. Between these two camps, Mao contended, lay “a vast zone which included many capitalist, colonial and semi-colonial countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa.” “Before the U.S. reactionaries have subjugated these countries,” Mao believed, “an attack on the Soviet Union is out of the question.” Therefore, the major contradictions in the world were those between the peoples of the “intermediate zone” and U.S. imperialism, especially those between China and the United States. China’s choice in this struggle, Mao declared, was to side with the Soviet Union.¹¹

As the CCP approached nationwide triumph, it repeatedly warned its cadres and soldiers against the danger of U.S. intervention. The party leadership believed that the threat from the United States could come either in the form of direct military invasion or by indirect meddling through secret agents, sabotage, and political infiltration. In perceiving this U.S. menace, the CCP leaders were influenced by the existing political context, by their ideological beliefs, and by historical analogies. In the CCP-KMT struggle for power, the United States sided with Chiang Kai-shek. Ideologically, America was the number-one imperialist power, inherently antagonistic toward national liberation movements and with many imperialist interests and prerogatives in China to protect. Historically, Washington had a tradition of intervention in foreign revolutions. In this regard, the history of U.S. intervention during the Russian Revolution sensitized the CCP leadership to the danger that the Americans might react similarly against them. This point merits close attention when analyzing Chinese Communist perceptions of the U.S. threat.

As did other human beings, CCP leaders tended to use the past to make sense of the present. This exercise often involved dipping into the grab bag of historical experience for instances that offered instructive analogies to current problems. They were prone to envision the future either as foreshadowed by past parallels or as following a straight track from what had recently gone before. Thus, it was both easy and natural for them to apply the Soviet experience to their own situation. They believed that, because Western imperialists had opposed the Bolshevik Revolution, they would not put up with the Chinese Revolution either. Mao claimed: “Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again … till their doom; that is the logic of the imperialists and all reactionaries the world over in dealing with the people’s cause, and they will never go against this logic.” Imperialists never learned from their mistakes, Mao explained; instead, they invariably repeated them.¹²

It is important to point out that CCP leaders’ understanding of Western intervention in the Russian Revolution was both simplistic and inaccurate. For instance, when analyzing the reason for the failure of the Allied mission, Zhou Enlai argued that this was because American soldiers “could not bear hardships.” Zhou was obviously not cognizant of the complex nature of the intervention and had no idea of the lack of official determination and coordination that characterized the entire course of the action.¹³

From their misreading of the American intervention in the Russian Revolution, CCP officials developed another misperception of the United States: American soldiers were spoiled by a rich and comfortable life in a capitalist society and would not withstand hard conditions. Therefore, even if the United States did invade China, the CCP would endure simply because American troops were “spoiled” and could be defeated. Zhou Enlai expressed this notion in a 1949 speech:

If American troops really invade China, we will surround them from the countryside, forcing them to ship all military supplies, including toilet paper and ice cream, from the United States. They would be burdened by big cities.… The Americans enjoy a high standard of living and are unwilling to fight. After the Russian October Revolution, the United States once intervened, but the result was “voluntary withdrawal”? Why? This was because they could not bear hardships. We have defeated...