The Red Flag: A History of Communism (50 page)

Within China itself, the Communists were one of a number of forces – regional, liberal, student and secret society – opposing a Guomindang that was divided, compromised by discredited elites and corrupt.
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Massive amounts of collaboration between Chinese elites and the Japanese
during the war split the Guomindang’s supporters, and the party was shattered by the war against the Japanese. Nationalist administrators after the war were widely seen as greedy – imposing unpopular taxes – and unable to meet the expectations for social justice that were then so common, in Asia as in Europe. The nationalists found themselves suppressing student demonstrations and rural unrest, whilst Chiang Kaishek’s attempts to strengthen central state control also alienated regional elites.

The Communists did attract much peasant and even some urban support, but their cohesiveness was perhaps their main advantage. Ultimately their victory was a military one, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion. Both sides made strategic errors, but Chiang Kaishek’s were more serious.
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He was forced to retreat to Taiwan, where the Guomindang ruled for many decades. In the spring of 1949 Mao found himself travelling from the village of Xibaipo in Hebei province – the Communist headquarters since 1947 – to the old imperial capital of Beijing. Mao was clearly nervous. He joked that it was rather like making the journey to sit the imperial mandarin exams,
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for whilst the trip was a relatively short one geographically, in cultural terms it was equivalent to the Long March. Mao had to transform himself from guerrilla leader to master of one of the largest states on the globe.

On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong ascended Tian’anmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace to the old Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing, and addressed a crowd of about 30,000, famously declaring: ‘The Chinese people have now stood up!’ His audience stood in the square in front of the gate, waving the new Chinese flag – red with four small yellow stars surrounding a larger star in the upper left-hand corner. Speaking in his high-pitched voice, he announced the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. It was followed by a military parade, made up of thousands of civilians, some holding portraits of leaders, others playing waist-drums and dancing the traditional Northern Chinese
yangge
.

The ceremony had been carefully planned, and every element was there for a reason.
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It owed much to the Soviet demonstrations for the anniversary of the October Revolution in Red Square, but, unlike them,
it also had a strong peasant, folk element. Meanwhile, the parade’s symbolism carefully combined Soviet Communism and Chinese nationalism. October was the anniversary of both the 1911 revolution against the Qing and the Russian revolution, whilst the red of the flag referred both to Communist revolution and China’s red earth. The stars also showed that the Communists were committed to national unity: they represented the four classes of ‘the people’ – the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the workers and the peasants, surrounding the great Communist Party, all of whom were to be part of the Chinese ‘New Democracy’. Mao was showing that the new regime was Communist, unashamedly nationalist, and pro-peasant.

October 1949 marked the culmination of the post-war reddening of the East. As in Europe, the end of Axis-power rule helped the anti-imperialist Communists, as did the serious damage done to old elites by collaboration. China joined two other states – North Korea and Vietnam – as part of the new Asian Communist brotherhood. All three regimes had close similarities, and differed from their East European confrères. They were created by peasant parties, operating in Confucian societies that had fought guerrilla wars against imperialist powers. Yet each state was born in rather different circumstances. If China was Asia’s Yugoslavia – a Communist state born out of an anti-imperialist guerrilla war – North Korea was closer to East Germany – a regime largely created by superpower
realpolitik
and partition. The Vietnamese revolution, meanwhile, had a strong urban element, and had similarities with its Russian predecessor.

The North Korean regime was created under the auspices of Soviet troops. The Americans had proposed that Korea be divided on the eve of the Japanese surrender in August 1945, allocating the portion north of the 38th parallel (bordering the USSR) to the Soviets and the South to themselves. The North then followed an East European path: a Popular Front followed by Communization. In February 1946 a Communist-dominated central government was established, led by Kim Il Sung (‘One-star Kim’). However, we should not press the East German parallel too far, for the regime soon secured a good deal of autonomy.

Kim S
ng-ju (he adopted his
nom de guerre
in 1935) was born in a village near Pyongyang in 1912 into a Christian family. His father was a member of a Christian Korean nationalist organization, and may have been imprisoned by the Japanese. On his release in about 1920, the family emigrated to Manchuria, joining a large Korean émigré community. Kim’s cultural background was therefore eclectic: he was Korean, born in a state ruled by the Japanese, was educated in Chinese schools in Mandarin, but also returned to Korea for two years at the age of eleven to attend a Christian school – indeed he was for a time a Sunday school teacher, a fact not recorded in his official biography.
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He followed his father into nationalist politics, joining a Marxist group at school in 1929 and, after a brief time in prison, joined a Chinese Communist Party-led guerrilla force in 1931 to fight the occupying Japanese. He rose through the ranks, and became a regional commander of the guerrilla army.

He spent most of his youth outside Korea, then, but it would be a mistake to see him as a ‘foreigner’. He, like many of his fellow guerrillas, saw himself as a Korean nationalist – though one fighting for international Communism under the leadership of the USSR. There were close links between Eastern Manchuria and the lawless borderlands of North Korea, and Koreans were involved in the guerrilla struggle against the Japanese throughout the region. It was in this tough guerrilla milieu – fighting against an extremely resourceful and harsh Japanese enemy – that Kim’s politics were forged.

By 1940, however, the Japanese were winning, and Kim, like many other fighters, was forced to seek refuge over the border in the Soviet Union. Kim flourished during his five-year sojourn there and embraced Soviet life with enthusiasm – he seemed to prefer the culture of the Red Army to his former guerrilla life. He received training at the Khabarovsk infantry officer school, and became a captain in the Red Army. He fathered two sons and a daughter during this time, to whom he gave Russian names. His elder son was called Iurii. The man who came to be known as Kim Jong Il was known as Iurri Irsenovich (Il-sung-ovich) Kim for the first few years of his life.

Kim seems to have wanted to continue his career in the Red Army, but on the fall of the Japanese the Soviets had different ideas for him. They had begun to mistrust the North Korean nationalists whom they were trying to work with, and decided to impose a more reliable, Communist leadership; the 33-year-old returnee was an ideal candidate, even though initially he was not keen.
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He was introduced to the public in October 1945 at a ceremony to honour the Red Army. He had been billed as a venerable, heroic guerrilla leader, and many confused him with a semi-mythological,
Robin Hood-style fighter. When they saw him, naturally, they were deeply disappointed:

Kim, then, was a Soviet puppet, but the Soviets were not interested in micro-management, and left much of the day-to-day administration to the Koreans.
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Despite his inauspicious start, Kim proved able to manage the factions within the party – his own ‘Manchurians’, the ‘Koreans’ who had stayed under the Japanese, the ‘Soviet’ Koreans who had lived in the USSR, and the ‘Yan’an’ Communists who had been attached to the Chinese Communists in China.
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As will be seen, he also laid the foundations for a regime that attracted a great deal of support by forging together Communism and Korean nationalism.

Just as Korea was being divided in August 1945, another Communist regime was rising from the ashes of Japanese rule, in Vietnam. But unlike the Koreans, the Vietnamese Communists came to power as part of a genuine, indigenous revolution – a mixture of the Chinese guerrilla revolution of 1949 and the Bolshevik urban revolution of 1917.
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Ho Chi Minh had always been a radical in the Comintern, on Roy’s side of the debate with Lenin (though Roy did not like him), but he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the Soviet obsession with the urban working class. With Mao’s success from the mid-1930s, Ho learnt from the Chinese experience, distancing himself from the old Moscow template. He visited Yan’an in 1938 (though he did not meet Mao himself), and then sent two young party members, Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong, there to a CCP school.
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The Vietnamese soon began to follow the Chinese recipe. They formed a ‘base area’ in the border regions to the North, created a guerrilla army, and in 1941 transformed the Communist movement into a nationalistic, cross-class Popular Front force (including landlords and officials), now called the League for the Independence of Vietnam – the ‘Vietminh’ – with an extensive rural organization. They then began to plan a peasant uprising against the French imperial administration, which was cooperating with the Japanese. Communists were told to merge with the peasants, dress like the locals, and translate Vietminh manifestos into vernacular verse. They took advantage of peasant resentment at the disruption of traditional agriculture, first by French colonial exploitation, and then by brutal Japanese exactions. Most help to the Communists, however, was the famine of 1944–5, which was made worse by Japanese wartime exactions and not helped by the French, who attracted most of the blame.
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In March 1945 central control of the country was weakened further when the Japanese launched a coup against the French administration and set up a puppet government under Emperor Bao Dai. When the Japanese finally surrendered to the Americans in August, the Vietminh were in an ideal position in the North, with strong support in both Hanoi and the countryside, and merchants and officials stood by as they took over. In the South, the Vietminh also took control, although there they had more serious nationalist rivals.

On 2 September 1945 Ho stood in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, dressed in a humble khaki suit and blue canvas shoes, and declared the independence of Vietnam, under Communist control. His speech quoted both the American declaration of independence of 1776 as well as the French declaration of the rights of man of 1791.
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Ho still hoped that he might secure American support by signalling that he was still committed to a broad, non-ideological government in the medium term; Stalin had not yet given the Vietnamese Communists any recognition or aid. However, when the French returned to the South with British help soon after the declaration of independence, nationalist groups began to withdraw their support for the Vietminh. The Communists, with strong support in the North, were soon on the defensive in the South, and by 1947 the Vietminh were fighting another anti-colonial war against a French-backed regime.