The Red Flag: A History of Communism (55 page)

The two largest Communist parties of the West therefore survived the crisis of 1947–8 as major political forces. They lost support, but politics was polarized enough to sustain them in their bunkers. Stalin’s ‘two camps’ view of the world still made sense to many, even though his behaviour made it more difficult to admire the USSR. On the other side of the Soviet sphere of influence, in China, meanwhile, the Communists also found Soviet high-handedness and
realpolitik
difficult to stomach. But there the Soviet model was much more attractive, promising an alternative to ‘backwardness’, division and foreign occupation.

In December 1949, Mao boarded a train and prepared to take his first journey abroad. His destination was Moscow. The ten-day trip was kept secret until his arrival, and the strictest security was observed. The train was escorted by two others occupied entirely by soldiers, in front and behind; guards were also posted along the entire route. Mao was accompanied by only a small delegation, but he had also brought an eclectic selection of presents for Stalin, ranging from white cabbage and radishes from Shandong, to embroidery and cushions from Hunan. Whether Stalin ate and appreciated the cabbage we do not know.
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The new master of Red China, now fifty-six, was to meet the great
vozhd
of world Communism for the first time on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Mao hoped to secure aid and recognition and a new Sino-Soviet treaty, to replace the one signed by Chiang Kaishek and approved by the Americans and British at Yalta in 1945. Despite its significance, though, the trip was far from the slick PR opportunity of the modern state visit. Indeed, it was one of the most bizarre encounters of the post-war era, as the two protagonists danced a tense
pas de deux
over the course of two months. Trouble started at the railway station, when Stalin failed to welcome Mao in person, against the usual protocol. The leaders did speak later that day, but Stalin made it clear he was reluctant to conclude a new treaty. He was happy to give aid, but did not want to risk upsetting the Yalta arrangements, and thus give the Americans an excuse to unpick them. Stalin also mistrusted Mao. So soon after the Yugoslav split, Stalin was worried that this guerrilla leader who had caused Moscow so much trouble over the years might well turn out to be a disloyal Asian Tito. Mao was sent to a state
dacha
, bristling with bugging devices so that Stalin could observe him and make up his mind. On one occasion he sent Molotov to find out ‘what kind of guy he is’. A patronizing Molotov reported back that he was a shrewd peasant leader rather like the eighteenth-century Russian rebel Pugachev. He was ‘naturally’ not a proper Marxist, and had not even read
Capital
. Even so, Molotov’s impression was broadly positive.

Mao, left ‘stewing in his own juices’, as his Russian minder put it, became more and more frustrated. Used to the privations of a guerrilla army, he hated the trappings of Western comfort, moaned about the European pedestal toilet, and ordered that his soft mattress be replaced with hard planks. He repeatedly tried to arrange another meeting with Stalin, but in vain. ‘Am I here just to eat, shit and sleep?’ he complained. He even told colleagues that he was under house arrest and might never be allowed back to China.

Stalin did, however, make a fuss of Mao at his birthday celebrations in the Bolshoi Theatre. Mao was placed at Stalin’s right hand, and was the first foreign leader to speak. Stalin clearly realized that he had a great deal to gain from association with a man who had brought Communism to a quarter of the world’s population. Eventually, fearing (unnecessarily) that Mao might do a deal with the Americans, Stalin agreed to the treaty. Mao was forced to make concessions, accepting an independent Mongolian People’s Republic, but he had got his way. Soviet aid and advisers went to China; the Chinese recognized the Soviets as their ‘elder brothers’.

However, the tension continued. Mao decided to recognize Ho Chi
Minh’s government in Vietnam, and Stalin felt he had to do the same, even though he did not want to antagonize the French. Stalin also continued to suspect Mao of colluding with the Americans. After one frosty meeting Stalin invited Mao, with a number of Soviet Politburo members, to his
dacha
for one of his bizarre soirées. He tried to break the ice in his customary way, by starting up the gramophone and presiding over an all-male dancing session. But Mao was not in the mood to party. As his translator remembered, ‘Although three or four men took turns trying to pull Chairman Mao onto the floor to dance, they never succeeded… The whole thing ended in bad odour.’
⁵⁵
A couple of weeks later the Soviets compounded the embarrassment by inviting the Chinese to Reinhold Glière’s 1920s ballet about revolutionary China,
The Red Poppy
. It told the story of a Soviet marine who met a Shanghai prostitute, and then converted her to Marxism-Leninism. Mao, hearing of the patronizing plot and the dubious title (to Chinese ears it seemed to be associating Communism with the evil of opium), did not attend. It is just as well he did not. His secretary, who went in his stead, was deeply offended by the yellow face-paint worn by the Russian dancers playing Chinese characters. To him it seemed that the Chinese were being portrayed as monsters.

In this fraught visit we can see the acute tension between Stalin’s ageing Communism and the younger, Radical Communism to the East. There were, of course, strong reasons for the USSR to seek close relations with China, despite the long-standing difficulties between Stalin and Mao. Communism in Asia gave Stalin real opportunities. He already had a close ally in North Korea; in North Vietnam, Ho had drifted away from Moscow towards Beijing, but Stalin could influence events in Vietnam through China. And whilst Mao was difficult to manage, he still recognized Stalin’s suzerainty over the world Communist movement. Mao, moreover, however frustrating he found the Soviets’ patronizing attitude, still saw them as the source of the magical blueprint for transforming China. Stalin’s
Short Course
of party history continued to be an enormously important text for Mao: in Yan’an its stress on ideological unity and conformity had been uppermost; now it was just as valuable as a route-map for development. By 1945 the
Short Course
was one of the five ‘must read’ books for Chinese Communist officials for the transition to socialism.
⁵⁶
The USSR, it was commonly believed, was
fundamentally the same as China, only about thirty years ahead; as the slogan of the mid-1950s went: ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is Our Tomorrow’. The
Short Course
’s narrative of Soviet history could plausibly be mapped onto China’s: there had been a revolution and civil war, and now was the time for an NEP-type period; then would come ‘socialist industrialization’ (1926–9 according to the
Short Course
’s idiosyncratic chronology), ‘Collectivization’ (1930–4) and finally the ‘struggle to complete the building of the socialist society’ (1935–7). China, it was widely believed, would follow the same stages, though the timetable was rather more controversial.

In 1949 the Chinese – and Soviet – leadership were agreed that the time was not ripe for socialist ambition. China, Mao and his colleagues believed, was still vulnerable to foreign invasion. And the Communists, who had not yet conquered Tibet and Taiwan, were therefore not yet ready for internal conflict. The Guomindang officials of the old regime were kept in place whilst liberal intellectuals, with their valuable expertise, were treated well. Private ownership was retained, and whilst land was taken from landowners the objective was not equality but improvements in productivity through consolidating farm size. This was defined as the era of ‘New Democracy’: the state was a ‘people’s democratic dictatorship’ under the guidance of the proletariat but including the bourgeoisie; purges were confined to only the avowedly anti-Communist.

As in the USSR in the 1920s, there were different views about how rapid China’s journey to socialism would be (though this time Stalin was a supporter of gradual reform). Those with the closest connections with Moscow – Liu Shaoqi, his ally and fellow Hunanese Moscow-educated Communist Ren Bishi, and Zhou Enlai (a leader with strong Soviet links since the 1920s) – all hoped that ‘New Democracy’ would last between ten and fifteen years, during which time they could build a state and economy on the Stalinist model.
⁵⁷
Liu was an especially important influence. He visited Moscow in June 1949, before Mao’s trip, and toured scores of ministries and institutions to learn how they worked. He then returned to China with some 220 Soviet advisers primed to set up Chinese organizations in the Soviet image. However, rather more important than the relatively modest number of advisers were translations of a wide range of Soviet ‘how to’ books.
⁵⁸
It was from these handy
socialist manuals that the Chinese learnt how to run factories and offices. Textbooks were much more effective than tanks in exporting the Soviet model of modernity.

Liu’s visit to Moscow turned out to be much more harmonious than Mao’s, as he shared a much closer affinity with Stalin. Mao, in contrast, with his nostalgia for the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an, continued to prefer radical solutions. He was impatient to push history forward towards industrialization and socialism.

As in the USSR of the late 1920s, the threat of war helped the radicalization of Chinese politics. In April 1950, Stalin, uncharacteristically, agreed to support Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea, and when, after initial North Korean successes, the Americans (leading a United Nations force) landed and drove them back, the Chinese reluctantly agreed to intervene.
⁵⁹
The war continued for over two years. The struggle was a huge burden on China. It was a conventional war of mass armies, planned and partly financed by Moscow, but fought largely by Chinese soldiers. Three million Chinese fought there, and over 400,000 died – Mao’s eldest son, Anying, was amongst them. China itself spent between 20 and 25 per cent of its budget on the campaign and the war caused enormous hardships on the front and at home.

The Korean War had the effect of accelerating calls for rapid industrialization, and Mao began to discuss the need for a Five-Year Plan as early as February 1951. But war legitimized radicalism more generally, and strengthened the supporters of violent ‘class struggle’. For example, the land reform of 1949 and 1950 had begun to stall as party bosses found it difficult to enforce redistribution against the opposition of landlords, clans and temples, and the war became an opportunity for the party to accuse foreign enemies of colluding with the bourgeoisie within. Land reform quickly escalated into violent ‘class struggle’. ‘Speak bitterness meetings’, public humiliations and straightforward violence – not always endorsed by the authorities – became common. Meanwhile, 43 per cent of the land was redistributed to 60 per cent of the population. Although this undoubtedly strengthened support for the new regime, it did so at an enormous human cost. It has been estimated that between 1 and 2 million died in these land reform campaigns.

The Chinese Communists were not yet imposing collective farms on the population, but in some ways they were even more radical than
their Soviet predecessors in the early 1930s. Determined to root out old identities of class, clan and region, they put enormous efforts into categorizing the rural population by class, and class labels – whether landlord, rich peasant or poor peasant – became crucial in determining people’s lives. Between 1951 and 1953 the CCP extended ‘class struggle’ to the towns with the ‘Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries’, the ‘Three Antis’ campaign against corrupt officials, the ‘Five Antis’ against the big ‘national bourgeoisie’ and a thought-reform campaign against intellectuals. These campaigns often involved extreme violence.
⁶⁰
The suppression of counter-revolutionaries campaign alone led to between 800,000 and 2 million deaths, and countless more were dragged before mass public trials. As in the countryside, the party was often successful in mobilizing the majority against the minority; between 40 and 45 per cent of all Shanghai workers sent denunciations against ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to the authorities. According to one report, 30,000 attended one accusation meeting in Beijing directed against the ‘five major tyrants’ – a group of local bosses. As they had done in the land campaigns, the Communists mobilized the respected elderly to denounce their ‘enemies’:

In September 1952 Mao announced to his colleagues that the era of NEP-style reconstruction was drawing to a close and the time was ripe for China to embark on building socialism. The First Five-Year Plan, when the socialist sector of the economy would begin to squeeze out the capitalists, began in 1953. Shortly thereafter, in 1955, collectivization was launched.

Now that he had decided on a full-blown Five-Year Plan, Mao was happier to accept the need for a move towards the High Stalinist model. In February 1953 he declared ‘there must be a great nationwide upsurge of learning from the Soviet Union to rebuild our country’.
⁶²
The graded hierarchies of the Soviet service aristocracy were now introduced wholesale; engineers were the new kings of the workplace, whilst the party organization was marginalized. Enormous industrial plants were
started with Soviet help. But most striking were the changes to the People’s Liberation Army, as Soviet-style ranks and insignia replaced the old civil-war guerrilla-style of army.