HOW CHINA BECAME COMMUNIST

But how did China fall to the communists in the first place, setting the stage not only for the subjugation of Mainland China but also the Korean and Vietnam Wars? The liberal view is that Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung (now known as Mao Zedong) was able to triumph over Nationalist (anti-communist) leader Chiang Kai-shek because of the former's agrarian reforms and perseverance and the latter's oppression and corruption. In truth, Mao was a mass murderer, and Chiang was a man who helped lead China away from domination by warlords and brought China's millions a measure of freedom that was previously unknown in that vast land.
So how was Mao able to defeat Chiang on Mainland China? As we shall see, the answer, simply stated, is that U.S. government policies made it possible for him to succeed and Chiang to fail.
 

Chiang Kai-shek Fights for Unity

In 1911, long before Chiang became China's leader, he was a 24-year-old studying at a military school in Japan. Dr. Sun Yat-sen had just launched a revolution to wrest control of China from dictatorial war lords. The future Chinese leader hurried home and immediately became a trusted lieutenant in the fledgling revolutionary government.
Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Kuomintang (National People's Party), was always a Chinese patriot. His favorable view of socialism, however, caused him to trust the agents of Soviet leaders Stalin and Trotsky, who were busily working in China to establish communist control. Sun Yat-sen became enamored of those he believed to be China's "friends" but who were really Soviet Russia's infiltrators. In 1923, he sent one of his government's most able lieutenants, Chiang Kai-shek, to Moscow for training. Chiang returned after only four months with a decidedly unfavorable view of what he learned about communist-style tyranny.
While the struggle against the warlords was underway, and with China still far from unified under a single government, Sun Yat-sen passed away in 1925. Chiang emerged above several possible candidates as the leader of the Kuomintang, and he continued the struggle to unite his country. He even faced a communist coup d'etat in 1927 led by Russian communist Michael Borodin, American communist Earl Browder, and Mao, a skirmish he quickly suppressed. He then expelled Borodin and other Russians from the country, tossed Mao out of the Kuomintang, and saw Browder flee to the United States.
It wasn't until 1931 that Chiang succeeded in unifying most of his country, but his problems were far from over. In 1933, he succeeded in driving Mao's forces out of an enclave they had seized. It was then that Mao and Chou En-lai staged their "long march" of about a thousand miles to the northwest where they regrouped and built a new force through terror and intimidation of the local Chinese population. From then on, Chiang not only suffered constant attempts at undermining from Chinese communists, he soon faced Japanese invaders who succeeded in taking control of Manchuria. Full-scale war with Japan began in mid-1937, four and hall years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese threat to China became so severe that, as early as 1937, Chiang agreed in desperation to allow forces controlled by Mao to become part of the Chinese Nationalist Army. By 1940, when it became obvious that Mao's forces weren't cooperating, and were claiming autonomy and seizing portions of the nation for themselves, Chiang broke the relationship. Despite fighting the Japanese, by 1940 Chiang also found it necessary to divert a sizeable portion of his military forces to counter the Chinese communists.
Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japanese leaders had hoped to conclude a peace treaty with Chiang, but the Chinese leader would have nothing to do with that kind of capitulation. He cast his lot with the United States one day after the Pearl Harbor attack and sent the following message to President Roosevelt: "To our new common battle, we offer all we are and all we have, to stand with you until the Pacific and the world are freed from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy." Our nation had a determined and able Asian ally in Chiang.
 

Soviets support Chinese communists

Our Soviet "ally," on the other hand, was not only reaffirming its neutrality with Japan via the Molotov-Matsuoka Pact but also doing all it could to help Chinese communist forces fighting against Chiang, our only real ally in the Pacific. Strange as it may seem to a novice looking back on that period, World War II found our nation allied with and saving one tyrannical regime, the Soviet Union, from another tyrannical regime, Nazi Germany, while the Soviet regime was undermining our ally in China.
During the early portion of WWII, most of America's effort was directed toward Europe where massive aid to Soviet Russia saved that communist tyranny from Hitler's forces. Meanwhile, Russia was stepping up its aid to the Communist Chinese in hopes of toppling Chiang's government. During the war, Chiang's continuous effort against the Japanese invaders actually kept three million Japanese (soldiers and civilian workers) bottled up. This huge force was never committed to all the other campaigns throughout the vast Pacific where the U.S. military was fighting to oust Japan from its many island conquests. Had Chiang taken advantage of many opportunities to make peace with Japan--something the Japanese eagerly sought--the war in the Pacific might have seen Japanese land forces attack Australia, Hawaii, and possibly even the west coast of the United States.
All during the war, Chinese communists devoted as little as 30 percent of their effort against the Japanese and the remaining 70 percent against the Nationalist Chinese. Instead of assisting Chiang, who had been officially named by U.S. leaders as the Supreme Commander of all the forces in the China Theater, General Joseph Stilwell, the commander of American forces in China, made plain his antipathy toward Chiang and made sure that the meager supplies supposed to reach the Chinese leader were dribbled out or never turned over at all. In their Strange Bedfellows: Chiang and Stilwell, Jennifer Wilding and Ralph Zuljan wrote: "[Stilwell received] assurances from the Soviets that the Chinese supporting Mao were not true communists, they were merely agrarian reformers.... Stilwell constantly pressed for reconciliation between Mao and Chiang."
In February 1945, when the Japanese were trying to surrender, President Roosevelt met with Stalin and Churchill at the Black Sea resort of Yalta. Accompanying the already terminally ill U.S. president (who died on April 12) were top advisers Harry Hopkins and Alger Hiss. Hopkins, an admitted supporter of Soviet Russia, had already arranged for the shipment of the plans and the parts for the atomic bomb to Russia. And numerous warnings about Hiss's communist affiliation had been ignored by the Roosevelt administration. At Yalta it was agreed that the Soviet Union--still "neutral" in the war against Japan--would be given control of Manchuria and Mongolia, several strategic Chinese ports, and rights to the Japanese-held Kurile Islands and Sakhalin Island. All of this amounted to a huge betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek who wasn't consulted about these decisions.
During the Yalta conference, Roosevelt reportedly begged Stalin to enter the war against Japan. Russia did finally enter the war--six days before its end and three days after the atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima. Huge stores of Japanese arms in Manchuria were immediately turned over to Mao's forces. When the war against Japan finally ended in August 1945, others relaxed but Chiang now faced a formidable civil war against the Communist Chinese army.
 

Communist Sympathizers within U.S.

Where Mao had been a relatively isolated commander of a guerrilla force in the far northwestern provinces of China in 1937, he had become by the end of World War II the leader of a force of half a million men under arms and a civilian party membership of an additional half million. All during the war, propaganda painting Chiang as a corrupt dictator and lauding Mao as the noble leader of an agrarian reform movement flooded America's press--conditioning the American public against Chiang. Most, though not all, of these totally wrong perspectives, emanated from the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a pro-Soviet group that held a virtual monopoly on what Americans would be told about what was happening in China.
Though it began as a branch of the YMCA for the purpose of assisting Christian missionaries in the Far East in 1925, the IPR soon became a haven for communists and fellow travelers who used it very effectively to help the Chinese communists and blacken Chiang's image. Louis Budenz, once the managing editor of the openly communist Daily Worker, who later became an ardent anti-communist, would tell congressional investigators that the IPR was a "little red schoolhouse" using its respectability to "teach Americans what they need to know about China." IPR pamphlets erroneously touted the upstanding character of the Soviet Union and the admirable merits of the Chinese Communists. A 1946 IPR publication held that "the Chinese Communists ... maintain the right of private property ... have a system of popular elections ... not unlike our New England town meeting." At the same rime, harshly negative views of Chiang were the IPR's regular fare.
Many of the communists spewing out these damaging falsehoods were later shown to be communist agents through the efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) during the early 1950s, as well as through the corresponding work of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee led during 1951 by Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nev.), and (decades later) the eventual treasure trove of information contained in the Venona intercepts. These messages to and from Moscow to its U.S. agents during and after the war years became available after the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. They proved beyond doubt that McCarthy and others had been correct in targeting the likes of John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore, Lauchlin Currie, and many others as tireless workers for Soviet gains, not only within the IPR, but in the several extremely sensitive government posts where they and others like them eventually were given further license to influence our nation's foreign policy.
U.S. Ambassador to China Patrick Hurley found so much communist propaganda coming from the State Department's Foreign Service Officers (ail IPR veterans) that he demanded the recall of Service and Davies and, getting no satisfaction, resigned in late 1945. He was replaced by General George Marshall, the patron of General Stilwell. Stilwell's deputy, Frank Dorn, later testified that he had been ordered by Stilwell in 1944 to "prepare a plan for the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek." Once Marshall arrived in China, he demanded that Chiang--who at the time was winning the battle against Mao--enter into a truce with Mao's forces. Because he was relying on help from the United States, Chiang had no choice but to act on such demands.
Soon, Marshall was elevated to secretary of state where he surrounded himself with IPR veterans and other pro-communists, demanded that Chiang form a coalition government with Mao, and eventually boasted that "with a stroke of the pen" he had disarmed 39 of Chiang's anti-communist divisions. The Nationalist Chinese were even prevented from receiving weapons and ammunition they had already purchased. The tide began to turn toward the Communist Chinese
By the summer of 1949, Dean Acheson had succeeded Marshall as Secretary of State. He commissioned Philip Jessup, another IPR veteran later shown to be a communist, to head a committee given the task of publishing U.S. policy regarding China. Released in August, Jessup's famous "White Paper" announced that the United States was finished with Chiang, declared that the communists had triumphed, and exonerated the State Department for any responsibility regarding these developments. Mao proclaimed his People's Republic in October, and Chiang took his forces to Formosa (Taiwan) in December. The best ally America had during all of World War II had been completely betrayed. It would not be the last betrayal by a nation he had a right to expect would be his friend.
In February 1950, Mao went to Moscow and negotiated a 30-year pact with the USSR. A few months later, North Korea, tremendously aided by Chinese communists, invaded South Korea and the Korean War was on. Soon, huge numbers of Chinese communist forces stormed into North Korea from communist-held Manchuria and started killing Americans. By now, Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, had begun his investigation of the communist penetration of our government. His work proceeded for several years and chief among the contributions he made was a thorough exposure of the Institute of Pacific Relations and the swarm of communists and pro-communists who had played such an important role in the sellout of China.
Under Chiang's leadership, Taiwan became a thriving island of free enterprise. When Chinese communist forces were occupied fighting the U.S. military in Korea, not only was Chiang's offer to provide troops denied, but American naval vessels patrolled the waters between Taiwan and the Mainland, not to protect Taiwan from the Communist Chinese forces, but to protect the communists from Chiang's forces. General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of our forces in Korea, noted years later in his autobiography Reminiscences, "I was specifically directed to prevent any Nationalist attacks on the mainland." The pattern of betrayal continued.
Chiang died in 1975 still contending that he, not the bloody-handed communists whom pro-communist American diplomats had ushered into power, was China's true leader.

Role of Social causes in heralding Revolution

While revolution in China began with reaction to imperialism and was influenced by Western ideas, in the end, it was the internal pressures and the lack of reforms by the KUOMINTANG REGIME that are the most important reasons for the 1949 revolution, bringing the Communists to power. The Kuomintang regime failed to adequately deal with the condition of the peasant masses and with the conditions of the urban classes.
In Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949 Lucien Bianco writes, “Discontent and the bankruptcy of rural society created an inexhaustible supply of potential revolutionaries, but it was the Chinese Communist Party that gave this blind force purpose and direction.”
Almost nothing was done to satisfy the peasants’ most basic needs. No steps were taken to protect them against excesses and the violence on the part of the military. Nothing was done to reform and expand the system of agriculture, or to reduce the despair caused by land tax and land rent. It was this failure to deal with the China’s rural social conflict that contributed the most to the Chinese Revolution.
China’s basic social conflict was both urban and rural. In the countryside the two opposing sides were the peasant masses and the landed upper class. Alongside the dire poverty and exploitation suffered by immense numbers of peasants, all other problems seemed minor. Urban problems were never insignificant and at times became critical, both for the working class and for the course of Chinese politics.
 

Urban problems

The limited and geographically restricted growth of modern industry in twentieth- century China gave rise to the class that lived and worked much as others had done in England, France and in Russia years before.
A long workday, infrequent days of rest, extensive use of ill-paid female and child labor in the textile industry, a high frequency of crippling accidents and occupational diseases, widespread tuberculosis, random deductions from wages, cruel rules and regulations, an almost total absence of welfare legislation, an extremely low standard of living, and for many workers chronic indebtedness made up the life of the urban worker. All of these factors can be compared to the social history of nineteenth-century Europe.
Little by little, the situation of workers improved. From 1936 to 1946 real wages rose significantly, the workday was shortened, child labor almost completely disappeared, and the gap between men’s and women’s wages diminished.
On the eve of the revolution, the problems of the working class had become less acute and affected only one percent of the Chinese population. The small size of China’s working class did not prevent it from becoming a great revolutionary force. The workers were concentrated in a small number of industrial centers that were also the country’s leading political centers.
After such promising beginnings as the HONG KONG STRIKE Of 1922, the Chinese labor movement grew so rapidly and dramatically that it became a major force in the revolutionary uprising of 1925-27. “Even though the labor movement played a negligible role in the last and decisive phase of revolution,” writes J. M. Roberts in The New History of the World, “the Communists did benefit enormously in China from the fact that capitalism could easily be represented as the unifying, connecting principle behind foreign exploitation and aggression.” Neither major strikes nor urban uprisings contributed greatly to the Red Army successes. There were very few workers in the victorious Red Army. It was comprised essentially of peasants who were led by other peasants and intellectuals.
 

Rural problems

The life of the peasant in pre-revolution China can best be described by one word – misery. The source of the revolution and the real strength of the Communist Party can be found in the living conditions that prevailed from one end of China to the other. Poverty, abuse, and early death were the only prospects for nearly half a billion people.
There were several factors contributing to the misery of the peasants. The peasants where still bound to medieval traditions and beliefs that the dragon that dispensed rain would spare their families in time of drought. Adding to this, China’s already vast population tripled in 200 years, from 120-140 million in 1651 to 350-543 million in 1851. All of this growth came before any real contact with the West and before the beginning of industrialization. On the eve of the revolution, the pressure of population on land in China was greater than it had ever been.
The Chinese agriculture was by no means primitive. The Chinese farmer’s refined techniques and infinite painstakingness have been compared to the highest form of gardening. But the Chinese farmer’s art belonged to a pre-scientific era, which meant that no matter how tireless and resourceful his efforts he could never hope for more than a modest yield. His choice of seed was left to chance with no consideration for irrigation.
Even if he had some knowledge of the application of soil and plant sciences to land management and crop production, the crudeness of his equipment would have kept him from applying it. The peasant farmer’s plight was further complicated by all sorts of psychological, social, and cultural patterns and practices. Among these were a tendency to adhere to established routine, which inhibited the acceptance of new practices and plant varieties.
The Chinese peasant accepted poverty as his fate. He accepted the fact that other men were rich and lived off his misery. As land owners, the rich received land rent from their tenants. As holders of all sorts of local administrative responsibilities, they received various fees and gratuities. As grain merchants, they were almost automatically speculators under the market conditions then prevailing. As moneylenders, they set the high interest rates creating chronic indebtedness.
The upper class as a whole dominated all sectors of the rural economy. The large landowners were almost the only people who did not work the soil. With few exceptions, all other classes participated in productive work of one sort or another. The small landowner who worked his own land was on the brink of poverty.
Two of the greatest ills that struck the peasant masses were land rent and land taxes. On the eve of the Second World War, land rent probably averaged around 45 percent of the total harvest. Land taxes were the second great agony of rural life. The peasant had no idea what the legal tax rate was, so no collector could be held to account. Often the theoretical amount of the tax was doubled by so-called surtaxes, and sometimes it was increased tenfold. After surtaxes, the most striking exploitation was collection of the land tax before it supposedly fell due. The last abuse was the monopoly on tax collection sometimes held by a hereditary cast, which kept its account books closed even to the district magistrate. Inequities of all sorts were accompanied by numerous inconsistencies and irregularities.
 

Role of Mao

After being perused by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao Zedong and Zhu Enlai eventually relocated to Jiangxi province, where they organized a rural soviet (council), a Communist-led regime that confiscated land from greedy landlords, punished or executed them, and redistributed their land to poor peasants. This simple program of land reform was tremendously appealing to Jiangxi’s peasantry, and by early 1930 Mao’s Communist movement in the province was gaining enormous popular support.
The Kuomintang regime did make an attempt to improve the condition of the peasant. A number of government agencies were charged with improving agricultural economy and peasant life. These new organizations cooperated with others in such activities as taking socioeconomic surveys, promoting technological improvements, launching irrigation and reforestation projects and trying to improve peasant health and hygiene. But all these measures affected only a few areas, and those only on the surface.
The government provided a small amount of money in their budget for these measures. Most of the government’s measures were concerned with the rural economy as such, not with any deeper problem. Some of its programs seemed to be based on the supposition that the peasant problem came down to the need for agricultural upgrading, others on no supposition whatever. As a result, whereas there was limited progress of sorts in different directions, no concentrated effort was made on the problem as a whole.
Almost nothing was done to satisfy the peasant’s most basic needs. No steps were taken to protect or satisfy their basic needs or to reform and expand the system of agricultural credit, or to reduce the misery caused by land tax and land rent.
 

Conclusion

In conclusion, China’s basic social conflict was with its workers. In rural areas the two opposing sides were the peasant masses and the landed upper classes. Rent and land taxes plagued the peasants. The urban class suffered many of the same problems experienced in other industrialized countries – long workdays, use of ill-paid female and child labor, crippling accidents and occupational diseases.
In the end though, it was the internal pressures and the lack of peasant reforms by the Kuomintang regime that are the most important social cause of the Chinese Revolution. The government’s inability to deal with the basic needs of its people allowed the Communists to be successful in 1949.
As Bianco writes, “The class that listened to the revolutionaries, the class they cultivated, the backbone and flesh of the Chinese Revolution, was the poor peasant class, which is to say the backbone and flesh of China herself.”