Excerpts on PRC founding and challenges

From Power and Primacy Abridged and Updated Edition

Any emphasis my own

Key points

  • Incredible challenges to overcome at time of independence, following a century + of devastation
  • CPC's victory widely doubted at first - yet its superior manner in handling itself and treating those under its control led to mass defections from KMT
  • Areas now treated as "contested" by Western powers (Taiwan, Tibet) were never in question as belonging to China when it was the KMT being dealt with
    • Stirring up of unrest in those areas is purely for destabilization
  • When needing to put all its efforts in building after years of devastation to foreign powers, CPC had to instead work on securing its borders, facing embargo, and all sorts of outside interference seeking to undermine the new government

Following Tokyo’s sudden surrender in September 1945 there was a power vacuum in many of the Japanese occupied territories in China, leading to a race among competing local forces to reach key strategic locations such as major ports and cities. The United States undertook extensive measures to ensure that these did not fall under communist control. American air and naval assets were used to facilitate a massive and rapid strategic redeployment of 400,000–500,000 nationalist military personnel across the country to seize key locations – many of which would otherwise have quickly fallen to the communist PLA. Two weeks after the end of the war Beijing was surrounded and about to be captured by the People’s Liberation Army, and only the swift deployment of the U.S. Marines prevented this.

Reports from the communist leadership indicate that U.S. forces also actively took to the offensive, attacking areas under their control and bombarding PLA positions.13, 14 The United States, though war weary in the Pacific War’s aftermath, was using all means at its disposal to ensure a communist defeat.

severe reprisals by American and Guomindang forces against population centers suspected of aiding their enemies. A rare report surfaced from a U.S. Marine deployed in China to his congressman stating that in at least one incident the Marines had blasted a small Chinese village ‘unmercifully’ without knowing ‘how many innocent people were slaughtered.’ The destruction wrought by 50,000 fully armed U.S. Marines deployed in China, often operating in an offensive capacity, served only to worsen conditions for Chinese civilians.

By 1946 100,000 American military personnel had been deployed to China, under the pretext of disarming and repatriating the Japanese. While this was eventually carried out, it was often secondary to their more immediate objective – providing the support needed to ensure a Guomindang victory.

By 1949 the U.S. aid going to the Guomindang forces since the war had begun had almost reached $2 billion in cash and a further $1 billion worth of military hardware. These were tremendous sums at the time, tens of billions of dollars in in the 2010s, given at a time when the United States itself was undergoing a serious postwar economic recession. The provision of aid on such a scale represented the importance of retaining China in the Western sphere of influence at all costs. A full 39 Guomindang divisions had been fully trained and equipped by the Americans to fight communist forces.23 The PLA on the other hand had received negligible foreign support, and their only major foreign backer had been North Korea – as the Japanese imperial era Korean resistance which had gone on to form the new North Korean leadership had formed close ties with the PLA during their joint struggle for independence. The main contribution the Koreans provided however was manpower, as the small state did not have the funds or the industrial capacity to support the PLA. Despite their overwhelming material and manpower advantages the Guomindang quickly saw their position deteriorate, leading to their eventual defeat.

The communists were seen to lead by example and took great care to portray themselves to the impoverished population as paragons of honesty, progressiveness and fairness. As a result, the people voted with their support, and not only did the rural populations support the PLA, but disillusioned Guomindang forces transferred entire divisions and their weapons to the PLA through mass defections. As former U.S. State Department employee William Blum observed: ‘The Chiang dynasty was collapsing all around in bits and pieces. It had not been only the onslaught of Chiang’s communist foes, but the hostility of the Chinese people at large to his tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence of his entire bureaucratic and social system.’29 As U.S. General David Barr, head of the U.S. Military Mission in China, had said, the Guomindang were under ‘the world’s worst leadership,’ noting ‘widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces.’

American delegations which had visited Chinese communist territory noted the stark discrepancy with areas under the Guomindang. It was these differences which can be largely credited for the latter’s ultimate defeat. Reports on the communists by an American delegation sent in 1944 were immensely positive, with a sense that they had ‘come into a different country and are meeting different people.’ The leader of the delegation, political analyst John Service, noted that ‘bodyguards, gendarmes and the clap-trap of Chungking officialdom are … completely lacking.’ By contrast he noted of the Chinese communist leadership: ‘Mao and the other leaders are universally spoken of with respect … these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking.’ He observed the lack of censorship which had been prevalent in Guomindang areas, and the sense of freedom in communist areas. ‘To the casual eye there are no police in Yenan,’ he reported of the communist controlled region by contrast to the nationalist police state. ‘Morale is very high … there is no defeatism but rather confidence.’ Service and others in his delegation reported that communist troops were better disciplined, their government and military did not face the widespread corruption their ←87 | 88→adversaries did, and policies were more economically just – which won a great deal of support from the population. It was these factors which likely decided the outcome of the war despite American and Japanese military support and far larger forces and territories at the disposal of Chiang’s government.

The communist victory came as much as a surprise to the Soviet Union as it did to the United States. The forces arrayed against the communists had been so much greater that prospects for victory had seemed impossible. In 1948 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin admitted that he had advised the CCP against fighting a revolutionary war, and now it was clear that he had been mistaken to do so.

Guomindang forces were forced to flee to Taiwan, taking with them numerous national and artistic treasures and the country’s entire gold reserve – the former which remain on Taiwan to this day.46 They had prepared Taiwan two years beforehand by terrorizing its native population using military force to assert their authority and establish their leadership. The massacres are estimated to have killed up to 28,000 of Taiwan’s indigenous population.47 The Guomindang themselves admitted to killing 18,000– 28,000 native-born Taiwanese in a single 1947 massacre alone.48 With Taiwan held by a U.S. aligned government the territory would become a key staging ground for the United States to wage a concerted campaign to undermine the Chinese government on the mainland, and would come to host American nuclear weapons and 30,000 military personnel.

The communist victory, in the United States widely termed the ‘Loss of China,’ came as the greatest blow to America’s foreign policy designs in the postwar era. The new People’s Republic of China (PRC) was thus met with unrelenting hostility by Washington,

Having been ravaged by war over several decades China’s economy was extremely weak when civil war ended in 1949. The key for the United States and its partners was to divert the new republic’s efforts and resources away from rebuilding and modernization, lest the independent power became a modern and capable rival like the USSR had.

As CIA case officer Ralph McGhee who had formerly been stationed in Taiwan stated, the CIA was working with the Western aligned Taiwanese forces ‘to train and drop teams of Chinese onto the mainland to develop resistance movements and gather intelligence.’57 Destabilization for its own sake appeared to be the goal.

Military provocations were far from the only efforts undertaken to undermine China’s new government, with the country subject to a harsh U.S. trade embargo for over two decades almost immediately after the civil war’s end.

Chinese governments had claimed Tibet as part of the country for over two centuries, and had the U.S. aligned Guomindang won the civil war an issue of the matter would not have been made. Before the communist takeover the United States made their position on Tibet’s autonomy clear: ‘The Government of the United States has borne in mind the fact that the Chinese Government has long claimed sovereignty over Tibet and that the Chinese constitution lists Tibet among areas constituting the territory of the Republic of China [The state’s name under GMD rule before declaration of the PRC]. This Government has at no time raised a question regarding either of these claims.’68, 69 After an independent government took power in 1949 this quickly changed.

As the fourteenth Dalai Lama recalled, co-operation with the CIA against China ‘only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet.’83 The United States could achieve its objectives of further draining the resources of the Chinese state by waging war by proxy, thereby itself incurring minimal costs and minimal losses. The campaign, while potentially promising and a considerable drain on Chinese resources, ultimately floundered due to lack of support from the vast majority of the Tibetan population.

It is worthy of note that support for separatist movements in China began immediately after China became an independent People’s Republic in 1949 – not before. The 14th Dalai Lama himself wrote that the West supported Tibetan separatism ‘not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilize all communist governments.’89 Policy regarding Tibetan separatism is itself highly indicative of the reality of Western morality and concern regarding Asian populations – that ‘human rights’ only become an issue raised against states which pursue independent policy contrary to Western interests, which at the time were mostly communist or communist aligned states.

While the Chinese Civil War supposedly concluded in 1949, the United States and its partners never accepted peace and would continue to subject China to aggression and provocation. For the CIA the war against China never ended. The continuation of this war had significant effects on Chinese political and social development. The war-weary nation was never truly allowed peace, not only due to the Korean War breaking out less than a year after the end of the Civil War, but also numerous other military provocations for decades ←101 | 102→afterwards. This combined with threats of nuclear and biological weapons attacks (see Chapter 9), infiltration by saboteurs and hostile paramilitary forces meant that the country was always in a state of war. The free and open society and approachable leadership described by political analyst John Service when he led the American delegation to the Chinese communists in 1944 could never last under such circumstances.

The immense scale of the security threat thus necessitated precautions which compromised the freedom of the Chinese people. Civil society was similarly increasingly restricted due to threats from ‘enemies of the people,’ in ways the communist government had never previously found to be necessary. It is clear that China under threat could never develop to its full potential, and into the free society which could have been an attractive model to much of Asia, due to the continuing war waged against it. To most who mistook the People’s Republic of China in its early years to be a country at peace, it could easily be portrayed by the West as needlessly repressive and paranoid. Without the context of the military incursions and threats as persistent as they were dire which the state faced ever since its formation, as well as the extreme hostility China’s communists faced from the United States during the civil war, the development of Chinese civil society and government can never be properly understood and can be easily misrepresented.

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