LITMIR.BIZ

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of what kind of housing people lived in. Peasants had their lands redistributed and city workers had apartments and sets of rooms reallocated and reassigned.

Intellectuals figured importantly in this. To understand the particular quality of animosity that Mao evidently felt towards this group, one has to remember that the term in Chinese – ‘zhishi fenzi’ – literally translates as ‘knowledge elements’. This covered a far wider group than the same term in English, running from teachers to those who worked in journalism, and who could be more broadly categorized as service sector workers in Western systems. That accounted for a sizeable number of people. Mao’s own history with this group had also been a difficult one. ‘Mao had long found intellectuals irritating,’ Alexander Pantsov and Stephen Levine wrote in their biography of the Chairman. ‘Skeptical and conscientious, they aroused in him, as well as in other Bolshevik leaders, hatred and revulsion.’¹⁹ This may have derived from Mao’s early life, when, as a lowly librarian at Beijing University, he had experienced first-hand the sharp treatment and intimidating behaviour those serving intellectuals sometimes suffered.

      Despite this, ‘knowledge elements’ were important to the new China, as engineers, medical practitioners, and planners. In terms of the social background of its leadership, the CPC was from humble stock. But now that it was in government, it needed those conversant in science, maths, and technology to be able to devise and implement its macro-economic and political plans. The issue with intellectuals, which would never be dispelled in the Maoist era, and lingers to this day, is that they were likely to be complicated in their private thoughts and allegiance. Some of them had studied abroad, in the pre-1949 period when young Chinese went to Japan, Europe, and the United States to study. Others were linked to family members who had fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan. Some were simply dissenters, aware of the creed of Marxism but also equipped to critique and doubt it. This group had to be reshaped somehow. ‘Thought reform’ was initially the means to do this.

Writer Yang Jiang (1911–2016) typifies the fate of many of this group. A formidable intellect, she had studied with her husband, scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910–98), in Oxford and then the Sorbonne in the 1930s. In 1947, in Cities Besieged (Wei Cheng), Qian had produced one of the best-loved novels of the life of those exposed to overseas culture and carrying their experiences back to their home country. Yang’s own work largely consisted of producing the first translations into Chinese of works like Don Quixote by Cervantes. She also wrote plays, criticism, and a series of memoirs. Living back in the new China, she and her husband were seen by the PRC government as a propaganda opportunity – a sign to others still abroad to return and do as this couple had, contributing to the creation of a new society – but also a target of persistent distrust and wariness. This created the environment of perpetual ambiguity that surrounded Yang and others like her.

In the 1980s, Yang wrote her sole novel, Xizao, whose English translation, Baptism, loses some of its clear reference to the idea of ‘cleansing’, as in the Chinese xinao (brainwashing). It referred back to the very early period when intellectuals, some of them returnees, were sent to staff the recently founded Social Science Institutes. A group of these individuals experience complex shifts and transformations in their relationships. Some of this is the result of the differences in their professional backgrounds before being brought together by government edict. Some is the result of personal issues between them. It is noticeable that throughout the novel Yang spends a lot of attention describing the clothes that people wear, and the ways that while these change and transform, fundamental character traits are evidently not so easy to eradicate. The novel obliquely, and critically, refers to the above-mentioned ‘thought reform’ movement happening at the time. And the ending is one laden with ambiguity, with two of the key characters tiptoeing around an affair, but then, frozen by their marital obligations, having to renounce their passions and endure their current situation.²⁰ That stands as a fair metaphor for the relationship between intellectuals generally and the Party by the mid-1950s: mutually reliant, and yet also mutually distrustful and each devising ways of trying to manage their lives with each other.

China and the World

Nor were the enemies solely within. New China after its establishment was an isolated place. The Nationalists, in fleeing to the island of Taiwan, also took with them most diplomatic alliances, including that with the United States, and a seat on the newly established United Nations. The Republic of China, with less than 5 per cent of the land mass of the PRC, and only a fraction of the people (in 1949, its population came to 7 million), was seen as the ‘real China’. Mao’s country was simply regarded as an interloper. For the USSR and its allies, however, the similarity in political model meant that they did have to confer recognition. The PRC was formally established on 1 October 1949. The USSR recognized it the next day. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) followed five days later. But by the end of 1949, there were still only twelve states recognizing Beijing. By 1960, the PRC only increased its quota of countries with formal links by twenty-two.

      Alliance with the USSR was perhaps the most significant move that the PRC government made in international affairs at its foundation. ‘The [CPC’s] decision to ally with the Soviet Union was a major factor spreading Cold War conflict in East Asia,’ John Garver has written in a comprehensive diplomatic history of this period. ‘The PRC’s decision to ally with the Soviet Union had a profound impact on China’s foreign relations and on the entire world situation.’²¹ Dependence on Moscow for technical and financial assistance was one element of this. So was Mao’s quest to maintain the uniqueness and autonomy of the new country’s position. In many ways, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence that Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) announced at the conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, with their premium placed on non-interference in the affairs of others and respect for their sovereignty, were aimed at protecting the PRC as much from Russian influence as from that of the imperialist capitalist West.

If Chinese Communism had grown from the soil of the Russian Revolution, it certainly did not feel beholden to it. While Stalin was alive, Mao was respectful. But after his death in 1953 the first sign of cracks started to appear. The most costly issue for Beijing as it created its new network of international relations was the decision by fellow socialist nation North Korea in 1950 to attack the South, from which it had been divided as a result of the outcome of the Second World War. Kim Il Sung had spent many years in north-east China. Chinese Communism, with its hybridity, had clearly had a profound impact on him. But his own version proved as bespoke as that practised in Beijing, with a fierce focus on Korean nationalism. The cost of Kim’s attack on South Korea under US protection was to be high for Mao. It not only included the loss of his own son along with up to a million other troops, but also provided a deeply unwanted distraction from the unfinished business of Taiwan. Deployment of over 3 million soldiers across the Yalu river into North Korea meant that at a crucial time when planning had already proceeded to see the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) make moves across the Taiwan Strait to take on the Nationalists on the island, everything was halted. The PRC had a small window of opportunity to effect its unification plans. North Korea effectively scuppered these. By the time of the announcement of the ceasefire in 1953, America had already solidified its alliance with Taiwan. The situation, in Beijing’s eyes at least, remains unresolved to this day.

Notes

      1 1. A. John Jowett, ‘Patterns of Literacy in the People’s Republic of China’, GeoJournal Vol. 18, No. 4 (June 1989), 417.

      2 2. Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, ‘Basic Statistics on National Population Census in 1953, 1964, 1982, 1990, 2000 and 2010’, http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/Ndsj/2011/html/D0305e.htm.

      3 3. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 50.

      4 4. Ibid., 51, 50.

      5 5. Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz, ‘The Early Years of the People’s Republic

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