annihilate any residue of opposition. The Nationalists fled to the south-western city of Chongqing, where, with US and British assistance, they mounted at least some opposition. Their main function, however, was simply to survive. The Communists, in their remote Yan’an revolutionary base in the central northern province known today as Shaanxi, did not have the capacity or the manpower to do much more than harass and survive by guile. But in a loose coalition with the Nationalists, and employing Mao’s guerrilla tactics, they proved surprisingly effective – at least as irritants to a Japan that was slowly and calamitously to discover that while it could control at least some of the cities, in the end the ‘sand-like’ quality of China in the countryside, where 90 per cent of people lived, proved too challenging. Stretched across the whole Asia Pacific, and now fighting against the might not just of the United States but also of Russia, Japan fell to defeat in 1945.
Mao may have been right when he said to the American reporter Edgar Snow in the 1960s that Communism would not have been ultimately successful in China without the searing experience of the Second World War.16 But the war also resulted in more committed and focused nationalism. China had survived – just. But it had experienced first-hand with terrifying consequences the meaning of being undeveloped, weak, and disunited against a foe that was none of these things. Japan’s advanced military, its strength and unity, were factors that caused China to suffer – and upon which after the war it was able to reflect. European colonial involvement with China had been destructive, but piecemeal. Britain never seriously attempted to subjugate the whole of the Chinese landmass. But in the Second Sino-Japanese War, 20 million perished and as many as 50 million were made homeless.
From 1949, the PRC vowed that never again would China be placed in this position of subjugation before an outside power, reinforcing the nationalism that had already been constructed. As Zheng Wang states in his study of the uses of historical memory in modern China,
It is no exaggeration to say that almost all the important changes, revolutions and reforms in [the country] after 1840 [and the first Opium War] are somehow related – if not a direct response – to the national humiliation during those subsequent hundred years. … It is impossible, therefore, to reimagine the recent history of China without the implications of the century of humiliation; it is an integral part of the Chinese Chosenness-Myths-Trauma complex.17
This reached its culmination in the war. It was the moment of most brutal and final exposure to the will and power of others. Even with the conclusion of the war, the country remained troubled. After years of uneasy truce with the Communists as they had tried, together, to beat the invaders, the Nationalists returned to the unfinished business of eliminating their rivals in a Civil War from 1946. Exhausted and demoralized, however, Chiang’s forces were defeated, fleeing to Taiwan, where they continued the Republic of China (which continues to exist to this day). The vision of Mao’s Communist nationalism had prevailed. It now had a world to rebuild.
Notes
1 1. Ge Zhaoguang, What is China? Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History, trans. Michael Gibbs Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 19.
2 2. Ibid., 21.
3 3. Xi Jinping, ‘Address to the First Session of the 12th National People’s Congress’, 17 March 2013, in The Governance of China, Vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014), 41.
4 4. Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World (London: Profile Books, 2019).
5 5. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Destiny and Chinese Economic Theory (New York: Roy Publishers, 1947), 41.
6 6. Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 2 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 307.
7 7. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16.
8 8. J. L. Cranmer-Byng (ed.), An Embassy to China: Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney During his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung 1793–1794 (London: Longmans, 1962), 164.
9 9. Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (eds), China Readings 1: Imperial China (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 284.
10 10. Ibid., 7.
11 11. Ibid., 7.
12 12. Chiang, China’s Destiny, 43.
13 13. Ibid., 92.
14 14. Mao, Selected Works, Vol. 2, 309.
15 15. Ibid., 329.
16 16. See EdgarSnow, China’s Long Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1971).
17 17. Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 68–9.
2 China Reconstructs (1949–1958)
In 1949, the average life expectancy in China was just 31. Levels of literacy were 20 per cent.1 Only 13 per cent of the population lived in cities by 1953.2 With a population of 573 million, the per capita GDP was US$50, ten dollars less than India’s.3 But as Barry Naughton has explained, ‘By 1949, China was still very poor, but development had nevertheless begun.’ The legacy of the war meant this ‘aided the Communist government in the execution of its socialist industrialization strategy’.4 Mao had declared that the Chinese people were a blank sheet. And while there had been some attempts to develop China under the Nationalists during the Republican era, these supplied a base on which a massive amount needed to be built for the country to have any hope of modernizing successfully.
‘In official histories,’ historians Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz argue, ‘the early 1950s appear as a “golden age” of relative stability, economic recovery, and social harmony.’5 In what some accounts portray as a honeymoon period, the Communists implemented a series of reforms, doing so with the mindset of a revolutionary force rather than a government. Private enterprises and non-governmental entities which had played some role in the period prior to 1949 were largely eradicated. The new regime faced severe challenges, however. The Korean War (1950–3) meant that the PRC was not at peace for the first years of its existence, but engaged in a conflict directly with UN forces, predominantly the United States, in the neighbouring Korean peninsula. Moreover, the impact of the Land Reform movement and early purges of intellectually and other distrusted groups from 1952 to 1953, the attempt to subjugate Tibet from 1951 to 1959, and looming clashes with the USSR, despite its initial role as a patron and development assister, also belong to a less ideal narrative.
Economic Priorities
One issue on which there was clear consensus was that China’s renewal needed a sound material basis. The decision was made to achieve this by centrally controlled plans operating within a political framework supplied by the Party itself, though partly building on the template initiated by the previous Nationalist government during the war. This planning system has been characterized by historian Andrew Walder as one which was more pure than the Soviet model it was copied from.6 The first Five-Year Plan in 1953 set a number of targets. The main priority was to ensure a high level of GDP growth. According to Chinese government data, from 1953 to 1978, GDP growth averaged 6.7 per cent annually. There is a lack of clear statistics from this era, with some saying the real figure was a more modest 4.5 per cent.7 But there was definitely growth. Per capita levels of wealth rose from around US$200 by values varying from 13 to 1 per cent growth a year until 1961, when the calamitous impact of the Great Leap Forward (see below) and the famines resulted in a drop of over 25 per cent.8
The introduction of a planned economy had two main characteristics. The first was to mark a shift away from the business model of small entrepreneurial companies that had existed prior to the 1950s. China had been a country of artisan business people, largely working in small