Restless Empire (43 page)

By the late 1940s the CCP had two kinds of members. The leaders were hardened Communists of the 1920s, people who had fought for their party and seen friends die for it. They had internalized the Mao-centered loyalty, the deep sense of isolation and danger, and the willingness to purge dissent. They had been through the rectification campaign of 1942–1943, intended to weed out all opposition to Mao’s leadership of the party. They had organized the first CCP labor camps for landlords, bourgeois elements, and political opponents during the civil war. They knew and approved of the methods Stalin had used to solidify Soviet power north of the border. The other group were recent recruits to the party, many of them young and from the cities. Some had left their bourgeois families to join the Communist cause. All had dedicated themselves to the party, but they had little experience of it. The party leaders needed them and their expertise but never trusted them fully and were afraid they could pollute the hard-won purity of the Communist Party. The process of practical learning from the Soviet Union, the CCP leaders believed, would create the means by which to integrate the newcomers and keep them gainfully employed.

The Sovietization of the CCP, which started in 1945 when party cadre began working directly with Soviet Communists in Manchuria and lasted for fifteen years, meant learning how to build a state and a ruling party. Mao and his followers had no intention of taking over and
using the state the GMD had constructed. They wanted a new state, built on the pattern of the Soviet Union, a full break with China’s earlier history
and
with the Chinese state that had come into being after the 1911 revolution. Even the leaders who were most dedicated to learning from the CCP’s own history realized that it did not prepare them for building a modern state. By 1949 all of the plans for a socialist China were drafted based on Soviet models and with Soviet expert assistance. From city planning to agricultural reform, from cultural institutions to labor camps, from nationalities policies to foreign policy, the new socialist state that the CCP wanted to build was to be modeled on the Soviet experience. Its capital city, which the party in 1949 decided would be Beijing, was to be fully refashioned in Soviet style. The earliest Communist plans for the city simply superimposed the Great Stalin Plan for Moscow of 1935 on the already existing old Ming grid. The link to the Soviet Union was intended to be the largest transfer of foreign knowledge into China ever and to enable the new regime to break with China’s troubled past in a quick and streamlined manner.

Some foreign observers in 1949 thought that the PRC faced a choice in terms of its foreign policy. Some Americans even believed that China might become an independent power rather than be close to the Soviet Union. They would have been rather shocked to find how total the orientation toward working with the Soviets was inside the CCP in the late 1940s. In foreign policy terms, the question was not whether to agree or not agree with Soviet positions, but how to find out enough about Soviet thinking to ensure a fast and full CCP compliance. There was the question of Yugoslavia, for example. There in the spring of 1948 Stalin very quickly moved from approval to condemnation, accusing the Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito of resisting Soviet orders. CCP foreign affairs personnel were desperate to keep up with current thinking in Moscow, especially since Tito’s party had been the only East European party the CCP had independent relations with. As soon as Stalin’s castigation of Tito became fully known to the CCP,
Mao—out his temporary dwelling in the town of Xibaipo—issued a proclamation using the exact phrases the Soviet leader had used in his condemnation. When Yugoslavia recognized the PRC in 1949, the new Chinese foreign ministry was ordered to send the letter of recognition back. The Chinese Communists were in no mood to deviate from Stalin’s point of view on any issue, domestic or diplomatic.

T
HE
S
INO
-S
OVIET ALLIANCE
was to have a deeper impact on China than any other alliance in the country’s modern history. So far it has taken other foreign influence more than thirty years, since the 1970s, to try to move China away from its Soviet heritage, but only with limited success. Education, defense, government, and party institutions, all seem very Soviet in style still, even after decades of so-called opening and reform.

Why did the Soviet experience fasten itself so deeply in China? One reason is the core value the Soviet project represented for the Chinese Communist Party. It was, after all, the basis on which the party had been founded. Another is the breadth and depth of the encounter with the Soviet experience. Not only did Soviet aid to China become, in relative terms, history’s biggest foreign assistance program from one country to another, but it also came at a time of unprecedented expansion of the Chinese state: Tens of millions of Chinese who had limited experience with foreign models first encountered them through Soviet plans, Soviet experts, or Soviet education.

Stalin’s ideologically based distrust of the CCP prevented the civilian assistance program for China from becoming fully functional, but his successor Nikita Khrushchev knew no such boundaries. On the contrary, Khrushchev made a deepening of the alliance with the PRC a cornerstone in his rise to power after Stalin’s death in 1953. To Khrushchev China was an obvious ally: It was a large, neighboring country, led by a dedicated Communist party that wanted to emulate the Soviet experience. To the new leader, Stalin’s hesitancy with regard to
the CCP stood as an example of the old boss’s increasing madness. No sane person, Khrushchev liked to stress to his colleagues, would forgo such an opportunity. Khrushchev’s own first major foreign visit was to China, in 1954. To Mao as well as to ordinary Chinese it meant a lot that the new Soviet leader came to Beijing instead of the Chinese going to pay homage in Moscow. It showed the importance the new Kremlin leaders attached to China and the respect they had for their CCP counterparts. Even more importantly, Khrushchev promised much more Soviet assistance to China, both civilian and military, than Stalin had ever dreamed of giving. One-third of all projects under the first Chinese Five Year Plan were to be built and paid for by Soviet or East European assistance. By 1955, sixty percent of China’s total trade was with the USSR.
⁷

It is hard to overestimate the significance of total Soviet Bloc assistance to the Chinese Communists between 1946 and 1960. Without it, the first steps toward the modern China that the CCP envisaged would have been impossible. The total economic assistance, including loans, was about $3.4 billion (US) from 1946 to 1960 in 1960 value (which is about $25 billion today). This is, on average, a little bit less than one percent of the Soviet GDP year by year. In reality, the transfers for 1954 to 1959 were much higher than this, in value as well as percentage-wise. This sum does not include technology transfers, salaries for Soviet experts in China, or stipends for Chinese students in the USSR. Even if we subtract the roughly eighteen percent that came from Soviet allies and around fifteen percent that was, over time, paid back by the PRC, we are still dealing with a vast program of resource shifting with significant effects for both countries.
⁸

By the mid-1950s, Soviet advisers were attached to all Chinese ministries, regional and provincial governments, and major industrial enterprises. Soviet experts advised on every aspect of life in new China—from working with youth and women, minorities, soldiers, teachers, and engineers, to education, science, mining, military training,
and general fitness. The Soviet advisers generally worked well with their Chinese counterparts. To the Chinese, in spite of the CCP’s attempts at preventing too enthusiastic fraternization, the Soviets were models for what they themselves wanted to become: educated, dedicated, and efficient. To the Soviets, the Chinese honored them and their experience by wanting to model their new state on the Soviet Union. There were plentiful conflicts over food, sex, hygiene, or status, the usual elements of cultural clashes. But the significance of what the advisers were doing usually overrode the problems that arose, despite attempts by propriety-obsessed party commissars from both parties to magnify any difficulty that arose. For most of the decade the Sino-Soviet alliance worked well and fulfilled the purpose that both countries aimed at: to create the most powerful anti-Western alliance the world had seen since the rise of the Ottoman empire.

T
HE MODERN NATION
that the PRC aspired to be needed a modern defense force. After the end of World War II, with the Red Army in Manchuria and the Japanese empire in ruins, the CCP, for the first time in its history, began the building of a modern army. While the party’s military experiences from the previous fifteen years obviously formed the backdrop for what in 1945 became the People’s Liberation Army, the inspiration for its organization, as well as its strategy, were explicitly Soviet. Some 1,500 young Chinese officers got their training in Soviet military academies before the People’s Republic was set up. Others were trained by Soviet instructors in Manchuria between 1947 and 1949. The likely figure for those trained in the Soviet Union from 1950 to 1960 is nine thousand. The number trained inside China must have been many times that. The result was a modern Chinese army that looked increasingly like the Soviet Red Army, that served the same purposes internally and fought wars more or less in the same way.

The organization of the new People’s Liberation Army was consciously and directly fashioned on that of the Soviet army. The units,
the ranks, the weaponry, the tactics, and even the uniforms were taken from Soviet textbooks or from advice given by Red Army instructors. The new force was the pride of the party leaders. They saw it as an impressive combination of battle skills learned in the war against Japan and the Chinese civil war, on the one hand, and Soviet teaching on the other. Even though some Chinese officers found it hard to give up the much more improvised and flexible approach to military affairs propagated prior to the final offensives of the civil war in 1948 and 1949, they too were easily won over by the increased status that their modern hardware and their bright new uniforms gave them. By 1955 this Sovietization of the PLA was more or less complete, with the concept of fourteen military ranks somewhat difficult for the egalitarian-minded Chinese soldiers to swallow.

The PLA became not just a defense force but something perhaps even more important. It became a school for socialism and the country’s most effective instrument for mass education and social betterment. Only a small percent of the country’s young men ended up drafted for two to three years of service in the new conscript force. There were exemptions for most things from study to farming. But the 800,000 who did serve each year were educated in the army, they traveled, and they learned about their country and about the new creeds of socialism and nationalism. The PRC spent a very high percentage of its annual budget—an average of 30 percent in the 1950s—on the military, but certainly the part that went into training officers and soldiery was paid back later, as many of these men came to play important roles in China’s general progress and development.

This symbiosis of military and civilian matters has been particularly important for China’s technological development. The patents, models, and training received from the Soviets in the military field in the 1950s were crucial to China for two decades to come. Much of Soviet technology was intentionally dual-purpose; it could be used in the military as well as in the civilian sector. While the Chinese navy and air force
developed according to Soviet models, the technologies taught in China’s military academies became crucial for China’s capacity in other fields as well, such as in its nuclear programs, its aircraft industry, and much of its heavy machine building. The first Chinese-built aircraft in common use, the Y-5 (Yunshu-5, or Yun-5), was a copy of the Russian Antonov An-2 light cargo biplane designed in the 1940s. Although an extraordinarily slow plane, it was well suited to China’s needs because of its versatility and low operating costs.

China’s military, as it still exists, was formed on the Soviet model. It became a rather cumbersome edifice capable of flashes of strategic brilliance, which treated its conscript soldiers harshly while catering to their basic needs. While kept under civilian control up to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the PLA became a crucial part of the power equation within the PRC, the seemingly streamlined and purposeful part of a republic that became increasingly given to political excess.

T
HE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE
S
OVIET MODEL
in education started in earnest in China after 1945. Even outside the CCP, there was much admiration for Soviet training and teaching methods going back as far as the May Fourth era. During the Second World War, the Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese Military and Political University and Yan’an University introduced Soviet pedagogical methods on a large scale. During the civil war, the lessons of the Yan’an period were deepened by much more direct contact with Soviet educational and technical advisers, especially in the Northeast. The First National Higher Education Conference in June 1950, the first of the normative conferences on changes in education, advocated a complete rebuilding of the Chinese higher education system according to a Soviet model. All universities and colleges were to be placed directly under the Education Ministry, young teachers were to be sent to the Soviet Union or Soviet-staffed training colleges in China for instruction in pedagogical methods, and a massive program of translating Soviet textbooks was inaugurated. Simultaneously, the conference
decreed the abolition of the system of individual teachers being responsible for training students. From now on there should be full-fledged departments that taught students collectively and were collectively responsible for the political content of their teaching.
⁹