CHAPTER 7: WHOSE IDENTITY, WHOSE CONSTRUCTS AND WHOSE INTEREST? THE SYNTHESIS OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DATA IN
4.5 The Establishment of the People’s Republic of China The Chinese People have stood up! (Mao, 21 September 1949)
The People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 October 1949. The country was finally under the rule of the communists and the nationalists had settled their government in Taiwan. In the speech Mao gave on 21 September 1949, he referred to China’s greatness that had been eroded by imperialism and “domestic reactionary governments” (Mao 2014:17) such as Chiang
36 In the 1980s China-Taiwan relations had improved, comparatively. However, these relations were gravely disturbed in the 1990s when Taiwan opted for democracy, making a return to authoritarian China even more remote (ibid).
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Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang. The United States and capitalist powers were also targets of Mao’s attack as he accused them of aiding and abetting the Kuomintang during the civil war. He spoke of China, a country that at the time represented a quarter of humanity as having had a proud history of being “a great courageous and industrious nation” (Mao 2014:16). However, the Chairman was aware of the fact that China was born amid a lot of challenges and that its stance to fight colonialism and strengthening “the people’s democratic dictatorship” (Mao 2014:17) would put China on the collision course with some powerful foreign and capitalist powers.
The identity that the new government took already gave it a controversial standing in world politics. Being a communist government almost automatically pitted China against the capitalist West and put it in the same camp as the Soviet Union. In his opening address at the First Session of the National People’s Congress in 1954, Mao asserted that “the force at the core leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party. The theoretical basis guiding our thinking is Marxism-Leninism” (Mao 2013: para. 1 line 1). Mao spoke of the Soviet Union in glowing terms, calling it the defender of world peace and describing its detractors as reactionaries (Mao 1961:100). Furthermore, China’s economy had been ravaged by two decades of civil war (Payne 2014) and the struggle against Japanese occupation. Thus, apart from identifying itself as a communist country, China also saw an intersection of identities with the poor countries of the world especially those that had experienced foreign invasion and occupation. During one of his speeches in 1935, Mao had described China as “a semi colonial country jointly dominated by several imperialist powers” (Mao 1965:153).
It was also a galling experience that though the GMD had been the ultimate loser in the civil war, the exiled government in Taiwan retained its role as the representative of China at the United Nations. From 1949 Taiwan held this role for more than two decades. China’s identities, then, were coupled with certain interests: being a communist power, China aimed at inspiring other regions with the rightness of communism; it also sought to end foreign invasion and imperialism and promote sovereign integrity; in addition, it wanted an end to Taiwan’s position as the representative of China and for this China had to rely on other regions for political support.
The power on which China could rely the most for sundry support was the Soviet Union (Lynch 2004), the biggest and most influential face of international communism. Being a self-professed communist country meant that China was automatically pitted against the capitalist West. With
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the high tension of the Cold War, ideological persuasion played a determinant role in international relations and foreign policy. For this reason, only communist powers and other players like India that could identify with China’s history (FitzGerald 1976), were overt in their support of the newly formed country. For China to establish beneficial relations with other powers, it required well thought out and crafted policies and diplomacy, a feat which some have argued China failed to achieve. Aitchen K. Wu (1950) traced China’s diplomatic ineptitude in dealing with Soviet Union to 1929 when the Chinese forced unilateral control of the Chinese Eastern Railway that was hitherto owned jointly between the Chinese and the Soviets. Philip E.
Jacob (1951:170) also referred to “the confusion, ineptness and disorganization of Chinese diplomacy which opened the way for the extraordinary expansion of Soviet influence over the life and affairs of the vast but virtually state- less country called China.” However, the PRC won some diplomatic victories. The milestone agreement that the People’s Republic of China made with the Soviet Union, called the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, was signed on 4 February 1950. By signing this treaty, the Soviet Union renounced its recognition of the Republic of China in favour of communist China. It was a crucial diplomatic victory by the communists over Taiwan and this tussle for recognition continues to this day.
However, it would be remiss of what claims to be an objective analysis to state that China and the Soviet Union were partners on equal footing. Indeed, the Yalta Conference signed among the aligned powers, in the absence of China (see Jacob 1951), devolved responsibility of Manchuria to the Soviet Union after the defeat of Japan in 1945. Thus, even before the institution of the People’s Republic the Soviet Union had questionable authority over what was rightly Chinese territory (Lynch 2004). The difference between the emerging circumstances after 1949 with those preceding was that under the new circumstances, China and the Soviet Union shared their ideological leanings and, in name if not substance, the two aimed at engaging in mutually beneficial interactions.
Prior to the crises in relations that were to follow, China looked on the Soviet Union as “the teacher of socialism” (Schrecker 2004:213) and Mao averred that “the Communist Party of China is a party built on the model of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (Mao 1961:284). These concessions have to be taken in context. Mao, as has been indicated in the chapter already, was convinced of the uniqueness of Chinese circumstances which demanded a
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unique revolutionary struggle. He was essentially saying the method that guaranteed socialists success in the Soviet Union cannot be applied in China with expectations of similar results.
Secondly, playing a subservient role to the Soviet Union was predictably a humiliation to communist China, led by a party that was virulently against subordinating China to any form of foreign control, physical or ideological. Thus, Mao’s adulation towards the Soviet Union masked a covert discomfort. Just as the intermittent and expedient comity that had characterized CCP- GMD relations, Sino-Soviet relations were equally based on expediency and convenience.
Indeed, concealed suspicions between the two powers that eventually escalated into open conflict and ideological attrition were testament to the weak foundations on which Sino-Soviet relations were built.