The Penguin History of the World

President Kennedy’s weakness for Sukarno had reflected the belief that strong, prosperous national states were the best bulwarks against Communism. The history of eastern and south-eastern Asia in the last forty years can indeed be read so as to offer support for that principle, but it had always to be applied specifically in difficult and complex contexts. In any case, by 1960, the dominant strategic fact east of Singapore was the re-creation of Chinese power. South Korea and Japan had successfully resisted Communism, but they too benefited from the Chinese revolution; it gave them leverage with the West. Just as East Asians had always held off Europeans more successfully than the Indian Ocean countries, they showed after 1947 an ability to buttress their independence in both Communist and non-Communist forms, and not to succumb to direct manipulation, even by the Chinese. Some have linked this to the deep and many-faceted conservatism of societies that had for centuries drawn on Chinese example. In their disciplined, complex social networks, capacity for constructive social effort, disregard for the individual, respect for authority and hierarchy, and deep self-awareness as members of civilizations and cultures proudly distinct from the West, the East Asians had more to draw on than many peoples who had come up against the West and its expansionism. The rise of East Asia in the late twentieth century is only comprehensible against a background dominated by something itself immensely varied in its expressions and far from adequately summed up by the cant phrase ‘Asian values’.

With the Chinese Communists’ victory and installation in power in 1949, Beijing was once more the capital of a formally reunited China. Mao Zedong and his party wanted to build a socialist society patterned on the Soviet Union, and Mao himself went on his first foreign trip, to Moscow of course, just a couple of months after his new People’s Republic of China had been founded. There he signed an alliance with Stalin, in spite of the latter’s uncertainties both about the dedication and the capacity of his Chinese Communist comrades. Given Cold War preoccupations elsewhere and the circumstances of the Guomindang collapse, the new China in fact did not need the alliance against an outside threat. Mao wanted Soviet assistance in beginning the difficult task of modernization even more than he wanted a guarantee against the Americans or the Japanese. The followers of Chiang Kai-shek, cooped up in Taiwan, could be disregarded, even if for the moment they were under American protection and irremovable. When a major threat appeared, as the United Nations’ forces approached the Yalu river frontier of Manchuria in 1950, the Chinese reaction was strong and immediate: they sent a large army to Korea. But the main preoccupation of China’s new rulers was the internal state of the country.

China had been in a state of flux ever since the Qing dynasty had been overthrown thirty-eight years before. Even though it had not lost much in terms of territory (except Outer Mongolia, which is – of course – quite a chunk), political stability and social progress were lacking. The economic progress that had been made during the Republican era (1911–49) had mostly been destroyed by the war with Japan. Poverty was universal. Disease and malnutrition were widespread. Material and physical construction and reconstruction were overdue, population pressure on land was as serious as ever, and the moral and ideological void presented by the collapse of the ancien régime over the preceding century had to be filled.

The peasants were the starting-point. Since the 1920s the Chinese Communists had experimented with land reform in the areas they dominated, and they had gained the loyalty of many of the poorest peasants by doing so. By 1956 China’s farms were collectivized in a social transformation of the villages that was said to give control of the new units to their inhabitants, but actually handed them over to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The overthrow of local village leaders and landlords was often brutal; they must have made up a large number of the 800,000 Chinese later reported by Mao to have been ‘liquidated’ in the first five years of the People’s Republic. Meanwhile, industrialization was also pressed forward, with Soviet help, the only source from which China could draw. The model chosen for this, too, was the Soviet one: a Five-Year Plan was announced and launched in 1953 and opened a brief period during which Stalinist ideas dominated Chinese economic management.