Four More Books on China
The internecine conflict between the Kuomintang (or Nationalists) and Communists defined Chinese politics for many decades. By the time the defeated Kuomintang fled to Taiwan in 1949, it had been going on for over 20 years—intermittently at first, and as a full-scale civil war from 1945. Thereafter, it continued as a mostly cold, very occasionally hot war before settling into the uneasy consensus that persists today. Although the Kuomintang is now just one party amongst many in Taiwan’s political system (and, somewhat ironically, on the side that favours warmer relations with the mainland), the spectre of the Kuomintang-Communist—or “Free China”-“Red China”—conflict continues to shape the discourse of Cross-Strait Relations.
To a significant extent, the Kuomintang-Communist conflict was a war without victors—certainly none of the moral variety. Not only was it hugely destructive on China’s environment and society, peace was a genuine possibility at a number of junctures. Sadly, it was rejected because both sides believed that military success at the expense of the other party was just around the corner.
This story of painstakingly assembled peace accords undone by arrogance and bad faith is the subject of Daniel Kurtz-Phelan’s excellent book, The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945–1947 (Norton, 2018). Marshall is well-known for his leadership during the Second World War, as well as his postwar stints as Secretary of State and Secretary of Defence. But between the glory of the Allied victory and the Marshall Plan, Marshall served 13 decidedly inglorious months in China, attempting to broker a truce between the Kuomintang and the Communists. At first, Marshall’s assiduous efforts paid off; peace seemed tantalizingly attainable. However, the age-old animosity proved hard to overcome, and the situation deteriorated. Marshall was also constrained by American unwillingness, despite the United States’ incipient rivalry with the Soviet Union, to be dragged further into a domestic dispute.
Kurtz-Phelan’s greatest strength is his ability to capture the complexity of his characters—first and foremost Marshall, but also Chiang Kai-Shek, Zhou Enlai, and their deputies. Chiang, for example, comes across as a man of personal virtue, but also frustrating political myopia. While he often proved willing to defer to Marshall’s judgment and do the right thing, he ultimately failed to overcome his hubris—rooted in the conviction that the Americans, fearful of a Communist takeover, would back him no matter what he did. Marshall is a much more sympathetic figure. He felt duty-bound to bring the two sides to an agreement, and thus went to great lengths to understand the situation and act as a neutral arbiter. Most importantly, Marshall, unlike Chiang, understood the practicable extent of American power. However, though he was not overconfident, he underestimated the degree to which the Kuomintang and Communist visions of China and conceptions of power were incompatible. No form of American intervention could bridge the divide.
The end of Kurtz-Phelan’s book dovetails with the beginning of Frank Dikötter’s “People’s Trilogy”, which consists of three books: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957 (Bloomsbury, 2013); Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (Bloomsbury, 2010); and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (Bloomsbury, 2016). Although Mao’s Great Famine was published before The Tragedy of Revolution, it is best to begin with the latter, so that the events unfold chronologically.
Over the three books, Dikötter paints a damning portrait of “Red China”. He argues forcefully that the Communist leaders who replaced Chiang and his coterie were not just wrong, but cruel. In making his case, he marshals an impressive amount of anecdotal and statistical evidence, much of it from previously inaccessible provincial archives. By the end of Dikötter’s narration, it is difficult to overcome the feeling that human life, as well as the environment, was indeed treated with appalling indifference during the Mao years. The numbers that Dikötter cites—along with, for example, harrowing stories of people eating mud, paper, or each other to stay alive during the famine—are overwhelming.
Dikötter’s weakness, especially in The Tragedy of Liberation, is his insistence that the Communists gained and retained power solely through deception and brute force. While his prosecution is convincing—and he is not a scholastic outlier in his interpretation of the facts in question—it is sometimes over-simplistic. Especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many people sincerely saw the Communists as a force for positive change, and continued to do so even after things began to come apart at the seams. Put another way, the Kuomintang years were not a golden age which the Communists brought to an end by mere political sleight-of-hand and intimidation. There is more to the story than that. To be sure, part of this can be ascribed, as Dikötter does, to naiveté on the part of the citizenry (e.g., artists and intellectuals who believed they would have unrestricted freedom of expression) and Communist machinations. However, this analysis does not fully canvass the ambivalence, acceptance, or even enthusiasm felt by many as the Civil War concluded with the establishment of the People’s Republic.
That criticism aside, Dikötter’s trilogy is a fine achievement, particularly for the scope and depth of his archival research. So long as Chinese archives remain partially or entirely closed to researchers, it will not be possible to piece together a full picture of the Mao years—at least from a statistical point of view. Moreover, even when access to government data is granted, as it was in a limited fashion to Dikötter, there remains doubt about the accuracy of that data. Nonetheless, the fact that the Mao years continue to be airbrushed in officially-approved accounts of Chinese history means that scholarship in this area remains necessary. For the interested reader, Dikötter’s books are not a bad place to start.