by Max Boot
IT IS VITAL to underscore how weak the two biggest colonial powers were by 1945 in order to understand why decolonization swept the world in the next few years and why anti-Western guerrillas and terrorists appeared to be ascendant. This part of the book will examine Mao Zedong’s triumph in China, Ho Chi Minh’s victory in Indochina against the French, the FLN’s defeat of the French in Algeria, and (the lone success for the counterinsurgents) Britain’s suppression of a communist revolt in Malaya. But focusing on individual wars can easily give the sense that armed rebels defeated their old colonial masters. It would be more accurate to say that the empires were beaten from within. Nationalist uprisings contributed to the end of the imperial age, but seldom were they the decisive factor.
Even if Britain and France had been determined to hold on to all their overseas possessions after 1945, they would have been hard-pressed to do so. Both were essentially bankrupt. Neither country could comfortably fight a prolonged counterinsurgency. Especially not in the face of hostility from the rising superpowers that had usurped their place on the world stage. The Soviets, and later the Chinese, were always ready to provide arms, training, and financing to “national liberation” movements of a Marxist bent. The United States, for its part, despite its support for rebuilding Western Europe, had little sympathy with attempts to prolong European rule overseas. As the editors of Life magazine “bluntly” informed “the People of England” in 1942: “we are not fighting . . . to hold the British Empire together.”3 Indeed the United States pressed Britain to end its rule from India to Palestine. Later, as the Cold War heated up, Washington would modify its stance; it showed a willingness, for example, to bankroll the French war in Indochina. But in general the Americans viewed the continuation of colonial rule as a gift to communist subversives.
In 1948–49 the Truman administration threatened an end to Marshall Plan funding for the Netherlands if it did not end its efforts to put down a nationalist revolt in Indonesia.4 Seven years later, in a more high-profile confrontation, the Eisenhower administration threatened to let the pound collapse unless Britain, and its allies, France and Israel, ended their military operation to seize the Suez Canal and overthrow Egypt’s strongman, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Threatened with financial ruin, Britain and France had no choice but to give in, thus demonstrating the pathetic depth of their postwar weakness.
Even before then the British elite had already largely given up the imperial ghost. The theories of racial superiority that had once underpinned white rule over Asians and Africans had been discredited in different ways by the Nazis and Japanese. A British officer wrote in 1945 that, walking in Calcutta, he felt “rather like a Nazi officer must have felt walking along a Paris boulevard.”5
Nationalism had been percolating for decades in what became known as the Third World, thanks to the proliferation of European ideas. The desire for independence had been held in uneasy check by fear of the consequences, but the fall of Singapore in 1942, when 85,000 British troops surrendered to a Japanese force one-third their size, shattered once and for all any illusions about European invincibility.6 By war’s end, colonial elites were no longer willing to accept European rule—and in most cases Europeans were not willing to impose it at gunpoint.
In 1946 a British government publication declared, “British ‘Imperialism’ is dead.”7 To be sure, even Clement Atlee’s Labour government, which held power from 1945 to 1951, had no intention of dissolving the empire overnight. Initially Atlee hoped for a slow, stately process “to guide the colonial territories to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth.”8 But it soon became clear that procrastination would not be possible. Despite the opposition leader Winston Churchill’s impassioned warnings that “premature, hurried scuttle” carried “the taint and smear of shame,”9 independence was rushed for India, Palestine, and other colonies, leading to bloody civil wars. As one Labour minister acknowledged in 1948, “If you are in a place where you are not wanted, and where you have not got the force, or perhaps the will, to squash those who do not want you, the only thing to do is to come out.”10
Come out Britain did beginning in 1947 with the transfer of power in India, continuing in 1948 with Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Palestine, resuming in 1956 with Sudan, followed the next year by the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Malaya. The rest of the African colonies were given their freedom a few years later. By 1967, the year that Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced the abandonment of commitments “East of Suez,” almost all of the empire was gone. Notwithstanding a few rearguard actions such as the Falkland Islands War in 1982, the age of imperialism was effectively over.
Most of the process was relatively peaceful. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi showed in India how civil disobedience, strikes, and protests—“a sort of non-violent warfare,” Orwell called it—could shame a liberal empire into withdrawal. (These were methods, Orwell noted, that “could not be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.”) Their example of “shaking empires by sheer spiritual power”11 (Orwell again) was emulated by Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, and other independence leaders in Africa. All of them were helped by the United Nations’ newfound ability to marshal international opinion against imperialism.
Where the British did face violent opposition, it did not take much to persuade them to leave. In 1947 the British cabinet decided to abandon Palestine after three years of attacks by Jewish terrorists, most belonging to the right-wing Irgun and Lehi (a.k.a. “the Stern Gang”), had killed 338 Britons—fewer than had died during one day of the retreat from Kabul in 1842. This was one of the more successful terrorist campaigns ever waged; Churchill called it a “hell-disaster.” But as important as bombs, such as the one that blew up the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946 (an Irgun operation that killed 91 people), was the force of moral suasion exemplified by the Exodus affair. In 1947 the Royal Navy intercepted a ship called Exodus from Europe—1947 packed full of Jewish refugees trying to reach the Holy Land. In the process of taking over the vessel, Royal Marines killed and wounded a number of the passengers. The British then sailed the ship to Germany, where the passengers were off-loaded in “the land of their annihilation.” As the Israeli historian Benny Morris notes, this was a “major propaganda coup”: “Nothing could have done more to promote the Zionist cause.”12
Britain generally fought only to hold on to a few bases such as Cyprus and Aden deemed to be of strategic significance—or, as in Malaya and Kenya, to prevent a takeover by Communists or other extremists. When they did choose to fight, the British often did so skillfully and successfully; their counterinsurgency record is better than that of the French during the same period, and some of their campaigns, notably that in Malaya, are still studied by military strategists. But Britain was as successful as it was in large part because it was careful to pick its spots and not get mired in hopeless struggles to perpetuate unpopular rule in the dawning age of national self-determination. Belgium likewise gave up its only colony, Congo, without a fight in 1960.
The French remained more truculent, perhaps in reaction to their all-too-accommodating behavior before the war. They saw a need to hold on to their empire in order to resurrect lost glory and erase the humiliation of defeat. In 1945–46 they slaughtered thousands of Algerians and Vietnamese, and hundreds of Syrians, to reestablish their rule. In 1947–48 they killed at least 11,200 people to quash a revolt in Madagascar.13 But, like the British, the French were willing to grant independence to most of their African colonies with no bloodshed. (Even Madagascar became an independent member of the French Community, the Francophone version of the British Commonwealth, in 1960.) And, as we shall see, their will to prosecute the wars in Indochina and Algeria was severely limited.
So too with the Dutch, who abandoned Indonesia after an unpopular “police action” in 1947–48.
The Portuguese, under their fascist dictator Ant
onio Salazar, held out the longest. They did not abandon their Africa colonies, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique, until 1974–75 following a coup d’état in Lisbon. Significantly, the end of the Portuguese Empire, as with the Russian Empire nearly two decades later, was brought about on the home front—not on a distant battlefield.
NONE OF THIS is meant to trivialize the accomplishments of nationalist rebels; only to place them in the proper perspective. That sort of perspective was lacking in the immediate post–World War II era when the myth of guerrilla invincibility was born. By the mid-1970s, following the American defeat in Vietnam, it was easy for an informed observer to believe that it was virtually impossible for a conventional army to defeat an unconventional foe. Nothing could be further from the truth; as our survey should have already shown, the odds remain stacked against those who adopt guerrilla or terrorist tactics. For guerrillas to triumph they usually require outside assistance along with a major lack of acumen or will on the part of the government under siege. All of these factors were present in China, whose civil war would serve as a template for postwar insurgencies.
Its inclusion in a section entitled “The End of Empire” may seem strange since the Chinese Communists triumphed over a homegrown regime, not one imposed from abroad. But the revolutionary struggle in China had long been fueled by opposition to imperialism, first Western, then Japanese. Part of the Communists’ winning strategy was to paint their enemies as the “running dogs” and “lackeys” of the “imperialists” and to depict themselves as the true champions of Chinese independence. Moreover, Mao Zedong’s triumph would serve as inspiration for countless imitators across the Third World intent on overthrowing regimes ruled by Westerners or friendly to them. It is impossible to understand what came later—what happened in the 1950s and 1960s, the great age of communist and nationalist insurgency—without understanding how the “Reds” came to power in the world’s most populous nation in the 1940s.
44.
THE RISE OF THE RED EMPEROR
Mao Zedong’s Long March to Power, 1921–1949
THE STORY BEGINS in Shanghai. This is where the Chinese Communist Party was born—an appropriate birthplace because communism was a Western import and Shanghai was, and still is, the most Western of mainland Chinese cities. In the 1920s much of the metropolis was ruled by “foreign devils”: Britons and Americans in the International Settlement, the French in their Concession next door, and the Japanese with an informal concession of their own. They had made Shanghai what it was—the “Paris of the East” or the “Whore of the Orient,” take your pick—a modern, bustling metropolis of palatial hotels and department stores, exclusive clubs, sleazy opium dens, louche cabarets and anything-goes brothels, broad boulevards jammed with cars and carts, rickshaws and electric trams. It was a major center of commerce, journalism, and the arts and a draw for hucksters, merchants, bankers, prostitutes, gangsters, intellectuals, missionaries, and refugees from across China and, indeed, the world.14
This Westernized city depended on countless Chinese laborers who lived in slums where disease was rampant and opportunities for advancement minimal. And even their existence was luxurious compared with that of the peasants, the vast majority of the Chinese population, who led lives that had changed little for millennia, toiling the jade green earth, always a flood or drought away from starvation. The average income of China’s 460 million people was just $12 a year, and 10 percent of the population owned more than 50 percent of the land. In retrospect historians can discern considerable evidence of positive evolution during this period, with rising standards of living, a vibrant intellectual scene, and the first stirrings of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. But that was not how it looked at the time. Mao Zedong aptly summarized the contemporary consensus when he said that China was “semi-colonial and semi-feudal.”15
Its humiliating backwardness had already sparked two unsuccessful uprisings that had undermined the imperial system: the Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864 and the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Manchu dynasty was finally toppled by a military mutiny in 1911. Yet no durable government emerged after the last emperor’s abdication. China was divided among regional warlords, many of them corrupt and predatory. A rising young generation hungered for an alternative, a regime that would make life better for all and restore the Celestial Empire’s long-lost greatness.
It was in these conditions that in July 1921 thirteen delegates gathered in a girls’ school, closed for the summer, on Rue Bourgeat in Shanghai’s French Concession. They were joined by two European representatives of the Comintern, the Russian-run Communist International, which was responsible for convening the meeting. The First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party ended ingloriously a few days later when the delegates had to flee just ahead of a police raid. At the time the entire party had just fifty-seven members.
Although he was present at the First Congress, twenty-seven-year-old Mao Zedong was not one of its leaders. The first secretary-general was a prominent university professor from Peking. Mao, by contrast, was, in the words of a fellow attendee, “a pale-faced . . . youth” who “had not yet shaken off his rough Hunanese ways”; “in his long gown of native cloth [he] looked rather like a Taoist priest out of some village.”16
Far from trying to hide his country bumpkin origins, Mao reveled in them, using his “rough” habits to shock his more cosmopolitan colleagues. Years later, when he was already on the cusp of power, a visitor “saw him absent-mindedly turn down the belt of his trousers and search for some guests”—lice. Like many peasants, he never learned to brush his teeth, preferring to rinse out his mouth with tea, and refused to visit a dentist. By the time he was China’s “chairman,” after a lifetime of chain smoking, his teeth were “covered with a heavy greenish film”; later they would turn black and fall out. He also refused to bathe, preferring to be rubbed down with a hot, wet towel. Likewise he resisted Western flush toilets; he would travel everywhere with a “squat-style privy.” And he never lost his affinity for the oily, spicy cuisine of his native Hunan, which was to make him portly in middle age. He often joked that a “love of pepper” was necessary for any true revolutionary.17
It goes without saying, however, that Mao was no ordinary peasant. For a start, his family was more wealthy than most; his father would have qualified as one of the “rich peasants” he would later “liquidate.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Mao loathed his father. Born in 1893, he was, like many other guerrilla leaders, a rebel from childhood on, arguing with his “harsh and severe”18 father in public, running away from home, even threatening to commit suicide if he didn’t get his way. He firmly resisted his father’s imprecations to prepare for a life on the farm. He was the “family scholar,” always reading, always dreaming. His favorite books were tales of bandits and peasant rebels—the Chinese version of Robin Hood.19 He also studied Chinese imperial history. Later in life, one of Mao’s intimates was to write that he “identified with China’s emperors” and “that his greatest admiration was reserved for the most ruthless and cruel.”20 No doubt he was drawn to strong leaders because the China of his youth conspicuously lacked them; from the ages of eighteen (1911) to thirty-five (1928) he lived in a country where warlords held sway and disorder reigned, even if it also saw rapid economic and intellectual progress, with the founding of great universities and the rudiments of parliamentary government.
Much as he hated his father, Mao benefited from his generosity in funding his education. He attended expensive schools at an age when most of his contemporaries were working the fields. Mao became politically aware while studying in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province. He was attracted to “liberalism, democratic reformism, and utopian socialism,” and bemoaned the “ignorance and darkness” of his country. In 1911 he and his friends cut off their pigtails in defiance of the tottering Manchu dynasty. In an early indication of his dictatorial personality, this eighteen-year-old radical also “assaulted” friends and “forcibly removed their que
ues.”
That year Mao joined a revolutionary army as a private but did not see battle. His arrogance was already becoming evident: as a student, Mao thought he was too good to fetch his own water from a well as the other soldiers did. He was not attracted to a military career and left after six months. He spent the next five years in a teacher training school. Upon graduation in 1918, he briefly followed one of his teachers to Peking, where he got a job as an assistant in the library of Peking University—the closest he ever got to a higher education. Here Mao met many of China’s leading intellectuals, “but to most of them,” he later recalled, “I didn’t exist as a human being” because “my office was so low.” He would amply repay such disdain decades later when he would consign millions of intellectuals to death, imprisonment, and hard labor.
Returning to Changsha in 1919, he became more active in politics. He founded a radical student newspaper and also a radical bookstore that turned a profit, showing his talents for propaganda and organization. Both skills—so essential for modern insurgency—would come in handy once he joined the nascent Communist Party as secretary of the Hunan branch, where his first job was organizing labor unions.21
THE COMMUNIST PARTY was so weak in those days that its Russian sponsors forced it into a marriage of convenience with the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen, which claimed more than 100,000 members.22 Following Sun’s death in 1925, leadership was assumed by his brother-in-law, an idealistic young army officer of socialist leanings and Methodist faith who had studied in both Japan and Russia. His name was Chiang Kai-shek, and he had much in common with Mao. A biographer’s description of Chiang—“Although often introverted, he could be a bully, self-righteous, and arrogant”23—applies equally well to Mao.
Chiang’s initial power base was the Whampoa Military Academy, near Canton, where his political commissar was Zhou Enlai, already a dedicated Communist, later Mao’s right-hand man. Mao, too, served the Kuomintang between 1923 and 1927; at one time, he was head of its Propaganda Department. The Communists eagerly cooperated with Chiang when he set out on his Northern Expedition in 1926 to defeat the warlords and unify the country—a task in which he was only partially successful.
