The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  They also lived in a chaotic world where politics mattered. With the Japanese invasion, the lives of ordinary people were clearly and directly affected by the world of high politics. Many of them had lost family members during the occupation. They felt they needed to become involved in politics, both to protect and to advance themselves. One option was to join one of the many community associations – secret societies, clans and trade organizations. But the Communist party offered something different. It was perceived as more reliable than traditional associations in helping its members; it seemed to make sense of the politics of the time and had a clear strategy. It was modern, yet not Western and ‘imperialist’, it was committed to the ordinary person – people like them91 – it was well-organized and powerful, and it promised to help the Chinese assert themselves. As one said, ‘I thought their propaganda said that if I joined them, I would be like those who were running China. I knew the Communists were very powerful in China and no one dared oppose them.’ Communism and the October Revolution had shown how a poor, weak nation could suddenly become one of the great powers: as another explained, ‘Until the Chinese learned about the Russian Revolution, we were no good at politics and we made fools of ourselves. However, now the Chinese Communists have learned from the Russians how to have a revolution, and no one laughs any more about the Chinese revolution.’92

  Once they joined the party, Communists felt they had influence in the world: ‘It was as if I climbed on the back of a tiger,’ one declared. ‘It was very exciting and I had the power of the tiger; I moved as he moved.’ They did not at first object to party customs such as rectification. As eager self-improvers they were happy for the party to correct them, though they soon became anxious that group criticism might lead to a loss of status within the party. Indeed, for Communists brought up in a Confucian culture, a primary attraction of the party was the moral education it offered: ‘The political commissar told me he would help me learn about Marxism-Leninism, so that I would be able to get rid of my bad habits,’ one remembered.93

  Maoist Marxism-Leninism served a number of other functions for the guerrillas. It could be a source of emotional sustenance in battle. The political commissar would frequently give long political lectures before fighting started, and each soldier would step forward with a clenched-fist salute, promising to sacrifice his life to the Marxist-Leninist cause. According to one soldier, ‘When we had all finished making our speeches, and I had told them that I wasn’t afraid to die a true revolutionary, it didn’t seem as though it would be very serious if we were all killed. That’s how fierce Marxism-Leninism is.’ The ideology was also seen in another way: as a special, esoteric knowledge, which showed how history worked and how to win the political struggle. The Malayan guerrillas were particularly impressed that the Communists had shared this valuable knowledge with them, unlike the selfish Westerners who kept the secrets of their success to themselves:

  Marxism-Leninism teaches one how to carry out a revolution and what history will be like. The Communists have books that tell how to be successful politically, and they let everyone read them so that if you want to help them you will know what to do. The democracies keep everything secret and tell no one what their plans are. Who knows what the strategy and tactics of Wall Street are? If I had wanted to work for the democracies against the Communists, how would I have known what to do?94

  Within China itself, the Communists were one of a number of forces – regional, liberal, student and secret society – opposing a Guomindang that was divided, compromised by discredited elites and corrupt.95 Massive amounts of collaboration between Chinese elites and the Japanese during the war split the Guomindang’s supporters, and the party was shattered by the war against the Japanese. Nationalist administrators after the war were widely seen as greedy – imposing unpopular taxes – and unable to meet the expectations for social justice that were then so common, in Asia as in Europe. The nationalists found themselves suppressing student demonstrations and rural unrest, whilst Chiang Kaishek’s attempts to strengthen central state control also alienated regional elites.

  The Communists did attract much peasant and even some urban support, but their cohesiveness was perhaps their main advantage. Ultimately their victory was a military one, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion. Both sides made strategic errors, but Chiang Kaishek’s were more serious.96 He was forced to retreat to Taiwan, where the Guomindang ruled for many decades. In the spring of 1949 Mao found himself travelling from the village of Xibaipo in Hebei province – the Communist headquarters since 1947 – to the old imperial capital of Beijing. Mao was clearly nervous. He joked that it was rather like making the journey to sit the imperial mandarin exams,97 for whilst the trip was a relatively short one geographically, in cultural terms it was equivalent to the Long March. Mao had to transform himself from guerrilla leader to master of one of the largest states on the globe.

  V

  On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong ascended Tian’anmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace to the old Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing, and addressed a crowd of about 30,000, famously declaring: ‘The Chinese people have now stood up!’ His audience stood in the square in front of the gate, waving the new Chinese flag – red with four small yellow stars surrounding a larger star in the upper left-hand corner. Speaking in his high-pitched voice, he announced the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. It was followed by a military parade, made up of thousands of civilians, some holding portraits of leaders, others playing waist-drums and dancing the traditional Northern Chinese yangge.

  The ceremony had been carefully planned, and every element was there for a reason.98 It owed much to the Soviet demonstrations for the anniversary of the October Revolution in Red Square, but, unlike them, it also had a strong peasant, folk element. Meanwhile, the parade’s symbolism carefully combined Soviet Communism and Chinese nationalism. October was the anniversary of both the 1911 revolution against the Qing and the Russian revolution, whilst the red of the flag referred both to Communist revolution and China’s red earth. The stars also showed that the Communists were committed to national unity: they represented the four classes of ‘the people’ – the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the workers and the peasants, surrounding the great Communist Party, all of whom were to be part of the Chinese ‘New Democracy’. Mao was showing that the new regime was Communist, unashamedly nationalist, and pro-peasant.

  October 1949 marked the culmination of the post-war reddening of the East. As in Europe, the end of Axis-power rule helped the anti-imperialist Communists, as did the serious damage done to old elites by collaboration. China joined two other states – North Korea and Vietnam – as part of the new Asian Communist brotherhood. All three regimes had close similarities, and differed from their East European confrères. They were created by peasant parties, operating in Confucian societies that had fought guerrilla wars against imperialist powers. Yet each state was born in rather different circumstances. If China was Asia’s Yugoslavia – a Communist state born out of an anti-imperialist guerrilla war – North Korea was closer to East Germany – a regime largely created by superpower realpolitik and partition. The Vietnamese revolution, meanwhile, had a strong urban element, and had similarities with its Russian predecessor.

  The North Korean regime was created under the auspices of Soviet troops. The Americans had proposed that Korea be divided on the eve of the Japanese surrender in August 1945, allocating the portion north of the 38th parallel (bordering the USSR) to the Soviets and the South to themselves. The North then followed an East European path: a Popular Front followed by Communization. In February 1946 a Communist-dominated central government was established, led by Kim Il Sung (‘One-star Kim’). However, we should not press the East German parallel too far, for the regime soon secured a good deal of autonomy.

  Kim Sng-ju (he adopted his nom de guerre in 1935) was born in a village near Pyongyang in 1912 into a Christian family. His father was a member of a Christian Korean
nationalist organization, and may have been imprisoned by the Japanese. On his release in about 1920, the family emigrated to Manchuria, joining a large Korean émigré community. Kim’s cultural background was therefore eclectic: he was Korean, born in a state ruled by the Japanese, was educated in Chinese schools in Mandarin, but also returned to Korea for two years at the age of eleven to attend a Christian school – indeed he was for a time a Sunday school teacher, a fact not recorded in his official biography.99 He followed his father into nationalist politics, joining a Marxist group at school in 1929 and, after a brief time in prison, joined a Chinese Communist Party-led guerrilla force in 1931 to fight the occupying Japanese. He rose through the ranks, and became a regional commander of the guerrilla army.

  He spent most of his youth outside Korea, then, but it would be a mistake to see him as a ‘foreigner’. He, like many of his fellow guerrillas, saw himself as a Korean nationalist – though one fighting for international Communism under the leadership of the USSR. There were close links between Eastern Manchuria and the lawless borderlands of North Korea, and Koreans were involved in the guerrilla struggle against the Japanese throughout the region. It was in this tough guerrilla milieu – fighting against an extremely resourceful and harsh Japanese enemy – that Kim’s politics were forged.

  By 1940, however, the Japanese were winning, and Kim, like many other fighters, was forced to seek refuge over the border in the Soviet Union. Kim flourished during his five-year sojourn there and embraced Soviet life with enthusiasm – he seemed to prefer the culture of the Red Army to his former guerrilla life. He received training at the Khabarovsk infantry officer school, and became a captain in the Red Army. He fathered two sons and a daughter during this time, to whom he gave Russian names. His elder son was called Iurii. The man who came to be known as Kim Jong Il was known as Iurri Irsenovich (Il-sung-ovich) Kim for the first few years of his life.

  Kim seems to have wanted to continue his career in the Red Army, but on the fall of the Japanese the Soviets had different ideas for him. They had begun to mistrust the North Korean nationalists whom they were trying to work with, and decided to impose a more reliable, Communist leadership; the 33-year-old returnee was an ideal candidate, even though initially he was not keen.100 He was introduced to the public in October 1945 at a ceremony to honour the Red Army. He had been billed as a venerable, heroic guerrilla leader, and many confused him with a semi-mythological, Robin Hood-style fighter. When they saw him, naturally, they were deeply disappointed:

  [He was] a young man of about 30 with a manuscript approaching the microphone… His complexion was slightly dark and he had a haircut like a Chinese waiter. His hair at the forehead was about an inch long, reminding one of a lightweight boxing champion. ‘He is a fake!’ All of the people gathered on the athletic field felt an electrifying sense of distrust, disappointment, discontent and anger.

  Oblivious to the sudden change in mass psychology, Kim Il-sung continued in his monotonous, plain and duck-like voice to praise the heroic struggle of the Red Army… He particularly praised and offered the most extravagant words of gratitude and glory to the Soviet Union and Marshal Stalin, that close friend of the oppressed peoples of the world.101

  Kim, then, was a Soviet puppet, but the Soviets were not interested in micro-management, and left much of the day-to-day administration to the Koreans.102 Despite his inauspicious start, Kim proved able to manage the factions within the party – his own ‘Manchurians’, the ‘Koreans’ who had stayed under the Japanese, the ‘Soviet’ Koreans who had lived in the USSR, and the ‘Yan’an’ Communists who had been attached to the Chinese Communists in China.103 As will be seen, he also laid the foundations for a regime that attracted a great deal of support by forging together Communism and Korean nationalism.

  Just as Korea was being divided in August 1945, another Communist regime was rising from the ashes of Japanese rule, in Vietnam. But unlike the Koreans, the Vietnamese Communists came to power as part of a genuine, indigenous revolution – a mixture of the Chinese guerrilla revolution of 1949 and the Bolshevik urban revolution of 1917.104 Ho Chi Minh had always been a radical in the Comintern, on Roy’s side of the debate with Lenin (though Roy did not like him), but he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the Soviet obsession with the urban working class. With Mao’s success from the mid-1930s, Ho learnt from the Chinese experience, distancing himself from the old Moscow template. He visited Yan’an in 1938 (though he did not meet Mao himself), and then sent two young party members, Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong, there to a CCP school.105

  The Vietnamese soon began to follow the Chinese recipe. They formed a ‘base area’ in the border regions to the North, created a guerrilla army, and in 1941 transformed the Communist movement into a nationalistic, cross-class Popular Front force (including landlords and officials), now called the League for the Independence of Vietnam – the ‘Vietminh’ – with an extensive rural organization. They then began to plan a peasant uprising against the French imperial administration, which was cooperating with the Japanese. Communists were told to merge with the peasants, dress like the locals, and translate Vietminh manifestos into vernacular verse. They took advantage of peasant resentment at the disruption of traditional agriculture, first by French colonial exploitation, and then by brutal Japanese exactions. Most help to the Communists, however, was the famine of 1944–5, which was made worse by Japanese wartime exactions and not helped by the French, who attracted most of the blame.106 In March 1945 central control of the country was weakened further when the Japanese launched a coup against the French administration and set up a puppet government under Emperor Bao Dai. When the Japanese finally surrendered to the Americans in August, the Vietminh were in an ideal position in the North, with strong support in both Hanoi and the countryside, and merchants and officials stood by as they took over. In the South, the Vietminh also took control, although there they had more serious nationalist rivals.

  On 2 September 1945 Ho stood in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, dressed in a humble khaki suit and blue canvas shoes, and declared the independence of Vietnam, under Communist control. His speech quoted both the American declaration of independence of 1776 as well as the French declaration of the rights of man of 1791.107 Ho still hoped that he might secure American support by signalling that he was still committed to a broad, non-ideological government in the medium term; Stalin had not yet given the Vietnamese Communists any recognition or aid. However, when the French returned to the South with British help soon after the declaration of independence, nationalist groups began to withdraw their support for the Vietminh. The Communists, with strong support in the North, were soon on the defensive in the South, and by 1947 the Vietminh were fighting another anti-colonial war against a French-backed regime.

  The subsequent restoration of European colonial rule after the defeat of the Japanese enraged and emboldened Communists throughout Asia. In many places they were able to exploit the economic disruption in the countryside caused by the war and harsh Japanese exploitation. But outside China, Vietnam and Korea, they were generally unable to fuse Communism with an attractive nationalism. The Indonesian Communist Party took part in fighting against the Dutch, but it had little success. The indigenous socialist leader Sukarno, who sought to combine a non-Marxist socialism with Islam, was much more able to forge such a diverse archipelago together than the Communists. The Communist Party was finally crushed after a failed rebellion in eastern Java in 1948. It was only when it adopted a less revolutionary approach in the 1950s that its fortunes revived.

  More serious were Communist insurgencies in American and British colonies, though, confined as they were to particular groups of the population, they also ultimately failed. The Americans granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, handing over power to a wealthy collaborator landed elite. Its attempts to disband the Communist-led People’s Anti-Japanese Army (‘Huk’ for short) precipitated a peasant rebellion in central Luzon. The Huks, though, were relatively few.
The Americans also decided that Communism was best fought by addressing social problems, and persuaded the Manila government that land reform could blunt the Communists’ appeal. The revolution was soon tamed by a judicious mix of repression and reform.108

  The Malayan Communist uprising failed for similar reasons. The appeal of Maoism and guerrilla warfare took hold amongst the Chinese in Malaya – like the Malays, about 40 per cent of the population – after the beginning of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937; it was then, at the age of fifteen, that their future leader Chin Peng first became interested in Communism.109 During World War II, the Malayan Communist Party, like the Vietnamese Communists, formed a guerrilla force to fight the Japanese and even received British support. But the British were soon to alienate the Chinese community, first promising them full political rights and then, when the War was over, reneging on that promise under pressure from the Malays. The Communists took up the Chinese ethnic cause, and fought a guerrilla insurgency against the British from 1948.110 They were, however, at a disadvantage compared with the Vietminh. Their support was largely limited to the Chinese, especially the poor, excluded rural population without secure land rights, and the British, like the Americans in the Philippines, generally took a more conciliatory line than the French and the Dutch. They sought to win ‘hearts and minds’ of potentially Communist villagers.111 And as well as declaring their intention of giving Malaya independence, they embarked on the costly resettlement of half a million Chinese squatter peasants into highly defended ‘new villages’, which gave them higher living standards and starved the guerrillas of support.