Dan Snow's History Hit - China 1949: Year of Revolution

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

In 1949 Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to victory in the long and bloody Chinese Civil War. The impact of this victory was felt not just within China itself, but globally throughout the Cold War and into the modern era. Today, the legacy of 1949 still resonates shaping the political and ideological landscape of China and how it perceives itself on the world stage. Graham Hutchings joins me to discuss the fateful events of 1949 and their impact and the looming possibility of conflict over the island of Taiwan.Graham Hutchings is an Associate at the University of Oxford's China Centre and an Honorary Professor at University of Nottingham, UK. Having previously been Principal at Oxford Analytica and China Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph from 1987 to 1998 he is an expert on Chinese history, and the author of Modern China: A Companion to a Rising Power (2000). His latest book China 1949: Year of Revolution Hardcover is available now from Bloomsbury Press.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got an absolutely brilliant episode for you today, you're going to love it. It's the start of another week of homeschooling here in the UK. My daughter,

Zia, who you've heard on this podcast before, is studying... Henry VIII in the Tudors. What were you writing today, Zia, about Henry's appearance? What was he like when he was young? What was he like when he was old? So what I wrote was that he was handsome and fit when he was young, then he was fat and old when he was older. Yeah, that happens. And Zia, how can you be, but if they were written by a more powerful person than him and they were good comments, then they would probably be true because if they were written by a person who would be scared of Henry punishing them, they would probably be false.

That's the big question. It's big questions here. It's all about bias. Anyway, everyone, It's big questions here. It's all about bias. Anyway, everyone, speaking of bias, this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit is about 1949. It's a turning point in 20th century history. It's the year that the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, finally won the lengthy, the gigantically costly Chinese Civil War. It's a year that therefore is decisive in China's relationships with the rest of the world, the Cold War, not just within China itself. And Graham Hutchings is an associate at the University of Oxford's China Centre. He is an expert. He's lived in China for a long time. He spent some time with me talking about 1949, about his new book, about the events of that fateful year. There's also a little sting in the tail

of this podcast when he says that war between China and Taiwan, of some description, is inevitable soon. So happy thoughts, everyone. Happy thought. You can while away the time between you and a thermonuclear conflict by watching History Hit TV. You just go to historyhit.tv. It's like Netflix for history. We've released a new updated version of the app. So it's working, it's firing at all cylinders now, better search function, better recommendation functions, all sorts of things going on. Thanks everyone for getting in touch with feedback.

You can go there, check out historyhit.tv and then you can watch all the history documentaries on there. For example, there's an excellent Rana Mitter documentary on there talking about China in the Second World War that you'll enjoy. In the meantime, enjoy this thought-provoking podcast with Graham Hutchings. Graham, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's wonderful to have you. It's my pleasure, Dan. We all think instinctively of 1945 being a great hinge, a great turning point of history, but surely 1949 is just important and

gets ever more so as we understand the extent of Chinese power and ambition in this century. It is a massively important year. There's always something arbitrary, isn't there, about historians choosing a year. History doesn't respect chronology in quite the way we scholars of history do, but it does, in the case of China, frame a series of events which were of fundamental importance for the country and its long-term future, and had a fundamental importance on the geopolitical, indeed, shape of the world. Talk to me about the end of the Second World War in 1945. So many people forget that China actually suffered the second highest number of casualties in the Second World War. Brutal, gigantic fighting with the Japanese that had gone on for years

before the Second World War even started for Western powers. What condition was China in? Well, that war, as you rightly say, exacted a terrific toll, not just due to the barbarity of the invasion undertaken by Japan, but also because it began long before war in Europe. You'll be aware that Manchuria, northeast China, in many respects the industrial heartland, was taken by the Japanese in the early 1930s, and they launched a full-scale invasion of China proper in 1937. His nationalist government, KMT government, was fighting this vicious invasion and survived million of them was very badly battered, and there was an enormous yearning for peace, which the Chinese rightly expected would come their way after this conflict. But alas and alack, it gave way to a continuation of the equally bitter civil war between Mao Zedong's communists and Jiang's nationalists.

Were the nationalists the favourites, or did the communists enjoy great advantages? Did they control key areas of the country or receive huge support from the neighbouring Soviet Union, for example? The latter was certainly true. The communists benefited from the fact that the brunt of the Japanese invasion was fielded and taken by Chiang Kai-shek's armies, and they were very badly battered. The communists are small in number. They were in their central China heartland around the city that later became famous of Yan'an, which was their base. But when 1945 came, they were disadvantaged by the fact that their troops were very much smaller in number than Chiang Kai-shek's. They were very much worse equipped.

And the United States in 1945 was still shoveling large amounts of military aid, including advisors in the direction of Chiang Kai-shek. So he was in a good position, as he thought himself at the time, to clear up the communist menace within a year or two and be the undisputed ruler of his country. But boy, it turned out very differently from that. Why was this? Why? I mean, was it the case of communist tenacity, wily tactics, or powerful and convincing messaging? Or was it nationalist corruption, failures, and incompetence? It was both and, he said rather annoyingly. This is one of those major historical questions for which there is no definitive answer,

certainly not at the moment, maybe at some point when we can understand more fully what the communists were doing when the archives are open. The principal reason, I think, is Chiang Kai-shek's military ineptness, his strategic failures, and the fact that he was unable to mobilize both the armies and, more importantly, the people to support his government. And the communists were good. Remember that Chiang Kai-shek is ruling the country and the communists are trying to topple him. The Chinese Communist Party in its inception, right until the present day, one might say, is cast as a fighting machine, a machine for waging struggle and overcoming enemies. for waging struggle and overcoming enemies. And with especially the appeal to peasants and the promise of land, which Chiang Kai-shek decided not to offer them, at least in the same way, they could count on, in the 1930s and 1940s, a big reservoir of support. Now, they had Soviet aid, they had Soviet vice alongside that, which certainly helped them. And they also had the fact that Jiang's armies were warm already. But it was more than that. They were better rulers than Chiang Kai-shek. They were better tacticians and better at strategy. strategy. To what extent does ideology matter here? Are we just talking about the good old fashion balance of steel, high explosive rifles, peasant conscript armies who can raise the most, or did motivation matter? Was the communist message, this transformative message, was it more attractive? The armies on both sides were broadly speaking conscripted. But because Mao and the Communist Party made such a strong play with land

reform and the promise of a much better future, they were able to recruit volunteer peasant armies as well. People who really felt, even if they were not given much choice about whether to fight or not, felt that they could have a reward when the war was done, when Chiang Kai-shek's regime was toppled. They would get their land, they would have peace, and they would have prosperity. On the nationalist side, the armies were bigger, they were better equipped, but they were pretty well all conscripted. And moreover, the conditions on the front line, indeed behind the front line, for soldiers on both sides, but especially the nationalists, was grim. And if you ask your nationalist soldier what he was fighting for, he would have much less clarity as far as an answer is concerned, much less conviction, much less personal stake compared with the communist counterpart.

stake compared with the communist counterpart. I've never thought this before talking to you, but you've made me realise that it might perhaps be useful to think about this war in the context of the later infamous, the oft-lamented great counter-insurgencies of the Cold War in the second half of the 20th century, Vietnam, Malaya, elsewhere. Is this a case really of what we see in those countries, a conventional government force bled white by a powerful rural insurgent movement? Well, there's something very much in what you say. In fact, the Maoist revolution was perhaps the largest example of this rural insurrection, the capturing of the countryside, the restructuring of the countryside in ways in which local people were given real stake in a putative new order. in which local people were given real stake in a putative new order. And of course, one has to remember in the case of China, what is still the case, despite enormous changes over the last 30

years in particular, it's still a rural country. The cities, the towns of China, though prosperous and numerous in the 1940s, accounted for a very small part of the population. If you controlled the countryside and you controlled the arteries of communication between the cities, as the communists did, then you could bring the cities and any government based upon support in those areas to heel. And that was a model. It was a model adopted widely by revolutionaries in Southeast Asia. It was, to some extent, at work in the Malayan emergency. It was certainly in the mind of Ho Chi Minh and the others as they sought to bring an end first to French authority in Indochina and then to American intervention. And it had its disciples, of course, in Latin America and Central America. So you could say that the insurrection, the rural revolt mounted by Mao and its victory in 1949 was a big inspiration.

There's a moment at the end of all these insurgencies when the guerrillas have to start fighting conventionally, you know, symmetrically. In the end, it was North Vietnamese tanks that actually took Saigon. But there's a point at which these forces start having to capture cities. That's right. I mean, the model of the communist revolution was the countryside surrounds the cities, and that they achieved very successfully. But they had to make a switch. They had to make a switch from insurrection to being ruler, from being a rebel to being the administrator. Now, what the communists faced as a major problem in the 1940s was that they didn't have much expertise in the form of people good at urban management. They didn't have a high quality cadre of people

who were able to move in, for example, to Beijing or to Nanjing or to Shanghai and run those cities in ways in which they had run. Cities of complexity, where living standards, educational standards, cultural levels were high. And Mao made much of this before he took over the major cities, saying to party members, we have got to learn rapidly to run cities. Remember also that these are Marxists. Now, they believe that in the vanguard of history as the proletariat, the working class, not the peasantry of whom some things could be expected in terms of creating a new polity, but not everything. So it was critical for Mao, having conquered the cities with his army, the PLA, to run them successfully

subsequently. So in this moment of climax, how does the communist leadership transform itself into a government? Not just any old government, a government of the most populous nation on earth, giant diverse country. It is. And it's attributable, I think, to two things in broad terms. One is the communist capacity for organization, planning, and discipline. So for example, before the communists marched in to Shanghai in May 1949, a city their holdover, which has not been questioned or challenged seriously ever since, they were at work with an underground movement in Shanghai. They were at work infiltrating the police. And they were, the second point, appealing to the spirit of nationalism, of renewal, of the widespread desire amongst the ranks of even

Chiang Kai-shek supporters to have a new China, a strong China, a China that could develop rapidly, that would never again be at the mercy of foreign powers in the way that it had been with Japan in the 30s and 40s, and of course, with the Western powers in the 19th century. These ran deep in the Chinese mind, and the communists were skillful at playing on that and promising people a new deal. That's fascinating. I naively thought the Chinese communist embrace of nationalism was quite a recent phenomenon, but actually it was present at the very beginning. That's right. Early on in the communist party's experience, remember it was only founded in July 1921. This is the year 2021 of its centenary. It began as a rural insurrection movement.

The nationalist element, the sense that we're rebuilding a new China in which all Chinese can be comfortable, was something that they acquired in the course of making revolution in the 30s and 40s. And it reached its apogee. Apple G. So the offer that Mao was making to people outside the Communist Party membership, outside the members of his own army, was, look, you're Chinese. We don't much mind whether you're communist or not at the moment. If you want to help us to build a new China, a China that will never again be humiliated and that will rise to its proper status, then come and join us. You mentioned Mao there. Who are the individuals we need to pay attention to in 1945? And do they matter in this story? Could things have been different if different people have been in charge? They're massively important. The nature of the revolution, the conduct of it,

would be different were it not for the principal personalities involved. I don't, of course, say it wouldn't have happened, but it wouldn't have happened in the way it did for the principal personalities involved. I don't, of course, say it wouldn't have happened, but it wouldn't have happened in the way it did. The principal protagonist arrivals are Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, men not separated much in terms of the age difference between them, and not separated by much when it came to their true nationalist commitment to their country, but very different when it came to the way in which that should be achieved and the goals. For Mao, who was very largely in admiration of Stalin and the Soviet Union, he thought that China would need to join the global socialist camp, would need to emulate the Soviet Union

in a host of respects. There would be elements that would be distinctly Chinese, as it were. He wasn't prepared to be slavish in his devotion, but he saw in the Soviet Union and its own remarkable survival under the Nazi assault as a model for the future of the new China. Chiang Kai-shek was more of a traditionalist, more conservative in outlook, not entirely, indeed, opposed to many modern ways, but felt that China would be better, broadly speaking, in a democratic liberal camp, though tinged with authoritarianism. For him, there was a Chinese model as opposed to a Soviet model. He, Zhang, had studied briefly in the Soviet Union and the army aside was not impressed by what he saw. the quasi-independent militaristic province of Guangxi down in southwest China, Baichongxi. He was a formidable general, perhaps Jiang's best, and he was pitted against Mao's best

by circumstances which are, I think, largely coincidental, but interesting. And Mao's best was Lin Biao, a formidable commander who was the architect of victory, the communist victory in Manchuria, took his fourth field army down to the Yangtze and dealt Bai Chongxi's nationalist armies a terrific blow and indeed destroyed them and ended Chiang Kai-shek's government. The problem with Bai Chongxi, as far as the nationalist cause was concerned, as he was at bitter odds with a Chiang Kai-shek. So not only was Chiang on the back foot from the beginning of 1949, he was ruling over a house divided. to Graham Hutchings about China about 1949. More coming up after this. Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that

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that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Talk to me about the decisive clashes of 1949. What was the scale of the fighting? In 1949, essentially, the nature of the military conflict is the communists advancing from the north to the south of China and basically carrying all before them. The situation immediately prior to that, the preface, if you like, to the year that I'm looking at, was one of huge pitched battles between mass armies. We spoke earlier in our

conversation about rural insurrection and about the communists capturing the countryside and then moving on to the cities and speaking as if it were the Civil War, largely a guerrilla contest. In fact, by the time you get to 1949 and in the early phase of 1949, we see mass armies, we see artillery pitted against each other. We even see tanks in those circumstances where the terrain favored it. The Nationalists had a Navy. The Nationalists had an air force, the Communists had neither. The Nationalists weren't able to deploy theirs to good effect. But once the Communists get across the Yangtze, they are not those of pitched ferocious battle of the kind we saw in the months preceding the year. Okay, you're a very experienced, world-renowned sinologist here, but you're going to laugh at me, but it sounds a little bit like the collapse of the Southern Song and the advance

of the Yuan, the Mongols. Well, the historical resonances run deep. Well, the historical resonances run deep. And what Chinese history does show is that unless Mao had been successful in dislodging Chiang Kai-shek from South China, he would not been able to have survived in North China very long. He had to capture the Yangtze Valley and its rich riverine cities and towns and take the ground, the economic ground from under his opponents. Otherwise, he would be forever in a precarious position. I think your work really emphasises for me the extent to which Chinese society had become brutalised. China had been at war for over a decade, and not just any war, a gigantic industrial warfare,

which had bordered on genocide at times, but certainly enormous casualties, appalling war crimes committed. What effect did that have on the people that you've studied? That's right. And I think that holds the clue to quite a lot of what happened once the communists had gained control over the mainland and waged their own campaigns in pursuit of socialism, in pursuit of socialist perfection, we might say. If you think, for example, of the class struggles that were undertaken to eliminate first the landlords and then the bourgeois intellectuals, and then the collectivization of the 1950s, of the starvation that followed. And finally, or we hope finally,

the cultural revolution when Chinese turned on each other again with terrific bestiality, although that wasn't formally a civil war. You're talking about degrees of behaviour, inhumane behaviour, that must be related to this long experience of war that so scored and marked the Chinese mind and the fabric of society in the 30s and 40s. What else did the communists do in 1949 to build the foundations of a state that we might still recognise today? What decisions did they make? Well, every country, every nation needs a founding myth. And as far as the People's Republic of China is concerned, 1st of October 1949 was that founding date, and that has been preserved and worshipped and celebrated ever since, and is a fundamental part of the liberation story, the development of China

story. Now, that's not just symbolically important, though it certainly is that it's substantially important, because what we see in 1949 is the creation of those institutions and methods of rule, which with changes survived to this very day. It saw the creation of a political culture on a scale the Chinese had never known before. Politics entered into private spaces, everyday life. Never have so many Chinese gone to so many meetings as they did in the 1949 period and into the 1950s, where they were rallied and mobilized in support of the new regime. If you take things like the media, for example, almost immediately the Chinese communists arrived in the cities, media organizations were taken over and became essentially mouthpieces of

the party. If you take the legal system, the communists almost instantaneously completely abolished the nationalist legal code and replaced it with a system of people's courts and revolutionary justice. Now, the effect of those policies, indeed, many of the very institutions, certainly the way of going about things in the political sphere, is very much a part of present day China. Indeed, President Xi Jinping, the current leader of the Chinese Communist Party, is very much to the fore, second to no one in his praise for Mao in that early period of the People's Republic of China. So it has deep resonance in contemporary China this year of 1949. Are the outside powers important here? Foreign foreigners? I mean, I know that in the USA for years afterwards,

a quote-unquote loss of China was regarded as a disaster of the first magnitude. How influential, how important were these outside powers? The three powers to think of in this connection are, of course, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. The United States was the most invested in Jiang's government, as you pointed out, and there was a substantial lobby, domestic lobby, which was in support of Jiang. It had missionary elements, it had educational and overseas aid, what would now be called overseas aid aspects to it as well. But Truman and Acheson and Marshall, the Secretary of State, realized that you could pour billions into Chiang Kai-shek's coffers and get nothing out of it. He, Chiang, was too weak to support. He was not in possession of the legitimacy that the Americans could feel happily associating

themselves with. But critically, he was actually a little bit too important to completely abandon. So they weren't prepared to save him and allow him to keep his grip on the mainland. But when he had fled to Taiwan, and when, importantly, Mao Zedong had begun his new China by launching a military assault into North Korea, the Americans realized that Jiang would have to be kept alive, although by now confined to the island of Taiwan. Stalin, on the other hand, he liked what Mao was doing. Of course, he was in alliance with Mao, informal, until a treaty was signed in 1950. But Stalin was also wary of Mao. He didn't really understand Mao's line of thinking.

He was concerned that, unlike the situation in Eastern Europe, China could never be called a satellite. He was concerned, moreover, that Mao might challenge him eventually for leadership of the socialist world. The final power, just to mention briefly, of the three that I touched on, is that of Great Britain. It said, we don't have a stake in the political outcome of this contest between the communists and the nationalists, but we're very keen on our investments in Shanghai, and we're very keen on retaining Hong Kong. Well, they thought that a way to achieve both those objectives would be when circumstances allowed to recognize the new regime, which they did in the early days of January 1950. But it didn't save their investment in Shanghai, and it wasn't that that saved their hold on Hong Kong. What they were concerned about with Hong Kong was whether the communists would stop at the frontier. Would they just march straight through and take all of Hong Kong back? Remember, it had been in, or a large

part of it had been in British hands for a century, and that was the beginning of the century of humiliation. But Mao and the PLA decided they wouldn't do that. They had enough on their plates, having just taken control over the mainland. And the British moved in very significant military resources for the size of the territory, not because they imagined they could ward the PLA off or still less defeat it, but just to show the PLA that if they did cross the frontier, there would be some sort of price to pay. And the communists relented, they didn't move south, and the story of British Hong Kong is one which we're familiar with, lasting as it did until the 1st of July 1997.

How did the communists' consolidating power, how did their victory in 1949, change the lives of Chinese people? How did their victory in 1949, the price of which could be very heavy see it united and wanted to see it strong, and moreover, were fed up with what they regarded as the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist followers. So there is a very strong element of compliance here. But with the passage of time, the costs of criticism, the costs of dissent increased very rapidly. And we saw with the fate of the landlords, with the fate of those intellectuals who dared to criticize the party when its policies had been implemented, ending up in labor camps at best,

in executions at worst, that there was a heavy price to pay for living in Mao Zedong's China. You're often going to get a peace dividend, aren't you? I mean, food shortages and hyperinflation had marked the previous decades. Did things improve in the short term? I mean, did the communists sort of deliver? They delivered in certain important respects, like issues of life expectancy, those general indices of literacy, of women's participation in society, of clearing out what Mao regarded, to some extent, rightly, the legacies of feudalism and the inequalities. There were substantive improvements which cannot be denied. It really, however, requires one to think about how they were accomplished and what they were

accompanied by. These campaigns of pressure and criticism and punishment, psychological torment in many cases, these benefits were real, but they came at a cost. cases. These benefits were real, but they came at a cost. How is 1949 seen today in China? Is it sort of unambiguously celebrated? Or is there any subtlety creeping into the messaging there, like we might get in the late Soviet Union talking about Stalin? I think the notion that communists would be subtle about 1949 is not to be entertained too seriously. I think the answer to your question really is that the legacy of 1949 is one of the principal strategic features of the landscape in East Asia that we confront today, i.e. Taiwan that is not controlled by the mainland. Xi Jinping has promised that the Taiwan issue must be resolved and it must be resolved promptly. It cannot be left to linger. China is

a global power now, yet unlike many global powers, it has not yet completed national reunification. You'll recall in the case of Italy, in the case of Germany, in the case of other European powers, unofficial, tentative alliance to preserve the status quo in Taiwan. What we're seeing in the shape of recent moves by Xi Jinping is a constant test of that and a very strong temptation, I think, on his part to resolve the legacy of 1949, to end the Chinese civil war, and to establish Chinese Communist Party control over Taiwan. Well, that's it. Yeah, fascinating. Does 1949 have lessons for us? Will it be a kind of massive, overwhelming military victory against fleeing nationalists? Or will there be a kind of accommodation as there was perhaps, as you mentioned, with the kind of capitalist bourgeoisie of Shanghai?

What will it be? I rather suspect that the resolution of the civil war will reflect the current standards of warfare. It'll be very different from what we saw in 1949, though the outcome I don't think is going to be in much doubt. It'll be waged by grey zone warfare. It'll be waged in the cyber sphere. And it might not involve much in the way of conventional cannon shot, but I think the campaign will be equally deadly in the sense that it delivers to the Chinese Communist Party what they have sought over the past 70 odd years. Crikey. So you're in no doubt there is going to be war of some description,

and it's going to be soon. I wouldn't say no doubt, but on the balance of probabilities, it is looking like the Chinese civil war will not end peacefully. Well, thank you. Even more reason to read your book and learn about that fateful year. Tell us what the book's called. The book is called China 1949, Year of Revolution. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. My pleasure. Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour,

head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.