Territorial Expansion And Foreign Defence Challenge In China - Term Paper Example

Territorial Expansion And Foreign Defence Challenge In China International Recognition One of the most pressing questions for the international press in the months following the victory of the Communist forces in China, and Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic, was the issue of whether the new government would be recognized as the legitimate spokesperson of the Chinese people on the world stage. In December 1949, this continued to be a difficult issue, and was still complicated by the existence of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government, now based on the offshore island of Taiwan. Geraldine Fitch, writing a letter to the editor of the New York Times on December 13, recognized ‘the difficulties involved in either type of recognition: status of Red China as one of the Big Five; a permanent place on the Security Council; another veto in the Soviet bloc of the U.N. General Assembly’. As Ms Fitch notes, one of the problems for the Western powers was that, in the context of an emerging Cold War between a Capitalist West and a Communist East, the admittance of the world’s most populous country into the diplomatic arena as an ally of the Soviet Union could, in time, upset the balance of power in favor of the latter. As an article in The Times of India put it on December 18, the powers were having to deal with ‘the emergence of a new Communist State controlling one-fifth of the world’s population’. While the United States of America stood firm in its recognition of the Nationalists now based in Taiwan as the sole legitimate Chinese authority, an article in the Washington Post on December 19 reported that the countries of the Commonwealth ‘have agreed to recognize Communist China simultaneously, but the exact date has not yet been set’, although sources in London indicated that it would be sometime in the coming week. Apparently Britain had deliberately delayed its own announcement of recognition while Australia and New Zealand, its fellow Commonwealth members, sorted out the issues raised by their recent, inconclusive general elections. In the region, Burma, as the Washington Post of December 19 reported, had already recognized the Communists in Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government on December 18. They had apparently been persuaded to this conclusion by unrest on the Sino-Burmese frontier. On the same day, December 19, the Washington Post recorded a direct result of Burmese recognition of the Communist government – the breaking of relations between Burma and the Nationalist forces. The article recorded a statement issued by the Nationalist Foreign Minister, George Yeh: “it is amazing that while fighting the Communists in its own land the Burmese Government should think it expedient to recognize the Communist regime in a neighbouring country”. However, Burma’s decision to recognise the Communists was part of a wider trend at the time, as countries around the world began to realise that the Communists were consolidating their power and were there to stay, while may doubted whether Chiang Kai-Shek would be able to hold on in Taiwan for even a few more months. For the United States, recognition of the government in Beijing was not a prospect yet on the horizon. In the Los Angeles Times of December 12, it was made clear that the US ‘intends to continue indefinitely recognizing the Nationalist government at Taipeh, Formosa [Taiwan], as the legitimate government of China’. Sino-Russian Relations After Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, and given the Communist dominance in mainland China, commentators, both domestic and itnernational, epxected a growing closeness in relations between Moscow and Beijing, assuming that the latter would join the bloc of Soviet-aligned nations. As the New York Times reproted on December 17, these expectations seemed to have been realised as ‘Chinese Communist leader Mao Tze-Tung was received tonight by Premier Stalin soon after having arrived in Moscow’. Mao had travelled via the trans-Siberian railway to the Russian capital, the first visit of its kind, and also met with Politburo members Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin. The newspapers of the following day drew the obvious conclusions from the visit. The Washington Post ran an article suggesting that a ‘Chinese-Soviet friendship pact appeared almost a certainty here [in Moscow] today’, and that such an arrangement was expected to include agreements on mutual assistance and trade. The Post also recorded the grand welcome accorded to the Soviets’ new and significant ally, stating that ‘the station and streets…were bedecked with flags of the Soviet Union amd the Chinese People’s Republic’, and made the interesting proposal that Mao’s visit had probably been timed to coincide with the celebrations, the following week, for Stalin’s 70th birthday. Nationalists in Retreat While the People’s Republic of China was gradually gaining recognition around the world as the new legitimate government of China, this process came to constitute little more than a recognition of the new status quo as the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek were deprived of their last remaining strongholds on the mainland, and were forced back on to Taiwan. It had become clear by mid-December 1949 that the Nationalists could no longer hope to win back control of China in the near future, and many doubted whether they could even hold out on Taiwan. In an extended piece in the New York Times of December 12, it was reported that the governor of the southern Yunnan province had staged a Coup, going over to the Communists and kidnapping several Nationalist generals in the process. The article noted the determination of Chiang to keep a mainland military base at Sichang, on the Tibetan border, because he hoped ‘to turn the tables on the Communists by waging against them the same kind of guerilla warfare that they waged against him’. However, it was now thought that the governor at Sichang was preparing to go over to Communists, and without a mainland base, Nationalist options were narrowing. The same article also concluded that it was ‘doubtful’ that Taiwan could be held for any significant length of time. The bad news for the Nationalists predicted by the New York Times on December 12 came to fruition on December 13, when the Scotsman was able to report that two Chinese Nationalist armies, led by their generals, had gone over to the Communists, ‘and so ended all Nationalist resistance in South-West China’. This also opened the way for the Communists to put pressure on the borders with Burma and Indochina, while the defence of Chengtu was also apparently ‘crumbling’. The Nationalists still had a very powerful ally, in the form of the United States, which remained treaty-bound to them, and the Nationalists were doing all they could to maintain this crucial support. The frontpage of the Times of India of December 13 bore a large picture of Nationalist acting president Li Tsung-Jen as he arrived with his wife in San Francisco – ‘the first Chinese chief of State ever to visit the U.S.’ Later in the week, the Washington Post of December 17 bore further evidence of the continuing United States commitment to the Nationalist cause, reporting that the Embassy Staff in China, including Robert C. Strong, US charge d’affaires, were following the Nationalists to their new capital at Taipei, Taiwan. This message had been reinforced in an article in the Los Angeles Times on December 12, which reported that although the situation on Taiwan was not particularly promising, the United States was committed to helping Chiang Kai-Shek turn the island into ‘a fortress against Chinese Communism’, while Secretary of State Acheson’s advisers were privately acknowledging that ‘a new era in Asiatic affairs opeend this week end with the flight of the remanants of China’s Nationalist government from the mainland’. There were even reports that Chiang might ask the United States to form a protectorate over Taiwan. Elsewhere, news for the Nationalists continued to be bad. The Times of India reported on the situation at ‘Chengtu’ – the last mainland capital of the Nationalists, on December 12, stating that with Communist armies now only 6 miles away, it ‘is expected to fall tomorrow’. At the same time, another Communist column was advancing to the Southwest, cutting off the Nationalists from their planned retreat into the mountains, from where they wanted to operate a guerilla campaign. A personal story of Nationalist retreat from the advancing Communists was carried by the Chicago Daily Tribune on December 12, as it recounted the tale of 14 Nationalists, including several generals, who had trekked for 55 days across the Himalayas from China into India, from where they were flown on to the new Nationalist base on Taiwan. Such a story also demonstrates just how desperate the situation had become for the Nationalist struggle. Territorial Expansion and Foreign Defence Challenge The New York Times of December 12 looked at the issue of Communist territorial expansion in terms of its impinging on western interests in the region. As the writer held that Taiwan could not realistically be held by the Nationalists for any significant length of time, he raises the issue that Taiwan in Communist hands ‘must be considered a direct menace to the Pacific defenses of the United States’. While menacing the United States in the Pacific arena, Communist success was also threatening French interests in Indochina to the south, where 125,000-150,000 French troops were based, although the latter were mainly occupied with keeping down the internal revolt by local Communist forces. Since Decemeber 1946, when the Fointainebleau Confernce between French leaders and Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Communist insurgency in Indochina, had failed to reach an agreement, the region had been gripped by widespread guerilla warfare. In view of these threats, the article concluded that the US must soon decide if it is to take direct action against Communist China, or ‘whether Asia is to be permitted to go the way of China by Western default’. Such sentiments reflect the contemporary fear of Communist expansion, and the preoccupations behind the Truman Doctrine, which held that America had the right to interfere anywhere in the world to prevent a country from going Communist. This doctrine would soon be tested in the Korean peninsula. Pressure was also being felt on China’s southwestern borders, with Tibet and India. On December 14, the New York Times reported on a speech made the previous evening by Sirdar J. J. Singh, president of the India League of America. Singh spoke of the ‘real danger’ of Communist infiltration into India, and mentioned recent reports indicating that China was preparing to move on Tibet ‘in the very near future’. Singh would be proven true in this prediction, and asked for US aid to help India, given that ‘Once Tibet comes under the rule of the Communists, troubles for India will begin’. Trade and Commercial Concessions The position of certain western nations, particularly Britain, which controlled its enclave of Hong Kong, and Portugal, which possessed an enclave at Macau, towards the new Communist government was even more complicated. They were forced to balance their distaste with the ideology and pronouncements of the new government in Beijing with a pragmatic realization that, with practically the whole Chinese mainland in the hands of Mao’s Communists, some form of accommodation with the new status quo was most conducive to the safeguarding of their commercial and territorial interests. By mid-December, Britain was prepared to announce its official recognition of Mao’s government as the legitimate administration of China. The Times of India reported on December 18 that, with regard to the hundreds of millions of western investment in China, ‘So far there has been no report of any hindrance with trade by the Communists, though the Nationalist blockade has held up business in some instances’. Indeed, the writer conjectures that Mao will adopt a pragmatic approach to western economic interests in China. Despite much Communist propaganda about the role of western capitalists in undermining and humiliating China in recent centuries, the article predicts that Mao will encourage commercial interests to remain in the country and continue trading, for the sake of building up Chinese prosperity. The United States adopted an official policy of stopping all unnecessary contact between itself and the Communist government, and was still actively supporting the Nationalist forces. As the New York Times reproted on December 19, the State Department had renewed its warnings to American shipping to keep well away from Shanghai harbour, and the article suggested that while America could send out a naval task force to protect its ships plying the trade with China, ‘In actual practice the overwhelming force of wrathful American public opinion would prevent the United States from using its proud Navy to open up a supply line for the Chinese Communists’. This American hatred of Communism would be responsible for the direction of its policy towards the People’s Republic for decades to come. Domestic Politics In an article published in the Washington Post on December 18, 1949, Lewisohn surveyed ‘the effect of the recent upheaval [the Communist takeover] on the domestic side’, and concluded that the ‘people of China have been between the devil and the deep blue sea’. Lewisohn had been the last of the western news correspondents to leave Beijing during the recent struggles, and was uniquely well-equipped to prepare such a survey for American readers. He described the huge unpopularity of Kuomintang rule over the past few years, but also noted that not all Chinese had welcomed the Communists with open arms. He describes the reception of Communist forces in Beijing and Shanghai as one of ‘moderate enthusiasm’. Even students, many of whom had been zealously pro-Communist in October, were, by December, rather less keen in their support, given the new restrictions on public demonstrations, by which only those planned by the Party could be held. Heavy new restrictions on the press and the arts are also cited by Lewisohn as causes of discontent. He states that the ‘official newspapers contain nothing but propaganda and are unutterably dull’, which traditional and popular Chinese plays had been banned, along with all art work which was not sufficiently focused on the lives of workers and peasants. Writing for a primarily western audience, Lewisohn also mentions some of the trademarks of a repressive Communist regime, already known to those readers who had followed developments in Soviet Russia in the decades since 1917. He writes of the widespread network of informers being organized by the government, including the use of children, who had been ordered to attend Communist schools. Indeed, ‘Their [The Communists’] interest is concentrated in the generation now growing up’. While Lewisohn is clearly writing from a western perspective for a western audience, he does recognize, and asks his readers to do likewise, that the Chinese ‘have no democratic traditions, they are accustomed to being ruled from above and they have always accepted such rule’. Economic Policy For several centuries, China’s economy had been underdeveloped in comparison to those of the western industrialized nations, and, since the late 19th century, with that of Japan also. Nevertheless, as a Times of India article of December 18 made clear, Mao’s government had inherited ‘a rich, in underdeveloped empire’. Its known resources included large quantities of coal, iron ore, tin and tungsten. Its agriculture, as the article concedes, was in a confused and disorganized state after decades of invasion and civil war, but had the potential, if guided by good policy, to supply enough for both internal consumption and large exports. Nevertheless, the same article is forced by circumstance to admit that given current levels of food production, famine in northern China was practically certain in the coming year, and suggests that while Communist Russia would be the obvious source of aid, Russia itself had no large surplus. The writer concludes that only the British and American merchant fleets would be able to bring in the quantities of foreign food needed to avert widespread famine. Given the shaky state of relations between Mao’s China and the western powers, and especially the United States, in December 1949, this proposal seems rather far-fetched. In the Washington Post of December 18, Lewisohn noted the ‘considerable discontent’ among the urban working class and the rural peasantry, which in many ways had been worsened by the policies of the new government. He claims that while the peasantry expected immediate improvement in their living conditions, they were disappointed by the heavy taxation, with 40% of their produce being redistributed for the succor of the armed forces. The rest had to be surrendered to the agricultural unions, which then in turn redistributed it in equal rations to all farmers. This complete regulation of rural life, and the new emphasis on uniformity, suggests Lewisohn, was unwelcome to many farmers. In the cities, reports Lewisohn while workers’ councils had been established to fix salaries, wages and working hours, many were also put out of employment because of the Communist suppression of what were deemed ‘unproductive trades’ such as the manufacturing of luxury goods. Clearly the Communists had not ingratiated themselves with all members of the class they claimed to champion. References Fitch, Geraldine. “A Policy Toward China: Objections Cited to Recognition of the Communist Regime”. New York Times, 13 December 1949. Print. “Rich Empire for New Rulers of China”. The Times of India, 18 December 1949. Print. Lewisohn, W. “Most of China Grumbles, but Reds Push ‘Reforms’”. Washington Post, 18 December 1949. Print. “British Commonwealth Nations May Soon Recognize Red China”. Washington Post, 19 December 1949. Print. “Mao Sees Stalin, Pledges Close Tie of China to Soviet”. New York Times, 17 December 1949. Print. “China Severs Burma Ties”. New York Times, 19 December 1949. Print. “China-Soviet Friendship Pact Forecast”. Washington Post, 18 December 1949. Print. “New Communist Frontiers”. New York Times, 12 December 1949. Print. “Red Threat to India Seen: Victory in China Presages Move on Tibet, Singh Says”. New York Times, 14 December, 1949. Print. “Staying out of Shanghai”. New York Times, 19 December 1949. Print. “Chinese President in U.S.” The Times of India, 13 December 1949. Print. “Fall of Chengtu Imminent”. The Times of India, 12 December 1949. Print. “U.S. Embassy Staff Going Soon to Taipeh”. Washington Post, 17 December 1949. Print. “Chinese Red at War with U.S. Ideals”. Los Angeles Times, 13 December 1949. Print. “14 Chinese Nationalists Hike Across Himalayas”. Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 December 1949. Print. “Two Chinese Nationalist Armies Join Communists”. The Scotsman, 13 December 1949. Print. “U.S. to Continue Support of Chiang: New Military Aid Unlikely; Protectorate Plan Reported”. Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1949. Print. Read More