April 18th marks the beginning of two administrations in Chinese political history. It was on this date in 1927 that Chiang Kai-shek established his government in Nanjing following the success of the Northern Expedition and a bloody purge of the Communists from the KMT ranks. 32 years later, Liu Shaoqi emerged from the political infighting in the wake of the Peng Dehuai Affair to become president of the People’s Republic of China.
While neither was very successful in the short-term, their respective political visions would cast long shadows.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government rebuilt urban infrastructure, attempted to impose order where there had been none, and at least tried to lay the foundations for a modern Chinese state upon the ruins of empire. Whether he was successful or not depends a bit on who you ask and where you decide to set the goal posts. Some point to the rampant corruption (KMT officials were often so crooked they had to screw their pants on in the morning), incompetent administration, and Chiang’s own Ahab-esque desire to root out political enemies at the expense of other goals.
Others argue that Chiang’s government never stood a chance. With a limited economic base, large chunks of territory still controlled by warlords or Communists, his major cities reduced to semi-colonial outposts of the imperialist power, and facing a Japanese aggressor who would not rest until the “semi-” part of the colonial equation was a thing of the past, there was little Chiang could do except tinker with the facade of state-building while leaning heavily on increasingly shrill and ineffective political campaigns that did little to motivate his army or reform Chinese society.
Liu Shaoqi too was dealt a pretty bad hand. Okay, that’s an understatement, For Liu it was kind of like waking up and discovering that your mother-in-law-to-be is Sarah Palin and she’s at the front door locked and loaded with her daughter, a pregnancy test, and a rented tuxedo. As the early reports dribbled in regarding Mao’s grand vision for a Great Leap, it was clear there was trouble in the Communist paradise. Inflated grain reports, preposterous agrarian policies (dump all the seeds into a giant pit and cover with fertilizer anyone?), and industrial policies so bizarre as to not completely rule out the vision of Mao and his cronies sitting around like college freshman, hitting the pipe and eating ‘hot pockets.’ (“Yeah…wait!…DUDE!…So, we make steel in, in, in…the BACK yard!…Yo! hit me….100 million people, yeah, man, beautiful…Yo! Yo! is Zhou Enlai wasted or what?!?!?….we’ll catch England in 25…no!….15!…Yeah, bro, 15 yearSSS!…Yo, Xiaoping….make me a poster bro and put another hot pocket in the microwave.”)
All well and good until Peng Dehuai came in and spilled bong water all over the party.
Mao used Peng’s “treachery” as another excuse to cleanse the party of disloyal elements, but the Chairman was also savvy enough to see that even among those who remained, discontent was in the air. In 1959, he took the somewhat bold step of resigning as head of state (though, obviously, still staying in control of the Party) with Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s semi-trusted second-in-command, taking over. Let’s just be clear: Mao putting his arm around you and telling you that “you’re his #2″ is a little bit like Paris Hilton buying you a shot of tequila at 2 am and telling you that you two are meant to be BFF. It’s not going to last and when it ends, it will be ugly and public. The worst part is, I think Liu knew it. I mean if Mao could turn on Peng Dehuai, then nobody was safe. That wasn’t some lawn jockey, it was Peng FREAKING Dehuai, the man helped organized the Long March, was part of the Zhu De/Peng tag-team that won the Civil War, and single-handedly (okay, so he had like 2 million ‘volunteers’ to help, but who’s counting?) bull rushed the US forces nearly off of the Korean peninsula.*
Liu was a party stalwart, he wrote THE essay on how to be a good Communist (entitled “How to be a Good Communist”), and by all accounts he was a genuinely nice guy…but was there any doubt that the next time Mao’s toe-nail fungus became too much for the Chairman to take, he was coming after Liu? The crazy part is that Lin Biao was so eager to line up next for his own chance at Mao’s BFF slot without thinking “Hey, I wonder what happened to the last guy?” It kind of reminds me of the scene in “Scarface” when Al Pacino watches Sosa’s men throw Salieri from “Amadeus” out of the helicopter and thinks, “Yeah, THIS is a guy I can do business with.” But I digress…
Liu — ever the company man — set about investigating and moderating the worst excesses of the Great Leap Forward. In the early 1960s, he rolled back the communes, allowed farmers more freedom to grow and sell their own crops, reopened rural markets, and relaxed some of the more aggressive industrial goals in favor of careful economic planning and practical development. While some of the specific policies might have differed, it’s not hard to see the similarities between Liu Shaoqi’s plans for recovery following the Great Leap and Deng Xiaoping’s economic policies following the Cultural Revolution. There was a real moment here for the PRC to forgo permanent revolution and replace it with the foundations of pragmatic economic growth. Today of course, the Party operates according to the reformist vision set out by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and has all but abandoned the legacies of revolutionary Maoism.
Similarly, while Chiang’s initial attempt at state-building came crashing down with the Japanese invasion of 1937, his vision of economic development under the control of an authoritarian party-state is not too different from how the CCP operates today. As I wrote last year:
Today’s CCP, like the KMT of the 1930s, emphasizes modernization, a strong military, and urban development at the expense of rural areas. Like the 1930s, today’s China boasts a fair amount of personal freedom and autonomy…so long as individuals don’t challenge the political leadership or threaten ’social stability,’ and as is the case in the PRC today, the secret police under Chiang’s government were always ready to squash dissent in the name of ‘national unity’ lest that personal freedom and autonomy get a bit too bumptious.
Even the CCP’s recent ‘Harmonious Society’ campaign bears more than a passing resemblance to Chiang’s New Life Movement in that both advocate a kind of Confucian neo-traditionalism in the service of social stability/political loyalty alongside campaigns against “uncivilized/backwards” habits of hygiene and personal deportment.
Chiang’s first attempt at state-building was lost in the devastation of war with Japan, but he would live to fight another day. And even though he would never succeed in his grand plan to unify all of China under KMT rule, once ensconced on the island of Taiwan, Chiang set about creating a mini version of his state building vision. Kind of like the woman who wants to run with the wolves but instead winds up buying a chihuahua. (It’s a dog only if you say it’s a dog…there’s an extended metaphor here regarding Taiwan, but I’m going to skip it because I don’t want Michael Turton crossing the strait and burning my house down.**)
As expected, things went less well for Liu Shaoqi. Faced with increasing political irrelevance and watching as economics began to trump ideology, Mao seethed in (relative) silence until the events of 1966-1967 provided him with an opportunity to rectify the mistakes of the past few years. Liu soon found himself facing down the Red Guards. Arrested and removed from power, he lingered ill in prison until after the 9th Party Congress. Once his usefulness as a “Living Example of a Capitalist Roader” was over, the former head of state was thrown naked into a prison outbuilding and left to die on the concrete floor.
In addition to the way today’s China seems to hew closer to his own vision rather than that of his archrival Mao, Chiang’s legacy is also undergoing a bit of a historical reappraisal on the mainland these days now that the CCP is convinced that the Devil You Know is in fact better than Chen Shuibian. Liu’s stock too has risen considerably in the past 30 years or so. He was granted a state funeral in 1980, and his death is now considered one of the tragedies of the Cultural Revolution era. Looking around China today, Mao may have won the early battles, but it’s looking like Liu Shaoqi and Chiang Kai-shek might end up winning their wars. We shall see.
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Three other events worth noting: On this date in 1943, a squadron of P-38s intercepted and shot down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. On April 17, 1906 the San Francisco earthquake leveled the city. Finally, this is also the 26th anniversary of the Beirut bombing in which a suicide bomber killed 68 US Marines.
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*Okay, there was also the part about Mao blaming Peng for the death of Mao’s son during the Korean War.
** And yes, I’m joking. I love Michael’s blog and everything he says about Taiwan is like God’s own truth. Really.
“Kind of like the woman who wants to run with the wolves but instead winds up buying a chihuahua.”
This morning you’re on fire! I check in for a dose of historic know what and end up laughing and laughing. Thanks for bringing what could be/is a toasty dry subject into the light. Thanks
OT, but i thought this might be some interesting grist for the mill:
http://www.latinoreview.com/news/exclusive-first-look-at-the-red-dawn-reboot-6596
they’re remaking red dawn, but with scary evil chinese commies instead of russians. oh dear lord.
The academic in me is astonished at the gobsmacking stupidity of it all…but the 11-year old in me is going “Wolverines!”
Ah, the duality of human nature.
i thought the first one was actually somewhat interesting in the way that it taught the dynamics of guerilla resistance to otherwise imperially-minded americans (also: wolverines!!!), but the remake looks awful.
and given that most americans i know actually form most of their opinions about the world by what they see on TV and in movies, it’s pretty disturbing, heading into a depression as we are. the *last* thing americans need to be told right now is that OMG the red chinamen are coming to get them!!!
But what a chihuahua!
The CCP should build a shrine to the Shinto Gods (Amaterasu?) and, facing east, bow towards Japan every morning. There should also be a statue of Zhang Xueliang inside…I’m no great fan of Chiang Kai-shek, but without the Japanese invasion, there’s no way the communists could have won the civil war. I remember reading as much, from the mouth of Chairman Mao (known for his offbeat sense of humor), quoted as saying so to a group of Japanese students in a book entitled The Revenge of Heaven.
Would the Chinese be better off today if they had skipped the first 30 years of communist social engineering chaos and instead simply gone directly to KMT Confucian-style authoritarianism?
You’re like the Bill Simmons of Chinese history. You should write a book in this style. Fun read.
Alternate history is always dangerous. It is, in fact, about as murky as predicting the future. It is tempting to extend a set of premises all the way to their logical conclusion, but there will always be unexpected and unforeseen consequences.
If the KMT had stayed in charge, it is not at all clear that China would’ve become as prosperous as Taiwan or South Korea. Why would China not have turned into, say, India, instead? The Communists defeated the warlords and established central authority from Beijing. Even the celebrated Northern Expedition merely left the KMT with allied warlords, rather than direct control. Even absent the Japanese, would the KMT have been able to manage that level of cohesion?
Similarly, if Liu and Deng had gotten their way and gotten the economic reforms started two decades earlier, it is not at all clear how far these reforms would’ve gone. Would they have turned China into the Soviet Union? Or into Tito’s Yugoslavia (minus the latent ethnic tensions)?
In “The Commanding Heights,” Yergin painted a picture of Deng in the tractor factory during the Cultural Revolution, spending “many hours pacing the courtyard, asking himself how modernization had failed and how it could be restored.”
Too neat a picture, but perhaps it was only the disaster and disillusionment of the Cultural Revolution that made possible the drastic changes of the last thirty years. Perhaps, absent the upheavals that shook up the party, the economic reforms would not have gone as far as they did. Such dramatic changes of direction in human history require multiple elements to come together at the right time.