A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (76 page)

Chiang Kai Shek’s army was driven far inland by Japan and was no longer in any condition to fight the Communist forces. He had little choice but to agree that the rival Chinese forces should tolerate one another while fighting Japan. But his own army seemed incapable of fighting anyone. Most of its generals were motivated only by the desire to grow rich at the expense of their soldiers and the peasants whose lands they passed through. The People’s Liberation Army, by contrast, steadily built up its strength. It gained prestige among the educated middle classes by fighting Japan, peasant support by a policy of reducing rents, and even a degree of backing from some Chinese capitalists by providing stable conditions for their operations.

The Japanese collapse in 1945 found Chiang with much the bigger army and in receipt of vast sums of aid from the US (and lesser sums from Russia, for Stalin at this stage gave no backing to the Communists). But Mao had an army with higher morale and better discipline. When civil war broke out between the two, Chiang’s army began to disintegrate, with whole sections (including their generals) changing sides. By the end of 1949 Chiang Kai Shek had fled the mainland for Taiwan—where the Kuomintang still dominates the government today.

Mao’s victory was a terrible shock for the US, which had come to see China as part of its informal empire as it poured funds into the pockets of Chiang Kai Shek’s generals. It reasoned that Mao was a Communist and Stalin was a Communist, and so it had suffered this setback as a result of a world Communist conspiracy—ignoring the fact that Stalin had provided aid to Chiang and advised Mao not to take power. US military operations in the Korean War, which broke out only months after Mao’s victory, involved troops sweeping right through North Korea to the Chinese border, virtually forcing China to come in on the North Korean side and driving Mao into Stalin’s arms (although their alliance was only to last a dozen years). At the same time the US came to see propping up French colonialism in Vietnam as part of its defence of the ‘free world’ against ‘Communism’, and it provided the funds and arms which allowed France to keep fighting until 1954.

Much of the left internationally drew a similar conclusion to the US but put the opposite interpretation on it. China and Russia were now, jointly, the bloc of ‘peace and socialism’. What is more, some argued, China showed how easy it was to take power through rural guerrilla warfare. They ignored the special circumstances of China in the second half of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s—the vast distances, the Japanese invasion, the extreme corruption in Chiang’s army. They also failed to see that, for all Mao’s dependence on peasant recruits for his army, it cadre and the administrative structure in his ‘liberated areas’ were made up of radicalised members of the educated middle classes from the cities.

The empires’ last stand

Mao’s victory, coming so soon after the British evacuation of India, added to the feeling in the colonies everywhere that imperialism could be beaten. There had already been stirrings of revolt in French Algeria and an attempt to establish an independent government in Vietnam. A nationalist movement had begun to grow in the huge Dutch colony of the East Indies before the war. Its leaders had taken advantage of the Japanese occupation to extend their base of support, half-collaborating with the occupying forces and proclaiming themselves the government of a new country, Indonesia, when Japan left. Now they fought the attempt to reimpose Dutch colonialism, achieving independence in 1949 under President Sukarno. In Malaya the local Communist Party, which had formed the backbone of the British-backed resistance to Japan, prepared to wage a war for freedom from Britain. Various students from Africa and the West Indies such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Eric Williams, who had known each other in London in the 1930s, returned home to agitate for independence too. In the Arab capitals of Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo a new, young middle class generation, sometimes strategically positioned within the officer corps of the state, began to plot to achieve real independence and to dream of a united ‘Arab nation’ from the Atlantic to the Gulf.

The instinct of the colonial powers was to react to the liberation movements as they had in the past, with machine-guns, bombing raids and concentration camps. This was the reaction of France in Vietnam, Madagascar, Algeria, and its west African colonies; of Britain in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden and the Rhodesias
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; and of Portugal in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau.

But it became clear, sooner or later, that this approach was counterproductive, serving only to deepen popular hostility to European interests. A growing number of rulers saw that a better policy would be to cultivate local figures who would faithfully serve their interests as heads of ‘independent’ governments. Britain adopted this approach in much of the Middle East, in west Africa and in the West Indies. In Malaya, Britain used heavy repression against the Communist-led liberation movement (troops cut off the hands and even the heads of dead ‘terrorists’ and forcibly resettled half a million people in villages surrounded by barbed wire). But it also promised independence to ‘moderate’ Malay politicians, who built support by playing on racial distrust of the Chinese minority. Even where Britain did try and stand firm against making concessions to the ‘natives’—as in Kenya, where it bombed villages and herded people into concentration camps where many died, and in Cyprus, where troops used torture—it ended up negotiating a ‘peaceful’ transfer of power to political leaders (Jomo Kenyatta and Archbishop Makarios) whom it had previously imprisoned or exiled.

France was eventually forced to adopt this approach in Vietnam and Algeria. But it only did so after spending vast sums and killing huge numbers of people in wars it could not win. The poison infected French politics as disaffected colonialist generals attempted a succession of military coups in the years 1958-62 (resulting in the National Assembly granting near-dictatorial powers to General de Gaulle in 1958). The eventual agreement to Algerian independence led to a million Algerian settlers decamping to France and a wave of right wing bombings by the OAS terrorist group in Paris.

Western Europe’s most backward capitalism, Portugal, tried to hold on to its colonies, but was eventually forced to abandon them in 1974-75 when the cost of subduing them provoked a revolutionary upheaval in Portugal itself. All that remained were the two white racist settler regimes in southern Africa—Southern Rhodesia, which was eventually forced to accept black majority rule as Zimbabwe in 1980, and South Africa, which finally followed suit in 1994.

The retreat of the West European powers from direct rule over half of Asia and almost all of Africa was a process of epochal importance. It marked the end of almost two centuries during which the line of world history passed through London and Paris. However, it did not mark the end of imperialism, in the sense that much of the world remained dominated by interests centred in a few economically advanced countries. Bitter conflicts in the Americas, south east Asia and the Middle East would repeatedly testify to this fact.

Oil and blood

The Middle East, with its huge oil reserves, was by far the most important prize for any imperialism in the second half of the 20th century. Britain had extended its Middle East empire during the First World War by collaborating with the ruler of Mecca, Sharrif Hussein, in an ‘Arab National Revolt’ and promising him all the territories ruled by Turkey. But the British government also promised Zionist leaders that it would allocate one of the Arab lands, Palestine, to Jewish settlers from Europe, seeing them as a barrier against any Arab threat to the nearby Suez Canal. As the Israeli political leader Abba Eban later explained, ‘We would help Britain become the ruling power and Britain would help us to develop the Jewish National Home’.
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Such double-dealing worked, up to a point. British firms got their hands on the oil reserves of Iraq and Iran, and Jewish settler volunteers worked with Britain to put down a Palestinian Arab revolt, the most serious rebellion to face the British Empire in the 1930s. But over time the policy backfired. There was growing Arab antagonism toward the Zionist settlers as they bought land from rich Arab owners and drove off the peasant families who had been cultivating it for centuries. Jews who had fled oppression in Europe found they were expected to oppress others in Palestine. Britain then tried to defuse Arab bitterness by restricting Jewish immigration and ended up under attack from both sides. By 1946 Jewish paramilitary groups which had been armed to suppress the Arabs were carrying out attacks on British troops and installations.

Britain decided to escape from the problem it had created by withdrawing its troops in 1947, relying for the defence of its oil interests on the puppet Arab monarchies in Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. The US and Russia were both keen to move in as Britain moved out, jointly backing a United Nations resolution partitioning Palestine and establishing an Israeli settler state (allocating half the land to one third of the population). The settlers received substantial supplies of arms from Communist-run Czechoslovakia and backing from the US. As fighting broke out they terrorised much of the Arab population into fleeing by massacring the inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin, and then defeated an ill-organised army sent by the Arab monarchies, allegedly to help the Palestinians—an army which ended up grabbing the rump Palestinian area (a mere 20 percent of the original land) and dividing it between the kings of Jordan and Egypt. Israel was established as a powerful settler state, willing and able to assist Western interests—which usually meant the US—in return for arms and financial aid.

This could not bring stability to the region. The bitterness caused by Israel’s victory over the Arab armies helped spark a military coup in Egypt which brought nationalist officers led by Abdul Nasser to power and ended the pro-British monarchy. Nasser’s move to nationalise the Suez Canal, owned by Britain and France, provoked British imperialism’s last great fling in the region. In November 1956 British, French and Israeli troops launched a joint attack on Egypt. The attack almost succeeded militarily, but completely backfired politically. The US took advantage of Britain’s financial problems to pull the plug on the operation and supplant Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East, while a wave of anti-British agitation throughout the region led to the overthrow of the British-backed Iraqi monarchy two years later.

The US followed Britain’s policy of relying both on the Israeli settlers and Arab client regimes. It provided Israel with more military aid than anywhere else in the world. At the same time it worked closely with the Saudi Arabian monarchy, encouraged coups which re-established the absolute rule of the Shah of Iran (in 1953), and gave power in Iraq to the Ba’ath Party, including a young Saddam Hussein, in 1962. The US was highly successful in asserting hegemony over the region and its oil. It could only do so, however, by encouraging antagonisms between states and peoples which burst into a succession of wars—the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the long civil war in Lebanon after 1976, the appalling war between Iraq and Iran throughout the 1980s, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the US-led war against Iraq in 1991. The 20th century was again seeing wealth, on these occasions oil wealth, transmuted into blood.

Through the looking glass

The form of economic organisation established in Russia fascinated many of the newly independent ex-colonial countries. Most had suffered economic stagnation or even regression under colonial rule. The food supply per head was no higher in India in the 1950s than it had been at the time of Akbar 400 years before. Meanwhile the Russian economy had shown it could grow faster than any other and, it seemed, avoid the periodic downturns which had plagued capitalism in the West.

It has been fashionable since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to claim that nothing ever worked in the Russia of Stalin or his successors, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In fact, for 30 years Stalinist methods produced more rapid rates of economic growth than those experienced anywhere else in the world—except perhaps Japan. What had been an overwhelmingly backward agricultural society in 1928 had become a mainly industrial country capable of challenging the US in Cold War weaponry and beating the US to put a satellite (the Sputnik) and then a man (Yuri Gagarin) into space.

Even bitter enemies of the Russian system recognised this at the time. It was possible for the future British Labour Party prime minister Harold Wilson to speak in 1953 of ‘Russia’s spectacular increase in production and productive capacity’.
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The perception was not false. As a relatively recent economic history of Eastern Europe tells, ‘The average rate of economic growth achieved in the region during the first two decades of central planning (1950-70) was better than the peak rates shown in the best inter-war years (1925-29)’.
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Stalinism in Russia arose from the isolation and strangulation of the revolution of 1917. In Eastern Europe it was imposed from above—except in Yugoslavia where it was introduced by the leaders of the resistance army which drove out Germany. But in each case it was not only repression which enabled it to flourish and establish deep roots in its early years. By providing a means of building up industry it also made wide sections of society’s middle layers feel they had an important future. It inspired enthusiasm as well as fear. It also provided vast numbers of people with a degree of upward mobility—the skilled industrial worker stood a chance of becoming a manager, and the peasant could escape from the primitiveness of rural life to the wider horizons of the city.

The sense that it was possible to change society, industrialise, urbanise and educate the masses, appealed to sections of the educated middle classes in every non-industrial country in the world—an appeal heightened by the understanding that an expansion of industry meant an expansion in the number of well-salaried positions for themselves. But no expansion was possible simply by waiting for small firms to grow enough to compete with the major corporations based in the advanced countries. The small firms would be driven out of business first. They needed size—and that could only come about by the state fusing them together and ploughing in funds. They also needed protection from direct foreign competition, which only the state could provide. State capitalism, usually misnamed ‘socialism’, seemed the answer.