Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (88 page)

Thus, after forty years of ferocious civil conflict, in which millions had died, none of Sun Yat-sen’s original aims, which included parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press and
habeas corpus
, had been secured, and China was back where it had started, with a despotism – albeit a much more confident and oppressive one. Mao’s first act was to extend his ‘land reform’, already begun in the North, to the entire country. It was aimed at ‘local bullies and evil gentry’ and he urged peasants to kill ‘not one or two but a goodly number’ of each.
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At least 2 million people perished, half of them the tyrannical owners of less than thirty acres. Mao, the revolutionary romantic, launched the largest nation on earth into a frenzy of violent activism which was to rival the social engineering of Hitler and Stalin.

The American policy-makers watched in bewilderment the disintegration of Roosevelt’s great pillar of stability. It left behind it a gigantic vacuum. How to fill it? Though they rated Japan as one of the four key areas they had to hold, they had never hitherto conceived it as the focus of their position in the Far East, as Britain was in Europe. By miraculous dispensation of providence, the Russians had entered the war against Japan too late to make any claim to share in the occupation. So the Americans had a free hand there, under the Potsdam declaration. General MacArthur ruled the country as a surrogate constitutional Tenno. As late as the summer of 1947 it was proposed to cast Japan adrift, by signing a peace treaty and evacuating it, though the country was disarmed, had no central police system to combat Communist subversion and, since Soviet Russia controlled the Kurile Islands, south Sakhalin and North Korea, faced a semi-circle of active hostility.
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Before this plan could be put into operation, the disaster of 1948–9 in China induced America to have second thoughts. As Soviet Russia had no official presence, America could act unilaterally and did so. Beginning in 1949, US policy was reversed: the occupation was lifted from the backs of the Japanese government and economy; the emphasis shifted from punishment to expansion, and from neutralism and de-militarization to the integration of Japan in the Western system through a generous peace treaty.

‘Containment’ implied precise lines, which the Russians would cross at their peril. In Europe they were now clear enough. In Asia, by 1949, Japan was firmly under the American umbrella. But where did the lines run elsewhere? On 12 January 1950 Dean Acheson made a very foolish speech to the National Press Club in Washington.
In it he appeared to exclude from the American defence perimeter not only Taiwan and Indo-China but Korea, from which both Soviet and US troops had withdrawn, and which was divided into North and South zones, with only five-hundred US military training personnel in the South. Acheson’s main point was that the Communization of China was not an unmitigated loss, since China and Russia would soon be at each other’s throats. He thought that the Soviet ‘absorption’ of the whole or part of ‘the four northern provinces of China’ (Outer and Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang and Manchuria) was ‘the most important fact in the relations of any foreign power with Asia’. America must not antagonize China and so ‘deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger and the wrath and the hatred of the Chinese people which must develop’. In fact Acheson was misinformed. He relied on a briefing by General W.E.Todd, head of the Joint Chief of Staff intelligence section, that in any ranking of Soviet targets for aggression, ‘Korea would be at the bottom of that list’. Nor did he know that at the time he spoke negotiations were taking place leading to the Russians handing over the Manchurian railway and Port Arthur to China.
⁶⁶

Behind Stalin’s uncharacteristic generosity was his anxiety not to repeat with Mao the mistake he had made with Tito – that is, to treat him as a puppet, instead of as a fellow-dictator who had established his regime by his own efforts. Stalin seems to have decided to put his Eastern European empire in order in the summer of 1947, after the Marshall Plan was announced. He held the first meeting of the Cominform in Belgrade, to show that Yugoslavia was an integral part of the system. But its object was in fact to replace local Communist leaders with some national standing by ones who owed everything to Stalin and Russian backing. The Czech
coup
of February 1948 was part of this process. Stalin also planned to destroy Tito, whom he had never forgiven for a rude wartime message: if you cannot help us at least don’t hinder us by useless advice.’
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The same month as he was swallowing the Czech leadership, Stalin had gathered in Moscow Dmitrov, the Bulgarian Communist leader, whom he humiliated, and Edward Kardelj and Milovan Djilas from Yugoslavia, one of whom, if pliable enough, he intended to make Tito’s replacement. He ordered them to knock Yugoslavia and Bulgaria into an economic federation on the lines of Benelux, which he thought consisted of Belgium and Luxembourg. Told that it also included the Netherlands, he denied it and shouted angrily, ‘When I say no it means no!’ Then, switching to bribery, he offered the Yugoslavs the bait of Mussolini’s little victim: ‘We agree to Yugoslavia swallowing Albania’, he said and made a gesture of sucking the forefinger of his right hand.
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When Tito got a report of the meeting he smelt a
putsch
against himself. Like Stalin, he was an experienced political gangster familiar with the rules of survival. His first act was to cut off information from Yugoslavia’s inner party organs, police and army, to their counterparts in Moscow. On 1 March he brought the crisis to the boil by having his Central Committee throw out Stalin’s proposed treaty. In the subsequent theological dispute, which began on 27 March, Tito was accused of anti-Sovietism, of being undemocratic, unself-critical, lacking in class-consciousness, of having secret links with the West and engaging in anti-Soviet espionage; and eventually the entire party was branded as Menshevist, Bukharinist and Trotskyist, the accusation culminating in a crude threat to Tito’s life: ‘We think that the career of Trotsky is quite instructive.’
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On 28 June the new Cominform dutifully warned that Tito’s plan was to ‘curry favour with the imperialists’ as a prelude to setting up ‘an ordinary bourgeois republic’ which would in time become ‘a colony of the imperialists’. It called on ‘healthy elements’ within the Yugoslav party to ‘replace the present leaders’.

The rage and violent language of Stalin’s communications reflected his growing realization that Tito was a step ahead of him at each stage of the dispute, which merely served to identify those in his party whose primary loyalty was to Moscow. Tito broke two of his principal colleagues, shot his wartime chief of staff, gaoled the deputy political head of his army and, in all, put 8,400 party, police and army suspects behind bars, the arrests continuing into 1950.
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Stalin imposed economic sanctions, held manoeuvres on Yugoslavia’s borders and, from 1949, mounted show-trials in the satellites with Tito as the arch-villain. But Tito’s ability to hold his party together around a nationalist line (’no matter how much each of us loves the land of socialism, the USSR, he can in no case love his own country less’) persuaded Stalin that he could not topple the regime without an open invasion by the Red Army and large-scale fighting, possibly involving the West. Tito never formally moved under the Western umbrella, but the safeguard was implicit. When he visited London in 1953, Churchill (again Prime Minister) told him: ‘should our [wartime] ally, Yugoslavia, be attacked, we would fight and die with you.’ Tito: ‘This is a sacred vow and it is enough for us. We need no written treaties.’
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Khrushchev later said that the Tito row could all have been settled by discussion.
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Stalin came to agree, though he never admitted it. The failure of his Yugoslav policy was apparent by the summer of 1948 and Zhdanov, who had presided over Tito’s excommunication, died suddenly on 31 August 1948, probably murdered on Stalin’s orders.
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With Mao, recognizing that he was master in his own house, Stalin pursued quite different tactics. He seems to have decided to bind the
new Chinese regime to the Soviet bloc not by threats and interlocking economic machinery but by raising the military temperature in the Far East. The Acheson speech of January 1950, with its wishful thought that, left alone by the West, China must break with Russia, suggested the danger; its pointed omission of Korea pointed to the remedy. A limited proxy war in Korea would be the means to teach China where its true military interests lay. If this was Stalin’s reasoning it proved correct. The Korean War postponed the Soviet-Chinese break for a decade. Not that Stalin exactly planned the war. He seems to have agreed in the spring of 1950 that Kim Il-sung, the North Korean Communist dictator, could make a limited push across the 38th parallel in November.
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But Kim was not a biddable man. He described himself in his own newspaper as ‘the respected and beloved leader’, as ‘a great thinker and theoretician’ responsible for ‘the guiding idea of the revolution of our era’, a ‘great revolutionary practitioner who has worked countless legendary miracles’, a ‘matchless iron-willed brilliant commander who is ever-victorious’, as well as ‘the tender-hearted father of the people … embracing them in his broad bosom’. He turned Stalin’s cunning probe into an attack by his entire army and launched it on 25 June, with sufficient success to panic the Americans.

The Korean War was a characteristic 20th-century tragedy. It was launched for ideological reasons, without a scintilla of moral justification or any evidence of popular support. It killed 34,000 Americans, a million Koreans, a quarter of a million Chinese. It achieved no purpose. All its consequences were unintended. Its course was a succession of blunders. Kim and Stalin underestimated America’s response. Truman judged the invasion to be a prelude to an attack on Japan and a direct challenge to America’s willingness to uphold international law through the United Nations. Hitherto that body had been designed to reflect great power agreement and its Security Council, with its veto system, underpinned the principle. Truman had no need to invoke the
UN
at all. The Potsdam agreement gave America ample powers to act alone.
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But Truman wanted the
UN’S
‘moral authority’. So he bypassed the Security Council and got authorization by the
UN’S
General Assembly, which America then dominated, on a mere counting-heads basis. Thus the first long-term consequence of Korea was to undermine the concept of the
UN
as a useful, but limited body, and set it on a course which transformed it into an instrument of ideological propaganda. Of course the reason Truman wanted
UN
backing was that he took America into the war without getting Congressional approval first. This was the second unintended consequence: the elevation of the Presidency into a supra-constitutional war-making executive, especially in a Far Eastern
context. A third consequence was, indeed, to place a sword between an American-Chinese rapprochement, as Stalin had wished, but in a manner he could not possibly have foreseen.

Stalin assumed the proxy war would increase China’s military dependence on Soviet Russia. The reverse happened. General MacArthur quickly dealt with the North Koreans; in three months he had recaptured the capital of the South, Seoul. But he was no more biddable than Kim. He told Washington: ‘Unless and until the enemy capitulates, I regard all of Korea open to our military operations’ and pushed up to the Chinese frontier on the Yalu. Under cover of the crisis the Chinese first swallowed quasi-independent Tibet (21 October 1950), another unintended consequence; then attacked MacArthur with a huge ‘volunteer’ army (28 December). He was beaten and in April 1951 sacked, something Truman should have done the previous autumn. With difficulty the
UN
forces re-established the front near the 38th parallel (October 1951) and armistice talks began. But they were marked by intense bitterness and frustration on America’s part. According to entries in Truman’s journal, he thought of using nuclear weapons on 27 January and again on 18 May 1952. When General Eisenhower succeeded him as President, the threat of nuclear war was conveyed to China through the Indian government.
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As a result of the Chinese-American confrontation, Mao turned China for the first time into a military power of the front rank, something Stalin certainly never intended. Indeed Mao induced Stalin’s successors to help China become a nuclear power. He refused to allow Soviet forces to establish nuclear bases on Chinese soil. Instead he pushed ahead with an independent nuclear programme, which the Russians felt obliged to assist. Khrushchev later complained Russia gave the Chinese ‘almost everything they asked for. We kept no secrets from them. Our nuclear experts co-operated with their engineers and designers who were busy building a bomb.’ According to his account the Russians were about to hand over a prototype bomb when they suddenly had second thoughts. The Chinese say it was 20 June 1959 when ‘the Soviet government unilaterally tore up the agreement… and refused to provide China with a sample of an atomic bomb.’
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But the impetus Soviet help gave to the Chinese programme could not be halted. By the time the Sino—Soviet break came, in 1963, China was on the eve of her first A-bomb test; and at only her sixth test she exploded a multi-megaton thermonuclear device. Stalin’s ploy delayed the quarrel for a decade but made it far more serious when it eventually came. From that point Russia had to deal with another major military power on her south-eastern borders.