Restless Empire (44 page)

The purges of the early 1950s delayed the full implementation of the 1950 program for higher education until the academic year 1952/1953. At that point, all institutions were supposed to be fully restructured. In the capital, for instance, a new Peking University was created by adding departments from Yanjing University and Qinghua University. Most important of all was the creation of People’s University in Beijing, a new institution that taught politics and social sciences, and prepared students for further study in the Soviet Union, just as two generations earlier nearby Qinghua University had been set up to prepare students for study in the United States.
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The wholesale importing of curricula and pedagogics led to much enthusiasm and not a little confusion. In some cases, newly translated Soviet textbooks replaced US or European ones that were better informed on the subject, and a whole generation of Chinese technicians paid the price. In others, students were trained for technologies that did not yet exist in China or that called for skills in subjects not taught in Chinese universities. The party’s insistence that work skills were as important as study skills led to the entry of large numbers of unqualified students into the universities. The needs of the First Five Year Plan, introduced in 1953, put enormous pressure on universities and colleges to produce high numbers of personnel for industry, causing slippage in standards. There was a fair share of claims of unrealistic achievements, leading to a need to falsify results.
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No other area of cooperation attracted as many Soviet advisers as education. Generally, they were left unimpressed with what they saw as piecemeal Chinese attempts at reforming the educational system. Education in China was hopelessly backward, as they viewed it. By the mid-1950s, there was still far too much deference toward teachers and far
too little emphasis on political education. Some of the Soviet advisers placed in the central bureaucracy advocated large-scale campaigns directed primarily against illiteracy in the countryside; they thought that too much in terms of resources was being spent in the cities and on higher education. The models, as they saw them, were the methods developed in Soviet Central Asia and in Mongolia in the 1930s. Progress in this area could be, and ought to be, faster than the First Five Year Plan envisaged.
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The year 1955 became the year of reckoning in Chinese education. On the one hand, there was more and more criticism of the universities for slipping standards and not providing personnel with the skills needed to fulfill the Plan. The programs for adult education—to turn workers into students, as the Soviets did in their
rabfaks
—were criticized for being unrealistic and expensive, and were in effect abolished at year’s end. On the other hand, the party leaders (and probably Mao himself) were increasingly impatient with the educational sector, but for different reasons. Their sense was that reform in education was moving too slowly to catch up with the country’s needs, and they attributed this inertia to a lack of political motivation. At the same time, there was an increasing sense, shared by the Soviets, that the countryside was being left behind. The so-called Little Leap, launched by the Chairman in the spring of 1956, was intended to correct these tendencies.
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The year 1956 saw the beginning of the divergence of approaches to education in China and the Soviet Union. These cannot simply be explained by the CCP’s perceived need to Sinify or radicalize their policies. Soviet advisers criticized the Chinese planners of the early 1950s in a manner that shared much of the Chairman’s concerns, especially with regard to incrementalism and lack of rural development. The Leap approach was as much a Soviet invention as a Chinese. When turning to more fundamental methods for forcing change, Mao and his associates looked as much to high Stalinism in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s as to their own Yan’an experience. An April 1957 article in
Jiaoshibao
traces the origins of the Little Leap to Stalin’s methods in 1929/30.
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The lessons given by Soviet advisers, in other words, were neither unitary nor extrinsic. Ideological elements happily crossed any national divide.

Besides land reform and education, perhaps the most important transformative policy of the new regime was in the field of urban planning. In spite of its Marxist origins, the CCP had grown up as a party deeply skeptical of life in the cities. Mao had famously refused at first to move into Beijing after the Communists had taken the city in the spring of 1949, preferring to stay with the troops on its periphery. Having had to conquer the cities from the outside, the Chinese Communists expected little support there, even from among the proletariat so important to Marx himself. The rurally oriented CCP generally regarded China’s big cities as dens of vice and counterrevolution. In 1950 there had even been a heated debate in the Politburo on a proposal from the head of the Manchurian party, Gao Gang, one of the CCP’s senior leaders, to demolish Shanghai and send all its pre-Revolution inhabitants for rectification in the countryside.
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In the early 1950s in China, the new regime and many non-Communist intellectuals agreed that the cities should be remade. The government wanted to regulate the urban centers to keep control. The intellectuals believed that urban planning could improve living conditions. Both sides distrusted all elements of what they liked to call Old China, including the urban environments in cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, and Wuhan. Their problem was whether these cities could be transformed quickly from a parasitic to a productive part of society. If they could, how to go about it? The CCP had inherited an urban crisis from the GMD. Refugees, unemployment, inflation, and the scarcity of goods contributed to the urgency. Output in the cities continued to fall during the first two years of Communist rule.
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As Chinese educators did with Soviet education theory, Chinese city planners turned to Soviet urban planning theory. That discipline
was developed in the 1930s and embodied in its most complete form in the 1935 General Plan for Moscow. In the mid-1930s, Stalin had wanted to transform Moscow, to make it a fitting symbol of socialism, to make it more productive, and to make it more secure for the Communist elite. The city needed more central regulation and more immediate functionality. The wanton destruction of old Moscow that had taken place in the 1920s was no longer enough. There had to be a centralized
plan
for both destruction and construction, not the experimenting and individual or group-based architectural projects of the early Communist period.
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The Style of the Plan, so to say, when transplanted onto China, was a celebratory, historicist version of Western development.

Paradoxically, it was Chinese non-Communist intellectuals who introduced CCP cadre to the specific Soviet ideas of urban planning. The intellectuals were preparing the cadre for receiving larger numbers of advisers from Moscow. The more the party faithful understood these principles, the more they liked them. For a leadership that distrusted their city populations, however much they lauded the virtues of the proletariat, the Soviet urban planning ideas were eminently practical, as well as theoretically correct. Broad avenues and big urban squares facilitated mobility of workers from home to factory and back, and they also could come in handy in case the PLA needed to enter the city center to crush a counterrevolutionary rebellion. But first and foremost, it seems, the Party leaders were convinced by the glory of it all. By transforming their cities in the Soviet image, China would for the first time have urban centers that were celebrations of the modern form—planned, functional, and productive, rather than haphazard, dysfunctional, and consumptive, as they believed the cities of Old China to have been.
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During the 1950s, Beijing—the Chinese city I know best—symbolized the development of the modern. Exceptional in many ways because it had been designated the capital in 1949, Beijing also became a showcase for Communist China’s urban planning. When work on
transforming the capital started—well before the People’s Republic was declared in October 1949—the 1935 Moscow plan was immediately taken as the model. The first Soviet planning team that arrived in Beijing, in September 1949, helped this process along, even though there were disagreements within the joint teams set up to work toward a General Plan for Beijing.
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A major disagreement among the Chinese and Soviet planners concerned where to build the headquarters of the party and the new government. Some Chinese architects and planners, such as Liang Sicheng, the US-educated son of the famous Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, proposed erecting a completely new administrative center
outside
the old city, in the western parts of Beijing. Liang and his colleagues wanted to rescue the Ming and Qing areas from destruction by locating a new center away from the Forbidden City and the old imperial quarters. His notes from that time also indicate a desire to start the modern, architecturally modernist Beijing in a location away from the clutter and complications of the old city. His son remembers that Liang Sicheng “believed that the time had come for mapping out a real scientific, reasonable plan for the city, because under socialism all the urban land is owned by the country and all the architectural activities are brought under a unified management.” Whatever Liang’s own motives may have been, the planners close to the CCP leadership had another motive for their insistence on a new location: They argued that the Party leadership simply would not be secure enough in the center of a city that was still “unreconstructed” and where “old elements” were roaming freely.
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The Soviet advisers, on the other hand, asserted that relocation would indicate weakness. The Red government had to take possession of the capital and show, symbolically as well as functionally, that it was the master of the place. In order to remake Beijing as a Red City and China as a Red Country, the Communists had to be at the center of it, not hiding away on the outskirts. The Soviets were supported by most of those who were providing planning and architectural advice to the
new regime, including the Japanese-educated Zhao Dongri, who later designed The Great Hall of the People, and the French-educated architect Hua Lanhong.

Mao agreed with the Soviets that the party and the government should be in the center of the city. Given the peregrinations of his thirty-year revolutionary career, he had by now had enough of hiding on the outskirts. “Apparently, emperors can live in Beijing, but I cannot,” the Chairman is said to have exclaimed angrily as he rejected Liang Sicheng’s plan. When it came to the transformation of China’s cities, Mao and the Politburo realized that whatever their own preferences had been at first, they would have to lead from the inside. If the Soviet Union had created socialist cities, China could do so as well. And Beijing would be the key example. In the work toward the first draft of the General Plan for Beijing, finally published in spring 1953, the whole city was to be reconstructed on a grid system according to strict zoning principles, with the factory as the overall model. Crucial to the plan was that Beijing should become not just a capital but an industrial center to serve the whole country. The population should be relocated to live in new housing near their places of work. There should be complete equality of services among different groups of the population, and most of these services should be provided through their work units, with the city government being in charge of overall planning.
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It is tempting to blame the first CCP leaders and their Soviet advisers for the destruction of old Beijing. The story of what actually happened, however, is more variegated and complex. The old city could not survive the needs of a modern city that was to be superimposed on it. The extensive use of Soviet models, ill-suited as they were for a Chinese city, carried its part of the blame. But the main reason why the old city fell was the link between Western-trained modernizing intellectuals, who admired the Soviet version of city planning, and the rough balance between rapid development needs and long-term goals that the new government sought. While prerevolutionary Moscow
was envisioned as the Third Rome (Constantinople being the Second), Beijing was going to be the Second Moscow, but even bigger and more modern.

I
F CREATING THE SYMBOLIC
and functional capital city was essential to the new Chinese government, so was coordinating a vast country of countless nationalities. And once again the Soviet experience was invaluable. Minorities’ or nationalities’ policy was probably the field of social engineering in which Chinese approaches were most closely modeled on those of the Soviets. There were many reasons for this. Soviet nationalities’ policy was regarded as highly successful, not just by the Chinese but by most of the rest of the world. Besides, the Chinese knew that minorities’ policy was a particular area of interest for Joseph Stalin himself. Georgian by birth, he had served as commissar for nationalities in the early 1920s and written extensively on the topic.
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Also, Old China, like old Russia, had been an imperial state with many different ethnic groups, and the Soviet solutions could therefore provide a practical blueprint for new China.

In the first conversations with the Soviets that the CCP had after coming to power, the nationalities issue loomed large. Much of the reason for this concern may be found in the rediscovery of China’s ethnic minorities that the party had gone through during the civil war, when it had come into contact with a far larger segment of the country’s ethnic minority population than ever before. The CCP rank-and-file observed the oppression and terrible social conditions many of these groups lived under and sympathized with their predicament. They also noticed how difficult it was to develop real alliances within these groups, because centuries of suspicion against Han Chinese stood in the way. Liberating the minorities was therefore an urgent task, and it could only be done by convincing them that the new China, unlike governments of the past, truly represented
all
those who lived within the state. It was to be a new type of central government.
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