As recent historiography has moved away from the Maoist interpretation portraying 1949 as a sudden and complete break between Old and New China, the transitional experience between the two “Chinas” continues to challenge historians with all of its complexities, ramifications, and implications. The articles in this issue deal with the consolidation of the People’s Republic, domestically and internationally, in the late 1940s through mid-1950s. While the studies analyze different aspects of working out the relationship between the new Chinese state and its citizens and the position of this state in an international context, they also show that the issues involved were often intertwined.
The issue begins with Wu Guo’s study of the “speaking bitterness” campaign of the late 1940s, which was a component of the Land Reform and an effort to provide political education to the new recruits of the People’s Liberation Army. The goal of the campaign was to transform peasants and peasant-recruits into politically conscious members of the new China. Using party documents and the recollections of the participants, Wu describes the techniques and strategies used in the practice of this mass mobilization movement. The techniques involved—such as provoking bitterness, inducing bitterness with bitterness, exposing landlords’ luxuriant lifestyle, and “Three Togethers” (eat, live, and work together with peasants)—were, according to Wu, quite “modern” in terms of achieving the psychological impact and winning the trust of the peasants and peasant-soldiers. The “modernity” of the speaking bitterness campaign, Wu argues, lies not only in the process of politicizing the peasants’ and soldiers’ historical memories, but more importantly in empowering both groups to free themselves from the “hierarchical relations” and “core value of submission to authority” that had dominated traditional Chinese rural politics for ages. The speaking-bitterness campaign may be perceived as a forced indoctrination, but it was really meant to be a mental emancipation for the peasants and peasant-soldiers.
Kenton Clymer’s study begins where Wu’s story ends, but Clymer’s focus is on the little known episode in US-Burma relations during the Korean War. The crisis was caused by a sizeable Kuomintang (KMT) force that escaped into the Burmese territory at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Fearing that Burma would become the first non-Communist state in Southeast Asia to fall under the control of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the CIA covertly provided supplies to the KMT force in Burma until 1952, with the assistance of Thailand. The situation was further complicated by the reluctance of Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Taiwan to order a withdrawal of its scattering forces in Burma. The Burmese discovery of the KMT operation put the American ambassador, who had not been informed about the American involvement, in an awkward position and, worse, irritated Great Britain, an American ally. The prospect that Burma would appeal to the United Nations and even possibly invite PRC forces into Burma to drive the KMT forces out of its territory compelled the United States to work out an agreement with Burma, Taiwan, and Thailand to evacuate the KMT troops from Burma. What the story unveils, Clymer argues, is that before President Dwight Eisenhower articulated the idea of “domino theory,” in 1954, as the guiding principle of his administration's foreign policy the practice of such “theory” had already begun in Southeast Asia.
Kyle Haddad-Fonda’s article tells another, rarely studied Cold War story—that of the PRC’s diplomacy with the Islamic world in the mid-1950s. Unlike many other studies on the Cold War, Haddad-Fonda’s study emphasizes the domestic relevance of PRC policy toward the Middle East, especially Egypt, at the time of the Suez Crisis. Beijing’s firm support of President Nasser’s break with the West was intended to highlight PRC’s anti-imperialist stance in the Islamic world but more importantly to mobilize Chinese Muslims to identify with the new China. Threatened by the Muslim-led insurgencies of the 1950s, Beijing found it urgent to speed up the process of national integration and instill among the Chinese Muslims “a sense of national belonging.” “Aiding Egypt,” Haddad-Fonda argues, “served as a tactic to single out Chinese Muslims,” who were expected “not only to sympathize with their co-religionists in the Middle East,” but also to endorse the “government’s anti-imperialist cause around the globe.” The government sponsored Muslim publications and official visits by Chinese Muslims to Egypt effectively helped achieve both aims.
Our Forum presents a conversation between Gail Hershatter, a leading China historian and a past president of the Association for Asian Studies, and Ping Yao, a member of our Editorial Board. The conversation touches on a variety of subjects, including Hershatter’s intellectual upbringing, the challenges and joys of studying labor movement and gender relations in Chinese history. We hope our readers find the conversation as illuminating and insightful as our previous interviews with other renowned historians. We would like to take this opportunity to announce that a Chinese volume of all the interviews/conversations that the journal has published since its inauguration in 2004 (including the Hershatter piece) will be published by Peking University Press later this year under the title 《开拓者: 著名历史学家访谈录》(Pathmakers: Conversations with Renowned Historians). While it is always exciting for us to share our publications with a wider, global audience, we thought the volume would also be an appropriate tribute to the first decade of the Forum, as well as the journal.