Organizer: Fang Qin, University of Minnesota
Chair: Steven I. Levine, University of Montana
Discussant: James Zheng Gao, University of Maryland
This panel reinterprets Chinese mobilization for the
Korean War with the aid of new historical evidence. The panelists investigate
the representation of the war in the new political discourse, showing how discrete
but significant groups—intellectuals, non-communist parties, Chinese Koreans, and Christians—were
mobilized and struggled against as war raged in Korea. While war propaganda
lent support to the growing dominance of CCP political power, our panelists
acknowledge and broaden the discourse on the agency of those who were mobilized.
Masuda probes the interaction between public opinion
and policy making in the war, arguing that anti-American sentiment was not
generated solely by the CCP but was an independent nationalistic impetus to
which the CCP had to respond to maintain its legitimacy. Extending upon the
need for the CCP to balance Party imperatives with political inclusion, Jiang
investigates representations of the war in the Guangming Daily published by
non-communist parties. Regime consolidation is analyzed from a different vantage
point by QIN, showing how stigmatization of Christian-controlled orphanages
both consolidated CCP control and allowed people to demonstrate their identities
as new citizens of the new China. The element of nationalism is complicated
further by Cathcart’s paper, which
uses new documents to focus on the role of Chinese Koreans in war mobilization.
In sum, the panel aims to shape further the discourse on the Korean War, emphasizing
the need for further analysis of the notion of a “Chinese public” and
its interaction with the CCP in the earliest years of the PRC.
Hajimu Masuda, Cornell University
China’s strategies during the Korean War have been traditionally explained
by the “state-centered” approach—the lenses of power politics
and policymakers’ leadership—for a long time. Yet, other significant
factors emerge through the “society-centered” approach: popular
attitudes and domestic politics. This paper argues that during the Korean
War the direction of foreign policy was subject to internal social unrest,
contingent domestic politics, and antagonistic popular sentiments.
This paper casts light on the role of historical myth and emotion over
international relations. Emotions matter. They can drive individuals
to war, to murder, and to even self-sacrifice in order to achieve something
more “meaningful”. More specifically, I suggest that popular
anti-American sentiment became an important factor that justified security
concerns, and subsequently limited the range of possible foreign policy.
Although Chinese public opinion was often viewed as monolithic, actually,
heterogeneity was observed. In terms of anti-American feelings, my research
shows that popular attitudes often exceeded the party line. The post-revolutionary
China had not built a strong foundation yet and faced critical domestic
problems. For a country where revolutionary social movements were the origin
of political legitimacy, widespread beliefs could cast restraints on the
nation’s politics. For Beijing, passive and defensive policies could
symbolically imply a concession to the enemy, images of which would damage
legitimacy of the newly established government.
This study is based on 1) policymakers’ telegrams, speeches, and memoirs;
2) news articles, political cartoons, and readers’ letters in local/central
newspapers; and 3) recently published archival documents in Chinese academic
journals.
Hailong Jiang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Established in June 1949 by China Democratic League, the Guangming Daily
became one of the most influential newspapers at that time. From 1949 to
around 1957, the main sponsors of this newspaper were those non-communist political
parties who participated in the Political Consulting Conference and were
admitted by the CCP. Therefore it is safe to consider the Guangming Daily an
overlapping space between the political discourse and the public opinion. The
breakout of the Korean War in 1950, however, challenged the Guangming Daily.
On the one hand, different from the People’s Daily, which mainly targeted the CCP
members and the Chinese people, the Guangming Daily expressed and also targeted
the intellectuals of the non-communist political parties. On the other hand,
this newspaper could not go beyond the dominant political discourse. It had
to understand the CCP’s ideology and blueprint of the Korean War. In other
words, the Guangming Daily became a space among the non-communist political
parties to express their understanding of the Korean War within the dominant
CCP discourse. Therefore, how to justify the necessity and rightness of China’s
participation in the war became one of its main concerns. By a closer reading
of the news reports published in the Guangming Daily from 1949 to 1953, we can
understand such issues as the relationship between the CCP and the non-communist
parties, how the non-communist parties identify themselves from the perspective
of “friends of the CCP” or of “class”, and the legitimacy
of the these political parties in the new regime.
Fang Qin, University of Minnesota
The Korean War not only dragged the new PRC into the international political
chaos. More crucially, as this paper proposes, this war provided the young
political regime an opportunity to erase the influence of the “imperialism” and
thus consolidate its authority among the people. Domestically, the CCP launched
waves of campaigns to achieve such goals. One of these was to stigmatize
the Christian-controlled orphanages established before the liberation, in which
the children were allegedly abused physically, usually to death, and polluted
spiritually.
This paper, by having a closer reading of the reports in the People’s
Daily in 1951, argues that the CCP deployed the strategies of speaking bitterness,
public accusation meetings, and publishing the readers’ letters and visual
arts to mobilize the people to actively oppose the (American) imperialism.
Meanwhile, the party also set up its masculine and authoritative image as the
savior of China. However, ironically, due to a long history of Christian-Chinese
conflicts, when struggling with the process of erasing all the connections with
the old society, the party-state nevertheless had to deploy the collective memories
from the past and thus did not, and could not, cut off its connection with
the past.
On the other side, people were not just passively mobilized. They responded
to the strategies that the CCP deployed and to some extent transformed this
campaign into a performing stage to demonstrate that they were the new citizens
of the new China rather than the polluted and potential threatening elements
from the past.
Adam Cathcart, Pacific Lutheran University
Using documents from the PRC Foreign Ministry Archive, this analysis of the “Resist
America Aid Korea” mobilization campaign in Northeast China investigates
the interaction between Chinese nationalism and the Sino-North Korean alliance.
While the alliance was undergirded by the anti-Japanese and anti-American resistance
ideology of both PRC and DPRK, the war highlighted for China the dangers of
blind support of North Korean nationalism and exacerbated the problem of North
Korean refugees and criminal elements. At the pivot point stood China’s
Korean minority, whose peculiar role in war mobilization is examined via local
documents from the Korean Autonomous Region of Yanbian and border cities such
as Dandong. The paper thereby aims to contribute to debates on Chinese nationalism,
the regional history of Northeast China, and China’s complex relationship
with an equally complex North Korea in the early years of the Cold War.
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