Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

But Greece developed a Europeanized educated class, with English and especially French schools; there was also a large diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean, Alexandria especially, which produced more in the way of European civilization than did Athens herself. Communism developed, particularly in Salonica, where dockers, minorities and refugees congregated — a miniature Shanghai. Here was imperialism (British) in alliance with a grasping native bourgeoisie (Aristotle Onassis, Taki Theodoracopulos) and an exploited peasantry; here as well was an army with a political role; and here too was an intelligentsia which could lead that mass of dock workers and porters and servants-of-servants and bargees who were too poor, disorganized and mistrustful to produce a trade union movement of their own. Here, the Party would come into its own. It would be the ‘vanguard’. Of course there was absurd oversimplification in seeing all such countries as the same. Later on, development economists fell for similar oversimplifications. But the fact is that there was often much of substance to what the Marxists said, and their diagnoses were often not wrong at all. The prescriptions turned out to be another matter. They created more havoc and mayhem than anything the banana republic alternatives would have done.

The failures of the Communists were some way in the future, and meanwhile in 1946, in that huge swathe of the world that was coming free of European empires, there was near chaos. The war had caused even more death and destruction in Asia than in Europe, the great symbol being the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945. The Japanese had taken a lead in showing that the Western powers could be defeated by their own technology. A Japanese fleet had annihilated a Russian one in 1905; Japanese commerce had taken over Western markets; then at the turn of 1941-2 superior Japanese air power had produced catastrophe for the British at Singapore and the Americans at the naval base of Pearl Harbor. Japanese occupation of an enormous area of eastern and south-eastern Asia had followed. The peoples involved — Vietnamese, Burmese, Malayan, Indonesian — produced independence movements that the Japanese (clumsily) encouraged, and when the war came to an end, these national movements had a force that could not, as events soon showed, be stopped. True, the Americans’ atomic bomb did indeed demonstrate that Western inventiveness was still ahead, or even far ahead. The casualties from that single bomb, about ten feet long and just over two feet in diameter, ran to 140,000 (direct and, through radiation, indirect); even the birds in mid-air were burned, and two thirds of the city’s buildings were destroyed. The West was still hugely superior in the most advanced forms of engineering (or ‘technology’ as it became known), but there were by now great limits to the effectiveness of this. Asia was at least learning ‘intermediate technology’, and though the West might win great land wars, winning small and scattered ones was another matter. Empire was over, though it fought a rearguard action that now seems very weird.

Such was the condition of the Far East as the Cold War got under way in 1947. So far, the Far East had already influenced events in Europe: at Yalta, the Americans had been willing to concede a great deal in eastern and central Europe in order to get Soviet help against Japan. But that meant a full-scale Soviet invasion. It struck a China already in endless convulsion. During the war, thanks to the American alliance, China had been very unsteadily returned to independence, had even been granted nominal Great Power status, with membership of the Security Council of the new United Nations. But she was in the grip of civil war, and Stalin patronized (or bullied) the local Communists, under Mao Tse-tung. The Berlin blockade was a very good device for diverting the attentions of the Americans away from China; they were surprisingly weak on the ground in the Far East, and were altogether unsure as to how to proceed. When the civil war began in China, American support for the non-Communists was limited and sometimes reluctant, and by 1949, when the Berlin blockade was ended, the Communists were well on their way to victory. This was a greater disaster than even the Second World War, but it began with good intentions and with Western sympathizers who, for all their extraordinary knowledge and sympathy, now look foolish.

Chinese Communism had started off as a reflection of Russian Bolshevism, and there were Chinese intellectuals — including the young Mao Tse-tung, then a librarian — who had looked at socialist or at least progressive literature. They seethed with resentment, or even hatred, at what had happened to old China: important seaports just seized by this or that foreign power, the Japanese in bullying mode, finances in a mess, native collaborators coining it in. In 1912 the old empire had been abolished, but no solid state had then followed: on the contrary, local warlords divided the country up. There were also some 6,000 Protestant missionaries, setting up hospitals and even universities some way into central China: Yale developed a connection. But this activity just called attention to Chinese backwardness: the awful poverty of the peasants, the degradation of women (in China little girls had their feet crushed so that, in later life, they would walk daintily), the illiteracy that was bound to follow from a script in which each word had its own character, sometimes of forty different brush strokes. Even the Americans’ record was not spotless: they imposed such restrictions against Chinese immigration that a team of Chinese representatives trying to set up their pavilion for an international exhibition at St Louis were roughed up as they came through. Shanghai was an international city, with tens of thousands of foreigners in their own settlements, from which Chinese were kept out; and when there were riots in the twenties, foreign policemen fired into the crowds. Russia had also been dominated by more advanced countries; Lenin had just refused to pay the debts, and in 1919 was defeating the foreign invaders trying to collect them and to return Russia to her previous status. In Peking, Chinese took an interest, and a Communist Party soon followed.

Of course, this was in some degree fanciful. Old Marx did not really have very much to say about such countries, regarding their economic and social arrangements as fossils. There was not much of an industrial working class in China, either. However, Lenin had made his revolution in a Russia that also had only a limited number of industrial workers: the ‘people’ were Volga boatmen, dockers, hawkers, servants-of-servants and especially peasants, and especially again peasants who had been pushed into military uniform in pursuit of a very badly managed war with Germany. There were at least the beginnings of that pattern in China, and some of the intelligentsia understood as much. The cause was even inspiring, and Chinese students, getting married in France, solemnly had photographs taken to record them in their wedding finery, jointly holding up a copy of Das Kapital . France, appositely enough, was the principal source for the spread of Marxist ideas: in the First World War, to create some gratitude on the part of the imperialists, the Chinese government had sent 100,000 labourers, each with a welded dog-tag, to the Western Front: this was known to the British as the ‘sausage machine’. Students, who also undertook to work part-time, also went to France, where, unsurprisingly, they picked up revolutionary ideas. Some of Mao Tse-tung’s most prominent colleagues were among these students: Chou En-lai and Deng Xiaoping, for instance. Later on, as French academe moved Left, the Sorbonne attracted many more such, from all countries.

On the worldwide scale, there was of course a potential Bolshevik alliance with victims of imperialism, and, quite soon after the Revolution, representatives of these, from India or China, began to appear in Moscow. The Communist International — Comintern — set up a school for them, and sent its own people to offer sage advice. Mao Tse-tung (the name means ‘shined-on east’) did not go to that school, and did not in fact go to Moscow at all until after his own victory, much later. But his cause was revolutionary, and he belonged to a type that, worldwide, produced revolutionaries: for he was a student teacher from a peasant background less dismal than others, and had ambitions to count as a scholar, which had been frustrated by an irascible, bullying father who made him work in the fields. The province in which he was born (in 1893), Hunan, was on a military road, and it was relatively open to foreign influences: in 1903 it had the first girls’ school in China and its capital was also chosen by Yale University as the place for an educational programme, on which American missionaries were very keen. In fact Mao was first noticed by an American, the president of Yale-in-China, as an agitator in 1924. It was easy enough for the young Mao to regard China with contempt. Why had such a civilization, the most ancient of all, come under Western domination? Mao cut off his pigtail, broke with his domineering father, and took up links with Peking intelligentsia who became interested in the Russian Revolution.