15.3 Communism Spreads in East Asia

Read the following Section and answer the questions that follow.                                                            

Communism Spreads in East Asia

In the late 1940s, communism made advances in East Asia. With their victory in China in 1949, the Communists gained control of one-fifth of the world’s people.

China’s Communist Revolution

By the end of World War II, the Chinese Communists had gained control of much of northern China. After Japan’s defeat, Communist forces led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) fought a civil war
against Nationalists headed by Jiang Jieshi (jahng jeh shur). Battles raged until Mao’s forces swept to victory and set up the People’s Republic of China. The defeated Nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan, off the Chinese coast. After decades of struggle, China was finally under Communist control.

How the Communists Won 
Mao’s Communists triumphed for several reasons. Mao had won the support of China’s huge peasant
population. Peasants had long suffered from brutal landlords and crushing taxes. The Communists redistributed land to poor peasants and ended oppression by landlords.
While support for the Communists grew, the Nationalists lost popularity. Nationalist policies had led to widespread economic hardship. Many Chinese people also resented corruption in Jiang’s
government and the government’s reliance on support from Western “imperialist” powers. They hoped that the Communists would build a new China and end foreign domination.
Widespread support for the Communists in the countryside helped them to capture rail lines and surround Nationalist-held cities. One after another, these cities fell, and Mao’s People’s Liberation Army emerged victorious. After their victory against the Nationalists, the Communists conquered Tibet in 1950. In 1959, Tibet’s most revered religious leader, the Dalai Lama, was
forced to flee the country. 

Changing Chinese Society 
Mao Zedong built a Communist one-party totalitarian state in the People’s Republic of China. Communist ideology guided the government’s efforts to reshape the economy and society that China had inherited from the dynastic period. The Communist government discouraged the practice of Buddhism, Confucianism, and other traditional Chinese beliefs. Meanwhile, the government seized the property of rural landlords and urban business owners throughout China.
Opponents of the Communists were put down as “counterrevolutionaries.” Many thousands of people who had belonged to the propertied middle class, or “bourgeoisie,” were accused of counterrevolutionary beliefs. They were then beaten, sent to labor camps, or killed. With Soviet help, the Chinese built dams and factories. To boost agriculture, Mao at first distributed land to peasants. Soon, however, he called for collectivization, or the forced pooling of peasant land and
labor, in an attempt to increase productivity.

The Great Leap Forward Fails 
From 1958 to 1960, Mao led a program known as the Great Leap Forward. He urged people to make a
superhuman effort to increase farm and industrial output. In an attempt to make agriculture more efficient, he created communes. A typical commune brought together several villages, thousands of acres of land, and up to 25,000 people. Rural communes set up small-scale “backyard” industries to produce steel and other products.
The Great Leap Forward, however, proved to be a dismal failure. Backyard industries turned out low-quality, useless goods. The commune system cut food output partly by removing incentives for individual farmers and families, leading to neglect of farmland and food shortages. Bad weather added to the problems and led to a terrible famine. Between 1959 and 1961, as many as 55 million Chinese are thought to have starved to death.

The Cultural Revolution Disrupts Life 
China slowly recovered from the Great Leap Forward by reducing the size of communes and taking a
more practical approach to the economy. However, in 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Its goal was to purge China of “bourgeois” tendencies. He urged young Chinese to experience revolution firsthand, as his generation had.
In response, teenagers formed bands of Red Guards. Waving copies of the “little red book,” Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung [Zedong], Red Guards attacked those they considered bourgeois. The accused were publicly humiliated or beaten, and sometimes even killed. Skilled workers and managers were forced to leave their jobs and do manual labor on rural farms or in forced labor camps. Schools and factories closed. The economy slowed, and civil war threatened. Finally, Mao had the army restore order.

China, the Cold War’s “Wild Card”
In 1949, the triumph of the Communists in China had seemed like a gain for the Soviet Union and a loss for the United States and its democratic allies. The number of people under communist rule had more than tripled. China’s role in the Cold War, however, proved to be more complex than a simple expansion of communist power.

Split With the Soviet Union
 The People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union were uneasy allies in the 1950s. Stalin sent economic aid and technical experts to help China modernize, but distrust between the two countries created tensions. Some of these tensions dated back to territorial disputes between tsarist Russia and dynastic China. By 1960, border clashes and disputes over ideology led the Soviets to withdraw all aid and advisors from China. Western fears of a strong alliance between the Soviet Union and China had proved unfounded.

Ping-Pong Diplomacy 
The rise in relations between the United States and China was a gradual process. The first tentative communications were senvia Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, who was friendly with both governments. In the first public sign of improved relations, Mao’s regime invited the U.S.
Ping-Pong team to visit China. The team toured the Great Wall and the Summer Palace and played exhibition games against their host. The trip became known as Ping-Pong Diplomacy. Soon after, presidential advisor Henry Kissinger secretly traveled to China to meet Premier Chou En-lai, paving the way for Nixon’s historic visit.

Washington Plays the China Card 
Relations between China and the United States were even more complex. After Jiang Jieshi (Chiang
Kai-shek) fled to Taiwan, the United States supported his Nationalist government as the rightful representative of China. Washington refused diplomatic recognition of the mainland People’s Republic of China, which American leaders saw as a communist threat to all of Asia.
As the Cold War dragged on, however, the United States took a second look at the People’s Republic. From the American point of view, there were strategic advantages to improving relations with Communist China after its split with the Soviet Union. By “playing the China card,” as this
strategy was sometimes called, the United States might isolate the Soviets between NATO in the west and a hostile China in the east.
The United States allowed the People’s Republic to replace Taiwan in the United Nations in 1971. A year later, U.S. President Richard Nixon visited Mao in Beijing. Finally, in 1979, the United States set up formal diplomatic relations with China.

Taiwan and the Nationalists 
Jiang Jieshi’s government continued to rule Taiwan under martial law as a one-party dictatorship. Not until the late 1980s did Taiwan’s government end martial law and allow opposition parties. Mainland China saw Taiwan as a breakaway province and threatened military action when Taiwanese politicians proposed declaring the island’s formal independence. In the long term, the mainland government insisted that Taiwan be rejoined with China. Taiwan’s government resisted such pressure.

War Comes to Korea

The nation of Korea occupies a peninsula on China’s northeastern border. Like East and West Germany, Korea was split in two by rival forces after World War II. And like other divided lands, the two Koreas found themselves on opposite sides in the Cold War.

A Divided Nation 
Korea was an independent kingdom until Japan conquered it in the early twentieth century. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Soviet and American forces agreed to divide Korea temporarily
along the 38th parallel of latitude. However, North Korea, ruled by the dictator Kim Il Sung, became a communist ally of the Soviet Union. In South Korea, the United States backed the dictatorial—but noncommunist—leader, Syngman Rhee.

North Korean Attack Brings a United Nations Response 
Both leaders wanted to rule the entire country. In early 1950, Kim Il Sung called for a “heroic struggle” to reunite Korea. North Korean troops attacked in June of that year and soon overran most of the south. The United Nations Security Council condemned the invasion. The United States then organized a United Nations force to help South Korea. 
United Nations forces were made up mostly of Americans and South Koreans. Although U.S. troops arrived in early July, North Korean troops continued to advance until United Nations forces stopped them in August along a line known as the Pusan Perimeter. This perimeter was
centered on the port city of Pusan, in the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula.
In September 1950, United Nations troops landed on the beaches around the port of Inch’on, behind enemy lines. These U.S.-led troops quickly captured Korea’s north-south rail lines and cut off North Korean troops from their supply of food and ammunition. North Korean forces in the south soon surrendered. By November, United Nations forces had advanced north to the Yalu River, along the border of China.

China Reverses United Nations Gains 
The success of the U.S.-led forces alarmed China. In late November, Mao Zedong sent hundreds of
thousands of Chinese troops to help the North Koreans. In tough winter fighting, the Chinese and North Koreans forced United Nations troops back to the south of the 38th parallel.
The Korean War turned into a stalemate. Finally, in 1953, both sides signed an armistice, or end to fighting. Nearly two million North Korean and South Korean troops remained dug in on either side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), an area with no military forces, near the 38th parallel. The armistice held for the rest of the Cold War, but no peace treaty was ever negotiated.

Two Koreas
Like the two Germanys, North and South Korea developed separately after the armistice—North Korea as a communist command economy, South Korea as a capitalist market economy. As in Germany, the capitalist portion of the country had an economic boom and rising standards of
living, while the communist zone went through economic stagnation and decline. Also as in Germany, the United States gave economic and military aid to capitalist South Korea, while the Soviets helped the communist north.
Unlike democratic West Germany, however, South Korea was governed by a series of dictators and military rulers during much of the Cold War. Unlike East Germany, where a series of officials led the communist government, a single dictator controlled North Korea throughout the Cold War. Whereas Germany was reunited at the end of the Cold War, Korea remained divided.

South Korea Recovers 
After the war, South Korea slowly rebuilt its economy. By the mid-1960s, South Korea’s economy had leaped ahead. After decades of dictatorship and military rule, a prosperous middle class and fierce student protests pushed the government to hold direct elections in 1987. These elections began a successful transition to democracy. Despite the bloody Korean War, most South Koreans during the Cold War years wanted to see their ancient nation reunited, as did many North Koreans. All Koreans share the same history, language, and traditions. For many, this meant more than Cold War differences.

North Korea Digs In 
Under Kim Il Sung, the command economy increased output for a time in North Korea. However, in the late 1960s, economic growth slowed. Kim’s emphasis on self-reliance kept North Korea isolated and poor. The government built a personality cult around Kim, who was constantly glorified as the “Great Leader” in propaganda. Even after its Soviet and Chinese allies undertook economic reforms in the 1980s, North Korea clung to hard-line communism.

( vocab ) collectivization

( vocab ) Great Leap Forward

( vocab ) Cultural Revolution

( vocab ) 38th parallel

( vocab ) Kim Il Sung

( vocab ) Syngman Rhee

( vocab ) Pusan Perimeter

( vocab ) demilitarized zone

( checkpoint ) What were the main successes and failures of the Chinese Communist Revolution?

( checkpoint ) How did China’s relationships with the Soviet Union and the United States change during the Cold War?

( checkpoint ) Explain when and why China became involved in the Korean War.

( checkpoint ) How did North Korea’s economic performance compare to South Korea’s?

( assessment ) What ideologies did Mao’s programs to transform China reflect?

( assessment ) How did the United States use the changing relationship between China and the Soviet Union to its own advantage?

( assessment ) How might the history of Korea have been different if United Nations forces had not
stepped in to oppose the North Korean invasion in 1950?

( objectives ) Analyze China’s Communist Revolution by providing examples of its successes or failures.

( objectives ) Describe China’s role as a “wild card” in the Cold War.

( objectives ) Explain how war came to Korea and how the two Koreas followed different paths.

( focus question ) What did the communist victory over the Nationalists within China mean for China and the rest of East Asia?