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China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s

China Today was a monthly periodical and the official organ of the American Friends of the Chinese People (AFCP), an organization formed by a group of American Communist Party members and left-leaning intellectuals devoted to introducing the Chinese communist revolutionary movement to Americans. Located in New York, the AFCP also organized public talks on Chinese politics and economics. The journal never became widely popular, with its highest monthly sale of a mere 7,000 copies, yet it remained influential among left-wing intellectuals who shared a concern for events in China.

The Communist Party USA’s Workers’ Bookshop, at its headquarters on 13th Street, between University Place and Broadway, New York City. Posters in the window advocate for a U.S. invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, to open a “second front” in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The editors included Philip Jaffe and a secret Communist Party member and graduate student at Columbia University, Chi Ch’ao-ting, using the pseudonym Hansu Chan. Chi joined the Communist Party in America, and together with a few other Chinese students, formed the Chinese Bureau of the Communist Party of USA. With the help of Moscow, Chi was able to receive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, which became an important source for articles in China Today. Chi later returned to China and acted as an undercover agent inside Kuomintang (KMT) government, the main enemy of CCP. Chi eventually became a prominent trade official in Mao’s China in the 1950s. Philip Jaffe, a successful leftist businessman, became well known because of the “Ameraisa” spy case in 1945, in which he and several other Amerasia editors were accused of espionage, after US intelligence agents found classified government documents in their office. The espionage charge was later dropped due to lack of evidence, and they were only punished with fines. Jaffe supported the journal financially since China Today was never an economically profitable enterprise and he gave the journal some credibility. Jaffe became interested in China well before the launch of the journal and, although a leftist, Jaffe never joined the Communist Party, sometimes even criticizing the orthodox Moscow-dominated communist movement.

Philip Jaffe, Owen Lattimore, Zhu De and Agnes Jaffe in 1937 (via Wikimedia Commons).

There were two reasons behind the launch of China Today. First, American Leftists were curious about the Chinese revolutionary movement. Classical Marxism predicted that communist revolutions would sooner or later sweep the world and liberate the whole of humankind. The founding of Soviet Union seemed to confirm the inevitability of the spread of communism globally giving hope to leftists. Many intellectuals believed that China would be the crucial next step in the global enterprise of revolutionary human liberation. A journal dedicated to introducing the Chinese communist revolution would perfectly fit the niche. Second, the journal sought to compete with reactionary news outlets and spell out the Communist perspective on Chinese events for the Anglophone world. China Weekly Review, a prominent pro-KMT government newspaper based in Shanghai was their direct target. Given its limited circulation, it appears China Today only partially fulfilled this object.

What gave this China Today a special advantage was its ability to procure Chinese communist documents. Because of KMT government censorship, people both inside and outside China had difficulty accessing undistorted political messages of the CCP. China Today offered such an opportunity when publishing original political manifestos or decrees of Soviet China. Chi was the crucial link as he was secretly receiving documents from China.

Three reports from China Today give an indication of the character of the journal. The three articles center on Chinese communists’ activities in Szechwan Province during the war between the Nationalist government and the communist insurgency that resulted in the Long March (1934-36) and the ascendancy of Mao Zedong. The first two articles give a detailed account of the origins of Szechwan Soviet Base (1929-35) and the military campaigns conducted by its main force, the Fourth Red Army. The third article surveys the communist military movements towards the latter stages of Long March.

Mao Zedong on the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

These articles contain important material not available elsewhere and they offer perspectives on the ways Chinese history, in this case the history of the Long March, was framed for an American audience. The heroism and sacrifice of Chinese communists portrayed in these articles are helpful in writing a more nuanced and comprehensive history of Communist China in America. The article on the Fourth Red Army, which occupies a unique position in Chinese revolutionary history, offers both valuable information and a case study in the political shaping of the past. The Fourth Red Army was led by a prominent Chinese communist leader Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-tao) who had a huge policy disagreement with Mao Zedong during Long March and even tried to kill Mao in late 1935. Szechwan was the base area controlled by Zhang at that point in time. The Fourth Red Army subsequently was defeated by government troops and suffered huge losses. Zhang lost his power base and eventually defected to KMT. As a result of this internecine fighting, official Communist Party history tends to erase the achievements attained by Zhang in constructing Szechwan Soviet Base. But these China Today articles were published just after the Zhang-Mao split, when the Fourth Red Army was still praised. Given the poor communication during Long March, the editors of China Today were probably still not aware of the inter-party struggle and therefore their account was more accurate and informative than later assessments of Zhang Guotao.

These news reports were about the events occurring during the epic Long March, but the reporters never explicitly mentioned the term Long March or the supposed goal of Long March: to go to North China to fight with Japanese invasion. This is a call to rethink the narrative of Long March. Chinese official history tends to frame Long March in a way that emphasizes the CCP’s superb strategical capabilities and nationalist political agenda. The Long March was considered to be a strategic retreat that has a clear purpose and destination. We can hardly glean any convincing evidence in articles in China Today that support this characterization. The Communist forces acted more opportunistically, striving to fend off government forces and find a favored location for building a new base. This was in fact for a long time a distinct pattern of Chinese communist guerrilla warfare before Long March. Thus, these news reports open a window to scrutinize pro-communist narratives of CCP activities from 1934-36 before a full-fledged account of Long March came into being.

Route of the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The articles in China Today provide useful information regarding both historical facts and narrative building. We still need to be cautious about overstating the achievements of the Fourth Red Army, but in this case, considering interpretations of Long March narratives, the journal’s ideological bias are not an obstacle, but instead a valuable asset.

Sources:
China Today is part of the Philip J. Jaffe Collection of Leftist Literature in Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Stephen Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)

Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

This essay mainly uses Wide-Giles Romanization System to denote Chinese names and places following its usage in the historical sources being analyzed, except for some well-known Pin-yin names such as Mao Zedong.

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)

By Jing Zhai

Seventy-two ordinary women, living in four different villages in central and southern Shaanxi Province, mostly born during the 1920s or 1930s, witnessed the rise of the new Communist regime in 1949 and experienced dramatic life transformations as a result. During the 1950s and 1960s, a few of them were national or regional labor models. Some were local activists, village-level officials, or midwives. And the others were just ordinary village women who did not involve themselves in local politics. Although the national or regional labor models might get the precious chance of going to Beijing and even meeting Chairman Mao, these women’s life experiences were mostly confined to their villages. Few of them had the habit of keeping a diary or recording their observations. And in official documents, their personal life stories were rarely discussed. If not for the interviews conducted by Gail Hershatter and Gao Xiaoxian from 1996 through 2006, aging and death would have surely silenced these women’s memory.

This book focuses on the memories of rural women who lived through the momentous events of the 1950s. It attempts to recount their life stories not only as historical witnesses, but mostly importantly as women. By tracing the social roles that rural women assumed across their lifetimes, the book reveals changes taking place in women’s field work, domestic labor, childbearing, and marriage. Hershatter successfully brings out the beauty, vibrancy and pain in these women’s rich life experiences. The author asks, “If we placed a doubly marginalized group — rural women — at the center of an inquiry about the 1950s, what might we learn about the effects of Party-state policy and its permutations and appropriations at the local level?”

Usually, memoirs, diaries and interviews that contain people’s memory are used as important clues for historical facts. However, Hershatter’s book is striking for its study of memory itself, based on the large number of interviews she and her collaborator were able to carry out. The distance between memory and the “true” story seems to not be an obstacle for the author and she is fully aware of today’s influences on recollecting the past. Instead, she analyzes the context in which individual memory is generated, especially the subjects’ special experiences as rural women and girls. The stories we hear from women reflect a more distant relationship from politics than that of men. Taking timekeeping as an example, compared with rural men who were familiar with using official time to organize their daily life, women relied on domestic events to remember things. The zodiac, the date of their marriage, and the birthdates of their children formed the system of timekeeping that they used to frame their memories. Memory here is gendered memory.

This book challenges the conventional narrative on the 1950s that is usually focused on changing political campaigns. Many events that people experienced are outside the narrative frame punctuated by campaigns such as land reforms, collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward. By following the life stories of women in farming communities far from the center of state control, these women’s conception of time produced a much more continuous narrative compared with official histories.

Chinese workers in front of the open hearth furnace, September 1958. Via Wikimedia Commons

Memories of Chinese rural women also questioned the unified narrative in the academic study of gender. For example Chaofeng had been a tongyangxi, a “child raised to be a daughter-in-law.” But she experienced painful uncertainties when she decided to divorce her husband during the New Marriage Law Campaign due to her close relations with her mother-in-law. Her experience argues against the traditional analysis of gender reform, regardless of the guilt of tongyangxi or the absolute legitimacy of marriage freedom. This book questions the limitations of a lot feminist scholars’ opinion and brings out the question about recording the perspective and the experience of ordinary women. Is gender such a coherent and unified genre that feminists can easily represent the experience of women from a lower society stratum?

As a work about China’s collective past, Hershatter’s book sheds light on the cultural and social history of the 1950s China. But even if you are just simply searching for some enchanting stories, Hershatter’s book is a great place to start.

Gail Hershatter The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Press (University of California Press, 2011)

Past and Present in Modern China

By Kazushi Minami

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), by Huaiyin Li

Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (Columbia University Press, 2014). by Zheng Wang

Will the Chinese economy continue to grow? Will Chinese politics democratize? Will the Chinese military try to dominate Asia? It is no wonder that we cannot agree on China’s future; we cannot even agree on its past. In fact, how to interpret the past is a heavily disputed subject in China, because history has always been a tool to promote one’s political agenda in the present. Huaiyin Li’s Reinventing Modern China and Zheng Wang’s Never Forget National Humiliation analyze the complex politics surrounding modern Chinese historiography.

Li traces the development of historical narratives from the Republican era to the present. In the Republican era, western-educated intellectuals, such as Jiang Tingfu, blamed China’s turmoil, from the Opium War in 1860 to the 1911 Revolution, on its backwardness in order to support the Nationalist Party’s state-building efforts. In response, Communist historians, especially Fan Weilan, attributed Chinese suffering to the collusion of domestic traitors with foreign imperialists,, a de facto criticism of the Nationalists’ cooperation with the Western powers. Following the Communist victory in the civil war in 1949, Hu Sheng’s narrative, which put class struggle on the center of historical developments, prevailed, serving Mao Zedong’s land reform and collectivization campaigns. After further radicalization during the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution, the reform movements and market liberalization under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s facilitated the revival of the pre-revolutionary historiography, which emphasized China’s century-long efforts for modernization, as the main trend of its modern history.

Wang discusses how history education in today’s China nurtures anti-Western nationalism among Chinese people, which in turn provides a grass-roots foundation for its uncompromising foreign policy. In response to the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, which shattered Chinese hopes for democracy and tainted the legitimacy of communism, the Chinese government launched the Patriotic Education Campaign in 1991. Neglecting the modernization and state-building efforts of the Republican era, it created a singular collective memory that China had always been victimized by foreign powers for a hundred years until the communist revolution. With the slogan “Never Forget the National Humiliation,” the official historiography now champions the Communist Party as the guardian of Chinese security and the agent for “the rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation,” justifying its one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen era. The Patriotic Education Campaign affects not only Chinese classrooms but also popular culture, including radio, TV shows, and movies, spreading what Wang calls “the culture of insecurity” among Chinese people, as observed in their angry reactions to the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the Western criticism on China’s human right abuse in Tibet before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

An episode in the revolutionary war in China, 1911- the battle at the Ta-ping gate at Nanking. Colour Lithograph 1911 By- T. Miyano.

By examining how China sees its past, Li and Wang offer useful frameworks to think about its future. Li, for example, concludes his book with a bold suggestion to establish a new “master narrative” of modern Chinese history, which highlights China’s search for its own modernity, distinct from Western modernity. By doing so, he argues, Chinese history can finally escape politicization. Readers may wonder, however, whether too much emphasis on China’s own modernity can give rise to xenophobic nationalism, as Japan’s pursuit of its own modernity nurtured imperialism in the 1930s. Like Li, Wang also implicitly calls for a more balanced historical narrative, as the unbalanced historical education in today’s China has unfavorable impact on its foreign policy, but readers are left wondering how it is possible when the Patriotic Education Campaign sanctions the Communist authoritarianism. A similarly difficult question is: how would Chinese people deal with the trauma of the Tiananmen Massacre, if the historical narrative were to change at all?

Iconic image of the Tiananmen Square from the May Fourth movement of 1919. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The May Fourth movement, Tiananmen Square, 1919.

Anthony D. Smith once wrote, “no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation.” Memories in the past, triumphant or traumatic, shape the nation at present. Li and Wang illuminate, albeit within differing disciplinary scopes, how this process works for modern Chinese history. Their books are both fascinating not only for historians and political scientists but also for anyone interested in the past and future of China.

Pa-Li-Kiao’s bridge, on the evening of the battle. The Battle of Palikiao (Baliqiao) took place on 21 December 1860 during the Second Opium War (1856-1860).

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