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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

By Kazushi Minami

History is a contested area of politics in any country. Particularly so in China, where the Chinese Communist Party defines the national history. In the 1980s, in a period of reform, China started to open up its archives and archivists generously helped researchers find documents they needed. The Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive used to be a mecca for historians of Chinese foreign policy. Then in the early 2010s the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly introduced much tighter restrictions, presumably because of the international dispute over the territoriality of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Now, the Foreign Ministry Archive is virtually closed, and historians have turned to provincial and municipal archives scattered throughout China. Between the fall of 2015 and the summer of 2016, I visited seven Chinese archives as part of my dissertation research on Sino-American bilateral exchange in the 1970s and witnessed the Chinese politics of history in motion.

guangdong-provincial-archive

Guangdong Provincial Archive (via author).

Each Chinese archive has its own rules and regulations. The Shanghai Municipal Archive, for instance, has relatively liberal policy and scholars can read and transcribe anything they can find in the on-site computer database. They even allow visitors to photocopy documents—but not any document. In my case, the Shanghai Archive usually denied photocopying of foreign policy related materials, including reports of American visitors after Richard Nixon’s February 1972 trip to China. Chinese researchers told me that the archival staff would not give us any physical document on a potentially sensitive topic with their official stamp on it. The Guangdong Provincial Archive, once a must-go place for historians, now has a much more restrictive policy and researchers cannot even look at most documents produced in the 1970s. Documents on seemingly harmless issues, including the American track and field delegation in 1975, are no exception. Considering Guangzhou’s proximity to Hong Kong, China’s gateway to the Western world, the Guangdong Archive’s stringent policy detracts much from the scholarship on history of Chinese foreign relations.

Although foreign scholars usually travel to large coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, Chinese archives in the remote hinterland sometimes possess surprisingly richer collections. Such was the case with the Shaanxi Provincial Archive in the ancient city of Xi’an. Unlike other archives, the Shaanxi Archive has made available most documents of the Office of Foreign Affairs, which administered hundreds of American visitors in the 1970s. Whenever Americans traveled to Xi’an, the Chinese hosts meticulously planned their itinerary and activities for propaganda purposes. They took American visitors to communes, factories, and schools to show off their socialist achievements, which did impress many Americans who were fed up with social ills back home, including racism, sexism, poverty, inflation, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency.

nixon_shakes_hands_with_chou_en-lai

Richard Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai while on a visit to China in 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Among various targets of archival restrictions in China, the history of culture illuminates the sensitive politics of the past. All the archives I visited had tight restrictions on documents of the Office of Cultural Affairs in the 1970s. One archival assistant explained to me that this was because “the old policy was different from the current policy.” During the Cultural Revolution, the notorious Gang of Four, who pursued leftist radicalization of Chinese foreign and domestic policies, controlled a large part of cultural life in China. For instance, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife and the leader of the Gang of Four, used famous revolutionary ballets “The White Haired Girl” and “Red Detachment of Women” to drum up support for her radical agendas. The politicization of Chinese culture, therefore, makes it difficult for us to dig up documents on China’s cultural exchange with foreign countries in the 1970s.

ballet_during_nixon_visit

The Red Detachment of Women ballet premiered in 1964 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All restrictions notwithstanding, Chinese archives still hold numerous sources that reveal how the Chinese masses saw the United States, their deadliest Cold War enemy, in the 1970s. In the wake of the Nixon trip, communes, factories, and schools throughout China held study meetings, where government officials justified the sudden turn in Chinese foreign policy as a tactical move to defeat the United States in the future. Chinese people, however, remained unconvinced of the virtue of making friends with “the U.S. imperialists” that they had fought in Korea and Vietnam. In the late 1970s, when China embarked on the so-called four modernizations in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology, Chinese people—scientists at universities or peasants in the countryside—enthusiastically embraced the assistance of the United States. Nevertheless, they never completely shook off the long-held suspicion of the United States, as seen in another round of study meetings after the normalization of bilateral relations in January 1979.

Today, there is no sign of an immediate relaxation of Chinese archival policy. It will be years, if not decades, before we gain even partial access to the Foreign Ministry Archive, let alone the Central Archive of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese provincial and municipal archives, however, still offer valuable materials that help us understand Sino-American contacts on the eve of the reform era.
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Read more by Kazushi Minami on Not Even Past:
Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)
Past and Present in Modern China: Two Works on Historical Memory in China
Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)
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Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

By Kazushi Minami

Cold War CrucibleFew topics in history have produced a larger literature than the origins of the Cold War. Since its onset, historians, rightists or leftists, have hotly debated whether the United States or the Soviet Union initiated the mutual antagonism, culminating in the Korean War. After decades of controversy, the scholarly tensions have now died down, though the issue is far from settled, as most Cold War historians moved on to a myriad of other issues. One may, therefore, well ask: Do we need yet another book about the making of the Cold War? Hajimu Masuda says yes. Contrary to the predominant notion of the Cold War as geopolitical and ideological struggle between the capitalist and communist states, Cold War Crucible depicts it as a social construct that local peoples consciously or unconsciously created from the bottom up. For Masuda, the Cold War was a popular fantasy, not an objective reality.

Cover of Red Channels, a pamphlet-style book issued by the journal Counterattack in 1950. Via Wikipedia.

Cover of Red Channels, a pamphlet-style book issued by the journal Counterattack in 1950. Via Wikipedia.

Masuda begins by explaining how Cold War perceptions took shape in the United States, China, and Japan before the Korean War. After WWII, American labor unions, women, and blacks openly called for more rights; Chinese students with vivid memories of WWII opposed U.S. reconstruction of Japan; Japanese workers and students demanded liberal reforms. These social movements, though not caused by communist conspiracies, met a growing backlash from conservatives in each country, who adopted Cold War language, such as “un-American,” “Commies,” and “Reds,” to denounce liberals.

He goes on to analyze how popular discourse distinguishing “us” from “them” during the Korean War consolidated the Cold War realities in the United States and China. Despite deep uncertainty within Harry Truman’s administration about crossing the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula, public enthusiasm and Republican pressure for victory against communists emboldened American policymakers. Likewise, despite ambivalence within the Communist Party toward the Korean War, Chairman Mao Zedong decided to send the People’s Volunteer Army because of popular outcry that connected the war against U.S. imperialists to the domestic struggle against landlords and bourgeoisies. Public support for the war, fueled by widespread fear of WWIII, translated local particularities into a monolithic reality of the Cold War.

Chinese Propaganda poster during the Korean War

Chinese Propaganda poster during the Korean War

Worldwide purges of liberals transformed such fears into political realities. In the United States, conservative offensives against African Americans, homosexuals, labor leaders, and immigrants, as well as gender struggle against working women, gave birth to McCarthyism. Similarly, Britain’s crackdown on labor unions, Japan’s Red Purge, Taiwan’s White Terror, and the Philippine’s suppression of “un-Filipino” activists, though all reflecting social divides at the local level, reinforced the Cold War illusion. Masuda concludes that, “the reality of the Cold War materialized in the crucible of the postwar era… leading to the rise of a particular mode of Cold War fantasy that ‘fit’ well with social needs of populations around the world.”

McCarthy_Red_Scare

So, was the Cold War simply a fantasy? Of course not. Masuda does not intend to ignore the actual geopolitical and military conflicts in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Instead, he argues that the Cold War was a product of complex interactions between international and local leaders and the populace. Although the Korean War was no doubt a military reality for U.S. and Chinese policymakers, ordinary peoples interpreted it through local lenses, which turned the foreign war into a factor in domestic social conflicts. Readers, however, may wonder if Masuda slightly overemphasizes the local agency, as he often cites emotional letters by ordinary citizens, while paying relatively little attention to strategic concerns of top-level policymakers.

Reality of Korean War: A G.I. comforts a grieving infantryman. Via Wikipedia

Reality of Korean War: A G.I. comforts a grieving infantryman. Via Wikipedia

Such a caveat aside, Cold War Crucible is a welcome addition to the rich historiography on the origins of the Cold War, as well as the burgeoning literature on the role of popular perception in international relations. Using primary sources from sixty-four archives in ten countries and regions, Masuda offers a truly international history. Although it is clearly too much to ask for more language sources, his research begs further study on Europe and the Soviet Union to examine whether the same reality-making mechanism was in place in the European front of the Cold War, where geopolitical and ideological confrontation was more intense than in Asia.

Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press. 2015)

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