How the Korean War affected the development of the PRC

Background to the war in Korea

• Korea had been occupied by Japan since 1910 and, when the Japanese left in 1945, the Russians invaded across its short common frontier and installed Kim Il Sung as leader in the north of the peninsula

• Korea was then partitioned along the 38th parallel, below which the non-Communist south looked for support from the USA

• However, as it became apparent that the USA was losing interest in Korea, Kim stepped up his interest in conquering the South for Communism.

Mao’ reasons for intervening

• War began in June 1950 but it immediately escalated when the UN authorised a force to defend the south

• Mao was initially reluctant to get involved, but he was worried that an American victory would leave China vulnerable to attack from US bombers operating from North Korea

• Therefore he did intervene when the UN/US force crossed into the North

• While fear of what the Americans might do to the PRC if they conquered Korea was important to Mao, he was manipulated into intervention by Stalin, who hoped to get Mao and Kim to deal with the Americans, without it draining Russia's resources

The war's role: Political effects at home: terror movements

• Mao launched the Great Terror against counter-revolutionaries in October 1950, as soon as the PLA were sent to the aid of North Korea

• The 'three anti' and 'five anti' movements were set in motion soon afterwards

The war's role: Political effects at home: terror movement impact

• Mao was able to remove elements who might emerge as future opponents

• The wartime terror increased the power of the Party because local leaders were given key roles in organising its details, and ordinary workers get involved by denouncing unpopular colleagues and exploitative bosses to Party officials

The war's role: Political effects at home: foreign groups before October 1950

• Foreigners were already being put under pressure before October 1950, having been forced to register with their local Public Security Bureau

• This pre-war hostility escalated into open persecution in wartime, when it became the government's aim to force foreigners to leave the country once they had been stripped of their assets

The war's role: Political effects at home: Americans

Life was predictably hard for Americans, who were branded as counter-revolutionaries, and also for Christian missionaries, who came in for particularly harsh vilification

The war's role: Political effects at home: Russians

The one foreign group that did not leave were the Russians, who had been arriving in large numbers under the terms of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty, they were soon joined by a new influx of military advisers, based mostly in Manchuria, near the war zone

The war's role: Political effects at home: promotion of national unity: Propaganda campaign against the US 

The Party orchestrated a concerted propaganda campaign against the USA, calling on people to 'Resist America, Aid Korea, Preserve Our Homes, Defend The Nation: Mass meetings were organised in workplaces and schools, and the press went into overdrive in whipping up anti-American paranoia

The war's role: Political effects at home: promotion of national unity: mass demonstrations

• Zhou Enlai took the lead in organising student demonstrations and patriotic parades where anti-American slogans were endlessly chanted

• the persecution of those who refused to participate ensured mass participation

• this helped create a sense of unity in which Communist China was portrayed as bravely standing up against the forces of the hostile outside world

The war's role: Political effects at home: promotion of national unity: pressure on the people

• people were pressurised by the Party into donating their money and goods to help finance the war

• Forced donations of anything up to three months' salary were collected from professionals in the cities, while farmers in the countryside saw their crops being compulsorily requisitioned

The war's role: Political effects at home: promotion of national unity: volunteering for the PLA

The rallies were also used by Party officials as means of applying pressure on people to volunteer for the PLA; although most military recruits were in fact conscripted by Party officials, who were given quotas to fulfil and they used whatever methods were effective

The war's role: Political effects at home: germ welfare scare

• In February 1952, Beijing raised the level of anti-American hysteria even higher by launching a germ warfare scare

• Building on widespread public fears of aerial bombardment, it was claimed that American planes were dropping cylinders packed with germ-infested insects not only on North Korea, but also on Manchuria, as well as releasing rats and frogs contaminated with plague

• The Party even organised a touring exhibition at which the public could inspect the evidence while listening to the confessions of captured American pilots being broadcast over the loudspeakers

• The campaign continued until April 1953, when its credibility was undermined by the Russians, who declared it to be false

The war's role: Political effects at home: the five pests

the Party had used the paranoia about health concerns to justify a campaign urging people to kill 'the five pests, of flies, mosquitoes, fleas, bedbugs and rats, along with announcing a more controversial cull of dogs, which as well as being a hazard to public health, were considered an ideological danger because keeping its symbolised lingering signs of bourgeois decadence.

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: manpower losses estimation

• The government never published figures for manpower losses caused by the war, but UN and Russian observers both put the figure at about one million lives

• While the scale of losses was high (similar to those suffered by Britain in the First World War, but in a shorter time), to Mao this was unimportant, as the population was so vast that the losses would soon be made up

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: type of manpower losses

Most of these were conscripts, though they were officially referred to as volunteers, to make it harder for the Americans to blame the Chinese government directly and invade China, which was possible if the war went badly for the North Koreans

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: examples of volunteers

• The volunteers' included Mao Anying, Mao's 28-year-old eldest son, who was working as an interpreter for Marshal Peng and was burned to death in an American incendiary raid on his headquarters

• Mao became even more distanced from ordinary people and their sufferings after this

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: government spending

over half of government spending in 1951 went on the military, and the annual budget for that year was 75 percent higher than that of 1950

The rest of the military equipment was produced in China, notably Manchuria, which was the centre of heavy industrial production

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: military hardware

While a great deal of the military hardware was provided by Russia, the Chinese had to pay for all of it, as well as for the military expertise being provided by Soviet advisers

The rest of the military equipment was produced in China, notably Manchuria, which was the centre of heavy industrial production

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: food supplies

• Food supplies for the army were only kept up by forced requisitioning from the countryside, particularly rice from Sichuan and bread from Manchuria

• high levels of coercion proved necessary in order to obtain the food, with dire consequences on living standards, even famine, in some regions

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: trade embargo introduced by the USA

Further difficulties were caused by the trade embargo on Chinese goods imposed by the USA when China entered the war, which caused a 30 percent fall in foreign trade in the first six months of 1951

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: industrial resources

At the very time when the new Communist economy needed them, vital industrial resources were being diverted into the war in Korea. This delayed the development of China's industrial growth significantly, and was a significant factor in restricting the success of the First Five-Year Plan, launched in 1952.

The human and financial costs of intervention in Korea: affects on public sectors

• the debts caused by military spending meant that the government had little to invest in education, health provision or vital aspects of the economic infrastructure, such as communications

• Progress in all these fields was set back years by the cost of the War

China's enhanced international prestige

• China's prestige was significantly boosted by the fact that its armies had held those of the USA at bay for the best part of three years

• The PRC, rather than the Soviet Union, could now claim to be the most powerful Communist nation, since it was China that had made the sacrifices and shed her blood to defend Communism, while Russia had stood in the background

• the preservation of a friendly, Communist North Korea gave China, and particularly Manchuria, greater security from attack in the future

• The Korean peninsula would no longer be the weak point by which China's enemies attacked her

China's diminished international prestige: USA

• The USA was now the enemy, and American resolve to prevent dominoes falling to Communism in the Far East (known as domino theory) had been hardened

• The CIA began plotting to undermine Chinese control of Tibet, and the Americans moved to replace the French in Vietnam soon after that

• The Americans also pledged themselves to keep Taiwan out of Chinese hands, and would succeed in making sure that the PRC was refused admission to the United Nations until relations thawed in 1972

China's diminished international prestige: Soviet Union

• Mao soon saw how he had been misled by Stalin at the outset, and also resented Stalin's failure to supply air cover to the PLA and get more directly involved in the fighting

• It must have seemed that China had contributed far more to the cause of international communism than Russia

• Sino-Soviet relations grew worse still after Stalin's death, because, although he never trusted Stalin, Mao had far less respect for Khrushchev, whom he saw as a revisionist who had stopped the revolution before it was over