China: Understanding Its Past

5. China and Other Countries, from 1949

China and Other Countries, from 1949 5 Section H aving examined China’s internal situation in the previous sections, we now turn to China’s relationships with other countries during the five decades after World War II. Political cartoons, background essays, and writings from the Chinese press illustrate the state of these relationships and give us insight into the feelings of government leaders. Political cartoons are among the most effective means of presenting a political point of view. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” 1. In your local newspaper or a current news magazine such as Time, U.S. News and World Report, or Newsweek, find a political cartoon you understand. Bring the cartoon to class. 2. Your teacher will make photocopies and overhead transparencies of about a halfActivity : Political Cartoons dozen cartoons for the class to analyze. With a partner, see if you can “read” the cartoons, keeping in mind the following questions. Then each person (not each pair) should write responses to the questions. a. What political issue does this cartoon present? b. What do you think each figure and object in the cartoon represents? c. Effective political cartoons express a point of view. What is the point of view of this cartoon? 3. Your teacher will call on pairs to share their analyses with the rest of the class. As you read the following selections, consider the viewpoints presented and think about how the incidents might be depicted in political cartoons . Later you will be asked to draw political cartoons about China’s foreign relations. Reading: China and the United States, from 1949 China and the United States, from 1949 Relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States over the last fifty years have, at times, been quite tense. China has been a communist country; the United States has been vehemently anti-communist. While the Chinese government has believed that the communist revolution should spread around the world, American officials have generally held that every effort must be made to stop its spread, even to the extent of propping up brutal but anti-communist dictators. Thus from a purely ideological standpoint, one would expect the two nations to be at each other’s throats. This natural antipathy was made worse during Mao’s lifetime because he was the inspiration for revolutionary Communism. During the Korean war (1950–1953), American and Chinese troops fought each other; during the war in Vietnam, the Chinese sent guns, money, and other military aid to the Vietnamese but stopped short of sending troops. During this period, the anti-American rhetoric of the Chinese reached an extraordinary pitch. 238 Chapter 3: Transforming Society: Chinese Communism, from 1920 Ironically, during the last years of the Vietnam war, with the American pullout assured, relations between the United States and China achieved, if not warmth, at least civility. The American president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972. Diplomatic relations were established seven years later, when the United States withdrew its recognition of the Guomindang on Taiwan as the legitimate government of all China. Since then the two sides have often been at odds on issues of international importance, but no one has actually feared that war would break out between them, as some did in the 1960s. China and the United States in the 1960s The following excerpt illustrates the tenor of anti-American sentiment in China during the mid to late 1960s. The title of this part of the article was “Defeat U.S. Imperialism and its lackeys by a People’s War.” It may be hard to take this rhetoric seriously today, but many Communist revolutionaries then believed that the United States was “the most rabid aggressor in human history.” Chinese Communists used the word “imperialism” in a different sense from the nineteenth -century meaning, empire-building through conquest. To the Communists, imperialism meant control of one country by another through political and economic exploitation. In this view, the United States was imperialist in Chairman Mao meeting President Nixon in February 1972. The meeting of these two leaders helped speed the process of normalizing relations between the United States and China. Courtesy of the Military Museum, Beijing. Chinese troops crossing the Han River in Korea during the Korean war. China’s entry into the war saved communist North Korea from defeat at the hands of American and South Korean forces. The Korean War also began a period of “cold war” between the United States and...