The Troika: Post-War Politics of the People’s Republic of China
Lin Biao was Chairman of the Communist Party of China, but his illness meant that he was forced to delegate many of his responsibilities. It is widely speculated that Mao elevated Lin Biao for this reason, figuring that he would be a non-offensive placeholder while Mao was away. However, there were other reasons to elevate Lin Biao, namely that he was commander of the Northeastern Field Army, the largest Army in the People’s Liberation Army.
While Lin Biao was in theory the paramount leader of Communist China, for all intents and purposes, a troika including Gao Gang, Liu Shaoqi, and Luo Ronghuan ruled the People’s Republic. Liu Shaoqi was Chairman of the Central People’s Government, the primary civilian governing body, giving him a key position. In contrast, Gao Gang was one of the lowest-ranked State Councillors in the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China. However, Gang’s State Councillor portfolio in the CPG was to be Chairman of the Northeastern People’s Government.[1] This meant alongside Liu, Gao was the most powerful Councillor, as the Northeast was the almost the entire region under Communist Control (the PRC controlled a tiny slice of Shanxi and Xinjiang province). Luo’s power rested in the military; he was Chairman of the Central Military Commission, a position he was naturally appointed to as Lin Biao’s chief political commissar for the Northeastern Field Army.
Gao and Shaoqi had largely overlapping responsibilities and Gao was known to be very ambitious. However, they somehow avoided clashing because of their shared political ethos. Both were solid Stalinists, trained in the Orthodox Soviet form of Communism. For that reason, they were both heavily favored by Moscow. In contrast, Luo was largely apolitical, which actually made him a relatively reliable mediator. In contrast to the early ROC, the early PRC had surprisingly few power struggles.
However, the Orthodox Communist programme fit obstacles. For one, the PRC was remarkably short on industrial machinery, much of it having been “requisitioned” by retreating Soviet troops in the aftermath of August Storm. The Soviet Union did provide some “humanitarian aid” (namely surplus food and WW2-era military equipment), but the PRC lacked in much industrial machinery. The PRC had no choice but to shift toward light industry, which ended up actually pretty effective in raising living standards. Throughout the early 1950’s, the PRC actually enjoyed a higher standard of living than the ROC.
The Communist Party of China consistently implemented one reform first in order to establish its power in “revolutionary base areas.” Land reform, which typically involved mass violence, usually lynchings, against landowners, with their land then unceremoniously redistributed into land collectives.[2] This was the brutal norm of earlier rule of Communist rule in its previous base areas.
This ran into one problem in former Manchukuo - there weren’t any landowners left. Most landlords in Manchukuo were Japanese elites - and most had all fled. The leftover Japanese settlers were mostly impoverished settlers who moved from Japan, mostly the Tohoku region (now the People’s Republic of Japan), because living standards were actually HIGHER in China. The possibility of violence against these settlers was quickly ended by two factors 1) close PRC relations with the PRJ (Tohoku) and 2) the fact that the CPC used the specter of KMT “Han chauvinism” as a legitimating ideology.[3] Another fact underlying the lack of landlords was that the Northeast had almost no large farms. Unlike South China and its massive rice plantations, almost all farms in the Northeast were small-scale family plots growing wheat, soybeans, or potatoes.
The troika was also largely unconcerned about agriculture, and they felt immediate collectivization might drain popular support. As a result, Luo's compromise was to organize all the migrants from past the Great Wall into collective farms, but to largely leave the native Northeastern farmers alone until the Communist state was better established. Instead, the party would focus on industrial development.
The First Five-Year Plan (1948-1953) was directed primarily towards reconstructing light industry in the country to restore pre-war living conditions. The troika also outlined a future Second Five-Year Plan (1953-1958) that would focus primarily on heavy industry and a rapid military build-up (presumably for conquest of the ROC). Then, a Third Five-Year Plan (1958-1963) would function as a “Great Leap Forward” where the remaining farms could be collectivized and all agricultural collectives converted into industrial production.
In contrast to the Republic of China, the PRC Constitution quickly established a unitary state. The old provinces of the Republic of China were abolished and replaced with much smaller prefectures that enjoyed no autonomy or self-governing rights. The Constitution also abolished all the provinces under ROC control, but no one really paid attention to that part.
Although the official capital was Harbin (the first city captured by Communist forces in the Civil War), the de facto capital quickly became Xinjing[4], simply because it had so many empty government buildings from being the former capital of Manchukuo. In fact, most observers suggested that the PRC was only pretending that their capital was not in Xinjing just to avoid Manchukuo parallels. However, keeping the de jure capital in Harbin was also a node to Soviet influence, by keeping the official capital close to the border of the PRC’s benefactor.
The arrival of millions of migrants from primarily the Gansu, Shanxi, and Shandong regions also created an unusual language dynamic. Unlike the South, which spoke many different Chinese languages, almost all PRC citizens were Mandarin speakers, although of many different dialects and accents.
To standardize pronunciations, Communist leaders made a choice that shocked those across the Great Wall - they entirely dropped the use of Chinese characters. The regime opted at the time for the Sin Wenz romanization system, as it was already in use by many pro-Communist peasants coming in from the Yan’an Base Area. Sin Wenz was in many ways, an odd choice for a national script, chiefly because the script failed to delineate different tones. In revulsion, the ROC government dropped its plans to simplify Chinese characters, sticking entirely to the old script.
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[1] This was his OTL position [东北人民政府主席], which made him the most powerful man in Northeastern China.
[2] Land reform in China was remarkably violent - Frank Dikotter wrote a well-regarded book on this.
[3] OTL Mao often brought up Han chauvinism as an "evil" for the CPC to crush.
[4] OTL Changchun.