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tive obscurity. But in a move whose motivation and meaning to this day remains somewhat of a mystery, Yeltsin in June 1992 suddenly announced that a number of American military prisoners had indeed been held on Soviet territory. And he vowed an investigation that would determine whether any remained alive.

His statement revived the hopes not only of thousands of families seeking information about MIAS in Indochina-the most vocal and media-noticed segment of the POW/MIA community-but also of a quieter and more patient community representing the families and friends of nearly 8,200 unaccounted-for men from the Korean War and dozens more from the shootdowns of U.S. spy planes during the 1950s and 1960s.

This community-unaligned with and largely separate from the academic community that had begun to forage in Soviet archives for its own purposes-had two powerful allies in its search for information about American MIAS assumed to be in Russian hands.

Each of these allies-the Senate Select Committee on POWs and MIAs and the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission-would end up disappointing the Korean War and Cold War MIA community in its own way.

The Senate committee, whose co-chairs were Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Robert Smith of New Hampshire, lasted for one year and drew significant media attention. But, predictably, it spent the vast majority of staff time and investigative effort on Indochina. The life of the committee was marked by private and public quarrels over the value of certain evidence and the integrity of some of the witnesses.

But in every case, the context of the news and controversy was the Vietnam War. In the public hearings phase, only one day was devoted to Korean War and Cold War issues and cases.

The Joint Commission, meanwhile, had begun what can now be seen as an extremely ambitious attempt to investigate the thousands of intelligence tips and live-sightings of Americans held in the former Soviet Union from the end of World War II to the present day.

Thanks to some Russian cooperation or, to put it another way, despite frequent Russian non-cooperation-the American side of the commission has been able to visit some archives and museums and interview a

number of Russian citizens who have come forward as a result of printed and broadcast appeals for information. (Joint Commission staffers operate on the understanding that Russian officials will be notified of and invited to sit in on all interviews of Russians volunteering information to the American side.)

Now in its fifth year, the Joint Commission remains in operation, although the flow of tips and leads has slowed drastically and the frequently stated promise of access to KGB files on foreign POWs remains unfulfilled.

While conducting ground-breaking work that frequently kept the POW/MIA community's hopes on razor's edge, the Joint Commission also became caught in post-Cold War gridlock, as the archival “window of opportunity" closed and the Russian side's hardliners parried with a dwindling and sometimes fractious team of Americans on the other side.

A report released in the summer of 1993 by the Task Force Russia-a team of U.S. experts on Soviet affairs and military intelligence put together by the U.S. Army— concluded that up to 1,000 or more American POWs from the Korean War had been shipped to the former Soviet Union for interrogation.

But the report's findings were minimized by Pentagon officials who charged they were more supposition than fact. The team of experts who had constructed the case made by the report-Task Force Russia-was effectively disbanded after one year, and its duties subsumed under the Pentagon's Office of POW/MIA Affairs.

The current U.S. position on this issue is that the strongest available evidence points to the transfer to Soviet territory of a relatively small number of Korean War American POWs perhaps corresponding to the roughly 25-30 fighter pilot MIAs who are believed to have been among the most prized captives for intelligence purposes.

[graphic]

Laurence Jolidon is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and the author of Last Seen Alive-The Search for Missing POWS from the Korean War, from which this article was excerpted.

CONSTRUCTING A HISTORY OF CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY FOREIGN RELATIONS

by Michael H. Hunt

The study of the foreign relations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is undergoing dramatic changes that are taking it in a distinctly more historical direction. This development has essentially been driven by the appearance of an abundance of new material (for details see the accompanying essay on sources). This material is largely the product of the party's own history establishment and its mandate to transcend a simple and largely discredited party mythology in favor of a better documented and hence more credible past. The publication of documents, memoirs, chronologies, and standard historical accounts has at last made it possible for specialists outside of China to move beyond broad, heavily speculative treatments based on fragmentary evidence and to construct a party foreign-policy history marked by engaging human detail and structural complexity.

My book, The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), is itself a good gauge of that already well advanced if uneven reorientation. As is evident in the volume, the historical ground becomes more treacherous to traverse the closer we get to the present. The prehistory of the CCP (located in the opening chapters of my study in the late Qing and the early Republic) is firmly in place. From the point of the CCP's formal founding in 1921 down to its consolidation of state power in 1949-1950 (the subject of the middle chapters), the evidence constitutes uneven footing that requires some caution. The most recent phase the foreign relations of the partystate-is just beginning to pass into the historical realm (as the tentativeness of the relevant chapter suggests). It will prove the most interpretively volatile as historical patterns begin to emerge for the first time from the accumulation of reliable evidence.

This trend toward a more historical treatment of the CCP's external relations has occurred at an uneven pace and taken different forms in a field effectively fragmented into two distinct parts. The work done in China is already decidedly historical though still politically constrained. Out

side of China (largely but by no means exclusively in the United States), scholarship bears the imprint of the political science discipline and the closely related international relations field, which has long dominated CCP foreign-policy studies. Historical questions and historical methods are thus, at least outside of China, only beginning to move from the margins to a more central position.

The purpose of this article is to offer a guide to this emergent historical approach. It begins with an extended look at the field's two chief geographic divisions, China and the United States. It closes with some thoughts on ways to encourage the already promising prospects for a solidly grounded and conceptually sophisticated history of party foreign relations.

Scholarship in China

Scholars in the People's Republic of China, now in many ways at the leading edge of CCP foreign-policy history, have only recently come into their own. They long labored under the gaze of party representatives whose main task was to ensure that history served the party's political agenda and contributed to nationalist myths and popular morale during the international crises that marked Mao Zedong's years of power. Under these difficult conditions specialists on Chinese foreign relations did their best work by putting together politically inoffensive collections of historical materials, many of notable quality and lasting value. But in their own writing they had to serve up a thin historical gruel heavily spiced but hardly made more palatable by quotes from Chairman Mao and other sources of the official orthodoxy. This revolutionary historiography, following tenets laid down by Mao, stressed the wave of imperialism that had overpowered China. Commercial and later industrial capitalism, its diplomatic agents, and those Chinese drawn into the unsavory role of collaborator, had left the Chinese people impoverished, economically subordinate, and politically in thrall. The predatory character of imperialism locked China in fundamental conflict with the powers until a popular revolution transformed China and altered China's relationship to the capitalist world.

Since the late 1970s established scholars have worked free of many of the old interpretive constraints, and joined by a

younger, adventuresome generation have begun to exploit their inherent advantages in studying China's complex behavior in an often threatening and generally intrusive world. They have had immediate access to publications (some of limited circulation), and enjoyed the first glimpses into the archives. They have profited from their personal contacts with former policymakers, and brought to new sources an unmatched sensitivity to the political culture in which China's policy was made. They have enjoyed the stimulus of a large and interested audience for their writing and easy opportunity to discuss with colleagues work in progress and news of the field. As a result of these developments, the center for the study of foreign relations and the CCP has shifted back to China. A glance at the number of specialists and special research offices, the frequency of conferences, and the long list of publications would all confirm this impression.

But Chinese specialists still face some notable difficulties. One of these is a patriotism that the CCP did not create but did powerfully reinforce in scholarship as in other realms of Chinese life. The mantra is familiar: China was divided and oppressed; China pulled itself together under CCP leadership; China stood up. This satisfying if somewhat simple story to which specialists on party history and foreign relations still give at least lip service constrains their examination of foreign relations, not least with the capitalist powers and inner-Asian peoples. These sensitive topics must be addressed correctly and carefully or not at all.

While the fate of non-Han people under China's imperial ambitions are simply written out of the category of foreign relations (to be treated instead as an "internal" matter), dealings with foreign powers are featured in terms of the comfortable and safe tale of struggle and triumph. For example, PRC scholars enjoying unparalleled access to source materials on the Korean conflict waged against a U.S.-led coalition have been in a position to offer the fullest account of its conduct, warts and all. Their accounts are indeed fuller but the warts are hard to spot, thus keeping alive the old heroic narrative. Patriotism, reinforced by party orthodoxy, has inspired repeated claims that the Korean intervention was a "brilliant decision" (yingming juece) unblemished by confu

sion, division, or opportunism. That very phrase appears in the title of one of the earliest of the documented accounts to appear in the PRC, and the theme persists in virtually all of the secondary studies of the Korean War published in the last decade.2

A second impulse, as constraining as patriotism and no less intrusive, has been the pressure to fit research findings within a linear, progressive conception of the CCP's development. Highly selfconscious of the importance of its own past to legitimizing the current leadership and maintaining party prestige, the CCP has consistently sought to explain its evolution in terms of the forces of history and the wisdom of its leaders. The result is a picture of a party that adjusted to changing social and international conditions and that consistently and correctly reassessed its own performance, distinguishing correct from mistaken policy lines. The party, thus at least in theory, developed according to a logic which left scant room for recurrent miscalculation or fundamental misdirection.

This notion of history in which all events are mere tributaries feeding the main stream itself flowing toward some predestined point is extraordinarily constraining, as a look at PRC writings relating the 1919 May Fourth movement to the CCP reveals. Chinese leaders interested in the origins of the party have tried to force a rich set of contemporary views into an orthodox framework wherein the raison d'être of May Fourth is to serve as intellectual midwife to the CCP's birth. Their studies make the Bolshevik revolution the central and transformative event in the intellectual life of future party leaders; they underestimate that era's ideological exploration and fluidity; they minimize attachment to such heterodox beliefs as anarchism; and they downplay the influence of earlier personal concerns and indigenous political ideas.3

The third obstacle standing in the way of party historians is the sensitivity with which the party center continues to regard past relations with "fraternal" parties. This reticence is perhaps understandable in the case of North Korea and Vietnam. A candid look at the past can complicate dealings with parties still in power. But the reticence applies even to the now defunct Soviet party. By thus consigning interparty relations to historical limbo, the CCP has effectively set out of bounds large and important slices of its own foreign-relations record and experi

ence.

How the CCP privately assessed the USSR as a supporter and model-surely the single most important issue for understanding the CCP's position within the socialist camp will remain a matter of speculation if not controversy so long as the historical sources needed to arbitrate it are kept locked in Chinese archives and excluded even from restricted-circulation materials. The opening of Soviet archives may provide the first revealing, detailed picture of broad aspects of the relationship, and may perhaps even help overcome some of the squeamishness party leaders apparently feel about a candid look at this important part of their own past. Or it may take the passing of the last of party elders whose memories of dealing with the Soviets go back to the 1920s. However they get there, scholars badly need freer rein to research and publish on this long sensitive topic vital to understanding the CCP after 1949 no less than before that date. [Ed. note: A sampling of recently released Chinese materials on Sino-Soviet relations, 1956-58, appears on pages 148-163 of this issue of the CWIHP Bulletin.]

The last and easily the most practical problem handed down from earlier CCP historical work is the matter of the layers of tendentious documentation and personal reminiscences that have come to surround Mao Zedong. Those layers have unfortunately not only served to obscure him as a personality and policymaker but also covered over the contributions of his colleagues. Repeatedly over the last half century party officials have remade Mao, re-creating his persona to suit the politics of the times. These multiple layers baffle and distract These multiple layers baffle and distract foreign scholars no less than Chinese.

The process began in the late 1930s when the task was to reinforce Mao's claims to leadership of the party. Mao himself made a signal contribution by relating his autobiography to Edgar Snow in mid-1936. Putting aside the reticence usually so marked a feature of Chinese autobiography, Mao offered a self-portrait that highlighted his own moment of Marxist illumination and his strong revolutionary commitment. The resulting account bears an uncanny resemblance to the genre of spiritual autobiograblance to the genre of spiritual autobiography penned by Buddhist and Confucian writers intent on making their own journeys of spiritual self-transformation and spiritual discovery available for the edification of discovery available for the edification of

others.4

But Mao's account also arose from the more practical political concern with launching a publicity campaign that would win support for the party among Chinese and foreigners and bring in much needed contributions from the outside. Inviting Snow, a reliably progressive American, to Bao'an was part of that strategy. Mao set aside roughly two hours a night over ten evenings to tell his story. While Wu Liping translated, Snow took notes. Huang Hua then translated those notes back into Chinese for Mao to review. Snow then returned to Beijing to prepare the final account, to appear in 1938 in Red Star Over China. The first Chinese version of Mao's story appeared the year before. That Chinese edition and others would circulate within Nationalist as well as 5 CCP controlled areas.

The second layer is associated with the "new democracy" Mao began to form in the wake of Wang Ming's defeat and in the context of the rectification movement of

1942-1943.6 Party theoreticians had in 1941 begun to promote the importance of "Mao thought" to party orthodoxy, and a Political Bureau meeting in September and October of that year produced statements of support from Wang Jiaxiang, Zhang Wentian, Chen Yun, and Ye Jianying. (Neither Zhou Enlai nor Lin Biao was present.) For the next two years the visibility of "Mao thought" continued to rise. Zhang Ruxin, Zhu De, Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhou Enlai offered praise, and Mao's writings figured prominently in the study material used in the rectification campaign. The Seventh Party Congress brought the apotheosis. A Liu Shaoqi report and a resolution passed at the congress established a Maoist historiography and proclaimed the guiding role of "Mao thought."

As early as mid-1944 the first genuine collection of Mao's writings had appeared to help consolidate his claim to ideological dominance within the CCP. This early fivevolume Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected Works of Mao Zedong] was edited under Wang Jiaxiang's supervision and published in the Jin-Cha-Ji base area by the New China News Agency. New editions of his selected works (perhaps as many as eight, some with restricted circulation) continued to appear in the base areas down to 1948. That same year Xiao San published his account of the young Mao; he had conceived the project nearly a

decade earlier and proceeded with Mao's approval and the party leadership's support.7

The third layer of Mao publications began to appear soon after the conquest of power in 1949. Stalin is supposed to have suggested to Mao during their Moscow summit the formal designation of an official body of Mao's writings. [Ed. note: The Soviet transcript of the first Stalin-Mao meeting, on 16 December 1949, published on pages 5-7 of this issue of the Bulletin, indicates that Mao, not Stalin, made this suggestion.] The Political Bureau gave its approval in spring 1950, and a compilation committee was formed at once. The resulting four volumes of this new xuanji, published between 1952 and 1960, burnished the image of the statesman traveling the Chinese road to socialism. This new collection, carefully revised by Mao with the help of his staff, was flanked by yet another treatment of the young revolutionary, this one by Li Rui.8

The next layer in the official Mao was laid down during the Cultural Revolution. Alarmed by what he saw as ideological backsliding in the USSR and the persistent bourgeois grip on China's intellectual and cultural life, Mao put forward his own ideas as the antidote. His acolytes took up the struggle, beginning with compilation of the "Little Red Book" on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. That slim but ever-present volume was but the herald to twenty-plus collections intended to define the most imposing Mao ever-"the greatest genius in the world," unsurpassed "in several hundred years in the world and in several thousand years in China." One enthusiast declared, "Chairman Mao stands much higher than Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin." His thought "serves as the lighthouse for mankind," its "universal truth applicable everywhere."9

The latest layer took form soon after Mao's death and was shaped by the political struggle to claim his legacy and appraise his achievements. Hua Guofeng sought to strengthen his claim to leadership through the editing of volume five of the official xuanji, published in 1977. The other, ultimately victorious side in the succession struggle dismissed the tendentious quality of that volume and went off in search of its own Mao. The new image, intended to serve the political program of Deng Xiaoping and his allies, was defined after two years

and considerable Political Bureau discussion. The resulting 1981 resolution, prepared by a small drafting group headed by Hu Qiaomu and supervised by Deng himself along with Hu Yaobang, made Mao bear the burden of mistakes committed in his last years, forced him to share credit for the successes with his colleagues, but let him retain full credit for his earlier revolutionary leadership. Finally, in 1986 a two-volume reader appeared defining the essence of this latest, emphatically scientific version of "Mao "10 thought."

In the new atmosphere of greater openness the party history establishment has made available a wide range of works that constitute the point of departure for anyone interested in Mao's outlook and political role. But cutting through the successive layers of Mao documentation and sorting through the mountain of writing that he left behind is a task that Chinese scholars have sidestepped. Without comment, they have let new scholarly collections pile up on top of the older ones compiled with a marked political agenda, leaving specialists outside China such as Takeuchi Minoru, Stuart R. Schram, Michael Y. M. Kau, and John K. Leung struggling to produce a full and accurate collection essential to recovering the historical figure beneath all the political mythmaking.

A variety of other difficulties stand in the way of the development of party history in its homeland. The publications process lacks quality controls, in part because there are so many party history journals with pages to fill and so many party elders with reputations to burnish, causes to advance, and scores to even. Access to archives for the entire history of the Communist Party and for the era of the PRC is tightly restricted. Some favored Chinese specialists get in; foreigners favored Chinese specialists get in; foreigners are uniformly excluded. Even the best libraries are weak on international studies generally and on the foreign relations of particular countries whose histories impinged on that of China. Opportunities are limited for research in libraries and archives outside China and for exposure to conceptual approaches prevailing abroad.

As a result, party historians in China operate in an atmosphere of caution and insularity. There is little if any interest in methodological or theoretical issues so prominent outside of China. Scholarly debates do not publicly at least go beyond brief exchanges in party history journals over such

factual questions as the date of a particular document or the contents of a particular conversation. Engrossed in a clearly defined body of party history materials, researchers pay scant attention to either Chinese society or the international environment in which the CCP operated. The failure to read, not to mention engage, foreign scholarship has helped preserve the narrowness, discourage international dialogue, and close off CCP history from comparative insights. Behind at least some of these difficulties is something that is likely to be in short supply for the foreseeable future—material resources for research and the assurance that researchers have political support or at least tolerance from a ruling party concerned to keep its historical reputation free of blemish. An attempt to circumvent these two problems by sending Chinese abroad for graduate study in history and international relations has proven somewhat disappointing. It is my impression that those studying overseas in one or another of the broad foreignrelations fields have not found training and research on China-related topics notably attractive, and dismayingly few of those who have completed their studies abroad have gone home to share their skills, knowledge, and contacts. Long-time expatriates are likely to find settling into home institutions trying and particularly frustrating after having paid a substantial personal price in making the earlier adjustment to foreign academic life.

Despite all these problems, good work on CCP foreign relations is being done in China that bears considerable relevance to historical scholarship in the United States and elsewhere abroad. Indeed, it has already had an impact here, thanks above all to the PRC scholars who have helped foreigners researching in China, who have published in English, or who have begun careers in the American university system. It seems certain that foreign historians bent on studying the CCP will ride on the coat-tails and in many cases work in close cooperation with the larger and more active group of Chinese scholars.

Scholarship in the United States

On this side of the Pacific, historical work on CCP foreign relations has suffered from neglect. In the most direct sense this state of affairs is the result of indifference to

the subject by historians of modern China. The paucity at least until recently of adequate sources provides the most obvious explanation for this indifference. But perhaps even more important is the fall of foreign relations from historical grace-from the position of prominence and respect it once enjoyed. As historians embraced a "China-centered" approach, they became increasingly absorbed in intellectual, social, economic, and local history. They looked back with a critical eye on the earlier historical literature with its strong emphasis on China's external relations, and they saw scant reason for interest in more recent treatments of CCP foreign policy produced in the main by political scientists.

As a result, an emergent CCP foreignpolicy history, like other aspects of China's foreign relations, stands somewhat apart from

CCP FOREIGN RELATIONS: A GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE

by Michael H. Hunt

This article offers a general overview of the literature on the origins and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP)'s external relations. This opportunity to share with interested readers my understanding of that literature also permits me to acknowledge the scholarly contributions of others who made my synthesis in The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy possible.

Background and General Treatments

Anyone in search of major themes in Chinese foreign relations or a ready overview should start with Jonathan Spence's elegant The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), and The Cambridge History of China, general editors Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge University Press, 1978-). The Cambridge History provides good coverage not only of the period treated in this study-the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-but also earlier times. Both Spence and The Cambridge History volumes offer help on the relevant literature.

Of all the broad-gauge surveys of CCP external relations, John Gittings's The World and China, 1922-1972 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) stands out for the vigor of its argument and for the breadth of its concep

today's governing historical concerns. Why should specialists in early twentieth-century anarchism, urban women, or rural society care about the party's dealings with the outside world? Even specialists in party history drawn from a new generation of American historians are inclined to set foreign relations beyond their purview or banish it at best to the margins of their concerns.

But arguably to set foreign relations somewhere on edge of Chinese history is to impoverish both. Politics and the state do matter, a point that social and cultural historians in a variety of fields have come to accept. 12 And foreign policy, the regulation of relations with the outside world, may be one of the most powerful and consequential aspects of the state's activity. Understanding the decisions, institutions, and culture associated with that activity can be of signal

tion. Gittings first broached the major themes later developed in the book in "The Origins of China's Foreign Policy," in Containment and Revolution, ed. David Horowitz (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 182-217. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse and Stuart Schram, Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings (London: Penguin Press, 1969), also offers a long-term view of the CCP within the context of the international communist movement. A sampling of the new work and a discussion of its interpretive implications and field repercussions can be found in Michael H. Hunt and Niu Jun, eds., Toward a History of Chinese Communist Foreign Relations, 1920s-1960s: Personalities and Interpretive Approaches (Washington: Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1995).

Historical materials appearing in China over the last decade have dramatically broadened our window on CCP foreign relations and left somewhat dated most of the earlier Western-language literature. The most important of those materials for the period treated here is Zhongyang dang'anguan, comp., Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian xuanji [A selection of CCP Central Committee documents] covering 1921-1949. This collection is supposedly drawn from an even fuller body of materials extending beyond 1949, Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian huibian [A compilation of CCP Central Committee documents], compiled by Zhongyang dang'anguan and available on a very limited basis only in China. The xuanji first appeared in an "inner-party" (dangnei)

importance in filling out such diverse topics as the role of ideas, life in the city, or changes in the countryside. Party historians in particular run the risk of losing track of the global dimensions of the revolutionary and state-building enterprise and thereby forfeiting a chance to move toward a fully rounded understanding of the CCP. At the same time, CCP foreign relations needs the methodological leavening and interpretive breadth afforded by the history of China as it is now practiced. Foreign relations also needs the well honed language tools that historians of China could bring to mining the documentary ore now so abundantly in view.

While there is no reason to mourn the passing of the age of foreign-relations hegemony in the study of the Chinese past, the effect has been to leave the stewardship of China's foreign relations to political scien

edition (14 vols.; Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao, 1982-87). It has reportedly been supplemented by a two-volume addition. An open edition is now available (18 vols.; Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao, 1989-92). A translation of key items from this collection will appear in The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis, ed. Tony Saich with Benjamin Yang (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming).

There are several other general collections containing materials helpful to exploring the party's approach to international issues and its closely related domestic concerns: Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zhengzhi xueyuan dangshi jiaoyanshi, comp., Zhonggong dangshi cankao ziliao [Reference materials on CCP history] (11 vols.; n.p. [Beijing?], n.d. [preface in vol. 1 dated 1979]; continued for the post-1949 period as Zhonggong dangshi jiaoxue cankao ziliao); Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan xinwen yanjiusuo, comp., Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen gongzuo wenjian huibian [A collection of documents on CCP journalism] (3 vols.; Beijing: Xinhua, 1980; "internal circulation" [neibu]), which covers 1921-1956; and Fudan daxue lishixi Zhongguo jindaishi jiaoyanzu, comp., Zhongguo jindai duiwai guanxi shiliao xuanji (1840-1949) [A selection of historical materials on modern China's foreign relations (1840-1949)] (4 vols.; Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1977).

Most of the major figures in the CCP

continued on page 136

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