Abstract
On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong declared that the Chinese people had ‘stood up’ and announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Despite its youth and fragility, the PRC entered the Korean War exactly one year later. How did the Communist leadership persuade the Chinese military and people that it was in the best interests of their young and developing nation-state to intervene in Korea? Against the background of a contested historical narrative, this chapter analyzes some of the rhetoric and images used in Chinese propaganda that justified the PRC’s involvement, articulated its war aims, and mobilized the Chinese population to support China’s intervention. China’s involvement presented both risks and opportunities in equal measure.2 On the one hand, the war offered China the chance to challenge the US presence in Asia, especially in Taiwan, Japan and Korea. This is indicated by rhetoric that labelled the war the ‘Great Movement to Resist America and Assist Korea’, and presented Chinese intervention as a chance to ‘Beat American Arrogance’. China’s intervention would also symbolize the PRC’s rise as a regional, if not a world power; and it would provide the occasion to strengthen the Communist Party’s support and legitimacy at home at a time of social and economic transformation.
A version of this chapter was published in Media, War and Conflict (2009) 2(3), pp. 285–315. I am grateful to the editors for permission to reproduce the article in this volume. I am grateful to the Department of Journalism of Shi Hsin University, Taipei where I was a Visiting Professor (March 2008), and to the Institute of International Studies, University of Technology Sydney, where I was Adjunct Professor (April–May 2008). These positions gave me the time, space and library facilities to write this chapter. Thanks also to the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds for graciously giving me the opportunity to take time away.
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Notes
M. Galikowski (1998) Art and Politics in China, 1949–1984 (Shatin, HK: Chinese University Press), p. 3. Mao encouraged artists to produce works ‘which awaken the masses, fire them with enthusiasm, and impel them to unite and struggle to transform their environment’ Mao (1975 [1942]), ‘Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ (1942), in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 3 (Peking: Foreign Language Press), pp. 69–98.
Gittings reminds us that in addition to being called xuanchuanhua, to denote the mass-produced posters that flooded China after 1949, they were also known as zhaotiehua, or ‘placard pictures’ that ‘seek attention’ and are attached to an object (for example, a wall). J. Gittings (1999) ‘Excess and Enthusiasm’, in H. Evans and S. Donald (eds), Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 27–46.
P. McLeod (2000) ‘The Korean War through Chinese Eyes’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds), The Korean War: A Fifty Year Retrospective (Canberra: Army History Unit, Department of Defence), p. 92.
A. Abner (2001) Psywarriors: Psychological Warfare during the Korean War (Shippensburg, PA: Bund Street Press), p. 63.
A. Ovodenko (2007) ‘(Mis)interpreting Threats: A Case-Study of the Korean War’, Security Studies, 16(2), pp. 254–89.
Cf. W. Stueck (1981) The Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward China and Korea, 1947–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press) and R. Foot (1985) The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
S.Y. Han (1994) Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898–1976 (London: Pimlico), p. 223.
Cf. W.I. Cohen (1980) ‘Acheson, His Advisers, and China, 1949–1950’, in D. Borg and W. Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations, 1947–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press); G.H. Corr (1974) The Chinese Red Army (London: Purnell); G.D. Rawnsley (1999) ‘Taiwan’s Propaganda Cold War: The Offshore Islands Crises, 1954 and 1958’, Intelligence and National Security, 14: 4, pp. 82–104.
J.R. Adelman and C.Y. Shih (1993) Symbolic War: The Chinese Use of Force, 1840–1980 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations), p. 179.
A.S. Whiting (1960) China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
J. Chen (1994) China’s Road to the Korean War (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 25.
The literature has tended to agree that the problem was not inadequate intelligence about Chinese intentions and motives, but the acceptance and interpretation of that intelligence. See A. S. Whiting, (1960) China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (Standford, CA: Standford University Press), W. Zelman, (1967) ‘Chinese Intervention in the Korean War: A Bilateral Failure of Deterrence’, Security Studies Paper No. 11. (Los Angels, CA: University of California) and, most recently, A. Ovodenko, (2007) ‘(Mis)interpreting Threats: A Case-Study of the Korean War’, Security Studies 16(2): 254–89. Ovodenko has interrogated documents in the American archives to demonstrate that although the Truman administration, the Pentagon and the CIA were initially dismissive of Chinese intervention in Korea, believing instead that the main threat remained the Soviet Union’s involvement, through July and August 1950 reports did increasingly accept that China’s participation was a ‘strong’ possibility: ‘A memo transmitted to … Truman affirmed that, by the end of August, the Joint Chiefs of Staff … considered the prospect of Chinese intervention as much as, if not more than, direct Soviet intervention.’ These concerns continued to be dismissed by Acheson and the CIA in favour of focusing on the USSR. Ovodenko ‘(Mis)interpreting Threats: A Case-Study of the Korean War’, pp. 261–2.
B. Brugger (1981) China: Liberation and Transformation, 1942–1962 (London: Croom Helm), pp. 68–81.
Available in Zhonggong dangshi jiaoxue cankao ziliao (Reference Materials for Teaching CCP History) (1986) vol.19 (1945–1953), (Beijing: National Defence University Press), pp. 205–6.
Cf. P. McLeod (2000) ‘The Korean War through Chinese Eyes’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds), The Korean War: A Fifty Year Retrospective (Canberra: Army History Unit, Department of Defence), pp. 145–6 and Chen, China’s Road to the Korean War, p. 192.
‘Outlines for Propaganda’, in Weida de kangmei yuanchao yundong (1954) (The Great Movement to Resist America and Assist Korea) (Beijing: People’s Press), pp. 674–84.
For a summary of the debates about, and the propaganda concerning, the claims of bacteriological warfare, see S. Badsey (2000) ‘Propaganda, the Media and Psychological Operations: The Korean War’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds), The Korean War: A Fifty Year Retrospective (Canberra: Army History Unit, Department of Defence), p. 160.
Ibid.
D.X. Qi (1991) Chao-xian zhanzheng juece neimu (The Inside Story of Decision-Making during the Korean War) (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue), p. 188.
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Rawnsley, G.D. (2012). ‘The Great Movement to Resist America and Assist Korea’: How Beijing Sold the Korean War. In: Welch, D., Fox, J. (eds) Justifying War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393295_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393295_13
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