News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: China and the Korean War

Date: October 29, 2000

Chinese Question Role in Korean War

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday , October 29, 2000 ; Page A32

BEIJING –– On May 31, 1951, Zhang Da, a company staff officer in the Chinese People's Volunteer forces in Korea, was captured by a detachment of U.S. soldiers as he sat down to his first meal in days, a clump of moldy rice in the home of a peasant.

"I had lost my last hand grenade the day before rolling down a hill escaping the Americans," Zhang recalled. "If I had had it, I would not be here today."

For Zhang and 4,000 other prisoners from the 180th Division, destroyed by a U.S. counterattack in China's worst defeat of the Korean War, capture was followed by months of rough treatment by U.S. troops and interrogations by Taiwanese. The interrogators etched the Chinese characters for "Fight the Chinese Communists, Oppose the Soviet Union" into Zhang's left arm. During his incarceration, Zhang witnessed U.S. military police killing his comrades during a POW uprising on the island of Cheju.

But after the war, Zhang--who dug the offending words from his arm with a knife, leaving a long, white, numb trench--was not welcomed home. For 30 years, he and thousands of other returning POWs were looked upon as traitors for failing to fight to the death and because of their close contact with Americans in POW camps. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, Zhang was the subject of a nationwide manhunt because he was considered an American spy.

It was not until 1980 that China's government acknowledged mistreatment of former POWs in an ambiguously worded explanation called Document 74. But like the Korean War in the United States, what is officially called the "War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea" has remained very much a forgotten conflict here, with China's role largely unexamined. Zhang and other veterans say it's time for that to change.

Fifty years after the eruption of the Korean War, a sensitive and significant debate is beginning in China. Spurred in part by the rapprochement between North and South Korea and improving ties between the United States and its old enemy in Pyongyang, Chinese scholars are for the first time posing difficult questions about the decision to send more than 1 million troops over the Yalu River into North Korea.

Should China have entered the war? Who started the war? Were China's losses and expenses--estimated at almost 1 million killed or wounded and $10 billion--worth it? Why doesn't China's military code give its soldiers the right to surrender? And, even, did China fight on the right side?

"We were told that the war was to protect China," said Zhang Zeshi, another POW from the 180th Division, who is not related to Zhang Da. "But later we discovered we weren't really fighting for China. We were fighting for [North Korean leader] Kim Il Sung. Then we discovered he was a feudal lord. And that he started the war. If North Korea had turned out like South Korea, rich and democratic, then it would have been worth it. But that's not what happened."

China officially marked the 50th anniversary of its entry into the conflict on Wednesday with documentaries and celebrations emphasizing its victory and the righteousness of its cause. But in Internet chat rooms and in several magazines, Chinese are for the first time publicly mulling over questions that the United States, South Korea and Russia have been discussing for years. Only the Stalinist government in North Korea remains closed more tightly than China on these matters.

Although subdued, the debate marks the first public criticism of the foreign policy of Mao Zedong, the dictator who steered China into the conflict. Everything else Mao did--from his disastrous economic policies to his political campaigns that ruined millions of lives--has been the subject of faultfinding by the Chinese. But Mao's geopolitical strategy, which kept China at loggerheads with the West for decades after the Communist victory in 1949, has remained untouchable until now.

The first stone thrown in the debate came late last year in an article in Suibi, an obscure magazine published in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. For the first time in China, a writer argued that Kim Il Sung started the war, that the United States had no intention of crossing the Yalu River and attacking China, and that China's losses far outweighed its gains.

The article, written by Yuan Xi, a reporter for the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, acknowledged that the war helped the Communist government consolidate its power. But it argued that the conflict also kept China out of the United Nations for more than two decades and retarded its economic and social development. The war also helped turn Japan, China's main Asian rival, into an economic power and greatly benefited the Soviet Union, the article contended.

Citing both Western research and internal reports, the article challenged Chinese official statistics, arguing that 900,000 Chinese were killed or wounded instead of the 740,000 acknowledged by China. It said that China spent $10 billion fighting the war, not $3.5 billion. It also complained that the "free" support promised by Joseph Stalin never arrived. China ended up owing Moscow $1.34 billion for "used weaponry from World War II," it said.

Finally, the article suggested something that Chinese scholars have discussed for years but that no one has dared to print: that Mao's decision to enter the Korean War prevented China from recovering Taiwan. Reunification with the island remains a Holy Grail for China's aging Communist leadership.

"Did China do right?" the article asked. "Did China have a better choice? Should the Chinese people have a new perspective about this war? And from the lessons of this experience should we get a new understanding and appropriately confront the challenges of the future?"

Last month, the article was attacked in the journal of the Academy of Military Science, the leading research arm of the People's Liberation Army. Senior Col. Qi Dexue, a Korean War scholar, defended the decision to enter the conflict, arguing that doing so stymied U.S. plots to destabilize China. The war firmly placed China in the camp of the "anti-imperialists," and protected China from further U.S. plots by establishing a buffer zone in North Korea, Qi wrote.

"In today's society, there is definitely a tendency to find fault with, unveil the scars of, look for the dark side and even totally negate the history of the Communist Party," Qi wrote.

In the murky world of Chinese politics, the debate about Korea is seen as an indirect way of questioning China's current foreign policy. Beijing's leadership remains wary of the West; in recent years it has again started to lean toward Russia, from which it buys more than $1 billion of weapons a year. China continues to back regimes at odds with the West, such as those of ousted president Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as well as those in Libya and Burma.

Chinese strategists have spent years proving that the Korean War showed how China could take on powers stronger than itself, especially the United States. The army has used this as the basis of its policy of military modernization, which is aimed at conquering Taiwan and keeping the United States at bay.

"If the Korean War is shown to have been a mistake, then it calls into question the wisdom of taking on the United States over Taiwan," said Thomas Christensen, an expert on modern Chinese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It raises doubts about the military's belief that force can solve the Taiwan issue. There is really little that is more sensitive than that in China's strategic thinking."

In his article, Qi argued that the defeat of the 180th Division was not caused by the army's senior officers, but by mistakes by lower-ranking soldiers. Their persecution upon returning to China was justified, he said.

China's military code does not permit its soldiers to surrender. Unlike such countries as the United States or France, where such former POWs as Arizona Sen. John McCain and the late French president Francois Mitterrand have become leading politicians, being a POW in China marks one as a traitor. For Zhang Zeshi, a Communist Party member, the criticism was even more severe.

"A revolutionary soldier is not permitted to surrender, especially a party member," Zhang said. "But I think that's a feudal idea."

Zhang was stripped of his party membership in 1954 and, despite having a degree from prestigious Qinghua University, was forced to take a job as a high school teacher. A party official forced Zhang's fiancee to denounce him; the official then took her as his bride.

Zhang was dispatched to the countryside for almost 10 years. During the Cultural Revolution, his students placed a dunce cap on his head and called him a traitor and a spy. He was jailed and lived in a cowshed.

After the Cultural Revolution, Zhang fought to restore the reputation of POWs and the fighters of the 180th Division. Backed by Gen. He Min, who persuaded Zhang and his comrades to return to China following the war, Zhang and others ultimately persuaded party leaders to issue Document 74.

That document had a direct effect on Zhang Da's life. He came out of hiding and in the mid-1980s embraced China's economic reforms, opening a successful Sichuanese restaurant in Beijing.

"I'm lucky," said Zhang, who as a wounded POW almost lost his leg to an American surgeon's knife. "I've lived through it all. But my biggest complaint is still about the Communist Party. They don't respect history. . . . If you don't face your history, you're going to repeat it."


© 2000 The Washington Post