'Telling the Truth About People's China'
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
‘Telling the Truth About People’s China’. By Alistair Shaw A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies. Victoria University of Wellington 2010 1 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 Chapter 1: People-to-people diplomacy in context 20 Chapter 2: Telling the Truth 56 Chapter 3: The New Zealand-China Friendship Society and its changing representations of the PRC 1949 – 1976 81 Chapter 4: ‘China’ for New Zealand communists 120 Chapter 5: The Imagination of China by NZ Student Activists in the 1970s 154 Chapter 6: NZCFS 1976-2002: Keeping Up With a Changing China 191 Chapter 7: Re-remembering the Heroes of the New Zealand–China Relationship 227 Conclusion 264 Abbreviations 272 Bibliography 273 2 Abstract This work is a discussion of the history of the construction and propagation over time (1949- 2002), by New Zealanders, of positive images of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was done primarily through the New Zealand China Friendship Society. The thesis also looks at China-aligned communist parties, students who went on New Zealand University Students’ Association study tours in the 1970s, and key interlocutors such as Rewi Alley. These other groups had cross-membership with the NZCFS but differing engagements with China. The images propagated by the New Zealanders altered over time in response to changes in the PRC, developments in New Zealand, and shifting characteristics amongst the people who were engaged in the practice of producing images of the PRC. The thesis looks at how these observers of the PRC, and the organisations which they are combined, are themselves created, and see themselves, in relation to their process of viewing the PRC. This idea of a shifting sense of China and the changing sense of self is explored using a range of ideas. These include ideology, subjectivity, concepts of truth and practices of truth-telling. The thesis is an attempt to provide a sympathetic reading of a wide range of material and trying to understand what the PRC has meant at different times, in different circumstances and to different people. Accounts of the PRC are examined contextually. This involves the re-reading of a range of texts that have ‘written’ the PRC for those New Zealanders who, in different circumstances, have themselves been sympathetic to projections of successes taking place in the PRC. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the support of my supervisor, Professor Brian Moloughney, and my examiners: Professor Paul Clark, Dr Lewis Mayo and Dr Limin Bai, whose helpful comments through the examination process contributed to the final work. The thesis would not have been possible without the subjects who generously made themselves and their material available. In particular my thanks are due to the New Zealand China Friendship Society for access to their archival records. I would also like to acknowledge the financial assistance I received by way of a Historical Research Grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a Faculty Research Grant from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, and a contribution from the Chinese Programme, Victoria University of Wellington. 4 Introduction When Mao Zedong declared the Chinese people Liberated and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) there were just a handful of New Zealanders who had the sort of contact with China that meant that their relationship continued with ‘New’ China.1 On the whole this small group found themselves in conflict with the majority of New Zealanders who subscribed not only to the ‘China has been “lost” to communism’ thesis but also who saw ‘Red’ China as a real threat to ‘world peace’.2 The New Zealanders in question were mainly Pakeha – Chinese New Zealanders and Maori were few. They lived in a New Zealand that was dominated by ideas relating to the Cold War and within a society in part structured towards an essentially white New Zealand produced by exclusionary immigration.3 Further, most of the people who are the subject of this thesis did not know Chinese. The end point of this study, the winding down of many of the relationships discussed here from the late 1990s, corresponds with the growth of a sizeable population of New Zealanders who had come from the PRC. Prior to that there was almost no-one in New Zealand who had experience of living in the PRC. This began to change in the 1970s as people who went to the country to learn Chinese, to be diplomats, to teach and to undertake business increased. With few exceptions, the latter are not the subject of this study. The groups who are the focus of this thesis are distinguished by a shared belief in the social transformative capacity and reality of the CPC-led Chinese project.4 This work is the story of how this small group of New Zealanders, and those who followed them with the same endeavour, attempted to construct and propagate a positive image of China. This was done primarily through the New Zealand China Friendship Society (NZCFS).5 This study also looks at China-aligned communist parties and students whose engagement with the PRC occurred through their involvement in New Zealand University Students’ Association (NZUSA) study tours. The images propagated by the New Zealanders altered over time in response to changes in the PRC, developments in New Zealand and shifting characteristics amongst the people themselves engaged in the practices. 1 Most contact between New Zealand and China from the 1920s through to the pronouncement of the PRC was either by missionaries, who were almost all out of China by 1951, or through the familial ties of Chinese New Zealanders. Contact for the latter was considerably difficult in the early period of the PRC, even more so after the start of the Korean War. 2 See the first parts of chapter 3 for more discussion about this. 3 Barry Gustafson, ‘New Zealand in the Cold War World’, in Alexander Trapeznik and Aaron Fox, Lenin’s Legacy Down Under, Otago University Press, 2004, 23. Patrick Ongley and David Pearson, ‘Post 1945 International Migration: New Zealand, Australia and Canada Compared’, International Migration Review, 29, 3, Autumn 1995, 176-793 particularly 773- 775. 4 The Communist Party of China (CPC) is often written in English as the CCP or Chinese Communist Party. I have used CPC as this is how the Party tends to refer to itself in English language materials and is also consistent with the nomenclature used by the Marxist inspired New Zealand groups to refer to their organisations: CPNZ, CPA, etc. 5 The Society went through a number of different names. For simplicity I will usually refer to the ‘Society’ or the NZCFS. 5 The ‘China threat’ construction was a recent one although it built on historic ones. Just a few years earlier China and New Zealand had been on the same side of a war against Japan. Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression had been a cause celebre in New Zealand and the toil of the Chinese peasants, as witnessed from a New Zealand that also regarded itself as having an agrarian identity, had been largely favourable. Although New Zealand, since European settlement, has been one of the most highly urbanised countries in the world, its export economy was developed under colonisation as a supplier of agrarian products to the United Kingdom. This is an important linkage between the New Zealand left and PRC radicalism – there was a strong emphasis on involvement with agricultural labour and factory work as part of the political action in Maoism and in the practical experience and cultural imaginary of people in the New Zealand left in this era: large numbers of New Zealanders had personal experience of physical labour in either rural or urban contexts from the 1950s to the 1970s and this cut across class lines.6 Intellectuals such as R.A.K. Mason and Communist leaders such as Victor Wilcox each had experiences as rural labourers. This was different from other Western countries, where members of the working class were less likely to shift back and forth between agricultural and factory labour, and where members of the intelligencia were less likely to have worked in farming or in factories at some stage in their lives. Maoist emphasis on the agrarian sector, and on agricultural mechanisation undertaken as a revolutionary activity, sounded less remote from everyday politics and economics in New Zealand than it might have in other rich countries. Leftist New Zealanders translated both what they read and what they saw in Maoist China into terms that fitted with their own economies – material and moral – in which ideologies and technologies associated with rural egalitarianism closely linked to mechanised farming, and strongly interpenetrating rural and urban sectors, even including such structures as farming cooperatives, seemed to be present in both systems. New Zealand’s most famous son in China, Rewi Alley, said that in the 1920s he had read in the Weekly News ‘on the great revolution in China’ and decided he ‘would like to go and have a look at [it]’. 7 Given the agrarian links identified above, Rewi Alley’s involvement with rural industrialism was a significant issue from both the New Zealand and Chinese ends. Alley’s exploits with Indusco during the War of Resistance and activities such as the transport of sheep to China along the Burma Road by CORSO fuelled the public imagination, albeit in a colonial manner not necessarily suited to the new environment.8 6 Richard Bedford and Brian Heenan, ‘The people of New Zealand: reflections on a revolution’, in Holland, P.G.