Searching for Oleksandr Korniichuk and Bao Ninh in China

In 1944, soon after the tide had turned against Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front in World War II, Pravda published a series of startling essays by an obscure writer named Oleksandr Korniichuk. Entitled simply The Front, which subsequently turned into a highly popular play by the same name, the essays were nothing less than a full-scale assault on the entire generation of military commanders who rose to power and influence in the years immediately after the civil war between the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Whites’. The Front, whilst providing readers with highly realistic portrayals of life at the front, also attacked the military tactics deployed by the Civil War generation of officers (particularly at the beginning of World War II) as well as the ‘long held principle of class origin’ in Soviet ideology. According to the veterans represented by Korniichuk, wartime valour was a more important criterion of citizenship than were the Marxist notions of class.Footnote ¹ As it turned out, The Front represented the first shot in what turned out to be a protracted battle between Civil War veterans and young officers of the World War II generation, as well as between veterans of the Red Army and World War II partisans, over who could claim ‘patriotic credit’ for the outcome of the war and which memories of it would be officially enshrined. In the post-war period, but particularly after Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet veterans published scores of literary works detailing the most gruesome aspects of war, recounted their difficulties adjusting to civilian life, and organized an interest group, the Soviet Committee of War Veterans (SKVV), which became one of the most powerful organisations in the state. Not only were partisans marginalized by Red Army veterans, veterans’ notion of citizenship—based on wartime sacrifice rather than on class origin—prevailed. Unlike China, purely class-based discrimination was generally a thing of the past in the post-war period. Equally important, veterans were able to persuade the political elite, and citizens more generally, that ‘fighting for the community was more important than other activities and that it entitled those who engaged in the task of soldiering to special treatment’.Footnote ² Part of this ‘special treatment’ included telling the truth about war. As noted by Weiner, veterans claimed a ‘moral right. . .to describe the history of the war as they had seen it’, and responding to their critics was a ‘political right earned with blood’.Footnote ³

Korniichuk and his comrades-in-arms were not the only veterans who were allowed some political space to offer the public a less-than-glossy account of what happened during and after war. In Vietnam, which shares its ‘regime type’ with China and the USSR, a veteran named Bao Ninh was permitted to publish The Sorrow of War (1991), a quasi-fictional, vivid portrayal of the author's bitter disillusionment over the human and material costs of war, his alienation from post-war Vietnam society (to the point of mental breakdown) and troubled love life. A best-seller in Vietnam, and later published in the United States (1994), Great Britain (1995) and elsewhere, The Sorrow of War (much like The Front in the Soviet Union, Waltz with Bashir in Israel Ari Folman, the director, is a veteran and Oliver Stone's Platoon in the US, and, to some extent, the story of Kenzo Okuzaki in The Emperors Naked Army Marches On (2006) in Japan) is very much part of the larger story of veterans’ finding their voice—often gritty, frank, realistic, harsh and critical—and broadcasting it to the larger public. These anti-heroic accounts of war have not emerged without controversy, political and otherwise. The Sorrow of War was criticized by other veterans and some members of the political establishment, as was Platoon and Waltz with Bashir.Footnote ⁴ The point here is not that veterans in these countries represent a new consensus about the war, but that they have been able to join the political fray in constructing a complex and often complicated analysis of wartime behaviour and post-war circumstances. This is not particularly surprising in the case of the US and Israel, both multiparty democracies with freedom of the press, but in Vietnam and the USSR, authoritarian states with a greater capacity to squash more sanguine memories, veterans’ ability to tell their story is rather striking.

Such political space, narrow as it may have been, stands out even more when looking at the People's Republic of China. Despite veterans who have attempted to publish unvarnished accounts of wartime experiences (such as Zhang Zhenglu's White Snow, Red Blood, a chronicle of the siege of Changchun during the Civil War, which was banished immediately after publication in 1989) China still does not have a counterpart to Bao Ninh—a best-selling veteran author who is permitted to provide readers with the messiness of wartime behaviour—or Korniichuk, even though it produces what is probably the highest number of dramas set in wartime in the world, claims success in all of its wars (particularly against Japan), valorizes veterans’ ‘glorious’ contributions to the victory of the Communist Party and falls into the category of states that were ‘made’ by war.Footnote ⁵ This does not suggest that wartime memory is entirely stylized according to a political script. For example, Feng Xiaogang's Assembly (集 结 号, 2007; Feng is a veteran of the 1979 war against Vietnam), uses ‘Spielberg-esque’ techniques (in Saving Private Ryan) to recreate highly realistic battlefield scenes of the Civil War, general wartime chaos when units were destroyed and merged into others, and provides a rather grim portrayal of the hero's efforts to get the civilian bureaucracy to commemorate the death of his comrades-in-arms. But much is left out. The hero, Captain Gu Zidi, who fought against Japan and the Guomindang (GMD), remains a lifelong bachelor, but we do not know why; his views about the state and its military leadership are never uttered; his attitudes towards civilians remain murky; his interior life is blank. Unlike Bao Ninh and Folman, all we get are his actions. In contrast, Ha Jin's War Trash (2004), a novel about the Chinese prisoner-of-war (POW) experience in Korea, is breathtakingly introspective and critical—both hallmarks of veterans’ post-war narratives—but the author lives in the United States and writes in English.

In this paper, I will attempt to explain the relative silence of veterans’ voices in the post-war period. Describing the predicament faced by veterans of the Anti-Japanese (1937–1945), Civil (1945–1949), and Korean (1950–1953) wars, I use the word ‘relative’ in two main senses.Footnote ⁶ First, compared with veterans’ officially high status in the state and the tonnage of propaganda materials devoted to their valorization (particularly on Army Day, Spring Festival, and Campaigns to Support the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and Military Dependents), their ability to tell authentic stories and contribute to a more realistic memory of China's wars has been highly constricted. Second, compared with their counterparts around the world, but particularly with those in other Marxist-Leninist or other forms of authoritarian regimes, Chinese veterans’ silence is highly conspicuous.

I argue that veterans’ relative silence is but one manifestation of their marginalized position, oftentimes bordering on powerlessness, in the state and society more generally. Power, status, and the capacity to be an ‘agent of memory’, to use Paloma Aguilar's term, are all closely connected and cannot be analyzed in isolation.Footnote ⁷ I suggest that the comparative evidence available on veterans indicates that their ability to manoeuvre within a political system, and to assert themselves as an alternative voice about the realities of war and wartime experience, is largely dependent upon:

1. (1) their status in politics and society;

2. (2) the extent to which there is a consensus about their role in a war (do people agree with the premise that veterans are as important as, say, a civilian worker or party official?);

3. (3) their ability to form local and national veterans organizations that have some degree of autonomy or power vis-à-vis the state;

4. (4) veterans’ capacity to form alliances between the elite—typically officers during the war—and ordinary soldiers both within veterans organizations and outside of them in the post-war period.

None of these conditions existed in the case of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Archival evidence and evidence from local gazetteers and other sources reveal that state officials and ordinary citizens did not give Sino-Japanese War veterans (from the 1937–1945 period) much credit for having defeated Japan or, later on, the GMD. Many also disputed the contributions of Korean War veterans for the victory against the US as well as those of Vietnam War veterans for ‘defending’ China against Vietnam. Veterans in China—unlike their counterparts in Taiwan, South Korea, the USSR, or Vietnam—have not been permitted to establish anything remotely similar to a fraternal veterans organization to ‘press their case’ on the public, and the educated elite have either been disinterested in, or unable to, advocate on behalf of ordinary soldiers after their discharge. In the absence of a strong consensus about the veterans’ role in war, organizations or alliances, veterans voices have been quite muted which has allowed propagandists—most of whom did not serve in combat—ample space to create highly distorted and simplified images and memories of what happened during China's twentieth-century wars.

But the question of why still lurks in the background. Even during the height of Soviet influence in China in the 1950s, the PRC did not establish an organization similar to the SKVV. ‘Asian culture’ writ large cannot account for why South Korea and Taiwan have veterans organizations but the PRC does not. If veterans ‘have always been treated as a privileged group in China’, were defined by the state as ideally representing the ‘social basis of the revolution’, constituted the ‘institutional core of the revolutionary regime’, were the ‘most important’ source of new rural leadership, and service in the PLA was ‘regarded as prestigious’ (until the late 1970s), then why doesn't China have a best seller comparable with The Sorrow of War or The Front?Footnote ⁸ Why can't Zhang Zhenglu's White Snow, Red Blood be published? A key part of the answer, I suggest, is that China has never had a national army (rather, parties and regional warlords have had armies), did not have a unified government during the Second World War, never instituted a national draft, and never fought what some might call a ‘mass’ or ‘total’ war involving the mobilization of the entire population.Footnote ⁹ As terrible as mass or total wars are, they often bring in their wake more successful claims to full citizenship by war veterans (in the case of the USSR, the diminution of class origin as a criteria for membership in the political community), a stronger consensus about veterans’ contributions (the front line soldier as more critical victory than the civilian apparatus), almost irresistible demands to establish veterans’ advocacy organizations, and, thanks to the mobilization of educated elites into combat, more potential for cross-class alliances. In China, in contrast, elites generally served in propaganda units.Footnote ¹⁰ China's wars should be better conceptualized as ‘limited wars’, or border wars (that were more characteristic of Latin American political development) which had far less potential for creating the political and social circumstances that have tended to allow veterans a greater voice in the post-war polity.Footnote ¹¹

This paper, as befits one that deals with a military-related topic, is divided into three sections. First I discuss the veterans’ political position and the extent to which veterans and military families were given political ‘credit’ for having participated in war, and whether veterans were able to use this credit to lay claim to political power and reasonably good treatment in employment. Second is the issue of organization: how did the state organize veterans, and what sort of organizational demands did these groups make upon the state from the 1950s to the early reform period? Finally, I focus on the possibility of class coalitions as a powerful vehicle for veterans to have their voices heard. Within each section I draw extensively upon the comparative literature on veterans—but particularly those cases where veterans have been more influential in the state and society, in order to tease out which factors were ‘missing’ from the Chinese case.

Contested status

Veterans who returned home from war—whether against the Japanese, Nationalists, Americans, or Vietnamese—did not enter a lush political landscape where plum jobs and high status were there for the picking. For many returned soldiers, their very status as a ‘veteran’ could not be easily asserted given the complicated political and military circumstances of the mid-twentieth century. Those who could demonstrate that they had served in the PLA their entire careers had an easier time, but those who served in the GMD military and switched over to the Communists either during the Civil War, or after ‘renewing’ themselves politically by serving in the Korean War and returning to China afterwards, had to go through a sometimes difficult process of proving their loyalty to the new state. Just who counted as a veteran was subject to different interpretations at different times (for example, in the 1960s, family origin sometimes overrode wartime service), and it was up to the veteran to prove his worthiness, which might be a full-time task.Footnote ¹² In addition to this problem, for all veterans, CCP and GMD alike, wartime service often meant many months or even years away from home (usually the countryside, in the case of the PLA), during which time local political leadership spots opened up during the consolidation and expansion of political control and key policies were enforced (such as land reform in the early 1950s, socialist transformation of industries or de-collectivization in the early 1980s). In each of the large waves of demobilization—1949 after the War against Japan and the Civil War, 1955–1956 after Korea and the late 1970s to early 1980s after the Cultural Revolution and the war against Vietnam—there were other officials who did not accept veterans’ claim to high status by virtue of their military service (on either side of the political spectrum). Moreover, these non-veteran officials were better placed politically simply because they were physically present when the fruits of victory were distributed, and they did their best to thwart veterans’ ambition. The fact that many veterans hailed from poor areas of the country that had experienced harsh warfare, particularly North China, made their arrival on the scene especially challenging. State policy towards mobilization, however, disregarded the often complex political, family and economic challenges that awaited veterans. From the very beginning, and changing very little over the course of PRC history, veterans were required to return to their native place (yuan ji an zhi; 原 籍 安 置) after discharge.Footnote ¹³

On the face of it, the yuan ji an zhi policy was reasonable: why would soldiers not want to go ‘home’? But in the context of the war-torn and poor countryside, this regulation was a tremendous simplification. Take the concept of ‘native’, for instance. Wars frequently lead to social dislocation, refugee flows, and family separation. Did ‘native’ mean where one was born, or where one lived during wars? ‘Place’ could be equally problematic. Wars also lead to a great deal of physical destruction—entire villages were bombed and burned by the Japanese during their occupation of China, and hundreds of villages were destroyed by the intentional flooding of the Yellow River in 1938, as part of a doomed Nationalist effort to halt the Japanese advance. What if there was no ‘place’ to return to? County gazetteers report many cases of veterans who moved into non-native villages because of war-related problems, but even in better scenarios rural China suffered from excess labour.Footnote ¹⁴ On the surface, ‘resettlement’ appears to be a simple concept, but it was not. The war against Japan and the Civil War in particular resulted in massive civilian casualties. What if an entire family was killed or some of them wounded? How could a veteran who returned to an empty or damaged home be celebrated as a returning hero? None of the inevitable chaos and complexity of war, let alone rural veterans’ desire to live in a city, were taken into consideration in the yuan ji an zhi policy.Footnote ¹⁵

County gazetteers, much like the hundreds of documents reiterating this basic regulation, give us an uncomplicated summary of how the yuan ji an zhi policy was enforced. These gazetteers, published in the 1980s and 1990s, published a section on veteran resettlement, including information on how many veterans were resettled in agriculture. Even though I am sceptical about the reliability of these data for any one county, a random selection of hundreds of gazetteers reveals the extent to which the yuan ji an zhi policy was pursued after 1950. Some samples of these data from different provinces give a pretty good sense of the social origins of PLA soldiers and the veterans’ post-war predicament. The Civil Affairs section of Anhui's provincial gazetteer notes that, from 1950–1958, the province took in 224,344 veterans, among whom 198,448 (88.5 per cent) were returned to the countryside from which they came.Footnote ¹⁶ In Nanling County, 3,233 out of 3,990 (90 per cent) veterans became peasants once again.Footnote ¹⁷ This was also the case for Huaiyuan because, ‘in our county most all soldiers come from the countryside’.Footnote ¹⁸ In Songjiang County, with the exception of seriously disabled soldiers, ‘all’ veterans whose family had remained in the countryside returned there after military service.Footnote ¹⁹ It was only during the Cultural Revolution, or, more precisely, in 1970–1971, when veterans appear to have achieved what they wanted. The gazetteer of Wei County (Hebei Province) reported that only 22 per cent and five per cent of veterans discharged in those two years respectively, returned to their village.Footnote ²⁰

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not veterans ‘assigned’ to work in agriculture stayed in the countryside, the general thrust of the data suggests that a large majority of them returned to (and stayed in) the countryside, confined to ‘peasant’ status at the same time that the benefits of urban residence were readily apparent. If this is the case, it would mean that only a minority of rural veterans would be able to secure positions in the local political structure, while those few who benefited from state patronage would see their interests aligned with the state. Gazetteer and other data bear out the veterans’ minority status in local political administration and the limited opportunities for upward mobility and power. In Jinzhai County in Anhui, 21 per cent of returned veterans had positions at the village and township.Footnote ²¹ Undoubtedly, these fortunate veterans were grateful to the CCP and viewed their military experience very positively—but it appears that most were less lucky and could not secure political jobs, especially those considered more rewarding, such as village party secretary, township party secretary, and such-like. In some areas, the percentage of beneficiaries may have been considerably less. In Dongping County, Shandong (1950–1981), 17 per cent of returning veterans (3,100 out of 17,842) were cadres in production teams and brigades.Footnote ²² The gazetteers are also generally silent on their precise status in the hierarchy, generally noting that they were ‘cadres’, but not whether they were village or township ‘heads’ (zhang), or for how long they held that status. In the Henan village studied by Ralph Thaxton, veterans who returned from war in 1953 and 1955 ‘faced a party leader who could thwart any threat to his power’.Footnote ²³ In Qingpu County (circa 1951), only one of the 38 returned veterans was a village chief, two were militia platoon (fendui) leaders and one-third were militiamen.Footnote ²⁴ Two years later in Qingpu, among 28 returned veterans, only one secured a position at the township level (as deputy chief), and one as village chief. According to a 1956 report, only ten per cent of veterans were ‘heads’ (zhang) of anything (82/758).Footnote ²⁵ As bad as this seemed to veterans in Qingpu, it was worse elsewhere. In the Southwest there were cases of bandit leaders, landlords, secret society members who received official posts in the bureaucracy (even district chief). In one district, 40 per cent of militia members were said to be members of secret societies in the early years of the PRC.Footnote ²⁶

Veterans’ relatively weak and vulnerable position in local leadership had important implications for their post-war prospects. Reports from the 1950s and 1960s (and the reform period) point to a tense relationship between returning veterans and local cadres, many of whom had risen to their status through non-military careers and saw themselves to be just as entitled to the jobs as the veterans. Land, power, and other resources were highly contentious issues, and in the battles over them (who got good land, and jobs working on it) veterans generally found themselves in a weaker position. In Shandong, for example, a report noted that ‘lack of land’ was a ‘problem’ for returning veterans of the Korean War (which included veterans of the Civil War as well as the war against Japan).Footnote ²⁷ This was an understatement: according to a hand-transcribed report of a meeting of county officials in the province, there were ‘uprisings’ against the government led by veterans and former prisoners of war who lacked land and housing.Footnote ²⁸ In some cases, village cadres prevented veterans from holding political posts.Footnote ²⁹People's Daily reports from the mid-1950s also attest to rural cadres discriminating against returned veterans and being insufficiently concerned with their well-being.Footnote ³⁰ In Qingpu, veterans complained that the only time local cadres were concerned with their welfare was when they were needed; otherwise they were ignored.Footnote ³¹ One veteran put it this way: ‘In the army we talked about everything, but back in the village the cadres just ignore us, as if we're not members of the mutual aid team. In the army, we felt welcomed, but here the treatment is always cold. How can we be enthusiastic about our work?’. This military-civilian transition problem was seconded by another: ‘In the army I was a platoon commander; I led men. Now others lead me. The township party secretary doesn't even talk or listen to me. What's more, he looks down on me! I can't take it’.Footnote ³²

In part, this problem can be attributed to veterans’ minority status in most villages, with the exception of those in some of the pre-1949 base areas. But more problematic from the veterans’ perspective was unfortunate timing: land reform, which was completed in most areas by 1953, usually took place before they arrived on the scene. By 1954–1957, by which time roughly 5,260,000 veterans had been discharged after several wars, the rural economy was already undergoing collectivization.Footnote ³³ Veterans, who had been away from the fields for a very long time, had rusty agricultural skills, and tended to be older. Moreover, few of them were enthusiastic about their return to the land in the first place—it was not their choice. As such, they were generally seen as a ‘burden’ on local resources.

Veterans who were either recruited from cities (usually a minority because of concerns about their political loyalty and family or class background) or who moved to cities from the countryside due to poverty, natural disasters or a ‘push’ from local officials, had even greater problems finding their ‘place in the sun’ after their discharge. In factories, hospitals, unions, publishing houses, party committees, and educational institutions, veterans never represented a ‘critical mass’ of personnel able to press their case for higher status, and usually ended up fighting in rear-guard battles merely to preserve their positions. Officials who had acquired power by joining unions in the 1930s, working as writers and propagandists during the war or by virtue of higher educational credentials, saw no reason to give veterans a powerful stake in the post-war political apparatus, unless they had no choice in the matter. At the Hongxiangxin boat repair factory in Shanghai, for example, cadres told veterans: ‘It took 30 years of bloody struggle for our working class to establish the union. You can't enter just like that to enjoy power and benefits’Footnote ³⁴.

Reports on serious difficulties in employment came from all parts of the country in the early-mid 1950s and persisted well into the Cultural Revolution. Veterans, often unbeknownst to them, were stigmatized by their association with the military and by the ‘prideful/arrogant’ (骄 傲) behaviour many of them displayed after being told that they were heroes of the war against Japan, the Civil War or the Korean War. An early (1953) report on Qingdao in Shandong noted that of the 10,000 people who were given ‘long term employment’ only eight were veterans. When Civil Affairs officials contacted employers, they just replied, ‘We don't need anyone’. As a result, for the first two quarters of 1953, 48 per cent of returning veterans remained jobless, ‘and still more were coming’.Footnote ³⁵ In the city of Linqing in Shandong, a report, published in 1955 in the Shandong Administrative Bulletin co-authored by a joint team from the Municipal Procurators Office and the Veterans Committee, found that ‘not a few’ work units used a variety of methods to avoid hiring veterans. When enterprises were looking for guards, they approached the local labour bureau with a key demand: ‘Just don't give us any veterans’. According to the investigators, veterans were all tagged as having ‘problems’, ‘hard to get along with’ and ‘difficult to lead’.Footnote ³⁶

Workplace discrimination, as frustrating as it was for veterans, is nothing unusual in the history of demobilizations. Veterans often have faced a very difficult labour market upon their return from war. In Nigeria after World War I, for example, only a small percentage of veterans (far less than in China) could get jobs in government. The remainder had to ‘make shift for themselves’. ‘Ironically’, Matthew notes, ‘most Nigerian veterans found that their military service had left them neither prepared for nor entitled to a wage-earning occupation’, even as they felt ‘superior to their peers’ when they returned home.Footnote ³⁷ In Ghana after World War I, veterans expected ‘better jobs’, war bonuses, gratuities and pensions, but ‘on the whole, they were disappointed and disillusioned’. Those veterans who managed better after the war tended to have good occupations prior to their enlistment, but ‘for most, war service merely heightened their frustrations by raising expectations that the post-war Gold Coast economy could not satisfy’.Footnote ³⁸ In the United States after World War I, employers, especially those in highly urbanized centres, were reluctant to fire workers who had taken veterans’ places during the war, since in the meantime the former accumulated valued skills (and consequently earned more money than returning veterans).Footnote ³⁹ On the whole, American World War II veterans, who shared with their World War I counterparts high expectations about post-war employment, fared better: the economy was doing well, many veterans benefitted from the ‘GI Bill’, and veterans’ expectations for a rise in status were greeted sympathetically by the elite. (‘Can we expect that such a man should come home. . .to his place behind the cigar counter?’)Footnote ⁴⁰

What makes China rather different is that discrimination against veterans was often prompted by a more fundamental disagreement over whether the cause for which they served or fought was worthy of any benefits. In the case of the Korean War, for example, and unbeknownst to veterans, Shanghai residents from all sectors of society had widespread misgivings over why China was going to war, why North Korea deserved their sacrifice and why the US was suddenly the enemy of China. Party investigators were alarmed when they encountered local cadres and ordinary workers’ reactions to the various protagonists in the war. In Penglai District, cadres said that China should only provide political support to the North Koreans, but otherwise they should ‘liberate themselves’. Many local cadres, despite the ‘Sino-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Security and Friendship’ signed in 1950, were suspicious of the USSR and wondered why China's foreign policy was not to ‘join the US-British alliance’ [NATO] instead of starting a fight with the US? Since Shanghai was an industrial centre, the US was sure to attack using the atomic bomb and the Marines.Footnote ⁴¹ Ordinary workers were similarly ‘confused’ according to investigators, who summarized their views after extensive interviews:Footnote ⁴²

Local officials, of course, tried to ‘correct’ these ‘mistaken’ viewpoints. The vice-chairman of the Shanghai Branch of the All-China Textile Union publicly complained that even workers who attended large meetings and small group sessions and ‘recognise the innate character of paper tiger American imperialism’, ‘still do not feel much hatred towards the United States’, ‘do not grasp the idea that ‘America has always been our enemy’, probably because this was simply untrue.Footnote ⁴³

This scepticism was shared by a fairly large swath of the city's more educated classes. For example, in 1950 the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions convened a meeting of the ‘education workers [teachers] union’ to hear their views on the war. Few appeared to accept the rationale for it. Lack of enthusiasm was said to be ‘common’. Some wondered: ‘We've already learned about social development; we know that imperialism will be defeated in the end and that the people will ultimately be victorious. What's the emergency now?’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Others panicked, fearing that ‘the atomic bomb would be dropped on them’ and so ‘refused to utter a word’. A few refused to wear red scarves or teach, fearing a Nationalist return to the mainland. One teacher explained: ‘When the Guomindang was here we said ‘The Guomindang is good’. Now the Communist Party is here and we say ‘The Communist Party is good, serve the people’. Now the Guomindang is returning. What should we do?’Footnote ⁴⁵

Given these views about the Korean War, as well as its less than heroic outcome—many Chinese were aware there were POWs—it should come as somewhat less of a surprise that veterans had a hard time reaping the fruits of victory in terms of social status, political clout and voice. For those who were POWs, the situation was frequently dire, as witnessed by uprisings in Shandong, but even those who returned under more normal circumstances could not escape the shame associated with becoming a POW. ‘Calling a veteran a ‘POW’ was an epithet in Shanghai factories as late as 1956’.Footnote ⁴⁶

In this respect, China's post-war experience appears to diverge with those of many other countries, but particularly those that emerged victorious, or at least claimed to be. In the USSR, for example, partisans and other officials went head-to-head against Red Army veterans for prestige, status, power and deciding ‘what the legacy of the war should be’, but the former went down in a resounding defeat.Footnote ⁴⁷ After World War II in the US, as reported post-war by Samuel Stouffer's research team—and sharply contrasting with the situation in China after the war—the ‘front line combat man’ was at ‘the top’ of the status hierarchy; he was ‘the only person who could not be asked: ‘What are you doing for the war?’. He had no need to justify himself’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Worried about the animosity that veterans might feel towards civilians, the Office of War Information published a booklet with guidelines about how they should treat the issue of sacrifice: ‘Certainly the word “sacrifice” in connection with anything the civilian has done is woefully inept and inaccurate when compared with the immensely greater contributions of the fighting men’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In China, veterans did have official ‘glory,’ but so did so many other officials who contributed in some way to ‘victory’. But more important were the non-official views, which had a larger impact on everyday interactions with veterans. The war in Korea was contested, as was the necessity and benefits of going to war with Vietnam in the late 1970s (for years, Vietnam, like the USSR, was an ally of China), so veterans, claims of glory could be easily contested, rendering their political status highly vulnerable.

Paths to power, status and representation

Veterans in China, like these populations elsewhere, quickly discovered that credit and recognition for services rendered does not emerge as a ‘natural’ or inevitable historical and political process. Rights, representation, and the ability to tell one's story in an authentic voice is, for the most part, a result of winning political, economic and social battles. I use the word ‘battle’ not simply to evoke associations of war, but rather to suggest numbers and organization. Just like most soldiers do not fight alone but in units, history shows that when veterans have gained a greater voice and higher status it has been through protracted struggle and organizational power. To give one brief example from the US to foreshadow the discussion below: the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC—one of the most ‘authentic’ representations of the costs of war to the individual—was organized, sponsored, and chosen by the Vietnam Veterans of America, not any particular individual or politician. Chinese veterans, like their counterparts in the US, were quite aware of this relationship and for years pressed for their own representative organization to fight against discrimination in the workplace, the right to move to cities, and establish a veteran ‘identity’ distinct from other groups who had participated in the revolution and war. Unlike women, workers, youth, overseas Chinese, the disabled and even property owners (!) veterans in the PRC still lack an organization, even in a Leninist guise, that they can even remotely call their own.

Protests involving groups of organized veterans began soon after the establishment of the PRC. Mentioned in an internally-circulated government report that found its way to the Shandong Provincial Archive, some unemployed veterans in that province ‘gathered together’ and created a ruckus in government offices. In the cities of Harbin and Dalian, government offices were occasionally ‘closed for business’ because of collective protests by veterans. In the city of Fushun, several veterans hooked up with former comrades-in-arms from Hebei Province and mounted a street ‘parade’ carrying aloft the image of Mao, as well as a sign that read (rhyming in Chinese) ‘The government doesn't care, so we have to beg’ (政 府 不 管 我 们 只 好 讨 饭). Other Shandong veterans, probably in a faux-suicide ploy, laid down on railway tracks to make a statement about their treatment.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other veterans took their complaints directly to provincial and national authorities.Footnote ⁵¹

For some, the only solution to their difficulties was in the formation of a veteran organization. During the Hundred Flowers Movement in early 1957, for example, Huang Bi, a veteran working in the Guizhou Provincial Forestry Bureau, in cooperation with an unemployed veteran and two others from different units, formed an organization called the ‘China Veterans Association’. This group demanded ‘organizational independence’ and ‘parallel’ status with the CCP. According to the press report (uncovered by the late Gordon White), the veterans held secret meetings ‘during which members complained that veterans were dregs who were not receiving adequate attention from the party and government’, and tried to recruit veterans in Shanghai, Beijing and Sichuan. In May, 1957, the China Veterans Association took advantage of a scheduled meeting of official ‘veteran representatives’ to threaten a street demonstration, if their demands were not met. Huang's critique went well-beyond bread and butter issues, however. Belying the image of veterans as staunch supporters of conservative political values, in June he argued that French-style democracy (not American, of course) could be adopted in China. In 1957, the CCP counterattacked: Huang was declared a rightist and the veterans association was disbanded as ‘reactionary’.Footnote ⁵²

Efforts to form veteran organizations to fill the void left by the absence of any form of effective interest group representation did not end in 1957. Absent of any other effective way to convey their grievances to those at the Centre, veterans tried—like other disgruntled groups—another tack when the Cultural Revolution broke out. On 21 December, 1966, at 3:30 pm, over 80 veterans, with others waiting outside, met just outside Communist Party headquarters (known as Zhongnanhai) and demanded a meeting with top officials, including Premier Zhou Enlai.Footnote ⁵³ The veterans came from Jiangsu, Fujian and Nanjing, where problems were said to be ‘serious’.

This was not the first time Zhou Enlai was dealing with organized veterans during the Cultural Revolution. Just one month earlier, in November, 1966, dozens of veterans pressed for a meeting with him, but since he was ‘busy’, or at least claimed to be, the tête-à-tête never took place. Miffed, a bunch of veterans managed to barge into Zhongnanhai, where they requested an audience with other top CCP leaders. Roughly ten of Zhou's deputies and other top officials did meet with them. When the veterans finally met Zhou, he was still upset at their earlier manoeuvre: Veterans, he emphasized, were very different from students who could leave their campuses and travel about the country to ‘make revolution:’ ‘You can't just leave your jobs; do you see me leaving my position?’. Still, to reassure the veterans of the sincerity of his concern, he identified himself as one of them: ‘You're veterans and I'm also a veteran—I've fought in wars!’. He also expressed his awareness of their problems, noting that when he had met with the Capital Red Guards, a student umbrella organization, ‘some others gave me notes describing veterans’ problems, including persecutions, beatings and unemployment’.

But when it came to the veterans’ central demand, which for them was the only solution to these problems—the establishment of an ‘independent, national veterans’ organization’—Zhou was far less accommodating. Citing a policy that he had articulated at the Capital Red Guard meeting, Zhou reiterated that veterans could only establish a ‘liaison organization’, but otherwise would have to participate in the Cultural Revolution in their work units, such as schools, factories and other enterprises: ‘veteran’ status as such could not be the basis of self-organization. Some of the attending veterans were sceptical about the authenticity of this order, however, and asked Zhou if this policy, which was part of a three-part decision regarding veterans in the Cultural Revolution (known as ‘The Three Directives’), had been personally approved by Chairman Mao and Vice-Chairman Lin Biao, and whether it would be possible for Lin to come out personally to prove that it was authentic. Zhou assured them that it was: ‘Chairman Mao approved it himself; it's not fake. Who would dare issue orders under his name without his approval?’.

The fate of veteran organizations during the latter phases of the Cultural Revolution was not much better. Even though Zhou denied calling these organizations ‘illegal’, or ordering their immediate dispersal (instead, he asked the veterans ‘to consider dispersing or not’), more radical leaders did not hesitate to brand them as such, or even ‘counterrevolutionary’ during 1967 and 1968, and to order the PLA to suppress them wherever they existed. Despite their grievances, which were shared among many on the ‘left’, evidence suggests that most veterans were not sympathetic to Mao's call to ‘bombard the headquarters’ and were aligned with the established party-state or ‘royalists’ as the radicals so colourfully put it.Footnote ⁵⁴ There were significant exceptions to this pattern, however. Apparently one-third of (mostly urban) veterans were aligned with rebel organizations because of long-standing grievances about their job prospects, forced resettlement in the countryside, and a broad ‘hostility to cadres in general’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The ‘Red Flag Army’ (hongqi jun) in Hunan, for example, operated under the umbrella of Shengwulian (Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Alliance Committee), a large ‘rebel’ organization of the political ‘have nots’. Its leader, Jonathan Unger notes, ‘had been denied a proper civilian position for having held a Guomindang membership card before 1949’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Other veteran-rebel organizations were active in Guangdong and Guangxi (‘August 1^st Combat Corps’), Shanghai (‘First Column Headquarters of the Red Banner Army’), Guizhou (‘Red Guard Army’), Jiangsu, Hebei, and Sichuan.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even after these organizations were disbanded, sporadic protests continued. In 1975 in Guangdong, veterans protested about ‘discrimination in wage and bonus policies’, but after a crackdown ‘issued a statement pledging to comply with party policy and end all wage protests’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The early years of the reform era, which brought together a rapidly-shifting economic policy, large scale demobilization and a difficult-to-understand foreign war (similar to the early 1950s), also witnessed a rash of veteran-led protests over a host of issues. In 1981, for example, a report pointed to a largescale outbreak of violence in the three Southwest provinces. These violent incidents brought together roughly 1,000 veterans and youth from minority communities, many of whom suffered from desperate poverty and Han discrimination and violence during the Cultural Revolution. Pushed to the edge, the veterans and minorities reportedly destroyed grain storage facilities, as well as trucks and boats that transported grain, before local officials called in reinforcements to suppress them. This was followed by a large manhunt in the railway stations, roads and harbours in Sichuan. Railroad workers had their theory of what was behind these incidents: ‘The CCP has sent very many veterans to the Southwest, but because a lot of them don't have any work, they are extremely dissatisfied and frequently create disturbances, for many different reasons. CCP cadres have been killed and wounded. On this occasion, they united with minorities, who also can't find jobs and they have very many problems getting by’.Footnote ⁵⁹

The credibility of this Hong Kong-based report on organized veterans in the Southwest is strengthened by internally-circulated reports indicating comparable developments in other provinces in the same time period. On Hainan Island, several thousand veterans who worked on a farm subordinate to the military district ‘rebelled’ when they read a 1982 State Council document calling for the introduction of a fiscal responsibility system. They allegedly attacked the county party committee, shouted slogans and denounced the state's ‘capitalist and revisionist policies’ in graffiti.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Shandong, railway stations were also at the centre of the action. According to the May, 1981, issue of Jiaodong tielu (Transportation and Railways), during March of that year close to 10,000 veterans had returned to the province after their military service. Dissatisfied because ‘their post-service positions are worse than the ones they had before joining the PLA and there is very little work for them’, veterans organized to find other ways to survive, or to take revenge. The journal reported 132 ‘criminal incidents’ involving veterans. Railway stations in Jinan and Qingdao were attacked—veterans stole switching lights, signs and other equipment, which they probably tried to sell on the black market.Footnote ⁶¹ In Qingdao, ports were raided. According to Qingdao's Gangkou kuaixun (Port Bulletin), forty veterans were arrested in the spring of 1981 for stealing television sets from a Japanese commercial liner. Port officials were worried because the veterans were organized (and probably armed), led by a discharged lieutenant and a staff sergeant.Footnote ⁶²

It is difficult to ascertain how, exactly, the veterans organized; one guess would be that they served in the same unit in the army and corresponded after their discharge. However they accomplished this, it was not new. Nor was this organization only aimed at the theft and/or destruction of state property. Discharged in very large numbers to villages whose leaders were not necessarily happy to see them return (and who were often successful using their position to make decent money while veterans were in the army), veterans banded together to protect their own interests and status. In a 1980 report in a Hong Kong newspaper, veterans were said to have been engaged in ‘protests and disturbances’, but also formed veteran organizations to fight for reasonable treatment by local authorities. In Zhejiang Province, for example, veterans who returned to villages organized (in December, 1980) the ‘Zhejiang Province United Veterans Federation;’ in Xing'an County in Guangxi Province, veterans organized the ‘Xing'an County Veterans Action Committee’ with separate departments (mimicking the CCP organization) for organization, propaganda, communication, and security; in Kunming, veterans formed the ‘Yunnan Province, Kunming City Action Committee General Headquarters’, and the ‘Negotiating Team of the Disabled Veterans Fighting for Employment Rights’. Although based in Kunming, both groups dispatched members to scout out other veterans to boost their organizational strength. According to the analysis in the newspaper, many veterans were in dire straits: some had committed suicide because of depression and their inability to find jobs, especially those that came close to matching their expectations of post-service upward social mobility. The simultaneity of the end of the Cultural Revolution and the initiation of reform-era policies worked to their disadvantage. Because of the Cultural Revolution, veterans had many political enemies in their villages and ‘could not return’, but owing to the ‘Household Responsibility System’, which placed the burden of agricultural production on the household rather than on the collective and added to the surplus of agricultural labour, many veterans could not find jobs. Even at this early date in the history of the post-1978 demobilization, reports noted some 400,000 veterans who did not have appropriate jobs and who had a very hard time surviving.Footnote ⁶³

Veterans’ long quest for political organization speaks to the larger question of their status and power within the CCP. Veterans in China did have minimal political representation, but they have never been allowed to establish anything close to a fraternal organization (either local or national), nor has the state allocated a separate bureaucracy to them, like the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US, or the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans in Korea, or the Fudaohui in Taiwan. Until the mid-1950s, for example, the government established ‘veteran committees’ at the township, district, county, provincial and national levels—but membership was generally limited to party-vetted ‘veteran representatives’. In factories, veterans might be allowed to organize a veterans’ ‘small group’. Locally, veterans committees could have some influence; its members did some of the ‘follow-up’ work after resettlement that Civil Affairs officials usually neglected. Equally important, veterans committees succeeded in co-opting a certain number of veterans (and thus weakening their solidarity), and gave many the impression that veterans were a critical and highly valued regime constituency. At the same time, however, veterans committees existed in bureaucratic no-man's land and could not serve as a base for protecting or enhancing veterans’ interests and status. Like Civil Affairs, they had no supervisory authority over any other organization: their official role was limited to ‘investigation’, ‘summarising resettlement work’, hearing veterans’ complaints and conducting ‘political education’ among them and therefore were easily ignored at no cost.Footnote ⁶⁴

The PRC's reluctance to place organization space, political power and resources in the hands of veterans stands out in sharp relief when seen in a comparative perspective. In the West, veterans have gained a voice in national politics and in the politics of representation because of their ability to organize. During the course of the First World War in Britain, at least four different veterans organizations were created, including the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers (formed in 1916 and connected to the Trade Union and Labour Party), The National Federation of Discharged and Demobilized Sailors and Soldiers (1917, affiliated with the Liberal Party), Comrades of the Great War (1917, led by a Conservative MP), and the National Union of Ex-Servicemen (1919, closely affiliated with the left). In 1921, these groups merged into an umbrella organization, renamed the ‘British Legion’ (now called the Royal British Legion).Footnote ⁶⁵ In post-World War I Australia, veterans had a high rate of enrolment in the Australian Returned Servicemen's League (one-third of all veterans), and the organization engendered ‘intense member support’ and a highly masculine ‘front-line pride and ethos’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Not only did veteran organizations play a ‘crucial role in cementing the Anzac legend as a national narrative’—in memorials, soldiers were acknowledged for ‘founding the nation’Footnote ⁶⁷—they also proved to be a highly successful pressure group for their members. According to a comprehensive political history of the Returned Servicemen's League (RSL), the organization was far more successful than its British counterpart. Thanks in part to its ‘direct access to the Commonwealth government’, the RSL was ‘completely successful’ on many important issues, as well as a ‘very definite factor in decision-making on all matters of repatriation’.Footnote ⁶⁸

But more significant than the existence of veteran organization in democracies—hardly a surprising phenomenon—is their proliferation in states more similar to China. Take, for example, authoritarian regimes in inter-war Europe. In Italy, the ‘Fighting Fascists’ was a ‘polyglot’ group that included war veterans, university students, futurists and nationalists, but veterans were allowed their own representation and identity, quite unlike Zhou Enlai's order to leave veteran identity at the door after joining a work unit. The planning committee for the first anniversary of Mussolini's 1922 ‘March on Rome’ included representatives from ‘The National Association of War Wounded’ and the ‘National Association of Combatants’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Similar to Italy, authoritarian Spain also allowed its veterans to form their own organizations. Less than a year into the Civil War, disabled Republican veterans created the ‘League of the Wounded and Disabled of the War in Spain’ (1937). Disabled Nationalists, for their part, fearing that they would receive little sympathy, and that society ‘might come to hate them’ as time passed, created their own organization, which they called the ‘Honorable Corps’ (1938). After the war, many of the non-wounded Nationalist veterans created their own organization: the ‘Brotherhood of Provisional Subalterns’ (1958). The Brotherhood created ‘special memorials’ to their ‘own fallen’.Footnote ⁷⁰

If we shift to authoritarian regimes of the Leninist variety, we can also see how the veterans’ ‘voice’ was linked to their ability to organize politically and socially. The Soviet Union created an intentionally weak ‘Soviet Committee of War Veterans’ (SKVV) in 1956, but it was ‘quickly appropriated by veterans’ activists who refused to believe that this was not the long awaited lobbying organization’; most of its leaders had been officers in the Civil War and in World War II.Footnote ⁷¹ Over time it became the primary, and increasingly powerful, forum for veterans to sustain their identity and solidarity as an ‘entitlement group’ (most veterans, unlike their Chinese counterparts, were able to stay in touch with almost all of their comrades ‘for the rest of their lives’) as well as a platform for advocating for the bread-and-butter welfare issues.Footnote ⁷² The SKVV, however, was not the only veteran organization in the former USSR. Local ‘Committees of Wounded Soldiers’ had existed since the Civil War, as well as a ‘Union of Frontline Soldiers’, and regional ‘Friendship Societies’, all organizations which provided the mid-1950s SKVV with many activists and delegates, known as ‘double veterans’.Footnote ⁷³

Veterans of the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong also appear to have more clout than their counterparts in China, a reflection of the greater legitimacy of their long anti-colonial wars against France and the US. In Vietnam, there are disillusioned veterans, such as Bao Ninh, who, as noted earlier, are able to write and publish biting novels about their wartime and post-war experiences. Veterans in Vietnam also organize more legitimately. According to a report by David Ignatius, ‘The closest thing to an organised opposition party here is a group of veterans that calls itself the ‘Old Resistance Fighters Club’. Their hero is General Vo Nguyen Giap, the great strategist of Vietnam's victories against the French and Americans’.Footnote ⁷⁴

In Taiwan, the GMD established a veterans agency that was differentiated from other welfare bureaucracies (unlike the Civil Affairs Ministry in China), published a veterans newspaper (‘成 功 之 路’) but, equally importantly, allowed veterans to set up their own ‘lineage groups’, complete with shrines and genealogies, from the beginning of the 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁵ In China, as we have seen, veterans were usually discharged individually to their ‘native place’ where they had to compete for political power and struggle for survival, and, as a result, maintaining group solidarity and identity as a ‘veteran’ was far more challenging.

Organization, class and voice

The establishment of organizations has been a critical factor giving veterans a source of power in the state and society—a ‘platform’ of sorts to tell their story of what happened in wartime. It is hard to imagine, for example, a Chinese veterans association acceding to the ‘return to the native policy’ that has so dominated civil-military relations in China. But the comparative history of veterans associations shows that organization by itself is often not enough. The critical factor is the class composition of the veterans organization, and whether or not elites are among its members, or at least broadly sympathetic to its goals. In other words, what has empowered the veterans’ voice has been a class-based alliance between most veterans, who tend to come from the lower classes, and the educated and business elite who served largely as a result of total mobilization during a mass war and who can amplify veterans’ stories to a wider audience. In Australia, for example, veterans organizations were feisty and had great access, but they were also assisted by newspaper reporters and historians, who became supporters of the Anzac legend through publications such as Smith's Weekly and The Bulletin, the most important veteran newspaper in the inter-war years, as well as one of the most widely read accounts of the war in the late 1930s: Raymond Lording's There and Back: The Story of an Australian Soldier.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the UK, the social and political status of its land army was quite low until the Crimean War, when ‘embedded’ journalists, aided by new technology like the telegraph and photography, helped shift the cultural tide through sympathetic reporting and by criticizing the government for its apathy towards returned soldiers. They were not alone. Charity organizations and the prominence of Florence Nightingale also helped generate support for veterans prior to the formation of the Royal British Legion.Footnote ⁷⁷ After World War II in the Soviet Union, an even greater variety of the cultural elite—many of them veterans themselves—supported their claims to status through the publication of novels, plays, diaries, stories in literary journals or plays; many of the heroes of a ‘barrage of popular novels’ on the post-war countryside were ‘demobilised officers’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite harsh criticism of the officer corps in Germany after World War II, public opinion surveys in the late 1940s and early 1950s found that many sympathized with the plight of former soldiers (who were allowed to organize), in part because, with near-universal conscription, ‘everyone had either served or had a father, brother, or husband in uniform’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Taiwan, veterans from the mainland benefited from activities sponsored by local native-place associations, which veterans could also join.Footnote ⁸⁰

The contemporary US, with its many holidays, highways, stadiums, and bridges commemorating veterans, as well as a cultural industry that promotes veterans’ authentic voices (Catch-22, Platoon, Jarhead), clearly shows the critical significance of civic organizations, but it was not always this way. For the first 40 years of America's existence, ordinary Revolutionary War veterans were just as neglected as many of their counterparts in China, but popular writers came to their aid.Footnote ⁸¹ Subsequent veterans were the beneficiaries of the activities of a wider circle of groups as the mass nature of war and the draft touched more people. After the Civil War, many businessmen promoted the activities of the Grand Army of the Republic (with reduced railroad fare), as did other organizations such as churches and women's groups.Footnote ⁸² After World War I, veterans once again were helped by the Red Cross, churches and university faculties.Footnote ⁸³ During the inter-war period, veterans, because they came from all social strata, became the ‘dominant object of commemoration’, a ‘multivalent symbol’ that received the support of businessmen, civic organizations and politicians; the promotion of patriotism itself was a collaborative effort involving veterans, and the business and professional classes.Footnote ⁸⁴

Here again, the contrast with the PRC is a stark one. Not only has the PRC not established veterans organizations, a veterans day or named a single street after veterans (educated city folk in China consider calling a street 复 员 军 人 街 a strange idea) one of its key survival strategies is to prevent alliances between intellectuals and other people with ‘social capital’ and more marginalized groups in society, as well as to create antagonisms among them, a legacy of what Chen Yung-fa (1986) has called ‘controlled polarization’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Post-war political campaigns against landlords, counterrevolutionaries, intellectuals, ‘rightists’, and ‘capitalists’, as well as the enforcement of the hukou and ‘return to the native place’ policies (which have no parallels in the USSR or in Vietnam) are epiphenomenal to the fact that China never had a national army, did not fight a mass or total war, and never had conscription that incorporated the educated elite into combat units; in China, ‘citizenship’ based on the experience of ‘bleeding in the same mud’ in war could never challenge, let alone trump, a politics based on class status. After World War II in the USSR, a Cultural Revolution-like campaign against various state enemies would have been impossible. As noted by Weiner, by 1944 social origins were no longer the ‘dominant criteria of socio-political status’—bad class or family background were redeemed through wartime exploits, while non-combat service was marginalized.Footnote ⁸⁶ In China, however, reducing the salience and cultural capital associated with veteran status was easily accomplished—through policies about residence, organization, and identity—because the PLA was mainly rural, the wars were of a more limited nature, and the elite did not serve or, when they did, were often in propaganda units—unlike their class brethren in the USSR and most Western powers during the two World Wars.