Introduction
Between April and June 1950, Zhou Enlai dispatched a series of letters and telegrams to the heads of various international organizations. Zhou wrote in his dual capacities as both the premier and foreign minister of the People's Republic of China (PRC), founded just six months earlier. He demanded that these organizations remove their current Chinese representatives, appointed while the Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party) controlled the Chinese mainland, and install new ones appointed by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Central People's Government. As Zhou declared to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) director-general Jaime Torres Bodet, ‘the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China is the only legal government representing the Chinese people’ and ‘the so-called “delegates” of the Chinese Kuomintang reactionary remnant clique…must be driven out from [UNESCO's] various organs and meetings’.Footnote 1 Zhou sent similar or identical messages to several other international intergovernmental organizations, ranging from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to the World Meteorological Organization.Footnote 2 The text and overall message of these missives mirrored that of the telegram drafted by Chairman Mao Zedong and dispatched by Zhou in January to the United Nations (UN).Footnote 3 Some of these organizations, like the ILO, long predated the UN's founding in 1945 and would subsequently become affiliated with it. Others, like UNESCO, were newly created products of the widespread institution-building impulse in the 1940s, a period characterized by Glenda Sluga as the ‘apogee of twentieth-century internationalism’.Footnote 4
After October 1949, foreign governments and international organizations alike were confronted with the issue of whether ‘China’ now meant the CCP-led People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland or whether it would continue to be the Kuomintang-led Republic of China (RoC), now based on Taiwan following the Nationalist Party's retreat there at the end of the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949). Burgeoning Cold War politics and, in the case of the UN, the outbreak of the Korean War, meant that this ideologically charged issue of Chinese representation would become one focus of inter-bloc competition. American containment policies helped to ensure the RoC's continued presence in the UN and its affiliated organizations and agencies until the dawning of the PRC's rapprochement with the United States in the 1970s.Footnote 5 Consequently, contemporary academic work produced during those decades on Chinese relations with international organizations like the UN has been dominated by the issue of representation.Footnote 6 With a few notable exceptions, the study of PRC relations with international organizations has continued to be the purview of social scientists, with a corresponding shift in focus to examining Chinese engagement after it achieved membership status.Footnote 7 Indeed, when the PRC has featured in any substantive way at all in recent histories of international organizations themselves, China-as-member has invariably remained the focus.Footnote 8 Thus, the overall narrative about the PRC and international organizations has mirrored a long-standing wider narrative about Sino-Western relations in the Mao era: one of ‘closure’ in 1949 followed by ‘isolation’ prior to ‘opening up’ in the 1970s. Recent historical scholarship on Chinese foreign relations, however, has challenged such a straightforward characterization of the Mao era, demonstrating the extent to which the PRC continued to engage with a wide range of actors in Western Europe, and even the United States, throughout the period.Footnote 9 By examining the relationship between the question of Chinese representation in UNESCO and the organization's on-the-ground presence from the Chinese Civil War through to the early years of CCP rule, this article brings international organizations into this more complicated picture of bilateral and transnational cross-bloc interactions.
The CCP's relations with UNESCO underscore the extent to which the emerging Cold War—and China's place within it—was characterized by both complexity and contingency. Discussing the CCP's commitment to the creation of a socialist world economy in the 1950s and 1960s, William Kirby aptly observed that ‘the CCP was, from its conception, internationalist in premise and promise’.Footnote 10 Yet its internationalist engagement also extended beyond the socialist world, including backing the creation of the UN. The foreign policy section of Mao Zedong's speech ‘On Coalition Government’, delivered to the CCP's Seventh National Congress on 24 April 1945, voiced support for the proposals to establish the UN which was negotiated at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference and which was about to be given form at the San Francisco Conference opening on the same day.Footnote 11 Meanwhile, Dong Biwu, a member of the CCP's Central Committee, who had attended the Party's first Congress in 1921, was one of the Chinese delegates in San Francisco and would sign the United Nations Charter.Footnote 12 The CCP and KMT were thus both keen to play a role in shaping the new international order emerging from the Second World War.
Both parties’ level of engagement stemmed from the RoC's status as one of the ‘Big Four’ allied wartime powers. The United Kingdom, United States, and Soviet Union may well have consistently treated China as the junior partner in that quartet, but such status still provided a platform for Chinese participation—and leadership—in significant conferences and dialogues both during and after the war.Footnote 13 For example, between 1943 and 1947 the RoC was far from a passive recipient of assistance from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); in fact, it also had a representative on the Central Committee of UNRRA's governing council alongside the United Kingdom, United States, and Soviet Union. Involvement in such organizations therefore facilitated RoC experts’ and policymakers’ embeddedness in policy networks extending beyond border and region, in turn influencing the KMT's own policymaking and post-war ambitions.Footnote 14 Yet, as Rana Mitter has shown, as much as the Nationalists saw UNRRA as a vehicle for their aspirations to be exemplars of and agents for post-colonial change in a new post-war international order, the international organization also represented a vector for lingering imperialist attitudes and potential threats to hard-fought sovereignty.Footnote 15 The CCP's relations with UNESCO, which inherited many of UNRRA's undertakings after 1947, show the Communists struggling with issues strikingly similar to those faced by the Nationalists.
As with UNRRA, the domestic and international were tightly intertwined for the CCP and KMT alike in their interactions with UNESCO. Like the other organizations to which Zhou Enlai dispatched letters or telegrams in 1950, UNESCO had an office in mainland China that remained open after the establishment of the PRC. Operating between 1947 and 1953, UNESCO's East Asia Field Scientific Cooperation Office (EAFSCO, Dongfang kexue hezuo guan) was one of the most visible and longest lasting of such offices.Footnote 16 Its field officers, based first in Nanjing and later in Shanghai, sought to support scientific exchange and reconstruction in a country whose economy and infrastructure was in tatters after its devastating war with Japan and which remained divided by domestic conflict.Footnote 17 After 1949, they faced a new set of challenges, trying to operate in a fledgling state not represented within the organization, while the issue of Chinese representation was fiercely debated in committees and general assemblies. The CCP's central and local authorities, then, were confronted with how best to respond to EAFSCO's activities on the ground at the same time as the CCP leadership worked to displace the KMT from UNESCO and other international organizations.
At both levels, CCP officials wrestled with both pragmatic and ideological impulses in dealing with UNESCO. This reflected their approach to other manifestations of the lingering foreign presence in the early PRC, ranging from foreign-owned enterprises and industry in cities like Shanghai and Dalian to the fate of Japanese technical experts who remained in China after the Second Sino-Japanese War.Footnote 18 Officials’ handling of UNESCO, and its book programme in particular, shows that the balance between pragmatism and ideology increasingly tilted toward the latter during the early 1950s. They viewed UNESCO and other UN-affiliated organizations with great suspicion not only because of factors like growing American influence but also, crucially, because of the KMT's involvement. While formal relations with the organization might have presented opportunities for expanded international influence and legitimacy, EAFSCO's activities in China were not only perceived as potential threats to sovereignty, but also provided evidence of the limits to the CCP's authority in the earliest years of its ‘New China’. This article therefore traces the trajectory of Chinese relations with UNESCO at both the domestic and international levels. Starting with the establishment of EAFSCO, it examines the international organization's failed efforts to remain above politics during the civil war. It then elucidates the interlinkages between battles over Chinese representation in UNESCO after 1949 and CCP officials’ struggles to contain and constrain EAFSCO's activities in the PRC.
Navigating the Chinese Civil War, 1946–1949
The Republic of China was closely interwoven into the efforts of British biochemist Joseph Needham to put the ‘S’ for science in ‘UNESCO’. His British Council-sponsored activities in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War and his connections with the China's KMT government were both contributing factors. Needham was still based in ‘Free China’ when he began lobbying influential figures and government ministers about creating some form of organization to promote international cooperation and development during the early 1940s.Footnote 19 One of his earliest acts in campaigning for such a service was a discussion with China's foreign minister T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen) in December 1943. Needham was hoping to find a larger organization in which what he dubbed a ‘World Science Cooperation Service’ (WSCS) might play a part.Footnote 20 Far from being a mere sounding board, Soong directed Needham's thinking on the matter. According to the British scientist, Soong urged him to press for this WSCS to be a part of a proposed international organization to promote intellectual cooperation ‘to be set up by [the] Big [Four]’ allied nations rather than the recently created UNRRA.Footnote 21 Needham seems to have heeded this advice, and over the next two years circulated three influential memorandums that argued for the importance of establishing an international scientific cooperation service and lobbying the Conference of Allied Ministers to include science as one of the areas covered the ‘United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization’ then being negotiated.Footnote 22 As one of the ‘Big Four’ allied nations, Republican China was involved throughout the process of creating the UN-affiliated organization and was one of the 44 signatories to the UNESCO constitution agreed in London on 16 November 1945 and which included science as one of the organization's areas of concentration.Footnote 23 The combination of Joseph Needham's presence and connections in China combined with the Nationalists’ involvement in the inter-governmental negotiations to establish UNESCO meant that both state and party had close ties to the organization from the outset. Even as China slid into civil war, the KMT's representatives and institutions remained embedded within the organization.
Needham's strong ties to China remained important even after he had left the country in February 1946 to lead UNESCO's Natural Sciences Section. Although he only served in that capacity until 1948, for some years afterwards he remained in close touch with UNESCO officials. Needham's support for China in the organization owed more to his long-standing fascination with the country and prodigious network of contacts there, than to any particular affinity for the Nationalists. On the eve of the CCP taking power in 1949, he wrote that:
Though necessarily associated with the Kuomintang government during World War Two, I never disguised where my political sympathies lay, and by concentrating wholeheartedly on scientific and technical work, was on excellent terms with officials, technologists, scholars, and all sorts of people on both sides of the lines, throughout China.Footnote 24
While he may have been writing about his wartime efforts in China, the passage also effectively captured his approach at UNESCO. Needham's left-wing politics meant he was a far from passionate supporter of China's Nationalist Party, but he was happy to work with it while it was in power in order to support Chinese scientists and further international scientific cooperation.Footnote 25
Needham's prominent position in UNESCO therefore afforded numerous benefits for Chinese scientists when it came to their relationship with UNESCO and the wider scientific community. From a practical standpoint, his knowledge and network made him an effective enabler of Sino-foreign scientific exchange. For example, in the autumn of 1948, Needham assisted the Pacific Science Association (PSA) in its efforts to invite Chinese scientists to attend its Seventh General Congress, funded through a UNESCO grant for scientists from war-torn countries.Footnote 26 Needham not only gave the PSA detailed information about scientists on its preliminary list, but further suggested other suitable candidates. His comprehensive reply included a wealth of invaluable information, which included the scientists’ names in English and Chinese, brief biographical sketches, and his last-known contact information for many of them.Footnote 27 A number of these scientists, such as Zhu Kezhen and Li Siguang, went on to hold prominent positions under the CCP after 1949, but his list was by no means politicized; rather, he steered the PSA toward prominent figures in major Chinese scientific organizations who, in many cases, were also connected to the KMT government's ministries or institutions.
UNESCO on the ground: the East Asia Field Scientific Cooperation Office (EAFSCO)
The benefits that Chinese scientists and the Kuomintang derived from UNESCO membership were far from limited to those afforded by Needham's extensive Chinese connections. Many of the most tangible advantages came via EAFSCO, the most visible manifestation of UNESCO's presence in China. Officially opened on 15 November 1947, EAFSCO in Nanjing was the third of UNESCO's field offices. As with its other two offices, based in Rio de Janeiro and Cairo, EAFSCO aimed to aid scientific development and foster international cooperation among UNESCO member states within the region.Footnote 28 Needham's Sino-British Science Cooperation Office (SBSCO) was the model for these field offices, a connection explicitly acknowledged by EAFSCO's first acting principal officer Jan Smid in his initial Activity Report for the Chinese National Commission to UNESCO.Footnote 29 As with SBSCO, while EAFSCO aimed to establish relationships with a broad base of scientific institutions and individual scientists, it nevertheless coordinated its activities with, and reported to, a body affiliated to the Nationalist government. The Chinese National Commission not only included senior KMT officials such as the Ministry of Education's deputy chief of government affairs and later minister of education Hang Liwu, it also held its meetings at the Ministry.Footnote 30 From the very beginning EAFSCO was explicitly and publicly linked to the RoC government. In this, its activities helped reinforce the Republican state's role in Chinese scientific research and education.
The opening of this UNESCO field office was a newsworthy event in China, to the benefit of the Kuomintang. Shenbao, the prominent Shanghai-based newspaper, even carried a profile of EAFSCO's first head in advance of the official opening in Nanjing. It described 35-year-old Czechoslovakian civil engineer Jan Smid's career before joining UNESCO, alongside information about EAFSCO's proposed activities and the Chinese delegation's participation in the upcoming UNESCO General Conference.Footnote 31 Notices about Smid's arrival as well as the meeting held at the Academia Sinica to formally welcome him were similarly covered by the paper.Footnote 32 From the outset Smid worked to build connections with China's scientific community. During his first seven months, he travelled to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Beiping, and Tianjin, visiting a total of 53 Chinese institutions along with 11 in the Philippines, the other UNESCO member state included in EAFSCO's regional remit.Footnote 33 One of the office's key responsibilities was facilitating scientific cooperation and the sharing of information across national borders. In China, such facilitation largely took the form of the UNESCO office arranging the distribution of foreign scientific books and periodicals to Chinese organizations and libraries, as well as helping to distribute Chinese scientific periodicals overseas. It also acted as intermediary in securing samples and research material, and provided limited funding for Chinese scientists to travel overseas for conferences.Footnote 34 The office was based in China because its government was a member of the UN and UNESCO, and these aid and reconstruction initiatives were targeted at institutions and individual scientists in China precisely because of their government's ties to these international organizations. Therefore, many of the office's activities at least indirectly reinforced the Republic of China's legitimacy and, by extension, the Kuomintang. In the context of the ongoing civil war, such associations would do little to endear the UNESCO office to the CCP.
One of EAFSCO's greatest undertakings was administering aspects of the Industrial Rehabilitation Education Program, one of the post-war reconstruction schemes that UNESCO and other UN agencies had inherited after UNRRA ceased most of its operations in 1947.Footnote 35 Its staff had to arrange the distribution of a large quantity of engineering equipment which UNRRA had purchased to Chinese universities based on size and need. This equipment began arriving from the United States and Canada from spring 1947 onwards and sat in storage at Jiaotong University in Shanghai while the international agencies negotiated the transfer of responsibilities.Footnote 36 UNESCO's equipment donations and other rehabilitation activities continued well into 1949, in spite of the increasingly disruptive effects of the civil war and shipments to institutions in both CCP- and KMT-controlled areas.Footnote 37 Nor was this activity low-key: as late as February, EAFSCO arranged a formal presentation ceremony at the UN's building in Shanghai which involved the heads of seven recipient educational institutions.Footnote 38
Another major undertaking by EAFSCO was to administer the UNESCO book coupons scheme in the region. The scheme had its origins in a recommendation approved at the very first General Conference in 1946, but it took years to operationalize.Footnote 39 Starting in December 1948, the scheme was intended to allow academic institutions in countries with unstable currencies to procure scholarly works published overseas. It allowed them to purchase vouchers in their local currency through UNESCO which foreign publishers or distributors could then redeem in another currency. In addition to those available for purchase, Chinese institutions were eligible for some of the US$40,000-worth of coupons that UNESCO's Reconstruction Fund made available to member states.Footnote 40 In August 1949, EAFSCO distributed US$793 in coupons to 117 institutions through the Reconstruction Fund and provided an additional US$100-worth paid out of its own budget. In contrast, however, it only sold US$154.25 in book coupons, US$54.25 of which was purchased by National Nankai University and the remainder by an institution in Hanoi.Footnote 41 These numbers highlight the stark reality of conditions for academic institutions in the later stages of the Chinese Civil War. While such a scheme was no doubt attractive to many institutions in the abstract, limited funds and disruption in communications links were highly problematic for the functioning of such a scheme.
Both central and local governmental authorities would show increasing hostility to the book coupons scheme in the years following the founding of the PRC. However, as late as December 1949, Jan Smid remained hopeful that those authorities would look positively upon EAFSCO as a result of it having sent these vouchers to academic institutions in both CCP- and KMT-controlled areas during the Civil War. These actions, he felt, showed that EAFSCO was operating without a political agenda.Footnote 42 Yet Smid's analysis overlooked the legacy of his office and the international organization it represented, which had clear institutional ties to the Republican government and its ministries. Smid may have been trying to make inroads with CCP officials by late 1949, but only months earlier he had been bemoaning the breakdown of the RoC's Ministry of Education. In March, he had written to Needham complaining that ‘contact with the Government is more or less unexisting [sic]’, representing one of the greatest impediments to EAFSCO's activities.Footnote 43 UNESCO may simply have been working with its member state's internationally recognized government, but doing so during a bitterly fought civil war meant that these early close ties to the KMT aroused great suspicion on the part of CCP officials both during and after 1949.
Seeking contact with the CCP
Throughout that year, UNESCO's leading officials followed developments in China with great interest, discussing how the organization might best go about building a relationship with a new CCP-led government in Beijing. Although Needham was no longer head of the organization's Natural Sciences section, he nevertheless remained an ‘honorary scientific adviser’ and so remained a vocal participant in high-level discussions. As such, his correspondence provides a window on the state of thinking among the organization's officials at the time. In the summer of 1949, Jaime Torres Bodet, UNESCO director-general, and Evert Barger, head of its Reconstruction Department and author of a memorandum on China, consulted Needham informally about the evolving situation there. At the heart of these exchanges was a desire to send a possible mission to mainland China to establish relations with the CCP as part of a wider strategy for handling the issue of diplomatic recognition with what increasingly seemed to be the incoming regime. Needham's view was that UNESCO should coordinate with its sister agencies and the UN to give any such mission a broad base of support and to time it for soon after the Communist government was formally recognized by major Western powers.Footnote 44 Torres Bodet and Barger were interested in sounding out Needham as a potential candidate to lead this proposed mission. The idea clearly held great appeal for him, but academic commitments—particularly as he had begun work on Science and Civilisation in China—were powerful confounding variables.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, the very fact that these discussions were taking place prior to the PRC's formal establishment in October 1949 showed the extent to which those working at the top of UNESCO not only took for granted that a CCP-led state would be recognized and become a UNESCO member, but furthermore that they were considering how to work constructively with that new government.
Discussions about the future of UNESCO in China extended to its presence on the ground, notably EAFSCO in Shanghai. Needham, in particular, was interested in appointing a new scientific cooperation field officer who might make more progress in building links with CCP officials than Smid had. Needham's concern was, above all else, to find someone familiar with China, who spoke the language, and had political leanings that might help to ingratiate them with the CCP. Subsequent to his September 1949 exchanges with Barger, Needham contacted Fritz Jensen, an Austrian physician who, he knew from his time in China, was openly sympathetic to the CCP. He was keen to find someone to lead EAFSCO in China who could build on foundations laid during the anticipated mission later in the year. Needham's letter was ‘an entirely exploratory and unofficial one, of a personal and confidential nature’ and so cannot be construed as definitive evidence of thinking among UNESCO's leading officers.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, his opinions mattered and clearly carried great weight with the organization's serving officers. Had he subsequently suggested Jensen as a candidate, the proposal would have been taken seriously.
Jensen was set to accept being considered for the position and, in fact, went so far as to send Needham a telegram indicating as much, but he was ultimately dissuaded from doing so following a ‘rather unexpected visit of some responsible Chinese friends’.Footnote 47 These friends, presumably well connected in the CCP, convinced him that returning to China as a representative of an international organization might be viewed as displaying a ‘double allegiance’, as he described it, rather than being ‘their own man’.Footnote 48 Jensen's reasons highlight the suspicion with which the CCP viewed international organizations such as UNESCO that had both a strong American presence and a long-standing relationship with the Kuomintang. As Needham later wrote while continuing his search for Smid's replacement: ‘it is going to be tragic if the UN and its specialized agencies are going to be quite unable to obtain the services of any “left”-sympathizers, to maintain their relations with the great communist countries’.Footnote 49
Therefore, China's KMT government had a clear and complicated relationship with UNESCO from the very beginning. As a founding member state, it had facilitated the organization's very creation, as well as serving as a source of influence and inspiration behind the scenes, including T. V. Soong advising Joseph Needham in 1943 and SBSCO serving as a model for field offices. UNESCO's intergovernmental nature meant that the RoC's Nationalist government continued to be prominently associated with its activities on the ground throughout the civil war. Both the organization's officials in Paris and its representatives in China sought to conduct their activities in an even-handed way. During the later stages of the conflict, as a CCP victory looked increasingly likely, they began planning accordingly. Nevertheless, its early and visible links with the Nationalist government cast long shadows over its attempts to reach out to the Communists. Even prior to the PRC's founding or the outbreak of the Korean War, the CCP was wary about the potential for international organizations to act as vectors for malign foreign influences regardless of the political sympathies of individual officials or representatives, as was pointed out to Fritz Jensen by his ‘responsible Chinese friends’. This confluence of factors would continue to shape relations with UNESCO into the 1950s.
The battle for representation and its consequences, 1949–1953
The Chinese Civil War did not come to a definitive end in 1949; instead, rival regimes made competing claims to represent ‘China’. This lack of a clear resolution to the conflict meant that it took on new forms, with international organizations like UNESCO becoming a battleground for a range of sympathetic ideological and regional supporters of the PRC aiming to dislodge the RoC's incumbent representatives. Prior to the Soviet Union's belated entry in 1954, the PRC lacked a superpower supporter in the international organization, unlike their RoC rivals.Footnote 50 This was all the more significant after 1950, when the United States began to actively assert itself in UNESCO, resulting in a tug-of-war over policies with senior officials, most notably Director-General Torres Bodet.Footnote 51 This was a positive development for the RoC's representatives. At the July 1950 General Conference, with American support, RoC delegates won recognition votes in both the Credentials Committee and the full conference, alongside a resolution calling for the UN to set out ‘guiding principles’ for affiliated organizations and agencies to follow.Footnote 52 These UNESCO votes were won in spite of vocal opposition from the Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, and Yugoslavian delegations, along with the Indian representative, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.Footnote 53 This set the pattern for subsequent meetings, with the PRC's cause being advanced by other socialist states as well as its then-sympathetic neighbour, India.
So it was in June 1951, when UNESCO member states’ delegations gathered in Paris for the organization's Sixth General Conference. While the issue of Chinese representation was not a central focus of the conference, it was nevertheless a heatedly debated part of the agenda once again. On 18 June, the Credentials Committee discussed the issue of Chinese representation, ultimately upholding the RoC's position. Foreign affairs officials from the PRC followed these developments with interest, albeit at some delay and distance, as France was not one of the handful of European states to have granted diplomatic recognition to the CCP-led state. Consequently, the Chinese embassy in Switzerland wired dispatches back to the PRC containing updates about the event, and the RoC delegates’ participation in particular. The embassy focused primarily on sources of support for the PRC in its report on the Credentials Committee's discussions. In particular, it highlighted Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's arguments—that the RoC government could no longer claim to represent the majority of China's population now that it was based on Taiwan and, more broadly, that UNESCO ‘need not do everything in lockstep with the United Nations’.Footnote 54 China's entry into the Korean War in October 1950 hardened American opposition to PRC representation in the UN.Footnote 55 Thus, the inter-organizational relationship between UN and UNESCO became even more important after the PRC became involved in a conflict on the opposing side to US-led UN forces. Radhakrishnan's argument reflected the extent to which UNESCO's relationship with the UN meant the handling of recognition and membership issues in one organization might impact on the other.
As a follow-up to the Credentials Committee's discussions, the General Conference subsequently adopted a resolution that the ‘Nationalist Government of China’ would continue as Chinese representatives in UNESCO, following interim guidance for affiliated agencies from UN General Assembly until such time as its Special Committee had reported on the issue.Footnote 56 A follow-up summary of events prepared for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) focused on the heated exchanges that took place during the debate between Radhakrishnan and Cheng Tianfang, the RoC representative and minister of education, before voting on the resolution. This report further noted which countries had supported, opposed, or abstained on RoC representatives’ voting rights.Footnote 57 In other words, for PRC officials, delegates’ behaviour in UNESCO served as a bellwether of international disposition towards each of the competing regimes on either side of the Taiwan Strait.
Radhakrishnan's interventions in particular carried multiple layers of potential significance for China within the context of UNESCO and beyond. In addition to being a prominent scholar of religion and philosophy, Radhakrishnan had a long-standing political dimension to his career. At the time of the Sixth General Conference in 1951, he was in his third year of service as India's ambassador to the Soviet Union and he would go on to be elected as the country's first vice-president in 1952. He was especially familiar with the situation in China, having visited Chongqing during May 1944 when tensions between the KMT and CCP had already ripped apart the ‘United Front’ against Japan's invasion.Footnote 58 As a prominent figure in India, his interventions on behalf of the PRC in UNESCO were noteworthy for that political dimension alone. Radhakrishnan's critical stance toward the RoC at the General Conference was also important for PRC foreign affairs officials because he had influence in UNESCO beyond his role as a national representative. As well as being a member of working parties devoted to issues that included representation and organization, he had served on its Executive Board. Yet, in the end, a combination of ideology and power politics proved to be more important than individual influence or rhetoric, as neither Radhakrishnan's position nor his arguments changed the vote's final outcome. Moreover, the PRC lost their influential supporter not long after the conference, since he was among the Executive Board members who retired that summer.Footnote 59 While the PRC's supporters may not have ultimately been able to overcome American-led opposition to recognizing the CCP's fledgling state, it was nevertheless the case that the issue of Chinese representation was regularly revisited and hotly debated within UNESCO during the early 1950s.
Containing and constraining EAFSCO
The UN and many of its affiliated agencies and organizations continued to have a presence on the Chinese mainland into the 1950s, in spite of none of them recognizing the PRC as a member state and the fractious backdrop of the Korean War. The UN building in Shanghai kept operating until July 1957, when it received instructions from the organization's central headquarters to shut down its operations.Footnote 60 The EAFSCO office in Shanghai was one of the last of any UN-affiliated agencies or organizations’ offices to close, managing to remain open until July 1953. Only the International Refugee Organization's (IRO) Shanghai office outlasted UNESCO, closing in 1956. In contrast, the WHO and ILO's offices closed in 1950 and 1952, respectively.Footnote 61
EAFSCO may have outlasted many other organizations’ offices, but it did so under increasing pressure and restrictions imposed by local authorities. From the CCP's perspective, tolerating its presence was, at least in part, pragmatic in light of the PRC's pursuit of membership in UNESCO. As it became increasingly apparent that the RoC's displacement was unlikely, PRC foreign affairs officials at both central and local levels of government adopted a correspondingly restrictive and interventionist approach to UNESCO's operations in the country.
Although CCP officials may have tolerated EAFSCO in the early days of the PRC, its presence and activities were not exactly welcomed. Jan Smid was keen to develop contacts with the new government and begin the process of building links with its ministries and institutions. He planned to visit Beijing, Tianjin, and Shenyang in December 1949 to establish relationships. Any such journey required prior approval by local authorities and receipt of a travel permit, owing to extreme restrictions on movement imposed on all foreigners during 1949.Footnote 62 Smid, however, was denied a travel permit and so remained stuck in Shanghai, where he experienced little success in his official interactions. As he described in his activity report for March–December 1949:
The Shanghai authorities were contacted in various matters but even if the contact is very polite and if the satisfaction was given in two or three matters, the personnel is [sic] mostly uncommitting [sic] and very reserved to engage their personal responsibility in matters on which no positive directions were given by the central office. This position will certainly be maintained till [sic] the official recognition by the UN or Unesco will be given.Footnote 63
Even before the first votes on Chinese representation in UNESCO or the outbreak of the Korean War, local officials sought to limit EAFSCO's reach and functionality unless directed to do otherwise by their central government counterparts. For all the frustration that this obfuscation and ambivalent treatment by officials may have caused Smid, it was, in fact, mild compared to the combative attitude and outright hostility many other foreign nationals were encountering.Footnote 64 Moreover, these early encounters between EAFSCO and local foreign affairs officials were far less hostile or fraught than what was to come in future years.
Indeed, EAFSCO's relations with the authorities took a turn for the worse in 1950, though uncertainty surrounding the PRC's possible accession into the UN and UNESCO meant that the Shanghai office was able to make some headway in its outreach and reconstruction activities. However, officials in the central government came to take an increasingly dim view of these activities and tried to put a stop to them, albeit with limited success. In March, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to the Culture and Education Committee of the Central People's Government requesting it to instruct subordinate organizations to sever contact with EAFSCO. They noted the Shanghai office's primary activities, which included meeting representative of various academic institutions, compiling indexes of researchers and publications, and selling UNESCO book coupons. Tellingly, the Ministry's stated objection to the office's undertakings was that the Central People's Government did not yet have relations with either the UN or UNESCO.Footnote 65 Its intervention, then, was prompted by domestic activities but ultimately underpinned by issues of international politics.
It was also one prompted by inquiries from other ministries who sought input and guidance on how to handle EAFSCO's activities. In late January, Mao Dun, the minister of culture, wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about EAFSCO requesting the assistance of the National Beijing Library in compiling a revised summary of Chinese scientific papers. The Library had requested guidance from the Ministry of Culture, which consulted the MFA.Footnote 66 Zhou Enlai instructed the Library to simply ignore the request in light of the lack of a formal relationship between the PRC and UNESCO.Footnote 67 In mid-March the Ministry of Education's Higher Education Department drew the MFA's attention to the fact that the UNESCO office in Shanghai had continued to sell book coupons to institutions in the PRC, a matter that was treated much more seriously. The case in question centred on correspondence between Jan Smid and Rao Yuqin, dean of National Peking University's College of Science, regarding the purchase of US$1,000 of the vouchers. In this instance, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended that the Ministry of Education find alternative means for Peking University and other institutions to purchase foreign books if they had an urgent need for such books.Footnote 68 In all, the MFA was far more concerned about EAFSCO selling the coupons than the University purchasing them.
The sale of book coupons, in particular, shows how closely domestic and international policy concerns were intertwined. Although Foreign Affairs officials did perceive these coupons as a means of helping Chinese academic institutions to overcome the instability posed by an unstable currency, as UNESCO had intended, they nevertheless classed the coupons as illegal ‘foreign currency exchange vouchers’, arguing that their sale ‘disturbs China's financial system’ and ‘foreign exchange controls’.Footnote 69 During these early years of the People's Republic, the government grappled not only with instituting its own new financial and monetary system, but also tackling the legacies of hyperinflation and economic instability that had rocked China during the previous decade.Footnote 70 Touching on the sensitive issue of foreign exchange, UNESCO's book coupons were framed as far more important a transgression on the part of EAFSCO than its other activities. Tellingly, the MFA's guidance to the Culture and Education Committee—that it should instruct research and educational institutions to sever communications with the UNESCO office—was issued on the same day as this response to the Higher Education Department. While other activities might simply be dealt with via officially sanctioned silence, book coupons prompted more active intervention. In light of the sums involved, it is unlikely that EAFSCO's sale of book coupons posed a tangible threat the PRC's financial system, but it did provide justification for putting further pressure on the office. Furthermore, as a subsidiary of UNESCO, the EAFSCO office was undertaking this activity based on agreements made with the previous KMT government rather than that of the CCP. As such, the book coupons were seen as a symbolic challenge to both the PRC's sovereignty and legitimacy.
Little came of central government ministries’ concerns or their instructions to subordinate bodies in the immediate period that followed. Well into 1951, numerous university departments, libraries, hospitals, and research institutes from all over the country continued to approach EAFSCO about purchasing book coupons and UNESCO's office continued to sell them. Moreover, while the coupons scheme originally may have been conceived of as a means of assisting academic institutions in countries with unstable currencies, by 1950 and 1951 it had also became a financial lifeline for UNESCO's operations in China. As Smid explained to Rao Yuqin when discussing the College of Science's payment for their book coupon order: ‘Due to the depreciation of JMP [Renminbi, Chinese yuan], we would prefer if your remittance would not exceed US$100 … every two weeks … [this] would permit us to spend the local currency for our administrative expenditures.’Footnote 71 Spreading these larger payments out over a longer period provided the office with regular infusions of local currency as well as providing it with a buffer against currency fluctuations.
By 1951, the sale of coupons was being considered as a means of supporting the United Nations Information Center (UNICS) in Shanghai as well. In June, UNESCO headquarters in Paris instructed the China office to try selling fixed quantities of book coupons at regular intervals to provide local currency for UNICS.Footnote 72 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs became aware of these proposals in September thanks to Shanghai's Foreign Affairs Department intercepting copies of outgoing EAFSCO correspondence on the matter. These they forwarded to their government counterparts along with a report on the sale of book coupons.Footnote 73 By involving EAFSCO in the UNICS’ financial affairs, UNESCO tied it and its office even more closely to the UN in the eyes of the PRC's officials. This development provided them with further reason to justify placing increasing pressure on UNESCO's representatives. In August, while awaiting MFA guidance, the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Department instructed Louis E. Low, EAFSCO's representative after Smid had left the country, to stop selling book coupons until further notice.Footnote 74 The MFA supported this decision and made it a permanent one that September.Footnote 75 As in 1950, the MFA soon wrote to the Culture and Education Committee to inform them of the report from Shanghai and to request that Committee to instruct all academic organizations in the country that they were not to purchase UNESCO book coupons, nor to have any contact with EAFSCO.Footnote 76 By November, this information had been disseminated to institutions and regional ministries via a circular by the minister of education, Ma Xulun.Footnote 77 Unlike in 1950, however, this spelled the end of UNESCO book coupons in China and, by extension, the financial lifeline that had been sustaining EAFSCO's activities, however limited this may have been.
While EAFSCO's office continued to operate nominally in Shanghai until 1953, Chinese officials managed to limit its activities with ever-greater success. In early 1950, the MFA had advised the National Beijing Library to simply ignore correspondence from EAFSCO—by the spring of 1952, municipal foreign affairs officials were able to assure their central government counterparts that Low had been prevented from contacting any academic institutions or individual scientists in China about a UNESCO survey.Footnote 78 This gradual ramping up of the severity in EAFSCO's treatment from 1949 to 1953 shows the extent to which UNESCO's on-the-ground activities reflected the trajectory of debates over Chinese representation in the organization, but also tapped into more fundamental concerns about the CCP's sovereignty and legitimacy—salient issues both at home and abroad.
Conclusion
Although UNESCO's presence in China disappeared in 1953, the ongoing debate over Chinese representation within the international organization did not. Since their RoC rivals already had representatives in the organization, foreign policy officials in the PRC relied on both socialist states and, crucially, sympathetic neighbours such as India to press their case. When the Soviet Union made its belated entry into UNESCO in 1954, it brought a superpower ally into the frame for the PRC; nevertheless, even the Soviet Union's presence failed to shift sufficient votes in the PRC's favour. But while the PRC's allies and sympathizers continued to raise the issue and attempt to find ways for it to take up a place in the organization, its absence from UNESCO during this period was at least partly self-imposed. Chinese Communist Party foreign policymakers refused to engage in any activity that might be even tacitly interpreted as lending legitimacy to the KMT on Taiwan or accepting a ‘two China’ solution in any way. In May 1956, the Czechoslovakian embassy approached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to offer a potential stepping stone into UNESCO. The Czechoslovakians indicated that their delegates were prepared to put forward a motion at an upcoming meeting calling for PRC observers to be able to attend UNESCO's Ninth General Conference to be held that November in New Delhi. However, Chinese officials demurred, citing the continued presence of RoC representatives.Footnote 79 In declining to pursue this potential avenue in 1956, officials in Beijing reasserted a policy they would continue to stand by in the following decades. The PRC's eventual admission to UNESCO followed its admission into the United Nations in 1971, in each case accompanied by recognition that it represented ‘China’ in the organization.Footnote 80 Indeed, once this had occurred, PRC delegates swiftly put forward a resolution insisting that all non-governmental organizations affiliated with UNESCO also expel any ‘bodies or elements linked with Chiang Kai-shek’.Footnote 81 Unlike Zhou Enlai's missive in 1950, this demand now came from a member of the intergovernmental international organization rather than from outside it, resulting in a very different outcome. The PRC's entry into these international organizations in the 1970s therefore signalled a definitive shift in the battle for legitimacy and recognition between the KMT and the CCP.
Indeed, the KMT's great advantage prior to the 1970s had been derived, in part, from the complexity and depth of the RoC's relationship with the international organization, starting in the 1940s. This was not only the case at an intergovernmental level, with the RoC involved in UNESCO's founding and its membership afterwards, but also at more subtle levels behind the scenes, most notably seen in Joseph Needham's Chinese connections. The extent of this embeddedness was particularly significant at both the practical and symbolic levels in light of the fact that UNESCO's founding in 1946 coincided with the resumption of outright hostilities between China's ruling Nationalists and their Communist Party rivals for power. In the years that followed, the new international organization's officials in Paris and its representatives in China sought to navigate these fractious and fluid circumstances without being drawn into the conflict. While UNESCO had numerous visible and practical connections with the Nationalist government—from the Chinese National Commission down to official relations with various ministries and departments—the organization's officials and field officers nevertheless pursued contacts with, and strove to aid, individuals and academic institutions in CCP-held territory as well. The ongoing domestic conflict thus invariably complicated attempts to facilitate post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation.
UNESCO officials made a particular effort to reach out to and build bridges with CCP officials after it became increasingly clear that the Communists were likely to be the victorious party. The international organization encountered an unexpected wariness—and even hostility—on the part of CCP foreign affairs officials at the local and central levels both before and after the PRC's founding in 1949. Indeed, these officials sought to restrict the international organization's activities and, ultimately, its influence in the country even as the PRC lobbied for membership in the organization. These two seemingly contradictory pursuits show that, similarly to the CCP policymakers’ handling of foreign nationals, businesses, or organizations in the early years of the PRC, there was a dynamic tension between pragmatism and ideology in their approach to international organizations.Footnote 82 When it came to their interactions with UNESCO, the balance appears to have tilted more towards ideology, particularly in their approach to the representation debate and the sale of book coupons. Such efforts were tangibly rooted in more generalized anxieties about sovereignty and foreign influence, much like those that had been a feature of KMT officials’ dealings with UNESCO's predecessor, the UNRRA.Footnote 83 Additionally, the CCP's relationship with international organizations was made even more complicated by their political rivals’ embeddedness and depth of engagement in such organizations from the early 1940s onwards. International organizations therefore also represented a vector for KMT influence on mainland China during the civil war and even after their retreat to Taiwan. After 1949, CCP policymakers thus perceived international organizations as representing threat and opportunity alike, in both domestic and international contexts.
Communist officials’ concerted efforts to curb UNESCO's interactions with academic institutions in these years, and their response to its book coupons scheme in particular, were tangible demonstrations of these complex dynamics. It took central and local authorities many years and multiple attempts to completely contain the international organization's activities in China. Yet it is also worth noting that, for all their objections to UNESCO's sale and distribution of book coupons to institutions in the PRC, foreign relations officials were not dead set against the broader principle of such schemes. As the Foreign Ministry's response to the Ministry of Education in 1950 indicated, they were not concerned that academic institutions were attempting to obtain foreign publications, but that these institutions were doing so via a scheme over which the PRC government had no control or influence. Thus, it was in fact Chinese representatives who started pressing the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW) to develop a strikingly similar programme to the UNESCO book coupons scheme in 1952.Footnote 84 Although both organizations emerged at the same time and had many common roots, unlike UNESCO, it was the CCP not the KMT that had a strong early connection in the World Federation.Footnote 85 An international organization like the WFSW therefore represented much less by way of threat and, in fact, a great deal of opportunity during this period. Yet it is significant that this definitive tilt towards focusing on organizations more closely aligned with the socialist world came after successive failed attempts to break through into those with broader constituencies.
In all, Chinese relations with UNESCO were complex and contingent. They were as tied to domestic developments as they were inescapably entangled with wider geopolitical ones. And, ultimately, they show rival Chinese regimes navigating not an ossified international order of clear-cut Cold War blocs, but rather one that remained very much in flux.
