EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 2
 

Abstract

This paper examines how veterans of the People's Liberation Army were treated in their communities and workplaces after their demobilization in the 1950s and 1960s.  It argues that evidence of widespread discrimination against veterans, who were lauded by the state for their heroism and sacrifice, challenges one of the more common "tropes" of contemporary Chinese politics--that patriotism and nationalism are rising among wide swathes of the population.  Using new archival sources, the paper focuses on the challenges veterans faced in the post-war era, among them chronic pain, poverty, job discrimination, and marriage difficulties. as well as how they responded to them. To be sure, these problems were not unique to China; many veterans around the world experienced them. The paper concludes by exploring the cultural, political, and economic reasons why veterans in China appear to have fared particularly poorly when compared with many of their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

Author

Neil J. Diamant is Assistant Professor, specializing in East Asian politics with an emphasis on state-society relations, policy implementation and institutional analysis. He is author of Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1950-1968 (University of California Press, in press), which examines the implementation of laws liberalizing divorce in Chinese cities, suburbs and among ethnic minorities in frontier regions

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

The Chinese state, like many modern ones, has two calendars. The first, shaped by culture and history, is the more familiar one: all students in courses in East Asian Studies departments learn about Chinese New Year, the Moon and Dragon Boat Festivals, Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping) and others. The other, less familiar to foreigners, is the political calendar. Its features, however, are readily recognizable: a day celebrating a political founding (Oct. 1, 1949 in the PRC; Jan. 1, 1912 in Taiwan), critical junctures in history, or the contributions of various social groups to national development (for example, May 1st for labor, March 8 for women). Sometimes cultural and political holidays overlap—the ROC government notes that, during the Qingming festival, it is “customary to visit the tombs of the martyrs or the revolution”—but usually the calendars remain separate, and change little or only incrementally, usually accompanied by controversy. Governments, like leaders of organized religion, understand the need to maintain ritual and routine to sustain legitimacy, and attempt to create rituals that speak to the heart of their citizens.

i Despite the plethora of political events and the variety of groups they commemorate, two days are conspicuously missing from the PRC’s political calendar: a “Veterans Day” and “Memorial Day.”ii Even though the CCP emerged victorious from its decades-long rivalry with the Nationalist Party, awarded veterans high class status, claims victory in the war against Japan and the United States in the Sino-Japanese and Korean Wars respectively, defeated the Indian Army in the border wars of the early 1960s, there is not a single holiday devoted to the people responsible for these accomplishments.iii Nor, for that matter, are there any stadiums, bridges, parks, or road commemorating veterans, although “Workers Stadiums” abound. Even current-day bellicosity among some “nationalists” (who threaten to use military force against Taiwan and the US should Taiwan declare independence) has not translated into a commemorative holiday for veterans, even as they were called the “flesh and blood” of the revolution and were the primary force behind the CCP victory.iv Nor has political activism made much difference: veterans have staged uprisings, strikes, work slow-downs, sit-ins and petitioning, but these have not resulted in their “elevation” to holiday status, unlike workers, women and children, who each have their days.v Groups of organized veterans are swatted away much like any other group that “threatens social stability.” In April 2005, just to give one recent example, 1,000-2,000 veterans, including divisional commanders, many wearing their old uniforms, gathered in front of the General Political Department of the PLA to protest their post-discharge treatment, but the police quickly arrested the leaders and the rest were dispersed.

vi When considering the comparative record of modern states that have fought and won large scale wars in the 20th century, the missing commemorative day for PRC veterans is somewhat of an anomaly.vii The United States, which has lost far fewer soldiers than the PRC, has a Veterans Day and a Memorial Day; the Mall in Washington is festooned with public memorials for three wars, including one that was lost (Vietnam) and one that ended in a stalemate (Korea). Israel’s Memorial Day comes the day before Independence Day, cementing the link between sacrifice and nation-building. In the post WWII period in the Soviet Union, perhaps the country most comparable to China in terms of its political system, veterans “carve[d] their own space” within the “highly styled parameters of the Soviet polity.” As noted by Amir Weiner, Red Army veterans dominated the post-war scene politically and culturally: war novels, memoirs, and parades and honors galore were bestowed upon the victors in the “Great Patriotic War.”

China’s missing days, I argue, are not happenstance; they reflect the failure of the modern Chinese state (Republican and Communist) to successfully cultivate an appreciation of “martialcitizenship” among its own officials and ordinary people, as well as the resistance of business and cultural elites to see much of value in military service, no matter what the cause. Chinese citizens, this article will show, frequently failed to provide veterans (of the anti-Japanese, Civil and Korean Wars) with a sense that their service was honored, valued, or appreciated.ix Hundreds of reports from those years when the emotions associated with patriotism supposedly peaked—the tension-filled 1950s and 1960sx—document a widespread pattern of overt and covert discrimination, limited access to medical care and land, and politically motivated bullying and retribution by other officials.xi By the mid-1950s, veterans in the provinces wrote letters to the Chair of the National People’s Congress, Liu Shaoqi, complaining that they were being treated like “donkeys slaughtered after having ground the wheat” (momian shalü), disposed of after having served their purpose. Others warned that they would not serve in the reserves if a war broke out because of the lack of state and public support for them.xii In a single factory in Shandong, eighty veterans, angry at the CCP, refused to register for the reserves,xiii and suicides among them were serious concerns. Given that politics in the PRC during these years have been described as militarized (there were “campaigns,” “production brigades,” “advances” and “fronts”), China fought several wars and the most iconic figure from the Maoist years—Lei Feng—was a soldier, the seething discontent among veterans is clearly something that requires further exploration and explanation...(Continued)