In addition, the Nationalists behaved despotically when Japan was obligated to return Taiwan, an offshore island originally named Formosa by the Portugese, that the Qing dynasty had ceded to Japan in 1895. Under the pretext of confiscating Japanese holdings, the Nationalists indiscriminately seized native homes and businesses. “When a Chinese with some influence wanted a particular property, he had only to accuse a Formosan of being a collaborationist during the past fifty years of Japanese sovereignty,” one Taiwanese observed. When news organizations began to publish such grumblings of discontent, the KMT, rather than address the problems provoking the discontent, chose to arrest a number of local news reporters, editors, and publishers who had brought the issue to light. Many Taiwanese natives now complained, in private, that the “dogs” (the Japanese) had left, but the “pigs” (the Nationalists) had replaced them. On February 28, 1947, simmering hatred of the Nationalists exploded into a serious uprising on the island. KMT reinforcements dispatched from the mainland brutally crushed the rebellion, in the process slaughtering thousands of Taiwanese.
Political unrest in Taiwan and elsewhere was only a fraction of Nationalist China’s concerns. The country was teetering on the brink of economic collapse. During the war, as inflation spiraled out of control, the government had inflicted heavy taxes on farmers and forced them to sell grain at fixed prices. In the immediate postwar years, many Chinese lost what was left of their fortunes when the Nationalist government, attempting to impose strict control over the nation’s money supply, asked its citizens to exchange their gold and foreign currency for government certificates. The result was hyperinflation. In 1947, the government issued at least 10,000 billion Chinese dollars in bank notes. Within one six-month period in 1948 prices soared by a factor of 85,000. A sack of rice priced at 12 yuan in 1937 cost 63 million yuan by August 1948. Shoppers pushed heaps of paper currency in wheelbarrows just to buy a few groceries. When a Guangdong paper mill recycled “eight hundred cases of notes ranging from one hundred to two-thousand-dollar bills which it used as raw material in the manufacture of paper,” it was reasonable to conclude that KMT currency was literally worth less than the paper it was printed on.
Among those who saw their wealth evaporate were many Chinese Americans. After the happy resolution of World War II, thousands of ethnic Chinese, both American- and foreign-born, left the United States to visit relatives in China. Some brought their entire life savings, eager to launch new companies or to retire, only to watch their nest eggs disappear within months. In 1947, for instance, a Houston businessman of Chinese heritage returned to Canton to open a travel agency and rice company. Rampant inflation ravaged his savings, leaving him bankrupt and forcing him to return to Houston to start over again. Another Chinese American deposited $6,000 into the Bank of China, in mainland China, in 1948. A year later his funds were worth scarcely enough to buy a postage stamp.
As the Nationalists were forfeiting the confidence of the people, the Communists were rapidly gaining stature in north China. When Soviet forces withdrew in the summer of 1947, the Communists began to consolidate control over Manchuria, employing well-honed skills in educating those under their control to look at the incipient civil war as a class struggle. As committed recruits expanded the Communists’ numbers, Chiang’s forces were being depleted by a growing discontent within the military that reflected the discontent within the general population. During both World War II and then the Chinese civil war, the KMT exempted young men of privilege from the draft while conscripting sons of peasant families. Ill fed, ill equipped, ill paid, and physically abused by their superiors, many of these Nationalist soldiers deserted at the earliest opportunity, often switching sides to join the Communists. By 1948, the Communists had 1.5 million troops—and each new victory brought more men and arms over to them.
During this period, some upper-class Chinese, alarmed by the successes of the Communists, began to leave the country. But most, even among the wealthy, did not emigrate immediately. For it is a reality universally acknowledged that to leave one’s community, to abandon one’s business or profession, to discard whatever wealth and status has been achieved over a lifetime and start all over again in a new country requires uncommon courage and resolve. For the majority of upper-class Chinese, it seemed better to sit tight and hope what they were witnessing was a transient political aberration, nothing more, and that everything would soon settle back to normal.
As 1948 slid into 1949, the Communists destroyed KMT forces in the north and then turned south into central China. One by one, major regions fell under Communist control: Shenyang, Manchuria, Tianjin, Beijing. In April 1949, the Communists seized Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, and in May, Shanghai, the country’s most populous city. There was no longer any doubt which side would be the victor.
Much of what remained of the establishment—bureaucrats, businessmen, intellectuals—now left in great haste. Abandoning businesses, homes, and real estate, they sewed gold bullion and jewelry into belts and seams of clothes, even shoes, and shoved their way onto trains so mobbed that people clung to the tops and sides of the railway cars in order to get away. During later stages of their journey, many left trunks and suitcases filled with cherished family possessions at the side of the road.
As a group, these new émigrés had more education, status, and wealth than the earlier waves of Chinese to the United States, but they also had a less coherent plan. Given the confusion of the last few months of the civil war, some Chinese were not sure, initially, whether to leave the mainland or to simply move to another region farther from the conflict. Many exhausted their savings to book passage to Hong Kong or Taiwan, leaving China with little more than the clothes on their backs. The impulse behind their migration was not, like the first wave of Chinese gold rushers in America, to provide a better living for themselves and their families, but to escape persecution and possible death at the hands of the Communists.
On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, Mao Zedong declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China. In December, Chiang Kai-shek abandoned mainland China and fled to Taiwan with the remainder of his troops and the bulk of the nation’s gold supply. The Qing dynasty had lasted almost three centuries; the first Republic of China had lasted fewer than four decades on mainland soil.
In the United States, the Communist revolution shook the halls of academe, leaving about five thousand foreign Chinese intellectuals marooned. While some were skilled professionals and scholars, most—4,675 of them—were students at colleges and universities scattered throughout the country. With few exceptions, these students came from the privileged upper strata of society, precisely the group that had the most to lose from Mao’s victory.
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Their original plan had been to return to China with the pedigree of a Western education and to establish their careers there. A foreign diploma offered an inside track to the best positions in Nationalist China; an examination of the 1925 edition of
Who’s Who in China
shows that most entrants—about 57 percent—had studied abroad. “We joked about getting gold-plated,” recalls Linda Tsao Yang, a former student at Columbia University who became the U.S. executive director on the board of directors for the Asian Development Bank in Manila. “That means you go abroad, you study, you get a fancy degree, and then you can go back and say, ‘I’ve been to the United States and I graduated from a leading university.’ ” Now Chinese students at American universi-tiesfaced the unimaginable prospect that upon graduation there would be no country to go home to.
As the society they had known crumbled away under Communist reorganization, many students stared into an uncertain and frightening future. Even before Chiang’s final rout, they had received letters from home about the rampant inflation, the impending Communist victory, and the frantic family conferences about what course of action to take. Some parents urged their children to return immediately, so that the family, for better or for worse, would at least be together. Others counseled their children to stay in the United States, telling them they had decided to abandon all business and property in order to move to either Hong Kong or Taiwan. “We came to a fork in our lives, not knowing whether to take branch A or branch B and what the final destination would be,” Linda Tsao Yang remembered. “And there was no one who could give you advice because we were all in the same boat.”
Now those who decided to stay in the United States had to fight for survival, unable to rely on parents or even the Nationalist government to pay their tuition or mail them scholarship checks. The ugly sequence of skyrocketing inflation, followed by a Communist revolution that was social, political, and economic, had depleted the fortunes of entire families, many of whom were now themselves refugees. With their private funding cut off, these students desperately needed money. By 1949, the entire foreign Chinese student community was in crisis—not only had these students lost their country, most could no longer even meet their basic living expenses.
Time
magazine estimated that more than 2,500 Chinese students lacked basic funds for rent and tuition.
Some American colleges and universities helped out by waiving tuition payments and giving the Chinese part-time jobs and loans, but the scope of the problem required federal intervention. After 1949, the United States allocated emergency funds for Chinese foreign students, whether or not they intended to return to mainland China. In total, between 1949 and 1955, the government appropriated slightly more than $8 million to help the stranded students complete their degrees in the United States.
During this time, many of these stranded scholars resolved to build new lives for themselves in the United States. Some decided to work for their doctorates, if only to remain full-time students and avoid cancellation of their visas. Those who already held a Ph.D. took research positions as visiting scholars at various institutions. As it turned out, their timing was fortunate: they had obtained their credentials just before American universities began a rapid expansion. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union brought massive U.S. government investment in science and technology, which led to new academic departments in those fields at many universities. At the same time, World War II veterans, eager to get their degrees on the GI Bill, were filling college classrooms, necessitating the hiring of new professors. With universities scrambling to find qualified faculty, and with a shortage of existing Ph.D.s in the United States, foreign Chinese intellectuals soon became hot commodities in the academic market.
When the government of the world’s most populous country is ousted and replaced by a radically different form of government, the reverberations are felt around the world. As China became a second Communist world power, few groups were more sensitive to the aftershocks than the ethnic Chinese in the United States.
A loyalty schism opened within the Chinatowns of America, with KMT agents and pro-PRC supporters jousting for influence within and control over the Chinese American community. In October 1949, the liberal China Workers Mutual Aid Assocation hosted an event in San Francisco Chinatown to mark the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China. Suddenly, a “Guomingdang-hired goon squad,” as one Chinese-language newspaper put it, burst into the auditorium, vandalizing property, stealing a PRC flag, and spraying blue dye over the crowd. Bystanders were assaulted and some needed to be hospitalized. The pro-KMT Chinese-language press, however, blamed the incident on “Communist bandits.”
The revolution also sent tremors through the small community of diplomats and government bureaucrats stationed in Washington, D.C., and in consular offices across the United States. Appointed by the Nationalist government, they now faced an uncertain future. Although its area of effective control was now restricted to the island of Taiwan, the Nationalist Republic of China would for many years continue to claim, with the support and concurrence of United States, to be the legitimate government of China, but its prospects for a victorious return to the mainland were dim.
As the foreign-born Chinese desperately sought to build new lives, the American-born Chinese began to rethink their own futures. Many had grown up believing that if they failed to establish themselves professionally in the United States, they could always find careers in China. That option was now foreclosed, and assimilation became a much more attractive possibility. In 1949, the participants of the Chinese Young People’s Summer Conference in Lake Tahoe urged youths not only to leave Chinatowns, but to discard Chinese traditions altogether—the best way, they believed, to advance “understanding” between the races.
Racial harmony, however, was difficult to realize as world events led Americans to see themselves as the last bulwark against a giant worldwide Communist conspiracy. The end of World War II had inaugurated the cold war, a quiet but intense struggle between the two great superpowers of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the United States watched with growing alarm as one Eastern European country after another became a Soviet satellite and disappeared behind the “Iron Curtain.” Viewing communism as operating like a contagious disease, the United States tried to contain the spread of Soviet power in 1949 by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance whose members—the U.S. and democratic Western European countries—pledged to unite if any one of them were attacked. Later that year, the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, ending the American monopoly on nuclear weapons.
This Soviet triumph sent the United States into hysteria. Many Truman administration experts had thought the Soviets incapable of developing an atomic bomb for at least fifteen years; some, such as Harry Truman himself, believed that, left to their own devices, they might never be able to build one at all. To them, the clear explanation was that the Soviets had gotten help from the outside. Thus the Soviet atomic bomb triggered not only a U.S.-Soviet arms race, in which scientific secrets on both sides would be jealously guarded, but a witch hunt for those suspected of loyalty to the other side. In January 1950, the American public’s deepest fears were confirmed when Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a British atomic scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, was arrested for passing secrets to the Soviets. The Chinese Communist revolution and the developing Sino-Soviet alliance subjected the Chinese American community to the same suspicions of disloyalty.