Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur |
Review of Neil J.
Diamant, Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and
the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949-2007. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Pp. xiii, 463. ISBN
978-0-7425-5766-6. |
Several
recent books have focused on modern China's military, but none (and
few articles) deal with demobilized military personnel, their
resettlement, employment, and care, or financial and other support for
the families of serving and retired servicemen, and the widows,
children, and other dependents of those who died on active duty. These
seldom examined topics are the subject of Embattled Glory. Neil Diamant is associate professor of Asian law and society
at Dickinson College and the author of books and articles on the
family, society, and law in contemporary China.[1]
He was educated in both Israel and the United States, and has
served in the Israeli army, to which he compares China's military
system.
The research
for this book involved several trips to China, where Diamant consulted
the Municipal archives of Shanghai, Beijing, and their outlying
municipalities, and the Shandong Provincial Archives. He had access to
government archives on Taiwan but makes few comparisons between the
two Chinas on the handling of veteran affairs. He does not cite
archives of China's Ministry of Defense or other national-level
government bureaus. Most of his materials date between 1949 and the
early 1960s. This reliance on primary sources of limited and atypical
regions raises a serious question that cannot be answered without
access to more archival materials: specifically, was the treatment of
veterans and their families in China's capital city Beijing and
premier port Shanghai plus one province representative of the whole
nation?
The book has
eight chapters, plus a short concluding chapter that discusses wounded
soldiers from the current Iraq war and other issues confronting the
United States as a result of the war. Three appendices comprise a
brief survey of archival materials in China that the author used, a
list of Chinese characters, and a survey of archival and published
sources. Each chapter has several subsections followed by lengthy endnotes totaling sixty-seven pages for the whole
book.
The People's
Republic of China (PRC) was established on 1 October 1949. Although
multiple factors caused the collapse of the Nationalist government,
which retreated to Taiwan, military
victories by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the civil war were
decisive. One
year later, the elements of the PLA (disguised as volunteers)
intervened to save China's ally, the communist regime in North Korea,
from collapse in its war against U.S.-led United Nations forces. The
ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) capitalized on these two
significant events to boost the people's nationalistic pride and
patriotism. Under the circumstances, one would assume strong party,
government, and popular support for the military, including veterans and
their families.
Diamant's
research shows the precise opposite. His book documents
the discrimination against and the humiliations and victimization of
veterans and their families. For comparison, he discusses at length
how other states treated their soldiers and veterans, including
ancient Rome, the United States from the War of Independence to the
present, Great Britain, France, and Germany after World Wars I and II,
the Soviet Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, several former
British colonies in Africa, and his own country, Israel. Although
comparisons with modern British, French, U.S., and Soviet policies and
attitudes are relevant, the inclusion of many small countries and
ancient Rome is perplexing, distracting, and to little purpose. Even
more remarkably, Diamant never mentions several Chinese dynasties that
enjoyed great military success and supported large armies, most
notably the Han (contemporary with the late Roman Republic and early
Empire). Further, he incorrectly states of the Qing dynasty
(1644-1911) that its elite banner army soldiers "were banned from
other occupations such as trade and had to work the land even though
they were not inclined to farm" (61). In fact, the banner units of
hereditary soldiers were granted land worked by tenant farmers whose
rent payments supported them and their families throughout their lives.
Diamant sees
several reasons for the disrespect, neglect, and discrimination
against the PLA veterans, their families and those of "martyrs" (men
who died in active service). One is the long (twenty-six-year)
duration of the wars that culminated in the establishment of the PRC.
Many groups besides the army contributed to the victory and wanted a
piece of the pie. Thus "glory was sliced and diced into millions of
little pieces and distributed widely, leaving many veterans vulnerable
to political attacks against their status" (16). Diamant cites a
relevant comparison with other modern nations: whereas Britain,
Germany, and the United States enacted universal military service laws
during the world wars, China did so neither before nor after 1949.
Thus veterans in Western countries came from a cross section of society, which allowed them access to power and respect after the
wars, even in defeated Germany. By contrast, China's army both before
and after 1949 relied on poorly educated rural recruits, some of whom
enlisted out of desperation. Most hoped for "urban status" after
demobilization because cities offered better living conditions and job
opportunities. These men found their aspirations blocked by urbanites
who despised them and rejected their claims for good treatment for
having fought in the civil war and against the United States in Korea,
especially since many educated city dwellers disliked communism and
admired the United States. Additionally, most of the party cadres who
ruled the cities and allocated jobs were urbanites and non-veterans
and therefore unsympathetic to veterans' claims. Diamant also points
out that, unlike the situation in modern Western countries, Chinese
culture and its elites did not associate military service with
"positive masculine values." Finally, the government had other, higher
domestic priorities: land reform, followed by collectivization.
After its
military successes, China needed to reduce the size of the PLA. Between
195o and 1957, 5.26 million soldiers were discharged, often in a
chaotic manner. Some units were disbanded in their original home
regions, others were sent to the northwest to pioneer as military
colonists (previous dynasties had used veterans in this same manner),
still other soldiers were left randomly where their units
demobilized, sometimes far from their homes. Unlike many other
countries, China had no office specifically charged with
demobilization and veteran's affairs. The task was dumped on the
Bureau of Civil Affairs, a low prestige office that also handled
welfare cases. This bureau was inefficient and riddled with
corruption. Its officers suffered from low morale, and many sought
transfers to other offices. No wonder the bureau was unwilling and
unable to cope with the massive problems connected with
demobilization.
Several major
issues confronted veterans on returning to their home villages. Some
had no families or houses left, others arrived after their village
land had already been redistributed and found no provisions had been
made for them, still others were disabled or had lost their farming
skills and therefore could not earn enough work points to survive. The
cadres in charge were unsympathetic; some had even taken advantage of
or abused the soldiers' womenfolk while they were away on duty. Many
veterans felt their service entitled them to go to cities rather than
their original country homes to find work because city wages and
living standards were higher. Some even managed to get to Shanghai and
Beijing. If the information from records of Shanghai,
Beijing, and nearby municipalities holds true for other urban areas,
veterans were badly treated by their urban compatriots, who often
called them "trash" because they believed that soldiers must have
committed offenses to be discharged. Like their colleagues in the
countryside, urban cadres of the Bureau of Civil Affairs treated
veterans as nuisances and troublemakers and ignored or fudged orders
from Beijing to help them find suitable jobs and housing. Likewise,
managers of state-owned enterprises either refused to hire veterans or
hired them only at the lowest grade levels or as temporary workers.
All veterans suffered indifference and indignities from the general
population and many had to beg to exist. Letters of complaint to
higher authorities were usually lost in the bureaucratic tangle or
simply ignored.
A single
high-ranking official exposed injustices to veterans--Minister of
Defense Marshal Peng Dehuai--but he fell from power in 1959. While
veterans in many countries formed organizations to further their
goals, Chinese veterans were thwarted and punished each time they
tried, beginning in 1957 when the government declared a newly formed
Chinese Veterans Association "reactionary" and "rightist" and forcibly
disbanded it with troops. Whereas Mao Zedong reviewed huge numbers of
young Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, only Premier Zhou
Enlai received a delegation of veterans who had traveled to Beijing
in December 1966, and then only to inform them that they could not
form their own organization. In 1966 and 1967, the PLA was ordered to
suppress veterans organizations wherever they existed. This included
veterans in southern provinces bordering northern Vietnam who had
served in the conflict between China and Vietnam in 1979 and
demonstrated for rights after the war. Nonetheless, sporadic veterans'
protests continued; most embarrassing for the government was the one
held in Yan'an, symbolically significant to the CCP as their capital
between 1936 and 1949. To this day, veterans organizations are still
prohibited in China.
Reforms begun
by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s posed twin problems for veterans. One
was the downsizing of the PLA in favor of a mechanized modern army:
between 500,000 and 600,000 men were demobilized annually during the
1990s. The other was the closing of inefficient state-owned industries
that had employed veterans in favor of private enterprises; many
veterans were laid off as a result. A paradoxical picture has emerged
as China enters the twenty-first century: its government has
successfully implemented many reforms, for example, in public health,
life-expectancy, and the position of women, but not, puzzlingly, in
committing resources to improving the lot of veterans and their
families. As Diamant observes,
In the absence of meaningful political change or policy innovation
protests have persisted into 2006 and 2007. According to the
Demobilized Military Cadre Resettlement Office, 70-80 percent of
China's large-scale protests were led by veterans. This number appears
to be confirmed by General Guo Boxiong, a vice chairman of the Central
Military Commission, who noted in a speech that many veterans were
filing petitions in Beijing and whose protests were occurring in most
every part of the country. In Hainan and Hunan provinces, veteran-led
demonstrations almost developed into revolts.....
What the PRC government seems not to understand, or perhaps
understands quite well but deliberately ignores, is that veterans were
protesting not only over money and conditions but also for respectful
treatment from state officials and their fellow citizens—a recognition
of their claim to martial citizenship and patriotic status….This could
come only through a broader consensus about the role of the veterans
in the revolution and the state, the legitimacy of the CCP's wars, the
meaning of the revolution, and the core identity of the nation and
state, and these are still sorely lacking in the PRC (394-95).
The first
seven chapters of Embattled Glory are organized by topic rather
than chronologically, which occasions much repetition because many
problems involve several issues. And, too, an over-abundance of very
short quotations distracts the reader and yields a huge number of
footnotes. But most troubling and mystifying to this reviewer is the
author's heavy use of comparisons between the PRC and ancient Rome and
numerous modern countries great and small to the near exclusion of
more apt ones between the PRC and the Nationalist government on Taiwan
regarding the challenges of veteran issues. After all the two
governments across the Taiwan Strait share much more in terms of
history, culture, and traditions than the PRC does with Australia,
Kenya, or even South Korea. Despite these shortcomings, the book makes
a valuable contribution to the study of issues confronting
contemporary China by concentrating on a sorely neglected subject.
Eastern Michigan University
jupshur@emich.edu
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[1]
See Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in
Urban and Rural China, 1949-1968 (Berkeley: U Calif Pr, 2000),
Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities
for Justice [ed. with S.B. Lubman and K.J. O'Brien] (Stanford:
Stanford U Pr, 2005), and "Re-Examining the Impact of the 1950
Marriage Law: State Improvisation, Local Initiative and Rural
Family Change," China Quarterly 161 (2001) 171-98.
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