# Chapter Thirty-Two — Africa and China After World War II

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## One Country, Two Different Worlds

During World War II, South Africa fought on the side of the Allies. But in 1948, after Germany’s defeat and Hitler’s death, a political party that *liked* Hitler’s ideas gained power in South Africa.

To understand how this happened, let’s look back at South Africa’s history for a moment. When we last visited the southern part of the African continent, a war between white British in South Africa and white Afrikaners, descended from Dutch settlers, had just ended. The south of Africa had been made into a country called the Union of South Africa.

In 1931, the Union of South Africa became independent from Great Britain. It would now govern itself—under a constitution that gave almost all of the power in the country to the whites who lived there.

Just north of the Union of South Africa lay other white-controlled African countries. Mozambique, on the eastern coast, was governed by Portugal. The country next to that, Rhodesia, and the country beside Rhodesia, Botswana, still belonged to Great Britain. The country on the western coast, Namibia, had once been a German colony. But after World War I, the League of Nations had given Namibia to the Union of South Africa.

This meant that the entire south of Africa was under the oversight of whites—not the Africans who had lived there for thousands of years.

Black Africans had gathered together into a group called the African National Congress, to gain more rights for blacks in South Africa. The African National Congress, or ANC, believed that Africa should be governed by the people who were native to Africa. “In the land of their birth,” one ANC leader told his followers, “Africans are treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa—a union in which we have no voice in the making of the laws and no part in their administration.”

In South Africa, blacks couldn’t even vote for other blacks. They did have the right to elect three representatives and four senators—but all seven elected officials had to be white. Whites earned ten to twelve times more than blacks for doing the same jobs. All of the best work was reserved for whites. There were no government schools for black children. They could only go to schools run by Christian missionaries.

During World War II, South Africa fought on the side of the Allies. As the war dragged on, a political party called the National Party began to gain more and more followers. The National Party wanted the power in South Africa to belong to whites, but not to whites of British descent—only to Afrikaners, who were white South Africans of Dutch descent. Even though Germany was defeated in World War II, the National Party agreed with Hitler’s views about how superior white civilization was to any other culture.

Many of the whites in South Africa were of Dutch descent. They liked the idea that the National Party would put Afrikaners, not British whites, into power. Many Afrikaners resented Great Britain’s efforts to help run South Africa. (And after all, South Africa had been forced to fight in World War II because of its alliance with Great Britain.)

In 1948, white South Africans voted to put the National Party into power.

The National Party began at once to pass laws that would make blacks even less free. Party leaders claimed that, unless whites kept control of South Africa, the black descendents of South Africa’s native tribes would spend all of their time fighting tribal wars with each other. (It was convenient for the National Party to forget that the white people of Europe had just spent six years fighting the most devastating war in history.)

In a 1948 statement, the National Party told South Africans:

> > \[Our\] aim is the maintenance and protection of the … pure White race, the maintenance and protection of the indigenous \[native\] racial groups as separate communities. … We can act in only one of two directions. Either we must follow the course of equality, which must eventually mean national suicide for the White race, or we must take the course of separation, through which the character and the future of every race will be protected … The party therefore undertakes to protect the White race properly and effectively against any policy, doctrine or attack which might undermine or threaten its continued existence. At the same time the party rejects any policy of oppression and exploitation of the non-Europeans by the Europeans as being in conflict with the Christian basis of our national life and irreconcilable with our policy.

But despite this “rejection” of oppression, every law passed by the National Party over the next ten years did nothing but oppress the nonwhites of South Africa.

National Party laws, called *acts*, gave every bit of power in South Africa to whites. To keep whites “pure,” the acts also separated whites from the rest of South Africa, so that they could lead totally separate lives.

The Population Registration Act identified every single South African as belonging to one of four groups: white, African, colored (people of mixed white and African descent), and Asian. Only whites had full privileges. The Immorality Act said that whites could not marry anyone from one of the other three groups. The Group Areas Act made many areas in cities off-limits to blacks, coloreds, and Asians. The Separate Amenities Act said that blacks, coloreds, and Asians had to use separate buses, separate taxis, separate movies theatres, separate restaurants, and separate hotels. They had to sit on special non-white park benches, swim at non-white beaches, and even climb up and down non-white staircases. They even had to use separate funeral homes, with black-only hearses to carry the coffins. The Bantu Education Act said that the Christian missions could no longer educate black children. Instead, blacks would be taught in government schools. These schools only got one-tenth of the money spent on white schools. All of the textbooks in the black schools explained how good the separation of the races was for South Africa.

This separation was called “apartheid,” a word from the Afrikaner language meaning “apartness.”

“Apartness” wasn’t the only goal of the National Party acts. The acts also kept black South Africans from having the freedom that whites had. Black South Africans couldn’t vote. They had to carry identification cards at all times. Blacks (but not whites) had to observe a curfew—after a certain time of night, they had to stay in or near their homes.

Nonwhites in South Africa called these acts the “Unjust Laws.” But blacks could do little to resist the unjust laws. The South African government also passed decrees, saying that the police could arrest any black South African without having to give a reason. Any black South African could be put in jail and kept there, without ever having been tried or sentenced. No black South African had the right to see a lawyer.

How could the African National Congress resist such injustice?

For many years, the ANC followed the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi and taught black South Africans to use nonviolent resistance. Members of the ANC simply refused to carry their identification cards, just as Indians had refused to hand over their taxes. When police arrested them, they didn’t resist.

The government reacted even more harshly than ever. ANC members were thrown into jail. Anyone suspected of joining the ANC could expect to be followed, spied on, and reported to the authorities. Newspapers couldn’t write about any protests that the ANC organized—so even if blacks demonstrated against their white government, no one would ever hear about it.

Desperately, the ANC went on resisting and protesting. But for years and years, blacks in South Africa lived under the Unjust Laws, without seeing any change for the better.

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## Two Republics of China

In China, after the end of World War II, Chiang Kai-shek had to figure out how to deal with the victorious Soviets—and with his own allies.

Chiang had decided, reluctantly, that his Kuomintang government needed the help of the Chinese Communist Party to fight off the Japanese invaders. When Japan declared itself to be an Axis power during World War II, the united army of the Kuomintang and the Chinese communists got a little more help. British and American soldiers came to China to fight against the Japanese.

But Chiang Kai-shek had never trusted the communists of China, even when he most needed their alliance. “The Japanese are a plague on our skin,” he once remarked, “but the communists will infect our hearts.” He meant that although the Japanese might bother and torment the Chinese, communism was more dangerous because it might change how the Chinese people thought, and who the Chinese people *were*.

When Japan surrendered, Chiang Kai-shek no longer needed his alliance with the Chinese communists. Also, he didn’t like the idea that the Chinese communists were such good friends with the Soviets. Now that World War II was over, he could see that the power of Communist Russia was growing. He was afraid that the CCP and the Soviet Union might ally themselves together, and make China a communist country by force.

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Actually, Joseph Stalin didn’t want to make an enemy of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. A few years before, he *had* hoped that China could be brought into the Communist Party. (And he had remarked about Chiang Kai-shek, “We’ll squeeze him like a lemon, and then we’ll get rid of him.” So Chiang Kai-shek was wise to be worried!)

But now the Kuomintang army had grown to more than three million soldiers, well-armed and well-trained. The Soviet army, on the other hand, had lost hundreds of thousands of men pushing the Germans back out of Russia. Stalin wasn’t anxious to take on those millions of Chinese soldiers.

So Stalin told the CCP that they should try to keep the alliance with the Kuomintang together. After all, Mao’s communist army had less than half a million men. And only a hundred and fifty thousand or so even had weapons!

Mao and the CCP refused. They didn’t like Chiang Kai-shek any more than he liked them, and they no longer wanted to ally themselves with the Kuomintang. As soon as Japan surrendered, the CCP and the Kuomintang began to fight between themselves for control of China’s government.

The Nationalist troops had soldiers, weapons, and control of China’s largest cities. But Mao and the CCP had the peasants and poor people of China on their side. Millions and millions of poor Chinese knew that a communist government would take land away from the rich and redistribute it to the poor. During World War II and the struggle against the Japanese, millions of Chinese had lost their jobs, along with any hope of making enough money to buy food and clothing. Chinese currency was so useless that one American dollar was worth ninety-three thousand *Yuan* (units of Chinese money)!

Peasants and poor workers flooded into the Chinese Communist Party. Communist bases began to grow up all across the country. The Kuomintang began to realize that they were outnumbered. Kuomintang soldiers began to switch sides. Many were glad to change armies, because the Kuomintang army had run out of money and hadn’t paid its soldiers for months. As a matter of fact, many Kuomintang soldiers had been earning money to buy food by selling their guns to Mao’s unarmed communist soldiers.

Chiang Kai-shek’s army was shrinking as the communist army grew. Whenever the CCP soldiers (also called the “Red Army”) captured land, the generals would take the huge tracts of land owned by the rich and give them away to the poor in the area. Not surprisingly, more and more poor people became loyal to the communists!

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By 1949, the communist army was ready to attack the capital city of the Kuomintang government: Nanjing. They boarded a fleet of tiny fishing boats, sailed across the Yangtze River, and invaded the city. The Kuomintang soldiers were forced to flee. Over the next six months, they ran further and further south, with the CCP army behind them taking city after city.

At last Chiang and his remaining men left China and crossed over to the island of Taiwan. Here on Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek announced, he would re-establish the true Republic of China, a democracy that would have free elections and that would truly preserve the culture and traditions of China—in exile.

But in China itself, the Chinese Communist Party announced, on October 1, 1949, that *they* governed the true Republic of China—the People’s Republic of China, a communist nation, with Mao as its chairman. In this new Communist China, all people would have equal access to land, to food, and to goods. Chairman Mao made an appearance in Tiananmen Square, in the ancient city of Beijing. The Chinese people cheered wildly. Mao had become the hero of the People’s Republic of China. Parades were held in his honor, with huge posters of him carried before enthusiastic crowds. Young Chinese boys and girls carried collections of his writings, known as Mao’s “Little Red Book.” Mao himself liked to be worshipped by his people. He even thought of himself as the sun, and told his people to sing a hymn to him that went, “From the Red East, a sun rises; Mao has appeared in China!”

Under Mao, China began to grow more prosperous. Peasants who owned their own land worked harder than they had in the days when all their profits were taken away by landlords. But although he was a hero to many, Mao also led a communist party that was harsh and repressive. As soon as the communists were in power, Mao’s government executed over a million people who still supported the Kuomintang. Twenty million people were sent to concentration camps and prisons. Some of these were supporters of the Kuomintang. But others were simply rich, or had been to European universities and so were considered “Westernized.”

Mao would remain popular for years. But before long, the prosperity he brought to China would begin to disintegrate, and China would sink once more into fighting, unhappiness, and violence.

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