Political movements in China and America during the Cold War

Political movements were a key player in shaping the world following the conclusion of WWII, often accompanied by political spectacles, abuse of power, and mass demonstrations. Both China and America experienced political movements in the Cold War and they form interesting comparisons
Political movements in China 1950s-70s
One country that saw tumultuous political movements in the Cold War was China. In 1949, Mao Zedong took charge of the country with the Chinese Communist Party, transforming the Chinese government to a Socialist Single-party state, with three tasks in mind for the party: 1. national unity; 2. social and economic change; 3. freedom from foreign interference. Mao was planning on bringing national unity through the historical idea of "Sinocentrism," meaning that China is a cultural center of the world, influencing Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Taiwan. Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao's rival, left for Taiwan, and was effectively banished him from a nation that the Generalissimo was planning to reform. It should be noted that Chiang was the head of the Nationalist Party, one of the leading parties in China prior to the beginning of WWII. Mao then left for Moscow to form an alliance with Soviet Leader Josef Stalin. However, neither member of this alliance trusted each other, proving this alliance to be unstable. One year after the People's Republic was settled, China then allied with North Korea during the Korean War; it could not have come at a worse time for the new regime. Despite the sacrifices made, Chinese troops succeeded in repelling the U.S. advance into the north, near the Yalu River on the Chinese border. Mao's party moved to the Yangtze countryside, inciting a peasant's revolt that resulted in the peasants getting land promised to them, in the process of killing their landlords. In this way, he not only rebuilt a nation that had once been shattered, but he transformed it, with a staggering population of over 400 million, one of the world’s largest. Thus a new campaign was created to replace these semi-regular campaigns, called the "Great Leap Forward." The Great Leap Forward was to be Mao's attempt to modernize the economy to a point where in 1988, the economy would rival that of the United States. One idea he had in mind for the Great Leap was to encourage communes to set up "backyard" production plants. The most famous were 600,000 backyard furnaces which produced steel for the communes, making nearly 11 million metric tons of steel to the amount made per year. The plan backfired when it decreased the production of steel, and that "people making steel in their back yards, who know nothing about making steel, make bad steel." In the first year of the Famine, the Yellow River flooded in East China, killing an estimated 2 million people directly via drowning or indirectly via crop failure. Dikötter argued that this flood was the result of an earlier campaign put out by Mao during the Great Leap Forward which would have revolutionized irrigation farming. In the middle of this famine, a draught hit nearly 60% of agricultural land in the northern part of the country. Dikötter also studied that local leaders of the CCP conspired on their part to cover up the famine and reassign the blame onto Mao. A report made by Encyclopædia Britannica yearbooks from 1958-1962 took note that there were more cases of this abnormal weather. In one such case, 30 inches of rain hit Hong Kong over the course of five days in June 1959. And the Cultural Revolution, the largest political movement in Communist Chinese history, ended with the arrest of Mao's wife and her closest followers called the Gang of Four.
Political Movements in the US, 1950s-70s
The United States was facing its own issues regarding youth and politics. This coincided with the widespread use of TVs in the home, as the newly adopted devices had absorbed evenings that had once been spent reading, listening to the radio, or going to the movies. This new device helped with deciding between the two major candidates for the upcoming 1960 Presidential Election: Democrat John F. Kennedy, a young but dynamic Massachusetts senator from a powerful New England family vs. Republican Richard Nixon, a seasoned lawmaker who was currently serving as Vice President to Ike Eisenhower. In the buildup to the debates, Kennedy’s aide and speech writer, Ted Sorensen, quizzed the candidate through a pile of notecards about the likely debate topics while Kennedy worked on his tan. Despite the cameras running only in black and white, Kennedy’s appearance was to appear mid-tone onscreen to give the confident appearance of health and youth. Kennedy's campaign was to reach out to the younger generations of the American people. Meanwhile Nixon was in the midst of a hospital recovery; he had a staphylococcal infection at the time, as well as a sprained knee from his campaigning in North Carolina. He appeared underweight, sickly, and sweaty as he appeared on the camera, making him seem weaker. The initial debate had a landslide victory for Kennedy. Subsequent debates saw Nixon improve his appearance with a “milkshake diet” to regain the lost weight. But the damage had already been done by the first debate. TV had made Kennedy the clear choice for US President, with Nixon left to try again for a later cycle. Kennedy was against the current war going on in Vietnam and had plans to withdraw the US Army from South Vietnam. Kennedy was never able to put through his plans of withdrawal; on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot in the back of his car during a motorcade in Dallas. All the nation watched as the President was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. The subsequent days saw a manhunt for the assassin, later pinned down as Lee Harvey Oswald, although his death prior to his trial suggests that more snipers were involved with the assassination. Long after the assassination of Kennedy, conspiracy theories began to spring up about who else was involved. Some theories suggest that members of Kennedy's own cabinet were involved in the assassination, including the CIA themselves. However it happened, many of the theories suggested that there was political abuse within Washington. The signs of political abuse appeared again in 1972, just after Richard M. Nixon began to campaign for his second term in office. On the night of June 17, 1972, the Watergate hotel was found to have been broken into by burglars, keeping doors unlocked using duct tape to keep the latches from locking. The FBI followed up the break in and discovered a connection between the burglary and a slush fund used by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (or CRP). The investigation was led by two journalists for the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. As documented in the book All the President's Men, it was uncovered that the burglar was a former member of the CIA, James W. McCord Jr. Mark Felt, a former member of the FBI, acted as an anonymous informant to the journalists, given the name of Deep Throat to conceal his identity. Deep Throat told the two journalists to "follow the money," a phrase popularized by the book's film adaptation, as a way of suggesting that there is a “money trail” or corruption scheme within an office position of high power.
The investigation led Bernstein and Woodward to the CRP, now sitting pretty with Nixon winning a second term in office. Investigations continued discovering that Nixon had his office wiretapped and had meetings recorded on tape. When the tapes were eventually uncovered, they had been recorded over by Nixon himself, suggesting that he had a hand in the burglary, most notably an 18½ minute gap from a recording of a June 20, 1972 meeting. The transcripts of the tapes were eventually released on October 20, 1973 and it was made clear that Nixon indeed had a hand in the burglary: he was stealing information from the Democratic Party in order to improve his image. Legal action was made in early 1974 against members of the Nixon Administration, dubbed the Watergate Seven. The release of what is now called the "Smoking Gun tape" was enough evidence needed for the impeachment of "Tricky Dick". However, no such impeachment came about, as Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, putting his then Vice President, Gerald Ford, as President. The scandal made one last resurgence before disappearing when Ford signed a formal pardon on September 8, 1974. In his pardon, Ford wrote that it was "… believed that a trial of Richard Nixon, if it became necessary, could not fairly begin until a year or more has elapsed. In the meantime, the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States. The prospects of such trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.” Despite this letter of pardon, Nixon was criticized further as if he was still giving orders to his former vice president. Such events were compiled again by Woodward and Bernstein in a follow-up book called The Final Days.
That same year saw television document the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South. Leading the movement included such figures as Malcolm X, an Islamic activist, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Arguably, the movement for Civil Rights started as early as the antebellum-era in the South, with abolitionists pushing for the freedom of African-American slaves, culminating in the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1864. Despite the Amendment stating that all men regardless of skin-color were indeed created equal, the South was almost unwilling to change status on who was the superior skin-color. The first major breakthrough of a Civil Rights movement began with the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education. The plaintiff was Oliver Brown who argued against the idea of a “separate but equal” status previously instated by Plessy v. Ferguson. His statement on this pointed out that his children were forced to attend a school several miles away from home despite the fact that there was a nearby school, which taught white students. The Court ruled in favor of Brown, leading to one of the first instances of desegregation in the South. Following this were the Montgomery bus boycotts, which started with the incident of Rosa Parks refusing to relinquish her seat on the bus to a white male; this was during a time when buses in the South were separated to having African Americans sit in the back and whites in the front.
In the years that followed, the path to civil rights among African Americans and whites followed a path of violence. This was best exemplified when the Little Rock Nine, a group of African American students, were allowed to attend the Little Rock Central High School. Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas at the time, called out the National Guard to attempt to block their entrance to the school. In the days that followed, the Little Rock Nine were harassed by the other students, leading to police patrol cars being used to pick up the Little Rock Nine. This crisis was enough to get the attention of President Ike Eisenhower, now determined to help with the push of permanent desegregation. Dr. King soon found himself as an advocate for civil rights through his messages of non-violence, most notably in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. In the letter, King writes "I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure." The letter presented his disgust about how the local clergy praised the police brutality against nonviolent actions of integration. Upon his release from jail, King received word that JFK's brother Robert had plans to meet with prominent black intellectuals, in what became known as the Baldwin-Kennedy meeting. Despite the best interests of both Baldwin and Kennedy, the latter was harshly criticized by the African American community for vacillating on civil rights, and said that their thoughts were starting to turn back to their violent ways, as was present with the Little Rock Nine. Despite this, the Kennedy administration decided that a new legislation was necessary for equal public accommodations, an idea that Alabama Governor George Wallace was against. King and his fellow activists demonstrated mass support for the civil rights with the March on Washington. The march came to a close on August 28, 1963, where King delivered his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech joining the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln for equal rights. In his own words “I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream - one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream...”
In a manner similar to the Civil Rights movement, a movement was formed against the US involvement in Vietnam. This was due to a rise in student activism pushing for free speech and civil rights. This led to the students criticizing what was considered immoral, including the war. They had also argued that the US involvement was accepted as part of the Domino Theory regarding Communism, and that this was merely an excuse to practice imperialistic intentions. Other students argued that the Vietnam War should remain as a civil war rather than act as a proxy war, much like what happened with Korea.
As the war dragged on, more and more Americans grew weary of mounting casualties and escalating costs, but this led to the antiwar movement becoming all the more noticeable, pressuring Congress to reconsider its involvement. It didn't just include students, but now it included the clergy and artists. John Lennon, a former member of the Beatles, became involved through his new career as a solo artist alongside his wife Yoko Ono, famously recording the songs "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance". Even within the musical aspect of the antiwar movement, normally one of peace, a more violent aspect was made apparent thanks to the actions of the Charles Manson estate. Manson believed that Vietnam would fold into a race war which he described as being encoded in the songs of the Beatles' White Album, describing an apocalyptic scenario called "Helter Skelter", with Manson himself as the head of the war. Throughout the late 60's, the Manson estate recruited members to their cause either by persuasion or by abduction, closing when Manson spoke of the scenario in court, "Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast. If you can't see the confusion coming down around you fast, you can call it what you wish." Even with this blemish, the antiwar movement continued to become more apparent in 1963 following the Kennedy assassination. In 1968, a series of riots broke out in Chicago after the Democratic National Convention. This was in light of Lyndon Johnson not seeking re-election, who had served as Kennedy's Vice President until his assassination. Dr. King was involved in the antiwar movement as well pointing out "f America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read 'Vietnam.'" The protests finally ended when Nixon announced that he would have the US force withdraw from Vietnam. The book served as a way for the Red Guard to commit to their objective as the future for China. The guard went on to attack anything representing both Soviet and Western capitalist influence, as well as burn the old Chinese ideas and attacked intellectuals, on the grounds of being personifications of the Four Old Things; by the same token, they supported Mao's criticism of the moderate party leaders who favored improved relations with the USSR.<ref name=":0" /> The British and Soviet embassies in Beijing were attacked in addition to the attacks on intellectuals.<ref name=":0" />
In the United States, these movements were best exemplified by the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Both of these movements played a key role in the Cold War in America. With the Civil Rights movement, America was pushing itself closer to its promise that "All men are created equal," as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Despite this, many people in the South were against this idea, as if it was igniting a new version of the American Civil War. It was almost in tandem with the student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, as both were about keeping America's problems within their borders rather than have them expand into other countries. The one link to these two movements was Martin Luther King, Jr. who spoke about ending turmoil through peace and not violence, taking a page from Mahatma Gandhi when he spoke against British rule in India. The antiwar movement spoke out not just through the many protests at the time, but through the arts as well. As music was beginning to become more widespread and develop into a major form of communication, people turned to their preferred musicians to get a good idea as to what they were fighting for, even if many of these ideas fell to the idea of racism in and of itself.
Conclusion
It is certain that many ideas during the Cold War would be best exemplified by both China and America during the twenty years following WWII. Political spectacles served as a way to present the ideas of the leaders. China's main spectacle was through the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. In the US, this was presented through the televised campaigns of JFK and Nixon for the 1960 Presidential Election. Political abuse made itself more noticeable as the regime of one leader went on. Mao suspected of this going on in his own cabinet as he would eventually see to it that Lin Biao would be executed and his death made to look like an accident, not knowing that the real abuse was within him as was pointed out by Khrushchev. In the US, political abuse was hinted at when JFK was assassinated in his car during the Dallas motorcade, with the prime suspect being gunned down before he could appear for his trial. The abuse was made more apparent when Woodward and Bernstein covered the Watergate scandal, tying the burglary to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, eventually leading to the attempted impeachment of Nixon and his resignation. The demonstrations of the people served as a way to present how the public thought of certain ideas that were being presented at the time. China's Red Guard acted as a way to help bring about Mao's will throughout the Cultural Revolution, attacking the representatives of the Four Old Things and spreading his ideas through the Little Red Book. In America, the Civil Rights movement presented that the African American population were not satisfied with their status in life and would not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. The antiwar movement showed that America wanted to keep itself out of what was supposed to be a civil war, which mutated into a proxy war against Communism. In conclusion, these three ideas helped present the major political movements during the Cold War in both countries.

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