During the Mao era, the International Liaison Department was the second most mysterious CCP department after Zhongdiaobu (the Investigation Department of the Central Committee). Its real identity and site of its headquarters were even shrouded in secrecy until 1971. So what did the Zhonglianbu do? The ILD was originally part of the CCP’s United Front Work Department. In 1951, it seceded and became an independent department. The mission of the ILD was to handle the relations between the CCP and the communist parties of other countries. The bilateral relations between the PRC and other socialist countries were managed through double channels: party-to-party relations handled by the ILD, and state-to-state relations overseen by the MFA. Both channels operated when bilateral relations worked well. But once the bilateral relations cooled or deteriorated, the party-to-party channels would be closed off, while the state-to-state channel was retained. For example, due to the Sino-Soviet split, the party-to-party relations between China and the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European countries (East Germany, Poland, Hungry, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria) were all terminated from the mid-1960s onward. In the eyes of the CCP leaders, the communist parties of these countries had turned revisionist. The ILD therefore refused to have any exchange with the communist parties of these countries. The CCP even refused to acknowledge that Romania, fairly independent from Moscow, was a communist country. It was not until 1971, when Ceauşescu visited Beijing, that the CCP restored the party-to-party relationship with the Romanian Communist Party.
After the establishment of the Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea (GRUNK) and the Khmer United National Front (FUNK) in 1970, the ILD was instructed by the CCP Central Committee to spearhead the mission of sending Chinese assistance to Cambodia. The ILD would continue to do this job after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. Wang Jiaxiang, the first director of the ILD, had been suspended in 1962 for his moderate views on the international situations. (Wang proposed the reduction of China’s foreign assistance and suggested the easing off of the tensions in China’s diplomatic relations, which ran contrary to Mao’s views.) The second director, Liu Ningyi, and many other senior cadres were deposed during the Cultural Revolution. Shen Jian, who was a vice secretary-general and later vice director of the ILD and survived the purges, had been the key figure coordinating the different organs involved in the Chinese assistance programs. These organs included the Combat Department of the PLA General Staff, the Armaments Department of the General Logistics, and the MFA. Moreover, Shen was the designated person for Ieng Sary to liaise with in Beijing. Given the interactions, the ILD was soon regarded as “the logistics department for the Cambodian Communist Party.” In contrast, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs relegated to a secondary role. The ILD’s director Geng Biao and vice director Shen Jian had been frequently involved in the high-level delegations to Cambodia and the reception of the Khmer Rouge leaders to China in the 1970s.
Like all the other departments
subsidiary to the CCP Central Committee and ministries to the PRC State
Council, the ILD was normally supervised by one politburo-level leader,
called Zhuguan
Lingdao or Fenguang
Lingdao (leader in charge). The Zhuguan Lingdao served
as one loop of the power chain linking the department on the one end and Mao
Zedong and other top leaders at the other end. Since the Eighth Congress of the
CCP in 1956, the Zhuguan
Lingdao for the ILD had been Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.The CCP power structure was reconfigured by the Eleventh
Plenum of the Eighth Congress in August 1966. Both Liu and Deng were sidelined,
and Kang Sheng took over the supervision of the ILD. Kang, well-known as the CCP’s Dzerzhinsky-Beria, had been
Mao Zedong’s henchman since the Yan’an period. In Yan’an, Kang played an
important role in helping Mao build up his power, purge the dissidents, and
prevail over the intra–party rivals. In compliance with Mao’s radical policies during the
Cultural Revolution, Kang laid down the mission of the ILD: Zhizuo Fanxiu, or “to
support the leftists and combat the revisionists.” The standard of a leftist
party was “whether to embrace Mao Zedong’s thoughts, support the Cultural
Revolution, oppose the Soviet modern revisionism and insist on the path of
seizing power by armed force.” Otherwise, the party would be regarded by the Chinese
as revisionist alongside the Soviets. Needless to say, the Khmer Rouge perfectly met the
standards of what constituted an orthodox communist party.
The next person to
supervise the ILD in the ailing Kang Sheng’s stead was Zhang Chunqiao. Zhang had caught
the attention of Mao Zedong as early as 1958 for his article titled Pochu Zichanjieji de faquansixiang (“Eradicate
the ideas of the bourgeois rightists”) during the Great Leap Forward. He was
favored by Mao for his ability to theorize and was instrumental in staging the
Cultural Revolution as a member of Mao’s small cohort. He joined the Zhongyang wenge xiaozu (the
Cultural Revolution Group) in 1966, played a crucial role in Shanghai’s
“January Storm” in 1967, and entered the politburo in 1969. Until his arrest
with Madam Jiang Qing in 1976, he was an important supporter of the Cultural
Revolution. From December 22-26, 1975, Zhang and the director of the
ILD, Geng Biao, led the CCP delegation for an official visit to Cambodia.
Before his visit, he had published his famous article titled Lun Dui Zichanjiejide
Quanmianzhuanzheng (“On Exercising the comprehensive
dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie”), which warned the Chinese people of the
revisionist restoration and sought to justify the Cultural Revolution
theoretically. The focus of Zhang’s talk with the Khmer Rouge leaders was
to introduce the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of
the proletariat]
Within the ILD, it was Division II (renamed Bureau II in the late 1970s) which took specific charge of the Indochina affairs. Huang Qun, a senior cadre in the Division II, worked in this division from 1963 to 1987. He was promoted to first vice head in 1977 and head of the Bureau in 1980. Throughout the two dozen years of his service in the division, Huang was deeply involved in managing the relations between China and the Indochina countries. He met Pol Pot during the latter’s first visit to China in 1965. In 1974, he proposed to make a visit to the Cambodian territory controlled by the Khmer Rouge in order to obtain first-hand information from the Cambodian battlefield. On December 5, 1974, Zhou Enlai met Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy on their way back from Paris. Tho agreed to help escort the Chinese delegation into Cambodia.
Formed in January 1975, the first official delegation from China to the “liberated zones” in Cambodia—the territory controlled by the Khmer Rouge—was titled the Chinese Press Delegation. Its head was Xie Wenqing from Xinhua News Agency and the vice head was Huang Qun. The nine-member delegation included journalists from the People’s Daily and the Xinhua News Agency, one staff officer from the General Staff, and two photographers. They flew to Hanoi, then travelled through the Ho Chi Minh trail under North Vietnamese escort, and finally were picked up by Khmer Rouge cadres on the Laotian-Cambodian border. It is interesting to note that their Cambodian hosts denied the North Vietnamese escorts entry into Cambodia.
During their one-month stay in Cambodia from March 1 to April 3, they travelled across the country and were received by almost all the top Khmer Rouge leaders. The Khmer Rouge left the Chinese delegation with a generally positive impression, although some delegation members sensed that some of the Khmer Rouge’s actions in Cambodia were “ultra-leftist.” In the meeting with Pol Pot, they were curious about when the Khmer Rouge would put the China-printed notes into use. As Ieng Sary requested during his visit in April 1974, the Chinese had printed Cambodian notes and delivered them to the Khmer Rouge in November 1974. Pol Pot replied that the barter worked well in the “liberated zones” and also worked with trade with the outside world. Thus Phnom Penh’s use of the currency would be decided in the future and would depend on the economic situation.
The Khmer Rouge’s land policies were also more radical than the CCP’s. The CCP’s land policy was normally implemented in stages. First, the CCP officials reduce land rents and loan interests by winning over both the landlords and the peasants in order to build a united front against a major enemy. After seizing power, the CCP confiscated the lands from the landlords and redistributed them to the peasants. Finally all the lands were collectivized into the communes. However, the Khmer Rouge skipped the first two stages and moved to build the cooperatives in the “liberated zones.”
Besides discovering that the Cambodians held radical ideas about land redistribution policies, the Chinese also learned about their viciousness. The Khmer Rouge forces would execute captured officers immediately and disband the units of the common soldiers instead of allowing them to join the communist ranks. The head of the Chinese delegation, Xie Wenqing, expressed his disagreement with the Khmer Rouge’s brutality and shared with his hosts the Chinese way: the PLA in the civil war would offer good treatment to enemies who had laid down their weapons and use the captured soldiers to supplement its own force. The delegation also encountered some unpleasant episodes. One episode was that the delegation members were told not to interview any person without the arrangement of his or her superiors. They also noticed the cautiousness of the ethnic Chinese when they had contact with them.
A large portion of Pol Pot’s talk to the Chinese delegation was on the Cambodian-Vietnamese relationship. He commented how the Vietnamese attempted to dominate and invade Cambodia, and how they encroached upon and occupied the Cambodian territory with the Vietnamese settlers. Pol Pot clearly knew that his words of discrediting the Vietnamese would be communicated to the CCP leaders when the delegation returned to Beijing. Later the Chinese delegation’s visit was made into a film widely shown in China. Its title was Yingxiong De Renmin—Fangwen Jianpuzhai Jiefangqu (“Heroic People—a visit to the Cambodian liberated zones”). When Pol Pot visited China in June 1975, he was asked to review the film. Pol Pot stated that Sihanouk should not appear in the film because he was the king of a dynasty and the Cambodian people opposed him.
Huang Qun’s next visit occurred in the wake of the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of Phnom Penh. At this moment, the Khmer Rouge’s representative in Beijing, Ieng Sary, was in Hanoi, on his way back to Cambodia. He was instructed to return to Beijing immediately to request that China help to restore the sea and airspace lines, and ship emergency assistance to Cambodia. On April 24, 1975, Marshal Ye Jianying chaired a Central Military Commission (CMC) meeting to discuss the shipment of emergency assistance to Cambodia. On the same day, an advance group consisting of forty people from the General Staff, the ILD, the PLA Air Force, and Navy, departed from Guangzhou and arrived in Kampong Som on May 31. The officers from the PLA Air Force were deployed to help restore Cambodia’s airlines and officers from the PLA navy were dispatched to help clear the mines which were sent from China and laid by the Khmer Rouge to block the Mekong River.
The next mission of the advance group was to re-establish the Chinese embassy in Phnom Penh. Their ship Hongqi-153 (Red Flag-153), which carried more than 2,000 tons of food and medicine, finally arrived in Kampong Som on May 31. The Chinese advance group was headed by Deng Kunshan, who later became the military attaché of the Chinese embassy. Huang Qun, representing the ILD, was the vice head of the advance group. When the group members arrived in Phnom Penh in early May 1975 they discovered that the whole city was being evacuated. The Khmer Rouge told the Cambodian people that the evacuation was due to the imminent American bombing. But the real reasons, as Ieng Sary explained to the Chinese guests, were to transform the old city completely into a brand-new one and neutralize the scheme of enemy who let many military and political personnel masquerade as ordinary people; to root out Sihanouk’s social foundation and prevent any future opposition, just in case these forces gather around him and oppose the Khmer Rouge when he returns; to lessen the pressure of the supplies to the city. Ieng Sary then listed the three major tasks for the Khmer Rouge: suppression of the counter-revolutionaries, restoration of the railway from Kampong Som to Phnom Penh, and devotion to food production.
After returning to
Beijing, Huang Qun submitted a report to the Central Committee. The report
again gave a positive view of the evacuation of the Cambodian cities by the
Khmer Rouge. Huang in his memoirs recalled that Chairman Mao not only favored
these measures taken by the Khmer Rouge but also recommended to the other
communist parties. In other words, in
Mao’s mind the Khmer Rouge had become a “model” for the other communist parties
to follow.
Huang Qun joined more Chinese delegations to Cambodia from 1975 to 1978—led by Zhang Chunqiao and Geng Biao in December 1975, Chen Yonggui in December 1977, and Wang Dongxing in November 1978. Huang presents detailed records of Chen Yonggui’s visit in his memoirs. Chen was a household name in Cambodia which was popularized by a film introducing how he led the villagers heroically to struggle in building “Dazhai.” His visit to Cambodia was a return visit hosted by Pol Pot who visited Dazhai in October 1977. Chen was strongly impressed by what he saw in Cambodia. All the cadres appeared to be striving to work and nobody received special treatment. In his view, the Khmer Rouge was advancing “a true and profound revolution.” He also thought Cambodian communists produced outstanding achievements in the economic reconstruction of the country.
The examination of the
ILD’s work shows that the CCP cadres had generally held a positive view of the
Khmer Rouge’s policies. From the powerful politburo members Kang Sheng and
Zhang Chunqiao to the vice director Shen Jian, then to the low-level cadres
such as Huang Qun, all held a generally favorable view of the revolutionary
campaigns launched by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The available sources reveal
these cadres had raised no formal criticism of the Khmer Rouge policies from
1970 to 1978.
It is understandable
that Mao’s henchmen and staunch supporters like Kang Sheng or Zhang Chunqiao
would not discredit the radical policies pursued by the Khmer Rouge. But why
did the moderate figures like Geng Biao and Huang Qun maintain their silence or
conceal their reservations? Their behavior could be explained in the following manner.
First, Mao’s China had went through the Great Leap Forward and established the People’s Communes, and now was undergoing the Cultural Revolution, all of which were surely no less radical than the revolutions waged by the Khmer Rouge. Thus, those CCP cadres in the 1970s who survived the endless political campaigns since 1949—this reality at least demonstrates that they were not the “rightists,” and at most proves that they had embraced the “leftist” policies—were in no position to question the radical measures adopted by the Khmer Rouge. Huang Qun notably admitted that he was affected by the “leftist atmosphere” of the Cultural Revolution when he assessed the Cambodian revolution. The second reason was more personal. Because the CCP leadership, especially Mao, held a positive view of the Cambodian revolution, and because the Zhizuo Fanxiu guideline had been established, to criticize the Khmer Rouge was tantamount to questioning and denying the policies willed by Mao. Wang Jiaxiang, the ILD’s first director, had been punished and purged for holding moderate views. His fate had set an example of what awaited anyone else who championed moderation. On the contrary, the more radicalized, the safer. Thus the CCP cadres were cognizant of the political dangers of being a moderate and of questioning Mao’s polices. They consequently withheld their criticisms, if they had any, of the Khmer Rouge.
Therefore the
CCP’s changing view of the Khmer Rouge’s revolutions would require the party
itself to change from radical to moderate, which would only happen after Mao
died in October 1976. In this sense, the CCP cadres in the Mao era, whether
they were radicals or moderates, all had to act in accordance with Mao’s
policies in order to survive, similar to Hannah Arendt’s description of how the
“banality of evil” guided an average person to act. The available Chinese sources show that the criticism of
the Khmer Rouge policies from the CCP cadres came as early as January 7, 1979.
According to the recollection of Zuo Yi, the chief correspondent of the Xinhua
News Agency at Phnom Penh, he was instructed by Sun Hao, the PRC ambassador to
Cambodia, to draft a telegraph on January 7, 1979. On that day the Chinese
embassy had retreated to the town of Sisophon, Battambang Province, under the
Vietnamese offensive. The telegraph was sent to Beijing with ambassador Sun’s
approval. Its main points were:
The scope of the Khmer Rouge’s suppression was too broad after they seized national victory. They had lost the hearts and minds of the Cambodia people. They would stand no chance to win if they did not change over to new ways.
Sun Hao’s suggestion was critical, but it came too late. On the same day Phnom Penh fell into the hands of the Vietnamese and soon the remnants of the Khmer Rouge forces were driven into the jungles on the Cambodian-Thai border. On January 8, the Chinese embassy staff and thousands of experts all retreated to Aranyaprathet, a small Thai town on the border.
With Jiefang Sixiang (“liberate
one’s thoughts”) and Boluan
Fanzheng (“rectify past mistakes”) of the post-Mao era, the
ILD itself began to rectify and rethink the mistakes it had made in the past.
In October-November 1980, the CCP convened conferences to discuss the drafts
of Guanyu Jianguo yilai
ruogan lishiwenti de jueyi (“The Resolution on Certain Historical
Questions since the Founding of the PRC”). Over 4,000 middle and high-ranking
cadres, most of whom recently rehabilitated, participated in the discussions.
The most controversial issue was how to evaluate Mao’s mistakes. Zhu Liang, who was the head of the Bureau VIII of the ILD
and promoted to the director of the ILD in 1985, criticized Mao’s radical
policy of channeling China’s limited resources into foreign assistance. On the
CCP’s policy with the Khmer Rouge, Zhu said:
On the eve of the liberation of Phnom Penh, Ji Dengkui talked with Ieng Sary on March 15, 1975. Ji elaborated on Chairman Mao’s instructions on theoretical issues and said “now you will enter the cities and (we) hope that after entering the cities you will not learn what we did after entering the cities.” Zhang Chunqiao propagandized the same (to the Khmer Rouge leaders) in the same year when he visited Cambodia. Until 1977 our leaders still told the Khmer Rouge that it was “well-done” and “right” to drive the people of Phnom Penh to the countryside. Thus we have some responsibility in that the Khmer Rouge and other “leftist parties” practiced the ultra-leftist policies. They were also the victims of the “Cultural Revolution.”[
On October 9, 1980 the
ILD submitted a report titled Gongzuo
huibao Tigang (“Outline of the Working Report”) to the Central
Committee. The ILD finally admitted the mistakes in the CCP’s policies toward
the Khmer Rouge and other communist parties. The report also criticized
the Zhizuo Fanxiu guideline:
We (at that time)
detected the “leftist” policies by the Khmer Rouge to certain extent and had
some discussions about it. However, we had not investigated this issue
seriously and had not brought it to the attention of the Central Committee. We
even gave some improper applause to the Khmer Rouge. For the other communist parties, we
also gave support to the “leftist” tendencies (emphasis
added).
The Zhizuo Fanxiu laid
down by Kang Sheng, is in fact proclaiming us as “the center of the world
revolution” and taking a chauvinistic attitude towards to the foreign parties.
The most prominent point is to take whether the foreign party agreed or
disagreed with Maoism and the “Cultural Revolution” as the “watershed” and
“touchstone” between Marxism and revisionism. As long as the party followed us
closely, it would be regarded as “true Marxist–Leninist.”
As the department that
played a central role in managing the CCP–Khmer Rouge relationship, the ILD had
acted faithfully in accordance with the Zhizuo
Fanxiu guideline and Mao’s grand deployment. The analysis here
indicates that the CCP had not intended or attempted to moderate the Khmer
Rouge even though some cadres found the policies to be overly “radical.” All
had to toe the line. If they did not, they would likely be purged.
