Joining the Socialist Camp } 47
Businesses, missionary schools, and hospitals found themselves sub-
ject to exorbitant taxes and fees. Workers became militant and raised costly
demands. Lock-ins by militant workers would detain foreign owners or man-
agers in their offices for long periods of time. It became virtually impossible
to fire workers, even with generous severance pay. More and more economic
activities were brought under government control. When taxes, wages, or
fees were not paid on time, heavy fines were imposed. Appeals and explana-
tions addressed to higher Chinese authorities were to no avail. CCP media
fanned anti-foreign sentiment. When incidents involving foreigners occurred
(many involving loss of tempers by foreigners), the media played them up as
major examples of imperialist arrogance, and heavy fines, and sometimes jail
sentences, were imposed. Foreign businessmen gradually realized that they
could no longer operate profitably or even safely in China. By fall 1949, US
firms were trying to get their personnel out of China as quickly and com-
pletely as they could. British firms tried to “hand on and hold out” with dip-
lomatic support from their government, but they too soon followed US firms
out China’s closing door. Many firms found themselves to be “commercial
hostages,” with home headquarters sending money to offices in China to
pay financial demands in hopes that their non-Chinese expatriate personnel
might then be allowed to leave China.
In dealing with Protestant religious schools and hospitals, the CCP worked
with “progressive” Chinese clergy and staff to exclude foreign personnel from
any administrative or supervisory roles. Western personnel performing im-
portant functions (faculty teaching science, math, or foreign languages and
medical doctors) were allowed to stay until their contracts expired. They were
then replaced by Chinese personnel. “Patriotic” Chinese Protestants were
then constituted as a Patriotic Chinese Protestant Church under strict state
and party control. It was more difficult for the CCP to find Chinese Catholics
willing to cooperate in breaking with foreign authorities, in this case the
pope. But eventually this effort, too, succeeded. The last noncompliant
Catholics, foreign and Chinese, were imprisoned as counterrevolutionaries
or as spies during the Korean War. By 1950, the once vast Western presence in
China, formed over a century, was rapidly being eliminated. By the end of the
Korean War, it was gone. Deep links between China and the West would not
be rebuilt for nearly forty years.
Planting the New: Transplanting the Soviet Economic Model
Within a year of the establishment of the PRC, Mao Zedong concluded that
the party’s earlier commitment to a ten- to fifteen-year period of capitalist
development by the “national bourgeoisie” and family farming should be
replaced by a drive toward socialism like that engineered by Stalin in the