Bellicose Peace: China’s Peace Signature Campaign and Discourses about “Peace” in the Early 1950s

Abstract

In the early 1950s, China engaged in several military actions, most notably in the Korean War. Nevertheless, the World Peace Council, an international organization sponsored by the Soviet Union, praised the country as a “fortress for the protection of world peace” in 1954. This hinged upon a very specific, bellicose understanding of “peacefulness,” which did not mean the rejection of war, but war against the “right” enemy. I discuss this understanding, its function within the international community, its embeddedness in international political thinking, and its promulgation among the Chinese population, using the example of a campaign in 1950 to collect signatures on a World Peace Council–authored appeal against the atomic bomb. Self-promotion as a peaceful nation in the bellicose sense served a variety of purposes for the young People’s Republic of China (PRC), most importantly the goal to instill bloc thinking in the PRC’s population and to gain prestige within the new international order of the Cold War.

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“…America watched in dismay as the People's Republic of China joined in with its own mass "peace signature campaign." 16 By the end of the year, nearly five hundred million people-a quarter of the world's population-had signed the appeal calling for "all men and women of good will throughout the world" to demand that atomic weapons be outlawed "as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples." 17 It was clear that the United States needed a new weapon in the international war of representation.…”