The Chinese communists, not surprisingly, felt betrayed by their presumed ideological compatriots. Plainly, Stalin’s calculation of Russia’s national interests superseded any sentimental attachment he had to the cause of fellow communist revolutionaries. The Soviet ruler, in fact, preferred a weak, divided China to a strong, unified China—no matter who was in charge. He wanted the Chinese communists to remain dependent on and subservient to Moscow, sensing risks in an intensely nationalistic movement that, were it to gain power, might seek to assert sovereignty over all Chinese territory, thereby jeopardizing the sphere of influence he craved. The reflexively risk-averse Soviet dictator also wanted to avoid provoking the United States. Stalin was content to loot Manchuria, which Soviet troops proceeded to do following their entry into north-east China in August 1945, and to solidify Moscow’s newly acquired commercial gains there and in other border areas. The needs of Mao, a man Stalin viewed as an obstreperous, hard-to-control upstart leading a group of ‘margarine’ communists, took a back seat to the needs of the Soviet fatherland.
Following the Japanese surrender, the political situation in China progressively deteriorated. Like Chiang, Mao considered a genuine peace between the communists and the Guomindang to be highly unlikely, and a civil war inevitable. In an inner-party directive of 11 August, he instructed Communist Party cadres and military leaders to ‘gather our forces in order to prepare for the civil war’. Throughout the autumn of 1945, communist and nationalist troops clashed in north-east China, with Chiang aggressively using US equipment and transport in an effort to dislodge communist forces.
US hopes for a unified, peaceful, pro-American China steadily faded. At the end of 1945, President Truman dispatched General George C. Marshall, the most respected and accomplished US military man of his generation, to China to mediate a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
Early in 1946, Marshall succeeded in arranging a temporary truce, but it soon unravelled. The American general’s attempts to fashion a compromise settlement between Chiang and Mao ultimately rested on the illusion that power could somehow be shared in a coalition government that would include communists and nationalists. Despite Marshall’s impartiality, those efforts foundered on the intractable differences between the two parties, neither of which trusted or was willing to share power with the other. By the end of 1946, Marshall determined, correctly, that this struggle could only be resolved through the force of arms, and that it was a contest Chiang could not possibly win. The Truman administration continued to provide aid to the Chiang regime—a total of $2.8 billion between the Japanese surrender and 1950—but more to protect its political flanks from assault by nationalist Chinese supporters in the Congress and the media, the so-called China lobby, than in the conviction that US support alone would enable the inept Guomindang forces to prevail. By the end of 1948, defeat turned into rout, with Chiang and his inner circle fleeing the mainland for the island of Taiwan. Mao’s dramatic declaration of the new People’s Republic of China from Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace, in October 1949, merely formalized an outcome that most informed observers had long before anticipated.
The communist victory in the Chinese civil war, although primarily the product of complex forces internal to China, carried unavoidable Cold War ramifications. A nationalist regime backed by the United States—in spite of the rocky, mistrust-laden relationship between Washington and Chiang—had been defeated by a communist movement backed by the Soviet Union—in spite of the rocky, mistrust-laden relationship between Moscow and Mao. Asian, European, and other interested bystanders instantly assessed the outcome of the Chinese civil war as a major defeat for the West and an epochal victory both for the Soviet Union and for world communism. So, too, did critics of Truman at home who blasted the president for losing China through ill-conceived, if not traitorous, actions. For their part, Truman administration planners viewed the communist triumph in China with some degree of equanimity, judging it a disappointing setback for the United States rather than an unmitigated strategic disaster. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his top State Department lieutenants, first of all, did not consider impoverished, war-ravaged China to be a critical ingredient in the overall balance of world power—at least not for the foreseeable future. Hence the stakes in China were not on a par with those in play in Europe and Japan—or even the Middle East. Second, they concluded that a communist China did not necessarily translate into a unified, Sino-Soviet, anti-American bloc. Senior US strategists believed that conflicting geopolitical ambitions worked against the development of strong bonds between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Finally, they were hopeful that Beijing’s desperate need for economic assistance might give the United States the opening it needed to drive a wedge between the two communist powers.
Some historians believe that the United States actually squandered a unique opportunity to develop friendly, or at least businesslike, relations with China at this important juncture. Certain elements within the Chinese communist government did desire a positive relationship with the United States so as to gain needed reconstruction aid and to avoid overdependence on the Kremlin. On the American side, Acheson thought that, once the ‘dust settled’, Washington could extend diplomatic recognition to Beijing and salvage what it could from the wreckage of the civil war. Recent Chinese evidence suggests, however, that such a ‘lost opportunity’ never really existed. Driven by a determination to remake China, a determination fuelled by his fury at the Western imperialists who had for so long defiled China, and needing an external foe to help mobilize popular support for his grand revolutionary ambitions at home, Mao gravitated naturally towards the Soviet camp. He thus rejected all suggestions from underlings that Beijing offer an olive branch to Washington. Instead, the Chinese leader travelled to Moscow in December 1949 and, despite the chilly reception he received from a still wary Stalin, managed to negotiate a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet treaty obligated each power to come to the aid of the other if attacked by a third party, serving as perhaps the most ominous symbol of a Cold War now firmly rooted on Asian soil.
The Cold War comes to Southeast Asia
Just as the Chinese civil war became inextricably entangled with the Cold War, so too did the independence struggles in post-war Southeast Asia. Indigenous nationalists and European colonial powers alike sought to gain international legitimacy and needed external backing by invoking the East–West contest, cloaking their respective causes in Cold War garb in order to coax diplomatic and material support from one or another of the superpowers. The ensuing ‘globalization’ of these local disputes established a pattern that was to become common throughout the entire Cold War era. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union at first identified vital interests in Southeast Asia or detected a meaningful connection between local power struggles in this distant corner of the globe and the far more significant diplomatic tussles in Europe. Yet the challenges posed by the two areas could not so easily be separated and, by the late 1940s, coincident with the Chinese communist triumph, Washington and Moscow increasingly looked at Southeast Asia as another important theatre of East–West conflict.
Prior to the Second World War, the Soviet Union had never devoted much attention to Southeast Asia. It was surprisingly slow, moreover, to recognize the geopolitical advantages it might reap from aligning itself with anti-Western, revolutionary insurgencies there, whether communist-led or not. Washington, like Moscow, paid scant attention to Southeast Asia in the immediate post-Second World War period. It moved quickly to divest itself of its own colonial possession in the area, presiding over the orderly transfer of sovereignty to an independent, pro-American government in the Philippines in July 1946. The Americans retained a visible presence in the Philippine islands, to be sure, demanding extensive base rights which helped secure for the US military a formidable naval and air capability that could be projected throughout the Pacific. Aside from those military bases, and a general desire here, as
elsewhere, for peace, stability, and a more open trading regime, US interests in Southeast Asia seemed minimal.
The Truman administration encouraged the British, French, and Dutch to follow its Philippine lead by gradually transferring the reins of civil authority to local, pro-Western elites while maintaining some degree of commercial, security, and political influence in former colonies. That formula struck American experts as best suited to the long-term peace and prosperity that US interests here, as elsewhere, required. The British, under the progressive Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, adopted the same basic formula, negotiating the peaceful devolution of power in most of their Asian possessions. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Burma and Ceylon in 1948. The French and the Dutch, on the other hand, were determined to regain control of Indo-China and the East Indies, each of which the Japanese had seized and occupied during the war. Their unwillingness to bow to what the Anglo-American powers rightly recognized as an irreversible historical force not only caused much needless bloodshed, but added a distinct Cold War coloration to the two most contentious decolonization struggles of the early post-war era.
The United States initially strove to maintain a public posture of impartiality and neutrality towards the French–Vietnamese and Dutch–Indonesian disputes. It took pains to avoid alienating either European colonialists or Asian nationalists, so far as possible, while retaining some influence with each. Yet the Truman administration, in practice, tilted towards its European allies from the outset; it considered France and the Netherlands too valuable to the emerging anti-Soviet coalition to risk antagonizing by waving an anti-colonial banner. Both Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno, the respective leaders of the Vietnamese and Indonesian nationalist movements, appealed for US support on the grounds of America’s wartime pledges favouring self-determination. Both were disappointed when their appeals fell on deaf ears, and were resentful of Washington’s indirect support for the imperial sovereigns they were seeking to topple (Box 3).
Box 3 Ho Chi Minh
The legendary Vietnamese nationalist leader was born in 1890 to a relatively privileged and educated Vietnamese family. Unwilling to work for the French colonial regime, he left his home in 1912, settling eventually within the Vietnamese exile community in Paris. Ho joined the French Communist Party in 1920, received ideological and organizational training in the Soviet Union, worked as an agent of the Communist International (Comintern) during the 1920s and 1930s, and founded the Indochina Communist Party in 1930. Returning to Vietnam in 1941, after an absence of nearly thirty years, Ho organized the Viet Minh as a nationalist alternative to French and Japanese rule. On 2 September 1945, in the wake of the Japanese surrender, he proclaimed an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
By 1948–9, a series of interconnected, extra-regional factors led US officials to become more worried about, and involved in, Southeast Asian affairs. The raging colonial conflicts in Indo-China and the East Indies, together with a communist-led insurgency in British Malaya, proved a significant drag on Western European recovery. The primary products of Southeast Asia had traditionally contributed to the economic vitality, and dollar-earning capacity, of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Unsettled conditions in Southeast Asia, however, not only precluded such a contribution but absorbed money, resources, and manpower required for the Marshall Plan and incipient Atlantic alliance—America’s top Cold War priorities. US experts were convinced that Japan’s recovery, too, was being hampered by the political instability and resulting economic stagnation in Southeast Asia. Japan needed overseas markets for its economic survival. Yet, with the consolidation of communist control in China, US policy-makers actively discouraged trade with the Chinese mainland, Japan’s largest pre-war market, for fear that close commercial links might draw Tokyo and Beijing together politically. Substitute markets in Southeast Asia appeared the most promising answer to Japan’s export dilemma; but the region’s political and economic turmoil first had to be quelled. The emergence of a communist regime in Asia’s most populous country constituted the other major external factor propelling a more activist US posture in Southeast Asia. US analysts feared China’s expansionist proclivities; the possibility that it might use its military power to gain control over parts of Southeast Asia posed one threat, the likelihood that it would provide support for revolutionary insurgencies another.
In response to those problems, the United States made a series of new commitments to Southeast Asia aimed at simultaneously spurring the political stabilization of the area and containing the Chinese threat. Most significantly, it abandoned its quasi-neutral approach to the Indo-China dispute in favour of a policy of open support for the French, officially recognizing, in February 1950, the French-installed puppet regime headed by former Emperor Bao Dai and promising direct military support. The Truman administration also stepped up its aid to British forces battling the communist insurrection in Malaya. Washington promised as well economic and technical aid to the governments of Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The latter achieved independence in December 1949, after a hard-fought struggle with the Dutch, partly because the United States abandoned its quasi-neutral status there as well, though in this case to pressure a European ally to recognize what appeared a moderate, and decidedly non-communist, nationalist movement.
Where the United States perceived dangers, its Cold War adversaries sensed opportunities. Strong fraternal bonds, and parallel interests, helped forge a common front between Mao, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh. The latter, a three-decade-long communist with extensive service in the Communist International, as well as a Vietnamese patriot of impeccable credentials, made a secret trip to Beijing, in January 1950, in an effort to gain diplomatic recognition and material support from China’s new rulers. The next month, he travelled to the Soviet Union and made a personal appeal for support to Stalin—and to Mao, who was himself in Moscow at the time hammering out what became the Sino-Soviet treaty of alliance. Ho’s efforts met with success. In early 1950, both Moscow and Beijing extended formal diplomatic recognition to Ho’s fledgling Democratic Republic of Vietnam; Mao shortly thereafter authorized the provision of military equipment and training to his Viet Minh fighters. The Chinese leader believed that by strengthening the Vietnamese communists he could help safeguard China’s southern border, diminish the threat posed by the United States and its allies, and lay claim to a central role in the anti-imperialist struggle in Asia. Mao created a Chinese Military Advisory Group which he dispatched to northern Vietnam to help organize Viet Minh resistance to the French and lend expertise to its overall military strategy. Mao’s interest in the Viet Minh cause, and his support for it, increased after the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in June 1950, just as US interest in and support for the French military effort intensified with the onset of the Korean conflict.
War comes to Korea
In the early morning hours of 25 June 1950, an attacking force of close to 100,000 North Koreans, armed with over 1,400 artillery pieces and accompanied by 126 tanks, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea. The unexpected invasion ushered in a new and much more dangerous phase of the Cold War, not just in Asia but globally. Certain that the attack could only have occurred with the backing of the Soviet Union and China—a correct assessment, as now-available evidence confirms—and convinced that it heralded a bolder and more aggressive worldwide offensive by the communist powers, the Truman administration responded vigorously. It immediately dispatched US naval and air forces to Korea in order to stem the North Korean advance and bolster South Korean defences. When that initial intervention proved insufficient, the administration dispatched US combat troops, which became part of an international force owing to the UN’s condemnation of the North Korean invasion. ‘The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt’, declared Truman in a 27 June address to the American people, ‘that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will use armed invasion and war
.’ He also revealed, in that same speech, that he was ordering the US Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait, increasing aid to the French in Indo-China, and speeding additional aid to the pro-American Philippine government which was battling the radical Huk insurgency. Behind those four interventions—in Korea, China, Indo-China, and the Philippines—lay the American perception that a unified threat of formidable proportions was being mounted against Western interests by a hostile and newly aggressive world communist movement under the leadership of the Soviet Union and its Chinese junior partner.
The impact of the Korean War on the Cold War is difficult to overstate. Not only did the Korean fighting lead to an intensification and geographical expansion of the Cold War, threaten a wider conflict between the United States and the communist powers, and foster increased East–West hostility, but it also spurred a huge increase in American defence spending and, more broadly, a militarization and globalization of American foreign policy. Beyond Asia, the conflict in Korea also hastened the strengthening of NATO, the arming of Germany, and the stationing of US troops on European soil. ‘It was the Korean War and not World War II that made the United States a world military-political power,’ diplomat Charles Bohlen has argued. Historian Warren I. Cohen calls it ‘a war that would alter the nature of the Soviet-American confrontation, change it from a systemic political competition into an ideologically driven, militarized contest that threatened the very survival of the globe’.
Yet, as Cohen also notes, ‘that a civil war in Korea would provide the critical turning point in the postwar Soviet-American relationship, and raise the possibility of world war, seems, in retrospect, nothing short of bizarre’. Certainly, in the aftermath of the Second World War, few places appeared less likely to emerge as a focal point of great power competition. Occupied and ruled by Japan as a colony ever since 1910, Korea factored into wartime councils merely as yet another minor and obscure territory whose future disposition fell on the Allies’ already overburdened shoulders. At the Potsdam Conference, the Americans and Soviets agreed to share occupation responsibilities there by temporarily dividing the country at the 38th parallel; they also agreed to work towards the establishment of an independent, unified Korea at the earliest practicable time. In December 1945, at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Moscow, the Soviets accepted a US proposal for the establishment of a joint Soviet–American commission to prepare for the election of a provisional Korean government as a first step toward full independence. But that plan soon fell victim to larger Cold War tensions that militated against any meaningful cooperation, or compromise, between Moscow and Washington. By 1948, the occupation divisions had instead hardened. In the north, a pro-Soviet regime under the leadership of the former anti-Japanese fighter Kim Il-sung took on all the trappings of an independent regime. So, too, did its counterpart in the south: a pro-American regime headed by the virulently anti-communist Syngman Rhee, a Korean nationalist of long standing. Each side regularly rattled sabres at the other; neither North nor South Koreans could accept a permanent division of their homeland.
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