they hoped to find constructive ways for the United States to deal with the
new Chinese Communist regime. There was strong debate in the administra-
48
Chapter 3
tion as to whether the United States should allow Taiwan, the island off the
Chinese coast where Chiang and his Nationalist forces retreated after their
defeat on the mainland in 1949, to fall to the Communists. The policy de-
cided upon was one of no intervention to protect Taiwan. 32
Secretary of State Dean Acheson was known for his efforts to end US
support for Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT regime. He sought publication of
the famed “China White Paper.” This lengthy (more than a thousand pages)
document was issued by the US State Department in August 1949. It was
critical of Chiang Kai-shek and his government for corruption and other
failings as they lost the Chinese Civil War against the Chinese Communist
forces. The report served to support the Truman administration’s efforts to
cut support for Chiang’s Nationalists. It also deflected attention from US
policy oversights and mistakes. The report was attacked by Chiang’s Nation-
alists, Mao’s Communists, and many US supporters of Chiang Kai-shek. 33
Also during the last months of the Chinese Civil War on the Chinese
mainland, Acheson instructed the US ambassador to Nanking, Leighton Stu-
art, to seek contacts with the Communist forces advancing on the Nationalist
capital. Stuart stayed in the city after Nationalist forces retreated. He made
contact with Huang Hua, a former student of his who was sent by the Com-
munist leaders to investigate US intentions. Stuart was invited to meet Com-
munist leaders setting up their new capital in Beijing, but President Truman
was unwilling to support a plan to have the ambassador travel to Beijing for
talks with the Communist rulers. 34
The Chinese Communists, meanwhile, reinforced their victory in the civil
war with the announcement that they would side with the Soviet Union in the
emerging Cold War struggle with the United States and its non-Communist
allies. Amid these grim developments for US interests in China, the adminis-
tration endeavored to adopt a lower profile regarding China. US leaders
anticipated Communist victory over Chiang’s forces holding out in Taiwan
and a subsequent long process of the United States working to build some
semblance of workable ties with the new regime in China. The US military
position in the region was weak as a result of the rapid US demobilization
and withdrawal of forces following World War II. While the United States
had shown strong military and political resolve following Pearl Harbor in
defeating Japanese aggression and that of the Axis coalition, US leaders were
only gradually coming to the realization of a need for continued strong mili-
tary preparations and presence in Asia in order to deter new sources of
expansion and aggression. 35
Relations during World War II, Civil War, Cold War
49
CONFLICT AND CONTAINMENT
Chinese Interests, Actions, and Perceptions
Mao Zedong and his CCP-led fighters faced large challenges as they endeav-
ored to consolidate their rule after defeating Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist
forces in the Chinese Civil War and establishing the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) on the Chinese mainland in 1949. China had been war-ravaged
for decades and arguably had been without effective governance for more
than a century. The Communists were a rural-based movement with decades
of experience in guerrilla war. They also had decades of experience support-
ing administrative efforts in the Chinese countryside, but little experience in managing the complicated affairs of China’s cities, its urban economy, or its
national administration. Seeking needed technical and economic backing as
well as guarantees and support for China’s national security, the Maoist
leadership endeavored to consolidate relations with the Soviet Union in an
international environment heavily influenced by the United States, the main
international supporter of its Chinese Nationalist adversary, and American-
associated states influential in Asian and world politics. 36
Taken together, these circumstances and determinants led to a strong
current in analyses of Chinese relations with the United States that empha-
sized Chinese imperatives of consolidation and development domestically
and reactions internationally to perceived threats and occasional opportu-
nities posed by circumstances involving the United States. In particular, as
the Cold War spread from Europe and came to dominate international dy-
namics in Asia for several decades beginning in the late 1940s, Chinese
relations with the United States were seen as dominated in the 1950s and
1960s by Chinese efforts to deal with what emerged as a massive US-led
military, economic, and political containment of China. Chinese interactions
with the United States in this period often were assessed in terms of Chinese
reactions to perceived threats posed by the strength and actions of the United
States and associated powers. 37
Heading the list of strengths that the Maoist leaders brought to bear as
they began national leadership in China were the CCP’s broad experience in
political organization and related social and economic mobilization, and a
strong revolutionary ideology. Mao Zedong and supporting leaders were
committed to seeking revolutionary changes in China and in international
affairs affecting China, and they had the determination and ability to move
Chinese people along these paths. This set of determinants and circumstances
led to another strong current in analyses of Chinese relations with the United
States, one that emphasized the importance of the Chinese leadership’s deter-
mination to challenge and confront the United States and its allies and asso-
ciates in Asia as the Chinese Communist leadership sought to promote revo-
50
Chapter 3
lutionary change in Asian and world affairs. The analyses also showed a
related tendency of the Chinese leadership to exploit episodes of confronta-
tion with America as means to mobilize greater support within China for the
often revolutionary changes sought there by the Maoist leadership. 38
Assessments of the record of the Maoist period show a complicated mix
of imperatives both revolutionary and more conventional—of security and
nation building—that drove Chinese decision making. Adding to the mix was
the emergence of the dominant role of Mao Zedong and his strong-man rule,
which came to determine Chinese decision making with particular regard to
Chinese foreign relations—notably, relations with the United States and the
Soviet Union. One consequence was the ability and the actual tendency of
China to shift direction dramatically in foreign affairs. China’s strong align-
ment with the Soviet Union in 1950 and break with Moscow ten years later
exemplified the kinds of major shifts in China’s foreign policy on issues
important to the United States during this period. 39
For their part, Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nati
onalists appeared at
the end of their struggle when they retreated to Taiwan after defeat on the
Chinese mainland in 1949. Given the Truman administration’s decisions to
cut ties with the Nationalists and await opportunities to build relations with
the triumphant Chinese Communists, it appeared to be only a matter of time
before Communist forces would overwhelm the Nationalists on Taiwan.
Those Nationalist leaders and officials who were less than fully committed to
Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist cause and had options other than joining
Chiang on Taiwan tended to follow those alternative paths and settled in
Hong Kong, the United States, or other safer locations. The two million
Chinese who fled the mainland to Taiwan included leaders and officials who
were loyal to Chiang and strongly anti-Communist, and large numbers of
officials, soldiers, and dependents who had few other options. 40
The outbreak of the Korean War and the subsequent US policy of con-
tainment against expansion of Chinese Communist power and influence dra-
matically reversed the fortunes of Chiang and his associates on Taiwan. They
sought to use the new circumstances to strengthen support from the United
States and to consolidate their power in Taiwan. On this basis, they endeav-
ored to go beyond US efforts to contain Communist China by striving to lead
efforts to roll back Communist rule on the mainland. 41
US Interests, Actions, and Perceptions
At the start of the Cold War, Asia seemed secondary in US strategy. The
United States demobilized rapidly after World War II. US forces occupied
Japan and US naval and air forces patrolled the western Pacific, but overall,
US military capabilities appeared unprepared for significant action in Asia.
When the Korean War broke out unexpectedly, the United States abruptly
Relations during World War II, Civil War, Cold War
51
reversed practice and began what became massive commitments of military
power and related assistance to stop the spread of perceived communist
expansion in Asia. Long-standing US interest in sustaining a balance of
power in East Asia favorable to the United States, as well as ongoing US
interests in fostering free economic access to the region and the spread of
American values there, now were seen to require the United States to under-
take the leading role in bearing the major costs, risks, and commitments
associated with a system of containment that came to dominate US policy in
Asia in the 1950s and the 1960s and to determine the course of American
policy toward China during this period. 42
Dominating the US foreign policy calculus toward China and other East
Asian countries were strategic concerns with shoring up the regional balance
of influence against Communist expansion in Asia. Strong efforts by the US
government to mobilize domestic American support for the costs and risks
associated with US leadership of the containment effort overshadowed pri-
vate calculations of American leaders and strategists. The latter appeared to
favor a more nuanced and flexible American approach that would have al-
lowed for possible efforts to seek contacts and accommodation with Commu-
nist-ruled China. Eventually, US elites and supporting groups began to chafe
publicly in the 1960s at what they saw as a counterproductive US tendency to
try isolating China as part of the Cold War containment strategy in Asia.
Their efforts to encourage greater US flexibility in dealing with the Chinese
Communists failed in the face of strident Chinese opposition to the United
States, a wide range of other adverse foreign influences at the start of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, and the concurrent large increases in US combat forces fighting Chinese-backed Communist forces in Vietnam. 43
Encounters and Interaction in the 1950s and 1960s
Neither the government of Mao Zedong nor the Truman administration
sought or foresaw US-China war in early 1950. The Americans were sur-
prised when North Korean forces, with the support of Soviet and Chinese
leaders, launched an all-out military attack against South Korean forces in
June 1950. The Chinese Communist leaders and their Korean and Soviet
Communist allies apparently calculated that the better-armed North Koreans
would attain victory quickly without provoking major or effective US mili-
tary response. Thus, it was their turn to be surprised when the United States
quickly intervened militarily in the Korean War and sent the Seventh Fleet to
prevent Chinese Communist attack on Taiwan. US forces and their South
Korean allies halted the North Korean advance and carried out an amphibi-
ous landing at Inchon in September 1950 that effectively cut off North Kore-
an armies in the South, leading to their destruction. 44
52
Chapter 3
The string of miscalculations continued. With UN support, US and South
Korean forces proceeded into North Korea. The Chinese Communists
warned and prepared to resist them, but US leaders thought the warnings
were a bluff. By November hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communist
forces were driving the US and South Korean forces south in full retreat.
Eventually, the Americans and their allies were able to sustain a line of
combat roughly in the middle of the peninsula as the two armies faced off for
more than two more years of combat, casualties, and destruction. 45
Chinese Communist leaders also launched domestic mass campaigns to
root out pro-American influence and seize control of US cultural, religious,
and business organizations that remained in China. The United States began
wide-ranging strategic efforts to contain the expansion of Chinese power and
Chinese-backed Communist expansion in Asia. A strict US economic and
political embargo against China; large US force deployments, eventually
numbering between five hundred thousand and one million troops; massive
foreign aid allocations to US Asian allies and supporters; and a ring of US
defense alliances around China were used to block Chinese expansion and to
drive a wedge between China and its Soviet ally. Meanwhile, led by often
irresponsible congressional advocates, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy,
congressional investigators in the early 1950s took aim at US specialists on
China and Asia, discrediting those with moderate and pragmatic views about
the Chinese Communists and endeavoring to silence those in or out of
government who were less than uniform in opposing the Chinese Commu-
nists and supporting Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. 46
The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration used threats and negotiations
in reaching an armistice agreement that stopped the fighting in Korea in
1953. American efforts to strengthen military alliances and deployments to
contain Chinese Communist–backed expansion continued unabated. They
faced off against enhanced Chinese efforts in the wake of the Korean armi-
stice to strengthen support for Communist insurgents working against
American-backed forces in French Indochina and direct Chinese military
probes and challenges against the United States and their Chinese Nationalist
allies in t
he Taiwan Strait. 47
Mao Zedong and his CCP-led government continued their consolidation
of control inside China, notably through mass campaigns led by Communist
activists targeting landlords, the leading urban political and economic elites, and others deemed abusive or uncooperative with Communist goals. They
prepared for major nation-building efforts with the support of their Soviet
and Warsaw Pact allies to establish a governing structure, often along the
lines of that of the Soviet Union, to rule Chinese civil administration, eco-
nomic planning, military modernization, intelligence collection, and other
endeavors. They sought means to tap into the surplus wealth being created in
China’s rural sector for investment in their planned expansion of China’s
Relations during World War II, Civil War, Cold War
53
industrial economy. After a brief period where peasants held land as a result
of the mass campaign for land reform in rural China in the early 1950s,
Chinese leaders saw the need to emulate the Soviet model and began to
collectivize the land under government administration so as to better control
the surplus rural wealth and to maximize its utility to the state’s interests in promoting industrial development. The Soviet Union was providing more
than a hundred major projects in assistance to Chinese industrialization and
modernization, but they had to be paid for it. Collectivization of the land and concurrently greater state control of the urban economy along Soviet lines
were chosen as the appropriate ways to deal with conditions in China while
seeking economic modernization and development of the sinews of national
and state power. 48
These dramatic and massive shifts in domestic policy and direction oc-
curred frequently in conjunction with crises and confrontations with the Unit-
ed States and its allies and associates around China’s periphery in Asia. At
one level, the Chinese determination to work against and confront the US-
backed forces in Indochina and the Taiwan Strait reflected a deeply held
determination to confound and wear down the American-fostered contain-
ment system. The Chinese Communist leadership held a strong revolutionary
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