The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  The Truman administration understood how hopeless the Nationalist cause was after Marshall returned from China in 1947, and how little it could do to preserve Chiang’s regime without introducing massive U.S. forces. But this was an unacceptable alternative: it seemed likely to do no more than create a stalemate that would involve the United States in a drawn-out war on the Asian mainland. The administration understood that the cost of such a conflict in blood and money would quickly test the limits of public support and create demands for atomic attacks that would not assure victory and would saddle the United States with a reputation for indiscriminate slaughter of Asian enemies.

  Besides, a Chinese Communist victory seemed more worrisome for its negative political repercussions in the United States than as a genuine threat to U.S. national security. To counter the predictable political attack on the administration for having “lost China,” Truman and Acheson agreed to publish a State Department white paper in August 1949 explaining Chiang’s self-inflicted defeat. This 1,079-page volume of annotated documents included a six-thousand-word letter of transmittal from Acheson to Truman, making the case for the administration’s reasonable handling of relations with China from 1944 to 1949.

  Although Acheson acknowledged that the volume was an incomplete history of U.S.-China relations, he described it as “a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country.” He reminded readers that the U.S. and Russia were allies during the war and that a determination to speed victory over Japan and save American lives had moved military planners to assure Soviet involvement in the Far Eastern fighting after victory in Europe with territorial concessions that unintentionally shielded China’s Communists from Nationalist attacks.

  Soviet control of Manchuria at the end of the fighting, however, could not explain Mao’s victory. Postwar developments in China were the consequence of conditions and actions beyond either Moscow’s or Washington’s power to control. The results of the civil war could be found in China itself: the Nationalist failure to solve China’s age-old problem of feeding its massive population and the transparent corruption of Chiang’s government, joined with Communist promises to transform the country into a modern society, sapped Nationalist appeal and made Mao’s party the popular alternative.

  The United States had three choices at the end of the Pacific fighting: abandon China to its fate; intervene in the Chinese civil war on the side of the Nationalists on a major scale; or assist the Nationalists at the same time we worked to arrange a compromise between the two sides. Neither of the first two alternatives was acceptable to the American public or made sense in terms of existing conditions in China. Truman considered Chiang’s government the “rottenest” in the world. It was run by “grafters and crooks,” and sending them aid was comparable to “pouring sand down a rat hole.” While mediating China’s differences seemed like the only viable option, it failed not because of American shortcomings but because of Nationalist-Communist unwillingness to reach a mutually agreeable settlement.

  In the final analysis, the collapse of the Nationalist regime was an entirely self-inflicted failure. “The unfortunate but inescapable fact,” Acheson concluded, “is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.”

  The backdrop to the preparation of the white paper was a debate in the administration about future relations with Mao’s regime. The Communists assumed that the greatest likelihood of future stability for their government required help from Moscow for reconstruction and support against Western threats of intervention to overturn the PRC. As late as the spring of 1949, however, Stalin had refused to invite Mao to Moscow or to promise future economic aid. He also discouraged him from crossing the Yangtze River and occupying all of China as a way to avert U.S. intervention. He urged Mao to be content with ruling northern China, while leaving the south to Chiang.

  Because Stalin was so unforthcoming, Mao did not rule out a relationship with the United States. But he made clear to U.S. envoys in China that any ties would depend on an end to American support of Chiang, promises of nonintervention in Chinese affairs, the abrogation of earlier unequal treaties, and trade on mutually agreeable terms.

  Buffeted by reluctance to see Communists in control of so large a country and convictions that shaping China’s future was beyond American power, the Truman administration was erratic in response. National security considerations dictated that Washington do what it could to prevent a Sino-Soviet alliance that would threaten wider Communist control in Asia. As a consequence, in the first half of 1949, Truman and Acheson did not rule out official relations with a Chinese Communist government.

  By June, however, as the Nationalist collapse became a matter of time, Truman backed away from any secret dealings with the Communists. When Ambassador John L. Stuart, a China-born missionary and president of Yenching University, proposed to visit Peking for the University’s graduation, Mao and Chou signaled their readiness to talk with him. But Truman instructed Stuart not to go to Peking nor suggest any U.S. intention to recognize Mao’s government. Acheson underscored the administration’s opposition to the new regime by declaring in his letter of transmittal that the Communists represented not independence for China but the establishment of imperial control by Moscow as part of its drive for worldwide dominance. Future American policy toward China would “be influenced by the degree to which the Chinese people come to recognize that the Communist regime serves not their interests but those of Soviet Russia and the manner in which, having become aware of the facts, they react to this foreign domination.”

  The depiction of China under Soviet control partly resulted from a Mao declaration on July 1 that China “must lean to one side…. Not only in China but throughout the world, one must lean either to imperialism or to socialism.” For Truman to have allowed his ambassador to travel to Peking would have been seen as appeasement of a Communist government that had no good intentions toward the United States. Private assurances from Mao that his speech was aimed at members of his party most determined to align China with Moscow could not combat the certain outburst of criticism from America’s ardent anti-Communists should it become known that Truman had opened secret talks with Mao.

  In fact, the 1949 white paper, like the reluctance to test a possible Sino-American relationship after Chiang was ousted and before a firm Sino-Soviet alliance was established, largely rested on domestic political considerations. But the publication of the State Department’s defense of U.S. China policy did more to intensify an attack on the administration for having “lost” China than to convince the mass of Americans that Truman had acted wisely. Former ambassador Patrick Hurley described the white paper as “a smooth alibi for the pro-Communists in the State Department who had engineered the overthrow of our ally, the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China.” Conservative Republican senators, seizing on the chance to pillory Truman’s White House, attacked the State Department volume as a “1,054-page whitewash of a wishful, do-nothing policy which has succeeded only in placing Asia in danger of Soviet conquest.”

  Having subscribed to the idea that a Peking Communist government was a smokescreen for Soviet control of China and all Asia, the Truman administration could not dispute the Republican conclusion about the dangers posed by Mao’s takeover. Moreover, with Chiang’s Nationalists on Taiwan still describing themselves as the government of all China, it was nearly impossible for Truman to raise the possibility of accepting Mao as the legitimate ruler of the mainland.

  American public opinion was also decidedly hostile to any friendly dealings with China’s Communists. Of the 36 percent of Americans who said they had heard of the U.S. gove
rnment’s report on China, 53 percent rejected the argument that the administration could not have done anything more to save the Nationalists. Of the three-quarters of the public who said they knew about the Chinese civil war, only 20 percent wanted the United States to extend recognition to the new Communist regime.

  Because Truman and Acheson believed that Mao would oust the Nationalists from Taiwan and definitively end Chiang’s claims to being the legitimate government of China, Acheson rejected State Department proposals for putting the island under UN control or occupying it with U.S. troops. The White House secretly accepted the likelihood that the island would fall to the Communists as a prelude to U.S. recognition of Mao’s government, which would follow wide acceptance of the regime by America’s European allies. “Mao is not a true [Soviet] satellite,” Acheson told the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the end of 1949, “in that he came to power by his own efforts and was not installed in office by the Soviet Army.” But fearful that an invasion of Taiwan might provoke the United States into an attack on his forces and willing to have the Nationalists as a threat that remained useful in unifying the mainland population, Mao did not move against Chiang.

  Mao, Stalin, and the Americans, driven by irrational fears, now acted in ways that added to international tensions, shed the blood of their fellow citizens, and led to wasteful defense costs.

  Mesmerized by his own rhetoric about American imperialism and convinced that the United States—not without reason—would make every effort to bring down his regime, Mao decided to court Soviet support. In December 1949 he traveled by train to Moscow, where he was subjected to humiliating treatment by Stalin, who did not meet him at the station and kept him at arm’s length for two months while their representatives negotiated a treaty of “friendship.” At a time when Mao’s new government faced huge tasks in launching the transformation of China’s half-billion population, he felt compelled to sit in Moscow—where, he complained, he had “nothing to do … but eat, sleep and shit”—until Stalin granted him some meager concessions.

  The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance of February 14, 1950, ceded to the Chinese control over the Manchurian Railway and Port Arthur, which the Yalta agreements had granted to the USSR, but not until 1952—time enough to see if Mao’s regime would maintain its hold on power. The Chinese would also regain control of Darien, the warm-water port on the Kwantung Peninsula Stalin had won the right to lease at Yalta. But the lease would not be terminated until after a Soviet-Japanese peace treaty in the indeterminate future. A provision of the treaty promising mutual support against Japanese aggression—hardly a likely prospect anytime soon—said nothing about a possible attack launched from Taiwan with American aid. Finally, the Soviets pledged $300 million in credit at 1 percent interest for a period of five years—a pathetically small loan that did not match the amounts provided to the East European satellites or come anywhere near meeting the needs of a China emerging from more than a decade of invasion and civil war.

  The Mao-Stalin encounter and the 1950 treaty signaled grudging ties between the two Communist giants. Stalin, who did not think the Chinese were true Marxist-Leninists but what he called radish Communists—red on the outside but white on the inside—feared the Chinese as a competitor for world leadership of communism. Mao, who distrusted Soviet support for a united, powerful China that could defend its territorial integrity and promote anti-imperial revolutions around the world, piled up resentments during his Moscow visit that would find full expression in the next twenty years.

  Stalin, who was busy purging Soviet leaders in Leningrad he believed were trying to replace him, could not bring himself to anything more than friendly gestures toward the Chinese. He saw them as competitors for current and future power, who were forcing him to give up some of his postwar Asian gains. The possibility of a genuine friendship that might bolster the long-term stability of Russian communism through economic exchange and defense against threats from the West never occurred to Stalin. Similarly, Mao could not see himself turning away from Moscow to court Washington, either because he believed his own rhetoric about international communism being incompatible with capitalist nations or because he assumed that ideologues in his party would rebel against any hint of a preference for a capitalist foe over Soviet comrades.

  Nor was flexible good sense at the forefront of American thinking about the Cold War—and especially about the threat the new Chinese Communist regime posed to U.S. national security interests. The greatest beneficiary in the United States of Mao’s victory was McCarthyism—the idea that communism in China had been made possible by members of the State Department, who either by design or naivete colluded with Moscow to bring down Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Because of these witting or unwitting “traitors,” the United States had “lost” China, was the constant refrain of administration critics. “Was there ever an odder flight of the imagination?” George Kennan wondered. How could one nation lose another it had never owned or governed?

  Such an attitude sprang from the arrogance of power, the feeling at the end of the war that the United States was the anointed nation, the country that God had brought into existence to save mankind from itself, as Woodrow Wilson had suggested when he described America’s role in World War I as making this the war to end all wars, making the world safe for democracy. China’s turn to Communism seemed to refute not only Henry Luce’s wartime prediction that this would be the American century but also the widely held American assumption that China would eventually be remade in America’s image. As Nebraska senator Kenneth Wherry said in 1940, “With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”

  In January 1950, three months after the PRC’s declaration of statehood and with Mao in Moscow negotiating the Sino-Soviet treaty, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to a prison term. When asked at a press conference about Hiss’s conviction, Acheson courageously, but foolishly, gave brooding anti-Communists like McCarthy a political opening when he declared, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”

  McCarthy, who was looking for a reelection campaign issue that could generate support in Wisconsin, seized upon a suggestion by Father Edmund A. Walsh, a Georgetown University priest, to focus on Communist subversion. In response to Acheson’s statement, McCarthy rose in the Senate to ask if the secretary was prepared to defend other unidentified Communists in the government as well. On February 9, in a speech before the Wheeling, West Virginia, Republican Women’s Club, McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 known Communist State Department employees Acheson was protecting.

  Although the number on the list would change repeatedly over the next several months—from 205 to 57, back up to 81, down to 10, and as high again as 121—McCarthy’s evasiveness did nothing to bring him down. On the contrary, the charges stuck, despite McCarthy’s changing numbers: memories of Nazi subversives in Norway—Quislings—and other European countries; Soviet puppet governments in Eastern Europe; the spying that had facilitated Soviet development of an A-bomb; and Russia’s alleged control of China’s new Communist government gave credibility to charges of American Communists working to give Moscow control of the United States. There were of course Soviet spies in Britain, Canada, and the United States, but the fears of their capacity to bring down Western governments were wildly out of proportion to the actual threat.

  Something more was at work here: cynical political aspirations to bring down the Democrats. But there was also genuine anger at those who had been responsible for governing the country for the last eighteen years. Why was America so threatened? After all, it had emerged from World War II with unparalleled power; now, suddenly, it found itself vulnerable in a world besieged by Communists who, by their own acknowledged purpose, intended to destroy capitalism everywhere.

  The Democrats were an easy target, and the aristocratic Acheson was a perfect whipping boy. Nebraska’s Republican senator Hugh Butler, a conservative self-made sev
enty-two-year-old businessman, expressed popular suspicions and antagonism toward the secretary of state when he said, “I look at that fellow. I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, ‘Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United States for years!’”

  McCarthy, exploiting Acheson’s identification with Hiss, another “elitist,” convicted of perjury and condemned as “disloyal” to the United States, echoed Butler’s complaints: “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.”

  In April 1950, in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Acheson replied to what he called “this filthy business.” He declared that the press, “by reason of your calling, are … unwilling participants” in this ugly assault on honorable men whose reputations were being smeared.

  Truman privately denounced McCarthy as “just a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” Truman believed that McCarthy’s accusations were another episode in a history of “hysterical stages” that temporarily seized hold of the country and then faded from view as earlier outbursts had. He saw them as part of the 1950 congressional campaign, which politically frustrated Republicans were desperate to win.

  But when McCarthy’s appeal seemed to grow in the first half of 1950, and he charged that Moscow’s “top espionage agent” in the United States had ties to the State Department, Truman saw himself dealing with a greater problem than he had anticipated. He wrote a cousin: “I am in the midst of the most terrible struggle any President ever had. A pathological liar from Wisconsin and a blockheaded undertaker from Nebraska [Kenneth Wherry, a licensed embalmer] are trying to ruin the bipartisan foreign policy. Stalin never had two better allies in this country.” Truman went after McCarthy in a press conference, saying that he was the Kremlin’s “greatest asset” in trying “to sabotage the foreign policy of the United States.” But the attack only added to McCarthy’s notoriety and credibility; by responding to McCarthy, Truman suggested to millions of Americans that the senator had struck a raw nerve and deserved a hearing.