China at War

by Hans van de Ven

  The armistice was finally signed on 27 July 1953, at the village of Panmunjom, following long-drawn-out negotiations in which the repatriation of prisoners of war was the most contentious issue. It brought to an end a conflict in which 2–3 million Korean citizens from both the North and the South lost their lives, with air power and the climate responsible for a large proportion of this terrible death toll. The USA dropped more bombs on Korea in three years than in the Pacific during the whole of the Second World War. Most of North Korea’s largest towns were at least partly destroyed, many dams – important for irrigation and hence for food production – were broken, railway lines and bridges were smashed, and napalm rains first drenched and then burned enemy troop formations as well as the villages and forests suspected of harbouring them.39 The South Korean armed forces suffered 163,000 dead (including 25,000 classed as missing presumed dead) and 429,000 wounded. The figures for US armed forces are 36,574 dead (of whom 7,926 were missing presumed dead) and 103,284 wounded.40 No reliable casualty figures exist for Chinese and North Korean combatants, but it is unlikely that they will have been any less than those for South Korea, that is, around half a million casualties each.41

  A Cold War Peace

  At the time of the Korean War, different futures for Asia remained in play. A new order based on Communist comradeship was one possibility. This inspired not just the Chinese and Korean Communists, but had large followings elsewhere, in French Indochina, for instance, but also in Japan. Japanese Pan-Asianism was dead, of course, but yearnings for Asian solidarity were not. When the Chinese Nationalists learned that the Americans might try to abolish the use of characters in Japan, they were greatly concerned until the Japanese premier Yoshida Shigeru told them that he would not allow this to happen and that Confucianism was the shared foundation for both Chinese and Japanese modernity.42 The Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had discussed with Chiang Kaishek the glories of Asian civilisations in Chongqing during the War of Resistance, now talked about a ‘Third Way’ based on common Asian values and independence from both Moscow and Washington. Britain promoted the British Commonwealth as the post-war successor to the British Empire, not just to sustain its pre-war global network of trade connections but also as an alternative to a US-dominated Cold War order.

  After the outbreak of the Korean War, the Truman administration decided that the goal of containing the Soviet Union could be best achieved by tying Japan as well as Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand to the USA through a series of defence treaties, trade agreements and economic aid accords. John Foster Dulles led the diplomatic negotiations that culminated in a series of treaties that achieved this aim, inventing shuttle diplomacy as he went about it. He was a Republican but, as Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration after 1952, he continued the policy of containing communism that his Democrat predecessor Dean Acheson had pioneered in Korea, doing so in south-east Asia. In the Truman administration he had served as a ‘special consultant’ to Acheson, when US policy was to contain communism rather than to fight back against it.43

  The US decided that peace needed to be restored between Japan and its former enemies, both to return sovereignty to Japan and so bring it into the new order as an independent nation and to lay the basis for collaboration among states in east and south-east Asia in the defence against the spread of communism. In early January 1951, Dulles formulated the principles for what would become the San Francisco Peace Treaty: the end of the state of war between Japan and its enemies; Japan’s renouncement of sovereignty over Korea, Taiwan and the small nearby island of Penghu; and the requirement that Japan should apply for UN membership. The peace treaty would also commit Japan to adhere to Article 2 of the UN Charter, that is, to use only peaceful means in resolving disputes with other countries. It was thought necessary to include this stipulation in the treaty because of the possibility that the Soviet Union might use its veto in the Security Council to block Japanese membership of the United Nations.

  Dulles’s diplomacy hit a roadblock when Britain and the USA fell out over which China should attend the peace conference: the People’s Republic of Mao Zedong or the Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek? Britain had recognised the People’s Republic, in part because it had substantial interests in the country, but also simply in recognition of the fact that the Communists were in control of China. As well, significant sympathy for the Communists existed in south and south-east Asian nations, whose support the British needed if the British Commonwealth was to be a success.

  The UK suggested as a solution the inclusion of an accession clause to the peace treaty and to hand to the Far East Commission the decision as to which China should be allowed to avail itself of this facility. That commission, of which the Soviet Union was a member, formally oversaw the Allied occupation of Japan. The proposal was unacceptable to the USA as it was likely that it would be outvoted on the commission. Another issue that divided the USA and the UK was that the UK argued that ‘a formula should be worked out about what should be done with Formosa [Taiwan] and the Pescadores [Penghu] rather than leaving the matter up in the air’.44 Dulles rejected that, arguing that ‘at present we were only providing that Japan should relinquish its claim to Formosa and that we were not attempting to indicate what the final settlement of the Formosa problem should be’.45 When it became clear that the USA and the UK were unable to arrive at a common position, they decided that neither Beijing nor Taipei would be invited to the peace conference. Given that China had been both their ally and one of Japan’s main enemies, this was awkward, but only on that basis could the two co-convenors of the San Francisco Peace Conference move forwards.

  Nehru wanted a peace conference involving only Asian countries. India declined an invitation to attend the San Francisco Peace Conference and protested at the United States’ ‘continued occupation of the Ryukyu (Okinawa) and Bonin islands, the failure to restore Formosa to China, and the provision that US troops stay as part of a US–Japan defensive agreement’.46 Krishna Menon, the head of the Indian delegation at the UN, declared that India would develop good will with Beijing by not attending the conference and that then ‘the whole of South Asia and the Far East would acclaim India’.47

  Other important issues proved controversial, including whether Japan should pay war reparations, but the peace conference went ahead anyway and a treaty was signed on 8 December 1951, on the tenth anniversary of Japan’s Nanshin operation, its attack on south-east Asia and Pearl Harbor. Its provisions were in line with the American design for the treaty. Japan abandoned any claims to Taiwan and Penghu as well as to the Kurile and southern Sakhalin islands. No war reparations were imposed on it but Japan also committed to the use of peaceful means in settling international disputes.48

  The Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Andrei Gromyko, attended the conference, not to sign the treaty but to denounce it. He called Dulles a warmonger, accused the USA of turning Japan into a military base and argued that the treaty was an injustice against China.49 In Beijing on 15 August – yet again a date chosen for its historical resonance (the surrender of Japan) – Premier Zhou Enlai echoed Gromyko’s criticism, adding that the failure of the treaty to restore Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan amounted to the US occupation of China’s ‘sovereign territory’.50

  Even though the San Francisco Peace Treaty restored independence to Japan, Japan was less than thrilled. The treaty bound Japan to sign a treaty with any of its former enemies who wished to do so, an oblique but clear reference to China.51 At San Francisco, Yoshida Shigeru told Dean Rusk, the US Under Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, that ‘he had been trying to think of some “contribution” Japan might make to the common cause of bringing peace and stability to East Asia … as a repayment for the enormous generosity and forbearance the Americans had shown during the occupation’.52 Rusk concluded that Premier Yoshida was preparing him for a Japanese decision not to sign with Taipei but with Beijing. Yoshida faced pressure from pro-C
ommunist parliamentarians in the Diet as well as from business interests to develop good relations with Beijing.53 As The New York Times explained, ‘many merchants and politicians [in Japan] look to Red China as an eventual and inevitable market for Japan’s resurgent industry’.54

  Dulles made sure that Japan opted for the Nationalists. Five days after the US occupation of Japan ended and the country became an independent nation again, Dulles handed Premier Yoshida a memorandum stating: ‘the US Senate, Congress, and American people generally will insistently want to know whether Japanese Government intends to pursue foreign policies in Asia generally compatible with those of the United States.’55 The memorandum went on to say that the Nationalist government ‘is recognized as the lawful government of China by the United States; … it has a seat, voice, and vote in the UN, including the Security Council … It is suggested that Japanese interests might best be served if the Japanese Government were to negotiate with the National Government.’56 After the USA promised to guarantee Japan’s security and access to new markets including in south-east Asia, Yoshida bowed to US pressure,57 and ordered a negotiator to Taipei. The Asia Bureau of Japan’s Foreign Office issued a public statement stating that ‘Japan has no relation whatsoever with the Peiping [Beijing] regime, and it is inconceivable that she will sign any treaty with that government.’58 This was clear as a bell.

  The negotiations in Taipei were short but fractious. Japan aimed not at a full-blown peace treaty but one that treated the Nationalists as a local government in control of a piece of territory with which Japan arranged a number of practical issues such as trade, postal communications, air transport, the citizenship of Taiwan’s residents and the delineation of fishing grounds. Japan, then, implicitly tried to treat the Nationalist government as they had attempted to do during the War of Resistance, as a minor local administration, no doubt to their astonishment and anger. The Nationalists, in their turn, hoped to secure Japan’s recognition that they were the sovereign government of all of China, including the mainland.

  The issue came to a head in discussions about the geographical area to which the treaty should apply. After long debate, Japan’s plenipotentiary negotiator, Isao Kawada, and the Nationalists’ Foreign Minister, Yeh Kung-ch’ao, settled on the following wording: ‘the present treaty … shall, in respect of the Republic of China, be applicable to all territories which are now, or which may hereafter be, under the control of its government.’ While the English text of the treaty was authoritative, Yeh and Isao agreed that the Chinese translation would use the word lingtu, which connotes ‘sovereign territory’ and that the Japanese translation would speak of ryoiki, a vaguer term. The head of the Asia Desk of Japan’s Foreign Minister explained to the Diet that ‘in common international practice some cases are found where the term “territory” is not so strictly interpreted as to mean “state territory”’.59 The wording allowed Japan to argue that the treaty applied only to areas actually under the control of the Nationalists and that it did not necessarily even regard these as sovereign territory of the Nationalists. In 1978, the Japanese also signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the People’s Republic of China.

  In contrast to his diplomats and lawyers, Chiang Kaishek did not believe the issue to be all that important. His greatest concern was that the treaty recognised the Nationalists as one of the victors of the Second World War, as it indeed did by being termed a peace treaty. On 27 April, the day before the treaty was signed, Chiang wrote in his diary: ‘we are able to sign a Treaty of Peace with Japan as one of the victors. Doubtless this is a major blow to the bogus Communist organization, although of course this cannot erase my responsibility for the defeat of the revolution.’60 ‘Bogus Communist organization’ was Chiang’s choice of words for the People’s Republic of China. He had lost the Civil War and was a much-diminished figure, of course, but recognition as one of the victorious allies of the Second World War brought enormous advantages. This way he kept hold of the diplomatic gains he had secured during the War of Resistance, including a seat for Taiwan on the UN Security Council. Last but not least, the peace treaty denied Mao Zedong the total victory he had been after. The Nationalists were safe in Taiwan. They lived to fight another day, or so they hoped.

  Naturally, America’s drive to shore up its Cold War front line in the western Pacific triggered a reaction in Beijing. A China Peace Committee was established, of which Guo Moruo, the author of ‘1644’, was chair. He and Sun Yatsen’s widow, Song Qingling, issued invitations for an Asian and Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing to discuss ‘the validity of the Japanese Peace Treaty’, the ‘revival of Japanese militarism’ and ‘the menace of atomic, chemical, and bacteriological warfare’, which Beijing was accusing the USA of waging at the time.61 The conference went ahead in October 1952 and was attended by representatives from thirty-seven countries, mostly from non-governmental organizations. When the conference opened, the People’s Daily accused the USA of conducting biochemical and bacterial warfare, suppressing independence movements and stalling on truce talks in Korea, while China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs called on the American people to campaign for the removal of the trade embargo imposed on China in 1949.62 The conference had a long-term impact by promoting the idea of peaceful coexistence which, for instance, shaped the non-aligned movement, that group of states that wished to keep both Moscow and Washington at a distance. It also gained Beijing sympathisers the world over. But it did not succeed in changing the basic outlines of the new US-dominated Cold War order that had now come about in east Asia; the hard truth was that the People’s Republic of China lacked the military power to achieve that aim.

  The Cold War peace was a strange sort of peace, a jerry-rigged armed peace, if it can be called a peace at all. The 38th parallel remains a potent symbol of the dislocations that came with the new order: divisions within and between states; fears about ideological others triggering panics, purges and suppression; and families split apart for decades. This was a peace shorn of any grand principles about equality among nations, rights to self-determination, democracy and human rights. It did not give hope, nor did it foster reconciliations, but instead it fuelled fears of nuclear war and Armageddon.

  For south-east Asia, the consequences of the new order were abysmal. When the US Cold War strategy turned aggressive, Vietnam paid a heavy price, as first French and then US forces brought their mechanical superiority to bear on a national liberation war whose architects and leaders learned from and were helped by their Chinese neighbours. In 1954, at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, artillery was important, as it had been during the Liaoshen Campaign. The North Vietnamese strategy of spreading the war out over vast areas and surrounding cities from the countryside followed that of the Communists in China. In Vietnam napalm rained down on forests and villages with devastating consequences which were captured in photographs and newsreels, whose distribution undermined support for the war in the USA. Other areas in southeast Asia were affected, including Malaysia, where a Communist insurgency lasted from 1948 until 1960. Not the least significant victims of the new Cold War order were the cross-Asian trade networks, flows of people and solidarities that had long linked east and south-east Asia. It is only in the last decade or two that they have begun to re-emerge.

  The USA, and other Western countries, were impacted by the new order, and not only because of the blood and money they spilled in fighting national liberation wars in south-east Asia and elsewhere. The McCarthyite paranoia about Communist infiltration of the US government was a symbol of the kind of nightmares that kept Americans in their grip and which shaped the USA’s international policies and interventions, not just until détente began in 1969, but well after; until the fires that had been set alight during the Second World War began to die down; the fears of a Third World War fought with nuclear arms began to lose their grip; and the habit of seeing the world as engaged in a fight to the end between two radically different alternatives – capitalism and communism – began to lose their p
ersuasiveness.

  But east Asia did reap real benefits from the new order, not least because, after the signing of the two treaties, the armies in the region have stayed largely in their barracks, despite occasional border wars. These include: China’s 1955 testing of the USA’s resolve when it attacked Nationalist-controlled offshore islands, a test which the USA met with ease; China’s clash with India in 1962; and its invasion of Vietnam in 1978. The internal violence in China took much longer to die down. In the early 1950s, the Campaign to Suppress Counter Revolutionaries and the implementation of land revolution in areas where it had not yet taken place were important in consolidating Communist control; estimates of death tolls range from a low (and officially acknowledged) 800,000 to 2 or even 5 million.63 The Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s were still to come. Violent class struggle – effectively, another form of civil war – ended only when Deng Xiaoping outlawed it in 1978. Even so, the new order made an economic miracle possible first in Japan, then in South Korea and Taiwan, and finally, after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, in China, whose economic miracle transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The case for peace has rarely been better made.