Mao's China and the Cold War / Edition 1

by Jian Chen

Overview

This comprehensive study of China's Cold War experience reveals the crucial role Beijing played in shaping the orientation of the global Cold War and the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The success of China's Communist revolution in 1949 set the stage, Chen says. The Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the Vietnam War—all of which involved China as a central actor—represented the only major "hot" conflicts during the Cold War period, making East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War, while creating conditions to prevent the two superpowers from engaging in a direct military showdown. Beijing's split with Moscow and rapprochement with Washington fundamentally transformed the international balance of power, argues Chen, eventually leading to the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the decline of international communism.

Based on sources that include recently declassified Chinese documents, the book offers pathbreaking insights into the course and outcome of the Cold War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849323
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	06/25/2001
Series:	New Cold War History
Edition description:	1
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

Chen Jian is C. K. Yen Professor of Chinese-American Relations at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and Zijiang Visiting Professor at East China Normal University.

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Introduction

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed sensational developments in the study of the international history of the Cold War — one of the century's most important events. With the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, for the first time scholars have been able to study the entire duration of the Cold War from the post-Cold War vantage point. In the meantime, new opportunities to access previously unavailable documents, especially from the Cold War's "other side," have allowed scholars to develop new theses and perspectives supported by multiarchival/multisource research. As a result, a "new" Cold War history — to borrow a term from historian John Lewis Gaddis — came into being.[1]

The study of China's Cold War history has made significant progress since the late 1980s. There was a time when China scholars in the West had to travel to Hong Kong or Taiwan, relying upon contemporary newspapers and Western intelligence information, to study Beijing's policies. Since the mid-1980s, the flowering of the "reform and opening" era in China has resulted in a more flexible political and academic environment compared with Mao's times, leading to a relaxation of the extremely rigid criteria for releasing party documents. Consequently, a large quantity of fresh and meaningful historical materials, including party documents, former leaders' works and memoirs, and oral histories, have been made available to Cold War historians. To be sure, with a Communist regime remaining in Beijing (no matter how quasi it actually is today), China still has a long way to go before "free academic inquiry" becomes a reality, but the contribution of China's documentary opening to the study of the Chinese Cold War experience cannot be underestimated.[2]

Since the early 1990s, I have traveled to China more than a dozen times to do research, conduct interviews, and attend scholarly conferences. This volume is the product of these trips. In writing this book, I have been directed by two primary purposes. The first is to make new inquiries about China's Cold War experience using the new documentation. Indeed, this is an everlasting process. If readers compare the five previously published chapters in this volume with their earlier versions, they will find that all have been substantially revised with the support of insights gained from documentation now available. While each chapter in this volume represents an independent case study, together they form a comprehensive narrative history about China and the Cold War.

My second purpose is to reinterpret a series of fundamental issues crucial to understanding the global Cold War in general and China's Cold War history in particular. My main objectives, concerning three interlocking themes, are to comprehend China's position in the Cold War; to (re)interpret the role ideology played during the period; and to assess Mao's revolution and to analyze Mao's China's patterns of external behavior. I outline these themes below and have tried to integrate them into the narrative of the chapters that follow.

China's Position in the Cold War
The Cold War was characterized by the tension between the two contending superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet the position of Mao's China in the Cold War, in many key respects, was not peripheral but central. The observation made by political scientists Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross certainly makes good sense: "During the Cold War, China was the only major country that stood at the intersection of the two superpower camps, a target of influence and enmity for both."[3]

China's leverage in the Cold War was primarily determined by its enormous size. With the largest population and occupying the third largest territory in the world, China was a factor that neither superpower could ignore. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Mao's China entered a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union, the United States immediately felt seriously threatened. Facing offensives by Communist states and revolutionary/radical nationalist forces in East Asia, Washington, with the creation and implementation of the NSC-68, responded with the most extensive peacetime mobilization of national resources in American history.[4] In its efforts to "roll back" the Soviet/Communist threat, the United States became involved in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, overextending itself in a global confrontation with the Soviet/Communist camp. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the situation reversed completely following China's split with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with the United States. As a result of having to confront the West and China simultaneously, the Soviet Union overextended its strength, which contributed significantly to the final collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

China's leverage in the Cold War, though, went far beyond changing the balance of power between the two superpowers. The emergence of Mao's China as a unique revolutionary country in the late 1940s (discussed more extensively below) also altered the orientation of the Cold War by shifting its actual focal point from Europe to East Asia. This shift, as it turned out, would make East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War, while, at the same time, would help the Cold War to remain "cold."

When the Chinese Communist revolution achieved nationwide victory in 1949, the global Cold War was at a crucial juncture. Two important events — the 1948-49 Berlin blockade and the Soviet Union's first successful test of an atomic bomb in August 1949 — combined to pose a serious challenge to the two superpowers. If either tried to gain a strategic upper hand against the other — and if a showdown were to occur in Europe, where the dividing line between the two contending camps already had been drawn in a definitive manner — the Cold War could have evolved into a global catastrophe, one that might have involved the use of nuclear weapons. Against this backdrop, Moscow's vision turned to East Asia.[5]

In June-August 1949, on the eve of the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution, the number two leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Liu Shaoqi, secretly visited Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. The two leaders concluded that a "revolutionary situation" now existed in East Asia. In an agreement on "division of labor" between the Chinese and Soviet Communists for waging the world revolution, they decided that while the Soviet Union would remain the center of international proletarian revolution, China's primary duty would be the promotion of the "Eastern revolution."[6]

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Abbreviations	xi
	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	The Chinese Civil War and the Rise of the Cold War in East Asia, 1945-1946	17
Chapter 2	The Myth of America's Lost Chance in China	38
Chapter 3	Mao's Continuous Revolution and the Rise and Demise of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949-1963	49
Chapter 4	China's Strategies to End the Korean War, 1950-1953	85
Chapter 5	China and the First Indochina War, 1950-1954	118
Chapter 6	Beijing and the Polish and Hungarian Crises of 1956	145
Chapter 7	Beijing and the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958	163
Chapter 8	China's Involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964-1969	205
Chapter 9	The Sino-American Rapprochement, 1969-1972	238
	Epilogue: The Legacies of China's Cold War Experience	277
	Notes	285
	Bibliographic Essay	373
	Index	387

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A major contribution to our understanding of Chinese Cold War history. Chen Jian's unrivaled control of the new and plentiful Chinese source materials is evident throughout, as an inspiration to other scholars in the field."—Odd Arne Westad, London School of Economics

Editorial Reviews

Chen's extensive documentation will boldly challenge the revisionist view of a more pragmatic Mao. ("Foreign Affairs")

We are fortunate to have this book because of the author's analysis and use of sources that are not generally available to non-Chinese. ("Library Journal")

A major contribution to our understanding of Chinese Cold War history. Chen Jian's unrivaled control of the new and plentiful Chinese source materials is evident throughout, as an inspiration to other scholars in the field. (Odd Arne Westad, London School of Economics)

From the Publisher

Chen's extensive documentation will boldly challenge the revisionist view of a more pragmatic Mao.

Foreign Affairs

A major contribution to our understanding of Chinese Cold War history. Chen Jian's unrivaled control of the new and plentiful Chinese source materials is evident throughout, as an inspiration to other scholars in the field.

Odd Arne Westad

The author, formerly a student in Shanghai and at Southern Illinois University, uses primary sources from Chinese archival materials to provide new information on and analysis of Chinese leader Mao Zedong's behavior during the Cold War. Chen takes further the current literature on Chinese security interests (see Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross's The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, LJ 7/97; for Mao's life, see Philip Short's Mao: A Life, LJ 11/15/99, and Ross Terrill's Mao Zedong: A Biography, Stanford Univ., 2000) and presents two important points: First, he argues that Mao made decisions primarily based on his ability to promote "continuous revolution" in China and bolster his own power. And, second, he asserts that Mao used the Chinese people's "victim mentality" (i.e., the feeling that foreign powers were poised to take unfair advantage of China's vulnerabilities) to rally public opinion. The author investigates several case studies, including the rise of the Cold War, America's "loss" of China, the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, the first and second Indochina War, the Polish-Hungarian crisis, and the Taiwan Strait crisis. We are fortunate to have this book because of the author's analysis and use of sources that are not generally available to non-Chinese. Highly recommended for all academic libraries and public libraries with international relations collections. Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Rockville, MD Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal