commitment to change the international order dominated by the United
States and its allies and to support Communist-led forces struggling against
this foreign imperialism. 49
The US effort also directly threatened China’s national security and sov-
ereignty, often in graphic and severe ways. The Eisenhower administration
threatened China with nuclear attack in order to push it toward an armistice
in Korea, and the US government used the threat of nuclear attack at other
times in the face of perceived Chinese provocations in the 1950s. Mao Ze-
dong’s China had no viable defense against US nuclear weapons and put top
priority on developing Chinese nuclear weapons to deal with such repeated
US intimidation. At the same time, the Chinese Communist leaders also were
seen to continue to use the crisis atmosphere caused by confrontations with
outside threats posed by the United States and its allies as a means to
strengthen their domestic control and their mobilization of resources for
advancement of nation building and administrative competence. 50
Defeat of US-backed French forces in Indochina led to the 1954 Geneva
Conference and accords that formalized French withdrawal from Indochina.
After the conference, US policy worked to support a non-Communist
government in South Vietnam, backing the regime when it resisted steps
toward reunification set forth in the Geneva accords. The United States also
deepened and broadened defense and other links with powers in Southeast
Asia in order to check Chinese-backed Communist expansion in the region. 51
President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were
wary of Chiang Kai-shek and Chinese Nationalist maneuvers that might drag
54
Chapter 3
the United States into a war with the Chinese Communists over Taiwan.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists used the fortuitous turn of fate caused by the
Korean War to consolidate their rule in Taiwan; and with American support
they rapidly built Taiwan’s military forces with the objective of eventually
taking the battle to mainland China. The political atmosphere inside the
United States was very supportive of Chiang and his harsh anti-Communist
stance. The so-called China lobby supporting Chiang and his Nationalist
government included liberals as well as conservatives in such respected or-
ganizations as the Committee of One Million, which opposed Communist
China taking China’s seat in the United Nations. US military and economic
assistance to Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist forces on Taiwan ex-
panded dramatically, and there was little public objection by the American
government to Chiang’s repressive authoritarian rule. 52
Though Dulles and other leaders of the US government were privately
unsure of the wisdom of such a close and formal US commitment to Chi-
ang’s Nationalists, Washington eventually brought Taiwan into the web of
formal military alliances that provided the foundation of the US containment
system against Chinese-backed Communist expansion in Asia. The United
States and Nationalist China signed a bilateral defense treaty in December
1954. 53
The People’s Republic of China reacted with harsh rhetoric and military
assaults against Nationalist Chinese–controlled islands off the coast of the
Chinese mainland. The new and potentially very dangerous military crisis
involving the United States and China so soon after the bloody conflict in
Korea was not welcomed by Great Britain and other US allies, nor by some
US congressional leaders and other elites. The US administration firmly
backed the Chinese Nationalists and their Republic of China (ROC). US
forces helped Nationalist forces on some exposed islands to withdraw as the
Taiwan Strait crisis of 1955 continued, raising renewed fears of US-China
war. 54
Against this background, the Chinese Communist government’s stance
against the United States moderated. The reasoning appeared related to a
shift in Soviet policy toward the West following Stalin’s death in 1953. The
incoming Soviet leaders were more interested than the now-dead Soviet dic-
tator in arranging advantageous modus vivendi with Western powers in Eu-
rope. While they continued to give some public support to their Chinese ally
in its dispute with the Chinese Nationalists and the United States, they also
signaled Soviet wariness about getting involved in Asian conflicts by playing
down the applicability of the Sino-Soviet alliance to Asia, where Soviet
commentary implied China was to bear the major responsibility for dealing
with the United States and its allies and associates. At the same time, the
Chinese government also began to try to broaden productive economic and
diplomatic ties with countries in nearby Asia and in Europe, and Chinese
Relations during World War II, Civil War, Cold War
55
leaders found that their hard-line, confrontational behavior in the Taiwan
Strait was counterproductive for this effort. Washington, for its part, had not sought to escalate military tensions with China, which complicated US efforts to work with European and Asian allies in exploring Soviet moderation
and building lasting alliance relationships to contain communist expansion in
Asia. 55
Thus, Beijing by early 1955 was faced with an increasingly counterpro-
ductive campaign over Taiwan, a potentially dangerous military confronta-
tion with Washington, lukewarm support from its primary international ally,
and increased alienation from world powers now being wooed by the Chi-
nese government. In this context, Chinese leaders understandably chose to
shift to a more moderate stance when presented with the opportunity afforded
by the American offer in mid-January 1955 of a cease-fire regarding the
armed conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing responded to the US proposal
with criticism but indirectly signaled interest in the offer by gradually reducing Chinese demands concerning Taiwan. 56
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai used the venue of the Afro-Asian Confer-
ence in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to ease tensions and call for talks with
the United States. Chinese leaders at the time attempted to engage in high-
level dialogue with the United States. How serious the Chinese were in
pursuing their avowed interest in such engagement with the United States
was never shown, as the Chinese overtures met with a nuanced but firm
rebuff from the United States. Secretary of State Dulles was wary that direct
talks with the PRC would undermine Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist govern-
ment on Taiwan. Though Dulles privately showed an interest in splitting
China from alignment with the Soviet Union, the strategy called for main-
taining a tougher US stance against China than the comparatively accommo-
dating US stance toward the USSR. On the other hand, Dulles faced congres-
sional and Allied pressures to meet with the Chinese, so he agreed to low-
level ambassadorial talks that began in Geneva in 1955. 57
The two sides fairly expeditiously reached an agreement on repatriating
detained personnel. The Chinese intended the agreement to lay the ground
for hi
gher-level talks with the United States. American officials from Dulles
on down responded by using the wording in the agreement to make demands
on the Chinese for release of detained US personnel, notably captured US
spies, which they knew, through private conversations with Chinese officials
at the ambassadorial talks leading up to the agreements, that China would not
do. Washington soon charged Beijing with perfidy and disregard for agree-
ments, souring the atmosphere in the talks. The US side also pressed hard for
a Chinese renunciation of force regarding Taiwan. Chinese negotiators came
up with various formulas to bridge differences between the United States and
China over this issue; at least one was positively received by the US negotia-
tors but was rejected by Washington. This issue came to stop progress in the
56
Chapter 3
talks, which were suspended for a time before resuming in Warsaw in 1958,
when the two sides met periodically without much result. The talks did at
least provide a useful line of US-PRC communication during times of crisis,
as both sides strove to avoid serious military conflict. 58
Dulles’s private strategy of vigorously pursuing a containment policy
against China favored a tougher US policy toward China than toward the
Soviet Union. He endeavored thereby to force Beijing to rely on Moscow for
economic and other needs the Soviet Union could not meet. In this and other
ways, he hoped to drive a wedge between China and the USSR. 59
In 1958 Mao Zedong’s Communists used artillery barrages in an effort to
challenge and halt the resupply of the Nationalist hold over the fortress island of Quemoy and other Nationalist-controlled islands located only a few miles
off the coast of the Chinese mainland. The military attacks predictably creat-
ed another major crisis and war scare, with the United States firmly support-
ing Chiang Kai-shek’s forces and threatening nuclear attack. Chiang Kai-
shek refused to consider withdrawal from the Quemoy fortress, where a large
portion of his best troops were deployed as part of his broader military
preparations to attack mainland China and reverse Communist rule.
The absence of landing craft and other preparations for an invasion sug-
gested that Mao was testing Nationalist and US resolve regarding the off-
shore island and did not intend to invade Taiwan itself. The crisis atmosphere
played into Mao’s efforts at the time to use the charged atmosphere of the
mass campaign to mobilize national resources for a massive “Great Leap
Forward” in Chinese development. Later, foreign analysts argued persuasive-
ly that the domestic mobilization was a major Chinese objective in launching
the military aggression on the offshore islands held by the Chinese National-
ists. Another line of analysis argued that the Chinese leader also used the
confrontation with the United States to test Soviet resolve in supporting
China in what was seen in China as a weakening Sino-Soviet alliance. 60
The Chinese-Soviet alliance indeed began to unravel by the late 1950s,
and 1960 saw a clear public break with the withdrawal of Soviet economic
aid and advisers. US policy makers had long sought such a split. Nonethe-
less, they were slow to capitalize on the situation as China remained more
hostile than the Soviet Union to the United States, and deepening US in-
volvement in Vietnam exacerbated Sino-American frictions.
During the 1960 presidential election campaign, Senator John Kennedy
criticized the “tired thinking” of the outgoing administration on issues re-
garding China; however, he said little about China once he assumed office in
1961. US domestic opposition, Chinese nuclear weapons development, Chi-
nese aggression against India, and Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia
were among factors that seemed to block meaningful US initiatives toward
China. The administration took firm action in 1962 to thwart plans by Chiang
Kai-shek to attack the Chinese mainland at a time of acute economic crisis in
Relations during World War II, Civil War, Cold War
57
China caused by the collapse and abject failure of the Great Leap Forward
campaign. The staggering damage to China from the three-year effort saw
the premature deaths of thirty million people due to starvation and nutrition
deficits. 61
Though publicly reserved about China policy, the Kennedy administra-
tion seemed to appeal to emerging American elite opinions seeking some
moderation in the stern US isolation and containment of China. However,
scholarship has shown there was strong private antipathy on the part of
Kennedy administration leaders to China’s development of nuclear weapons
and support for Communist-led insurgencies in Southeast Asia. The adminis-
tration’s backing of Chiang Kai-shek in the United Nations also went beyond
pledges under Eisenhower, with officials privately reassuring Chiang that the
United States would veto efforts to remove Nationalist China from the Unit-
ed Nations. Kennedy was actively considering a visit to Chiang in Taiwan. 62
The administration of Lyndon Johnson, 1963–69, saw US-Asian policy
dominated by escalating US military commitment and related difficulties in
Vietnam. There was some movement within the US government for a more
flexible approach to China, consistent with growing signs of congressional
tion toward China. But they came to little as China entered the throes of the
violent and often xenophobic practices of the Cultural Revolution, and the
American forces in Vietnam faced hundreds of thousands of Chinese antiair-
craft, railway, construction, and support troops sent there. Johnson was anx-
ious to avoid prompting full-scale military involvement of China in the Viet-
nam conflict. US diplomats signaled these US intentions in the otherwise
moribund US-China ambassadorial talks in Warsaw, and Chinese officials
made clear that China would restrain its intervention accordingly. 63
By early 1968 the bitter impasse in Sino-American relations had lasted
two decades and seemed unlikely to change soon. The net result of the twists
and turns in Chinese domestic and foreign policy since the widespread star-
vation and other disasters caused by the collapse of the Great Leap Forward
were years of violence and life-and-death political struggle among elites and
other groups mainly in Chinese cities during the Cultural Revolution, which
began in 1966 and did not end until Mao’s death in 1976. At first, the sharply
deteriorating domestic situation in the early 1960s caused Mao to retreat
from regular involvement in administrative matters. His subordinates pur-
sued more moderate and pragmatic policies designed to revive agricultural
and industrial production on a sustainable basis without reliance on the high-
ly disruptive and wasteful mass campaigns and excessive collectivization of
preceding years. The economy began to revive, but the progress was marred
in Mao’s eyes by a reliance on the kinds of incentives prevalent in the
“revisionist” practices of the Soviet Union and its allied
states, and the con-
58
Chapter 3
trolling bureaucratic elites in those states seen as restoring the kind of un-
equal and exploitative practices of capitalism. 64
Mao found that two of the three main pillars of power and control in
China, the CCP and the Chinese government, continued to move in the
wrong direction. The third pillar of power and control, the Chinese military,
was under the leadership of Lin Biao following the purge of Defense Minis-
ter Peng Dehuai, who dared to resist Mao’s Great Leap policies during a
leadership meeting in 1959. Lin positioned his leadership in support of
Maoist ideals of revolution, equality, and service to the people. Indoctrina-
tion and involvement in civil society and affairs often took precedence over
professional military training. The distillation of Mao’s wisdom from vol-
umes of selected works was distributed throughout the Chinese military and
the broader masses of China in the form of a plastic-covered “little red
book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, published with a preface
by Lin Biao. 65
Mao was not prepared to break with his party and government colleagues
until 1966. By that time he had become sufficiently opposed to prevailing
administrative practices and tendencies. Also, he had built up enough support
outside normal administrative structures to challenge and reverse what were
later portrayed as a drift toward revisionism and the restoration of capitalism.
Relying on his personal charisma, organizational support from military lead-
ers like Lin Biao, security forces controlled by radical leaders like Kang
Sheng, and various political radicals and opportunists, Mao launched his
unorthodox efforts that saw the creation of legions of young Red Guards
leading the attack against established authority in urban China. The result
was confusion, some resistance from political and government leaders often
unaware of Mao’s commitment to the radical Red Guards and their allies,
and ultimately mass purges and persecution of senior and lesser authorities
amid widespread violence and destruction carried out by Red Guard groups.
By 1968 numerous sections in cities in China had burned during clashes of