A New Look at American Mediation in the Chinese Civil War: The Marshall Mission and Manchuria

Abstract

[Editor's note: This article introduces the pin-yin system for romanizing Chinese characters. The editor, trained in the Wade-Giles system, hesitates to switch. Readers' views are solicited.] General George C. Marshall's effort to mediate the conflict between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists after World War II is often viewed as a selfless if misguided episode in American foreign policy. It is said that by seeking to promote a unified and democratic China, the United States was continuing a China policy whose origins went back to the days of John Hay. Marshall's inability to achieve his major political objective—a government of national union embracing the Nationalists, the Communists, and third-party elements—is seen as proof positive of the failure of his China mission. This paper offers an alternate view of the Marshall mission. First, it locates the origins of American mediation in the Chinese civil war within the global context of the emerging Cold War and the mounting U.S. concern with Soviet expansionism in East Asia. Second, it focuses on northeast China (Manchuria), the key geopolitical region where the two Chinese rivals clashed in the field and Soviet policy fed American anxieties. Finally, it offers the perhaps paradoxical conclusion that although the Marshall mission failed to unify China, it succeeded in its basic purpose of thwarting Soviet expansionism.