Confronting the West: China as David and Goliath in the Korean War

Abstract

The use of the biblical reference in the subtitle to this paper is an opportunity to examine some familiar references to the images that often inform both the cliches of popular culture and the assumptions of scholars who study international conflict. China's transformation in the course of the Korean War was indeed one of power, both as image and as reality, in Chinese eyes and much of the rest of the world as well. The question is pinpointing the nature and degree of the transformation. To what extent can China be compared to the figure of David with five smooth stones and with courage and justice, fighting against a Goliath, nine feet tall with an armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels and a spear with an iron point weighing six hundred shekels? To what extent did China become a Goliath by the end of the war? This theme will be explored in three different directions. The first, which the largest, is China's transformation to world status as mea sured by military and economic power. The second is China's exer cise of its new status as a world power in diplomacy. And the third is the choice of keywords and uses of memory in assessing China's role in the Korean War. The term used by Chinese leaders then was people's war, which was distinctive to China's historical setting and drew upon the large corpus of Mao Zedong's military writings during the Yan'an years. Communist military efforts then have often been described as guerilla warfare. But Chinese military histories further define warfare then as mobile and positional, and they divide their statistics on casualties and losses from the years of resistance against Japan to the Korean War years, accordingly.1