Food for Thought: Reflections on Food Aid and the Idea of Another Lost Chance in Sino-American Relations

Abstract

Jean Kang and Victor Kaufman shed light on one of the more intrigu ing questions of Sino-American-Soviet relations during the Cold War: Why in the early 1960s, after achieving the rupture in the Sino-Soviet alliance sought by U.S. policy since 1950, did the United States tilt toward the Soviet Union rather than toward the People's Republic of China (PRC)? The U.S. tilt toward alignment with the USSR against the PRC in the early 1960s is paradoxical because, as U.S. leaders rec ognized in 1950, the USSR represented a far greater threat to the United States than did the PRC. The USSR constituted one of only several global centers of industrial and technological power. It had achieved a fairly high level of industrialization and technological prowess by the 1950s and had proved its ability to translate those economic capa bilities into effective military power, both conventional and nuclear. The USSR controlled the eastern half of Europe and deployed power ful military forces on the frontiers of Western Europe—itself an indus trial and technological center second only to North America. The Soviet state had spawned and for several decades directed a global Commu nist movement founded on inveterate hostility to the bourgeois val ues and institutions of the West. The USSR had already for a generation used the resources mobilized by its powerful state to wage protracted political war against the capitalist world. The PRC by contrast was preindustrial and technologically primi tive. Its armies abutted areas whose resources might weigh signifi cantly in the global balance, but they were nonindustrialized areas. In Asia, only Japan ranked in the same league with Europe as a center of industrial-technological wealth and power, and there was no pros pect that Chinese armies or political agents might bring about Japan's defection from the U.S.-led alliance system. Moreover, the PRC was successor to previous Chinese states that had several times cooper ated with the United States in important ways while sometimes view ing Russia with deep suspicion. These geopolitical factors were recognized by leaders of the Truman administration in late 1948 and early 1949 when they decided to let