The Korean War in World History (review)

Reviewed by: A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976 by Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia Adam Cathcart (bio) Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. xiv, 357 pp. Hardcover $65.00, ISBN 978-0-231-18826-5. Sometimes a book needs to be written to obliterate a single word in conventional discourse. In the case of Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia's new opus on Chinese-North Korean relations, the word (or phrase) is "traditional friendship." From the outset of their impressive and widely-sourced book, the authors endeavor to pry apart the building blocks of Pyongyang's connectivity with the Chinese Communist Party, and likewise to untangle how Mao and the CCP navigated their own needs while dealing with Kim Il-Sung's Korean Workers' Party. Their aim is, as they put it, a destructive one: "it is necessary to refute the historical myth, to tear off the veil, and to eliminate the special set phrases that have been used to describe the history of the relationship" (p. 2). This is a tall order, given that so much of the discussion of North Korea in Chinese official sources of late consists of little more than set phrases, or at best displaces tired metaphors like "lips and teeth" with new but ultimately meaningless phrases about "beginning a new chapter" with Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping. Fortunately, the authors do not waste a lot of time complaining about the gaps in the field and get quickly to filling them instead with a welter of documents. Ultimately the book that results is aimed at a mainland audience where scholarship on Chinese-North Korean relations (really the Party-Party relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing) has been less than abundant. The Chinese version of the book, published by The Chinese University Press in Hong Kong, is accordingly longer than the present version and is likely to be even more influential given the ease with which Zhihua Shen can still fill—and amply entertain—any given university lecture hall. Zhihua Shen is well known for his extraordinary archival reach, and this study generally does not disappoint in this realm. Shen and his co-author have combed through the wide array of documents and studies of the Korean War era which were published in the 1980s and 1990s, along with extensive work in [End Page 140] the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives, readings of Soviet archives and published documents, memoir literature of participants, and even a few interviews. They also haul a number of their most fascinating anecdotes from Chinese provincial archives in Shanxi and Sichuan, from which we learn for the first time in detail about what precisely the Chinese state did with a number of North Korean elite exiles who fled from Kim Il-Sung after the now-infamous August 1956 plenum. (They ended up being labelled as ethnic Korean Chinese, working on state-run farms in Sichuan and other remote provinces.) The Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., provided a number of documents for the study, sourced out of Eastern European and German archives, and the authors make regular if occasionally baffling use of Central Intelligence Agency declassified electronic archives. A simple read through the sources which form the fundament of the book should indicate to even a casual reader that this is very much a work of Cold War history. The concerns of the authors are geopolitical—they revolve around China and North Korea's mutual appreciation and attitude toward Soviet power, their attempts to come to grips with American policy in East Asia, and the views of a multitude of communist states and interlocutors of Mao's outlook on Kim Il-Sung and vice versa. In that sense it has been shaped by the "who started the Korean War?" debate and by nature spends a fair amount of pages on Stalin's outlook and activity in managing his two client states. North Korea's drive toward economic and political development is taken up, but almost exclusively in...

After the Second World War, a bipolar world, known as the Cold War Era, has been clearly formed between the Western Bloc and Communist Bloc while the United States and the Soviet Union at the peak on each side. In Eastern Europe, the United States was restrained and felt helpless about Soviet expansion in this area with the perception of Yalta system. On the other hand, in Asia, with the breakdown of talks, an all-out war resumed. A Chinese civil war fought between Kuomintang (also as KMT or Chinese National Party) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the end of 1948, KMT has occupied the inferior position. In the early period of 1949, CCP forces crossed the Yangtze River and successfully captured Nanking, the capital of KMT’s Republic of China (PRC) government. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with its capital at Beiping, which was renamed Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and millions of Nationalist Chinese retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the CCP takeover of mainland China, the United States came to reformulate its China Policy which later marked a turning point in Sino-American relationship during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950. In June 1948, the leader of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, was officially denounced and his party, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), was ejected as a member of the Cominform by the Soviet Union. Since the West branded Tito a Soviet puppet for his loyalty and constancy of faith to Stalinism, the Tito-Stalin Split presented a whole new realm of possibilities to the United States for its dilemma in china—“Chinese Titoism.” With the influence of Stilwell Incident over Sino-American relationship and the facts of Tito-Stalin Split, Truman made an about-face change to U.S. China Policy in 1949. By the early 1949, the Truman Administration has already been making plans to diverge from Chiang and his KMT such as the publication of China White Paper; at the same time, Truman Administration keeping making chances to have conversations with the CCP. By meeting and negotiating with the CCP officials, Truman Administration attempted to disunite Communist China and the Soviet Union, expected Mao to be the “Asian Tito,” and then Communist China can joint forces with the United States to fight against the Soviet Union, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Until the outbreak of Korean War in June 1950, the United States finally realized that what it faced is hostile china along with the Sino-Soviet partnership. By applying Graham T. Allison’s three decision-making models, namely, the Rational Actor Model (RAM), the Organizational Behavior Model (OBM), and the Governmental Politics Model (GPM) as the theoretical structure and basis, the thesis would step by step explore the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950 through the perspectives of the rational assessment and choice on national interest, struggles between/among organizations based on different target and organizational culture, and pulling, hauling and bargaining games among relative bureaucrats. In addition, the thesis also applied the principles from Alexander L. George’s book, Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy, to aim at examining how President Truman’s, who has the final say, character, personality, value and world views made effect in the decision-making process of the target case study. In the process of theory confirming, the thesis discovered that by the period of transformation of Chinese regimes in 1949, the Tito-Stalin Split of 1948 presented the United States a new inspiration for the Communist World, that is, the Eastern Bloc is not a rigid “Iron Curtain.” Truman Administration considered that Titoism may set its roots upon China, the Yugoslav-Soviet Conflict could be a replay situation that occurred in mainland China, and both would put the strategic thought—Engaging China to counter the Soviet Threat—into practice. Nevertheless, from the historical perspectives, this kind of strategic thought seemed over-optimistic, which did not conform to fully rational considerations. However, with regard to the background of the early Cold War Era and the suspicion between the Truman Administration and KMT, the alternative that the United States took reflected the principles of “bounded rationality model.” As a result, by examining the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950, what the thesis explored not only the facts about the Sino-American relationship in this period, but also the continuity and change of Truman’s China Policy along with its cause and effect.

Identity Discourses and the Sino-Soviet Split Daniel Leese Yee-Wah Foo, Chiang Kaishek’s Last Ambassador to Moscow: The Wartime Diaries of Fu Bingchang. 256 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0230584778. $115.00. Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958. 320 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0199379767. $27.95. Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History. 352 pp., illus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1469611594. $36.95. The past decade has witnessed a flood of new publications on the turbulent relationship between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This new wave of scholarship has increasingly been based on Chinese archival holdings as well.1 Although the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Archives near Beijing have remained off limits to both foreign and independent domestic researchers, at least the first half of the Hu–Wen administration (2003–12) witnessed unprecedented access to archives at the provincial, municipal, and county levels. The comparatively open archives during these years included the Archive of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which allowed for greater access to its records, especially from the [End Page 988] 1950s. The insights gained from these holdings have considerably enriched our knowledge about Chinese foreign policy with regard to both high-level domestic decision making and international relations.2 Restrictions have tightened in recent years, however, and many previously accessible documents have been reclassified or, under the pretext of digitization, withdrawn from the catalogues. The three books under review here all in one way or another have profited from the short-term liberalization of Chinese archival practices. Two of them heavily rely on Chinese primary sources, and this review is therefore written from the perspective of a historian of China, not the Soviet Union. The books share a focus on the early or even pre-Cold War period of Chinese–Soviet relations between the 1940s and the mid-1960s. In Chiang Kaishek’s Last Ambassador to Moscow, Yee-Wah Foo analyzes Guomindang diplomacy during World War II. More specifically, she traces the life and times of her grandfather Fu Bingchang. The special relationship between author and research subject is not adequately discussed, and the book over long stretches reads like an attempt to cast Fu’s historical role in a brighter light. The volume is divided into six parts, starts with a family history prior to 1943, and continues with a cultural history of embassy life and organization in the 1940s. On Fu’s farewell visit prior to embarking for Moscow, Chiang Kai-shek personally stated Fu Bingchang’s mission to project an image of China as a great power; to minimize Soviet interference, especially in Xinjiang and Manchuria; and to make the Soviet Union join the war against Japan. Parts 3–5 discuss the difficulties of achieving these tasks by looking at Fu’s role in the October 1943 Moscow declaration, which granted China great-power status, the removal of Soviet influence in Xinjiang, and the negotiations of the Far Eastern Agreement at Yalta in 1945. All these questions have been extensively dealt with in previous diplomatic histories—for example, by Garver and Heinzig—and despite the author’s effort at ascribing a greater role to Fu Bingchang, the utter powerlessness of the Chinese delegate and his country’s complete dependence on U.S. backing cannot be dispelled.3 There are a few interesting new details on the situation in Xinjiang and on the second round of discussions regarding the 1945 Sino-Soviet treaty, which merit the specialist’s interest. [End Page 989] The book mostly offers details on the personal relations between Fu and other major ambassadors, as well as relations with the Soviet hosts, which were characterized by mistrust, spying activities among lower-level staff (not to mention infiltration by Chinese Communist Party [CCP] spies, most notably Fu’s mistress and press attaché Hu Jibang). A unique source explored in the book is the war period diary of Fu Bingchang, which remains in the family’s possession and consists of about 220 handwritten pages. It is difficult...

Since the 1980s, a large number of books have been written on the Korean War, once labeled the United States' “forgotten war.” One of the more important of these has been William Stueck's The Korean War: An International History (1995). Placing the war in a global setting, Stueck shows how it was both a product and a determinant of much of the Cold War diplomacy that followed. Yet Stueck's latest book, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History, disappoints a little, not because it is flawed in terms of scholarship, interpretation, or style. Stueck is too good a historian to allow that to happen. Missing for the most part, though, is anything new that might contribute to the historiography of the war. As Stueck acknowledges, all but three of its eight chapters, subdivided into three sections, are based largely on earlier papers; his purpose is merely “to provide an overview [of the war] that takes into account the vast body of new documentation that has surfaced in recent decades” (p. 2). In this respect, the most interesting part of the book's first two sections is Stueck's discussion of the triangular relationship among Pyongyang, Beijing, and Moscow, including an analysis of why Soviet premier Joseph Stalin allowed North Korea to invade South Korea on June 25, 1950, and why Communist China intervened in the conflict after United Nation forces had advanced as far as the Yalu River. Yet few of Stueck's conclusions, predicated on archival and recently published materials from the former Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and made available by such scholars as Kathryn Weatherbsy, Michael Sheng, and Chen Jian, are especially new. That North Korea's leader, Kim Il Sung, for example, could not act without Stalin's approval and that the Soviet leader gave Kim the green signal only reluctantly are views that most historians generally accept.

This paper reviews Chiang Kai-shek"s plan and will to regain the mainland before and after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Chiang Kai-shek, who moved to Taiwan after the defeat of the civil war, conceived a plan, that is called “Return to Mainland” in order to stabilize the regime. After losing Mainland, he needs to retaliate to consolidate internal unity.<BR> To Carry out a Plan “Return to Mainland”, Chiang Kai-shek must first solve the problems of US military support and participation. Chiang Kai-shek expected South Korea to play an important role here.<BR> At that time, the United States insisted on retreating from Asian issues as much as possible. Therefore, Chiang Kai-shek believed that the United States would intervene only if there were disputes in Asia. In Chiang Kai-shek’s view, the region with the greatest possibility of conflict in Asia was the Korean Peninsula. In addition, Shao Yu-lin made a suggestion that Korea is the most appropriate place to collect information and supplies for the “Return to Mainland”. Chiang Kai-shek hopes that will increase tensions on the Korean Peninsula, that he will be able to participate actively in the issue and will expand the anti-Communist front from the Korean Peninsula to mainland China.<BR> Although the crisis on the Korean Peninsula that the Nationalist government expected broke out, that is, the Korean War, but Chiang Kai-shek was unable to participate in the crisis on the Korean Peninsula and to link it to the plan “Return to Mainland”. Chiang Kai-shek conveyed to South Korea and the U.S. the intention to dispatch troops, but the U.S. refused to accept Chiang Kai-shek"s offer, fearing the intervention of the Chinese Communists. Chiang Kai-shek believed that in order to achieve a plan to counter-attack on the Mainland, co-operation among the anti-Communist camp must be established. Chiang Kai-shek applied this idea to the American anti-Communist, MacArthur.<BR> At the end of July 1950, MacArthur visited Taiwan, showed a very friendly attitude towards Chiang Kai-shek, and promised the National Government to provide assistance. But the United States had no intention of supporting Chiang Kai-shek"s “Return to Mainland” plan. Although MacArthur provided Chiang Kai-shek with promised aid, it was not enough to attack the mainland.<BR> In the late 1950s, what changed the situation on the Korean Peninsula was the dispatch of troops by the CCP. The U.S. is opposed to the dispatch of troops by KMT troops in fear of the intervention of the Chinese Communist forces, but in the end the Chinese Communist forces intervened in the Korean War.<BR> After the Chinese military intervened in the Korean War, Chiang Kai-shek also mentioned “Return to Mainland”, but his rhetoric changed. The reason was that the U.S. supported Army Commander-in-Chief Sun Li-jen rather than itself.<BR> In early 1950, Chiang Kai-shek proposed a plan “Return to Mainland” in order to stabilize his regime. But after the Chinese Communists entered the war, if they send KMT troops to South Korea or send to the mainland, the United States had to worry about the “defense of Taiwan”. And the United States believed that even if a second front was opened, its commander would not need to be Chiang Kai-shek.<BR> Finally, as President Truman opposed the intervention of the military, domestic discussions about the use of the military were suspended. Chiang Kai-shek also did not advocate active participation in the Korean War, so neither the Korean War nor Chiang Kai-shek"s “Return to Mainland” further link up.

Introduction Suzy Kim (bio) Speaking to veterans on July 27, 2013, at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, President Obama declared the Korean War a victory for the United States in an effort to challenge its status in American memory as a forgotten war. It is worth quoting his remarks at length to appreciate the change in emphasis on the war’s “victory” from what had previously been a focus on the hardships of an unknown war: That July day, when the fighting finally ended, not far from where it began, some suggested this sacrifice had been for naught, and they summed it up with a phrase — “die for a tie.”… But here, today, we can say with confidence that war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When fifty million South Koreans live in freedom—a vibrant democracy, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, in stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy. When our soldiers stand firm along the DMZ; when our South Korean friends can go about their lives, knowing that the commitment of the United States to the security of the Republic of Korea will never waver—that is a victory, and that is your legacy. [End Page 1] When our allies across the Asia Pacific know—as we have proven in Korea for sixty straight years—that the United States will remain a force for peace and security and prosperity—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy. And for generations to come, when history recalls how free nations banded together in a long Cold War, and how we won that war, let it be said that Korea was the first battle—where freedom held its ground and free peoples refused to yield; that, too, is your victory, your legacy.1 The Korean War does not stand alone in this renewed effort to valorize American interventions during the Cold War. The last several years have seen milestone anniversaries of two American wars in Asia—the Korean War and the Vietnam War—that have generated a grandiose rhetoric of victory for two of the deadliest wars of the twentieth century outside the two world wars. The sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement in 2013 prompted the president to claim victory in his speech at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. In the previous year, the administration issued a presidential proclamation for an unusually long thirteen-year program to commemorate the Vietnam War, designating the period from May 28, 2012, through November 11, 2025, as the official tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the war, at a cost of five million dollars per year.2 Observing March 8, 1965, as the date when thirty-five hundred marines were deployed to start the American ground war in Vietnam, formal events are planned throughout 2015. The year 2015 also marks the seventieth anniversary of the division of the Korean peninsula, an action proposed by the United States (and accepted by the Soviets) at the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945. Indeed, American involvement in Vietnam must also be traced back to 1945, when the United States threw its support behind France in its bid to recolonize Vietnam. How can we explain the turn of perspective toward such triumphalist rhetoric at this point in time? Similar to the Vietnam War, but in a much shorter span of only three years, the Korean War resulted in an estimated three million civilian deaths, and the unended Korean War continues to elicit tensions along the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, and throughout the Asia-Pacific region today. But unlike Vietnam, where American veterans have engaged in projects for peace and reconciliation with Vietnamese partners, peace in Korea seems like a distant dream at best.3 [End Page 2] The purpose of this special issue is twofold: first, to engage in a critical intervention into the memorialization of the Korean War among the chief participants—the two Koreas, the United States, and China—to disrupt monolithic understandings of its origins, consequences, and experiences; and second, to do so as a necessary step toward reconciliation by placing...

Reviewed by: Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu, and: Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Pierre Asselin Matthew Masur Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World. By Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 388pp. $39.95 (cloth). Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965. By Pierre Asselin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 319pp. $55.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). If the “origins of the Cold War” is a well-trod subject for historians, Masuda Hajimu offers an innovative approach to the topic. The Cold War, he argues, was not “something that existed as an objective situation immediately following World War II.” Instead, the Cold War was an “imagined reality” that “existed . . . because people thought that it existed.” Cold War Crucible is “a history of the fantasy of the Cold War, focusing on its imagined and constructed nature as well as the social need for such an imagined reality” (p. 2). According to Masuda, the “imagined reality” of the Cold War initially took hold in the United States, East Asia, and Europe—areas that had potent recent memories of wartime experiences. (Africa and Latin America would be slower to adopt the “Cold War” construct because they tended to view international events through a postcolonial lens.) But even in areas where the “Cold War” reality took hold, it was as much a product of local conditions as it was the reflection of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the immediate post–World War II years, the United States, Japan, and China experienced periods of intense social and political conflict. In the United States, a grass-roots conservative movement attacked groups or individuals perceived to be “un-American.” In Japan, conservatives pushed back against postwar occupation reforms intended to reshape Japanese society. In China, anger at America’s “reverse course” [End Page 343] in Japan led to growing support for the Chinese Communist Party and vocal denunciations of America’s Guomindang allies. While all of these disputes would later be identified as part of the early Cold War, Masuda sees them as outgrowths of local political and social conditions. It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that people in the United States, Japan, and China—and in other parts of the world—began to interpret domestic politics through a Cold War lens. Particularly in areas affected by World War II, people came to see the Korean War as the beginning of a new global conflict—the first salvo in World War III. In this heightened atmosphere, the political differences that had emerged after 1945 intensified and hardened. Moreover, political and social conflicts took on a distinctly “Cold War” cast, reflecting the growing perception of a global conflict between communism and capitalism. The Korean War has long been understood as a key event in the hardening of American and Chinese Cold War policies. Masuda echoes this view, though he explains the relationship differently. In both the United States and China, common people reacting to the conflict in Korea pressured their governments to respond firmly. On the American side, Masuda argues that public opinion influenced the Truman administration’s decisions to cross the 38th parallel and to adopt NSC-68. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Communist Party similarly responded to growing public pressure to intervene in the conflict on the Korean peninsula. Both cases illustrate “the encroachment of the social into the sphere of high politics” (p. 143). They also show that “the Cold War was not necessarily a product created through policymakers’ conduct and misconduct; numerous nameless people were, more or less, also participants in the making of such a world” (p. 144). Cold War Crucible concludes with a section describing the suppression of dissent—often violently—during the Korean War. In Korea itself, massacres of civilians were perpetrated under the guise of eliminating Communists or class enemies. Masuda suggests that a similar dynamic was at work elsewhere: at roughly the same time, “China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries; Taiwan implemented the White Terror; the Philippines suppressed ‘un- Filipino’ activities; Japan conducted its...

What was the Cold War? Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015) is an inquiry into the very nature and meanings of the conflict. It traces the Cold War's metamorphosis during the Korean War from a diplomatic stand-off among policymakers to an ordinary people's war at home through examining not only centers of policymaking, but seeming aftereffects of Cold War politics during the Korean War: The Red Purge in Japan, the White Terror in Taiwan, Suppression of counterrevolutionaries in China, the crackdown on “un-Filipino” activities in the Philippines, and McCarthyism in the United States. Why did such similar patterns of domestic repression occur simultaneously around the world? Were there any similarities among these repressions? What would happen if we were to remove the Cold War lens? What were the implications of such a worldwide phenomenon?While these events have usually been examined separately and are commonly considered aftereffects of the global Cold War, the book redefines these events as parts of a global phenomenon of nativist backlashes—a sort of social conservative suppression—that operated to silence various local conflicts that surfaced in the aftermath of World War II. It shows how ordinary people throughout the world strove to silence disagreements and restore social order under the mantle of the global confrontation, revealing that the actual divides of the Cold War existed not necessarily between the Eastern and Western blocs but within each society, with each, in turn, requiring the perpetuation of such an imagined reality to maintain order and harmony at home. Exploring such social functions and popular participation, Cold War Crucible suggests that the Cold War was more than an international and geopolitical confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs. It was also a social mechanism for purity and order, which functioned in many parts of the world to tranquilize chaotic postwar and postcolonial situations through containing a multitude of social conflicts and culture wars at home. This article draws on and extends parts of Chapter 8 and 9 concerning Japan's Red Purge and China's Suppression of counterrevolutionaries.

86 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1997 Chen Jian. China's Road to the Korean War: The Making ofthe SinoAmerican Confrontation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xii, 339 pp. Hardcover $37.50, isbn 0-231-10024-8. This study of the process by which China made its decision to enter the Korean War provides the reader with an outstanding analysis of Chinese sources. Professor Chen Jian has given us a remarkable view ofthe internal workings ofthe Chinese government, military, and leadership. His research relies on extensive interviews with many participants in the policy formation that led to China's engagement in the Korean War, and on intensive use ofprimary sources. His study provides a new standard for research on this East Asian conflict. Professor Chen politely takes issue with the major interpretations of China's military policies in Korea. He disputes the findings ofthe classic work by Allan Whiting (China Crosses the YaIu), and dismisses the works of Russell Spurr (Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared WarAgainst the U.S. in Korea), and Harrison Salisbury ( The New Emperors: China in the Era ofMao and Deng). He cites the studies by Michael Hunt and Thomas Christensen as being among the "best efforts in reinterpreting China's entrance into the Korean War." The main thesis of this richly documented work is that Mao Tse-tung had decided to send troops to North Korea well before MacArthur's landing at Inchon in October 1950. Although the threat ofAmerica's invasion into North Korea and its military thrust up to the YaIu intensified the crisis facing China's security , the leadership in Beijing had already decided to ally their armies with those ofKim Il Sung. The Chinese had actually foreseen the possibility of an Inchon landing. They felt that a preemptive strike before the Americans and UN forces could cut offthe North Korean troops would aid in driving the imperialist forces from the Korean peninsula, but this strategy was complicated by tactical problems . Time after time, Stalin refused to provide adequate support for the Chinese march into Korea; consequently, the Chinese leadership expressed reservation and caution about the timing for the movement oftroops across the YaIu. The lack of Russian air cover, the superior military weapons ofthe enemy, the fear that the conflict on the Korean peninsula with the U.S. would spread onto Chinese soil, and the difficulties ofworking with Kim Il Sung provided Lin Biao and others in the Chinese Politburo with strong arguments against Mao's resolve to enter the war. Mao slowly overcame these objections through his political maneuverings© 1997 by University and ideological convictions. For Mao, the war provided an opportunity to save ofHawai'i Pressme reVolution in East Asia, and, by driving the Americans offthe Korean peninsula , China could restructure the existing international system in Asia. His plan to Reviews 87 enter the war was delayed from late August and early September until the week of final decision, from October 12 to 19. On the evening ofOctober 19, Chinese troops crossed the YaIu. This date is important because ofthe timing; it followed the September 15 invasion at Inchon, and the October 9 crossing ofthe 38th parallel by UN forces. Most ofthe earlier scholarship on the war has presumed that the Chinese entered the war because of previous aggressive incidents. Dr. Chen's research, however, points out that this popular conclusion about the Chinese decision to enter the war reflects the common historical fallacy ofpost hoc, ergopropter hoc—the mistaken idea that ifevent B happened after event A, it happened because ofevent A. But the decision to enter the war had already been made by Mao as one means to protect China's security , long before the invasion of Inchon. The event that finally triggered this decision was Mao's success in winning over the Politburo, and not the victories ofthe UN forces. Chen's book reaches beyond the study ofthe decision-making process of the Chinese leadership—including its internecine struggles and quarrels with its international allies. It points up many ironies with regard to U.S. behavior, and tickles the reader's interest for more information. Mao's decision to dub his army...

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies:Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) In 1953, following the Korean Armistice Agreement that ostensibly ended direct U.S. intervention in Korea (but, in reality, merely led to a recalibration of the unending Korean War), African American soldier Clarence Adams was one of twenty-one prisoners of war who refused repatriation back to the United States and instead migrated to the People's Republic of China. His decision was influenced by the antiblackness that structured the segregated U.S. South, curtailing his chances of upward mobility, as well as his compassion for the Korean civilians devastated by U.S. military intervention, prompting recognition of the shared oppression of Third World peoples.1 Twelve years later, during the Vietnam War, he broadcast a message to Black soldiers via Radio Hanoi, urging them to return to the United States: "You are fighting the wrong war. Brothers, go home. The Negro people need you back there."2 According to Daniel Y. Kim, "Adams mobilize[d] a historiography of a race war to cast both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as ones waged by a white empire against a colored population," exemplifying what Bill Mullens terms "Afro-Orientalism": a phenomenon in which Black activists turned to idealized Asian subjects for anti-imperialist and antiracist inspiration.3 I begin with Adams' story for three reasons. First, it highlights continuities between Black narratives of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Whereas historians have elucidated the experiences of Black soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, few studies have grappled with these two Cold War fronts in relation, noting patterns and [End Page 97] particularities in Black subject formation across the two U.S. imperial conflicts.4 With the signing of Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, exemplifying the United States' project of racial liberalism and bolstering the expansion of the liberal empire, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, even as Jim Crow laws continued to delimit the mobility of African Americans on the home front. Whereas the Korean War was the first U.S. experiment in militarized integration, it wasn't until the Vietnam War that the question of Black–white tensions in the military, transposed from the continental United States to the battlefront in Asia, gained widespread visibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967: "[We watch] Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."5 Segregation at home was only interrupted by "brutal solidarity" abroad: the uniting of Black and white soldiers in a common project of racialized wartime destruction.6 But continuities between the Korean and Vietnam Wars also led to political mobilization: many civil rights and Black Power leaders active during the Vietnam War era, such as Bobby Seale, James Forman, Ivory Perry, and Robert F. Williams, were radicalized during their experiences as Black soldiers in Cold War Korea.7 Second, Adams' story stitches together three southern spaces that are rarely discussed in relation: the U.S. South, South Korea, and South Vietnam. To focus on the southern-ness of these three sites is to trace the convergence of white supremacy, antiblackness, imperialism, and anticommunism that cohere at the intersection of the U.S. Civil War and Cold War politics.8 Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, amid the structural antiblackness of the segregated U.S. South, Adams joined the U.S. Army to escape incarceration at the hands of white policemen. This military service brought him to South Korea: a decolonizing nation that the United States had taken upon itself to protect in the Cold War struggle against North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Union. These south-south relationalities—the transposition of a Black subject of the U.S. South to the southern warfront of a new...

Reviewed by: Mao's China and the Cold War Xiaobing Li (bio) Chen Jian. Mao's China and the Cold War. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. x, 400 pp. Paperback $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4932-4. Since the sudden end of the Cold War in the 1990s, there has been in America and in the West generally an increasing interest in the mysterious, untold, "view-from-the-other-side" stories of the Communist experience. This book provides a comprehensive study of Communist China's experience during the Cold War from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972. Making the first effort of this kind, Chen Jian offers path-breaking insights into the calculations, decisions, and divergent views toward the world in general and the United States in particular by Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders. Rather than using the traditional America-centered methodologies to follow the Soviet-American rivalry, Chen instead focuses on the Sino American conflicts that made East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War. He studies the relatively neglected inner dynamics of the Chinese revolution, which defined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) worldview and determined their foreign policy. With its fresh new look at Sino-American relations, this book should be read by both specialists and nonspecialists interested either in China's foreign policy or in Asian international relations. Chen begins by introducing Mao's doctrine of "continuous revolution" and the role played by communist ideology in Chinese foreign-policy making. Then, the book follows a chronological approach, beginning with the examination in the first chapter of China's transition between World War II and the revolutionary [End Page 374] civil war in 1945-1946. Although at this time the CCP attempted to establish "a closer relationship with Washington" and had actually felt "betrayed" by Stalin, the Soviet-American confrontation nevertheless "had a profound effect" on China and eventually brought the Cold War to East Asia (p. 36). The second chapter challenges the commonly held belief that the United States somehow "lost" China, suggesting instead that it was impossible for Washington to establish a normal working relationship with the CCP since Mao was using an anti American discourse to mobilize the masses for his revolution. The discussion of Mao's grand plans continues into the next two chapters, explaining why China entered the Korean War in 1950, why Mao sought a negotiated settlement to end the war, and the growing problems between Beijing and Moscow. Since Mao treated China's foreign policy as an "integral part" of the revolution, his policy and actions also served to maintain and enhance the "inner dynamics" of the CCP revolution. Chapter 5 is devoted to Mao's support of the Vietnamese Communists in their struggle during the First Indochina War of 1950-1954. For example, Mao sent a "Chinese Military Advisory Group" to Vietnam, supported the Dien Bien Phu campaign, and pushed a settlement at the 1954 Geneva Conference, where Premier Zhou Enlai emerged as "the real winner." A deepening rift between Beijing and Moscow in the late 1950s is discussed in chapter ., where it is argued that the Polish and Hungarian crises may have "triggered a series of more general confrontations within the Communist world, eventually leading to the decline of international communism as a twentieth-century phenomenon" (p. 145). Chapter 7 deals with the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and shows Mao's desire to use the issue of Taiwan to create new momentum for his Great Leap Forward movement, one of the most important episodes in the development of China's continuous revolution. Chapter 8 explains China's deep involvement and its ultimate policy failure in the Vietnam War in the period 1962-1969. According to Chen, Beijing lost its influence over Vietnam after the collapse of an alliance that "was once claimed to be 'between brotherly comrades'" (p. 205). There was a "huge gap" between Beijing's words and actions: while portraying itself as a model and leader of the communist movement, Beijing failed to satisfy the Vietnamese communists. When the unification of Vietnam made...

This book examines relations between China and the Soviet Union during the 1950s, and provides an insight into Chinese thinking about the Korean War. This volume is based on a translation of Shen Zihua’s best-selling Chinese-language book, which broke the mainland Chinese taboo on publishing non-heroic accounts of the Korean War.The author combined information detailed in Soviet-era diplomatic documents (released after the collapse of the Soviet Union) with Chinese memoirs, official document collections and scholarly monographs, in order to present a non-ideological, realpolitik account of the relations, motivations and actions among three Communist actors: Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung. This new translation represents a revisionist perspective on trilateral Communist alliance relations during the Korean War, shedding new light on the origins of the Sino-Soviet split and the rather distant relations between China and North Korea. It features a critical introduction to Shen's work and the text is based on original archival research not found in earlier books in English. This book will be of much interest to students of Communist China, Stalinist Russia, the Korean War, Cold War Studies and International History in general.

Reviewed by: Strait Rituals: China, Taiwan, and the United States in the Taiwan Strait Crises, 1954–1958 by Pang Yang Huei Xiaobing Li bli@uco.edu Pang Yang Huei Strait Rituals: China, Taiwan, and the United States in the Taiwan Strait Crises, 1954–1958 . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 317 pp. $55.00 (cloth). Few areas of research on international crises are more difficult than the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s, due to their historical role in the origins of the Cold War in East Asia and their unique geopolitical position in relation to the ongoing tensions among the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (ROC or Taiwan), and the United States. Conventional texts have adopted a Cold War approach, characterizing the Taiwan Strait crises as byproducts or a sideshow of the confrontation between two contending camps: the free world and Communism. Therefore, the crises resulted naturally from an ideological conflict, misunderstanding, or miscommunication of the other's intention. The communication obstacle between Communist and non-Communist governments was that each projected themselves into the frame of reference within which the other operated. On the basis of extensive, multiarchive research, Pang Yang Huei diverts from the usual Cold War approach, focusing instead on the relatively neglected area of each government's national interest, security concern, and a "quiet diplomacy" (267) through their "tacit communication" (268). His interpretation of the tacit accommodation process "allows one to appreciate the complexity of adversarial and alliance diplomacy" (6) and makes a new contribution to this case study. Beginning in the first chapter, Pang follows major historical events and introduces his approach and sources. Then, he sets up a stage for the crises in chapters 2–4 by providing a historical background of PRC-ROC-United States relations from 1950 to 1954, emphasizing the Geneva Conference (1954) as "a foundation for Sino-US tacit communication" (49). Nancy Bernkopf Tucker's work indicated that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations made commitments to Taiwan's security in the early 1950s, despite it being riddled with mistrust, ignorance, and "strategic ambiguity." 1 In retrospect, US policy and the Korean War simultaneously disengaged the Chinese from their hot civil war and engaged them in the global Cold War. Harry Truman's legacy was to keep the Taiwan Strait military struggle "cold" and build the basis for political and international competition in which both Chinese parties could find alternatives or potentially a peaceful solution to their civil struggle. Truman did not intend to postpone the Chinese Civil War or provide Beijing with a different reason to attack Taipei. Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing understood Truman's policy and stopped their planned landing operation against Taiwan in 1950–1953. 2 Certainly, the Korean War played an important role in Beijing's strategic shift from the Taiwan Strait to the Korean Peninsula. Pang devotes chapters 5 and 6 to the crisis of 1954–1955 and shows that "a ritualized pattern of diplomacy emerged in spite of the belligerent rhetoric hurled around" (152). Scholars have searched for the answers to Chinese war decisions and use of military forces. 3 In 1954, Beijing perceived unmistakable indications that the Taipei-Washington collaboration was accelerating. If a quick and effective message was not conveyed to the Eisenhower administration, Beijing believed, American cooperation would legitimize Taiwan within international politics, hindering the PRC's goal of gaining full acceptance [End Page E-14] in the international community. On the one hand, Chinese leaders seemed willing to accept the fact that the PLA (People's Liberation Army; the PRC's armed forces), as a weak army, would not fight the superior US armed forces in the Taiwan Strait if the Americans made a commitment to its defense. On the other hand, Beijing used armed forces in the Taiwan Strait explicitly to demonstrate its determination as well as to encourage possible restraint from Washington. Meanwhile, US nuclear threats in the spring of 1955 forced Chinese leaders' momentous decision to make their own nuclear bomb. Thus, the 1954–1955 Taiwan Strait crisis may be viewed as the starting point of China's nuclear weapons development program. 4...

This paper adopts a comparative approach by focusing on a selection of early DPRK and People’s Republic of China war films made during the years that followed the Korean War. It looks into the narrative, and the aesthetics of the films in the general framework of socialist construction but also in terms of the DPRK’s shattered dream of reunification. The Korean War broke out during the beginnings of socialist construction, a time of awakening and departure into a new world. It marked the beginning of the Cold War that drew battle lines that would remain in place over the next four decades. The war also served as the theme of a number of films in both countries that reflected their war experience. For the DPRK and PRC, film provided an occasion to address the socialist construction and supremacy over the United States. While the earliest Chinese movies, The Battle of Shangganling Ridge (上甘岭 1956) and Flying in the Sky (长空比翼, 1958), focused on the heroic battles of the Chinese troops, later films such as Friendship (友谊, 1959), Raid (奇袭, 1960) and At the 38th Parallel (三八线上, 1960) recounted incidents of Chinese and Korean soldiers fighting in cooperation against the US enemy under the background of a “Resist the US and Help Korea” campaign. The eight DPRK films discussed include Again to the Front (또 다시 전선으로, 1951), Scouts (정찰병, 1953), and The Combat Unit of a Fighter Plane (비행기 사냥군조, 1953). These productions had to confront the fact that Kim Il Sung’s attempt for (forced) unification had ended in a complete failure that permeated divisions and cut family ties. The Korean War broke out during the early stages of socialist construction in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a time of awakening and departure into a new ideological world.1 It marked the beginning of the Cold War, drawing battle lines that would remain in place for the next four decades. When Chinese Volunteer troops entered the Korean War on the DPRK side, they were motivated, rather than by friendship, by a mutual enemy, the US, which the PRC feared might further invade Manchuria.2 The war became the theme of a number of films in the DPRK, and the PRC, reflecting their war experience. For the DPRK and the PRC, film was a means to address the process of socialist construction and its supremacy as a model over that of the United States. The DPRK’s films had to deal with the fact that Kim Il Sung’s attempt at (forced) unification had ended in complete failure, which permeated divisions on the Korean peninsula and cut family ties. In addition, the films were produced at a time when Kim Il Sung and the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) sought to build North Korean society anew, in order to present the socialist system as superior to what had been before. A few years before, Mao Zedong had started to introduce socialist values among his followers during the first rectification campaign in Yan’an in 1942. However, the socialist construction period only started after the establishment of the PRC in 1949. This paper focuses on the war films made in the DPRK and the PRC during the Korean War and the years that followed it, when the Chollima movement in the DPRK (launched in 1955, in full swing by 1957), the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957) and the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) in the PRC, served as ideological turning points until the beginning of the 1960s.