The United States, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1950: A Reappraisal

Abstract

The United States government's perception of the relations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Soviet Union greatly influenced Washington's policies toward China in the years following the Second World War. Secretary of State George C. Marshall worried that a pro-Soviet CCP with strong military forces might upset the stability of East Asia and damage U.S. security in the Pacific region. To offset the threat, he tried to disarm the CCP and incorporate it into a reformist government of China which would be influenced by the U.S. and dominated by the Guomindang (GMD). The CCP, however, refused to lay down its arms, and the GMD was unwilling to reform itself along American lines. Between 1948 and 1950, Marshall's successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, saw no chance of rescuing Jiang Jieshi's GMD regime from collapse and preventing the CCP from taking over short of massive U.S. intervention. Among the other reasons for his hands-off policy was a belief that China under the CCP would likely become another Titoist Yugoslavia in conflict with the Kremlin. But rather than establish a Titoist China, Mao Zedong instead entered into a Chinese-Soviet military alliance in 1950, the year the Chinese Communist invasion of Korea took place. What went wrong? Encouraged by the Sino-Soviet border clash in 1969 and the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s, some scholars