Future Of China example essay topic

IF MAO HAD COME TO WASHINGTON: AN ESSAY IN ALTERNATIVES Before examining the circumstances and reasons for this procedure, let us imagine instead that, following a more normal process, the message had been duly forwarded to the 'highest officials, ' and had received an affirmative response which is 9944/100 percent unlikely but not absolutely impossible. If Mao and Chou had then gone to Washington, if they had succeeded in persuading Roosevelt of the real and growing strength of their sub-government relative to that of the decadent Central Government, and if they had gained what they came for-some supply of arms, a cessation of America's unqualified commitment to Chiang Kai-she and firm American pressure on Chiang to admit the Communists on acceptable terms to a coalition government (a base from which they expected to expand) -what then would have been the consequences? With prestige and power enhanced by an American connection, the Communists' rise and the Kuomintang's demise would have been accelerated. Three years of civil war in a country desperately weary of war and misgovernment might have been averted.

The United States, guiltless of prolonging the civil war by consistently aiding the certain loser, would not then have aroused the profound antagonism of the ultimate winner. This antagonism would not then have been expressed in the arrest, beating and in some cases imprisonment and deportation of American consular officials, the seizure of our consulate in Mukden, and other harassment's, and these acts in turn might not then have decided us in anger against recognition of the Communist Government. If, in the absence of ill-feeling, we had established relations on some level with the People's Republic, permitting communication in a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and sus-pi cion of us to make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have been no Korean War with all its evil consequences. From that war rose the twin specters of an expansionist Chinese communism and an indivisible Sino-Soviet partnership. Without those two concepts to addle statesmen and nourish demagogues, our history, our present and our future, would have been different.

We might not have come to Vietnam. II Although every link in this chain is an 'if,' together they tell us something about the conduct and the quirks of American foreign policy. What we have to ask is whether the quirks were accidents only, or was the bent built in? Was there a real alternative or was the outcome ineluctable? Looking back to find the answer, one perceives the ghost of the present, and from the perspective of a quarter-century's distance, its outline is more clearly visible than among the too near trees of the Pentagon Papers.

In the circumstances of 1945 there are three main points to remember: first, the Japanese were as yet undefeated; second, American policy was concentrated urgently and almost obsessively on the need to bring Nationalists and Communists into some form of coalition; third, the American Military Observers Mission of nine was already in contact with the Communists. These had become acutely important with the approach of an American landing in China, and with the approach, too, of Russian entry against Japan. Coalition was the central factor in American plans because only in this way would it be possible, while still supporting the legal government, to utilize Communist forces and territory against the Japanese entrenched in the north. In the absence of coalition, we feared the Russians might use their influence, when they entered the war, to stir up the Communists and increase the possibility of a disunited China afterwards. Primarily they wanted to convince President Roosevelt that they, not the Kuomintang, represented the future of China. They knew that time was working in their favor, that the mandate of heaven was slowly and irresistibly shifting.

If they could somehow make this plain at the policy-making level in Washington, then the United States might be persuaded to mitigate its support of Chiang and thus hasten the shift. Second, they wanted access, as a partner in a coalition government, to American arms and other munitions on the model of Tito, their Communist counterpart in Europe. On the basis of usefulness against the enemy, they considered they had no less a claim. Armament was their most serious deficiency; they had gained control of North China beyond and behind Japanese lines by an astonishing organization but without enough weapons to risk a real battle. In Washington they hoped to persuade the President of the validity of their claim. They felt the United States was blind to the real state of the Kuomintang's decline and their own rise, and that if they could reach Roosevelt they could make this clear.

' We can risk no conflict,' Mao told Service, 'with the United States. ' Coalition having reached another deadlock, Hurley and Wedemeyer arrived in Washington in March 1945 for consultation. Choosing their presence there as the opportunity to bring to a head the issue in American policy, all the political officers of the Embassy in Chunking, led by the Charge' d'Affaires, George Atchison, joined in an unprecedented action. With the concurrence and 'strong approval' of Wedemeyer's Chief of Staff, they addressed a long telegram to the Department, in effect condemning the Ambassador's policy. It pointed out that the Communists represented a force in China that was on the rise, that it was 'dangerous to American interests from the long-range point of view' to be precluded from dealing with them, that with the approach of a landing in China the time was short before we would have to decide whether to cooperate with them or not. They recommended therefore 'that the President inform the Generalissimo in definite terms that military necessity requires that we supply and cooperate with the Communists,' and that such decision 'will not be delayed or contingent upon' coalition.

In March when the President made this decision, Mao and Chou in conversations with Service were still emphasizing and amplifying their desire for cooperation and friendship with the United States. The rebuff suffered by the lack of any reply to their offer to go to Washington was never mentioned (doubtless because they wished to keep it secret) and in fact none of the political officers attached to the Dixie Mission knew anything about it. Supported by Chu Teh, Liu Shao-chi and other leaders of the Party, Mao and Chou returned repeatedly to the theme that China and the United States complemented each other economically-in China's need for postwar economic development and America's ability to assist and participate in it. Trying to assess how far this represented genuine conviction, Service concluded that Mao was certainly sincere in hoping to avoid an exclusive dependence on the Soviet Union. We reached in China exactly the opposite of what had been our object. Civil war, the one absolute we tried to prevent, duly came about.

Though we defeated Japan, the goal that would have made sense of the victory, a strong united China on our side after the war, escaped us. The entire effort predicated on the validity of the Nationalist government was wasted. What should have been our aim in China was not to mediate or settle China's internal problem, which was utterly beyond our scope, but to preserve viable and as far as possible amicable relations with the government of China whatever it turned out to be.