No Exit? The Origin and Evolution of U.S. Policy toward China, 1945-1950 (review)

The importance of this book lies not so much in its substantive addition to what is already known by Western specialists on America's China policy in the years 1945-1950 as in its presentation of a mature and intelligent Chinese scholar's retrospective views of that policy some fifty years later.

The author was a young woman in the last stages of the Chinese civil war, a graduate from Qinghua University in 1951 who was enthusiastic about the nationalist and revolutionary promise of the new China. For thirty years she played a part in China's "people-to-people" diplomacy, including her first sustained experience abroad, in Vienna, between 1956 and 1959. In 1980 she became a member of the Institute of International Studies, a think tank linked to China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She spent a year (1982-1983) at Princeton University's Center of International Studies, where she supplemented the research that resulted in the Chinese version of this book in 1987. She then joined the new Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, becoming its director in 1991 and continuing to do research in the field.

Zi Zhongyun's historical account, relying heavily on the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States, but also on Chinese archival sources, begins with the final months of President Roosevelt's life, when Roosevelt's China policy was to aid the government of Chiang Kai-shek so as to keep it in the war against Japan, and as much as possible to avoid a civil war in China. Although she is aware that Roosevelt caved in to Chiang's demand to fire General Stilwell, who had contempt for Chiang, and that the president had "pushed the U.S. government a giant step in the direction of supporting Chiang against the Chinese Communists," she nevertheless understands that it was after Roosevelt's death that "the scale of U.S. policy toward China began to decisively tilt toward the KMT."

One sign of this development, Zi points out, was Ambassador Patrick Hurley's public attack on the Chinese Communists and his lavish praise of Chiang Kai-shek in a speech on April 2, 1945, a speech that was not contradicted by top officials in the Truman administration. Another sign was the transfer out of China, at Hurley's request, of all the State Department officers who were well versed in Chinese affairs but who dissented from Hurley's views. Still another sign was President Truman's approval of $500 million in aid to Chiang's government without the preconditions that the Secretary of the Treasury had previously insisted upon.

More importantly, the United States began to assist the Nationalist forces militarily. Zi describes how, after Japan's surrender, American transport planes flew many divisions of Nationalist troops from southwestern China to eastern China to be in a position to receive the surrender of Japanese troops, who had been ordered by General MacArthur to surrender exclusively to the Nationalists. Fifty thousand U.S. Marines were landed in northern China to help Nationalist troops hold their new positions. Then the U.S. Navy transported twelve divisions of Chiang's troops to ports in southern Manchuria to enable them to occupy Manchurian cities before the Communist troops could get there from their base area around Yenan.

Next, Zi describes and analyzes the self-contradictory tasks of General George Marshall in his mission to mediate between the Nationalists and the Communists, which took place during most of 1946. She quotes from a Marshall memorandum to show that "the bottom line of the U.S. mediation was to support Chiang under any circumstances—only for the time being this card was not shown to Chiang." Nonetheless, Chiang was aware of this and thus felt free to break successive cease-fires arranged by Marshall. Chiang's army...