Great Power Conflict and the Chinese Civil War

For many years, scholars relied almost exclusively on Western sources to write about Cold War history. In his 1983 survey of the field of post-1945 Sino-American relations, Warren I. Cohen hoped for a breakthrough in the coming decade: access to Chinese archival material. ¹ Since 1989, a steady stream of publications utilizing new Chinese documents as well as American archives has appeared. ² By presenting highly revealing Chinese materials and incorporating Chinese perspectives into the investigation of Sino-U.S. confrontations, these new works have greatly invigorated the study of the early Cold War, especially its East Asian dimension. In varying ways, these studies have addressed many fundamental questions about the origins of the Cold War in Asia and the emergence of Sino-American conflict: What were Chinese Communist perceptions of the post-1945 international situation in general and the United States in particular? Why did Mao Zedong decide to lean to the side of the Soviet Union? What was the nature of the Mao-Stalin relationship? Why did Beijing intervene in the Korean War? What was the extent of China's assistance to the Viet Minh in the early 1950s? Many heretofore unknown events and episodes have been illuminated and many previously unanswered questions about the role of the communist side in the early Cold War have begun to be addressed. ³ The appearance of these new studies would certainly have satisfied Cohen, a doyen in the field of American-East Asia relations, who, together with Akira Iriye, has made tremendous efforts to encourage fresh scholarship and introduce young scholars into the field.

The book under review represents one of the latest entries in this emerging international history of the Cold War in Asia. Westad has benefited from a great deal of previously unavailable Chinese material both on the mainland and in Taiwan. From the mainland, he has drawn upon a wide array of primary sources, including officially published documentary series, memoirs, books, and articles written by Chinese researchers who enjoyed privileged access to party and government archives. In Taipei, he has consulted such significant sources as published collections of Chiang Kai-shek's personal papers and the diary of Wang Shijie. He has also used the papers of such former Nationalist officials as Hu Shize and Zhang Jia'ao, now deposited in the Hoover Institution archives. For the American perspective, Westad has utilized a broad range of archival documents and private papers. The result of such prodigious research is a volume that offers a much fuller picture than previous accounts of the complex and intriguing relationship between Soviet-American conflict and the genesis of the Chinese civil war.

Westad adopts a quadripartite approach to discuss Chinese Nationalist, Chinese Communist, and Soviet interests and policies as well as those of the United States. To demonstrate his thesis that the Chinese civil war stemmed from the appearance of the Cold War, he begins by describing the creation and collapse of the Yalta system. As Westad sees it, the Yalta agreement represented a Soviet-American search for stability in East Asia. Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin desired to make China “a stabilizing buffer between a central and northeast Asian mainland dominated by the Soviet Union and a Pacific area dominated by the United States” (p. 31). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Chiang “welcomed the Yalta agreement” (p. 32) because it made Washington a participant in Sino-Soviet relations, a goal that the Chinese leader had worked diligently to achieve during the closing days of World War II. To isolate Mao and his party and to prevent revolutionary change in China, Chiang made the decision to conclude the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945. A consistent strategy of Chiang was to win international support to compensate for his domestic weaknesses. His plan was to use Great Power endorsement of his authority to make Mao aware of the futility of continued opposition.

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