The Soviet Union and Communist China, 1945-1950: The Arduous Road to the Alliance (review)

When the Sino-Soviet border war erupted in 1969 and Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing followed in 1972, the Western world was almost in shock. In the academic world, what emerged in the aftershock was a fundamental change of climate; the "revisionist" interpretation of the "lost chance in China" overwhelmed the "lost China" thesis of the heyday of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. The Democrats of the Truman administration recognized the impossibility of massive intervention in China to stop the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) march in 1948-1949, while hoping that the "nationalistic" Mao would be a Tito in the East. The "hands off" China policy ensued. Compounded by the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, the CCP's victory in late 1949 and the Sino-Soviet military-alliance treaty in early 1950 not only made the "wise men" in Washington appear to be quite unwise but also provided ammunition for the Republican opposition. The attack on the Truman China policy became ferocious with the outbreak of the Korean War, a war that turned out to be the first that the Americans would not win. The finger-pointing on Capitol Hill was reflected in the academic world, with the publication of books with titles such as How the Far East Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China.¹

The Sino-Soviet conflict started to simmer before the end of the 1950s, culminating in the border clash at the end of the 1960s. Trying to find a way out of the Vietnam fiasco, the Nixon administration played the China card to take the advantage of the feud between the two communist giants. Mao's ping-pong diplomacy not only opened China to the world but also forecast a revisionist wave in the academy, and books then flooded the shelves with such titles as "Lost Chance in China."² The revisionist school perceived the Chinese Communists as nationalists, progressives, or agrarian reformists—anything but communists, whose "political program is simple democracy. This is much more American than Russian in form and spirit."³ Thus, the conclusion arose that Washington under both Democratic and Republican administrations had lost the chance to win over the CCP by blindly supporting the Guomindang (the GMD/KMT, or Nationalist Party) during the Chinese civil war, and then by fighting needless wars in Korea and Vietnam.

This revisionist school of thought was not seriously challenged until the 1990s, when a considerable amount of new historical evidence came to light in the post-Cold War environment. Based on what "we now know"—to borrow from the title of John Gaddis' book—some scholars, many of them émigrés such as Chen Jian and this reviewer, revisited the events leading to the founding of the Beijing government in 1949, concluding that the "lost chance in China" was nothing but a myth.⁴ The new post-Cold War literature has found that a shared ideology and a common distrust of the KMT and its backer, the United States, brought Mao and Stalin closer, although they conspired to mislead the Americans to believe that the Chinese Communists were "margarine communists" and that Moscow had nothing to do with them. In reality, Mao reported every major decision to Stalin in advance, and Stalin's advice was always closely heeded, which saved the CCP from Mao's often reckless impulses in many crucial instances. But what is new in the new literature is its emphasis on the role of ideology in the equation of foreign relations; a policy maker's perception of national interest is never "objective."

After stating the history-in-a-nutshell in a necessarily simplistic manner, where does this current book stand? At first glance, it is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensively researched scholarly works to date, with eighty-five pages of meticulously documented notes. The most important...