Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Masuda Hajimu exploring Chinese citizens' reactions to the Korean War and the interaction between ordinary Chinese citizens and Communist Party officials. The vast literature on the Korean War has traced decision-making on all sides in great detail and has also documented the military operations of all parties. The impact of the war on U.S. society has also been studied closely. But the impact of the war on the public mood in the other major combatant countries has been much less thoroughly examined, in part because of the exiguous source base until very recently. Masuda takes advantage of the release of important Chinese documents to assess how ordinary Chinese responded to the war. The Chinese authorities sought to mold public perceptions, but they were constantly mindful of the need to take account of public morale. The "Resisting America and Assisting Korea" campaign, devised by the Communist regime to enforce a particular view of China's role in the war, was also shaped in part by sentiment from below. Masuda argues that the interaction between the regime's policies and ordinary citizens' outlooks influenced the Chinese authorities' prosecution of the war.

The next article, by Anna Geltzer, discusses U.S.-Soviet biomedical cooperation and exchanges from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, using this topic to illuminate broader questions about each side's approach to science in the Cold War era and the misunderstandings on both sides that were bound to hinder efforts at scientific cooperation. Geltzer argues that each side's perception of the other side's science establishment was shaped in part by Cold War considerations, which did not always correspond to the reality. Even though U.S. scientists accurately grasped the major weaknesses of the Soviet science system, they tended to overstate these and to underestimate Soviet scientists' abilities in certain areas. Soviet scientists, for their part, were wont to assume the superiority of their system and did not fully appreciate the immense strengths of U.S. science. According to Geltzer, these misperceptions left the program vulnerable to derailment once the broader U.S.-Soviet détente went off-track in the latter half of the 1970s.

The third article, by Mircea Munteanu, discusses Romania's involvement in attempts to promote peace negotiations between the United States and the Vietnamese Communists in the 1960s to end the ongoing war. Previous articles in the Journal of Cold War Studies, by James G. Hershberg and Zoltán Szoke, have scrutinized the efforts of Poland and Hungary to facilitate a negotiated settlement of the war. Munteanu fills in the picture by focusing on Romania's role, which up to now has received much less attention. Although relevant U.S. documents on the matter have been available for a long while, crucial Romanian archival materials were inaccessible until recently. Munteanu draws on the Romanian documents to provide an in-depth look at Romania's abortive efforts to mediate. Munteanu cites numerous reasons for the ultimate failure of Romania's diplomatic intervention, but chief among these was the North Vietnamese authorities' unwillingness at the time to settle for anything less than outright military victory. Romania's involvement, Munteanu argues, is a valuable case study of how smaller powers in the Cold War, especially maverick countries like Romania and France, tried to influence both U.S. and Soviet policies.

The next article, by Johan Matz, focuses on the case of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish envoy in Hungary who saved large numbers of Jews from Nazi death camps during World War II but was then arrested and imprisoned by Soviet forces. Wallenberg's unexplained death in Soviet captivity has been a cause célèbre for many years. The most basic details about Wallenberg's fate are still unknown, and the Russian government has displayed no interest in clarifying the matter by releasing crucial files from the Russian Presidential Archive and the archive of the former Soviet state security organs. What is known, however, is the way the Swedish, U.S., and British governments handled the matter before, during, and afterWallenberg's highly successful but ill-starred mission in Hungary...