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Put 'er there, pal.
The words of truth are always paradoxical.
Lao Tzu – Founder of Taoism
The China we know today comprises the classic riddle wrapped inside an enigma. A commercial enterprise now stands in place of the People’s Revolution once championed by the Great Leader, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, exhibiting a rate of expansion that dwarfs the growth of any other nation in history. Much of that growth is the result of trade with the United States, which not only provided the capital, but also the expertise in the form of American-built factories and time-tested methodologies. Those global companies took advantage of the abundant cheap labor and growing local demand. China took everything else.
In turning China into a capitalist state, we have become the victims of our own success. Our trade imbalance with China is debilitating to our domestic economy. Semi-skilled labor, already victimized by automation in this country, lost the bidding war against overseas competition as much due to the long-term ill will between unions and management as from the lowball bids and sweetheart deals available in China. Still, it was our loss and their gain.
China manipulates its currency to an unheard of degree and practices obstructionist import policies, making our exported goods uncompetitive in their domestic markets. Chinese banks underwrite manufacturing exports to allow profit-taking from below-cost contracts. China uses our own technology against us, creating new breeds of super-computers with U.S.-made video accelerator chips, while directing their electronic spies to hack into our most sensitive databases. The need to reassess the status of our position with China is now forced on us. We may be left with no choice but confrontation. We might leave it to our government to go through the process of demonization and justification, which it feels is necessary in order to get us into a fighting mood. Since we are fairly well-educated as a nation, a simple examination of the facts should help and a brief history lesson is always a good place to start.
Over the last hundred years or so of American globalism, the relationship with China reflects both its varied political forms and our specific global and domestic imperatives. During the Boxer Rebellion, President William McKinley ordered 5,000 American soldiers overseas (and by doing so, became the first president to undertake a foreign military venture without the permission of Congress) to protect the multi-national trade groups, diplomats and missionaries under siege from Chinese nationalists and elements of the Qing Dynasty.
After the initial occupation of China by Japanese Imperial forces in 1937 and prior to U.S. entry in the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt secretly agreed to place American pilots, ground-support troops and planes at the disposal of the Republic of China’s leader, General Chiang Kai-shek. The personnel, formally relieved from active duty in the USAAF, and the aircraft, 100 Curtiss P-40s pared off from an RAF contract, formed the 1st American Volunteer Group, popularly known as the “Flying Tigers.” Under the guidance of Claire Chennault and with the unofficial sanction of U.S. political and military leadership, the AVG fought Japan on behalf of the Chinese government until reverting to U.S. command early in 1942.
As the Second World War played out, a drama of a different sort was progressing in the Chinese political arena. The Japanese occupied Manchuria in the north (ruled by a puppet Chinese imperial government) and coastal port areas. Meanwhile, a combined force consisting of Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalists (the ruling party of the Republic of China) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) attempted to thwart Japanese incursions into the interior. The coalition, brought about when the CPC kidnapped Chiang and forced him to agree to their terms, held flimsily and, for the most part, ineffectively until tactical and ideological differences resulted in armed clashes between the two Chinese groups, beginning in 1941. At the conclusion of the Pacific war, the terms of surrender included the demand that Japanese forces remain in control of occupied Chinese territory until officially relieved by KMT troops. The CPC, given no standing by the international community, resumed the civil war it had waged for ten years prior to the Japanese invasion.
At the end of the Second World War, all wary eyes turned toward the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill, once a lone voice warning of the global threat growing within Germany’s Third Reich, again took to the pulpit and preached about a darkness descending on the whole of Eastern Europe. This time, he did not stand alone. Western preoccupation with the U.S.S.R. in Europe allowed events in East Asia to slowly coalesce into the imbalanced form with which we are now familiar. By 1949, the Chinese Civil War was settled in favor of the CPC (with a good deal of help, in the end, from the North Korean government).
By declaring the People’s Republic of China as a new Marxist state, Mao Tse-tung (or Mao Zedong, for the Standard Chinese interpreters among you) created a separate category of geopolitical considerations. Caught off-guard by the KMT’s collapse, Western governments, including the United States, reacted too late in the process to alter the balance of power within China. The defeated Kuomintang and their followers retreated across the China Strait to the island of Taiwan (known as Formosa before being ceded by the Japanese as war reparations) and reestablished a Republic of China government in Taipei. Outright possession of the island stood as a matter tied to the legal pretzel of several conflicting treaty agreements, while possession of the mainland remained the goal of the Kuomintang. The KMT continued to mount small-scale attacks against the Chinese mainland until 1979 and a technical state of war between the People’s Republic and the Taiwanese exiles continues to the present day.
French Indochina tells a tale more convoluted than that of China’s internal drama, more complex than these few paragraphs will allow. Simply put, the conflict between French colonial rule and a Soviet-inspired “independence” movement, which lasted for five years after the end of WWII, represents the first large-scale “war-by-proxy” of the Cold War. The United States provided weapons and money (and eventually, limited naval and air support) to the French, the U.S.S.R. supplied money and advisors to the Vietnamese, and the People’s Republic (and the CPC before them) supplied the rebels with a majority of their weaponry. This standoff, in which a colonized people rose up against their colonial masters and left a nation literally divided, established the lasting precedent that ideology, at least as represented by the spread of Communism, trumped any long-held anticolonial sentiment in this country.
More troubles brewed to the north. Korea, granted independence from Japan in accordance with the Cairo Agreement of 1943, quickly turned into a bargaining chip at Potsdam, where the United States and Great Britain conceded the northern portion of Korea to Soviet influence in exchange for considerations in Europe. Once again, we see Eurocentric minds creating untenable situations elsewhere. Two U.S. Army colonels chose the dividing line at the 38th Parallel, one of whom was Dean Rusk (who later served as Secretary of State for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and acted as international point man during the escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam). The positioning of the border later proved a strategic blunder, placing it too far north for immediate reinforcement.
At the war-time Cairo conference, as well as at Yalta and Potsdam, the negotiating parties gave no thought to the possibility of Chinese Communist intervention in Korean affairs. In fact, they gave little thought at all to Korea as a possible flashpoint. The main players considered China an ally, as well as a democratic nation (at least as democratic as a one-party government could be), albeit of minor importance. The expectation, especially after the Potsdam Conference in 1945, was of Soviet domination in Manchuria, checked by American and British strongholds in the Philippines, Japan, Malay and Hong Kong, along with friendly governments in China (including Taiwan) and South Korea. The Communist victory in China upset that balance, temporarily to the favor of the Soviets.
When North Korean President Kim Il-sung approached Joseph Stalin in 1950, seeking Soviet support for a war of unification, the Soviet leader reacted favorably to the idea, but told the Korean that he could not support it publicly. Stalin advised Kim to bring his plan to the Chinese. The friendly relationship between the Korean and Chinese Communists dated back to the years they fought side-by-side in Manchuria against the Japanese. It was further strengthened by North Korea’s support during the Chinese Civil War. It seems natural now to infer that China felt beholden to Korea in promising support for their impending attack on South Korea. That Kim would move without the comfort of knowing a trusted ally had his back appears doubtful. It is quite possible that, by reason of logic, the Korean War would not have occurred when it did without China’s promised cooperation.
The Truman administration initially considered U.S. intervention on behalf of South Korea worrisome for its potential to spread to Europe (once again looking backwards at the Soviets). The decision to act hinged partly on Korea’s proximity to Japan, along with the growing concern (finally!) of a complete Communist conquest of East Asia. Rather than act unilaterally, the United States pressed the United Nations Security Council to vote for U.N. intervention. Resolution 82 passed, thanks to a Soviet Union boycott of proceedings, due to the seating of Taiwan, rather than the People’s Republic of China, on the Council. The United States moved to assist South Korea under the U.N. flag, accompanied by token numbers of troops from throughout the free world.
Moving forward, a back-and-forth struggle ensued, with the North Koreans pinning the South Koreans and the U.N. forces with their backs to the sea at Pusan. Reinforcements, along with a backdoor amphibious assault at Inchon, created several problems for both sides. During the initial assaults, China placed a quarter of a million troops at its border with North Korea. As the landing at Inchon took place, the Chinese advised Korea to withdraw from the vicinity of Inchon and retreat north, allowing U.N. forces to retake the South Korean capital in Seoul. Soviet advisors, under the direction of Stalin, advised the North Koreans to redeploy the forces still surrounding Pusan to defend against the incursion at Inchon. The resulting confusion resulted in an almost complete disintegration of North Korean forces in the south.
Meanwhile, Truman issued a National Security memo expressly forbidding Theater Commander Douglas MacArthur from sending U.N. forces across the 38th Parallel if there was any sign of Soviet or Chinese intervention. However, with the North Korean army in full retreat, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall provided MacArthur with his personal authorization to do so, regardless, thus countermanding a Presidential directive. U.N. troops followed the South Korean Army north, eventually approaching the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China. It was MacArthur’s stated goal, despite Truman’s continuing orders for restraint, to cross into Chinese territory and destroy the supply lines feeding back into the North Korean forces. Before he could do so, Chinese troops crossed over and began a counter-offensive. During the extended fighting, U.N. forces retreated back below the 38th Parallel. The conflict turned into a war of attrition and ended with a negotiated truce. The two Koreas, like the two Chinas, remain in a state of war.
One of the results of the clash of advice to the North Koreans was a growing rift between the People’s Republic and the Soviet Union. There were ideological differences, of course. Mao was an orthodox Marxist, while the Soviet system followed the Protestantism of Lenin. To us, they were Communists. To each other, they were the wrong kinds of Communists. As a nation, we were not yet sophisticated enough to appreciate, and take advantage of, the difference. Instead, we followed our Global Anti-Communist playbook to the letter and ended up knee-deep in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
After the French gave up their claim to Indochina, Cambodia and Laos became independent nations, and Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th Parallel, in keeping with popular notion that by giving each ideology its own space, peace might reign. It did not. Another war-by-proxy ensued, but this time the Chinese sat it out. The South Vietnamese performed so poorly, despite receiving millions in weapons and aid, that the Johnson administration felt obligated to escalate U.S. involvement with the introduction of American ground forces. We know how that ended … as the most unpopular war in our history, to the everlasting detriment of the citizens who served in the armed forces during that period and to our nation’s prestige on the world stage. For once, China lay blameless. Let’s give them two points for that.
Richard Nixon did. In 1972, he became the First U.S. President to visit China. The results of that visit are monumental. Fearing isolation, the Soviet Union broached détente with the U.S., the People’s Republic and the U.S. normalized diplomatic relations (at a cost of throwing Taiwan out of the U.N. and off the list of Presidential State Dinner invitations), and Red China finally took its place on the Security Council of the United Nations.
In the intervening years, there have been clashes between India and China, the relationship with the Soviets remained cool through the collapse of their empire (and remains so with those mildly democratic Russians) and Taiwan continues to play the role of sticking burr. The last thing China wants right now (or at any time in the near future) is a major conflict with the United States. They have a strategy that is working, by worming slowly, almost unnoticeably, into our national body, creating conditions that leave us unable to resist their ultimate and total domination, perhaps sooner than any of us imagines.
In the next part, we will look at the case for war with China, including plausible justifications, potential global trigger-points and endgame strategies, along with realistic best and worst-case scenarios. Stay tuned.
