Document created: 31 October 03
Air University Review,
January-February 1973
Apparently the flood of books about China is not about to ebb, nor is the quality any less checkered as the years go by. These works vary from serious studies to potboilers aimed at grabbing off a segment of what appears to be an insatiable market. A yellow dustjacket with China in large red letters seems to be the answer to a publisher’s prayers. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of most American writing about China is the tendency to account for “the loss of China”—as if we ever had it—as the work of one or more villains, sometimes Chinese, sometimes American, and sometimes both. These villains stubbornly refused to comply with a simplistic solution so obvious to the author of the work explaining our “loss of China.” During the McCarthy period, the villains were the U.S. State Department officials, in both Washington and Chungking, allegedly working hand in glove with the Chinese Communists. Later Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang “clique” were the had guys who stubbornly refused to carry out needed reforms and thus allowed Mao and his gang to take over almost by default. Every Secretary of State from George Marshall to Dean Rusk has received a share of the obloquy so generously dished out in recent years. On the other side, Mao Tse-tung is either the Great Helmsman guiding the Chinese Revolution toward Utopia or a psychopathic monster surpassing even Stalin-after all, Mao had more people to pick on than did Stalin.
The two books * herein reviewed are guilty of the tendency to “villainize” to some degree. Caldwell’s book focuses on two main villains, Chiang Kai-shek and the head of his secret military police, Tai Li. The late Professor Dulles’s book is more restrained, but John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk are portrayed as the heavies in the Sino-American drama between 1953 and 1968. The two books are vastly different: Caldwell’s is a personal record of his experiences with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in China in the 1944-45 period while Dulles’s book, as its title indicates, is an attempt to describe American policy toward China between 1949 and 1969. The first is journalistic in style, the latter a scholarly work.
*
Oliver J. Caldwell, A Secret War: Americans in China, 1944-1945 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1972, $5.95), 218 pages.
Foster Rhea Dulles, American Policy toward Communist China: The Historical
Record, 1949-1969 (New York: Crowell, 1972, $7.95), 173 pages.
Caldwell would seem to have impeccable credentials as a China watcher since he was born in Foochow and educated through secondary school in China. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Chiang Kai-shek when he was sent to China in 1944 but was rapidly disillusioned during his two years with the Nationalists. He vividly describes the totalitarian aspects of Chiang’s Kuomintang regime, especially the Gestapo-like methods of Tai Li and the Secret Military Police, which he claims drove the liberals into the arms of the Communists. His account of Tai Li’s Happy Valley, the headquarters where Li concocted his skulduggery, allegedly with the connivance of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO), headed by a malevolent U.S. Naval captain named Miles, sounds like a Dr. Fu Manchu thriller by Sax Rohmer. Caldwell found himself playing a whole series of roles: he was working for the OSS, involved with Tai Li’s outfit, and, through a mysterious Mr. Chen, was in cahoots with some leaders of the Chinese secret societies who were trying to create a Third Force,” a liberal leadership aspiring to occupy a middle ground between Chiang on the right and Mao on the left.
Caldwell’s constant plaint is the lack of realization on the part of
Washington and its man in Chungking. General Pat Hurley that the only salvation
for China was firm American support for a liberal third force. This is the same
will-o’-the-wisp that eluded General George C. Marshall during his mission to
China in 1945 and 1946. As John K. Fairbank points out in the following passage
from his Introduction to Dulles’s book, this was indeed an ignis fatuus:
The American analysis of the late 1940’s that China needed reform which Chiang Kni-shek refused to provide is now yielding to the recognition that the Chinese revolution had accumulated an urgency and inevitability that probably no reform program could have satisfied, In a way, these recent studies of the deep-seated malaise in Chinese society, of the necessity for mass mobilization and the participation of the farming population in political life, all lend credence to Chiang Kai-shek’s claim that reform would only feed the fire of rebellion. It seems more plain that he represented an old order that could not be remade with the same actors still on the scene; the reforms urged by sundry Americans could not perpetuate his power It was far too late for reform to stave off revolution, and General Marshall’s decision in 1946 to disengage from the Chinese mainland was the only feasible one. (p. viii)
The only course open to Chinese liberals in the situation prevailing at the end of the war was to fall in step with either Mao or Chiang, or opt out entirely.
The best parts of Caldwell’s book are Chapter 9, in which he describes two journeys from Kunming to Sian, some 1500 miles through Yunnan, Kweichow, Szechwan, and Shensi, and Chapter 10, in which he gives a vivid picture of wartime Sian. He is obviously in love with the scenic beauty of west China and with its peoples, both Han and non-Han. Furthermore, it provides an artistic device through which he points up the contrast between the simple Chinese peasant, tilling his plot in the pure mountain environment, and the fetid political atmosphere of wartime Chungking. If one is not too finicky about the lack of scholarly tone, Caldwell’s book makes for good light reading and does give some flavor of the weird political situation in China at the close of World War II.
Foster Rhea Dulles’s study is a serious attempt to portray the evolution of American policy toward Communist China from 1949 to 1969. There is little, if anything, new in Professor Dulles’s account, but it does get the story into a concise format, only 173 pages. It is the sad tale of a series of lost opportunities for a better understanding between Washington and Peking, at least as told by Dulles. The real tragedy seems to be that whenever one side hinted at détente, the other side was in a hostile phase; the urges toward détente never seemed to coincide. Furthermore, underlying the American policy in Asia was the assumption that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an aggressive Communist nation determined to expand into Southeast Asia, an assumption that took as axiomatic that the Chinese were instruments of overall Kremlin strategy. American policy-makers were altogether too slow in realizing that Chinese nationalism was the primary driving force in Peking’s policies and that Mao and his associates were never merely a Soviet instrument. With the hindsight that makes historians and Sunday-morning quarterbacks omniscient, Dulles assumes that American policy-makers should have been able to distinguish between Peking’s rhetoric and its serious intentions. This was asking a lot of the statesmen in Washington who were confronting either Chinese troops in Korea or Chinese-assisted Communists in Indochina.
As the story moves through the 1950s and 1960s, each incoming U.S. administration inherited a messy set of problems from its predecessor. The Roosevelt attempt to make Nationalist China a great power was a shambles when bequeathed to Truman. Truman tried to play a neutral role from the closing years of the Chinese civil war, but the Chinese intervention in Korea made the backing of Chiang’s regime in Taiwan too tempting a gambit to be resisted. Furthermore, Peking’s backing of the Ho Chi Minh insurgency in Vietnam led the United States to support the French. The incoming Eisenhower regime inherited a triple confrontation with the PRC—Korea, Indochina, and Taiwan. The new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, a cousin of our author, was less a states-man than a fervent moral crusader against Communism, and Foster Rhea does not let his kinsman off lightly. Secretary Dulles’s refusal to be civil to Chon En-lai at the Geneva Conference in 1954, his rejection of Chou’s offer to negotiate made at Bandung in 1955, and his sabotaging of a reciprocal exchange of newsmen between China and the United States in 1956—all are regarded as lost opportunities to better relations with Peking. Dulles’s bolstering of the American position in Asia through a series of treaties, especially the Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan and the creation of SEATO, could not but cause alarm in Peking. Only Eisenhower’s adamant refusal to engage American troops on the mainland of Asia kept Dulles from getting the U.S. even more deeply committed in Vietnam. When the Kennedy administration came in, the U.S. commitment to the Diem regime in South Vietnam was one of its inheritances. It also inherited a messy situation in Laos.
During all this period, for domestic reasons no administration dared to move very far or very fast in easing relations with Peking. The Truman-Acheson team was faced with the hysterical McCarthy accusations of not only being soft on Communism but even of being treasonable. The McCarthy spirit carried over into the Eisenhower period. Any suggestion that the PRC be allowed into the United Nations infuriated the China lobby and the China bloc in Congress. Even Kennedy had to instruct Adlai Stevenson to resist the admission of the PRC; he felt that it was too early to get the American public to endorse such a move.
Johnson, on taking office, found that during the Kennedy years the military mission in South Vietnam had been increased from 800 to 16,000 men. Then came the escalation with its tragic consequences for President Johnson. This was the situation bequeathed to Nixon when he became President in 1969. Throughout the Kennedy arid Johnson years, Professor Dulles’s main target is Dean Rusk, whom he portrays as an anachronism of the early cold war days, a man obsessed by the danger of Communist expansion, the “Cold Warrior” incarnate.
To a certain extent, Professor Dulles seems to be indulging in a mild form of demonology, with the demons located mainly in the executive branch of the American government. That the presidents and secretaries of state during those twenty years reflected American opinion is played down. The Formosan Resolution of January 1955, which gave President Eisenhower an open-ended grant of authority in the defense of Taiwan, and the Tonkin Bay Resolution, which gave President Johnson similar powers in Indochina—both passed Congress with scarcely a dissenting vote. Only when the casualty lists mounted precipitously did the public sour on the war.
On the other hand, the picture with respect to Chinese policies or Hanoi’s strategy is blurred. Mao, Chon, Lin Piao, and Ho Chi Minh are vague figures in the background. Professor Dulles has little to say about the constant barrage of threats from Peking, threats that turned out to be somewhat hollow in retrospect but were alarming at the time they were made. Unfortunately, we do not know what Peking’s real intentions were during many of the crises, since the Bamboo Curtain is very opaque indeed. Usually, we know why an American leader did what he did, but not why the opponent reacted as he did—we can only surmise. Thus the study of American-Chinese relations tends to be one-dimensional and exceedingly frustrating.
These presidents and their secretaries of state had all seen Hitler’s rhetoric become action, the word become deed. Why shouldn’t they take Mao’s rhetoric seriously? Furthermore, they had witnessed the enormous expansion of Communism in the postwar years, an expansion from a single country, the Soviet Union, to fourteen countries by 1961, not even counting the gobbling up of the three Baltic states. The number of people under Communist control had gone from fewer than 200 million in 1944 to 1200 million by the early 1960s, a sixfold increase. Little wonder that administration after administration in Washington felt there was more than just rhetoric emanating from Peking, Moscow, and Hanoi.
Professor Dulles, who died in September 1970, lived long enough to be puzzled about Nixon. Throughout his book, only Nixon is depicted as a more stalwart cold warrior than Dean Rusk. But the new policy enunciated at Guam, plus other overtures made to Peking in 1969 and 1970, seemed to indicate a new approach to the PRC. As Dulles put it: “. . . these steps were significant; they had broken through the patterns of the past.” (p. 243)
Why has that epitome of cold warriorhood, Richard Nixon, emerged as the first President of the United States to visit both Peking and Moscow? With no intention of derogating the brilliance of the Nixon performance, nevertheless he is operating in a different domestic and international milieu than his predecessors. The leadership in Peking, as it entered the 1970s, found itself in an almost untenable position. Its now hostile neighbor to the north and west along a 6000-mile border, the Soviet Union, had won great influence in India, while China’s ally, Pakistan, had just been torn asunder. Therefore, most of China’s land frontiers adjoined hostile neighbors. In Southeast Asia and along China’s coast loomed the United States and its allies, a network of alliances stretching from South Korea to Thailand. And China’s traditional enemy, Japan, had become the world’s third-largest economic power, power that could be translated into military power in Peking’s opinion. In short, the leaders of the PRC were in a hostile relationship with the two superpowers and with two potentially dangerous neighbors, India and Japan. Something drastic had to be done to get out of such an absurd impasse. The Peking leadership, noting that the United States was showing every intention of lessening its overcommitment in Asia while the Soviet Union was expanding its commitments in South Asia and showing an increasing interest in completing its encirclement of China, saw the American threat as the lesser of the two. Ergo, Peking’s favorable response to the Nixon overtures and the summit of 1972.
The point to be made, a point that seems to have eluded Professor Dulles in his analysis of the Sino-American relationship over two decades, is that presidents and secretaries of state as well as Communist policy-makers are to a large extent the victims of their domestic and foreign environments. An Acheson could not have journeyed to Peking to drink toasts with the Communists in the early l950s without being stoned by an irate public on his return. A China only mildly angry at Russia and still in a state of peaceful coexistence with India was proof against any blandishments by Dulles, even if such a thought had crossed the mind of that crusader. But a China that had experienced two armed conflicts with India and was still shaken by its armed clash with the Russians on the Ussuri in March 1969 was open to Nixon blandishments. Thus, at least to some extent, the “villains” of Professor Dulles and Mr. Caldwell could better be called the victims of the particular circumstances extant during their tenure of office.
I do not intend this lengthy analysis of Professor Dulles’s book to disparage the work; rather, I seek to point up the fact that it tends to elicit thought and to provoke argument, both indicators of a good book. In less than 200 pages he has skillfully interwoven most of the salient facts pertinent to his topic and done it without sacrificing readability. Anyone desiring a compact account of American vicissitudes vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China over the last two decades could do no better than read Professor Dulles’s book.
Air University Institute for
Professional Development
Dr. Kenneth R. Whiting (Ph. D., Harvard University) is Directorate of the Documentary Research Directorate, Air University Institute for Professional Development, Air University. A frequent contributor to Air University Review, he is the author of The Soviet Union Today: A Concise Handbook (1962) and of numerous monographs on Russian subjects. Dr. Whiting formerly taught Russian history at Tufts College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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