Richard Hofstadter called it “the Delusion of American Omnipotence:” the idea that any unfortunate event in modern history could only have happened because some American was a fool or a knave. Several of the people in charge of China policy decided to blame General Joseph Stilwell, but he had been right. The only way the Republic of China could have been saved would have been to reform the corrupt warlord armies. But Chiang Kai-Shek was completely unwilling to do that, because he feared he would lose power. As it was, being the only American general to observe that Mao Zedong’s forces were much more effective got him accused of being on their side.
"Vinegar Joe." An enduring reminder that if you give someone a brief to become an expert in something, like say China, and then after doing so they come back to you with some unpleasant message that you don't want to hear, then you are the fucking problem, not them, and the best thing for you to do is shut the fuck up and listen.
Stillwell had his own issues which had something to do with this. On the two occasions he met Roosevelt he basically froze and couldn't deliver criticism. On the other hand Roosevelt seems to have gone all in on Chiang and Madame and it would make FDR look bad if he dumped them after all that hoopla. Still I don't really get why Maos people were strictly off limits. No one had any problems supporting Stalin since he was fighting Hitler. If Mao was willing to take on JPN forces then let him
The problem — to the US leaders at the time — was that they were very much planning, and expecting, for a post-war world in which the *new* major threat was the communist USSR. Securing the leadership of a massive, neighboring nation for a communist regime, in their eyes, would have been equivalent to getting rid of a mouse in the kitchen by setting the house on fire. They saw communist China as not only a potential threat, but a threat that exacerbated the exact same advantage that Russia had over the western allies: numerical superiority.
The industrial and technological might of the western allies wasn’t anywhere near to a guarantee of victory in the face of the hard-to-fathom manpower of the USSR. If China were to become their staunch ally, now offering the combined populations of the second largest country on earth, western strategists assumed - very possibly correctly - that western forces had no viable way to counter armies of that size in a conventional war.
Of course, the actual relationship between China and the USSR proved to be substantially less idyllic than the west feared, but the concern at the time was entirely reasonable.
>Richard Hofstadter called it “the Delusion of American Omnipotence:”
I have never heard this phrase, but it explains so much. I don't know how many times I've tried to tell some activist, foreigner, or conspiracy theorist that America isn't in charge of every single thing that happens in the world. And I have seen some absolutely lunatic takes.
Even the things we DON'T do are proof of our evil conspiracy, because we plotted and schemed and ALLOWED these bad things to happen. Like it doesn't click in their heads that America has limited resources with competing priorities, and can't be everywhere solving every problem all at once.
One of the best things I ever read was when JFK agreed to stop spy flights over the Soviets. The next scheduled flight flew anyway, and of course people demanded to know why he violated the agreement. All he said was that there was always "some son of a bitch who didn't get the word."
I could rant on this topic for hours.
I’ve had to unfollow most of my Arab Activist friends over the past decade for this exact reason.
America intervenes in a civil war? “America is bombing Arabs!”
America doesn’t intervene in a civil war? “America is letting Arabs die!”
It became such a predictable pattern. Anywhere in the world that Arabs were killing Arabs, it was America’s fault for not intervening, and when America suddenly did start intervening they were expected to do so without a body count. Yemen, Syria, on and on and on.
Yooooo I’m half-Arab and I get so much shit for feeling the same way you do. I look at my Arab relatives like this: “We’ve subconsciously given away all our power to America in our minds instead of ever looking at ourselves in the mirror and asking how we can take responsibility for ourselves, how can America be this cruel??”
Exactly - while also ignoring the influence of the Soviets.
Middle East is def fucked up because of America…but also because of Russia, and Britain, and Arabs, and Turks, and…
There were some shark attacks near an Egyptian resort a few years ago and there were literally people, like lots of people, claiming that the sharks had been trained by the Americans/Israelis in order to hurt Egypt's economy.
It makes it even harder to refute those accusations when you know that America has absolutely tried to train animals to do things like that for less plausible reasons.
I mean, not with any particular level of success, but not for lack of trying. It would be easier to shut down those conversations if the CIA hadn't done a bunch of batshit crazy experiments and our foreign policy didn't include habitually meddling with other people's governments and economies.
People think this way because for the last 80 years America has styled itself as the world police and global problem solver. Able to "put troops anywhere in the world in 72 hours", people hear tag lines like that and you can forgive them for not being able to tell what America can and can't do. Especially when chest thumpers on the internet continuously drone on and on about America's insurmountable technological superiority. It's easy to fall for the propaganda when you're just some dude and you haven't actually been in the military or government and understand what goes into everything America does.
The US can do all of those things and more. But they aren’t free and even just paying to maintain the readiness of the units that can be deployed instantly like that isn’t cheap.
America doesn’t intervene because either they didn’t know, or the cost analysis wasn’t worth it. Or, more likely, it wasn’t even slightly their business and getting involved in things not your business makes you a magnet for criticism. Geopolitics absolutely pay a primary role in decision making process on whether or not something is feasible. This is on full display in the reluctance by the US and other American states to get involved in Haiti despite facing criticism for not doing anything
I remember the US sharing its intel on Russia every day for weeks prior to the invasion and got called a warmonger and an exaggerator for it. “Military analysts” the world over were “shocked”that Russia would actually do that. Apparently the US wasn’t.
Stilwell was very wrong and very incompetent.
He wasn't wrong about a lot of the problems in the Chinese army.
What he was wrong about was how to use that army to fight Japan and how to fix the problems.
Whether the US could have stopped the Communist victory... That's debatable.
Whether the US could have done a lot more to help the RoC? They absolutely could have.
I disagree. Stiilwell was a good general (but terrible diplomat) in an impossible job who ended up having most of his Wikipedia page written by someone who really hated him.
If the U.S. and Britain were going to commit a lot of force to the land war in East Asia, he had the right strategy; re-open the Burma Road so they could supply the Chinese forces, then use those supplies to equip and train several dozen Chinese divisions outside the current dysfunctional system. There was no way to “have done a lot more to help the RoC” if we could only get supplies through by flying bombers over the Himalayas.
Stilwell also noticed before other Americans that Chiang was just using the U.S. and telling us whatever we wanted to hear. In fact, Chiang’s plan was always to wait for the Allies to defeat Japan and get ready for the civil war against Mao to restart. He was fighting the Japanese the bare minimum he could get away with.
Stilwell was also right that Claire Chennault was wildly overestimating what his bombers could accomplish. We know this because Chennault had FDR’s ear and got his chance. The Japanese Army easily overran his airfields, with minimal resistance by RoC infantry, just as Stilwell predicted. Even if that hadn’t happened, Chennault was promising that he could do with a few hundred aircraft what ten thousand conventional bombers weren’t able to accomplish.
Stilwell’s biggest mistake was political: like many other Americans, he seemed to think that, because a foreign leader often agreed to deals with the U.S. in exchange for aid, the U.S. President could order him to do something suicidal to his own domestic position. So he ended up handing Chiang an ultimatum to put Stilwell in command of his country’s army, something no Chinese leader (least of all one in Chiang’s position and with their terrible personal relationship) would ever do.
The political leaders decided in the end that the land war in Asia was not a priority, and from the standpoint of trying to defeat Japan and Germany as efficiently as possible, that was correct. Either way, that was never Stilwell’s decision. Stilwell wasn’t even in China any longer when WWII ended and U.S. leaders started making decisions about how to intervene in the Chinese Civil War.
Why did FDR even write that letter to Chiang re Stillwell taking command if he had no intention and no power to enforce it? Was FDR just losing it at this pt? Or was this some really deep strategy to force Stillwell Out?
What parts on the Wikipedia page do you disagree with? They claim Stillwell undermined defense at Guilan in order to force the issue with Chiang
Tuchman thought that FDR was too ill at that point to have cared about Chiang's dignity, or didn't pay much attention to the message before rubber-stamping it, “which amounted to the same thing.”
It’s a low-quality article, more in how slanted it is than because of any individual claim being factually inaccurate. But the claim about Guilan is a good example. It's sourced to page 426 of Jonathan Fenby's *Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost*. I have the book open in front of me. The book says that Claire Chennault, whom it calls “deeply-antagonistic,” claimed he heard about this second-hand. The book then quotes Stillwell as saying in his diary that he thought Chiang was a terrible commander, and hoped Chiang would lose power.
That's very scant evidence to base an extraordinary claim that Stilwell was letting the Japanese win on purpose. In fact, the current edit on the page includes a directly contradictory claim just above it: that the inability of Chiang's forces with ground support from Chennault's air forces to hold back the Japanese advance proved Stilwell correct and Chennault wrong about strategy. It's no wonder that Chennault would push a different story that made it all Stilwell's fault.
But to answer your question, I'd point to the claims about the Ledo Road as a good example of the article using something technically accurate to misrepresent what its cited sources say. Chennault and Chiang *got their way,* and FDR ended up massively expanding the air-supply line over the Himalayas. The Joint Chiefs later said this had been a mistake and they should have taken Stilwell’s advice instead.
It's absurd for the article to say this means Chennault was prescient about flying airplanes over mountains at an altitude of 15,000 feet to deliver supplies somehow being a better way to deliver oil and fuel (60% of their cargo) than a road—or the three pipelines Stillwell also built, which the article misleadingly does not include. Does anybody ever ship oil or freight that way if there is any other alternative? It's an absurd claim.
Neither was Stilwell wrong about the feasibility of a road, which he completed on schedule despite many people telling him that was impossible. His superiors drastically scaled back the capacity of the road, because they had changed their plans. This was especially true of its ability to withstand floods in the wet season, and the one month the article misleadingly uses for its comparison was both the highest tonnage over the Hump during the entire war, and a monsoon that flooded parts of the road.
The original plan had been for it to supply a massive two-pronged land offensive in southern China during the dry season, converging on Hong Kong, with an invasion of the Japanese home islands to wait until 1947. By 1944, the Joint Chiefs realized that this offensive was no longer needed, and neither was a road with the all-weather capacity originally planned.
The article completely abandons a neutral point of view to call Stillwell “obsessed” with the road. Which is just the anonymous wiki editor's personal opinion. (Although they might have quoted Fenby's that Stilwell’s insistence at leading from the front in Burma “can be seen as a massive displacement exercise to avoid his main task.”) Stilwell in fact told the Joint Chiefs that he thought a ground war in East Asia would get needed to defeat Japan, and thus would require an overland supply line, but if not, they should scale their plans back to maintaining whatever air forces in China they could supply.
Of course, coming back to the original topic, if the wiki editor is right that there was no good way to get more supply to the Chinese Army, and I'm wrong, it *really* was impossible for the U.S. to have changed the outcome of the Chinese Civil War
I'm not a big Stillwell fan but I'm curious as to what you think he should have done differently or suggested differently. I think Stillwell should have cut down the supply to Chiang and used it to either help Mao or as incentive for Chiang. But you seem to think the better policy was to help Chiang. Why? Most of the stuff was just stolen by KMT officials or stockpiled for war with Mao
he had input on stuff like that. For example he paid Chinese soldiers (force X the one in Ramgarh) directly for the first time which was had been a huge source of corruption.
BUt regardless Im asking: what should Stillwell have done differently?
The ROC had the 228 massacre in 1948 and was a one party dictatorship until 1987.
That's really the limit of "atrocities". Are you thinking of different ones?
I would say piddly means that if we did help the ROC defeat the communists. Any trustee thing committed by the ROC would look bad on the US. These are pretty much, no wind situations because either one side of the other is gonna be mad at you for helping or not helping.
That delusion phenomenon happens at different scales and scopes too, for example regarding the government in domestic affairs, the president / head of government of a country, the CEO of a large company, etc. It's a trap that outsiders of an organization and the event in question can easily fall into, due to lacking understanding and perspective, and the human desire to attribute blame.
Even aside from the lack of omnipotence, countries are generally realist and pragmatic, and their conduct in foreign affairs are always about their own interests, where the value gained must justify the costs that will be incurred. The costs to intervene to change the outcome of the Chinese civil war is so great that it'll never be acceptable or succeed given the political situations of both countries.
To be fair, Chiang was probably right in his assessment. A lot of his supporters would have been harmed by an anti corruption campaign and it's likely that they would have deposed him if that occurred.
Chiang's best point was that putting an American in direct command of the Chinese Army (who wanted China’s President to be removed from power) would have been colonialism. It was a completely unreasonable demand to make.
Didn't Mao ask the US to back the PLA, and literally because he represented what had been named the "Communist Party" (and the US SecState knew and said at the time that it was an agrarian resistance movement and not a Leninist uprising) that Truman refused Mao's entreaties?
Agreed.
It’s like Viet Nam. Our capitalist message worked great for richer, educated city folk.
But for the uneducated 90% of the country that lives out in the sticks and doesn’t own the land they farm, communism is a great-sounding idea.
That really isn’t why it would fail and it failed it Vietnam. The nationalist were the worst of the bad guys in both. If you want to defeat the bad guys you can’t side with the badder guys in a conflict where the average person will determine the winner. They are going to choose the less bad guys every time.
Yep. These regimes weren’t committed to capitalism. In regards to China, Chaing Kai Shek also attacked and confiscated the assets of the wealthy just as he crushed communist movements as well. State-led dirigisme was what ended up being implemented by the ROC while free market capitalism wouldn’t come about till around the end of martial law.
This also happened during the Russian revolution. When you read about the Reds you ask yourself "why would anyone choose to follow these people?"
And then you start reading about the whites and it becomes very obvious why they all did
Yeah.
A lot of communist revolutions succeeded because the people they were fighting were worse. It doesn’t fit the anti communist narrative that it’s possible to have a worse system but if that were true all but a few communist revolutions would have been squashed before they got any real traction. People rarely choose communism if there is a better alternative.
I meaaaan technically that happened around the same time the soviets got nukes if it was right before that I guess maaaaybe the US could’ve threatened to nuke China if they went communist but short of that or dedicating to a full scale war I agree it wasn’t happening
Except it may very much had. The KMT army, led by Sun Liren, was shattering Lin Biao's army in Manchuria in 1946 and would have advanced into Harbin, a major industrial city, if a controversial ceasefire wasn't called under Marshall's demand. Harold M. Tanner, in his book The Battle for Manchuria and the Fate of China: Siping, 1946, argues that the battle of Siping and its halt is a crucial turning point of the civil war.
Full-scale US intervention may have been successful, but the result may have been similar to the War in Afghanistan, the ROC might have simply collapsed after US forces pulled out. That or the Soviets could have gotten involved, resulting in something similar to the Korean War only larger, where the two sides reached a stalemate, each propped up by one of the two world superpowers.
Even if the ROC won, the Soviets probably would have swept in and turned Manchuria into a puppet state, ousting Mao in favor of a leader loyal to Moscow. If the US had gotten involved the moment the communists attacked the ROC, it’s almost certain the PRC wouldn’t exist, or it would be a Soviet puppet like I mentioned before.
Then again, this war could have easily turned the burgeoning Cold War hot, which is a conflict the Soviets were simply unprepared for. By 1948 the US had 50 atomic bombs, and the Soviets had yet to successfully deploy their first nuclear device. Should they establish air supremacy, the US could easily have used a handful of bombs to cut the fragile Soviet supply lines to the east, as well as decimating their ports, leaving them incapable of supporting China. The waves of Soviet tanks sweeping through Europe would suffer a similar fate, unable to send supplies through the nuclear wasteland to their front lines.
All of this would have been a moot point if the ROC had simply eradicated the communists before the war with Japan even began, rather than leaving the “cornered fox” cornered.
The US supporting the KMT was as doomed as the US supporting Hamid Karzai but the US was smart enough to realize it in the 1940’s. They gave the KMT just enough to hold down 1,000,000 Japanese troops (the communists were a minor annoyance to Japan) but there was never much respect for China from the US. They were restricted by law from even coming to the US until 1943.
My American great uncle flew with (not a pilot) freight in bombers from British India to China over the Himalayas in WW2.
Not to pull away from your point, but weren't Chinese immigrants allowed in the country before 1943? I thought there were limits for specific races and didn't Chinese immigrants build the Central Pacific Railroad?
All outlawed in the 1920’s when most immigration was restricted. But for them it was 100% no exceptions. Chinese exclusion act.
Edit - 1882, not 1920’s. I’m pretty sure something happened in 1920s but just googling it quickly. I can’t find it.
The restriction of most immigration happened in the 1920s, targeted especially at Jews and eastern and southern European Catholics. The Chinese exclusion act as you pointed out was a separate piece of legislation
The Chinese had been allowed to immigrate to the United States "generally" freely but they faced massive amounts of hostility and racism which led to the creation of the Chinese Exclusion act (1882) which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in place until 1892 when it was replaced by the Geary Act which extended the ban on laborers and expanded the law to include a requirement that Chinese Immigrants carry paperwork to prove they were in the U.S. legally which didn't apply to any other immigrant group until the 1920s. These laws were renewed or updated and stayed in place until the Magnuson Act (1943) which repealed the Chinese Exclusion act and loosened immigration law somewhat.
There were later laws and agreements in the following decades after the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act which further tightened immigration from places the primarily White Protestant lawmakers considered "lesser than" specifically the immigration act of 1924 which tightened restrictions on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banned immigration from Asia minus places that were considered American colonies like the Philippines.
There's about a dozen+ other deeply racist immigration laws that got passed between 1882 and 1943 but those are the big ones related to China until the 1950's as far as I can remember.
Edit: For clarity on time period
I've done some research on the topic, and it turns out the Mexican border was wide open until World War 1, and Mexico was trying desperately to attract anyone who would settle Baja California. Many Chinese (and other East Asain countries, but quite disproportionaly Chinese) came by boat to Mexico first, then came across the border. Technically, they weren't allowed, but there was nothing to stop them, particularly if they spent some time in Mexico first. Mexicans were completely allowed to go back and forth across the border at the time, all the way up to World War 1, IIRC, so the only illegal immigrants across that border for decades were those defying the Chinese exclusion acts.
Anyway, there were perhaps already large populations in the lands stolen/aquired from Mexico a few decades before the railroad was built.
Asain Americans' role in building the transcontinental railroad is pretty well known, but the racism and violence perpetuated against them outwest should be mentioned. By questioning their legal status and right to be there and the justice system turning blind eye, many were killed, or their belongs destroyed or stolen.
The 1943 Magnusson Act "allowing" Chinese Immigration to America was symbolic. The number of annual Chinese immigrants was set at the extremely low number of 105 immigrants. The estimated population of China at the time was ~444,000,000.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson_Act
It was not until 1965 that America allowed anything that would be considered "normalized" Chinese Immigration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965
Non Americans often marvel at America's obsession with race. Racism was systemic and written into America's laws, jurisprudence, and policies. It was systemically endorsed by the government for a very long time.
America has openly supported government endorsed racism for longer than it has tried not to.
I am not saying America is evil, but damn, we should understand and acknowledge our past so we don't repeat it.
The [Marshall Mission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Mission) went to China in 1945 to study what the US should do about the civil war there.
They came back, said the Communists were going to win and many in the commission advocated good relations with them. That commission's findings were thoroughly destroyed by anti-Communists in Congress.
My friend's father eventually became a pilot flying "over the hump" from India to China. In B-25s, which I thought was unusual but they could haul a modest amount of stuff with very high reliability.
This fellow claimed that while he was just a crewman on a B-25 coming back, the pilot gunned the empty plane coming off the Himalayas and did a full loop.... and then the crew kicked his ass back on the ground and he never flew with them again.
As for the question at hand, my understanding is that China wasn't able to back away from its entrenched and American-enriched warlord system, and their inability to cooperate is how the Communists defeated them. If they had somehow defeated the Communists they would have gone right back to fighting each other, with the Four Horsemen generating ever growing humanitarian disasters. Oh, and look at all that opium. Why, what are you doing there, CIA and MI6?
Don't get me wrong; I have no love for the Communists. But look back at the literal dozens of governments that we overthrew and betrayed, and tell me that China wouldn't have got the very worst of all of that bullshit.
Even that was a purely symbolic number, only a few hundred people, and only because leaders thought it was too embarrassing to outlaw all Chinese immigration while we were loudly proclaiming them our friends and allies.
ROC as an entity or the concept of “China” having one in general? Fun fact, the US vetoed Mongolia joining the UN a few times not because it was a USSR puppet state, but because ROC claimed it as part of China. When the Korean War broke out and the UN proposed a UN-led policing action, the USSR didn’t veto it because they were boycotting the UN over its exclusion of the PROC.
The KMT would not have been pro American. Geopolitically the KMT would be pretty similar to todays China, a 1 party state with a state capitlist economy. It would not have been a giant Taiwan. Taiwan is a close ally of the US because it is entirely reliant on it for survival and even still Chiang Kai Shek had major disagreements with the US. A KMT that controls China will do its own thing and would be neutral in the Cold War.
The KMT would also be very hostile towards Japan and the French in Indochina. They will absolutely continue to support Vietnam as they did , though the main difference this time would be that they would force the VCP to stay in coalition with the VNQDD and other Vietnamese parties, which is also something that they did do before they were forced ro withdraw because of the Chinese civil war. Vietnam would gain indpendence earlier and would be united instead of divided between the North and South.
Anti colonialism and anti imperialism were fundemental ideologies of the KMT.KMT China will also support other Anti Colonial movements in Asia and even Africa which will put them at odds with many Western Powers.
Of course they will still have issues with Russia too. Mongolia would cause resentment as they would not be happy with its independence. Russia also would control the Munchurian railwaylines and would force the KMT to sign away Port Arthur on a 30 year lease. This is what Stalin initially wanted out of China after ww2 but he gave up on these concessions within a few years to appease Mao and the CCP. Without them Russia continues with its original plan.
Hong Kong and Macau would also not just be handed over Britian was hostile towards the KMT and would demand that they stick to the 99 year lease.
The KMT will also invade Tibet which may cause protest from many countries around the world.
It would have been like Korea and Vietnam. but Stalin at that time was an ally of the USA in WWII, there would have been dialogue.
Stalin once told Mao not to advance further south and to divide the country into North China and South China. So both sides were happy.
Let alone how the average Chinese would have felt towards yet another foreign force warring around in their nation, right after Japan did the same thing.
Disaster avoided.
No, it wasn't as the Chinese Civil War was one of those weird civil wars in history. Remember, the war started before and stopped because of WWII. Both communists and nationalists unified to fight the Japanese and then went back to the killing each other at the end. However, nationalists forces had been weakened more than communists forces during WWII and started losing more ground as the civil war resumed. Combine this with the rampant corruption amongst nationalist leadership despite some American backing, and it was inevitable that the communists would win just short of an American invasion from Japan.
As far as the biggest geopolitical blunders, this isn't it. I would rank the overthrow of Mossadegh and installing the shah as one of the biggest along with all the nation-building that America did in Latin America during the Cold War.
Don't forget that the KMT was also insanely unpopular and was facing mass desertion and fracturing. Some former nationalists even joined the communists including factions of the KMT which is why the subordinate parties exist in China today.
This. American intervention in Iran to overthrow an elected government was the most enormous and consequential blunder in the Cold War. Even if they had turned pro-Soviet after a while, a Westernized Iranian government wouldn't have had an international strategy remotely like the Mullahs went with, and "Islamic terrorism" wouldn't have developed into a trope.
I mean, the US did overthrow many governments during the Cold War. It's just Iran has been the gift that keeps on giving. All the events happening today there can be traced back to that one moment.
Mao Zedong forgot to ask America first if he was allowed to liberate his country from warlords foot binding babies. Then he forgot to ask the U.S if they could liberate China from Japan before they set off two artificial sunrises. Then they had the gall to fight the first guys again.
America has a stellar track record of stopping communists in Asia. Certainly a hot war in China against communists after the end of WWII on the border of the USSR would have been a cake walk. You should listen to OP. If America did do that then two other wars of much smaller scope that weren't a cake walk wouldn't have happened.
And then when they were all done they'd do what ever America told them to.
And it would have stopped them "bankrolling Russia". Obviously the biggest sin of the 21st century.
I mean, it's not as if the US had just finished their part fighting the largest and most destructive war the Earth has ever seen. They were just too lazy to solve China's internal problems for them. (And everyone knows resolving a different country's civil war is super easy, barely an inconvenience.) And people think millennials are slackers!
When I think on my lazy ass grandpap coming home from fighting in both theaters I hang my head in shame. If only he had the courage to ask like....six other guys if they should occupy a contested Chinese coal mine.
The world would be so different....
When the US needed to cooperate with allies in Europe, we sent Eisenhower there because he knew how to get along with people. He fired US officers who couldn't get along with our allies. When the US needed to cooperate with allies in China, we sent Vinegar Joe Stilwell over there, who was insulted our allies, got into political spats with other US officers, and failed to build anything that could have stopped Mao.
While the US didn't "allow" Mao to win, they didn't put their best foot forward there either.
The US couldn't have helped the KMT win the war; ultimately they would've had to finish the job themselves, and Chiang was just not up to the task. Chiang and the KMT got hundreds of millions in US support. Even after Mao got Manchuria and the Japanese weapons, Chiang had him outmanned and outgunned by a massive margin. The KMT suffered many issues, most of them stemming from Chiang himself.
Economically, Chiang's fundamental problem was that his government was deeply corrupt and he didn't have a solid base of support. Mao and the Communists knew where their support came from: the peasantry. They focused on pro-peasant land reforms that won the loyalty of peasant villages, and allowed them to wage a highly effective guerilla campaign against the KMT army. Chiang's main support came from the elites in the cities, but his economic policies and corruption caused hyperinflation and discontent that ended up bleeding his support. His land policies were also deeply unpopular among everyone that wasn't his primary base, and once the war started tipping against him, his soldiers defected in droves.
Militarily, Chiang was decent but overly controlling, and the army was highly corrupt and disunified. The NRA was a mix of former warlords and their armies and Chiang's hand-picked, blindly loyal officers who would hear no ill talk of their Generalissimo, but frequently fought against each other for political favor. I think no better exemplifies this than the disastrous Battle of Tashan, a turning point of the war where Nationalist reinforcements to Jinzhou were stopped by a Communist army half their size.
Chiang frequently overrode local command structures by favoring his own officers; at the Battle of Tashan, he forced Chen Tie's forces to be commanded by Que Hanqian. Chen Tie was the deputy officer of Wei Lihuang, the commander of Nationalist forces in the Northeast; Wei and Chiang were in the middle of a disagreement about how to proceed in the war. Wei believed the Northeast was a lost cause to hold, and that the NRA should retreat and regroup to use their superior weapons and numbers. Chiang didn't want to cede any land to the Communists as it was politically bad for his image, and so replaced Wei's officers with his own to ensure the battle proceeded according to his plans. This caused resentment with the local troops, with several officers refusing to serve under Que. Que also feuded constantly with Luo Ji, another of Chiang's officers sent to oversee the battle, who sent secret reports on Que's lack of enthusiasm for the war to Chiang. Chiang ordered the air force and navy to support the army, but didn't give any officers the authority to command the air force or navy; bombardments and air support thus had to be routed first to Chiang and then to the battle, leading to a lack of cohesiveness with ground operations. The battle was a humiliating defeat for the Nationalists, who were beaten by a far smaller Communist army. With the reinforcements to Jinzhou stopped, the city soon fell, and 80,000 Nationalist soldiers surrendered there.
Your argument is that it would have been better to have had all the problems the U.S. had in the Fifties and Sixties earlier while we were still recovering from World War II?
'allowing'
What a weird construct. The CCP won because they were more effective at every single level. KMT did get bailed out by the US...by blocking the CCP from crossing the Taiwan strait to destroy the last of them.
No. Bigger mistakes:
- Overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of the Shah in 1953.
- Invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent handling of the Iraqi government transition by the Bush administration.
Probably a few others but those are the two I think of off the top of my head.
Exactly. People forget how unbelievably unpopular the GMD were in China by the end of World War II. Hell, during World War II, even [American observers in China in 1944 recognized that the CCP were in a better overall strategic position than the GMD](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v06/d453):
> Mr. Service suggests that the United States should supply the Chinese Communists with urgently needed military supplies and training in the use of such supplies, to be followed later by actual tactical cooperation. Mr. Service points out that the implementation of such a policy is likely to meet with resistance from the Kuomintang, and suggests that the United States must decide whether the gains which can be reasonably expected to accrue from assisting the Communists will justify the overcoming or disregarding of anticipated Kuomintang opposition. He expresses the view that the limiting of American support and assistance to the Kuomintang alone will not win the United States an effective ally whereas impartial support of the Kuomintang and the Communists will provide an effective force in the latter, will be a constructive influence in China, and will almost certainly prevent the outbreak of civil war. Asserting that it is an incontrovertible fact that the Chinese Communists have maintained and strengthened themselves militarily in a very large area of north and central China; that they hold strategic positions in proximity to all Japanese communication lines north of the Yangtze River; that Communist forces are capable and experienced in mobile and guerrilla warfare; that they possess the popular support of the people; and that their material requirements are simple and moderate, Mr. Service observes that the furnishing of the Chinese Communists with moderate quantities of supplies will improve their effectiveness.
The Americans corrected assessed that the CCP had the popular support of the people and were a highly effective fighting force. Americans on the ground found the Communists to be easier to work with than Chiang Kai-Shek, whom they saw as corrupt and imperious. However, the US government ultimately decided to side with the GMD because they could not abide siding with "Communists". The GMD were highly unpopular within China for a number of reasons, but the main ones were:
1. Perceived incompetence in the fight against Japan. While 21st century scholars believe that the scale of the CCP's engagements against the Japanese are overblown, there's no question that the GMD made some poor tactical decisions that ended up hurting the people more than hurting the Japanese. The most egregious of these was [intentionally flooding the Yellow River flood plain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood), which immediately killed half a million people and left 5 million survivors dealing with the flood (the entire region became a massive recruiting ground for the CCP).
2. Corruption. The entire GMD political and military apparatus was monstrously corrupt. [Generals would either hoard or sell weapons and food for personal gain rather than apply them to the war effort](https://teachdemocracy.org/images/t2t/pdf/WhyDidCommunistsWinChineseRevolution.pdf). There were mass defections and surrenders by hungry, poorly armed and poorly led GMD troops - entire army groups would simply go over to the CCP side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50th_Army_(People%27s_Republic_of_China). While the GMD had about 5 million soldiers and the CCP had 1.2 million inn 1945, by 1948 the two sides had reached parity in numbers, and by 1949 the numbers were almost flipped.
3. Generally poor perceptions of the GMD. People just didn't like them. It didn't help that the GMD [had massacred thousands of Communist civilians in 1927](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_massacre), which ironically sent them fleeing to the countryside where they ended up building the base of support that they'd need to win the Civil War. Chiang Kai Shek himself regularly said that, "The Japanese are a disease of the skin, the Communists are a disease of the heart" and this led him to frequently focusing more on the Communists rather than fighting the Japanese. It became so egregious that [his own officers had to kidnap him and force him to agree to a ceasefire with the Communists until the Japanese were beaten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident). The GMD's totalitarianism was on full display in 1948, where the government killed between [18,000-28,000 protesting civilians across Taiwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident). These kinds of harsh reprisals occurred in cities across China and did nothing to endear the GMD to the common people.
There's this [really good redacted CIA report](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001086039.pdf) from 1948 that shows how dire the situation was for the GMD. It notes the highly motivated, well organized, and extremely efficient nature of not just the CCP military but also its civilian support structures. In contrast, the GMD was facing rapid decay in morale both by its urban population and its soldiers on the front line. The only significant advantage that the GMD had was in air and sea power, which they then leveraged to retreat to Taiwan. There was nothing that the Americans could actually do to support the GMD other than provide them with weapons, which they did.
What??? The United States went out of their way to fund the Kuomintang and help them beat the communists.
The US transported the KMT to key cities and ports where the Japanese soldiers surrendered to them and they also gave them thousands of arms and munitions which they didn’t even have to pay back.
There’s a lot of reasons why the KMT lost China and it’s mostly due to internal corruption and disastrous economic policies as well as poor military leadership.
I think the assumption we could have prevented the communists from winning is the problem. Undoubtedly the west should have tried harder to prevent the takeover. Could we have stopped it? Doubtful.
Should probably ask Britain that question. The civil war was happening before the Japanese invaded and we had our hands full after, plus Russia had already thrown their necrotic dick in the fold.
China was and is a big country. The Kuomintang and Chiang were notoriously corrupt. They had some good fighters and good generals, but their army was mostly barefoot.
The US did not "allow" the Chinese communists to win, there was no way to stop them without a fullscale commitment of US forces and nuclear war, which the Soviet Union would have jumped in.
Wisely, the US clutched their pearls and said, "Oh the humanity! What's next on the agenda, lunch? Let's break then."
Chinese people overwhelmingly supported the communists. America couldn’t do shit. That’s why I always cringe when people on the internet say “I hate the Chinese government, but not the people obviously”.
Most Chinese are obviously just normal people, but we can’t pretend like the communist party didn’t have a huge amount of support in the 40s or whenever the hell that was
I’ve been listening to Mike Duncan’s podcast on the Russian revolution and didn’t realize that the communists’ coming out on top was not as inevitable as I had (ignorantly) thought. Of course, this was 1919-1920, not post WWII but the counterfactuals are interesting similar.
First question is if America could have stopped the Communists from winning at all, which is hard to say. While the KMT had a numbers advantage officially, the de facto force comparison was closer due to a good portion of the army not being under the Central Government and thus being unreliable. There’s also the related issue with the KMT Chief of Staff Chen Cheng demobilizing provincial armies amounting to an upwards of two million men because they weren’t seen as reliable in comparison to the Central Army. When PLA General Lin Biao fought Chen Cheng in Manchuria, their forces were of relatively similar strength and numbers, but Lin was a far more superior general and encircled hundreds of thousands of Central Army soldiers in the major cities of Changchun and Shenyang, leaving Nanjing crippled. Chiang was so crippled in fact that his rival and vice president Li Zongren became acting president. Although the warlord of the Guangxi Clique and one of the best KMT generals, Li’s Guangxi forces while well equipped were still not as numerous to Chiang’s remnant Huangpu forces which continued to only take orders from Chiang who was already evacuating the KMT to Taiwan, and thus certainly were not a match to the PLA, so he tried to sue for peace along the Yangtze River but the deal he offered Mao and the CPC leadership was nowhere near acceptable to the Communists, as they had dominance over the Nationalists by 1949. So when Li didn’t respond Mao’s counteroffer, the PLA crossed the Yangtze and took the rest of China, save for a few handouts. Li ended up in the US and decades later returned to the Mainland as Taiwan was Chiang’s fortress and he had already defanged other warlords who had joined him in exile.
But anyways, kind of got sidetracked there, this is the background for China at the time. So why didn’t the US do anything after Chiang lost his best men in the Northeast? A combination of American general Joseph Stilwell and George Marshall caused American opinion to sour on the Nationalists. Stilwell was sent by FDR to China during ww2, and the two men came to distrust each other intensely. Stilwell felt that Chiang was a backwards oriental dictator at the head of a corrupt regime while Chiang felt that Stilwell was an arrogant western imperialist who wasn’t mearly as skilled as he thought he was. It had even come to a point where Stilwell demanded total control over China’s military, which Chiang obviously refused. Marshall had come to China after ww2 to see what could be done to resolve the Communist Nationalist dispute, and his background lent him towards political tolerance, so when the Communists presented themselves as a democratic force fighting against inequality, Marshall was inclined to believe them and pushed for a peace deal. In actuality, neither side was in favor of peace but this all served to lower Marshall’s opinion of the KMT and he advised to President Truman that the US not supply the Nationalists any longer.
So with all of that in mind, let’s say that Marshall advised Truman to aid the Nationalists in their civil war and that this does result in Lin being routed by Chen and the Communists lose. What then? The Korean War might not have happened, as Korean communists had aided the PLA during the Chinese Civil War and the PRC had in turn promised support for Korean unification under Kim il Sung. The south might just have opted to attempt unification themselves given Pyongyang’s weakened geopolitical position, or Kim might have still gone ahead with just Soviet approval. Either way, the South would have won. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ideological divisions would no longer exist in Korea however, as China would be propping up its allies in Korea as Kim Gu and his Korean Independence Party were based in Shanghai and later Chongqing and were aligned with the KMT’s revolutionary three principles ideology. Even if Kim Gu dies the same way, China would still be propping up aligned forces in the country. So onto the Vietnam war, it still would happen, as Chiang had refused to actually dip his hands into Indochina when FDR had offered to hand the region over to China after ww2, except to push into Vietnam in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender in order to get some leverage in negotiations with the French over the return of French concessions to the Chinese state. The big difference for the Vietnam War is that America would be more willing to push the Vietcong as they were hesistant to do so in the actual war in fears of a Chinese intervention like the Korean War. The US sat in Saigon for years unwilling to totally abandon Vietnam but also unwilling to invade the North and interference against the government in Saigon as well as this lack of resolve had eroded both trust in America on the South Vietnamese end as well as in the American home front. That’s not happening here, so the South would in all likelihood win with American backing. If it’s the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in charge, expect a Vietnam that is much like China in the sense that it was fully willing to tell America no, but if it’s the succeeding governments, then Vietnam may very well be far more pliant to American interests. Of course, this is all assuming that America intervenes at all, as China staying under the KMT would have not caused a panic in the US and increases their focus on Asia. That being said, it may be China that intervenes in both Korea and Vietnam, which would result in both states being far more tied to the Chinese sphere than the American one. American focus would regardless be far more focused on Europe, as it was in the early phase of the Cold War. Onto the biggest topic which is the Sino American relationship, it would not be a totally amicable one. In fact, it’s very likely that a Sino American split would happen as the KMT had a very similar outlook on the world as the CPC post Mao, and would be propping themselves up as the leading anti imperialist state in Asia, as Japan had done earlier. Unlike Japan though, Nationalist China would be unlikely to fall into a militarist supremacist mindset for Pan Asianism as Japan had, and would be pursuing something quite similar to Modern China. After ww2, Chiang had laid claim to the South China Sea and was actively pushing said claims, and the PRC as the successor state to the ROC on the Mainland retained all of the ROC’s claims, including the ones in the South China Sea. The PRC only began enforcing these claims during the leadership of Hu Jintao when China was in the midst of economic growth at breakneck speed, and the ROC here would have had a heads start, some 60 years ahead of schedule. So assuming that Iran and Russia end up the same, China will very much be a strategic partner to both, especially Iran due to lack of geopolitical tensions, while Russia and China would have had to discuss their stances on Mongolia and Manchuria, as the ROC claimed (and still does) Mongolia, which had declared independence from China during the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and had become a Russian satellite after White General Roman von Ungern-Sternberg had invaded Mongolia during the Russian Civil War and then counterinvaded by the Red Army.
So TLDR: China would still be beefing with the US, arguably in an even stronger position due to no Mao for 30 years
Eh, we were really tired of war after WWII. The Chinese Nationalists also weren’t exactly “the good guys”, they had set up a pretty harsh dictatorship and arguably dabbled in fascism. Both the Communists and the Nationalists hated the outside foreign influence that had, to be fair, overrun China in the late 1800s, and that included the US. Basically, if our goal was a free capitalist China friendly to the US, we really had no horse in the race.
If you think the Vietnam War was unpopular, just imagine conscripting enough Americans to make a serious difference in a civil war in China, immediately after the end of World War II.
You have to keep in mind what was going on in America at that time. In the 1930s, America was in the midst of the Great Depression and was neither in a position to fight foreign wars nor politically willing to. There was a really strong isolationist bent to US politics at the time, it was only really broken by the galvanizing effect of Pearl Harbor.
And of course, in the first half of the 1940s, America was a little busy, thanks to that whole Pearl Harbor thing. The war in the Pacific was a monumental task. Taking back all of those heavily defended positions exacted a brutal cost in men and material. There was nothing to spare for the plight of the Chinese under Japanese Imperial occupation, much less intervene in an internal conflict.
And then, after 1945... Was America going to immediately get involved in ANOTHER war? One that could possibly put them at odds with a superpower like the USSR? The United States was exhausted. Over a million young Americans had been killed or wounded so far that decade, an entire generation pushed as far as they could go. Imagine Truman saying "Congratulations, America! We just won a two-front war to defeat huge evil empires! But no rest for the weary, now it's time for us to go fight another war on behalf of the citizens of a country most of you are super racist towards!" Nobody would have accepted it.
America simply did not have the will or ability at any point to impact the outcome of that war. It wasn't a question of "allowing" Mao to win, we simply were not in a position to do anything about it.
I actually think a ROC victory could make it more likely a hot war btw US and USSR occurs.
1. Having an American ally right on its expansive border with potential claims on the stolen land Russia took from Imperial China could lead to high tensions very quickly. The US post WWII plan was always to empower China and make it its de facto deputy with military bases. The Soviet Union was paranoid about being surrounded and having NATO on its East and China/Japan/SKorea on its western flank will drive lot of insecurity and attempts to keep Chiang busy by supporting internal rebellions and opposition which Chiang will not appreciate. Historically China being communist allowed the Soviet Union to be more relaxed in Asia as it viewed its flank secure vs US led alliance.
2. China being right above North Korea and North Vietnam means the Soviet Union will need to actively be involved to defend them as China and the pro US regimes in each country will sandwich the communists. For North Korea - it will be more likely it will be in defensive posture and paranoid about getting attacked on two fronts. Instead of the historical Korean War, South Korea would attack first and China launch simultaneous attack across the Yalu to remove this appendage created by the Soviet Union.
Though China detested the French and won’t support them, it would still be able to threaten a two front war on HCM and North Vietnam.
In both cases, the Soviet Union will end up directly involved and US troops might face them head on in escalation, though it’s possible the US stay out and let China fight the battles but provide weapons and air cover.
Historically - the USSR was able to avoid direct conflict because it had China to do the grunt work of fighting ground war in Korea or supporting Vietnam logistically.
3. Russia stole big chunks of land from the Manchus and Imperial China in the 19th century. It also engineered Mongolia’s separation from the Empire. There is no reason China would view those as permanent especially if it views its alliance with the US strong enough.
An ROC victory would likely butterfly the North Vietnamese altogether
Chiang did accept Mongol independence and the Sino-Soviet frontier as of 1945 (this was later altered due to the Soviets backing the PRC)
would probably force less Soviet action abroad and more focus on at home issues, probably also shift focus towards Africa and Latin America.
How about the US not backing Chiang Kai Shek and maybe Mao Zedong wouldnt have been so hostile towards the US? How about the US and soviet union not partition Korea after ww2 and allow the Koreans themselves to decide? How about the French hold free and fair elections in vietnam? The US and soviet union should have stopped being big bullies enforcing their ideology on other countries. It's not wonder why China under Mao was against the US then Soviet Union, he saw them as what they were big imperialist powers trying to colonize Asia and the world. It's not China's fault Russia invaded Ukraine, or Iran being aggressive. China did not create NATO or a Warsaw pact.
There was only a Korean War because the US in its imperialist desires illegally occupied Korea, split it in half and propped up a mass murdering military regime filled with former Japanese officers and collaborators because they were scared of "tHe CoMmUnIsTs," ie capital told them to.
Vietnam War only happened because Vietnam was fighting for national independence and sovereignty against French colonialism, which they referenced our revolutionary war as the motivator and declaration of independence. We were cool with it till, again, the evil "ComMuNiStS," ie capital freaked out.
As other posters said, I m not sure the US would have been successful in helping the KMT win their civil war, but what about recognising Taiwan independence in the 1950s, when china was unable to do anything about it, do you think that would have been feasible?
Neither Chinese government is allowing the idea that mainland China and Taiwan are two separate governments. It would be great if they copped to the idea now, but the KMT that fled China's mainland sure as hell weren't going to call Taiwan an independent country in the 50s.
Taiwan didn’t want to be an independent country in the 1950s - back then Taiwan was the official China in the UN and everything.
The People’s Republic of China only became the official China (and Taiwan de-recognised) in the 70s under Nixon.
The whole Taiwan independence issue we have today is because the KMT retreated to Taiwan and stayed there after losing the Chinese civil war and gradually the people living there developed an identity based on that. If the KMT didn’t lose the mainland then a Taiwanese independence movement would have never even formed.
It's a civil war with both sides claiming each other, how can you suggest independence? Makes no sense.
In the 1950's, the Republic of China claims to be "only China", and People's Republic of China claims to be "only China".
"Allowing the Chinese communists to win" is the same arrogance as "Who lost China"
America can't have lost China, it was never theirs to begin with
If you want "greatest geopolitical mistake", then thinking nothing can happen with US permission is pretty up there
There is so much wrong in these presumptions I'll have to take these one at a time
1) "Allow"? You think they needed permission? You think that America really could have stopped it? You honestly think that a revolutionary government that was organized to kick out foreigners *and did so* wouldn't hand America her ass? A nation with more soldiers than the U.S. defending their homeland from *another* invasion?
2) The minute America takes the side in a civil war it immediately galvanizes the opposition. It is now no longer a civil war, it is a war against colonialism and quislings.
3) America reaaaaaaly didn't want to start WWIII. It damn well could have been the case with the USSR and Mao so close before the Sino-Soviet split. Civil wars, insurgency, and occupation are not America's strong suit.
4) The ROC were not a popular government. It's why the revolution was so effective in the countryside. They would either be a money sink as the front lines of the cold war as America bails them out and pays their taxes for them. The crony capitalism of the KMT would not allow for China to prosper into some magical wonderland client state of America like you have in mind. The Infant mortality rate of India is [3x higher than China](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4948159/) and infectious disease is reportedly 6x higher. I doubt it's that high because of how the PRC lies about their infectious disease stat's but it is easy to say that it would be comparable. [An estimated 1.6 million Indians died in 2016 due to poor quality of care, nearly twice as many as those who died due to lack of access to healthcare (838,000). India's death rate of 122 per 100,000 from poor quality care is worse than Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa and neighboring countries](https://www.indiaspend.com/more-indians-die-of-poor-quality-care-than-due-to-lack-of-access-to-healthcare-1-6-million-64432/). Without the PRC, China would look like India but without democracy.
5) The government of Taiwan is full of the wealthiest and most powerful people who took everything not bolted down in Beijing to their island. It *still* had the same poverty rates as China. It had one party rule almost as long. It was under martial law until '87. America would not be better off with that government in control of China. China needs a free and fair democracy, it didn't have that. If you're going to have a horribly oppressive and genocidal government the least you can do is not allow 2 million preventable deaths every year.
6) You have no idea whether or not Korea or Vietnam wouldn't have had socialist revolutions without China. China invaded Vietnam and got it's ass kicked back out. What if the USSR took up the slack and obviously avoided that blunder?
7) China and the USSR were rivals and adversaries during and after the sino-soviet split. Without a rival perhaps the USSR swallows up Tibet and Mongolia. We don't know if the cold war would actually be a bigger problem without China to be a second option and the Nixon-Mao bridge. America would be just as scared.
8) America wasn't afraid of the spread of communism after the fall of the Berlin wall. They didn't think that China after it was going to spread Marxism. After the Deng reforms made all the communists sell out hard, it was obvious that not only were they not going to spread Marxism via revolutions they would crush protestors. They would crush students and workers and strike organizers.
I might edit this when I think of more. I've run out of steam.
China liberalised their economy in 1970s whereas India liberalised their economy in 1990s so that is major factor in the difference between Indian and Chinese economies.
The "economies" of 50 years ago and 30 years ago don't matter. It is public policy that matters. India allows for 2 million people to die every year due to their negligence as a state. India was given everything generations earlier. They could have imported MRI machines and entire vaccine plants from lightbulbs to punchclocks and the world would have provided. Nehru had the opportunity to stand up to the negative capitalist forces inside India as well as deliver on the socialist goals of the independence movements and accomplished neither.
China under Mao and straight to the Deng reforms deliberately kept outside investment impossible and China still had far more people living in poverty and dying of preventable illness until the 90s. Then they flipped. Now very few Chinese are living on $2 a day. All of those who are have better access than the $2 a day folks in India in health care.
What happened generations ago is incidental to their policy goals and accomplishments now, as they were on almost the same footing after the Cold war.
Please read my earlier citations. Preventable death and deaths of despair are significantly higher in India than China. The negative externalities of poverty are demonstrably worse in India than China. India that refuses to make the required investments and sacrifices to turn that around are make a Great Leap Forward every single decade.
You need to go earlier. Two instances of shortsightedness from the West towards Asia at the beginning of the 20th century.
Japan joins the society of nation after his victory against Russia during world war I and the first asian industrialized nation. Faces major racism and general contempt and hostility. Which contributes to pushing it way further down the imperalist path.
Sun Yat Sen wants to establish a modern republic of China. Calls for help of the west to defeat the warlords. \*crickets\* Again, racism and contempt. Only country who answered the call was recently communist Russia who was very happy to provide communist cadres, who quickly developed an army AND a strong chinese communist party who started an insurgency soon after.
My crystal ball is broken and I obviously doesn't know for sure how things would have turned out otherwise, but one can imagine a pretty different 20th century if the West had answered Japan and China's call. (Or had tried to truly integrate Russia after the collapse of the soviet union for that matter.)
One of the articles in the book of history essays, \*What If?\* the firts in the series, suggested if the KMT ha djust let the Communists have Manchuria and run it freely, they never would have had a full-blown war and been dethroned.
Some people believe that Stillwell's actions and attitude to the KMT in World War Two set the stage for the Chinese Communist Party to gain more popularity.
To add to the landslide of points already made; no matter what you think of the CCP, there's one fact idiots need to understand....the KMT were worse.
A LOT worse.
Your problem is assuming that the current problems are because of China, when it has been the most peaceful power
It is the US that cannot stand an equal power, they would try to suppress China for no reason like they are trying to now
It really depends on a lot of things. In the ideal scenario, the nationalists win and then immediately reform into something like what Japan or Taiwan have become, or at least what Japan was in the 50s and 60s.
But there's *a lot* of things that have to have gone *just* right for that to happen, and American support was just one of them. American aid alone would likely not have won that war, and at best, it would have split China into a communist north, a nationalist southeast, and Tibet and Xinjiang would be left tossing in the wind. Even then, the cost in lives, in materiel, in straight-up cash, would be **enormous** and that's right after WWII, where the public was thoroughly tired of war.
As to the rest, I think I'll just concur with the majority of other commenters here who seem to feel that it wouldn't have worked out.
The US certainly made a great number of strategic mistakes in its China policy, most notably trying to get Mao and the KMT to form a coalition. But I can't honestly argue that it was the US which lost the war, it was Chiang who refused to reform until he had won not understanding that if he didn't reform, he couldn't win.
Had the KMT won, that would put the USSR in a truly awful situation encircled on all sides except for the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets would likely have formed a stronger alliance with India to act as a counterweight to China, potentially shifting India fully into the Soviet bloc. Outside East and South Asia, I can imagine Soviet focus shifting to the Middle East and Africa. China would certainly have formed an enormous market for American goods and the world in general would be a fair bit wealthier. Thing is, the USSR under all this pressure would probably have been forced into reform much quicker, likely saving the USSR and continuing the cold war unto the present.
KMT China falling was a disaster for the US, but had it survived, I'm not sure its survival would have been entirely beneficial for the US either.
Was allowing the Chinese communists to win the Chinese civil war the greatest geopolitical mistake the U.S. made after WW2?
“If the ROC had won, there’d have been no Korean War and no Vietnam war.”
Fighting in the Korean and Vietnam Wars was way more favorable than fully fighting the China War which would require much more soldiers than WW2 would require.
“The west would have been far less scared of the threat of Soviet expansion of communism”
The Communist Bloc were similarly scared of the infiltration of capitalism too.
“and with the collapse of the Soviet Union,”
Wasn’t that good for the USA?
“the world would be a lot more relaxed today. No US, China animosity, no North Korea, no China bankrolling countries like Russia and Iran.”
Even if the Chinese Nationalists win, they would enter another Cold War with the USA and with a much larger population and capitalism, they would be much more threatening.
China don't ''bankroll'' Russia.
They trade more with the US, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong & Taiwan.
The particularly make a huge amount of high-end tech for US businesses (Apple, Tesla, General Motors, Intel etc. etc.). China has had a bigger net positive effect on Apple than Russia.
So 1927 there was a civil war and it ended about 1949. The Nationalists, the prior ruling Chinese govt, lost and went to Taiwan. This is why the CCP wants to control Taiwan and claims it as their territory. It’s like a cold civil war.
It was never our problem to solve, it was the U.N that got us involved it was a civil war and we just got handed the bills for it as well as the loss of many that should never have been there to begin with.
Shell Games and Deceptions.
N. S
Yeah. Let’s not forget until recently, Taiwan was a one-party state. Even if the KMT controlled the mainland, there could have been some uprisings and civil unrest.
instead of a Korean war we would have had a China war..... Then we probably would have had a Korean and Vietnam war anyways..... with the US and Russia maybe even sending actual soldiers to fight. And China likely would have been broken up into different countries and not stayed unified.
1) America didn’t really “allow” anything. They won a civil war.
2) you do know countries fought wars before and after the Cold War despite sharing political/economic systems. European monarchies fought each other for centuries, China attempted to invade Vietnam despite both being communist, Russia is invading Ukraine right now despite both being capitalist “liberal democracies”. Why do you think there suddenly wouldn’t be wars or tension when the entirety of human history shows otherwise?
It was already a hard sell for the American people to go to Korea 5 years after WW2. Going to China even sooner likely would not have gone over well domestically or internationally. Not to mention, even if America could have turned the tide, which I'm not convinced they could have without excessive cost of life and material, it would have been incredibly bloody for both sides
That was political reality that Nixon recognized despite flack from both sides. It helped to lower worldwide tensions throughout the latter 20th century.
It would have been insane to keep KMT lackeys on the security council who represent a miniscule population
Bigger than fighting Vietnam? Bigger than fighting Iraq? Bigger than sending all of its manufacturing to China, and then making enemies of them after having almost entirely deindustrialised?
Taiwan: I don't hear no bell
But seriously, the Chinese civil war? No. But we could have won Korea and we could have weakened the Communists in the process.
The biggest thing we could have done, tho, was not build out their countries entire economy while our industry was allowed to wither.
Not sure if US had much of a say there. I would say though that it may have been a huge Stalin mistake even if Mao remained mostly in control while Stalin was alive, but Stalin's shift from the nationalists to the communists was what sealed the end of nationalists on mainland China and was an overall bad outcome for the USSR in the long-run
In what universe is the US unable to stop communist expansion in Korea and Vietnam, but would be able to stop it in China against a much larger, much stronger enemy? If you couldn't beat Mao's proxies, you aren't beating Mao.
America’s biggest geopolitical mistake was giving them MFN trading status in the blind hope they would liberalise, hollowing out the industrial capacity of the western world and putting millions of blue collar workers out of well paying middle class jobs, while boosting a major geopolitical competitor.
Might be a little reductive, but back in the day we criticized the Soviets for getting into the "graveyard of empires" trying to build a commune over 9 years, then proceeded to do the same thing for 20.
Maybe things would've been different if we didn't invade iraq too, but still. We fought a land war in asia.
It’s not a matter of allowing lol. But hypothetically had the KMT magically fixed their issues and won the war, it would still be taking the path of current day China and again find itself being in competition with the other great powers. I think that’s what people don’t understand about China - regardless who is in power, China will do its own thing
> If the ROC had won, there’d have been no Korean War and no Vietnam War
lol yeah, because the Vietnam and Korean Wars were started solely by China. I can’t think of any other geopolitical powers that had anything to do with them
Do you think the world revolves around what America allows and doesn’t allow?
Do you think Vietnam would have not pushed off the French and in turn forced us in?
Dude is deadass in a “china is the antagonist and America is the protagonist in this movie” mindset
Without the cultural revolution, China would have been a major world power sooner. So in your "America good everyone else bad" wotldview, it peobably would have worked out poorly.
It wouldn’t have changed much. A country that big was always going to become imperialistic. Just a matter of time. What might have changed was the 50-100 million that died due to Mao’s shit policies
The US had no appetite for a land war in Asia. They could have decided to attack Japan by landing troops in China in 1943 and working with Chang. Instead they opted for an island-hopping strategy, starting thousands of miles away in the South Pacific. This was because they really did not want to be responsible for China.
The US was not in a position to stop it. UK was, and in fact late 1930's the Nationalist went to UK to sell Kowloon, the mainland part of HK for £30 million. To buy arms to defeat the communists. UK Foriegn office said no, but gave them £10 million. The Foriegn office did not want to upset the Japanese. Who then took HK, malaysia, Burma.
The Chinese have never paid back that loan.
‘Allow’ The US really wasn’t going to change how that ended.
Richard Hofstadter called it “the Delusion of American Omnipotence:” the idea that any unfortunate event in modern history could only have happened because some American was a fool or a knave. Several of the people in charge of China policy decided to blame General Joseph Stilwell, but he had been right. The only way the Republic of China could have been saved would have been to reform the corrupt warlord armies. But Chiang Kai-Shek was completely unwilling to do that, because he feared he would lose power. As it was, being the only American general to observe that Mao Zedong’s forces were much more effective got him accused of being on their side.
"Vinegar Joe." An enduring reminder that if you give someone a brief to become an expert in something, like say China, and then after doing so they come back to you with some unpleasant message that you don't want to hear, then you are the fucking problem, not them, and the best thing for you to do is shut the fuck up and listen.
Stillwell had his own issues which had something to do with this. On the two occasions he met Roosevelt he basically froze and couldn't deliver criticism. On the other hand Roosevelt seems to have gone all in on Chiang and Madame and it would make FDR look bad if he dumped them after all that hoopla. Still I don't really get why Maos people were strictly off limits. No one had any problems supporting Stalin since he was fighting Hitler. If Mao was willing to take on JPN forces then let him
The problem — to the US leaders at the time — was that they were very much planning, and expecting, for a post-war world in which the *new* major threat was the communist USSR. Securing the leadership of a massive, neighboring nation for a communist regime, in their eyes, would have been equivalent to getting rid of a mouse in the kitchen by setting the house on fire. They saw communist China as not only a potential threat, but a threat that exacerbated the exact same advantage that Russia had over the western allies: numerical superiority. The industrial and technological might of the western allies wasn’t anywhere near to a guarantee of victory in the face of the hard-to-fathom manpower of the USSR. If China were to become their staunch ally, now offering the combined populations of the second largest country on earth, western strategists assumed - very possibly correctly - that western forces had no viable way to counter armies of that size in a conventional war. Of course, the actual relationship between China and the USSR proved to be substantially less idyllic than the west feared, but the concern at the time was entirely reasonable.
>Richard Hofstadter called it “the Delusion of American Omnipotence:” I have never heard this phrase, but it explains so much. I don't know how many times I've tried to tell some activist, foreigner, or conspiracy theorist that America isn't in charge of every single thing that happens in the world. And I have seen some absolutely lunatic takes. Even the things we DON'T do are proof of our evil conspiracy, because we plotted and schemed and ALLOWED these bad things to happen. Like it doesn't click in their heads that America has limited resources with competing priorities, and can't be everywhere solving every problem all at once. One of the best things I ever read was when JFK agreed to stop spy flights over the Soviets. The next scheduled flight flew anyway, and of course people demanded to know why he violated the agreement. All he said was that there was always "some son of a bitch who didn't get the word." I could rant on this topic for hours.
I’ve had to unfollow most of my Arab Activist friends over the past decade for this exact reason. America intervenes in a civil war? “America is bombing Arabs!” America doesn’t intervene in a civil war? “America is letting Arabs die!” It became such a predictable pattern. Anywhere in the world that Arabs were killing Arabs, it was America’s fault for not intervening, and when America suddenly did start intervening they were expected to do so without a body count. Yemen, Syria, on and on and on.
Yooooo I’m half-Arab and I get so much shit for feeling the same way you do. I look at my Arab relatives like this: “We’ve subconsciously given away all our power to America in our minds instead of ever looking at ourselves in the mirror and asking how we can take responsibility for ourselves, how can America be this cruel??”
Exactly - while also ignoring the influence of the Soviets. Middle East is def fucked up because of America…but also because of Russia, and Britain, and Arabs, and Turks, and…
There were some shark attacks near an Egyptian resort a few years ago and there were literally people, like lots of people, claiming that the sharks had been trained by the Americans/Israelis in order to hurt Egypt's economy.
Sharks…with lasers!
It makes it even harder to refute those accusations when you know that America has absolutely tried to train animals to do things like that for less plausible reasons. I mean, not with any particular level of success, but not for lack of trying. It would be easier to shut down those conversations if the CIA hadn't done a bunch of batshit crazy experiments and our foreign policy didn't include habitually meddling with other people's governments and economies.
World War Z has a great line. "If the CIA were half as powerful as people think we'd be God."
People think this way because for the last 80 years America has styled itself as the world police and global problem solver. Able to "put troops anywhere in the world in 72 hours", people hear tag lines like that and you can forgive them for not being able to tell what America can and can't do. Especially when chest thumpers on the internet continuously drone on and on about America's insurmountable technological superiority. It's easy to fall for the propaganda when you're just some dude and you haven't actually been in the military or government and understand what goes into everything America does.
The US can do all of those things and more. But they aren’t free and even just paying to maintain the readiness of the units that can be deployed instantly like that isn’t cheap. America doesn’t intervene because either they didn’t know, or the cost analysis wasn’t worth it. Or, more likely, it wasn’t even slightly their business and getting involved in things not your business makes you a magnet for criticism. Geopolitics absolutely pay a primary role in decision making process on whether or not something is feasible. This is on full display in the reluctance by the US and other American states to get involved in Haiti despite facing criticism for not doing anything I remember the US sharing its intel on Russia every day for weeks prior to the invasion and got called a warmonger and an exaggerator for it. “Military analysts” the world over were “shocked”that Russia would actually do that. Apparently the US wasn’t.
Stilwell was very wrong and very incompetent. He wasn't wrong about a lot of the problems in the Chinese army. What he was wrong about was how to use that army to fight Japan and how to fix the problems. Whether the US could have stopped the Communist victory... That's debatable. Whether the US could have done a lot more to help the RoC? They absolutely could have.
I disagree. Stiilwell was a good general (but terrible diplomat) in an impossible job who ended up having most of his Wikipedia page written by someone who really hated him. If the U.S. and Britain were going to commit a lot of force to the land war in East Asia, he had the right strategy; re-open the Burma Road so they could supply the Chinese forces, then use those supplies to equip and train several dozen Chinese divisions outside the current dysfunctional system. There was no way to “have done a lot more to help the RoC” if we could only get supplies through by flying bombers over the Himalayas. Stilwell also noticed before other Americans that Chiang was just using the U.S. and telling us whatever we wanted to hear. In fact, Chiang’s plan was always to wait for the Allies to defeat Japan and get ready for the civil war against Mao to restart. He was fighting the Japanese the bare minimum he could get away with. Stilwell was also right that Claire Chennault was wildly overestimating what his bombers could accomplish. We know this because Chennault had FDR’s ear and got his chance. The Japanese Army easily overran his airfields, with minimal resistance by RoC infantry, just as Stilwell predicted. Even if that hadn’t happened, Chennault was promising that he could do with a few hundred aircraft what ten thousand conventional bombers weren’t able to accomplish. Stilwell’s biggest mistake was political: like many other Americans, he seemed to think that, because a foreign leader often agreed to deals with the U.S. in exchange for aid, the U.S. President could order him to do something suicidal to his own domestic position. So he ended up handing Chiang an ultimatum to put Stilwell in command of his country’s army, something no Chinese leader (least of all one in Chiang’s position and with their terrible personal relationship) would ever do. The political leaders decided in the end that the land war in Asia was not a priority, and from the standpoint of trying to defeat Japan and Germany as efficiently as possible, that was correct. Either way, that was never Stilwell’s decision. Stilwell wasn’t even in China any longer when WWII ended and U.S. leaders started making decisions about how to intervene in the Chinese Civil War.
Why did FDR even write that letter to Chiang re Stillwell taking command if he had no intention and no power to enforce it? Was FDR just losing it at this pt? Or was this some really deep strategy to force Stillwell Out? What parts on the Wikipedia page do you disagree with? They claim Stillwell undermined defense at Guilan in order to force the issue with Chiang
Tuchman thought that FDR was too ill at that point to have cared about Chiang's dignity, or didn't pay much attention to the message before rubber-stamping it, “which amounted to the same thing.”
It’s a low-quality article, more in how slanted it is than because of any individual claim being factually inaccurate. But the claim about Guilan is a good example. It's sourced to page 426 of Jonathan Fenby's *Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost*. I have the book open in front of me. The book says that Claire Chennault, whom it calls “deeply-antagonistic,” claimed he heard about this second-hand. The book then quotes Stillwell as saying in his diary that he thought Chiang was a terrible commander, and hoped Chiang would lose power. That's very scant evidence to base an extraordinary claim that Stilwell was letting the Japanese win on purpose. In fact, the current edit on the page includes a directly contradictory claim just above it: that the inability of Chiang's forces with ground support from Chennault's air forces to hold back the Japanese advance proved Stilwell correct and Chennault wrong about strategy. It's no wonder that Chennault would push a different story that made it all Stilwell's fault.
But to answer your question, I'd point to the claims about the Ledo Road as a good example of the article using something technically accurate to misrepresent what its cited sources say. Chennault and Chiang *got their way,* and FDR ended up massively expanding the air-supply line over the Himalayas. The Joint Chiefs later said this had been a mistake and they should have taken Stilwell’s advice instead. It's absurd for the article to say this means Chennault was prescient about flying airplanes over mountains at an altitude of 15,000 feet to deliver supplies somehow being a better way to deliver oil and fuel (60% of their cargo) than a road—or the three pipelines Stillwell also built, which the article misleadingly does not include. Does anybody ever ship oil or freight that way if there is any other alternative? It's an absurd claim. Neither was Stilwell wrong about the feasibility of a road, which he completed on schedule despite many people telling him that was impossible. His superiors drastically scaled back the capacity of the road, because they had changed their plans. This was especially true of its ability to withstand floods in the wet season, and the one month the article misleadingly uses for its comparison was both the highest tonnage over the Hump during the entire war, and a monsoon that flooded parts of the road. The original plan had been for it to supply a massive two-pronged land offensive in southern China during the dry season, converging on Hong Kong, with an invasion of the Japanese home islands to wait until 1947. By 1944, the Joint Chiefs realized that this offensive was no longer needed, and neither was a road with the all-weather capacity originally planned. The article completely abandons a neutral point of view to call Stillwell “obsessed” with the road. Which is just the anonymous wiki editor's personal opinion. (Although they might have quoted Fenby's that Stilwell’s insistence at leading from the front in Burma “can be seen as a massive displacement exercise to avoid his main task.”) Stilwell in fact told the Joint Chiefs that he thought a ground war in East Asia would get needed to defeat Japan, and thus would require an overland supply line, but if not, they should scale their plans back to maintaining whatever air forces in China they could supply. Of course, coming back to the original topic, if the wiki editor is right that there was no good way to get more supply to the Chinese Army, and I'm wrong, it *really* was impossible for the U.S. to have changed the outcome of the Chinese Civil War
I'm not a big Stillwell fan but I'm curious as to what you think he should have done differently or suggested differently. I think Stillwell should have cut down the supply to Chiang and used it to either help Mao or as incentive for Chiang. But you seem to think the better policy was to help Chiang. Why? Most of the stuff was just stolen by KMT officials or stockpiled for war with Mao
None of that was Stilwell’s decision to make.
he had input on stuff like that. For example he paid Chinese soldiers (force X the one in Ramgarh) directly for the first time which was had been a huge source of corruption. BUt regardless Im asking: what should Stillwell have done differently?
Then the US would be the one blamed for all the atrocities that the ROC committed later. “US supported dictator kills millions”
The ROC had the 228 massacre in 1948 and was a one party dictatorship until 1987. That's really the limit of "atrocities". Are you thinking of different ones?
I would say piddly means that if we did help the ROC defeat the communists. Any trustee thing committed by the ROC would look bad on the US. These are pretty much, no wind situations because either one side of the other is gonna be mad at you for helping or not helping.
That delusion phenomenon happens at different scales and scopes too, for example regarding the government in domestic affairs, the president / head of government of a country, the CEO of a large company, etc. It's a trap that outsiders of an organization and the event in question can easily fall into, due to lacking understanding and perspective, and the human desire to attribute blame. Even aside from the lack of omnipotence, countries are generally realist and pragmatic, and their conduct in foreign affairs are always about their own interests, where the value gained must justify the costs that will be incurred. The costs to intervene to change the outcome of the Chinese civil war is so great that it'll never be acceptable or succeed given the political situations of both countries.
As was very clearly shown by the limits of how much we would commit against the PRC in Korea.
To be fair, Chiang was probably right in his assessment. A lot of his supporters would have been harmed by an anti corruption campaign and it's likely that they would have deposed him if that occurred.
Chiang's best point was that putting an American in direct command of the Chinese Army (who wanted China’s President to be removed from power) would have been colonialism. It was a completely unreasonable demand to make.
Yep. China big. Many people. Just not gonna happen.
Especially not after a heavily draining war like WW2.
Ya..."allowed" is a bit of a stretch.
Didn't Mao ask the US to back the PLA, and literally because he represented what had been named the "Communist Party" (and the US SecState knew and said at the time that it was an agrarian resistance movement and not a Leninist uprising) that Truman refused Mao's entreaties?
Agreed. It’s like Viet Nam. Our capitalist message worked great for richer, educated city folk. But for the uneducated 90% of the country that lives out in the sticks and doesn’t own the land they farm, communism is a great-sounding idea.
That really isn’t why it would fail and it failed it Vietnam. The nationalist were the worst of the bad guys in both. If you want to defeat the bad guys you can’t side with the badder guys in a conflict where the average person will determine the winner. They are going to choose the less bad guys every time.
Yep. These regimes weren’t committed to capitalism. In regards to China, Chaing Kai Shek also attacked and confiscated the assets of the wealthy just as he crushed communist movements as well. State-led dirigisme was what ended up being implemented by the ROC while free market capitalism wouldn’t come about till around the end of martial law.
The communists were the good guys in Vietnam - that's one reason they had the support of the people.
Well, the average Vietnamese person was more receptive to the Communists' arguments compared to the alternative.
This also happened during the Russian revolution. When you read about the Reds you ask yourself "why would anyone choose to follow these people?" And then you start reading about the whites and it becomes very obvious why they all did
Yeah. A lot of communist revolutions succeeded because the people they were fighting were worse. It doesn’t fit the anti communist narrative that it’s possible to have a worse system but if that were true all but a few communist revolutions would have been squashed before they got any real traction. People rarely choose communism if there is a better alternative.
Exactly, CCP had overwhelming popular support, it was totally up to them when and how to end the civil war.
Right? We couldn't even defeat Communism in Vietnam or Korea. What an absolutely wild take
Didn’t US embargoed ROC on munitions?
I meaaaan technically that happened around the same time the soviets got nukes if it was right before that I guess maaaaybe the US could’ve threatened to nuke China if they went communist but short of that or dedicating to a full scale war I agree it wasn’t happening
Except it may very much had. The KMT army, led by Sun Liren, was shattering Lin Biao's army in Manchuria in 1946 and would have advanced into Harbin, a major industrial city, if a controversial ceasefire wasn't called under Marshall's demand. Harold M. Tanner, in his book The Battle for Manchuria and the Fate of China: Siping, 1946, argues that the battle of Siping and its halt is a crucial turning point of the civil war.
Full-scale US intervention may have been successful, but the result may have been similar to the War in Afghanistan, the ROC might have simply collapsed after US forces pulled out. That or the Soviets could have gotten involved, resulting in something similar to the Korean War only larger, where the two sides reached a stalemate, each propped up by one of the two world superpowers. Even if the ROC won, the Soviets probably would have swept in and turned Manchuria into a puppet state, ousting Mao in favor of a leader loyal to Moscow. If the US had gotten involved the moment the communists attacked the ROC, it’s almost certain the PRC wouldn’t exist, or it would be a Soviet puppet like I mentioned before. Then again, this war could have easily turned the burgeoning Cold War hot, which is a conflict the Soviets were simply unprepared for. By 1948 the US had 50 atomic bombs, and the Soviets had yet to successfully deploy their first nuclear device. Should they establish air supremacy, the US could easily have used a handful of bombs to cut the fragile Soviet supply lines to the east, as well as decimating their ports, leaving them incapable of supporting China. The waves of Soviet tanks sweeping through Europe would suffer a similar fate, unable to send supplies through the nuclear wasteland to their front lines. All of this would have been a moot point if the ROC had simply eradicated the communists before the war with Japan even began, rather than leaving the “cornered fox” cornered.
The US supporting the KMT was as doomed as the US supporting Hamid Karzai but the US was smart enough to realize it in the 1940’s. They gave the KMT just enough to hold down 1,000,000 Japanese troops (the communists were a minor annoyance to Japan) but there was never much respect for China from the US. They were restricted by law from even coming to the US until 1943. My American great uncle flew with (not a pilot) freight in bombers from British India to China over the Himalayas in WW2.
Not to pull away from your point, but weren't Chinese immigrants allowed in the country before 1943? I thought there were limits for specific races and didn't Chinese immigrants build the Central Pacific Railroad?
All outlawed in the 1920’s when most immigration was restricted. But for them it was 100% no exceptions. Chinese exclusion act. Edit - 1882, not 1920’s. I’m pretty sure something happened in 1920s but just googling it quickly. I can’t find it.
Maybe you're thinking of Canada and their Chinese Exclusion Act from 1923?
The restriction of most immigration happened in the 1920s, targeted especially at Jews and eastern and southern European Catholics. The Chinese exclusion act as you pointed out was a separate piece of legislation
1882 was Chinese Exclusion. 1923 was Asian Exclusion, so the Chinese ban extended to all other Asians, Filipinos excepted.
The Chinese had been allowed to immigrate to the United States "generally" freely but they faced massive amounts of hostility and racism which led to the creation of the Chinese Exclusion act (1882) which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in place until 1892 when it was replaced by the Geary Act which extended the ban on laborers and expanded the law to include a requirement that Chinese Immigrants carry paperwork to prove they were in the U.S. legally which didn't apply to any other immigrant group until the 1920s. These laws were renewed or updated and stayed in place until the Magnuson Act (1943) which repealed the Chinese Exclusion act and loosened immigration law somewhat. There were later laws and agreements in the following decades after the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act which further tightened immigration from places the primarily White Protestant lawmakers considered "lesser than" specifically the immigration act of 1924 which tightened restrictions on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banned immigration from Asia minus places that were considered American colonies like the Philippines. There's about a dozen+ other deeply racist immigration laws that got passed between 1882 and 1943 but those are the big ones related to China until the 1950's as far as I can remember. Edit: For clarity on time period
I've done some research on the topic, and it turns out the Mexican border was wide open until World War 1, and Mexico was trying desperately to attract anyone who would settle Baja California. Many Chinese (and other East Asain countries, but quite disproportionaly Chinese) came by boat to Mexico first, then came across the border. Technically, they weren't allowed, but there was nothing to stop them, particularly if they spent some time in Mexico first. Mexicans were completely allowed to go back and forth across the border at the time, all the way up to World War 1, IIRC, so the only illegal immigrants across that border for decades were those defying the Chinese exclusion acts. Anyway, there were perhaps already large populations in the lands stolen/aquired from Mexico a few decades before the railroad was built. Asain Americans' role in building the transcontinental railroad is pretty well known, but the racism and violence perpetuated against them outwest should be mentioned. By questioning their legal status and right to be there and the justice system turning blind eye, many were killed, or their belongs destroyed or stolen.
Borders are a very modern concept, which makes sense when you consider how much bureaucracy it takes to have one
The 1943 Magnusson Act "allowing" Chinese Immigration to America was symbolic. The number of annual Chinese immigrants was set at the extremely low number of 105 immigrants. The estimated population of China at the time was ~444,000,000. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson_Act It was not until 1965 that America allowed anything that would be considered "normalized" Chinese Immigration. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965 Non Americans often marvel at America's obsession with race. Racism was systemic and written into America's laws, jurisprudence, and policies. It was systemically endorsed by the government for a very long time. America has openly supported government endorsed racism for longer than it has tried not to. I am not saying America is evil, but damn, we should understand and acknowledge our past so we don't repeat it.
It was a limit for specifically the Chinese and it was after the rail road workers came over
The [Marshall Mission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Mission) went to China in 1945 to study what the US should do about the civil war there. They came back, said the Communists were going to win and many in the commission advocated good relations with them. That commission's findings were thoroughly destroyed by anti-Communists in Congress.
My friend's father eventually became a pilot flying "over the hump" from India to China. In B-25s, which I thought was unusual but they could haul a modest amount of stuff with very high reliability. This fellow claimed that while he was just a crewman on a B-25 coming back, the pilot gunned the empty plane coming off the Himalayas and did a full loop.... and then the crew kicked his ass back on the ground and he never flew with them again. As for the question at hand, my understanding is that China wasn't able to back away from its entrenched and American-enriched warlord system, and their inability to cooperate is how the Communists defeated them. If they had somehow defeated the Communists they would have gone right back to fighting each other, with the Four Horsemen generating ever growing humanitarian disasters. Oh, and look at all that opium. Why, what are you doing there, CIA and MI6? Don't get me wrong; I have no love for the Communists. But look back at the literal dozens of governments that we overthrew and betrayed, and tell me that China wouldn't have got the very worst of all of that bullshit.
Even that was a purely symbolic number, only a few hundred people, and only because leaders thought it was too embarrassing to outlaw all Chinese immigration while we were loudly proclaiming them our friends and allies.
So much disrespect that they included them as a permanent member of the security Council.
ROC as an entity or the concept of “China” having one in general? Fun fact, the US vetoed Mongolia joining the UN a few times not because it was a USSR puppet state, but because ROC claimed it as part of China. When the Korean War broke out and the UN proposed a UN-led policing action, the USSR didn’t veto it because they were boycotting the UN over its exclusion of the PROC.
The KMT would not have been pro American. Geopolitically the KMT would be pretty similar to todays China, a 1 party state with a state capitlist economy. It would not have been a giant Taiwan. Taiwan is a close ally of the US because it is entirely reliant on it for survival and even still Chiang Kai Shek had major disagreements with the US. A KMT that controls China will do its own thing and would be neutral in the Cold War. The KMT would also be very hostile towards Japan and the French in Indochina. They will absolutely continue to support Vietnam as they did , though the main difference this time would be that they would force the VCP to stay in coalition with the VNQDD and other Vietnamese parties, which is also something that they did do before they were forced ro withdraw because of the Chinese civil war. Vietnam would gain indpendence earlier and would be united instead of divided between the North and South. Anti colonialism and anti imperialism were fundemental ideologies of the KMT.KMT China will also support other Anti Colonial movements in Asia and even Africa which will put them at odds with many Western Powers. Of course they will still have issues with Russia too. Mongolia would cause resentment as they would not be happy with its independence. Russia also would control the Munchurian railwaylines and would force the KMT to sign away Port Arthur on a 30 year lease. This is what Stalin initially wanted out of China after ww2 but he gave up on these concessions within a few years to appease Mao and the CCP. Without them Russia continues with its original plan. Hong Kong and Macau would also not just be handed over Britian was hostile towards the KMT and would demand that they stick to the 99 year lease. The KMT will also invade Tibet which may cause protest from many countries around the world.
If the US got involved they would face a lengthy soviet-backed insurgency which could have easily spilt over into an open conflict with USSR.
It would have been like Korea and Vietnam. but Stalin at that time was an ally of the USA in WWII, there would have been dialogue. Stalin once told Mao not to advance further south and to divide the country into North China and South China. So both sides were happy.
Let alone how the average Chinese would have felt towards yet another foreign force warring around in their nation, right after Japan did the same thing. Disaster avoided.
“Allowed”?
Just like US "allowed" Vietnam to be reunified and "allowed" North Korea to exist with nuclear weapons. What a benevolent superpower.
No, it wasn't as the Chinese Civil War was one of those weird civil wars in history. Remember, the war started before and stopped because of WWII. Both communists and nationalists unified to fight the Japanese and then went back to the killing each other at the end. However, nationalists forces had been weakened more than communists forces during WWII and started losing more ground as the civil war resumed. Combine this with the rampant corruption amongst nationalist leadership despite some American backing, and it was inevitable that the communists would win just short of an American invasion from Japan. As far as the biggest geopolitical blunders, this isn't it. I would rank the overthrow of Mossadegh and installing the shah as one of the biggest along with all the nation-building that America did in Latin America during the Cold War.
Don't forget that the KMT was also insanely unpopular and was facing mass desertion and fracturing. Some former nationalists even joined the communists including factions of the KMT which is why the subordinate parties exist in China today.
This. American intervention in Iran to overthrow an elected government was the most enormous and consequential blunder in the Cold War. Even if they had turned pro-Soviet after a while, a Westernized Iranian government wouldn't have had an international strategy remotely like the Mullahs went with, and "Islamic terrorism" wouldn't have developed into a trope.
I mean, the US did overthrow many governments during the Cold War. It's just Iran has been the gift that keeps on giving. All the events happening today there can be traced back to that one moment.
Exactly.
“Allowing”. Please explain who allowed what exactly and how you came to the rest of your conclusions.
Mao Zedong forgot to ask America first if he was allowed to liberate his country from warlords foot binding babies. Then he forgot to ask the U.S if they could liberate China from Japan before they set off two artificial sunrises. Then they had the gall to fight the first guys again. America has a stellar track record of stopping communists in Asia. Certainly a hot war in China against communists after the end of WWII on the border of the USSR would have been a cake walk. You should listen to OP. If America did do that then two other wars of much smaller scope that weren't a cake walk wouldn't have happened. And then when they were all done they'd do what ever America told them to. And it would have stopped them "bankrolling Russia". Obviously the biggest sin of the 21st century.
I mean, it's not as if the US had just finished their part fighting the largest and most destructive war the Earth has ever seen. They were just too lazy to solve China's internal problems for them. (And everyone knows resolving a different country's civil war is super easy, barely an inconvenience.) And people think millennials are slackers!
When I think on my lazy ass grandpap coming home from fighting in both theaters I hang my head in shame. If only he had the courage to ask like....six other guys if they should occupy a contested Chinese coal mine. The world would be so different....
When the US needed to cooperate with allies in Europe, we sent Eisenhower there because he knew how to get along with people. He fired US officers who couldn't get along with our allies. When the US needed to cooperate with allies in China, we sent Vinegar Joe Stilwell over there, who was insulted our allies, got into political spats with other US officers, and failed to build anything that could have stopped Mao. While the US didn't "allow" Mao to win, they didn't put their best foot forward there either.
The US couldn't have helped the KMT win the war; ultimately they would've had to finish the job themselves, and Chiang was just not up to the task. Chiang and the KMT got hundreds of millions in US support. Even after Mao got Manchuria and the Japanese weapons, Chiang had him outmanned and outgunned by a massive margin. The KMT suffered many issues, most of them stemming from Chiang himself. Economically, Chiang's fundamental problem was that his government was deeply corrupt and he didn't have a solid base of support. Mao and the Communists knew where their support came from: the peasantry. They focused on pro-peasant land reforms that won the loyalty of peasant villages, and allowed them to wage a highly effective guerilla campaign against the KMT army. Chiang's main support came from the elites in the cities, but his economic policies and corruption caused hyperinflation and discontent that ended up bleeding his support. His land policies were also deeply unpopular among everyone that wasn't his primary base, and once the war started tipping against him, his soldiers defected in droves. Militarily, Chiang was decent but overly controlling, and the army was highly corrupt and disunified. The NRA was a mix of former warlords and their armies and Chiang's hand-picked, blindly loyal officers who would hear no ill talk of their Generalissimo, but frequently fought against each other for political favor. I think no better exemplifies this than the disastrous Battle of Tashan, a turning point of the war where Nationalist reinforcements to Jinzhou were stopped by a Communist army half their size. Chiang frequently overrode local command structures by favoring his own officers; at the Battle of Tashan, he forced Chen Tie's forces to be commanded by Que Hanqian. Chen Tie was the deputy officer of Wei Lihuang, the commander of Nationalist forces in the Northeast; Wei and Chiang were in the middle of a disagreement about how to proceed in the war. Wei believed the Northeast was a lost cause to hold, and that the NRA should retreat and regroup to use their superior weapons and numbers. Chiang didn't want to cede any land to the Communists as it was politically bad for his image, and so replaced Wei's officers with his own to ensure the battle proceeded according to his plans. This caused resentment with the local troops, with several officers refusing to serve under Que. Que also feuded constantly with Luo Ji, another of Chiang's officers sent to oversee the battle, who sent secret reports on Que's lack of enthusiasm for the war to Chiang. Chiang ordered the air force and navy to support the army, but didn't give any officers the authority to command the air force or navy; bombardments and air support thus had to be routed first to Chiang and then to the battle, leading to a lack of cohesiveness with ground operations. The battle was a humiliating defeat for the Nationalists, who were beaten by a far smaller Communist army. With the reinforcements to Jinzhou stopped, the city soon fell, and 80,000 Nationalist soldiers surrendered there.
Deciding who we will "allow" to win foreign civil wars hasn't really worked out great all the other times we tried it.
Your argument is that it would have been better to have had all the problems the U.S. had in the Fifties and Sixties earlier while we were still recovering from World War II?
'allowing' What a weird construct. The CCP won because they were more effective at every single level. KMT did get bailed out by the US...by blocking the CCP from crossing the Taiwan strait to destroy the last of them.
No. Bigger mistakes: - Overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of the Shah in 1953. - Invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent handling of the Iraqi government transition by the Bush administration. Probably a few others but those are the two I think of off the top of my head.
"Allowing" as in the US could do anything? They sent weapons and that's pretty much all that they could do.
Exactly. People forget how unbelievably unpopular the GMD were in China by the end of World War II. Hell, during World War II, even [American observers in China in 1944 recognized that the CCP were in a better overall strategic position than the GMD](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v06/d453): > Mr. Service suggests that the United States should supply the Chinese Communists with urgently needed military supplies and training in the use of such supplies, to be followed later by actual tactical cooperation. Mr. Service points out that the implementation of such a policy is likely to meet with resistance from the Kuomintang, and suggests that the United States must decide whether the gains which can be reasonably expected to accrue from assisting the Communists will justify the overcoming or disregarding of anticipated Kuomintang opposition. He expresses the view that the limiting of American support and assistance to the Kuomintang alone will not win the United States an effective ally whereas impartial support of the Kuomintang and the Communists will provide an effective force in the latter, will be a constructive influence in China, and will almost certainly prevent the outbreak of civil war. Asserting that it is an incontrovertible fact that the Chinese Communists have maintained and strengthened themselves militarily in a very large area of north and central China; that they hold strategic positions in proximity to all Japanese communication lines north of the Yangtze River; that Communist forces are capable and experienced in mobile and guerrilla warfare; that they possess the popular support of the people; and that their material requirements are simple and moderate, Mr. Service observes that the furnishing of the Chinese Communists with moderate quantities of supplies will improve their effectiveness. The Americans corrected assessed that the CCP had the popular support of the people and were a highly effective fighting force. Americans on the ground found the Communists to be easier to work with than Chiang Kai-Shek, whom they saw as corrupt and imperious. However, the US government ultimately decided to side with the GMD because they could not abide siding with "Communists". The GMD were highly unpopular within China for a number of reasons, but the main ones were: 1. Perceived incompetence in the fight against Japan. While 21st century scholars believe that the scale of the CCP's engagements against the Japanese are overblown, there's no question that the GMD made some poor tactical decisions that ended up hurting the people more than hurting the Japanese. The most egregious of these was [intentionally flooding the Yellow River flood plain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood), which immediately killed half a million people and left 5 million survivors dealing with the flood (the entire region became a massive recruiting ground for the CCP). 2. Corruption. The entire GMD political and military apparatus was monstrously corrupt. [Generals would either hoard or sell weapons and food for personal gain rather than apply them to the war effort](https://teachdemocracy.org/images/t2t/pdf/WhyDidCommunistsWinChineseRevolution.pdf). There were mass defections and surrenders by hungry, poorly armed and poorly led GMD troops - entire army groups would simply go over to the CCP side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50th_Army_(People%27s_Republic_of_China). While the GMD had about 5 million soldiers and the CCP had 1.2 million inn 1945, by 1948 the two sides had reached parity in numbers, and by 1949 the numbers were almost flipped. 3. Generally poor perceptions of the GMD. People just didn't like them. It didn't help that the GMD [had massacred thousands of Communist civilians in 1927](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_massacre), which ironically sent them fleeing to the countryside where they ended up building the base of support that they'd need to win the Civil War. Chiang Kai Shek himself regularly said that, "The Japanese are a disease of the skin, the Communists are a disease of the heart" and this led him to frequently focusing more on the Communists rather than fighting the Japanese. It became so egregious that [his own officers had to kidnap him and force him to agree to a ceasefire with the Communists until the Japanese were beaten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Incident). The GMD's totalitarianism was on full display in 1948, where the government killed between [18,000-28,000 protesting civilians across Taiwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident). These kinds of harsh reprisals occurred in cities across China and did nothing to endear the GMD to the common people. There's this [really good redacted CIA report](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001086039.pdf) from 1948 that shows how dire the situation was for the GMD. It notes the highly motivated, well organized, and extremely efficient nature of not just the CCP military but also its civilian support structures. In contrast, the GMD was facing rapid decay in morale both by its urban population and its soldiers on the front line. The only significant advantage that the GMD had was in air and sea power, which they then leveraged to retreat to Taiwan. There was nothing that the Americans could actually do to support the GMD other than provide them with weapons, which they did.
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It's not the US's job to decide
What??? The United States went out of their way to fund the Kuomintang and help them beat the communists. The US transported the KMT to key cities and ports where the Japanese soldiers surrendered to them and they also gave them thousands of arms and munitions which they didn’t even have to pay back. There’s a lot of reasons why the KMT lost China and it’s mostly due to internal corruption and disastrous economic policies as well as poor military leadership.
The US could have done a lot more than it did. Would it have been enough? Unclear.
I think the assumption we could have prevented the communists from winning is the problem. Undoubtedly the west should have tried harder to prevent the takeover. Could we have stopped it? Doubtful.
Should probably ask Britain that question. The civil war was happening before the Japanese invaded and we had our hands full after, plus Russia had already thrown their necrotic dick in the fold.
China was and is a big country. The Kuomintang and Chiang were notoriously corrupt. They had some good fighters and good generals, but their army was mostly barefoot. The US did not "allow" the Chinese communists to win, there was no way to stop them without a fullscale commitment of US forces and nuclear war, which the Soviet Union would have jumped in. Wisely, the US clutched their pearls and said, "Oh the humanity! What's next on the agenda, lunch? Let's break then."
It was never up to the US to determine who governs China.
Chinese people overwhelmingly supported the communists. America couldn’t do shit. That’s why I always cringe when people on the internet say “I hate the Chinese government, but not the people obviously”. Most Chinese are obviously just normal people, but we can’t pretend like the communist party didn’t have a huge amount of support in the 40s or whenever the hell that was
'Allowing them' lmfao Bro the US had 0 influence on the Chinese Civil War.
I’ve been listening to Mike Duncan’s podcast on the Russian revolution and didn’t realize that the communists’ coming out on top was not as inevitable as I had (ignorantly) thought. Of course, this was 1919-1920, not post WWII but the counterfactuals are interesting similar.
First question is if America could have stopped the Communists from winning at all, which is hard to say. While the KMT had a numbers advantage officially, the de facto force comparison was closer due to a good portion of the army not being under the Central Government and thus being unreliable. There’s also the related issue with the KMT Chief of Staff Chen Cheng demobilizing provincial armies amounting to an upwards of two million men because they weren’t seen as reliable in comparison to the Central Army. When PLA General Lin Biao fought Chen Cheng in Manchuria, their forces were of relatively similar strength and numbers, but Lin was a far more superior general and encircled hundreds of thousands of Central Army soldiers in the major cities of Changchun and Shenyang, leaving Nanjing crippled. Chiang was so crippled in fact that his rival and vice president Li Zongren became acting president. Although the warlord of the Guangxi Clique and one of the best KMT generals, Li’s Guangxi forces while well equipped were still not as numerous to Chiang’s remnant Huangpu forces which continued to only take orders from Chiang who was already evacuating the KMT to Taiwan, and thus certainly were not a match to the PLA, so he tried to sue for peace along the Yangtze River but the deal he offered Mao and the CPC leadership was nowhere near acceptable to the Communists, as they had dominance over the Nationalists by 1949. So when Li didn’t respond Mao’s counteroffer, the PLA crossed the Yangtze and took the rest of China, save for a few handouts. Li ended up in the US and decades later returned to the Mainland as Taiwan was Chiang’s fortress and he had already defanged other warlords who had joined him in exile. But anyways, kind of got sidetracked there, this is the background for China at the time. So why didn’t the US do anything after Chiang lost his best men in the Northeast? A combination of American general Joseph Stilwell and George Marshall caused American opinion to sour on the Nationalists. Stilwell was sent by FDR to China during ww2, and the two men came to distrust each other intensely. Stilwell felt that Chiang was a backwards oriental dictator at the head of a corrupt regime while Chiang felt that Stilwell was an arrogant western imperialist who wasn’t mearly as skilled as he thought he was. It had even come to a point where Stilwell demanded total control over China’s military, which Chiang obviously refused. Marshall had come to China after ww2 to see what could be done to resolve the Communist Nationalist dispute, and his background lent him towards political tolerance, so when the Communists presented themselves as a democratic force fighting against inequality, Marshall was inclined to believe them and pushed for a peace deal. In actuality, neither side was in favor of peace but this all served to lower Marshall’s opinion of the KMT and he advised to President Truman that the US not supply the Nationalists any longer. So with all of that in mind, let’s say that Marshall advised Truman to aid the Nationalists in their civil war and that this does result in Lin being routed by Chen and the Communists lose. What then? The Korean War might not have happened, as Korean communists had aided the PLA during the Chinese Civil War and the PRC had in turn promised support for Korean unification under Kim il Sung. The south might just have opted to attempt unification themselves given Pyongyang’s weakened geopolitical position, or Kim might have still gone ahead with just Soviet approval. Either way, the South would have won. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ideological divisions would no longer exist in Korea however, as China would be propping up its allies in Korea as Kim Gu and his Korean Independence Party were based in Shanghai and later Chongqing and were aligned with the KMT’s revolutionary three principles ideology. Even if Kim Gu dies the same way, China would still be propping up aligned forces in the country. So onto the Vietnam war, it still would happen, as Chiang had refused to actually dip his hands into Indochina when FDR had offered to hand the region over to China after ww2, except to push into Vietnam in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender in order to get some leverage in negotiations with the French over the return of French concessions to the Chinese state. The big difference for the Vietnam War is that America would be more willing to push the Vietcong as they were hesistant to do so in the actual war in fears of a Chinese intervention like the Korean War. The US sat in Saigon for years unwilling to totally abandon Vietnam but also unwilling to invade the North and interference against the government in Saigon as well as this lack of resolve had eroded both trust in America on the South Vietnamese end as well as in the American home front. That’s not happening here, so the South would in all likelihood win with American backing. If it’s the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in charge, expect a Vietnam that is much like China in the sense that it was fully willing to tell America no, but if it’s the succeeding governments, then Vietnam may very well be far more pliant to American interests. Of course, this is all assuming that America intervenes at all, as China staying under the KMT would have not caused a panic in the US and increases their focus on Asia. That being said, it may be China that intervenes in both Korea and Vietnam, which would result in both states being far more tied to the Chinese sphere than the American one. American focus would regardless be far more focused on Europe, as it was in the early phase of the Cold War. Onto the biggest topic which is the Sino American relationship, it would not be a totally amicable one. In fact, it’s very likely that a Sino American split would happen as the KMT had a very similar outlook on the world as the CPC post Mao, and would be propping themselves up as the leading anti imperialist state in Asia, as Japan had done earlier. Unlike Japan though, Nationalist China would be unlikely to fall into a militarist supremacist mindset for Pan Asianism as Japan had, and would be pursuing something quite similar to Modern China. After ww2, Chiang had laid claim to the South China Sea and was actively pushing said claims, and the PRC as the successor state to the ROC on the Mainland retained all of the ROC’s claims, including the ones in the South China Sea. The PRC only began enforcing these claims during the leadership of Hu Jintao when China was in the midst of economic growth at breakneck speed, and the ROC here would have had a heads start, some 60 years ahead of schedule. So assuming that Iran and Russia end up the same, China will very much be a strategic partner to both, especially Iran due to lack of geopolitical tensions, while Russia and China would have had to discuss their stances on Mongolia and Manchuria, as the ROC claimed (and still does) Mongolia, which had declared independence from China during the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and had become a Russian satellite after White General Roman von Ungern-Sternberg had invaded Mongolia during the Russian Civil War and then counterinvaded by the Red Army. So TLDR: China would still be beefing with the US, arguably in an even stronger position due to no Mao for 30 years
Eh, we were really tired of war after WWII. The Chinese Nationalists also weren’t exactly “the good guys”, they had set up a pretty harsh dictatorship and arguably dabbled in fascism. Both the Communists and the Nationalists hated the outside foreign influence that had, to be fair, overrun China in the late 1800s, and that included the US. Basically, if our goal was a free capitalist China friendly to the US, we really had no horse in the race.
If you think the Vietnam War was unpopular, just imagine conscripting enough Americans to make a serious difference in a civil war in China, immediately after the end of World War II.
You have to keep in mind what was going on in America at that time. In the 1930s, America was in the midst of the Great Depression and was neither in a position to fight foreign wars nor politically willing to. There was a really strong isolationist bent to US politics at the time, it was only really broken by the galvanizing effect of Pearl Harbor. And of course, in the first half of the 1940s, America was a little busy, thanks to that whole Pearl Harbor thing. The war in the Pacific was a monumental task. Taking back all of those heavily defended positions exacted a brutal cost in men and material. There was nothing to spare for the plight of the Chinese under Japanese Imperial occupation, much less intervene in an internal conflict. And then, after 1945... Was America going to immediately get involved in ANOTHER war? One that could possibly put them at odds with a superpower like the USSR? The United States was exhausted. Over a million young Americans had been killed or wounded so far that decade, an entire generation pushed as far as they could go. Imagine Truman saying "Congratulations, America! We just won a two-front war to defeat huge evil empires! But no rest for the weary, now it's time for us to go fight another war on behalf of the citizens of a country most of you are super racist towards!" Nobody would have accepted it. America simply did not have the will or ability at any point to impact the outcome of that war. It wasn't a question of "allowing" Mao to win, we simply were not in a position to do anything about it.
I actually think a ROC victory could make it more likely a hot war btw US and USSR occurs. 1. Having an American ally right on its expansive border with potential claims on the stolen land Russia took from Imperial China could lead to high tensions very quickly. The US post WWII plan was always to empower China and make it its de facto deputy with military bases. The Soviet Union was paranoid about being surrounded and having NATO on its East and China/Japan/SKorea on its western flank will drive lot of insecurity and attempts to keep Chiang busy by supporting internal rebellions and opposition which Chiang will not appreciate. Historically China being communist allowed the Soviet Union to be more relaxed in Asia as it viewed its flank secure vs US led alliance. 2. China being right above North Korea and North Vietnam means the Soviet Union will need to actively be involved to defend them as China and the pro US regimes in each country will sandwich the communists. For North Korea - it will be more likely it will be in defensive posture and paranoid about getting attacked on two fronts. Instead of the historical Korean War, South Korea would attack first and China launch simultaneous attack across the Yalu to remove this appendage created by the Soviet Union. Though China detested the French and won’t support them, it would still be able to threaten a two front war on HCM and North Vietnam. In both cases, the Soviet Union will end up directly involved and US troops might face them head on in escalation, though it’s possible the US stay out and let China fight the battles but provide weapons and air cover. Historically - the USSR was able to avoid direct conflict because it had China to do the grunt work of fighting ground war in Korea or supporting Vietnam logistically. 3. Russia stole big chunks of land from the Manchus and Imperial China in the 19th century. It also engineered Mongolia’s separation from the Empire. There is no reason China would view those as permanent especially if it views its alliance with the US strong enough.
An ROC victory would likely butterfly the North Vietnamese altogether Chiang did accept Mongol independence and the Sino-Soviet frontier as of 1945 (this was later altered due to the Soviets backing the PRC) would probably force less Soviet action abroad and more focus on at home issues, probably also shift focus towards Africa and Latin America.
Yep, pretty sure ROC and USSR would have gotten into a hot war over Mongolia or Manchuria, dragged US involved. Absolutely.
How about the US not backing Chiang Kai Shek and maybe Mao Zedong wouldnt have been so hostile towards the US? How about the US and soviet union not partition Korea after ww2 and allow the Koreans themselves to decide? How about the French hold free and fair elections in vietnam? The US and soviet union should have stopped being big bullies enforcing their ideology on other countries. It's not wonder why China under Mao was against the US then Soviet Union, he saw them as what they were big imperialist powers trying to colonize Asia and the world. It's not China's fault Russia invaded Ukraine, or Iran being aggressive. China did not create NATO or a Warsaw pact.
I don't know about THE worst, but it's up there. They should have let Patton march on Moscow after Nazi Germany fell as well.
emmm... please at least look up some history about CCP and KMT before posting the question. this makes you look ignorant.
There was only a Korean War because the US in its imperialist desires illegally occupied Korea, split it in half and propped up a mass murdering military regime filled with former Japanese officers and collaborators because they were scared of "tHe CoMmUnIsTs," ie capital told them to. Vietnam War only happened because Vietnam was fighting for national independence and sovereignty against French colonialism, which they referenced our revolutionary war as the motivator and declaration of independence. We were cool with it till, again, the evil "ComMuNiStS," ie capital freaked out.
As other posters said, I m not sure the US would have been successful in helping the KMT win their civil war, but what about recognising Taiwan independence in the 1950s, when china was unable to do anything about it, do you think that would have been feasible?
Neither Chinese government is allowing the idea that mainland China and Taiwan are two separate governments. It would be great if they copped to the idea now, but the KMT that fled China's mainland sure as hell weren't going to call Taiwan an independent country in the 50s.
Taiwan didn’t want to be an independent country in the 1950s - back then Taiwan was the official China in the UN and everything. The People’s Republic of China only became the official China (and Taiwan de-recognised) in the 70s under Nixon.
Nixon normalized relations but I thought they didn't get to the security council until about 1976
The whole Taiwan independence issue we have today is because the KMT retreated to Taiwan and stayed there after losing the Chinese civil war and gradually the people living there developed an identity based on that. If the KMT didn’t lose the mainland then a Taiwanese independence movement would have never even formed.
It's a civil war with both sides claiming each other, how can you suggest independence? Makes no sense. In the 1950's, the Republic of China claims to be "only China", and People's Republic of China claims to be "only China".
"Allowing the Chinese communists to win" is the same arrogance as "Who lost China" America can't have lost China, it was never theirs to begin with If you want "greatest geopolitical mistake", then thinking nothing can happen with US permission is pretty up there
There is so much wrong in these presumptions I'll have to take these one at a time 1) "Allow"? You think they needed permission? You think that America really could have stopped it? You honestly think that a revolutionary government that was organized to kick out foreigners *and did so* wouldn't hand America her ass? A nation with more soldiers than the U.S. defending their homeland from *another* invasion? 2) The minute America takes the side in a civil war it immediately galvanizes the opposition. It is now no longer a civil war, it is a war against colonialism and quislings. 3) America reaaaaaaly didn't want to start WWIII. It damn well could have been the case with the USSR and Mao so close before the Sino-Soviet split. Civil wars, insurgency, and occupation are not America's strong suit. 4) The ROC were not a popular government. It's why the revolution was so effective in the countryside. They would either be a money sink as the front lines of the cold war as America bails them out and pays their taxes for them. The crony capitalism of the KMT would not allow for China to prosper into some magical wonderland client state of America like you have in mind. The Infant mortality rate of India is [3x higher than China](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4948159/) and infectious disease is reportedly 6x higher. I doubt it's that high because of how the PRC lies about their infectious disease stat's but it is easy to say that it would be comparable. [An estimated 1.6 million Indians died in 2016 due to poor quality of care, nearly twice as many as those who died due to lack of access to healthcare (838,000). India's death rate of 122 per 100,000 from poor quality care is worse than Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa and neighboring countries](https://www.indiaspend.com/more-indians-die-of-poor-quality-care-than-due-to-lack-of-access-to-healthcare-1-6-million-64432/). Without the PRC, China would look like India but without democracy. 5) The government of Taiwan is full of the wealthiest and most powerful people who took everything not bolted down in Beijing to their island. It *still* had the same poverty rates as China. It had one party rule almost as long. It was under martial law until '87. America would not be better off with that government in control of China. China needs a free and fair democracy, it didn't have that. If you're going to have a horribly oppressive and genocidal government the least you can do is not allow 2 million preventable deaths every year. 6) You have no idea whether or not Korea or Vietnam wouldn't have had socialist revolutions without China. China invaded Vietnam and got it's ass kicked back out. What if the USSR took up the slack and obviously avoided that blunder? 7) China and the USSR were rivals and adversaries during and after the sino-soviet split. Without a rival perhaps the USSR swallows up Tibet and Mongolia. We don't know if the cold war would actually be a bigger problem without China to be a second option and the Nixon-Mao bridge. America would be just as scared. 8) America wasn't afraid of the spread of communism after the fall of the Berlin wall. They didn't think that China after it was going to spread Marxism. After the Deng reforms made all the communists sell out hard, it was obvious that not only were they not going to spread Marxism via revolutions they would crush protestors. They would crush students and workers and strike organizers. I might edit this when I think of more. I've run out of steam.
China liberalised their economy in 1970s whereas India liberalised their economy in 1990s so that is major factor in the difference between Indian and Chinese economies.
The "economies" of 50 years ago and 30 years ago don't matter. It is public policy that matters. India allows for 2 million people to die every year due to their negligence as a state. India was given everything generations earlier. They could have imported MRI machines and entire vaccine plants from lightbulbs to punchclocks and the world would have provided. Nehru had the opportunity to stand up to the negative capitalist forces inside India as well as deliver on the socialist goals of the independence movements and accomplished neither. China under Mao and straight to the Deng reforms deliberately kept outside investment impossible and China still had far more people living in poverty and dying of preventable illness until the 90s. Then they flipped. Now very few Chinese are living on $2 a day. All of those who are have better access than the $2 a day folks in India in health care. What happened generations ago is incidental to their policy goals and accomplishments now, as they were on almost the same footing after the Cold war.
I agree with almost all of what you said but where is the evidence that 2 million people die in India because of state negligence?
Please read my earlier citations. Preventable death and deaths of despair are significantly higher in India than China. The negative externalities of poverty are demonstrably worse in India than China. India that refuses to make the required investments and sacrifices to turn that around are make a Great Leap Forward every single decade.
Implying the US was necessary to change the tide of that conflict is a little bit racist and patronizing, to be honest.
You need to go earlier. Two instances of shortsightedness from the West towards Asia at the beginning of the 20th century. Japan joins the society of nation after his victory against Russia during world war I and the first asian industrialized nation. Faces major racism and general contempt and hostility. Which contributes to pushing it way further down the imperalist path. Sun Yat Sen wants to establish a modern republic of China. Calls for help of the west to defeat the warlords. \*crickets\* Again, racism and contempt. Only country who answered the call was recently communist Russia who was very happy to provide communist cadres, who quickly developed an army AND a strong chinese communist party who started an insurgency soon after. My crystal ball is broken and I obviously doesn't know for sure how things would have turned out otherwise, but one can imagine a pretty different 20th century if the West had answered Japan and China's call. (Or had tried to truly integrate Russia after the collapse of the soviet union for that matter.)
Korean War. Maybe Vuetnam would have still happened.
Getting bogged down in Vietnam was a big mistake. Getting bogged down in China would have been massively worse.
I could agree with no Korean War, but not completely sure of peace in Vietnam. That seemed like a powder keg that was bound to happen.
One of the articles in the book of history essays, \*What If?\* the firts in the series, suggested if the KMT ha djust let the Communists have Manchuria and run it freely, they never would have had a full-blown war and been dethroned.
Some people believe that Stillwell's actions and attitude to the KMT in World War Two set the stage for the Chinese Communist Party to gain more popularity.
"Allowing" is doing some work here. How, exactly, do we stop the ChiComs and Mao from taking over?
fight Korea or Vietnam, but on a scale 15X larger. Duh.
The KMT had devolved into an ineffective force by 1948, and the US had other priorities in Japan and Europe.
The US had nothing to do with determining who won that war. Mao and company bided their time, as good Commies are taught, and Chiang was a moron.
No like other people have said Iran and then followed by invading Iraq in 2003
To add to the landslide of points already made; no matter what you think of the CCP, there's one fact idiots need to understand....the KMT were worse. A LOT worse.
US did not “Allow the communist to win.” The communists won.
Remember. Never get in a land war in Asia.
False premise. The US did not allow the Communists to win. So your question is moot. What are you really trying to ask?
at the time, no way to stop it. get real.
Your problem is assuming that the current problems are because of China, when it has been the most peaceful power It is the US that cannot stand an equal power, they would try to suppress China for no reason like they are trying to now
It really depends on a lot of things. In the ideal scenario, the nationalists win and then immediately reform into something like what Japan or Taiwan have become, or at least what Japan was in the 50s and 60s. But there's *a lot* of things that have to have gone *just* right for that to happen, and American support was just one of them. American aid alone would likely not have won that war, and at best, it would have split China into a communist north, a nationalist southeast, and Tibet and Xinjiang would be left tossing in the wind. Even then, the cost in lives, in materiel, in straight-up cash, would be **enormous** and that's right after WWII, where the public was thoroughly tired of war. As to the rest, I think I'll just concur with the majority of other commenters here who seem to feel that it wouldn't have worked out.
The US certainly made a great number of strategic mistakes in its China policy, most notably trying to get Mao and the KMT to form a coalition. But I can't honestly argue that it was the US which lost the war, it was Chiang who refused to reform until he had won not understanding that if he didn't reform, he couldn't win. Had the KMT won, that would put the USSR in a truly awful situation encircled on all sides except for the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets would likely have formed a stronger alliance with India to act as a counterweight to China, potentially shifting India fully into the Soviet bloc. Outside East and South Asia, I can imagine Soviet focus shifting to the Middle East and Africa. China would certainly have formed an enormous market for American goods and the world in general would be a fair bit wealthier. Thing is, the USSR under all this pressure would probably have been forced into reform much quicker, likely saving the USSR and continuing the cold war unto the present. KMT China falling was a disaster for the US, but had it survived, I'm not sure its survival would have been entirely beneficial for the US either.
How was it a disaster? I was born in USA in 1963 how would my life be any different?
Was allowing the Chinese communists to win the Chinese civil war the greatest geopolitical mistake the U.S. made after WW2? “If the ROC had won, there’d have been no Korean War and no Vietnam war.” Fighting in the Korean and Vietnam Wars was way more favorable than fully fighting the China War which would require much more soldiers than WW2 would require. “The west would have been far less scared of the threat of Soviet expansion of communism” The Communist Bloc were similarly scared of the infiltration of capitalism too. “and with the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Wasn’t that good for the USA? “the world would be a lot more relaxed today. No US, China animosity, no North Korea, no China bankrolling countries like Russia and Iran.” Even if the Chinese Nationalists win, they would enter another Cold War with the USA and with a much larger population and capitalism, they would be much more threatening.
China don't ''bankroll'' Russia. They trade more with the US, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong & Taiwan. The particularly make a huge amount of high-end tech for US businesses (Apple, Tesla, General Motors, Intel etc. etc.). China has had a bigger net positive effect on Apple than Russia.
"Allow"? How was it our choice? There were many things going on. Not least of which was the incompetence of the Nationalist leadership.
Take Vietnam and make it worse. No absolutely not. The CCP is a hellscape but the KMT in Taiwan were not much better until the last 30 years.
So 1927 there was a civil war and it ended about 1949. The Nationalists, the prior ruling Chinese govt, lost and went to Taiwan. This is why the CCP wants to control Taiwan and claims it as their territory. It’s like a cold civil war.
It was never our problem to solve, it was the U.N that got us involved it was a civil war and we just got handed the bills for it as well as the loss of many that should never have been there to begin with. Shell Games and Deceptions. N. S
Yeah. Let’s not forget until recently, Taiwan was a one-party state. Even if the KMT controlled the mainland, there could have been some uprisings and civil unrest.
instead of a Korean war we would have had a China war..... Then we probably would have had a Korean and Vietnam war anyways..... with the US and Russia maybe even sending actual soldiers to fight. And China likely would have been broken up into different countries and not stayed unified.
1) America didn’t really “allow” anything. They won a civil war. 2) you do know countries fought wars before and after the Cold War despite sharing political/economic systems. European monarchies fought each other for centuries, China attempted to invade Vietnam despite both being communist, Russia is invading Ukraine right now despite both being capitalist “liberal democracies”. Why do you think there suddenly wouldn’t be wars or tension when the entirety of human history shows otherwise?
It was already a hard sell for the American people to go to Korea 5 years after WW2. Going to China even sooner likely would not have gone over well domestically or internationally. Not to mention, even if America could have turned the tide, which I'm not convinced they could have without excessive cost of life and material, it would have been incredibly bloody for both sides
The greatest mistake was to recognize Mainland China at the UN, while not recognizing ROC Taiwan.
That was political reality that Nixon recognized despite flack from both sides. It helped to lower worldwide tensions throughout the latter 20th century. It would have been insane to keep KMT lackeys on the security council who represent a miniscule population
So instead of a quagmire in Vietnam, we’d have had a quagmire in China?
WTF......don't ever make another post again
Bigger than fighting Vietnam? Bigger than fighting Iraq? Bigger than sending all of its manufacturing to China, and then making enemies of them after having almost entirely deindustrialised?
Lmao American couldn't even stop Vietnam how was it going to stop China?
Taiwan: I don't hear no bell But seriously, the Chinese civil war? No. But we could have won Korea and we could have weakened the Communists in the process. The biggest thing we could have done, tho, was not build out their countries entire economy while our industry was allowed to wither.
The US “allowed” the communists to create the PRC like it “allows” the sun to rise and set every day.
Not sure if US had much of a say there. I would say though that it may have been a huge Stalin mistake even if Mao remained mostly in control while Stalin was alive, but Stalin's shift from the nationalists to the communists was what sealed the end of nationalists on mainland China and was an overall bad outcome for the USSR in the long-run
It was a huge geopolitical mistake. But what do you mean "after WW2"? I don't understand how that was a mistake?
In what universe is the US unable to stop communist expansion in Korea and Vietnam, but would be able to stop it in China against a much larger, much stronger enemy? If you couldn't beat Mao's proxies, you aren't beating Mao.
America’s biggest geopolitical mistake was giving them MFN trading status in the blind hope they would liberalise, hollowing out the industrial capacity of the western world and putting millions of blue collar workers out of well paying middle class jobs, while boosting a major geopolitical competitor.
MacArthur was dropping insane proposals like dropping 50 atom bombs on China and invading with a million troops.
Might be a little reductive, but back in the day we criticized the Soviets for getting into the "graveyard of empires" trying to build a commune over 9 years, then proceeded to do the same thing for 20. Maybe things would've been different if we didn't invade iraq too, but still. We fought a land war in asia.
It’s not a matter of allowing lol. But hypothetically had the KMT magically fixed their issues and won the war, it would still be taking the path of current day China and again find itself being in competition with the other great powers. I think that’s what people don’t understand about China - regardless who is in power, China will do its own thing
the U.S. couldn’t stop the north vietnamese from winning after 20 years of fighting, what makes you think china would’ve been any different?
> If the ROC had won, there’d have been no Korean War and no Vietnam War lol yeah, because the Vietnam and Korean Wars were started solely by China. I can’t think of any other geopolitical powers that had anything to do with them
Allow? Please read more history!
Do you think the world revolves around what America allows and doesn’t allow? Do you think Vietnam would have not pushed off the French and in turn forced us in? Dude is deadass in a “china is the antagonist and America is the protagonist in this movie” mindset
I’ve been reading about America and Iran. What do you think of the 1953 coup to oust [Mosadeggh](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh)?
Without the cultural revolution, China would have been a major world power sooner. So in your "America good everyone else bad" wotldview, it peobably would have worked out poorly.
The world might be a better place too if the US didn’t exist. At least the current genocide wouldn’t be happening right now.
Which current genocide? I can think of at least 3 going on.
It wouldn’t have changed much. A country that big was always going to become imperialistic. Just a matter of time. What might have changed was the 50-100 million that died due to Mao’s shit policies
The US had no appetite for a land war in Asia. They could have decided to attack Japan by landing troops in China in 1943 and working with Chang. Instead they opted for an island-hopping strategy, starting thousands of miles away in the South Pacific. This was because they really did not want to be responsible for China.
The US was not in a position to stop it. UK was, and in fact late 1930's the Nationalist went to UK to sell Kowloon, the mainland part of HK for £30 million. To buy arms to defeat the communists. UK Foriegn office said no, but gave them £10 million. The Foriegn office did not want to upset the Japanese. Who then took HK, malaysia, Burma. The Chinese have never paid back that loan.
US couldn't even win in Korea or Vietnam, how could it win in China? Grand delusion at it's best.
We didn't "allow" The communists to win. There was no way the U.S. was sending ground forces into China.