(3) Marshall and Truman were the “noblemen” of the Chinese Communist usurpation of power
After the failure of Marshall’s mediation, the Truman administration had already decided to abandon its allies in the ROC. In August 49, the night before the fall of mainland China, Truman approved the publication of the White Paper on U.S.-China Relations, trying to make a mockery of the situation and shirk responsibility, claiming that “within reason, nothing done by the United States could have changed the situation in China; if the United States had done what it did not do, it would have had no effect on the situation. This was the result of internal forces in China, and the end was determined internally by China and was the result of negligence on the part of one party.”
However, the U.S. was not in any way responsible for the fall of mainland China. Just as American aid was a decisive factor in the victory of Britain and France over Fascist Germany, so, in fact, was the war between the Communists and the Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party was a puppet of the Soviet Union from the very beginning, and had always received explicit and implicit support from Stalin. Against this backdrop, U.S. assistance to the ROC’s allies was particularly pivotal. Other things aside, the U.S. sold out China’s interests in the Yalta agreement and introduced Soviet bogeymen into the Northeast, making it possible for the CCP to establish insurgent bases there. After Japan’s surrender, the United States, ashamed of its allies, did not try to undo the bad effects of the Yalta agreement, but instead tried again by sending Marshall, the communist envoy, to China to interfere strongly in China’s internal affairs. On the surface, the government’s defeat in the civil war was the result of a combination of corrupt officials, economic collapse, popular sentiment, poor U.S. aid, and undercover Communist spies. But when we look at the root of the problem, almost every factor is related to the U.S. policy of appeasement.
Politically, the U.S. wanted the Kuomintang and the Communist rebels to form a “democratic coalition government”, providing an opportunity and a stage for the Communists to whitewash their sins, discredit the government, and deceive the people under the guise of democratic demands and enlightenment. Even the intellectual elite, who are independent and liberal-minded, were deceived into joining the anti-government movement.
Militarily, the U.S. fell into the trap of nationalizing the Communist army, preventing the government from fighting the Communists by force, first by releasing the Communists in the Northeast, and then by forcing the government to cease fire in Guan’an, putting layers of strings on the national army, and even forcing it to cut off arms. The Nationalist Army was attacked on both sides, losing the opportunity to fight repeatedly, and was in a dilemma, making counter-insurgency unsustainable.
Economically, the U.S. mediation delayed the war for a long Time, and the government’s expectation of eliminating the communists in one year and restoring the economy in two years failed. With the transportation disrupted by the communists paralyzed for a long time, and the burden of huge military expenses, the economy was eventually crushed.
In terms of public opinion, there was no shortage of pro-Communists at the decision-making level of the U.S. government, with deep-rooted stereotypes about the Nationalist government. The U.S. itself is the soprano in the chorus of criticism of the National Government’s corruption and incompetence, dictatorship, and even greater the effect of the mouths of the people, the destruction of the bones, the devastating blow to the government and public sentiment is incalculable.
Even in the communist spy undercover, the United States has inadvertently become complicit. Zhou Enlai had left a notepad on Marshall’s plane with top-secret information on Hu Zongnan’s side of the communist spy Xiong Xianghui, which was sealed with fire paint by Marshall and returned intact. [26] If he had handed it over to the National Army intelligence department for inspection, not only would Xiong have been exposed, but Mao Zhou and other bandit leaders might have been captured in northern Shaanxi.
If the Nationalist government was being attacked on both sides, the communist side benefited on both sides. They did not defeat the KMT by any means by adding rifles to rice, but by relying on the massive amount of heavy arms provided by the Soviet Union and the joining of Japanese skilled soldiers to defeat the Nationalist Army, which was stuck by the United States. They ultimately gained power not because of Communist brilliance, but because of American stupidity. It can be said that Truman and Marshall became the “valuable people” who helped the Communists to redevelop China and took “great credit” for it, first by helping the national government without asking questions, and then by walking away and leaving the national government to fend for itself, watching mainland China The Chinese people have fallen into the clutches of the communists and hundreds of millions of them have been reduced to communist slaves, writing an extremely unpleasant page in the history of U.S. post-war relations with China. As Jiang Zhongzheng said in his diary, “The failure of the revolution against the bandits was not a failure of the communists, but a failure of Russian history (Stalin); nor was it a failure of Russian history, but a failure of U.S. Marshall’s (Marshall) obstinacy.”
Marshall’s mission to China was certainly a failure, but the root of the problem was Truman, the decision maker. Although U.S. presidents are elected by popular vote, there is no guarantee that the person elected will have a visionary strategic vision and a strong will and sense of mission to confront communist evil and defend freedom. A number of U.S. presidents since World War II have been “unworthy of their positions” and have disdained the evil nature and power of the Chinese Communist Party, and have pursued appeasement policies of appeasement towards the Communist Party, to the grave detriment of the U.S. and the free world, Truman being the first of them.
After the end of World War II, the brief U.S.-Soviet alliance came to an end. Faced with the expansion of Soviet communist power, the United States began to pursue a containment strategy against Soviet communism, making the defense of freedom and the containment of communist totalitarianism its primary strategic goal. As president, Truman had the responsibility to adjust his policy toward China in time to adapt to the new post-war world landscape. For the United States, whether the Communists cooperated or not was no longer important. The most important thing was to prevent China from being deflowered and joining the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviet Union had already invaded and controlled northeastern China, and there was a real danger of fostering a pro-Soviet Chinese Communist regime. Therefore, it was in the interest of the United States and the free world to firmly support the government of the allied Republic of China.
However, Truman pursued two different policies in Europe and Asia. In China, he ignored the mainstream of the Nationalist government’s inclination toward the U.S. and Britain and its anti-Soviet and Anti-Communist stance, seized on the one-party government of the Kuomintang during the training period, put political democratization above confrontation with communism, and forced the national government to form a coalition government with the communists as a condition for aid to China.
In Europe, in response to the potential crises in Greece and Turkey, he proposed the Truman Doctrine, in which the U.S. would firmly support governments (democratic or not) and people (around the world) who fought against armed rebellion by communist forces in order to stop communist redistribution. However, he believed that this policy did not apply to China, so when he formally introduced the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he deliberately removed the definite word “throughout the world. In other words, the U.S. had to assist European countries that were not yet under the thumb of Soviet totalitarianism in order to prevent problems before they occurred. For China, which has already been infiltrated by Soviet communist forces, the priority is to promote political democratization. Truman’s apparent emphasis on Europe over Asia, favoring one over the other, inconsistent words and contradictory foreign policy is another strategic mistake of the U.S. after Roosevelt drew the wolf into the house at Yalta. This is the fundamental reason why Marshall’s mediation failed and the US finally lost China. Truman pushed down the first domino of the great reversal of U.S.-China relations, and its subsequent effects stretched over decades.
In January 1950, Secretary of State Acheson publicly announced that the U.S. defense line in the Pacific (also known as the Acheson Line) would include only an arc of islands from the Aleutians, Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines, excluding the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan.
The active withdrawal of the U.S. opened the green light for the evil communist forces of S, Mao and Kim who were eyeing and ambitious, and became the fundamental trigger for the outbreak of the Korean War. The U.S. was unwilling to cooperate with the Nationalist government in eliminating the Communists, but soon engaged the Chinese Communists directly in the Korean theater. The Communist army was the same one that had previously seized power on the mainland under the patronage of the United States. If the U.S. had been as firm in its support of the National Government’s counter-insurgency efforts against the Communists as Hurley, Weidemeyer, and MacArthur were from the beginning, it is likely that neither the mainland nor the Korean War (or even the Vietnam War) would have been lost, and the fate of post-war China and the world landscape would have been rewritten. Why should we have done it in the first place if we had known?
However, instead of accepting the lessons of blood, the U.S. forgot the pain of its sores. With the election of Nixon as president, a new round of U.S. appeasement policy towards the communists made a strong appearance, once again embarking on the road of no return to the detriment of its own national fortunes.
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