On China (17 page)

If that was the case, a military alliance was really not needed. Stalin made his reserve explicit when Mao formally raised the issue. He made the stunning assertion that a new treaty of alliance was superfluous; the existing treaty, which had been signed with Chiang Kai-shek in quite different circumstances, would suffice. Stalin buttressed this argument with the claim that the Soviet position was designed to avoid giving “America and England the legal grounds to raise questions about modifying” the Yalta agreements.
⁵

In effect, Stalin was arguing that Communism in China was best protected by a Russian agreement made with the government Mao had just overthrown. Stalin liked this argument so much that he also applied it to the concessions the Soviet Union had extracted from Chiang Kai-shek with respect to Xinjiang and Manchuria, which, in his view, should now be continued at Mao’s request. Mao, ever the fervent nationalist, rejected these ideas by redefining Stalin’s request. The present arrangements along the Manchurian railroad, he argued, corresponded to “Chinese interests” insofar as they provided “a training school for the preparation of Chinese cadres in railroad and industry.”
⁶
Chinese personnel needed to take over as soon as they could be trained. Soviet advisors could stay until this training was completed.

Amidst protestations of amity and affirmations of ideological solidarity, two major Machiavellians were maneuvering over ultimate predominance (and over sizeable tracts of territory around China’s periphery). Stalin was the senior and, for a time, more powerful; Mao, in a geopolitical sense, the more self-confident. Both were superior strategists and therefore understood that, on the course they were formally charting, their interests were almost bound to clash eventually.

After a month of haggling, Stalin yielded and agreed to a treaty of alliance. However, he insisted Dalian and Lushun would remain Soviet bases until a peace treaty with Japan was signed. Moscow and Beijing finally concluded a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance on February 14, 1950. It provided what Mao had sought and Stalin had tried to avoid: an obligation of mutual assistance in case of conflict with a third power. Theoretically, it obliged China to come to the assistance of the Soviet Union globally. Operationally, it gave Mao a safety net if the various looming crises around China’s borders were to escalate.

The price China had to pay was steep: mining, railroad, and other concessions in Manchuria and Xinjiang; the recognition of the independence of Outer Mongolia; Soviet use of Dalian harbor; and the use, until 1952, of the Lushun naval base. Years later, Mao would still complain bitterly to Khrushchev about Stalin’s attempt to establish “semi-colonies” in China by means of these concessions.
⁷

As for Stalin, the emergence of a potentially powerful eastern neighbor presented a geopolitical nightmare. No Russian ruler could ignore the extraordinary demographic disparity between China and Russia along a two-thousand-mile frontier: a Chinese population of over five hundred million adjoined a Russian total of less than forty million in Siberia. At what point in China’s development would numbers begin to matter? Seeming consensus on ideology emphasized, rather than diminished, the concern. Stalin was too cynical to doubt that when powerful men achieve eminence by what they consider their own efforts, they resist the claim of superior orthodoxy by an ally, however close. Stalin, having taken the measure of Mao, must have known that he would never concede doctrinal preeminence.

An episode that occurred during Mao’s stay in Moscow was symptomatic of both the fraught relations within the Communist world as well as the potential and looming role of the United States in that emerging triangle. The occasion was an attempt by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to answer the chorus of domestic critics on who had “lost” China. Under his instructions, the State Department had issued a White Paper in August 1949 addressing the collapse of the Nationalists. Though the United States still recognized the Nationalists as the legitimate government for all of China, the White Paper described them as “corrupt, reactionary and inefficient.”
⁸
Acheson had therefore concluded, and he advised Truman in the White Paper’s letter of transmittal, that

In a speech to the National Press Club on January 12, 1950, Acheson reinforced the White Paper’s message and put forward a sweeping new Asia policy. His speech contained three points of fundamental importance. The first was that Washington was washing its hands of the Chinese civil war. The Nationalists, Acheson proclaimed, had displayed both political inadequacy as well as “the grossest incompetence ever experienced by any military command.” The Communists, Acheson reasoned, “did not create this condition,” but had skillfully exploited the opening it provided. Chiang Kai-shek was now “a refugee on a small island off the coast of China with the remnants of his forces.”
¹⁰

Having conceded the mainland to Communist control and whatever geopolitical impact this might have, it made no sense to resist Communist attempts to occupy Taiwan. This was in fact the judgment of NSC-48/2, a document reflecting national policy prepared by the National Security Council staff and approved by the President. Adopted on December 30, 1949, it concluded that “the strategic importance of Formosa [Taiwan] does not justify overt military action.” Truman had made a similar point at a press conference on January 5: “The United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa.”
¹¹

Second and even more significantly, Acheson left no doubt about who was threatening China’s independence in the long run:

The final new point in Acheson’s speech was even more profound in its implications for the future. For it did nothing less than suggest an explicit Titoist option for China. Proposing to base relations with China on national interest, Acheson asserted that the integrity of China was an American national interest regardless of China’s domestic ideology: “We must take the position we have always taken—that anyone who violates the integrity of China is the enemy of China and is acting contrary to our own interest.”
¹³

Acheson was laying out a prospect for a new Sino-American relationship based on national interest, not ideology:

Such a view toward Communist China would not be put forward again by a senior American official for another two decades, when Richard Nixon advanced similar propositions to his Cabinet.

Acheson’s speech was brilliantly crafted to touch most of Stalin’s raw nerves. And Stalin was in fact lured into trying to do something about it. He dispatched his foreign minister, Andrey Vyshinsky, and his senior minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to call on Mao, still in Moscow for the alliance negotiations, to warn him of the “slander” being spread by Acheson and, in effect, inviting reassurance. It was a somewhat frantic gesture, not in keeping with Stalin’s usual perspicacity. For the very request for reassurance defines the potential capacity for unreliability of the other side. If a partner is thought capable of desertion, why would reassurance be credible? If not, why would it be necessary? Moreover, both Mao and Stalin knew that Acheson’s “slander” was an accurate description of the current Sino-Soviet relationship.
¹⁵

The Soviet pair asked Mao to disavow Acheson’s accusations that the Soviet Union might seek to detach parts of China, or a dominant position in them, and recommended that he describe it as an insult to China. Mao did not comment to Stalin’s emissaries except to ask for a copy of the speech and inquire about Acheson’s possible motives. After a few days, Mao approved a statement sarcastically attacking Acheson—but in contrast to Moscow’s response, which was issued in the name of the Soviet foreign minister, Beijing left it to the head of the People’s Republic of China’s official news bureau to reject Acheson’s overtures.
¹⁶
The language of the statement decried Washington’s “slander” but its relatively low protocol level kept China’s options open. Mao chose not to address the full implications of his view while he was in Moscow, trying to construct a safety net for his still isolated country.

Mao revealed his true feelings about the possibility of separating from Moscow later, in December 1956, with characteristic complexity, in the guise of rejecting the option once again albeit in a more muted way:

But what if the United States were ready to offer what Mao called “a full meal”? That question would not be answered until 1972, when President Nixon began his overtures to China.

Matters could have proceeded as a kind of shadowboxing for several, perhaps many, years as the two morbidly suspicious absolute rulers were calibrating each other by ascribing their own motives to their counterpart. Instead Kim Il-sung, the North Korean leader whom Stalin had ridiculed in his first meeting with Mao in December 1949, entered the geopolitical fray with startling results. In their Moscow meeting, Stalin had fended off a military alliance between China and the Soviet Union by mockingly suggesting that the only threat to peace would come from North Korea, if “Kim Il Sung decides to invade China.”
¹⁸

That is not what Kim Il-sung decided. Instead, he chose to invade South Korea and, in the process, brought the major countries to the edge of a global war and China and the United States into actual military confrontation.

Before the North Korean invasion of the South, it would have seemed inconceivable that a China barely emerging from civil war would go to war against a nuclear-armed America. That the war broke out is due to the suspicions the two Communist giants had of each other and to Kim Il-sung’s ability, though wholly dependent on his incomparably more powerful allies, to manipulate their mutual suspicions.

Korea had been incorporated into imperial Japan in 1910 and quickly became the jumping-off point for Japanese incursions into China. In 1945, after Japan’s defeat, Korea was occupied in the North by Soviet armies, in the South by American forces. The dividing line between them, the 38th parallel, was arbitrary. It simply reflected the limits their armies had reached at the end of the war.
¹⁹

When the occupying powers withdrew in 1949 and the hitherto occupied zones became fully sovereign states, neither felt comfortable within its boundaries. Their rulers, Kim Il-sung in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South, had spent their lives fighting for their national causes. They saw no reason to abandon them now, and both claimed the leadership for all of the country. Military clashes along the dividing line were frequent.

Starting with the withdrawal of American forces from South Korea in June 1949, Kim Il-sung had throughout 1949 and 1950 tried to convince both Stalin and Mao to acquiesce in a full-scale invasion of the South. Both at first rejected the proposal. During Mao’s visit to Moscow, Stalin asked Mao’s opinion of such an invasion, and Mao, though favorable to the objective, judged the risk of American intervention as too high.
²⁰
He thought any project to conquer South Korea should be deferred until the completion of the Chinese civil war through the conquest of Taiwan.

It was precisely this Chinese aim that provided one of the incentives for Kim Il-sung’s project. However ambiguous American statements, Kim Il-sung was convinced that the United States was unlikely to accept two Communist military conquests. He was therefore impatient to achieve his objectives in South Korea before Washington had second thoughts should China succeed in occupying Taiwan.

A few months later, in April 1950, Stalin reversed his previous position. During a visit by Kim Il-sung in Moscow, Stalin gave the green light to Kim’s request. Stalin stressed his conviction that the United States would not intervene. A Soviet diplomatic document recounted that