"Lost Chance" for What? Rethinking the Origins of U.S.-PRC Confrontation Thomas J

A "Lost Chance" for What? Rethinking the Origins of U.S.-PRC Confrontation Thomas J. Christensen Cornell University

The question of whether or not the Truman administration wasted a chance for friendly relations with the Chinese Communists has spawned as much scholarship and debate as any issue in the history of China's foreign relations. Those supporting the "lost chance" thesis point to Mao Zedong's pragmatism, the ideological differences between Mao and Joseph Stalin, and the highly nationalistic nature of Chinese communism. In its original and simplest form, the lost chance thesis posits that Mao could have befriended either camp in the Cold War. American belligerence, not ideological hard-wiring, determined Mao's hostility toward Washington and alliance with Moscow. Those rejecting the lost chance thesis point to Mao's ideological hatred and distrust of the United States and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) desire to secure spiritual as well as practical leadership from Stalin.'I New scholarship and documentary evidence from the People's Re- public of China (PRC) suggest that the critics of the lost chance thesis are basically right. Given Mao's fundamental mistrust of the United States and early affinity for Moscow, it would have been impossible for Washington to woo the Chinese Communists away from the Sovi- ets and toward the Western Camp. In fact, Mao's "lean to one side"

The author would like to thank Jian Chen, Peter Katzenstein, Robert Ross, Jack Snyder, William Stueck, Kathryn Weathersby, and Allen S. Whiting for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. For early lost chance arguments, see Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (New York, 1972), chap. 20; Barbara Tuchman, "If Mao Had Come to Washington: An Essay inAltematives," Foreign Affairs 51 (October 1972); and Melvin Gurtov, The United States against the Third World: Antinationalism and Intervention (New York, 1974), 142. For arguments stressing Mao's ideology and the inevitability of both Sino-Soviet alliance and Sino-American conflict, see Okabe Tatsumi, "The Cold War and China," in Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1977); and Steven Goldstein "Sino-Ameri- can Relations, 1948-50: Lost Chance or No Chance?" in Yuan Ming and Harry Harding, eds., Sino-American Relations 1945-55: A Joint Assessment of a Critical Decade (Wilmington, Del.,1989). policy seemed set in stone as early as the 1930s.2 While some have argued that modified American behavior in 1948-49 might have changed Mao's fundamental perceptions of America, new findings demonstrate that Mao would have been extremely suspicious of the Americans, even if the United States had adopted maximally concilia- tory policies: cutting aid to the Kuomintang (KMT) and recognizing the Communists in 1949.3 A major limitation of the original lost chance debate is its focus on the possibility for amicable relations or alignment between the United States and China. A large number of potential outcomes fall between Sino-American alignment, as witnessed after 1972, and direct military conflict, as occurred in Korea in 1950. Just because there was no chance for friendship does not mean there was no chance for peace. The same holds true for Sino-Soviet relations. There is a spectrum of possibili- ties between the high level of Sino-Soviet cooperation in Korea and the out-and-out enmity of the late 1960s. In 1950 the Chinese Commu- nists were going to ally with the Soviets regardless of American behavior; but the tightness of the Sino-Soviet alliance still may have depended largely on American actions. The original lost chance debate too often focused on Washington's ability to replace the Soviets as a friend and benefactor. In the early 1980s scholars began to address the lost chance question more subtly, asking if Sino-American relations could not have been somewhat bet- ter, even if they could not have been friendly.4 But despite these con- tributions, there has not been enough exploration of just how American policies, if different, might have reduced conflict between the two sides. This is not coincidental. The lack of documentary evidence on the Chinese side rendered speculation highly problematic. Using newly available documentary evidence-including Mao's military and diplomatic manuscripts-this essay analyzes Mao's atti-

2. Michael M. Sheng, "America's Lost Chance in China? A Reappraisal of Chinese Communist Policy toward the United States before 1945," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 29 (January 1993). 3. The documentary evidence will be discussed at greater length below. For recent scholarly work on this period, see Shuguang Zhang, "Preparedness Eliminates Mishaps: The CCP's Security Concerns in 1949-50 and the Origins of Sino-American Conflict," Journal of American-East Asian Relations 1 (Spring 1992); Kuisong Yang, "The Soviet Fac- tor and the CCP's Policy toward the United States in the 1940s," Chinese Historians 5 (Spring 1992); and Jian Chen, China's Road to the Korean War (New York, 1994). 4. For a carefully circumscribed lost chance argument, see Michael Hunt, "Mao Tse- tung and the Issue of Accommodation with the United States, 1948-50," in Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs, eds., Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations,1947-50 (New York, 1980); also see William Whitney Stueck, Jr., The Road to Confrontation: American Foreign Policy towards China and Korea, 1947-50 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981); and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Con- troversy, 1949-50 (New York, 1983).