Beijing and the Korean Crisis, June 1950-June 1951 Author(s): Michael H. Hunt Reviewed work(s): Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 453-478 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2152440 . Accessed: 27/04/2012 02:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Science Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Beijingand the KoreanCrisis, June 1950-June1951 MICHAEL H. HUNT Our understanding of the Korean War and especially the crisis- filled first year of that war has undergone some dramatic changes. Through the 1980s, approaching the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, some twenty books appeared dealing with the war's politics, diplomacy, and strategy.' The late Gregory Henderson, writing in an elegiac vein, acknowledged this new era in scholarship. "The men who lived the Korean War now pass. A new genera- tion, eyes deep in mountains of documents declassified up to 1954, claims the old fields. The headiness of those years for us who lived them ebbs. We come, cooly [sic] enmeshed in footnotes, to the scribes' time."2 The scribes have been busiest rewriting American policy and Anglo-American relations during the war. Perhaps as much as anything, the appearance between 1976 and 1984 of the relevant volumes in the U.S. foreign relations series and the clock-like opening of pertinent materials in the British Public Records Office stimulated this fresh research. New accounts have also brought the role of Ko- I A count that included military and campaign histories would go substantially higher. The findings of Bruce Cumings, Rosemary Foot, Burton I. Kaufman, Callum A. MacDonald, and others have served cumulatively to displace David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), the standard treatment for at least twenty years. For recent reviews of the new literature, see Rosemary Foot, "Making Known the Unknown War: Policy Analysis of the Korean Conflict in the Last Decade," Diplomatic History 15 (Summer 1991): 411-31; and Philip West, "Interpreting the Korean War," American Historical Review 94 (February 1989): 80-96. 2 Gregory Henderson, book review, Journal of Asian Studies 47 (May 1988): 389. MICHAEL H. HUNT, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy and The Making of a Special Relationship, which is a study of early U.S.-China ties. He is now completing a book on the origins of Chinese Communist foreign policy. Political Science Quarterly Volume 107 Number 3 1992 453 454 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY reans into clearerfocus. IntegratingKorean sources with the English-language literature,those accountshave focusedattention on the peninsularorigins of the war and the interactionbetween the great powersand the local actors, between internationalpolitics and local politics. On a thirdfront, Sovietinvolvement, the first volumeof Nikita Khrushchev'smemoirs opened up some intriguinginsights in 1970, and the 1990 volume has offered some supplementarydetails. But in general, our view on the Kremlinremained limited in the age of glasnost, and little has yet changednow in the age of Boris Yeltsin.3 The Chineserole has, at leastuntil recently,been only marginallybetter under- stood. Whetherand when the Chinese might release illuminatingmaterial on the war has been a subject of occasional, generallypessimistic comment.4 But the Chinese are making their own contributionto our understandingof the war, helping us to move beyond the point researchersrelying heavily on the contemporarypublic record had carried US.5 Thanks to new material China'sintrusion into the narrativeneed no longerbe accompaniedby a relentless rain of speculationand misinformation.We can now correct misconceptions by nonspecialistsintent on a more global view of the war,6 subject undocu- mented claims to critical scrutiny,7and begin to nail down such vital but elu- 3 See John Merrill, review article, Journal of Korean Studies 3 (1981): 181-91, for a helpful appraisal of Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, Strobe Talbott, trans. and ed., 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970 and 1974). See also Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, Jerrold L. Schecter with Vyacheslav V. Luchkov, trans. and eds. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 143- 47. For recent revelations, perhaps a harbinger, see the Reuters report from Moscow, "Ex-North Korea Envoy Says Kim Started War," New York Times, 6 July 1990; and N. Anin (pseud.), "How the War in Korea Started," Newsreview, 13 July 1991, 31, and 20 July 1991, 29, and 27 July 1991, 30. Milton Leitenberg was kind enough to supply me with a copy of the latter item. 4For example, Max Hastings writing in 1987 suggested that the Chinese records are either lost or forever sealed. "It may never be possible to piece together the precise decision-making process in Peking that led to the order to enter Korea. Almost all the key participants are dead, and among the living there is no reliable body of records to enable even those who wish to establish the objective truth about recent Chinese political history to do so." Hastings, The Korean War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 132. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Day the Chinese Attacked: Korea, 1950 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), 144, is similarly pessimistic. 5 Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (originally published 1960, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), a meticulous reconstruction of Chinese signalling from June to November 1950, is the best known and most influential of these works based primarily on the public record. 6 Take for example the basic error of making Lin Biao the commander of the Chinese "volunteers" in Korea in Joseph C. Goulden, Korea: The Untold Story of the War (New York: Times Books, 1982), 309; and Clay Blair, TheForgotten War:America in Korea, 1950-53 (New York: Times Books, 1987), 390, 396. 7See for example the imaginative treatment of Chinese decision making in October and November 1950 in Russell Spurr, Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War against the U.S. in Korea, 1950- 51 (New York: Newmarket Press, 1988). Spurr fails to indicate precisely how the interviews in China on which he relies so heavily support his narrative. Hoyt, The Day the Chinese Attacked, a somewhat better grounded account, also dispenses with precise documentation. BEIJING AND THE KOREAN CRISIS | 455 sive topics as the domesticimpact of the war8and its effects on Sino-Sovietre- lations.9 The creditfor this advanceon the Chinesefront of the KoreanWar, but one aspect of a broad movementto develop and open up party history, goes to the Communistparty central committee itself. Much of the headwaymade through the 1980swas dueto the efforts of threehistorical units in Beijingoperating under the directsupervision of a centralcommittee "small group."'0 The partycenter's own researchoffices have put out a wide variety of materialrelevant to Mao Zedong'scentral role in the crisis as well as the context in which he operated."I Adding significantlyto the literature,the Chinesemilitary itself has promoted researchand publicationon a topic in whichit takes considerablepride. Officers who played a prominentrole in the conflict together with militaryresearchers have producedan impressivebody of work, much of it publishedby one or another of the military-runpresses.-2 These various secondarytreatments and 8 The most ambitious study to date is Larry S. Weiss, "Storm Around the Cradle: The Korean War and the Early Years of the People's Republic of China" (Ph.D. dissertation in Political Science, Columbia University, 1981), which contends that the war radicalized China's domestic policy, thus bringing to a premature end the New Democracy stage of China's development. I See RobertR. Simmons,The StrainedAlliance: Peking, Pyongyang,Moscow and the Politics of the Korean War (New York: Free Press, 1975); Wilbur A. Chaffee, "Two Hypotheses of Sino- Soviet Relations as Concerns the Instigation of the Korean War," Journal of Korean Affairs 6 (1976- 77): 1-13; and Nakajima Mineo, "The Sino-Soviet Confrontation: Its Roots in the International Background of the Korean War," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 1 (January 1979): 19-47. 10 For a fuller treatment of developments over the last decade, see Michael H. Hunt and Odd Arne Westad, "The Chinese Communist Party and International Affairs: A Field Report on New Historical Sources and Old Research Problems," China Quarterly 122 (Summer 1990): 258-72. For an updated listing of sources, see Steven M. Goldstein and He Di, "New Chinese Sources on the History of the Cold War,"Cold WarInternational History Project Bulletin 1 (Spring1992): 4-6. " Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, comp., Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao [Mao Zedong manuscripts for the period following the establishment of the country], 5 vols. to date, internal circulation (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian, 1987), vols.