Chapter 3
ALLIANCE PROBLEMS, SIGNALING, AND ESCALATION OF ASIAN CONFLICT

There were two intrawar deterrence failures in Korea in late summer and fall 1950, and both were related to alliance politics. Lack of coordination and mistrust in the communist camp rendered the alliance incapable of sending clear and timely signals of resolve to the United States that might have deterred the United States from crossing the 38th parallel in the crucial three weeks following MacArthur’s successful Inchon landing. Once U.S. forces entered North Korea, escalation was assured in large part because previous U.S. actions in relation to its own regional security partners and future allies in recent months had made unification of the Korean peninsula by UN forces under U.S. leadership seem intolerably threatening to the long-term security of the PRC and, to a lesser degree, the Soviet Union.

The continuing lack of coordination in the communist camp made the communists militarily less effective in fall 1950, to the great benefit of the United States and other UN partners on the battlefield. But this same lack of coordination caused the communists to send weak signals of resolve regarding their willingness to protect North Korea from a full-scale invasion designed to unify the peninsula, thus undercutting communist efforts at coercive diplomacy in September and early October. What was good for the United States in terms of war-fighting in the near term was not good in terms of coercive diplomacy and was not in the long-term interest of the United States.

U.S. policies in the early weeks of the Korean War had a powerful impact on strategic thinking in Moscow and Beijing about the long-term implications of the military defeat of the North Korean communist regime and the unification of the Korean peninsula under a government friendly to the United States. U.S. policies toward Taiwan and Japan helped render such a prospect intolerable to Mao and, to a lesser degree, Stalin, and eventually undercut efforts to deter large-scale Chinese entrance into the war.

On a different front, varying national security interests and ideological differences between the Soviets and Chinese communists also help explain why the Vietnamese communists received so much external support from the latter from 1950–53. The Vietnamese were able to garner external support from China despite the distractions in Korea and the continuing relative indifference of the Soviet Union to peasant rebels in distant Southeast Asia.

ALLIANCES AND THE COMMUNIST DETERRENCE FAILURE OF FALL 1950

Why the U.S. Crossing of the 38th Parallel Was Hard to Deter

After the United States entered the war in late June 1950 and broke out of the Pusan perimeter in mid-September 1950 with MacArthur’s brilliantly executed Inchon landing, President Truman and his advisors had a difficult decision: should the initial war aims in Korea to restore the Republic of Korea in the South expand to include the destruction of the aggressive North Korean regime and unification of the peninsula under a friendly, anticommunist government? In Korea itself, various factors contributed to the Truman administration’s late September decision to expand the war effort and to attempt to unify the peninsula by force, sending UN ground forces into North Korea on October 7, 1950. Washington wanted to teach a punitive lesson to the communists about the price of aggression. Less abstractly, U.S. leaders were tempted by the opportunity to eliminate the threat from the North once and for all after North Korean forces were cut in two and left in disarray by MacArthur’s effective amphibious offensive.¹ Eliminating North Korean forces before they could reconstitute themselves, they believed, would reduce the long-term burden of guaranteeing South Korean security on U.S. grand strategy. Soviet documents show that the North Koreans indeed planned to reorganize for future offensives if and when they were able, but that they were quite desperate by late September in the face of MacArthur’s onslaught.² Moreover, for reasons I will discuss in further detail, U.S. elites in Washington and Tokyo did not believe that the Soviets and Chinese would or could effectively intervene to protect the wounded Northern regime, especially when they had failed to do so when U.S. forces were pinned down in southernmost Korea in summer 1950 (the Pusan Perimeter) or immediately upon news of the successful Inchon landing in September.

There was one additional fundamental factor that has received little attention. The “strongpoint defense strategy” had fostered dangerously low levels of U.S. support for South Korean security prior to the war and, thereby, undercut deterrence of the initial communist invasion of the South. But there was a geostrategic reason for Washington’s relative indifference to South Korea. U.S. resources were more needed in other parts of the world that held greater strategic value. If, after intervening in the Korean War, the United States had stopped at the 38th parallel and allowed North Korean forces to reconstitute themselves north of the parallel, then the United States would have inherited exactly the posture that Acheson had feared when he excluded South Korea in his Press Club speech: costly standing U.S. defenses in an area considered of only secondary strategic importance to the United States in its global struggle with the Soviet Union. In his own recollections of his thinking on this issue in early July 1950, Dean Acheson describes the context of a letter he wrote regarding Korean unification to Policy Planning Staff Director Paul Nitze, who, along with George Kennan, was among the very few influential voices in Washington opposed to crossing of the 38th parallel in Korea:³

Washington had not decided whether to make a permanent commitment to South Korean security and still feared being pulled into future wars by its Korean security partners if it did so. Rhee might attack the North, thereby potentially entrapping the United States in a wider war when it was even less prepared for one.⁵ So a decision to stay south of the 38th parallel and to help provide for a strong, long-term defense against a reconstituted North Korean military was a difficult choice for Washington, but it was one that would almost certainly have prevented escalation of the war into a Sino-American conflict later in the year.⁶

Budgetary concerns also raised the perceived opportunity costs of simply defending against future communist ground attack in Korea. The initial outbreak of the Korean War mobilized the United States for the Cold War only in a limited way, with an increase in defense spending from $15 billion to $22 billion. The full NSC-68 complement of a $50 billion U.S. defense budget would be passed only after the United States crossed the 38th parallel and met stiff Chinese resistance later in the year.⁷ Since Europe and other strategic “strongpoints” remained more important to the United States than Korea even after that mobilization of new funds, an outcome short of total destruction of the Korean threat would leave the United States with a series of bad choices: leaving South Korea vulnerable to a replay of the Korean War; shoring it up with U.S. forces at great opportunity costs to U.S. grand strategy; or providing significant assistance to Syngman Rhee to defend his own country and hoping that he would behave moderately with that military wherewithal.

Why Deterrence Was Still Possible

Despite the success at Inchon and the other factors supporting the U.S. decision to invade North Korea, MacArthur’s orders in late September to go north were contingent on the estimation that large-scale Chinese or Soviet intervention was unlikely.⁸ These orders, together with more recently declassified intelligence reports, which will be analyzed in this section, strongly suggest that the United States could have been deterred from crossing the 38th parallel if a combination of earlier and more credible signals had been sent by Moscow and Beijing about the dangers of escalation if the United States chose to go beyond restoring the status quo ante in Korea.

One direct problem in communist efforts to deter the United States was the lack of direct contacts between Washington and Beijing, a circumstance that was partially a result of communist alliance dynamics described in chapter 2, and of the U.S. refusal to abandon Chiang Kai-shek promptly and completely in 1949–50. The lack of direct contacts and personal relationships among leaders complicated coercive diplomacy in Korea, as Zhou Enlai passed a deterrent warning through the Indian ambassador to Beijing, K. M. Panikkar, an interlocutor distrusted in the United States and a channel that greatly reduced the authority of the CCP message.⁹ This was particularly true because Panikkar himself, just two weeks earlier, had assured the United States that China’s entrance into the war was “beyond the range of possibility” unless it was in the context of World War III.¹⁰

Though this factor was indeed important, there was more at work here than unsteady communications from a distrusted source. Differences in national interests and military strategies among the allies, combined with generally poor military and diplomatic coordination in the communist camp, prevented the communists from organizing early, defensive deployments by Chinese communist forces in North Korea that could have lent credibility to the Chinese threat of escalation. Although enemy lack of coordination initially assisted the United States on the battlefield, it led to poor policy decisions in Washington that extended a war unnecessarily for over two years.

U.S. misperceptions about the cohesion of the communist alliance were critically important to the failure of coercive diplomacy and the escalation of the war in fall 1950. If the Chinese had raced across the border with a large but still limited force before the United States had crossed the 38th parallel, the likelihood of a U.S. advance across the 38th would have been significantly reduced. Those misperceptions help explain why the United States underestimated the likelihood of initial Chinese intervention in October 1950 as American forces prepared to cross the 38th parallel. At that time, American intelligence knew that, in the preceding months, the Chinese had amassed hundreds of thousands of troops in Manchuria. The Americans generally did not believe that these forces had been sent there to enter Korea, however. Rather, they assumed their purpose was to protect China from a U.S. ground invasion, something no one in Washington was considering at the time. Working under the assumption of a highly coordinated communist movement, some U.S. analysts concluded that, since Chinese forces did not enter the Korean War when U.S. forces were at their most vulnerable (in summer 1950 before Inchon), China was likely unwilling to risk war over Korea. After Inchon and before the U.S. and other UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, some previously quite nervous U.S. intelligence analysts similarly noted that Chinese and Soviet troops did not rush in to reverse what was clearly a shift in the balance of power in favor of the UN forces. This increased the intelligence community’s confidence that China was unlikely to intervene massively in Korea even after U.S. forces had crossed the 38th parallel.¹¹ Since the alliance was being treated as relatively cohesive and monolithic, the lack of an earlier, coordinated response by the Chinese and Soviets signaled a lack of resolve in the movement overall. A declassified National Security Agency retrospective states that when the PRC did not react immediately after U.S. forces landed at Inchon and drove DPRK forces north of the 38th, the prospect of a large-scale Chinese intervention seemed greatly diminished, even to intelligence analysts who had previously been quite concerned about the implications of the Chinese military buildup in Northeast China during the summer. Many of those analysts began making efforts to explain away previous intelligence about those buildups and diplomatic warnings from China through third-country diplomats about the implications of UN forces crossing the 38th parallel.¹² Once the United States had dismissed the warnings from Beijing and UN forces had crossed the parallel, it was too late to stop escalation of the war.

If Chinese forces had entered North Korea in large numbers before the U.S. crossing of the 38th parallel on October 8, 1950, U.S. intelligence would likely have detected this, especially if Chinese troops moved far south of the Yalu border toward the 38th parallel. Under those circumstances, leaders in Washington would have known that an escalation of the Korean War into a significant Sino-American conflict would have been set off by U.S. forces crossing the 38th. This situation would have lent credibility to Chinese deterrent threats in early October to fight U.S. forces if they crossed the 38th. As historian William Stueck describes the view in Washington in September and October of that year, “[I]f either of the top Communist powers were going to intervene directly in North Korea, they would do so well before the United Nations forces reached the thirty-eighth parallel… . Thus, when no foreign soldiers entered North Korea immediately following the Inchon landing—and the Soviets assumed a relatively conciliatory posture in New York—the way seemed clear for a United Nations military offensive to unify the peninsula.”¹³

At their mid-October meeting at Wake Island, President Truman and MacArthur discussed the prospect of large-scale Chinese entrance into the war if the general were to move his forces, which had already crossed the parallel, to the northernmost sections of North Korea. The president was apparently very concerned about such a large-scale escalation and wanted assurances from the general and from his intelligence agencies that such a development was unlikely to happen. As in early October, the scenario was again dismissed based on the lack of any militarily meaningful reaction by the Chinese to earlier U.S. deployments and actions in South Korea. While the intelligence community did consider seriously the possibility of Chinese entrance into the war in late October (just as Chinese units engaged U.S. forces in northernmost Korea), they still falsely imagined such prospective engagements would be part of a limited defensive strategy to maintain a friendly buffer between the Chinese border and UN forces in North Korea, not as part of a large-scale escalation of war.¹⁴

Even after UN forces were engaged by Chinese forces in late October and early November, the same exaggeration of communist alliance cohesion in the early phases of the war allowed CIA analysts to comfort themselves that Chinese military goals in Korea were likely limited. They surmised that the Chinese and Soviets were probably dedicated to saving some North Korean rump state and creating a deadlock with UN forces in northernmost Korea, as opposed to preparing to drive the Americans entirely off the peninsula. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate from November 6, 1950, is worth quoting at length in this regard:

If we were to accept the CIA analysts’ false assumptions regarding communist alliance cohesion, this analysis would make perfect sense. A China with more expansive military goals in a highly cohesive and hierarchically ordered alliance with the Soviets and North Koreans would have entered the war earlier.¹⁷ If the analysts’ assumptions about communist alliance cohesion had been true, then the PRC’s military and political goals in Korea in late October and early November 1950 must, therefore, have been limited to preventing the quick and total annihilation of the North Korean military and government by UN forces. As we now know, this was very far from the case.

Even if one rejects the counterfactual reasoning that an earlier, large-scale and defensive Chinese deployment in North Korea would have precluded a U.S. crossing of the 38th parallel, we can still argue that escalation would have been more manageable from a U.S. perspective had the communist camp been more organized and had projected power earlier and more confidently into North Korea before the United States had crossed the parallel. Even if U.S. intelligence had failed to detect a large-scale Chinese entrance into Korea in late September or early October, U.S. military leaders at least would have known what they were up against earlier during their advance north, and would have been less likely to overextend themselves in northernmost Korea and fall into Mao’s trap at the Yalu later in November.

Once Beijing made the eleventh-hour decision to enter the war, the Chinese strategy in Korea was actually more aggressive than it would have been under Stalin’s initial plan for Chinese forces to buttress the 38th parallel before the U.S. forces were to cross into North Korea. On October 1, after receiving a desperate appeal from Pyongyang, Stalin requested that Mao send five to six Chinese divisions on an urgent basis to help defend the 38th parallel. Given national strategic interests that diverged somewhat from those of the Soviets and the Soviets’ unwillingness or inability to provide prompt air cover for Chinese troops, Mao was reluctant to expose his weak forces to U.S. attack by sending a relatively small number of them as far south as the 38th parallel where they would be overextended and exposed to superior U.S. firepower.¹⁸ After the United States ignored Chinese warnings in early October 1950 and crossed the 38th parallel, the Chinese were committed to war, but they were not committed to a defensive and limited war simply to assist in the reconsolidation of North Korean military north of the 38th, as the Soviets would have had it in early October. In his October 7 communication with Stalin via the Soviet Embassy in Beijing (sent several hours before U.S. forces began crossing the parallel), Mao told Stalin that it would be better if China initially sent nine divisions, rather than five to six, and allowed U.S. forces to come further north where it would be easier for Chinese forces to take them on in combat.¹⁹ This strategy, born of weakness and the fear of protracted war, of course ran directly against the goal of deterring the United States from sending its forces across the 38th parallel in the first place and reduced the likelihood that Sino-American conflict on the peninsula would remain limited after escalation. Despite the number of forces initially sent to Korea and the desire to fight a decisive war, rather than an attritional one, Mao’s initial plan in North Korea involved building a defensive line in northernmost Korea and building up forces for a massive offensive against the Americans some six months later, in spring 1951, by which time the Chinese would have received weapons and training, particularly fighter planes and fighter training, from the Soviets.²⁰

Although it seems unlikely, this planned respite between the fall and the spring offensives might have provided new opportunities for coercive diplomacy on both sides, as Allen Whiting originally suggested in his path-breaking book.²¹ But even if we were to accept that Mao’s offensive plans might have changed in the interim if given the opportunity, the tardiness of the PLA forces’ arrival in the theater quashed even this dim hope for coercive diplomacy. By the time Chinese forces had entered Korea in large numbers, U.S. forces were moving quickly up the peninsula providing few options for standing defenses. In November Mao decided instead to lure the U.S. forces further north and attack them with a full-scale counteroffensive involving over 260,000 Chinese troops (twelve divisions) later that month.²²

While counterfactuals can never be proven, this evidence suggests the strong possibility that if the communist alliance’s efforts had been coordinated more smoothly and Mao had promptly entered the war following Inchon and before the U.S. crossing of the 38th parallel, as Stalin had envisioned, escalation would have been less likely as there would have been much more concrete evidence of Chinese resolve in fighting for the North. If the United States had failed to note the Chinese entrance or attacked across the 38th in any case, escalation still would have likely been less severe from a U.S. perspective than what UN forces under U.S. leadership suffered in late November 1950: a massive Chinese surprise attack on overstretched and divided UN forces that led to the longest overseas retreat of U.S. forces in American history. In this very real sense, the communist alliance, from the perspective of U.S. security strategy and coercive diplomacy in Korea, was worse than a monolith.

WHY DID THE COMMUNISTS RESPOND SO SLOWLY TO INCHON?

One of the key factors that prevented earlier intervention and a clearer set of signals from the Asian communists in the late summer and early fall of 1950 was a lack of coordination and planning, combined with a fairly high degree of distrust among the three key parties: the North Korean communists, the Soviets, and the CCP. The lack of a timely North Korean request for foreign intervention after Inchon and the lack of advanced coordination between the Chinese and Soviets about the conditions of Soviet support and air cover for Chinese troops entering the war precluded the type of early foreign communist intervention in North Korea that would have signaled Moscow’s and/or Beijing’s resolve to the Americans before they crossed the 38th parallel.

The Soviets, for their part, had envisioned such an early defensive role for the Chinese communist forces in North Korea, and on October 1, 1950, they requested that China send such early defensive deployments toward the 38th parallel immediately.²³ This Soviet request to Beijing itself came two full weeks after MacArthur’s Inchon landing and only one week before the United States took the fateful step of crossing the 38th parallel. For reasons discussed in detail over the next pages, the North Koreans requested direct Soviet and Chinese entrance in the war via the Soviet Union only in the early hours of October 1. After receiving the North Korean plea for help, Stalin immediately requested Chinese entry into the war (one hour later). Only then did China begin its own lengthy decision process that included an initial expression of reluctance to enter the war; followed by a much more positive response to Stalin on October 7; a renewed period of indecision on October 12–13; and finally a reaffirmation of the earlier positive decision on October 13. This Chinese decision process alone took roughly two weeks, meaning Mao made the final decision for war only on October 13, five days after Beijing’s coercive diplomacy had failed (with U.S. and other UN forces crossing the 38th parallel on October 7–8) and five days before those forces would seize Pyongyang. In fact, Chinese troops would begin crossing the Yalu late on the night of October 18–19, the same day that UN forces seized the North Korean capital. Since Beijing made its final deterrent warning to the United States via the Indian ambassador to China at midnight on October 2, those signals of communist weakness could not have come at a worse time for the purposes of successful coercive diplomacy.²⁴ The weak coordination between Pyongyang and its allies, the lack of sufficiently coordinated pre-Inchon preparation by the Soviets and the Chinese, and the differences between Stalin’s defensive strategy for Chinese troops to enter early and defend the 38th, and Mao’s offensive strategy of luring the United States deep and then launching a counteroffensive, all combined to undermine successful coercive diplomacy by the communist camp in its efforts to prevent the U.S. from attempting armed unification of the peninsula under UN control.

For the Americans, then, if enemy actions had been more coordinated and more clearly under the control of the main enemy of the United States, Stalin’s Soviet Union, in June through October 1950, the calamitous attacks on U.S. forces in northernmost Korea in November 1950 might have been avoided. Of course, the lack of coordination, the stubborn optimism of Kim Il-sung, Stalin’s distrust of Mao, and the related delay in Pyongyang’s direct request for Chinese intervention, and so forth, assisted the United States greatly in war-fighting during those months. But to the degree that all participants in the war would have been better off with a ceasefire and a divided Korean peninsula in October 1950 than in July 1953, no one benefited from the failure of communist coercive diplomacy that came along with that communist military weakness. So, in this important sense, the United States suffered because the enemy communist alliance was still disorganized and poorly prepared in September–October 1950. Because the Americans assumed the alliance was more monolithic and well coordinated at the time, they misread a delayed communist response to the Inchon landing as a willingness to accept the defeat of Kim Il-sung’s regime by military means without a massive Chinese response.

Asian Communist Alliances and PRC Strategy in Korea

When faced with weakness among anticommunist forces, as he was in early 1950, Mao supported communist expansionism in order to fulfill his internationalist agenda, protect his movement’s reputation in the international communist arena, and create larger strategic buffers on his nation’s periphery. But when faced with resolute opposition from the United States and others, Mao lashed out reactively, fearing for his nation’s security in a way that a more distant Soviet leadership did not. After North Korea invaded the South and the United States responded with military intervention in Korea and the Taiwan Strait, Mao’s nationalist and defensive side became more important than his internationalist Leninist motivations. At an August Chinese Communist Party meeting to discuss war preparations, Korea was not just “an issue related to a fraternal country, but viewed as integrally linked with the interest of our nation’s northeast (Manchuria).”²⁵ In early October both Soviet and Chinese leaders would argue for intervention with some reluctant Chinese colleagues in the CCP Politburo by appealing to the national security risks to the PRC, including the costs of an extended Cold War on the Chinese border with Korea and, worse still, the prospect of future attacks on China from Korea and Taiwan, if the United States were able to unify the peninsula under a pro-U.S. regime. Fears of future U.S. attacks on China pushed Mao toward massive intervention in the Korean War.²⁶

As early as the first week of July, the Soviets and Chinese were discussing Chinese entrance into the war in anticipation of a possible U.S. crossing of the 38th parallel (which would not occur until October). Stalin seemed impatient for Mao to amass forces on the Sino-Korean border and to coordinate with the North Korean leadership a plan to save the North Korean military from annihilation if the U.S. intervention in Korea were to prove effective and an invasion of North Korea seemed imminent. The Soviets clearly wanted Chinese forces to help defend against that outcome by helping bolster defenses in the North. For this reason, in the weeks and months following Kim’s failed gambit to unify the peninsula under his leadership, the Soviets urged China to prepare between five and nine divisions at the border for rapid assistance to North Korea if and when the United States threatened to cross the 38th parallel.²⁷ Leaders in both Beijing and Moscow feared that the United States might attempt unification of the peninsula under UN control if insufficient resistance was offered by North Korea and its allies. Beijing in particular had warned the North Koreans about overextension of its forces and overconfidence regarding its operations in the South. Before Inchon, Zhou Enlai had urged the North Koreans to consider the possibility of strategic withdrawal in the event of such a UN counterattack, but Kim Il-sung reportedly replied that “he ha[d] never considered retreat.”²⁸ Zhou’s advice followed a pattern of Chinese warnings to North Korea in the weeks prior to the Inchon landings.²⁹

After MacArthur’s September 15 Inchon landing, the Soviets themselves urged a fast-paced retreat northward of North Korean forces in South Korea to protect them from being cut off from their brethren further north. These orders were not implemented because of some combination of continued North Korean stubbornness and over-optimism, the failure of Soviet advisors on the ground to implement these orders from Moscow, and the poor communications between North Korean political leaders and their military counterparts in the field. As a result, several divisions of Korean People’s Army (KPA) forces in southernmost Korea were fully cut off from the remaining forces in and around Seoul and to the north of the South Korean capital.³⁰

Kim Finally Cries Uncle, Stalin Orders Out for Intervention, and Beijing Balks

One hour after receiving a desperate plea for direct Soviet and Chinese intervention from Kim Il-sung in the early morning hours of October 1, Stalin urgently suggested to Mao that he dispatch five to six divisions of troops “at once” to the 38th parallel to help Kim regroup. The goal was to defend against an impending U.S. invasion of the North.³¹ This request was made from Stalin’s Black Sea dacha one week before U.S. forces would cross the parallel and set in motion the escalation of the war. Stalin was asking for early, immediate, and defensive deployment of Chinese forces deep into Korea on October 1. But the lack of prior coordination between the Soviets, Chinese, and the North Koreans in advance of that date precluded such a rapid Chinese response. In the broadest sense, the CCP’s military preparations had been generally consistent with Stalin’s wishes in the summer. The Chinese leaders had sent a large number of forces to Manchuria from July through early October 1950 and continued to consider options relating to Chinese forces crossing the Yalu. In fact, on September 21, Liu Shaoqi had reported a high degree of morale among the Chinese forces, having observed the PRC’s general readiness to assist in guaranteeing North Korea’s survival.³² But in very important and consequential ways, the poor coordination among the three capitals prevented a timely North Korean request for Chinese assistance after Inchon and did not provide the proper levels of Soviet support and assurance to the Chinese to allow them to enter immediately after both Stalin and Kim Il-sung had requested Chinese intervention.

For his own part, once Mao learned of the seriousness of the North Korean military situation and received, on October 1, a formal request from Pyongyang for intervention, he himself seemed quite committed to entering the war with massive numbers of Chinese forces, as is evident in an October 2 telegram that he drafted to Stalin but never sent.³³ But Mao felt obliged to meet with his comrades in the Politburo in Beijing before making such an important decision. The majority of them were initially opposed to the war because of the risks of escalation and the military, economic, and political costs that the newly founded PRC would have to endure in a war with the world’s strongest military. So, in the October 2 telegram that Mao actually sent to Stalin via the Soviet ambassador to China, the Chairman discussed how “many comrades” on the Central Committee were worried about the international and domestic costs of entering the war and stated that China would not enter the war at this time. Mao emphasized that Chinese forces were ill prepared militarily for battle with the United States, that war could harm the economy, and that it could cause domestic dissatisfaction against his new government. Mao made clear that a “final decision had not been taken.” He said that there would be meetings on the question and that he would send Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao to the Soviet Union to consult with Stalin on the matter. Despite Mao’s final statement that the matter was still open to discussion, Soviet Ambassador Roschin attached a somewhat overwrought analysis of Mao’s telegram calling this a full abandonment of China’s earlier “basic” policy toward Korea. Roschin speculated about what threats from the United States had been passed on to China via India to spook the Chinese into backing down.³⁴

The Soviets apparently had been naïve to think that the Chinese would be ready to enter the war and project power as far south as the 38th parallel on a moment’s notice and therefore they overreacted to the initial Chinese telegram of October 2. One problem China faced in quickly responding to a request such as Stalin’s was that the North Koreans, for their own nationalist and psychological reasons, had tried consistently to limit communications and consultation with the Chinese communist representatives in Korea. This precluded proper military and political preparations for entering the war when the North Korean forces finally collapsed. In his May 1950 meetings with Mao, Kim was cocky about his prospects for success and thereby dismissed as “unnecessary” Mao’s offer to prepare forces on his border in case his invasion plans were to fail and the North Koreans were to fall into trouble. Then Kim failed even to inform Mao of the timing of his invasion, of which Mao learned from the international press.³⁵ After the war started, the Chinese communists and Korean communists were slow to establish official contacts, a source of real frustration for Stalin.³⁶Once those contacts were established, the CCP complained that very little military intelligence was shared with Chinese representatives in Pyongyang. Chinese representatives in Korea such as Chai Chengwen and Ni Zhiliang enjoyed extremely limited access to top leaders in Pyongyang. According to a recently published secondary account, the former complained that military intelligence was basically a “forbidden zone” for the Chinese. For example, in the first half of September, the Chinese (PLA) General Staff proposed sending a high-level entourage to North Korea, but the North Koreans refused.³⁷

Even in the days immediately after MacArthur’s Inchon landing, when the KPA’s situation was increasingly desperate and UN forces began moving on Seoul, Zhou Enlai complained to the Soviets that Chinese advisors were in the dark about the situation on the battlefield.³⁸ A careful reading of Russian documents reveals that the Soviets apparently believed that Zhou’s complaint about Pyongyang’s intentional exclusion of Beijing from the decision process was quite justified. In an initial draft of a September 20 telegram to China on the subject, Gromyko criticized as “entirely mistaken” the North Korean leadership’s reluctance to “conscientiously inform the Chinese Comrades of the military situation and all the decisions the Korean commanders and political leadership made regarding issues arising in the course of military operations.” In this initial draft Gromyko wrote that he believed that Kim Il-sung himself “must correct this point.” Gromyko did not, however, transmit this draft to Beijing. The telegram that was actually sent was quite different and was almost certainly geared toward manipulation of the alliance to minimize China’s anger at Pyongyang and to maximize the chance that Beijing would still come to its defense if and when needed. In the revised telegram the situation is described more neutrally as “not right” (or “abnormal”) but then is quickly explained away by reference to the “weak links” that the central command in North Korea has with its front lines. Gromyko says this situation arose because of technical difficulties not because the “Korean Comrades are unwilling” to share information with the Chinese.³⁹

Moscow’s first interpretation of the motivations behind Pyongyang’s delay in collaborating with Beijing fits much better than the second with what we know about the overall situation. After all, Pyongyang only formally decided to request Soviet and Chinese entrance into Korea at the very end of September and at first directly contacted only Moscow. Pyongyang’s initial telegram to Stalin requesting Soviet or Chinese “volunteers” to enter the war was received in the early morning of October 1 at Stalin’s Black Sea dacha.⁴⁰ Stalin, ever conscious of alliance politics and manipulations, then did two things that were consistent with his strategy of maintaining his position in the communist alliance system. First, he sent a highly polite and respectful telegram to Mao, neglecting to mention Kim’s request for direct Soviet intervention. Instead, Stalin suggested that Beijing send five to six divisions of Chinese volunteer forces “at once” to help North Korea defend against a U.S. crossing of the 38th parallel. Stalin also promised that the Chinese would have command authority over those forces. He pledged that he had not discussed his request to Beijing with Pyongyang and that he had no plans to discuss this matter with Kim Il-sung. He thereby respected the confidentiality of Mao’s decision process and appeared not to pressure Mao into accepting his advice.⁴¹ Stalin then contacted Pyongyang on the same day, telling Kim that “they [elites in Moscow] believe that the most acceptable form of assistance is to dispatch [Chinese] volunteer forces. But regarding this question we must first consult with the Chinese comrades.”⁴² In essence, Stalin was both gently refusing Kim’s request that he send Soviet troops directly into Korea, and suggesting that he would arrange for Chinese volunteers to enter Korea. Therefore, as in spring 1950, Stalin would get a good deal of the credit if China supported Pyongyang but he could pass on the blame if China did not. He was, of course, also breaking his pledge to Mao that he would not discuss his request to the Chinese with Pyongyang.

It was only after receiving this message from Stalin that Kim Il-sung would, for the first time, formally and directly approach the Chinese ambassador for direct Chinese intervention. He reportedly did so on the night of October 1, 1950.⁴³ It was then only after these requests were received and deciphered in China that the formal decision process for war began in Beijing. To be sure that the message was delivered, on October 3, 1950, an emissary from North Korea also carried a letter from Kim Il-sung to Beijing (dated October 1, 1950) asking for direct Chinese intervention. The letter warned that if the United States continued unopposed, it would be able to complete its mission of turning Korea into a colony and a military base.⁴⁴

A combination of mistrust within the alliance, particularly between the North Koreans and the Chinese and between the Soviets and the Chinese, prevented a smoother and more coordinated response to the UN victories in mid-September. In a series of excellent writings on this period based on recently declassified Soviet archives, Chinese diplomatic historian Shen Zhihua chronicles how Stalin’s caution about being dragged into World War III by his Asian allies and his jealous distrust of the Chinese communists’ intentions in Korea prevented him from responding earlier to North Korean suggestions that Chinese intervention in the war would be useful to Pyongyang. Following the initial U.S. intervention in Korea and in accord with Stalin’s request for China to assemble forces on the border to assist in North Korean defense in the event of a U.S. crossing of the 38th parallel, Mao had promised Kim in July that, if he ran into problems in the war, the PRC would prepare the necessary forces to dispatch to Korea. Zhou Enlai similarly told the Soviets that China would assemble and ready forces in Manchuria for such a contingency, but also requested Soviet air cover if and when they were to be deployed to Korea. It was very clear that Stalin offered to provide such support to the Chinese if and when they decided to enter the war but that he envisioned PRC entry only if UN forces clearly threatened to move ground troops into North Korea itself. He seemed quite concerned that any Chinese military action in Korea before PRC intervention was entirely necessary to save North Korea would only make escalation of the war, perhaps to a global war, more likely. Stalin wanted to maintain control over the situation by preventing the Chinese and North Koreans from taking action without his approval.⁴⁵

One major problem precluding a more timely Chinese response was the strained lines of communication and decision-making within the alliance. The North Koreans, of course, wanted the Chinese to be standing at the ready to defend the North if they were needed, but wanted to avoid excessive Chinese influence in Korea, so they turned to the Soviets for guidance on all important matters, including Chinese intervention. In July the North Koreans sent reports to Stalin asking for his opinion about the prospect of eventual Chinese intervention, but also sent relatively rosy assessments about the prospects of victory for his forces against UN troops in the South. As the cautious, more globally conscious leader of the communist movement, such reports from Pyongyang only increased Stalin’s desire to rein in what he saw as the potential for North Korean and Chinese adventurism in Korea that could lead to unnecessary escalation and, potentially, a loss of Soviet prestige to the Chinese communists in Korea.⁴⁶ Shen writes, “[T]he eagerness Mao Zedong showed to send troops to Korea most likely aroused Stalin’s suspicions: one consequence of China sending troops would be to expand her status and influence in Korea. From a long-term point of view, this would not be to the Soviets’ advantage.”⁴⁷

For their part, the North Koreans were suspicious of the Chinese and were certainly unwilling to risk alienating Stalin by upgrading their military coordination with the Chinese communists without clear direction from Moscow. According to Shen, in August Mao reached out to the Soviet philosopher Pavel Yudin as a channel to Stalin about the dangers facing the Korean communists over time and the need for early Chinese intervention if and when the war turned against North Korea. But Stalin apparently did not offer any supportive signals to the Chinese in response to this outreach.⁴⁸ In July and August, the North Koreans continually raised the prospect of Chinese intervention with the Soviets, and, in late August, began to send more pessimistic prognoses about frontline conditions and the prospect of a UN amphibious invasion behind their forward positions in the South. Stalin responded in a reassuring but rather disingenuous fashion, assessing the likelihood of North Korean victory as great despite recent setbacks, and promised Soviet material support to North Korean forces. He failed to address Kim’s questions regarding potential Chinese intervention. In fact, throughout July and August, Stalin would simply refuse to respond to queries from his representatives in North Korea about Kim Il-sung’s questions regarding the prospect of Chinese intervention.⁴⁹ Shen argues that after several iterations of this kind, Kim would come to understand that Stalin would not even consider Chinese intervention until a critical moment had arrived in the war and North Korea found itself in dire straits.⁵⁰

In an article on the PRC-DPRK relationship during the war published in Taiwan, the apparently pseudonymous author, Liang Zhensan, argues that more prompt Chinese military backing of the North Koreans after Inchon was precluded by two factors: differences in strategic assessments between the overly self-confident North Korea and the more cautious Chinese; and North Korea’s misgivings about Chinese involvement in their affairs, which made them rely on and communicate with the Soviets exclusively until the situation was very dire. Liang suggests that if Kim had informed China earlier of the depth of North Korea’s military problems and directly asked for assistance before October 1, 1950, such assistance might have been forthcoming at a time when it could have made a decisive difference in the war.⁵¹ He writes, “China certainly dispatched forces into Korea to ‘Oppose the United States, Help Korea, and Defend the Nation,’ in order to fulfill revolutionary goals, and carry the responsibilities of internationalism. But the North Korean leadership’s innermost thought (neixin) was to resist China’s direct provision of military assistance. In analyzing the reasons why, there are generally two aspects [to consider]: first, there is Kim Il-sung’s excessive self-confidence (guoyu zixin), his excessively optimistic estimation of the situation, and his belief that he could rely on his own power to solve the entire problem; second, is the special historical Sino-Korean relationship that existed; China’s ability to have suzerainty (zongzhuquan) over Korea as well as the Chinese Communists’ influence over the Korean Workers Party caused the Korean leaders to have some misgivings and concerns (danxin he youlü) toward China’s dispatching of troops.”⁵²

Shen Zhihua argues that once China learned of the successful Inchon landing, Zhou Enlai reached out to DPRK’s ambassador to China, Yi Chu-yon, on September 19 and asked what the North Koreans might be requesting from China in terms of support. The North then turned to the Soviet representative in Pyongyang for a response to the Chinese request, emphasizing the potential utility of Chinese troops further north in Korea and, as before, received no reply from Stalin. According to Shen, at a September 21, 1950, North Korean Workers’ Party Politburo meeting, Kim Il-sung would pour cold water on the idea of responding to the Chinese offers positively without first getting Stalin’s approval. In rejecting such a direct outreach to Beijing, Kim cited the following factors: the critical material support that the North had received from the Soviet Union; the likely jealousy Stalin would feel if Pyongyang now turned directly to Beijing for help without approval from Moscow; the likelihood that efforts to rebuild the DPRK army might be sufficient to hold the line against the UN forces; and Kim’s certainty that his two larger allies would save him in the end if the situation deteriorated further. Shen sums up the situation by saying, “[T]he result of the meeting was that no resolution [on a request for Chinese entrance] was passed. Now Kim Il-sung was acting completely by reading Stalin’s mind, while Stalin was trying his best not to let China enter the war until the final moment; i.e. the moment the enemy crossed the 38⁵³ parallel.”⁵⁴

Of course, since Stalin’s direct request to the Chinese on behalf of the North (and the North’s subsequent direct request to the Chinese) would not come until October 1, this led to a critical delay in the alliance responding to the new strategic situation. A prompt response might have signaled to the United States their resolve in preventing the destruction of the DPRK. As discussed earlier, the buildup of forces in the Northeast, which Zhou Enlai had hoped might deter UN forces from crossing the 38th parallel, had indeed been watched closely by U.S. intelligence, but the failure of the alliance to act in the weeks immediately following Inchon led intelligence analysts in the United States to start discounting the information that they had collected about the buildup and to reduce greatly the probability assigned to a large-scale Chinese intervention in Korea.⁵⁵

There were still other critically important alliance-related hurdles that delayed Chinese entrance into the war until after the first U.S. forces crossed the parallel on Oct. 7. The lack of tight Sino-Soviet coordination and preparation before Inchon regarding Sino-Soviet burden-sharing in a wider war also delayed the Chinese decision to enter this war. As a result, Beijing made the final decision to enter the war nearly two full weeks after Stalin’s and Kim’s initial requests for Chinese intervention on October 1 (and those requests themselves came quite late in the U.S. decision process regarding the crossing of the 38th parallel). Once Korea had finally invited the Chinese to enter the country with military force, Beijing’s decision process was complicated and lengthened further by the lack of prewar coordination between Moscow and Beijing regarding the degree and type of Soviet assistance to Chinese troops in Korea once those troops crossed the Yalu River border. In particular, the initial telegram Mao sent to Stalin on October 2, 1950, foregoing intervention for the time-being, discusses how poorly equipped the Chinese forces were in fall 1950. Mao seemed concerned that if such troops raced down as far south as the 38th parallel, as Stalin wished, they could draw the United States north and be forced into retreat on the enemy’s terms.⁵⁶ Although they had collaborated for months in the long-term development of indigenous Chinese military capabilities, Beijing and Moscow had failed to work out in advance the details of how, in the nearer term, Soviet military assistance would be supplied to the Chinese forces as they prepared to enter the field of battle in Korea.⁵⁷ In fact, the entire purpose of Zhou Enlai’s and Lin Biao’s trip to the Soviet Union on October 8 would be to ensure and coordinate Soviet aid for the Chinese forces.⁵⁸ On the issue of air cover, the PRC and the USSR had been working quite closely in developing and training a PLA air force tentatively scheduled for deployment in spring 1951, but they had apparently not coordinated the details of how, before that time, Soviet planes and pilots would assist in protecting Chinese ground deployments in Korea and base areas and industrial sites in China.⁵⁹ As Mao offered conditional agreement with Stalin’s request to send Chinese forces into Korea on October 7, Mao complained that Chinese forces on the border were still terribly ill equipped.⁶⁰

One basic problem in alliance coordination in Korea was that, for reasons related to China’s own national security, Mao did not want his forces to be bogged down in a war of attrition in Korea. Therefore, once he decided to enter the war, Mao searched for ways to achieve total victory on the peninsula for North Korean and Chinese forces. While there is ample evidence that Beijing entered the war out of defensive motivations related to the UN crossing of the 38th parallel and the threat that would pose for his new country over the long run, China’s strategy in Korea was offensive and required the ability to deliver a knockout blow to U.S. forces. From all appearances, and as we will see in the next chapter, the Soviets seemed much more dedicated to the prevention of a U.S. rollback in North Korea than to total victory and seemed more comfortable with the prospect of a longer war that sapped U.S. global strength in Korea and kept both China and North Korea highly dependent on Soviet assistance. Reflecting the differing national interests of the various members of the alliance, Stalin’s strategy allowed for fighting to achieve these goals, but only if that fighting was being done by Chinese and North Korean forces, not his own.

U.S. ALLIANCE POLICY AND FAILED COERCIVE DIPLOMACY IN NORTHERN KOREA

In his account of the Soviet strategy toward Beijing and Pyongyang in Autumn 1950, political scientist Alexandre Mansourov concludes that “had the United States been less ambivalent, more consistent, and more persuasive on the diplomatic front in stating to Moscow and Beijing the goals of its Korean campaign—for example, that it had no desire to attack mainland China or threaten the territory of the Soviet Far East—the Soviet and Chinese governments could well have decided to let Kim Il-sung’s regime go under.” Mansourov blames MacArthur’s brusque statements and demands, in particular, as the key factor that undercut U.S. coercive diplomacy.⁶¹ I agree with Mansourov’s general notion that the Soviets could have lived with a unified Korea under UN control more easily than could Mao, and most obviously, than could Kim Il-sung. But the historical data now available strongly suggest that it would have been much harder for the United States to reassure China than Mansourov suggests, regardless of the diplomatic niceties. In this sense, the divided nature of the communist alliance made it more difficult to engage in coercive diplomacy.

The main reason that China reacted so strongly to the U.S. crossing of the parallel is that a series of decisions by the United States regarding its future allies in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan practically rendered meaningless any of its diplomatic efforts to reassure China about the prospects of a unified Korea allied with the United States. While the threat of U.S. escalation if China were to enter the war—passed in part through a “calculated indiscretion” by the U.S. ambassador to India, Loy Henderson—were not discounted in Beijing, assurances that the PRC would be secure if UN forces were permitted to unify the peninsula under a pro-U.S. regime were simply not credible in Beijing. China’s suspicions were largely rooted in U.S. policy toward its future allies in Taiwan and Japan.⁶²

In the early weeks of the Korean War, the United States adopted three policies related to its East Asian security partners and future allies that greatly affected the prospect of limiting the escalation of the Korean War and preventing a U.S.-PRC war there. First, the Truman administration decided on June 27, 1950, to block the Taiwan Strait with elements of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet. Washington did so, ostensibly, to prevent attack from either side of the Strait. It was at this time that the U.S. government shifted from recognizing Taiwan as part of Chinese territory to stating that the island of Taiwan’s sovereignty was “undetermined,” a stance that remains to this date.⁶³ In Beijing, unfortunately, the U.S. intervention was seen as an unambiguous reversal of previous pledges by the Truman administration not to involve itself in the Chinese Civil War. Second, the Korean War led Washington to redouble its efforts, ultimately largely unsuccessful, to convince Japanese authorities to contribute more to the future U.S.-Japan alliance by building up its own military power. For Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang, these efforts signaled a frightening prospect: a rearmed and assertive Japan in the future. Third, the United States decided for a range of military, political, and budgetary reasons to cross the 38th parallel and attempt to unify the Korean peninsula under friendly rule by means of military force. These three policies in combination convinced a very reluctant Beijing to send large numbers of forces into Korea and to adopt aggressive, relatively expansive military strategies once in the country. Moreover, Beijing chose to do so despite concerns about the timing and scope of Soviet assistance to its efforts.

The direct U.S. intervention in the Taiwan Strait was viewed as a shock and as an invasion of Chinese territory by Mao and his colleagues. Even before Truman’s January 5, 1950, speech on nonintervention in the Chinese Civil War and the Acheson Press Club speech one week later, Chinese military strategists did not expect direct U.S. intervention in the conflict across the Taiwan Strait. As fit their assessments for Korea, they anticipated that the United States might send Japanese “volunteers” to help the “Chiang clique” but would forego direct intervention.⁶⁴ After the Truman and Acheson speeches on the American side and the signing of the PRC-USSR Treaty of Mutual Defense on the communist side, the prospect of direct U.S. intervention in cross-Strait relations must have seemed smaller still. The Truman administration’s reversal in both Taiwan and Korea in June affected Beijing’s perceptions of U.S. Korean War intervention in three key ways. First, future assurances of U.S. restraint either in Korea or at the Yalu border with China carried little weight in Beijing. If Washington could reverse its pledges on Taiwan policy so easily, why could it not reverse its stated policy in Korea as well? Second, Taiwan provided a second front from which the United States and Japan could attack China at any time of Washington’s choosing. The United States would control both Northern Korea, adjacent to China’s industrial center in Manchuria, and Taiwan, in striking distance of China’s second industrial area of Shanghai. Third, U.S. direct support for the KMT on Taiwan meant that the United States would be protecting and encouraging Mao’s domestic anticommunist enemies at a time when communism was being rolled back in neighboring Korea. The prospect of a reinvigorated domestic opponent significantly raised the costs of settling for a permanent standoff along the Yalu border with large numbers of PLA forces. After all the PLA was a Party army, not a national army, and its forces to this day are dual purpose forces designed to fend off domestic enemies of the CCP as well as enemies abroad.⁶⁵ China’s concerns on this score could only have been aggravated by an unauthorized and highly public trip by General MacArthur to Taiwan in late July with three squadrons of fighter jets, during which he publicly criticized the “threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate Continental Asia.”⁶⁶

The Truman administration was primarily interested in the reputational costs of appearing weak in the face of an armored invasion by North Korea that violated UN resolutions on Korea. (This is, perhaps, the first major post–World War II invocation of the Munich analogy.) The U.S. leadership viewed the war in Korea as most directly related to the future security of Japan. The Korean War, therefore, amplified voices in the administration calling for a rearmed Japan. For example, on September 15, 1950, Dulles would argue to the State Department that there should be no limits set on Japanese military power.⁶⁷ Dulles would gain little satisfaction on this score in Tokyo, as discussed in the last chapter, but there is little doubt that Dulles’s desires for Japan were consistent with Stalin’s and Mao’s fears about the future strategic environment in East Asia. As we will see, those concerns in the communist capitals about the future of Japan played prominently in Chinese and Soviet deliberations in October regarding the meaning of U.S. occupation of northern Korea and the need for Chinese entrance into the Korean War to prevent such an outcome.

Windows and War: Mao Pulls and Stalin Pushes the CCP Politburo into Korea

Especially given Beijing’s lack of detailed coordination with Pyongyang and Moscow, it is hardly surprising that Mao and his colleagues did not simply accept Stalin’s request to immediately move ill-equipped Chinese forces without air cover far from the Chinese border to defend the 38th parallel against the Americans. Such a momentous decision for such a young country would require deliberations. The initial telegram Mao sent to Stalin on October 2 reflected opposition to China’s entering the war among many members of the Central Committee, whose views Mao learned of at Politburo meetings on the evening of October 1 and October 2.⁶⁸ Many line officers and soldiers were also apparently quite nervous about taking on the Americans in the leadup to war.⁶⁹ The telegram that Mao himself had drafted on October 2, 1950, but never sent to Stalin, suggests that the Chairman himself was apparently committed to go to war very early in the process, basically as soon as he had received a formal request for assistance from Kim Il-sung via the PRC embassy in Pyongyang the previous evening.⁷⁰ He and like-minded leaders like General Peng Dehuai needed to convince their colleagues of the wisdom of this policy and the dangers of the alternatives. According to various analyses, Mao was on board early because he saw both internationalist and nationalist reasons to fight the Americans in North Korea.⁷¹ According to Xu Yan, a leading Chinese military and diplomatic historian at the PLA’s National Defense University, an expanded session of the Chinese Politburo was hurriedly convened on October 4 to discuss the Korea situation following the requests for Chinese intervention by Stalin and Kim.⁷²

Xu reports that no minutes were kept of the relevant meetings on the 4th and 5th. So his version of events is based on the recollections of participants to which, given his research position at the National Defense University, Xu should have full access. When they initially met on October 4, the majority of Politburo members were opposed to entering the war. Drawing upon General Peng’s account of the meetings ten days after they convened, Xu compiles the following list of reasons offered by those opposed to entering Korea: “1) the wounds of [previous] wars have not yet healed; 2) the land reform process is not yet completed; 3) domestic bandits and special agents have not yet been thoroughly eliminated; 4) military equipment and training is not yet ample; 5) a portion of the military are sick and tired of war. To sum up, preparations are insufficient.”⁷³

Those who supported the war in the Politburo argued that while China’s “preparations are insufficient, the imperialist clique’s preparations are also insufficient.”⁷⁴ They believed that the strategy of the United States and its partners was to exploit internal difficulties in other countries in order to seize them and expand their influence. This alleged U.S.-led effort needed to be stopped sooner, rather than later. Mao himself weighed in saying it would be hard to watch while a neighboring country suffered great difficulties. Moreover, he stated that the Chinese had a chance to achieve a great victory over imperialism in Korea. According to Xu, Zhou Enlai added reasons based on national defense for sending in troops. Although Zhou left no record of his own statements at the October 4–5 meetings, twenty days after the decision he gave a relevant report to the leadership of the People’s Consultative Congress. In that report Zhou Enlai estimated that, even if the enemy were not to attack China right away after conquering North Korea, the preparation and maintenance of standing defenses along the Yalu river to counter the Americans and Koreans and the relocation of Manchurian industries away from positions vulnerable to enemy air attack would be very costly for the PRC over the long run. China would never know when the enemy would choose to attack and, Zhou added ominously, “once the enemy has occupied Korea, it won’t just stop there.”⁷⁵ This accords with Zhou’s and Mao’s consultations in late September, in which China was viewed as a future target of the United States after UN forces crossed the 38th parallel.⁷⁶ Of course, as Xu notes, fighting the United States over Korea could also have caused massive damage to China and its economy, and so Mao faced a difficult dilemma.⁷⁷

According to an internal Party history, Peng weighed in decisively in support of sending troops into Korea in the critically important meeting on the afternoon of October 5. After arriving in Beijing on October 4 and staying silent at the meetings that evening, Peng decided overnight to support the dispatch of Chinese troops and at the October 5 meeting helped Mao convince wavering comrades by saying that allowing the United States to occupy both Taiwan and all of Korea up to the Yalu river border posed too large of a security risk to the young PRC. Such deployments would allow Washington to find “some excuse” to invade China at any time of its choosing and would encourage “reactionary” domestic opponents to the new Chinese regime. So, even if the risks were great and the costs of war high, for defensive reasons China had no choice but to enter the war.⁷⁸ Author Zhang Xi reports that after Peng’s presentation, Mao suggested that he had long ago reached the same conclusion, stating that Peng had “hit the nail on the head (yizhen jianxie)!”⁷⁹

Two parallel and related logics won the day in Beijing: the first was the desire to jump through a window of opportunity to attack the enemy before the United States and its allies were more fully prepared for war; the second was the need to prevent a window of vulnerability from opening, by not allowing the United States and Japan to amass forces and use bases in Korea and Taiwan to attack the PRC later. In his briefing to his division commanders just before entering Korea, Peng pointed out in October 1950 that the United States and its allies were overextended, and, while the Americans were indeed mobilizing, it would take the United States until June 1951 to draft and train 500,000 additional troops. Peng said that this was the reasoning used by those in the Politburo who decided that fighting a war sooner rather than later was the right decision, despite China’s own lack of full readiness.⁸⁰ As Peng explained, “Our preparations [for war] are insufficient, [but] the enemy’s preparations are also [currently] insufficient, especially the American imperialist’s preparations are insufficient.”⁸¹ Mao’s and Peng’s argument to the Politburo for action was that a combination of geography and Chinese military backwardness made ground warfare the most desirable option to employ against the Americans, who could attack by bombardment from Korea and Taiwan at any time of its choosing. Waiting to fight would also allow the Americans and it allies to bring more force to bear against economically more developed targets. So, the winning argument for war in Beijing was that fighting a war in the short term would be less painful than fighting a larger war later.⁸²

The same kind of windows logic was emphasized in a telegram that Stalin sent to Mao on October 5 during the important CCP Politburo meeting. In the telegram Stalin explained why he was disappointed that China had not simply accepted his October 1 request to send five to six divisions toward the 38th parallel to help defend North Korea. Stalin emphasized China’s national security concerns as paramount in his reasoning for why China should send troops into Korea, stating that he had assumed China had prepared to enter the Korean War over the previous months “in order to prevent Korea from becoming a military base from which the Americans and the future militaristic Japan can oppose China. This is all closely bound up with China.” He continued by suggesting that there were four key reasons for him to advise China to enter the war with five to six divisions.

Stalin continued that, on the off chance that the Americans chose to escalate and cause a world war out of concern for its “prestige,” then it was better to fight such a war now rather than later. Applying windows logic, he said “then let us fight now, and not after several years. By that time, a militaristic Japan will have been revived and will be a U.S. ally, and the United States and Japan will have a bridgehead on mainland Asia under conditions in which Syngman Rhee controls all of Korea.” Stalin concluded his telegram by expressing a bit of bewilderment regarding Mao’s discussion of war and domestic politics in the PRC contained in the October 2 telegram that the Chairman had sent to him. Mao had said that many in China yearn for peace and that, therefore, war would be domestically risky for the PRC. Seeming to call into question Mao’s movement’s internationalism, Stalin said he understood this to mean that capitalist party factions in China’s government would be able to use domestic dissatisfaction in wartime conditions to attack the Communist Party and its leaders.⁸⁴

Stalin’s lengthy and detailed October 5 telegram provided reasons grounded in national security concerns and internationalist ideology explaining why Mao should push his party toward war. However, he placed a heavy emphasis on the national security issues for China. In laying out the argument for war now rather than war later, Stalin emphasized issues related to all three of Washington’s future East Asia alliance relationships. He argued that Korea and Taiwan were linked together and that the United States had chosen to protect Taiwan and to unify Korea as future launching pads for attack against China. The protection of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan helped undercut assurances made by Washington that its intention of unifying the Korean peninsula was not aimed at the Chinese communists or any other third party. With regard to Japan, Stalin ascribed to the United States the intention of rebuilding Japanese military strength but also pointed out that Washington had not yet succeeded in doing so.

So, in Stalin’s mind, the prospect that the United States could sign a peace treaty with Japan unilaterally and then encourage a more robust Japanese military posture undercut both sides of successful coercive diplomacy: the credibility of near-term threats and the credibility of long-term assurances that the threats are conditional on the target’s behavior. U.S. policy on Japan helped create a double failure of coercive diplomacy. The difficulty that Dulles and other U.S. officials had in convincing Japan to play a more active military role helped undercut the credibility of the United States’ deterrent threat to escalate effectively in the near term if China were to enter the war in Korea. At the same time, the longer-term prospect of a remilitarized Japan undercut Washington’s assurances to China that a unified anticommunist Korea could be viewed as an acceptable and nonthreatening outcome for China and the Soviet Union. Finally, Stalin tied all the elements of his threat assessment together by saying that Korea and Taiwan were a threat because of the future opportunities they would supply not only to an aggressive United States, but also to a militarily revived Japan.

Infamous for his diplomatic duplicity, Stalin was almost certainly not fully sincere in these strategic assessments. We can be fairly certain that the confidence Stalin expressed to Mao about a superpower conflict in 1950 was just bravado. As Kathryn Weathersby argues, no matter how concerned he might have been about the future balance of power if North Korea were to fall, Stalin did not see the USSR as having the upper hand in 1950 and he therefore seemed committed to going to great lengths to avoid war with the United States.⁸⁵ We can probably also take with a grain of salt Stalin’s predictions that, if China entered the Korean War, the United States would forego a unilateral peace treaty with Japan and abandon Taiwan. In fact, as discussed in the last chapter, it seems just as likely, if not more so, that Stalin hoped that Chinese involvement in Korea would distract Chinese attention from Taiwan and also lock the United States and China into a hostile, long-term relationship, preventing Beijing from straying too far from Soviet alliance leadership.

Those caveats having been stated, Stalin’s concerns about the threats that failure in Korea would pose for China and the Soviet Union were likely fully sincere. Stalin seemed to have shared for quite some time many of China’s apprehensions about a revived Japanese military presence in Northeast Asia, particularly on the Asian mainland. He probably was quite concerned, albeit not to the same extent as were CCP elites, that a unified Korea and an increasingly confident United States would lead only to a more assertive and capable Japan in Asia in the future.⁸⁶

It is not entirely clear how important Stalin’s October 5 telegram to Mao was in the CCP leadership’s deliberations for war. It seems quite likely that the key decisions may have already been made in Beijing by the time the cable arrived. Military historian Xu Yan argues that the Politburo had reached the same conclusion on its own and that the Stalin telegram was not decisive for that reason. Xu points out that Stalin’s argument that it would be better to fight sooner rather than later was precisely in line with the arguments already made in the CCP Politburo session by war supporters such as Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai.⁸⁷For our purposes, what is important is that Mao and Stalin saw eye to eye on the logic of the latter’s telegram, which emphasized the importance of U.S. defense relationships in the region as a reason to fight now, rather than later. Late in the evening of October 6, 1950, Mao told Soviet Ambassador Roschin that the CCP had decided in principle to send at least nine divisions to Korea. In this message, Mao stated that he “totally agreed with” (wanquan tongyi) Stalin’s analysis of the international situation in the October 5 telegram.⁸⁸ In a telegram on October 8 to the North Koreans, Stalin described how he had convinced the wobbly Chinese, including Mao, about why they had to enter the war.⁸⁹ As was usually the case with Stalin’s version of events, the truth of the matter was almost certainly more subtle.

We know Mao himself was resolved to enter the war in the first days of October, but he did need to convince more nervous comrades.⁹⁰ Stalin’s October 5 telegram may have assisted in that process, but we are not sure exactly what role it played. As Xu recognizes, even if Mao and the CCP leaders came to the same general conclusions on their own, Stalin’s thinking on the issue, as laid out in his telegram, was still quite important in Beijing. First, no matter how resolute he was about fighting in Korea, Mao would need Soviet military support for a Chinese effort against the United States, including air cover for key points (yaodian) in the interior.⁹¹ So, it was important that the Chinese and Soviets were on the same strategic page. Second, doubts about the decision to enter the war lingered in Beijing long after the initial decision was made in the Politburo on October 5. For example, on October 6, at a meeting to discuss how to implement the October 5 decision, Lin Biao once again stated that he opposed sending troops to Korea.⁹² Moreover, Mao’s message to Stalin at midnight on October 6–7 regarding the Chinese decision to enter the war was, in some basic sense, no more final or definitive than was his October 2 telegram declining Stalin’s October 1 request for China to enter the war immediately. Both statements were heavily conditioned on how much support China was to expect from Stalin’s USSR.

However confident Stalin himself might have been after he received Mao’s message on October 7, we now know that the CCP Politburo’s decision was still conditional on the timeliness and scope of the military support that the

Soviets were willing to lend to their Chinese allies.⁹³ On October 6–7, Mao told Stalin’s envoy that the PRC was preparing to send nine divisions, not just six, but that they could not be dispatched immediately and that, in the meantime, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao should travel to the USSR to discuss Soviet aid.⁹⁴ Since Stalin was at his dacha on the Black Sea, Zhou would need to fly to Crimea, along with Lin Biao, and would not meet with Stalin until the night of October 9. Apparently dissatisfied with the initial messages that Zhou was sending back to Beijing on the question of prompt Soviet provision of air cover (an urgent telegram, it seems, was sent from Zhou to Beijing from the PRC Embassy in Moscow on the night of October 10), on October 12 Mao ordered that preparations for entering Korea be halted and that troops simply train pending further orders. He also recalled Peng Dehuai to Beijing and called for a second emergency Politburo meeting on October 13 to discuss the Korean War.⁹⁵ It was only on October 13 that Mao would reaffirm China’s commitment to the war in a telegram to Stalin.

Mao’s eleventh-hour hesitation and Zhou Enlai’s continued arguments to Stalin for Chinese reluctance to enter the war suggest that Stalin’s arguments in his October 5 telegram, repeated to Zhou Enlai during his trip to Moscow, still might have been important in steeling the CCP’s resolve for the final commitment to war, even if they did not directly impact the deliberations on October 5 in Beijing.⁹⁶ Stalin’s arguments, in line with those in China who supported entering the war, could then simply have made it easier for Mao and Peng to gain and maintain support among their comrades who in early October still had severe reservations about a war and whose concern could only have grown when it appeared to top Chinese observers that Stalin was backing out on his earlier promise to provide air cover promptly to Chinese forces crossing the Yalu river.

We do not have the detailed minutes of Zhou’s negotiations with Stalin during his trip to the Soviet Union in the second week of October, but we can be fairly sure from his translator’s memoirs and from secondary accounts that the main topics were the nature and timing of Soviet assistance and the overall willingness or unwillingness of the Chinese to fight in Korea. Always a fine negotiator, Zhou apparently opened the discussion with all the reasons for China not to enter the war.⁹⁷ Back in Beijing, Mao was apparently unsatisfied with the nature of the initial Soviet responses to Zhou’s requests for rapid and significant Soviet military assistance. He therefore entered a final period of apparent indecision regarding the war and put the plans to dispatch troops to Korea on hold in an October 12 telegram to his commanders. As will be discussed in more detail, on October 12–13 Stalin mistakenly concluded that his Chinese allies had backed out of the war, and he began to make preparations to facilitate communist abandonment of North Korea. When Mao reconfirmed to Stalin on October 13 that China would indeed enter the war, the Chairman emphasized the importance of clarification of Soviet assistance levels in the decision. Mao said, “Past hesitations by our comrades occurred because questions about the international situation, questions about the Soviet assistance to us, and questions about air cover were not clear to them. At present all of these questions have been clarified.”⁹⁸ Mao added an explanation for why China needed to enter the war that was fully consistent with Stalin’s October 5 telegram, citing the huge security costs of inaction to China, the region, and the world, and the huge potential benefits of taking the fight successfully to the Americans in Korea.⁹⁹

It seems quite possible that Stalin sincerely agreed to provide air cover in the meetings with Zhou and Lin, but that the Chinese were disappointed to discover that the air cover would not arrive immediately. The Chinese were, perhaps, initially incredulous about the technical explanations Stalin and his colleagues offered for the delay. Historian Zhang Xi speculates that, after the stunning U.S. victories following Inchon, Stalin had grown nervous about the prospect of a direct U.S.-Soviet clash and therefore rescinded on his earlier promises of prompt air cover for Chinese forces entering Korea.¹⁰⁰ A simpler explanation would be that there was insufficient coordination between Beijing and Moscow on this question before Mao decided to cross the Yalu. Therefore, when Chinese “People’s Volunteers” began pouring over the Yalu border on the night of October 18, 1950, the Soviet planes were not yet there to protect them. The available evidence suggests that this was more of a function of poor alliance coordination than it was Soviet reluctance to supply air cover in general. The Soviets had promised air cover in principle as early as July 1950 and once they made a concrete decision to assist in mid-October, the Soviets were able to get their pilots into the fight by November 1, hardly a long lead time for decisions that were made so late in the escalation process.¹⁰¹ Judging from Chinese and U.S. documents, these Soviet air activities were quite significant, even before MacArthur made his final push to the Yalu in late November. On November 15, 1950, Mao agreed with Stalin’s proposal to transfer 120 Mig-15s to China. In the same telegram Mao praised Soviet pilots for having downed twenty-three U.S. planes in the previous twelve days.¹⁰² On November 21, 1950, Acheson discussed the downing of four U.S. B-29s over northernmost Korea by Soviet planes with French Ambassador Henri Bonnet.¹⁰³

In one sense, exactly how and when Stalin’s own analysis and argumentation to the Chinese might have mattered in the Chinese decision process might not be so important for our purposes here. The most important argument that Xu makes in supporting his claim that Stalin’s October 5 telegram was not influential in the CCP decision process is that the basic arguments about future U.S. alliances and the logic of a closing window of opportunity or an opening window of vulnerability laid out in Stalin’s telegram was apparently already shared and articulated by Politburo members in Beijing. In fact, in his telegram it is possible that Stalin was simply cynically playing on what he correctly believed to be Chinese leaders’ existing fears about the future of Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, knowing Mao would “totally agree” with the logic of his telegram. But whichever the case, we still see the consequences that early developments in the U.S. Cold War alliance system in East Asia had on Chinese and Soviet strategic thinking in what was, by all accounts, an extremely difficult decision to make. The failure of U.S. coercive diplomacy in northern Korea in 1950 was due in part to the ways in which its currently weak but possibly strong and aggressive future alliances undercut near-term credible threats and long-term credible assurances. Under those circumstances, once U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel, nothing MacArthur could have said or done differently in the near term likely could have prevented escalation of the Korean War to a Sino-American conflict, short of an unforced military retreat, an option advocated by no one in the U.S. government.

Stalin Nearly Accepts Defeat but China Saves the DPRK

The Soviet reaction to Mao’s final days of indecision in Beijing also speaks volumes about how the communist alliance was in many ways harder for the United States to coerce successfully than a unified alliance might have been. Despite all of their own fears about a resurgent Japan and a unified Korea working in cahoots in Northeast Asia, the Soviets were apparently much more willing to accept North Korean collapse as the price of avoiding a wider war with the United States than were the Chinese. On the one hand, Stalin was clearly unable simply to order China into the war against its will, as he might have been able to do if the movement were monolithic. But it is clear that Soviet national security concerns regarding unification of Korea under UN control were still different than those of the Chinese.

Stalin had grown frustrated with the CCP in the first half of October. He had expected China to snap to attention and enter the war unconditionally, immediately, and on his terms after he sent his initial telegram on October 1. Stalin again came to believe that China would enter the war after receiving Mao’s telegram on October 7, 1950. So, he must have been terribly disappointed a second time when Zhou came to the Soviet Union and once again seemingly backtracked from that commitment. What he did not recognize readily is that Beijing all along was willing to enter the war as long as the Soviets provided significant assistance and air cover, a common theme that ties together Mao’s October 2, October 7, and October 14 messages to Stalin.

A careful analysis of Stalin’s roller-coaster ride of pessimism and confidence from October 1–14 reveals two important and related alliance dynamics that guided the process of Korean War escalation: 1) the differences between Chinese and Soviet security concerns in Korea, and the relative cautiousness of the alliance leader about confronting the United States directly; and 2) Stalin’s overriding goal of preserving Soviet prestige and influence within the communist alliance. Four telegrams reveal Stalin’s manipulation of his allies. In the first telegram to Kim on October 2, as discussed earlier, Stalin duplicitously reveals to Kim his allegedly confidential discussions with Mao and accuses the Chinese of backing out on their earlier commitments, even though at that point Mao had not drawn any final conclusions about the Chinese entrance into the war. On October 8, Stalin sent a telegram to Kim Il-sung regarding Beijing’s October 6 and October 7 communications with the Soviet leader. Although Mao had said that the PLA was not yet ready to enter the war on October 7 and that he wanted discussions in the USSR about the terms of Soviet assistance, Stalin apparently took this new position by Beijing as a permanent and full reversal of Mao’s earlier reluctance to enter the war. In his telegram to Kim, Stalin did more than reveal again all his confidential discussions with Mao, Stalin portrayed himself as the hero in the story. He revealed to Kim his initial request to Mao on October 1 to send five to six divisions into Korea and simplistically and inaccurately described Mao’s “refusal” to do so. Stalin then pasted into the telegram to Kim a huge section of his October 5 telegram to Mao, in which he had urged Beijing to reconsider. Stalin concluded the October 8 telegram to Kim by claiming that, after receiving Stalin’s own October 5 telegram, Beijing had finally come around to his position and was now willing to send nine divisions into Korea.¹⁰⁴ As in early 1950, Stalin seemed more interested in portraying himself as the most helpful ally to the North Koreans than in building any solidarity between the Chinese communists and the North Korean communists. Moreover, he did this even though he had consistently been less willing to take risks than the Chinese communists had been since the outbreak of the war.

Some time after Zhou Enlai arrived at Stalin’s Black Sea dacha to negotiate Soviet support, Stalin once again grew very pessimistic about the prospects of Chinese intervention. According to Mansourov’s account, in response to Zhou’s expressed reasons for China to avoid entrance into the war, Stalin first grew angry. The Soviet leader then startled the Chinese entourage by saying that they should encourage the North Korean government to flee Korea and set up bases in Manchuria. ¹⁰⁵ Although it would be a most unwelcome outcome in Moscow, Soviet national security, broadly considered, would not be very greatly affected by the unification of Korea under a pro-U.S. regime. Therefore, preventing it was not worth risking a wider war involving direct Soviet intervention (Chinese intervention in a more limited war, of course, was quite another matter).¹⁰⁶According to the Chinese interpreter at the meetings, Stalin proposed to Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao that while U.S. occupation of all of Korea would of course be terrible, especially for China, it would be better if it came about by a planned retreat to Manchuria by Kim Il-sung’s forces than their total destruction in fighting in North Korea.¹⁰⁷

This new position by Stalin may have seemed an empty threat—a pure negotiating tactic—designed to startle the Chinese into accepting the burden of North Korea’s defense. But it was apparently much more than that. On October 13 Stalin appears to have sent orders to his embassy in Pyongyang to prepare to evacuate Kim Il-sung’s government from North Korea and to prepare to set up a government in exile. These orders caused even more alarm among the Korean comrades (who nevertheless apparently complied with the order from their “loving father” in Moscow). Obsessed with the Soviets’ relative position in the movement, in this October 13 telegram Stalin once again pinned all the blame for the North Korean collapse on the CCP’s unwillingness to fight in Korea despite Soviet leadership in asking them to do so.¹⁰⁸ Then, in two telegrams to Kim Il-sung on October 14 Stalin would report to an elated Kim that he should postpone the evacuation plan and that the Chinese were indeed coming to assist him. Especially in the second telegram, Stalin portrays himself as resolute and consistent in his support and the Chinese as having wavered but having finally decided to enter the war, adding gratuitously for good measure, “all technical equipping of the Chinese military will be provided by the Soviet Union.”¹⁰⁹

When the Chinese communists appeared unwilling to enter the war, in communications with Pyongyang Stalin blamed them for their lack of strategic acumen, their lack of resolve, and their lack of internationalism, placing the North Korean defeat firmly on Beijing’s doorstep. When the Chinese communists had clearly agreed to enter the war, in communications with Pyongyang Stalin emphasized how they had wavered before they were urged on by Stalin. He also underscored how massive Soviet assistance to China was largely responsible for their ability to fight. In this way, regardless of the outcome of the Chinese decision, the USSR would be seen in Pyongyang as the clear alliance leader and as the high church of communist internationalism. Moreover, regardless of the outcome of the Chinese decision process, Stalin would maintain his key equities in the communist alliance system. If China entered the war it would be distracted from Taiwan and terribly dependent on Soviet support and therefore much less likely to go its own way and break with the Soviets. If China did not enter the war and U.S. forces were allowed to move to the Yalu, China would also be distracted from an offensive in Taiwan and would also be dependent on the Soviet Union to help deter and defend against a U.S. attack on Manchuria.

WORSE THAN A MONOLITH IN INDOCHINA: MAO’S ASSISTANCE TO VIETNAM BEFORE AND DURING THE KOREAN WAR

The First Indochina War

Although the fighting there was being done by France and Great Britain, U.S. NATO allies, and not directly by the United States, alliance politics in the communist camp also made the international communist movement harder to contain in Southeast Asia—something that the United States, Great Britain, and France were all committed to accomplishing. This was particularly true in Indochina, where Chinese economic and military assistance to Ho Chi Minh’s young government was indispensible in its successful prosecution of war against the French colonial forces in the northernmost part of Vietnam.

In January 1950, Mao formally recognized Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam (DRV) before the Soviets did later in the month. Although the order of recognitions was only of symbolic importance, what it symbolized was indeed important. As a global power the Soviets could not let East Asia harm interests at the core. In some ways there was a parallel between the Soviets’ valuing of Europe over Southeast Asia and the U.S. strongpoint strategy that precluded more active intervention in peripheral areas, such as mainland China. In addition, as a skeptic about rural, Third World revolution, Stalin had ideological reasons to call into question the veracity of Ho’s Marxist-Leninist credentials.

Stalin’s main interests were in Europe, and his reluctance to recognize Ho’s regime came partially out of his desire not to alienate the French public. The bulk of French citizens supported French imperialism in Southeast Asia.¹¹⁰ In fact, French communist politicians themselves voted for war credits for the Indochina war either out of heart-felt conviction or fear of electoral backlash. Stalin did not want to alienate the French public at a time when France faced decisions regarding European defense that could influence the European balance of power to the detriment of the Soviets (France’s role in NATO and the European Defense Community).¹¹¹

As a regional actor, Mao cared little about France, NATO, and the question of German rearmament, but he did care a great deal about Indochina, which bordered his own nation. In addition to these differences in national interest between the Soviets and Chinese communists, Vietnamese revolution provided a fine platform for proof of Mao’s own brand of rural, Third World revolution combined with postcolonial nationalism. Both geographic and ideological factors led Mao to give significantly more assistance to Ho Chi Minh in 1950 than the Soviets did. It seems fair to argue that Mao provided more aid to Ho’s movement than the Soviets would have arranged for Ho had Moscow been in tight control over events in the region (if nothing else, the relative unimportance of Vietnam as compared to France for the communist alliance as a whole probably would have limited Soviet assistance).

Mao went further than simply being the first to recognize Ho Chi Minh’s government. He offered Ho economic and military assistance and created Chinese advisory groups to assist the Vietminh in planning war with the French.¹¹² The initial decisions for support of Vietnam apparently came in late December 1949. Although China rejected certain Vietnamese communists’ requests, including one for $10 million U.S. dollars in hard currency, the Chinese Communists offered clear, early support to their Vietnamese brethren.¹¹³ The CCP Central Committee’s priority was to assess and meet the emergency military needs of the Vietnamese communists, but it is clear that in the early months of 1950 the ultimate goal was to assist in helping Ho Chi Minh “defeat the French imperialists” in a broader struggle.¹¹⁴ One internally circulated CCP Party history argues that, despite the appearance of joint Sino-Soviet support for the anti-French struggle of the Vietnamese communists, in material terms only China provided support during the early 1950s. That support included 116,000 guns as well as hundreds of artillery pieces, ammunition, and so on. Moreover, this book states that Chinese provision of firearms, food, oil, and medical supplies helped harden Ho Chi Minh’s attitudes toward military struggle with the French.¹¹⁵ It is difficult to believe that the Soviets would have devoted such attention and expended so many resources on distant Vietnam if they had been managing the alliance’s regional strategy in Southeast Asia from Moscow.

Historians Chen Jian and Qiang Zhai point out that national security concerns were almost certainly part of the reason for Mao’s early support of revolution in Vietnam, but that assistance was not merely a reaction to the heating up of the Cold War and China’s increased worries about its security: it also had strong ideological components.¹¹⁶ After all, the initial Chinese commitment of support occurred in the period before the Korean War, when U.S. defense spending was one third of what it would be a year later, when NSC-68 was shelved by Truman as unworkable, and when the United States had recently withdrawn troops from Korea and mainland China and had apparently written off Korea and Taiwan in

Truman’s January 5 speech and Acheson’s defense perimeter speech of January 12, 1950. So, especially before the Korean War, a desire to improve China’s ideological stature in the international communist movement seems to have been a more important motivation behind the CCP’s assistance to the Vietnamese communists. Emphasizing the importance of international ideological status in Chinese strategy at the time was Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi. In an internal March 1950 directive he argued that the CCP’s assistance to Asian revolution was “one of the most important methods to consolidate the victory of the Chinese revolution in the international arena.”¹¹⁷

Southeast Asia was indeed a potential front for invasion by foreign imperialists and a raiding base for remnant KMT groups near the still largely unpacified Southwest part of China (Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces, for example). The Soviets were simply not at risk from the same threats, and their relative attention to Korea and inattention to Vietnam demonstrated this. As Odd Arne Westad points out, Korea was not only more important to the Soviets than Vietnam, the Soviets all but managed North Korea’s strategy and diplomacy as the nation that accepted Japanese surrender in Korea north of the 38th.¹¹⁸The North Korean leadership was therefore much closer to the Soviet regime than to the Chinese. The Vietnamese communists were a distant lot to Moscow, and, according to historian of Soviet foreign policy Ilya Gaiduk, Stalin was very skeptical about the internationalism in the Vietnamese communist movement, worrying that Ho’s party had excessive contacts with the West. Stalin would eschew alliances with or aid packages for the Vietminh. Moreover, Stalin was not eager to run again the risks in another Korea-style conflict involving the United States and its allies.¹¹⁹

Westad reports that Stalin was more than relatively indifferent about Vietnam, he was nervous about Chinese support to the Vietnamese communists. In July 1949 Liu Shaoqi had promised CCP support for Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh and, as discussed earlier, Stalin had placed the CCP “in charge” of Asian revolution in a way that was fully consistent with a hierarchical alliance. But when Mao and his colleagues began reporting their plans for significant aid to the Vietminh, Stalin warned them against overconfidence, citing the danger that the United States could enter on the side of France. Such an escalation would pose real dangers for the communists inside and outside Vietnam. According to Westad’s account, Mao took the lead on Vietnam pushing an aggressive plan of action there against a resistant, cautious Stalin. Although he backed the Vietnamese communists in principle, internally Stalin complained to his Soviet colleagues about CCP overexuberance toward the Vietnamese and worried about the CCP’s overconfidence that the United States would not support the French there.¹²⁰ In late January 1950, Beijing took the lead again in arranging for Ho’s entourage to travel to Moscow, where they were greeted coldly by Stalin and warmly by Mao and Zhou Enlai, who were still in town for the negotiations regarding the Sino-Soviet treaty. Ilya Gaiduk states that the only reason that Stalin agreed to meet Ho at all was that he did not want to cause “bewilderment” in the visiting Chinese entourage in Moscow, who had arranged Ho’s trip. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, Stalin was condescending and unpleasant to Ho after he arrived.¹²¹

The U.S. entrance into the Korean War and the blocking of the Taiwan Strait also energized Mao to increase the existing levels of support for Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Rather than turning his attention from Vietnam in his preparation for conflict in Southeast and Northeast China, Mao sharply increased his support of the Vietnamese communists. He did this for a range of motivations not fully shared by the Soviets: fear of future attacks from foreign and domestic foes in the Southwest as part of a three-pronged enemy offensive; his desire to prove his party’s internationalism on the international stage; and his sincere belief in the viability and utility of Marxist-Leninist revolution in the developing world.¹²²

Chinese secondary histories reveal that, despite the appearance of joint Sino-Soviet support for the anti-French struggle of the Vietnamese communists, in material terms only China provided support in the early 1950s.¹²³ China also sent military advisors to North Vietnam and Laos to assist the Vietnamese communists in their fight against the French military.¹²⁴ It is difficult to believe that the Soviets would have devoted such attention and expended so many resources on distant Vietnam even if they had not ceded “leadership” of Asian revolution to the Chinese.

For its part, Moscow initially lent more political support to the Vietnamese communist effort upon the outbreak of the Korean War, apparently sharing to some degree the Chinese calculations that Vietnam could become part of a three-pronged attack against the PRC. When the Korean War escalated, however, and the Truman administration successfully used the occasion to implement NSC-68, Stalin refused to take concrete actions to assist the Vietnamese communists. The bulk of the increased U.S. defense spending would be utilized in Europe and other areas far from East Asia, areas that the Soviets, like the Americans, deemed much more important than Southeast Asia. So, as Gaiduk argues, “The Korean War further discouraged Moscow from risking a further involvement in a war in the remote regions of Indochina or Southeast Asia.”¹²⁵ While Vietnam was a vital interest to China, it was at best a secondary one for the Soviets.

Moreover, as Chinese historian Yang Kuisong argues regarding Beijing’s aid for Ho Chi Minh, “[T]he decision to provide such aid reflected to some extent the CCP’s geopolitical interests, but ideological considerations were predominant.” He points out that Mao applied the same revolutionary advice he gave to Vietnam to other communist parties in Asia, not just those on his southern border. So, he concludes, “[I]t was in line with this tendency to support Asian revolution that the CCP offered assistance to the anti-French war led by the Vietnamese Communists.”¹²⁶ As the uncontested leader of international communism and as someone still skeptical about rural revolution, Stalin also did not share Mao’s need to demonstrate his revolutionary internationalism nor did he place great stake in the prospects for widespread Third World revolution. Again, for both realpolitik and ideological reasons, it is difficult to imagine that a more centrally controlled international communist movement under his control would have been as supportive of revolutionary forces in Southeast Asia as was Mao’s independently motivated CCP in 1950–53.