Chapter 4
THE BENEFITS OF COMMUNIST ALLIANCE COORDINATION AND THE CONTINUING COSTS OF U.S. ALLIANCE FORMATION, 1951–56

By the mid-1950s Mao had proved himself a full-fledged member of the international communist movement, and Sino-Soviet cooperation would be much closer than it was before the Korean War began. While hardly an unalloyed benefit for the United States and its allies, a relatively more coordinated and hierarchical international communist movement meant that peace deals were easier to negotiate in Korea and Indochina and that more aggressive local actors were less capable of dragging their more powerful allies into positions that would cause escalation of the existing conflicts.

With the important exception of the 1954–55 Taiwan Strait crisis, the period 1954–57 was one in which relations across the Cold War divide in East Asia were relatively stable. That crisis itself was precipitated in large part by the interaction of U.S. alliance politics in the region with the CCP’s devotion to preserving the mission of one day “liberating” Taiwan and unifying the island politically with the mainland. The United States unwittingly sent threatening signals to China regarding future U.S.-Taiwan political and defense relations during the process of forming the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Mao responded to these signals with a preventive assault on the Taiwan-held offshore islands off of Fujian Province. These attacks failed and, if anything, served only to hasten the formation of a U.S.-ROC security alliance.

REACHING A KOREAN ARMISTICE: THE MIXED BLESSING OF GREATER COMMUNIST COORDINATION

By the first half of 1951, political and military conditions in the Korean War had become much clearer than they were in the summer and fall of 1950. The Chinese communists were in the war very deeply, as were U.S. and allied forces fighting under the UN flag. Although alliance coordination problems in the communist camp remained, particularly between Chinese military and political leaders and their North Korean counterparts, the level of coordination between the three communist governments had improved quickly and significantly after fall 1950. In particular the Sino-Soviet relationship was very tight and very cooperative once Beijing decided to enter the war in force. Differences between Kim Il-sung and Peng Dehuai on war strategy remained through at least the first half of 1951. As we would expect, Kim continued to be the most aggressive advocate of offensives and was often able to get at least limited backing in Moscow and Beijing, sometimes to Peng’s great frustration.¹

Coordination among the three communist leaderships in military and diplomatic affairs improved after China’s massive entrance into the war. Unfortunately for the United States, however, the UN battlefield defeats and the general impression that the communists had the upper hand in December 1950 and early January 1951 meant that communist alliance coordination did not produce accommodation in negotiations, but rather continued belligerence. All things being equal, such coordination among one’s enemies would have facilitated U.S. coercive diplomacy, but successful coercive diplomacy still required one’s own demonstrated strength and resolve, and until the stabilization of the UN position in South Korea in early 1951, UN forces were unable to demonstrate sufficient military power to constrain their enemies. In other words, given the massive communist victories against UN forces in late November and early December 1950, the local interests of the North Korean communists in East Asia, the regional and ideological interests of the CCP, and the global interests of the Soviet Union as leader of the alliance all coincided. Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang all supported the idea of maximizing both North Korean gains and U.S. humiliation by crossing the 38th parallel with communist forces and thereby delegitimizing further the 38th parallel as a stable dividing line in Korea. In December 1950 and January 1951 the three allied communist capitals coordinated their positions and consistently opposed early armistice talks. They all agreed that any U.S. suggestion of a ceasefire was simply an attempt to buy time and regroup for future UN offensives against the North.

In this context, Moscow and Beijing decided that it would be best to ignore the concerns of the Chinese commander on the ground, Peng Dehuai, about his forces’ need for rest. Instead Soviet and Chinese leaders chose to order attacks on UN and ROK forces south of the 38th parallel before those forces had a chance to regroup.² In an important meeting in Moscow in early December, Deputy Foreign Ministers Andrei Gromyko and Wang Jiaxiang discussed the desirability of attacking across the 38th parallel. They both decided that it was best to “strike while the iron is hot.”³ This policy line fit perfectly North Korea’s strategic goals: to drive U.S. forces entirely off the peninsula as soon as possible.

Communist forces suffered terrible losses in the early months of 1951 after they briefly retook Seoul in January. Overextended and vulnerable in South Korea, the communists faced fierce counteroffensives from UN forces. Through the first half of 1951, however, all three communist capitals still ultimately wanted to drive the UN forces completely off the peninsula. Where they differed was how aggressively to pursue this goal. The North Koreans preferred the most consistently aggressive approach. For their part, the CCP leaders, particularly those in the field, became tactically much more cautious than the DPRK leaders, who seemed almost desperate to deal a death blow to UN troops before foreign anticommunist forces could consolidate a position in South Korea. After Chinese troops suffered heavy losses in January and February, Mao initially shifted to a strategy of rotating troops at the front, while still planning for a large-scale spring offensive after his forces had had a chance to rest and recuperate. By early March, Mao decided to adjust to a less aggressive, attritional strategy, at least for the foreseeable future. He would continue to prepare for a spring offensive, but seemed increasingly aware of the limits of Chinese power. In April, Mao would launch one last spring offensive, but it was limited in scope and designed largely to preempt an expected UN offensive. This campaign took heavy tolls on the communist side and forced them to give up some territory north of the 38th parallel.⁴

Following horrendous losses in the ill-advised offensives of January, February, and April 1951, in May 1951 the communist leaders in North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union recognized that the war was, at best, in deadlock. In fact, the communists believed themselves vulnerable to UN offensives should the anticommunist allies decide to recover more areas controlled by the communists in the near term. As for a major communist offensive, this would be out of the question anytime over the next year unless the sixteen Chinese divisions in Korea could be given time to rest and could be reequipped quickly through Soviet support.⁵ Given these constraints, Mao opted for a piecemeal strategy designed to attack smaller enemy units and wear down enemy resolve.⁶

After they perceived that the war was deadlocked, Mao and Stalin would decide that the communist coalition should enter armistice talks if the United States were willing to pursue them. On June 1, 1951, George Kennan, a top advisor and former official of the Truman administration, told the Soviet ambassador to the UN, Jacob Malik, that the United States was interested in a ceasefire agreement. This move followed early feelers sent out to lower-level U.S. officials by Malik.⁷

Following consultations between Moscow and Beijing, Stalin and Mao decided in principle to pursue talks; Mao then called the most aggressive communist leader, Kim Il-sung, to the Chinese capital in early June to convince him of the wisdom of the plan, which included proposals for the 38th parallel as a ceasefire line. Mao made compromises of his own in this process, agreeing not to allow issues related to Taiwan or PRC representation at the UN to get in the way of talks. Stalin supported this approach, stating that “now, a ceasefire is a good thing to pursue.” ⁸ The communist camp initiated its strategy later that month through a prepared statement by Ambassador Malik on June 23, 1951, suggesting that the communists might be willing to entertain a U.S. proposal for armistice talks. General Matthew B. Ridgway then proffered such a proposal for the UN in early July. The talks would begin that month in Kaesong, would break down from August to October, and would then restart at Panmunjom, where they would eventually produce an armistice agreement in July 1953.

Several factors had fostered the communist allies’ decision to pursue peace talks. The Chinese and their North Korean allies suffered very heavy losses in the UN counteroffensive with clearly negative implications for the broad and decisive offensive that Mao always seemed to be planning to launch some time just over the horizon. Another problem was that Soviet military assistance had proven more limited than Mao had hoped. Mao had always planned to depend on massive Soviet aid to equip his resting and rotating troops as they prepared for future offensives. In spring Mao had not been satisfied with the pace of Soviet weapons transfers, particularly given the quickly growing needs of his forces in the field.⁹ On June 24, 1951, just before the opening of the armistice talks, Stalin rejected Mao’s request for the Soviets to arm and outfit sixty Chinese divisions over time. Mao apparently wanted sixteen divisions (the number in Korea) outfitted within one year so that his forces could return to the offensive.¹⁰ Stalin said that it was “impossible” and “inconceivable” that the Soviets could equip more than ten divisions within one year and said that the full Chinese request could not be met even within three years.¹¹ The quite-blunt late June telegram from Stalin to Mao was sent after the three communist capitals had already agreed to pursue armistice talks, but the limits on Soviet arms transfers had become clear before the decisions for an armistice in early June. The Soviet policy must have helped lock the Chinese communists into a position of sincerely pursuing a sustained ceasefire and accepting an outcome that fell far short of military “liberation” for all of Korea. Moreover, the limited nature of Soviet assistance must have helped determine the outcome of future debates on strategy later that year. Throughout the summer Chinese military elites debated the advisability of a sixth major offensive in August or September designed to drive UN forces back into South Korea and restore the 38th parallel as the military dividing line between the two sides. This aggressive strategy, unsurprisingly, was supported by Kim Il-sung, but was ultimately rejected by Mao as too risky.¹²

Apparently Soviet caution was a major constraining factor on Moscow’s Asian allies. Soviet global concerns and desire to prevent escalation of the Korean War contributed to restraint on the Chinese and North Koreans in the war. This is what we would expect from a global leader of a revisionist alliance. General Xu Xiangqian, who was representing the PRC at discussions in Moscow in June 1951, recalled, “The Soviet leaders respected our victory in the Chinese revolution and supported the Chinese people’s engagement in the Korean War. They were willing to provide certain assistance and help us speed up our army’s modernization and standardization. The Soviet leaders, however, had their own worries and anxieties. I think they were afraid of provoking a war with the United States.”¹³

By July 1951, then, the stage was set for armistice talks. The war had fallen into a deadlock—albeit an often quite violent one—that would be difficult for either side to break without major new sacrifices in the Korean theater. Not much significant territory would be gained or lost on either side of the 38th parallel between July 1951 and July 1953, when the armistice was signed (though the territory that was gained and lost was hotly contested at great costs to both sides).

The most important sticking point in reaching an armistice agreement was the dispensation of the POWs held by both sides. Many of the Chinese POWs in UN custody expressed a desire to remain outside the PRC, and the Truman administration refused to return them to China under those circumstances. For its part, the Truman administration demanded the return of all UN POWs.

PRC officials rejected the U.S. proposal as unacceptable in principle. The Chinese made it clear from the beginning that the POW repatriation issue was very important to Beijing’s war strategy (but Mao did not initially seem to anticipate that it would become such a major sticking point in the negotiations).¹⁴ Such an unequal exchange was viewed by the communists as the equivalent of a political defeat in the war. Communist elites worried about the future implications of such a major compromise for future coercive diplomacy in the standoff in Korea and over issues beyond the peninsula itself, including Taiwan. Moreover, many of the Chinese POWs who did not want to return to the mainland understandably wanted to travel to the “other” China—Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China on Taiwan. This only made Beijing’s acquiescence on this issue harder to obtain.

From the start, Moscow and Beijing consulted with each other in great detail and fully coordinated their position on armistice talks. The initial communist positions at the talks were actually relatively accommodating. Mao and Stalin agreed that the PRC would not link Taiwan and PRC UN representation with the ceasefire talks. In July 1951, the Chinese communists also decided, in consultation with Stalin, to leave off the agenda their most controversial, coveted, and elusive Korean War goal: the permanent removal of all foreign forces from Korea. The removal of foreign forces was considered not only an issue of principle but also a prerequisite for a lasting peace, particularly from the point of view of the North Koreans. Neither Mao nor Stalin, however, wanted this issue to get in the way of reaching a preliminary ceasefire. They proposed instead to discuss this issue after a ceasefire was reached. ¹⁵

It is unclear just how much Kim wanted to resist these key decisions by Mao and Stalin, but he had little choice but to accede to such a strategy if his two protectors agreed that this was the way to proceed. It appears from available evidence in China and the Soviet Union that Kim Il-sung accepted quietly the advice of his two stronger allies about the desirability of negotiating a ceasefire. Kim participated in meetings in Moscow in June that helped bring that position about. There is some suggestion in the archival evidence that he did so with great dissatisfaction, however. According to an analysis of the Soviet representative to North Korea, Ambassador V.N. Razuvaev, Kim initially showed great frustration with the need to reach an armistice. Though Kim recognized the objective constraints on the communist forces, he remained angry at the Chinese, whom he believed to be leaning too hard toward the United States in seeking a ceasefire. The Soviet ambassador reports that the North Koreans saw the Malik statement at the UN as the “clearest manifestation of China’s efforts to achieve a ceasefire and to throw off this burden of assisting Korea.” Razuvaev also notes that the North Koreans were relatively slow to discuss Malik’s statement at the UN in published reports and propaganda, a fact noted by at least one leading historian of the period as well.¹⁶ Razuvaev also reported that Kim came home dejected after an early July visit to Beijing and thereafter begrudgingly resigned himself to the ceasefire. Finally, the Soviet envoy reported that in a July 27 exchange with Mao regarding terms for a ceasefire, Kim found Mao’s proposed position on a dividing line between the two enemy militaries to be too soft (ceding some territory previously controlled by North Korea to UN forces). Kim apparently complained in anger to his own colleagues that perhaps it “would be better to continue executing the war under conditions in which we do not receive help from China.” According to Razuvaev, Mao apparently toughened his negotiating position on the issue of dividing lines the following day, to the great relief of Kim.¹⁷

It is not clear from available evidence what role intra-alliance differences played, if any, in the breakdown of armistice talks from August through October. From the standpoint of alliance management, the September 10 Razuvaev telegram, which was distributed to several top Soviet leaders in addition to Stalin, could not have been entirely unwelcome news in Moscow. The main point of the telegram was that residual Korean nationalist frustration regarding the need to negotiate a ceasefire and to divide Korea with a demilitarized zone (DMZ) was aimed at China, not the Soviet Union. Moreover, that frustration had been kept sufficiently in check to keep the North Koreans committed to the negotiation process. So, Stalin got to have his cake and eat it too. North Korean comrades would continue to pursue a path consistent with Moscow’s wishes and thereby minimize the chance of escalation of war with the United States, but the North Koreans would steer their frustration about the need to compromise toward the Chinese, rather than the Soviets.

Razuvaev’s story about Kim’s frustration seems logical, especially when one compares Kim’s alleged vexation with the similar anguish of South Korea’s elites regarding a ceasefire pushed on them by the United States and others at the UN. Syngman Rhee and his colleagues, too, knew that an armistice agreement would deprive them of their own dream of unifying the peninsula under their control.¹⁸Kim did participate in the initial strategy to create the conditions for armistice talks, and we have no specific documentary evidence of his actively resisting or opposing the proposals of Mao and Stalin regarding these talks.¹⁹ Razuvaev’s account of Kim’s frustration with a ceasefire agreement, however, is consistent with secondary histories discussing communist alliance politics in mid-1951. Citing the memoirs of Korean War generals, Shu Guang Zhang reports that in Beijing on June 3 and again later in the month Kim “vehemently demanded an immediate offensive to restore the 38th parallel,” before ceasefire talks could be entertained.²⁰ Kim apparently remained the most aggressive member of the coalition and was restrained only by his high degree of dependence on a relatively well coordinated and more cautious pair of allies in Beijing and Moscow. If these accounts are accurate, as seems likely, it is notable that when there was coordination and cooperation between the two most powerful communist allies—the Soviet Union and China—there was little that the more aggressive Kim could do to change the outcome at the most fundamental level. Kim could only influence events on the margins. For example, he did manage to affect how rigid the communists would be on issues like the location of the dividing line between the two enemy militaries. But his leverage at this point paled in comparison to the previous year, when he successfully manipulated a less cohesive coalition into a major war. In 1951 Kim was dragged into a more accommodating position by his more powerful allies and forced to accept in principle the negotiated division of his country by a demilitarized zone. As we will see, there are, therefore, direct parallels between summer 1951 in Korea and the negotiations leading up to the Geneva Accords on Indochina in 1954, discussed later in this book. In both cases, coordination in Moscow and Beijing on the alliance’s grand strategy left the more radical local power little choice but to agree to a negotiated settlement that fell short of achieving its political and military ambitions in the near term.

There are some limits to this analogy between communist alliance dynamics in Korea from 1951 through 1953 and in Vietnam in spring 1954. Unlike the North Vietnamese communists following their victory against the French at Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954, North Korean forces in the second half of 1951 had not only just suffered a massive defeat, but they and large sections of the DPRK were also being continually punished by bombing from UN forces.

Under these constraints, from summer 1951 to early 1952, North Korea would reverse roles and become the main advocate of vigorously pursuing a peace settlement. By early 1952, as North Korean hopes of unifying the peninsula under Pyongyang’s control dwindled and the economic and human costs of the war grew, the North Korean communists became interested in an armistice, if not a peace treaty. In February 1952 Kim told Mao that he had “no desire to continue the war.”²¹ As armistice talks remained deadlocked over the terms for the return of UN and communist POWs, North Korea morphed from the most aggressive member of the communist alliance in 1950–51 to its most conciliatory. The North Koreans’ political goals were still expansive, but if they could not achieve them, they did not want to pay the heavy price of being the site for a bloody and economically costly sparring match between the two Cold War camps. For their part, both China and the Soviet Union had reasons to want to continue the fighting unless the United States offered sufficient concessions in negotiations, particularly on the POW issue. Mao’s and Stalin’s goals were to make the United States appear stymied in the war and to prevent the communists themselves from appearing to have lost prestige in the negotiation process. In other words, only an outcome that could be portrayed as a political defeat for the United States rather than for the communists was acceptable in Beijing and Moscow. Anything less, they believed, would compromise future coercive diplomacy in Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere.²² The United States was paying a direct, high price for stalemate in Korea, whereas the costs to its leading counterpart in the enemy camp, the Soviet Union, had become quite manageable.

In 1952 the Chinese and the Soviets were less eager to cut a deal with Washington than were the North Koreans and were therefore less willing to brook perceived injustices on the POW issue. But it is important to note that neither Beijing nor Moscow wanted escalation. At key junctures Moscow intervened to insure that neither China nor North Korea would take military initiatives that might cause an expansion of the war. As discussed earlier, in June 1951 Stalin did this consciously or unconsciously by limiting the amount of military aid he offered to the Chinese, thus limiting the option of future Chinese offensives. Similarly, in August 1952 Stalin would reject North Korean proposals for Chinese air offensives against South Korea. The North Koreans, under heavy bombardment themselves and seeing little progress in negotiations, had raised this proposal as a way to increase communist negotiating leverage and to speed an agreement. Stalin not only rejected air strikes on the South, but he also went further, rejecting more broadly any new offensives, small or large, by the Chinese or the North Koreans while ceasefire negotiations continued.²³ Although the picture was mixed from the perspective of U.S. coercive diplomacy in 1951–53, the increase in Sino-Soviet-North Korean coordination after China entered the war made escalation easier to control and an armistice agreement more likely, even though it took many months of bloody warfare and ultimately the death of Stalin to bring about an acceptable compromise on the POW issue.

In our study, the 1952–53 period is a rare case in which the interests of the local power—in this case North Korea—were generally more moderate and less revolutionary than those representing the interests of the international movement as a whole. Still, this was only true because North Korea had been unable to convince a relatively unified pair of stronger allies to continue to pursue its more radical revolutionary agenda. Although they were more cautious than their North Korean comrades to avoid appearing overly conciliatory in talks, in general Beijing’s and Moscow’s position themselves were still comparatively moderate, ensuring that an armistice could be reached with the United States and its UN allies under the right political circumstances.

The August 1952 meeting between Zhou Enlai and Stalin in Moscow is instructive as to the alliance dynamics involved in the Korean armistice talks. The Chinese and the Soviets both opposed the North Koreans’ push for a near-term armistice. They both believed that continued fighting within a controlled scope was worth the costs because it would serve the purpose of tying down U.S. energy and preventing the United States from asserting itself in other parts of the world.²⁴ To some degree, Beijing was still trying to impress the Soviets with Chinese internationalism almost two years after Chinese entrance into the war. Zhou said to Stalin that China’s role in extending the conflict in Korea placed Beijing in the “vanguard,” with Chinese troops at the front helping to stave off World War “for 10-15 years, assuming that they will succeed in containing the American offensive in Korea. The USA will not be able to unleash a third world war at all.” ²⁵ As one might expect of someone concerned about his leadership in the movement, Stalin granted China only partial credit for such an outcome. Stalin pointed out how weak the United States is in military affairs and questioned whether it would be able to launch another war even without the Korea problem. Stalin ridiculed the United States for being a bunch of “merchants” and “speculators” who did not know how to fight wars the way that the Soviets and their former enemies had. He mocked the U.S. inability to conquer a country like “little Korea” when it took the Nazis only weeks to subdue France. But at the same time Stalin did not want the Chinese to abandon the fight and capitulate in the negotiations. For this purpose, as in 1950, Stalin used a different tactic, appealing to Chinese parochial national interests to point out why a U.S. political victory in Korean War negotiations would be so costly. He said, “The Chinese comrades must know that if America does not lose this war, then China will never recapture Taiwan.”²⁶

For their part, the Chinese themselves wanted to make sure that they did not lose out politically in negotiations with the United States over prisoner swaps. By late 1952 Beijing did, however, appear willing to accept any face-saving way out of the problem offered by the UN. The problem was that in the talks to date, the United States had offered to return a much smaller percentage of Chinese POWs than North Korean POWs and demanded in exchange the full release of UN POWs (the United States proposed repatriating 80 percent of the North Koreans and only 32 percent of the Chinese). Beijing cared more than Pyongyang about these details for both straightforward and abstract reasons, including the belief that saving face and reputation for resolve were on the line. Moreover, despite the obvious costs of continuing the war, Beijing also was receiving some benefits. As North Korea’s frontline ally, Beijing was receiving significant military assistance from the Soviet Union. This flow of weaponry and expertise that strengthened China’s military overall reduced further Beijing’s incentives for adopting a more accommodating negotiating position on the POW issue. CCP elites, of course, would not come out and say anything so cynical and self-serving to the Soviets regarding the links between Soviet aid and the CCP negotiating position, but this was precisely the Soviets’ impression of the interests that drove Beijing’s negotiating strategy at Panmunjom.²⁷ The logic was not foreign to Stalin. In June 1951 Stalin argued to Mao in typically cold-hearted fashion that an advantage of a protracted war in Korea for the communist camp was that the Chinese military could gain valuable experience against the U.S. and allied forces.²⁸

As the leader of a more cooperative and integrated movement in East Asia than we saw in early 1950, Stalin played a mixed role in the armistice process. Through his ambassador, Jacob Malik, he initiated the process of armistice talks. But after talks began, Stalin encouraged continued belligerence, dismissing what he viewed as the excessive compromise toward the United States preferred by Pyongyang. By siding with the Chinese position over that of Pyongyang in 1952, Stalin fostered the continuation of conflict against the wishes of the increasingly dispirited North Koreans. Stalin concurred entirely with Mao’s strategy of a protracted war for the purpose of securing a more advantageous long-term peace for the communist camp as a whole.²⁹ On the other hand, Stalin played a restraining role on the Chinese and the North Koreans, limiting their ability to launch large-scale offensives, and proscribing even smaller-scale offensives that might scuttle peace talks.³⁰ Stalin apparently liked extended conflict in East Asia as long as it was tightly controlled. More important still, Stalin was not at all averse to an armistice if it came at a sufficient price to the United States, and he clearly wanted to avoid escalation that would preclude such an armistice and perhaps spark a wider war.

Despite his stated desire for a tough position regarding the United States, in their August 1952 meeting Stalin agreed with Zhou that if the United States made any visible concessions on the POW issue, the communists should accept the concessions and move toward an armistice.³¹ In a September 1952 meeting he even entertained Zhou’s concept of a ceasefire prior to an agreement on the POW issue. Stalin, however, expected the United States to reject any such proposal.³²

Stalin would not live to see an armistice. His death in March 1953 was arguably a major catalyst in pushing the communists toward a settlement. Still, the July 1953 Panmunjom armistice was probably compatible with Stalin’s core goals during the Korean War.³³ Stalin basically preferred an armistice to a formal peace treaty, and such a treaty is lacking to this day. Stalin, like Mao, also wanted to find face-saving ways for the communists to cope with U.S. refusals to simply turn over all Chinese POWs to the PRC. The combatants would eventually find one by employing the good services of a third party, India, to vet the POWs’ wishes as to repatriation. This solution was fully consistent with what Zhou and Stalin had agreed upon in summer 1952. The Panmunjom Armistice appeared to accord with Stalin’s wishes because it kept U.S. forces on station and on alert in the region but greatly reduced the downside dangers of escalation to a broader regional or global war, something the Soviets, with bigger fish than Korea to fry, could not allow.

From the point of view of the United States, Sino-Soviet coordination was not an entirely positive phenomenon. But by increasing greatly the transparency of the situation, it made U.S. coercive diplomacy more effective and thereby reduced the likelihood of catastrophic surprises such as Peng Dehuai’s brilliant counteroffensive in northernmost Korea in November 1950. Stalin sided with the Chinese in disagreements with the North Koreans regarding whether or not to vigorously pursue a ceasefire in 1952. Stalin also very much appreciated Mao’s logic about the utility of an extended Korean conflict for the world communist movement, an argument probably created by Mao for precisely this effect, given Mao’s apparent desire to use Korea to erase any doubts in Moscow about the CCP’s internationalism. Still, both Mao and Stalin insisted that an armistice was a desirable outcome and it was only in this international context that Pyongyang desired an armistice even more urgently than its allies. In other words, if either Stalin and Mao had held out the possibility of major offensives to unify the peninsula in the foreseeable future and/or if Kim thought he could manipulate one or both of his allies into supporting such an offensive, Kim likely would have been the most, rather than the least, aggressive member of the alliance, as he had been from 1949 through most of 1951. In this sense, Stalin’s caution as the leader of the most powerful member of the communist alliance, and as the leader of a state with global, not just regional, interests, was a sobering influence on the strategy and tactics of the communist alliance for both the Chinese and North Koreans. That influence was very important for the prospects of the two enemy camps reaching a settlement and avoiding further escalation.

THE GENEVA CONFERENCE: THE BENEFITS OF SINO-SOVIET UNITY FOR THE ANTICOMMUNIST CAMP

   By the time the Korean War ended in July 1953, Mao had certainly proven himself a true member of the movement to Stalin and his successors. Although Soviet suspicions about Mao’s becoming a rival in Asia may have continued, nobody seemed particularly concerned about his Titoism and lack of devotion to internationalism.³⁴ During the Korean War and in its immediate aftermath, Mao continued to earn his red stars by training the Vietnamese communist forces engaged in the anticolonial struggle with the French and by supplying those Vietnamese forces with an impressive quantity of guns and ammunition. At a time when the Soviets paid little attention to Indochina, Chinese technical and logistical support was critical to the Vietnamese communists’ offensives in northernmost Vietnam during 1953–54 and the impressive victory at Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Soviets under Stalin and his immediate successors had been relatively indifferent to Vietnam, worried about the implications for Soviet policy toward France—particularly about the political consequences of collaborating with Paris’s colonial enemies—and generally unhelpful to the Vietnamese communists’ armed struggle in Southeast Asia. Moscow was also nervous about China’s activism in Indochina. China, on the other hand, offered almost unlimited amounts of ammunition to Vietnamese artillery gunners in 1953–54, thus providing the Vietnamese with the capability to coerce the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu into submission.³⁵ According to one estimate, during the campaign at Dien Bien Phu, China would transfer to Vietnamese troops “200 trucks, 10,000 barrels of oil, over 100 cannons, 3,000 pieces of various types of guns, 2,400,000 bullets, over 60,000 artillery shells, and about 1,700 tons of grain.”³⁶

The number of Chinese military advisors and the amount of material aid flowing to Vietnam increased sharply after the Panmunjom armistice.³⁷ Through the military advisors he dispatched to Vietnam and Laos, Mao urged an aggressive anti-French stance by the Vietnamese forces to secure the northern part of Vietnam for the communists. The creation of a stable, friendly regime on his border to replace a colonial European power allied with the United States would provide a strategic buffer for Mao’s new nation. Beijing had an exaggerated view of the coordination between the United States and France in Southeast Asia.³⁸But what was just as important, assisting the successful Vietnamese communist campaign against the French established and solidified his revolutionary internationalist credentials in the immediate region and beyond.³⁹ Mao’s CCP tried to build on its new self-image as leader of revolution in the developing world against the United States and its allies.

The Chinese assistance that helped the Vietnamese communists secure victory at Dien Bien Phu against the French also helped create the strategic backdrop for the peace settlement at the Geneva Conference in 1954. In mid-June of that year a more accommodating new government came to power in France under Pierre Mendes-France and seemed eager to reach an agreement. With the signing of the Geneva Accords on July 21, Vietnam would be divided at the 17th parallel with an agreement, ultimately unfulfilled, to carry out nationwide elections in North and South Vietnam in 1956. The French and the Vietminh would also agree (in principle) to withdraw forces from Laos and Cambodia. The various signatories agreed that these would become neutral countries, militarily allied neither with the communist nations nor the Western powers and containing no foreign military basing.⁴⁰

The agreements that were reached in July seemed a compromise much more consistent with U.S. interests than would be continued warfare or escalation in Vietnam.⁴¹ Secretary of State Dulles had been very worried about the type of agreement that would come out of the Geneva Conference. He refused on principle to sign the accords, since they granted sovereignty to the communists in northern Vietnam. Fearing that any accords would be a near total capitulation to the communists, Dulles had hoped that the negotiations would break down. He personally preferred a policy of opposing all compromises by the British and the French and limiting U.S. activity at the conference. Eisenhower intervened and reversed Dulles’s position, fearing that discord between the Western allies would only serve the interests of the communists. The president insisted that Dulles back the negotiating positions of the new French leader, Mendes-France, albeit indirectly, and encourage active diplomacy in Geneva by the U.S. representatives to the talks, Walter Bedell Smith. In fact, Dulles traveled to Paris in early July just before the accords were reached. His goal was to coordinate U.S. and French positions toward the talks. Eisenhower’s intervention made sense. When the Geneva Accords were finally reached, even Dulles was pleasantly surprised. The Geneva Accords seemed to secure a territorially contiguous, noncommunist southern Vietnam and, thereby, provide the basis for containing communism throughout the rest of Indochina and Southeast Asia more broadly.⁴² As historian George Herring sums it up, “Although notably hostile toward the Geneva agreements in public, he and Eisenhower were not entirely displeased, seeing in them the means to accomplish their larger goals.”⁴³ Those larger goals included creating, for the purposes of containment, an alliance of regional actors that was “free of the taint of French colonialism.”⁴⁴

U.S. interests and concerns were well represented in the negotiation process. We know from declassified Chinese documents that Anthony Eden and other British officials would share U.S. views with Zhou Enlai during the negotiations.⁴⁵ Once an agreement was reached, even in public comments President Eisenhower had positive things to say about the accord, stating on July 21 that he was “glad that an agreement has been reached at Geneva to stop the bloodshed in Indochina.” While adding that “the agreement contains features we do not like,” he also pledged that “the U.S. will not use force to disturb the settlement.”⁴⁶

Given the common interests of France, Great Britain, and the United States in a negotiated settlement, the most interesting question is not why they accepted it, but why the communists did (particularly the Vietnamese communists). In understanding why, we see how a relatively unified and stable movement was easier for anticommunist actors to contain through coercive diplomacy and negotiations than was the internally contentious but externally more aggressive communist alliance of the 1960s. The only actors whose motivations remained the same over the two decades were the Vietnamese communists, who wanted to use armed struggle to unify the nation under their leadership as soon as possible. The Vietnamese communists were dependent, however, on the material and political support of Beijing and Moscow for their revolutionary activities. For their part, in the mid-1950s the Chinese and the Soviets were preparing for a “peace offensive” toward the Western powers and noncommunist regimes, particularly in the Third World. Neither nation wanted war in the short-term, particularly if it involved the United States. Beijing was still recovering from the anti-Japanese War, the Civil War, and the Korean War. It also did not want to encourage a tighter U.S.-led encircling alliance in the region.⁴⁷ In the 1950s Soviet leaders, like U.S. leaders, were focused more on global “strongpoints” like Europe and the Middle East than on revolution in Southeast Asia. In 1953–54 Moscow still hoped to turn French opinion against the European Defense Community and German remilitarization by appearing moderate on Indochina.⁴⁸ Moreover, the Soviets were in an economic rebuilding period, and a political transition period following the March 1953 death of Stalin. The Soviets therefore saw anything but peace in Vietnam as draining of critical resources better used elsewhere. Escalation in Vietnam could lead to increased U.S. military activity locally and globally, as it had in Korea. It is fairly clear that the Soviets in the mid-50s saw Vietnam as a relatively unimportant issue and were relatively willing to allow China to play a leading role there, as long as the conflict would not escalate. After all, in a period in which Soviet relations with the Chinese communists were still good, there was little reason for Moscow to compete too jealously with the CCP for the loyalties of Ho Chi Minh and his movement.⁴⁹

As leading historian Chen Jian writes, “The 1954–55 period shined as a golden age of the Sino-Soviet alliance.”⁵⁰ There were many good reasons for Beijing to coordinate its foreign policy with Moscow. Beijing still relied heavily on Moscow to break out of its diplomatic isolation. Moscow helped arrange the PRC’s entrance onto the great power stage by guaranteeing PRC participation in the 1954 Geneva Conference. At Beijing’s request, the Soviets also gave their novice allies training in how to tackle challenges at international conferences.⁵¹ Moreover, China was implementing its first Five Year Plan (1953-57) with massive assistance and guidance from the Soviets. Accordingly, in the mid-1950s China was clearly looking for a breathing spell in its efforts to spread revolution and challenge the Western powers in East Asia. Zhou Enlai apparently told the Soviets that he needed to disabuse the Vietnamese comrades of the notion that one could simply assume that China would enter into a war in Southeast Asia as it had in Korea to counter any future U.S. escalation. In addition to the direct costs of such a repeat Sino-American military conflict, Zhou appeared concerned that it would assist the United States in building an encircling alliance around China from Japan to Indonesia to India.⁵² Neither the Soviets nor the Chinese were looking to spread revolution in a risky fashion in East Asia. So, Beijing and Moscow both had strong incentives to cooperate in establishing a peaceful international environment.

The PRC had its first opportunity to play a major role at an international conference at Geneva. At the conference, the Soviets and Chinese were working largely from the same playbook, and coordination between Beijing and Moscow would never be tighter. In fact, before the conference started Zhou Enlai made two separate trips to Moscow for consultations. Beijing knew that the Soviets had been responsible for PRC inclusion in the conference, overcoming the resistance of the United States. Moreover, the relatively inexperienced CCP leadership wanted practical advice from the Soviets. After his second trip to the Soviet capital Zhou flew directly to the Geneva Conference. While in Moscow, the Vietnamese and Chinese comrades met in plenary session with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslev Molotov in order to coordinate policies. Beijing would join the Soviets in encouraging the Vietnamese communists to consolidate victories in the North and postpone aggressive actions in the South.⁵³

In Moscow, the Soviets seemed to throw wet blankets on their Chinese and Vietnamese colleagues in a preemptive fashion. They told them not to expect to gain too much from the conference and to avoid providing the United States pretexts to escalate the war. The Soviets clearly wanted an armistice agreement and did not want the aspirations of the Vietnamese or the Chinese to get in the way.⁵⁴ As Ilya Gaiduk points out, in managing the alliance, the Soviets were more concerned about the views of the Chinese communists than the Vietnamese communists, and were heartened that the former seemed much more willing than the latter to entertain a peace settlement based on the territorial division of Vietnam.⁵⁵

Although there was a large degree of commonality in the Chinese communist and Soviet positions, the Chinese had somewhat greater aspirations for the conference than the Soviets. As major players in the Indochina War, they knew that they would be instrumental in pounding out an armistice agreement. As rookies in international conferences, they were determined to prove themselves effective both as international actors and as allies to the Vietnamese communists. The Chinese, while cautious and basically in agreement with the Soviet desire for an armistice, also wanted to assure some gains for the Vietnamese communists.

As we would expect from our study of Kim Il-sung and the Korean War, the Vietnamese communists were the most aggressive in pursuing gains for themselves at the expense of the French. They wanted to avoid any agreement that reduced their ability to unify Vietnam under their control in the near future. For related reasons, they also wanted to maintain and increase their influence in the ongoing domestic political struggles in Laos and Cambodia.

In principle, both major allies of Ho Chi Minh’s movement supported a peace deal that would include the partition of Vietnam into clear and distinct communist and noncommunist sections and the removal from Laos and Cambodia of foreign forces (including Vietnamese communist forces). In discussions with their Vietnamese comrades, they were quite insistent on a settlement that emphasized a stable armistice in Vietnam and a geographic consolidation of Vietnamese communist victories to date rather than a crazy-quilt map of communist strongholds surrounded by territory held by anticommunist forces. The latter concept was initially pushed by the more aggressive Vietnamese communists as part of their plan to continue armed struggle aimed at unification in the nearer term.⁵⁶

The Vietnamese communists would also be asked to compromise on policies toward Laos and Cambodia, where Ho Chi Minh’s party had exerted military and political influence. The Vietnamese communists were attempting to control strategically important territory to be used for logistical and other support for revolution in Southern Vietnam and for the spread of communist revolution into the rest of Indochina more generally. The Chinese entourage at Geneva, led by Zhou Enlai, would broker a deal between Britain and France on one side and the Vietnamese communists on the other for the removal of all foreign forces from Laos and Cambodia. This was important because the Vietnamese communists had played a strong hand in spreading revolution to Laos in particular. As Zhou Enlai would learn from discussions with noncommunist representatives to the conference from Laos and Cambodia, this revolutionary activity by Vietnamese communist forces and their local communist allies went far beyond opposing French occupation and included destabilizing any local anticommunist political forces in the kingdom.⁵⁷ In this period of consolidation, Beijing was much more interested in preventing escalation of the conflict or providing any pretext for a long-term U.S. military presence on China’s border in Laos or northern Vietnam than it was in spreading revolution beyond North Vietnam.⁵⁸

Despite the more expansive goals and aggressive strategies of the Vietnamese communists, Ho Chi Minh and his advisors eventually acceded to the Chinese and Soviet insistence on accepting a clear geographical boundary between communist and noncommunist Vietnam.⁵⁹ Even before the dramatic final victory at Dien Bien Phu on May 8, 1954, the Vietnamese communists felt that they were ascendant and that, with the further backing of the Chinese and Soviets, they could continue armed struggle toward near-term unification.⁶⁰ The Vietminh leadership, therefore, was extremely reluctant to accept division of Vietnam and came around to this position in June only under persistent Soviet and, especially, Chinese pressure.⁶¹ Moreover, they resisted both the details of the dividing line in the final accord (which they believed to be drawn too far north) and the two-year delay in elections designed to abolish the dividing line and unify the nation.⁶² Finally, the Vietnamese communists, originally the “Indochina” communists, also had long planned to extend their influence in Laos and Cambodia, areas of strategic concern to both the United States and China as well.

The Vietnamese communists would be compelled by their allies to accept division of the Vietnamese nation at the 17th parallel and the delay of planned elections, intended to end this state of affairs, until 1956. Ho Chi Minh’s movement would also need to accept, in principle, if not in practice, the notion that all foreign troops, including Vietnamese communist troops, should be withdrawn from Laos and Cambodia. A final compromise was international oversight of the peace agreement, including monitors in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to police against aggression, revolutionary activities, or irredentism from either side. The solidarity and moderation exhibited by their Chinese and Soviet allies left a materially poor Vietminh no chance to play one capital off the other or to gain the level of material and political support necessary to continue the fight against the southern regime and to spread communist revolution to nations bordering Vietnam.⁶³

For their part, the French settled for an agreement only reluctantly. Only the dramatic defeat at Dien Bien Phu, followed by the rise of a new more accommodating French government under Mendes-France on June 16, would allow France to accept many of the peace terms, and the details of a peace settlement still mattered in Paris. In order to facilitate an agreement, in negotiations with the British and French representatives, Zhou Enlai and his Chinese colleagues would all but admit that Vietnamese forces were in Laos, despite the fact that the Vietminh denied their existence. After learning much more about the political realities on the ground in Southeast Asia and recognizing the independence and nationalism of states in Laos and Cambodia, China then played a major role in pressuring the Vietnamese to agree to withdraw forces from those countries as payment in return for pledges of neutrality vis à vis Laos and Cambodia from local governments, from European governments, and, indirectly through the British representatives in Geneva, from the United States.⁶⁴

As the most active diplomatic actor in Geneva on the communist side, Zhou Enlai pursued the following goals for the PRC: a consolidated territory for the Vietnamese communists in the northern part of Vietnam, free of French military presence; prevention of escalation of the war and direct involvement of the United States; and the removal of French forces from Cambodia and Laos without having them replaced by U.S. military forces or alliances.⁶⁵ Zhou knew that achievement of these goals required persuading the Vietnamese communists to make the necessary compromises on their near-term goals in southern Vietnam and in Laos and Cambodia.⁶⁶ The communists and anticommunists involved in the negotiations needed to settle on an international advisory body that was acceptable to all and that could verify compliance with whatever agreement was made.

Judging from the secondary accounts and from the recently opened PRC Foreign Ministry Archives, Zhou worked tirelessly during the talks and during the recess. He shuttled between the headquarters of the various entourages in Geneva, brokering a deal between the French and Vietnamese communists. To do so he apparently put a good deal of pressure on the latter to accept peace and a dividing line between north and south even as he represented the Vietnamese communist positions in discussions with envoys from London and Paris. As the communist side’s “honest broker,” Zhou met frequently with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who played a similar broker’s role for both France and the United States, especially before the rise of the new Mendes-France government in mid-June (Mendes-France was eager for an agreement and would decide to negotiate directly with Zhou Enlai at Geneva).⁶⁷ Zhou gathered information from the noncommunist representatives of Laos and Cambodia about the popular legitimacy of their regimes and the destabilizing influence of Vietnamese communist infiltration into Laos in particular. He then apparently pressured the Vietnamese communists, who publicly denied the presence of their troops in other countries, to agree in principle to withdraw any “remaining” troops from those countries.⁶⁸

During the intersession in the talks in late June through early July, Zhou went on a whirlwind tour of South Asia and Southeast Asia. In July he also met with China’s Vietnamese communist allies in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou to prepare the final negotiating positions of the communist camp for the July Geneva Accords signed later that month. Zhou showed a great deal of initiative, and he apparently achieved more for the Vietnamese communists in negotiations than the Soviets had expected. But he kept the Soviets fully informed of his strategy in the negotiations, and one does not get a sense from the archives that Zhou was acting in ways that ran against Soviet interests or intentions.

Only selected documents regarding Chinese-Vietnamese discussions at the Geneva Conference have been released in China to date, but there is some evidence in the recently opened PRC Foreign Ministry archives that the Vietnamese communists initially resisted the compromises they were being asked to make by their foreign comrades and by the British and French. The tenor of the meetings between Zhou and British leaders, in particular, suggests that Beijing had been wrestling with a difficult partner in Hanoi throughout the negotiations.⁶⁹ The best evidence that the Vietnamese communists’ arms were twisted by China and the Soviet Union at Geneva comes from recently available Chinese documents from the late 1960s. These documents demonstrate that the Geneva Accords were a bitter pill for the Vietnamese communists. Saigon’s decision to refuse to honor the commitment to national elections in 1956 (a decision Washington supported) was infuriating but expected in Hanoi. The legacy of Geneva therefore, would become a bit of an embarrassment for the Chinese communists in the 1960s. At that time, Beijing elites were accusing Soviet leaders publicly and privately of antirevolutionary revisionism and selfish nationalist chauvinism in international politics. It appeared that the PRC in 1954 had been guilty of the same sins of moderation of which Beijing was accusing Moscow in the 1960s. As will be discussed in chapters 5 and 6, Vietnam was one of the countries that China was trying most to impress during the Sino-Soviet rift in the 1960s, and Hanoi’s leaders were fully aware of Beijing’s history on this score. In October 1968 Chinese Foreign Minister Foreign Chen Yi berated Le Duc Tho, the head of Hanoi’s committee to oversee the southern campaign, for agreeing to peace talks with Washington earlier that year. He did so by referring to the mistakes at Geneva. Le Duc Tho acidly reminded Chen that Vietnam only made that mistake in 1954 because “we listened to your advice.” Chen Yi fired back, “You just mentioned that in the Geneva Conference, you made a mistake because you followed our advice. But this time, you will make another mistake if you do not take our words into account.” ⁷⁰ In November 1968 when Mao was criticizing the Vietnamese communists for being too soft by negotiating with the Americans, he was quite frank about Beijing’s differences with the Vietnamese communists in 1954. Mao stated that at Geneva, “it was difficult for President Ho to give up the South, and now, when I think twice, I see that he was right.” Zhou Enlai quickly chimed in, blaming the compromises at the Geneva Conference on the Soviets. Mao, however, insisted, “I think we lost an opportunity.”⁷¹ Whether the Soviets or the Chinese had exerted the most restraint on the Vietnamese communists in 1954, it is clear that, long after 1956, the Vietnamese communists continued to blame both the Soviets and the Chinese for the alliance’s moderation at Geneva.⁷²

While differences in the alliance remained, the communist alliance in East Asia was never more unified and well coordinated than it was at Geneva.⁷³ The most important factor was that China and the Soviet Union were in basic agreement that an armistice needed to be pursued vigorously and that their dependent ally, the Vietnamese communists, must be convinced of this basic fact. The lack of rivalry between Mao and his Soviet counterparts in this period meant that the Vietnamese communists could not play one communist ally off the other as they would in the 1960s. Neither major ally shared the Vietnamese communists’ intense interest in taking the South nor its desire to destabilize and spread its influence in Laos and Cambodia. The United States and its anticommunist allies, who wanted a negotiated settlement of the conflict in Indochina, were the clear beneficiaries of this enemy unity and the restraint that it fostered.

But it is, of course, possible that alliance cohesion was not the key variable here: the national interests of China and, to a lesser degree, of the Soviet Union in securing a friendly buffer state for China and preventing escalation of conflict in Indochina may provide a complete explanation. That realpolitic explanation would be fine if the same nations had maintained that position into the 1960s. The clear national interest is hard to deduce purely from geography and the distribution of power in any case, but neither changed between the mid-1950s and the 1960s, and yet the communist camp’s behavior in the two periods was markedly different. For reasons I outline in the next chapter, shifts in U.S. policy in the interim do not provide sufficient explanation for this change. It is clear that the key change from the mid-1950s to the 1960s was one from alliance unity and consensus, at least between China and the Soviet Union, to alliance rivalry and internal discord, which not only prevented effective restraint on the Vietnamese communists by their stronger allies, but also served to catalyze overall foreign assistance to the Vietnamese communists thus fostering their belligerence against the South.

U.S. REGIONAL ALLIANCE FORMATION AND THE MAKING OF THE 1954 TAIWAN STRAIT CRISIS

In the early 1950s, the United States had set up a series of bilateral treaties in East Asia and one trilateral treaty in the case of ANZUS (the defense treaty of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States). In August 1951, the United States signed a bilateral defense treaty with the Philippines. In September 1951 the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was signed. In the same month, ANZUS was formed. After an armistice was reached in Korea, Washington entered into another bilateral defense treaty with Seoul. During the Geneva Conference, Dulles made it clear that he wanted to set up a broader, multilateral anticommunist defense pact in Southeast Asia to stem the spread of communism there. Although he privately wanted the Geneva talks to collapse when he first introduced the idea of such an alliance, he claimed publicly that the creation of a pact like this should assist in the process of a peace settlement in Indochina. In an April press conference in London, he answered a query about an East Asia defense pact and its relationship to the Geneva Conference as follows: “Well, I would think that the discussions about the collective defense should proceed more or less independently of the Geneva talks. There is an interconnection? Of course; but I have felt that the Geneva talks were more apt to succeed if there was some strong alternative to a failure to accomplish the result we wanted by negotiation. The very existence of that alternative, will, I think, make it more likely that there will be successes in Geneva.”⁷⁴

Dulles’s concept would come to fruition with the signing of the Manila Pact in September 1954, creating the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Signatories included the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, the Philippines, and Pakistan. None of the three noncommunist states of Indochina—Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam—could join because of restrictions in the Geneva Accords, but the SEATO treaty carried a “special protocol” that covered those areas and thereby called for their protection against aggression.⁷⁵ This protocol was actually the very essence of the treaty, which had as a central purpose to enforce the geographic delineations of the Geneva Accords and prevent the rest of Indochina and Southeast Asia from falling to the communists.⁷⁶

As was the case with the development of the U.S.-Japan security partnership in the period 1948–51, the process of creating SEATO produced certain destabilizing effects in relations across the Cold War divide. The Eisenhower administration was quite public about its desire to form such a pact in the spring and summer of 1954. The notion of an encircling alliance of anticommunist states would, in and of itself, be of great concern to the Chinese communists, as was expressed consistently by Zhou Enlai and his colleagues during the Geneva talks.⁷⁷ What made the prospect of much more concern to Mao and other CCP elites was the possibility that the United States might conclude a defense treaty with Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan and, perhaps, link Taiwan into the SEATO structure. In an important July 27, 1954, document on strategy toward the United States, SEATO, and Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee noted recent discussions between Washington and Taipei about a defense treaty. The Chinese top leadership did not believe a final decision had yet been made but stated that “if the United States and Jiang [Chiang] sign such a treaty, the relationship between us and the United States will be tense for long period, and it will become more difficult [for the relationship] to turn around. Therefore, the central task of our struggle against the United States at present is to break up the U.S.-Jiang treaty of defense and the Southeast Asian treaty of defense.”⁷⁸The worst outcome for China would have been the linking of the two treaties because this would have potentially involved more countries than just the United States in relations across the Taiwan Strait and solidified the defense relationship between Chiang’s Taiwan and the United States. Such an outcome could have prolonged the division of the mainland and Taiwan and, under certain circumstances, allowed Chiang Kai-shek to drag the United States into a war to recover the mainland. None of these prospects were particularly bright ones for Mao. Chiang Kai-shek had been lobbying vigorously in the United States in 1954 for a U.S.-ROC defense pact and had been pressuring a reluctant Eisenhower administration to agree to one. Chiang’s government employed not only confidential government-to-government channels in this campaign, but also congressional lobbying and media connections, so Beijing did not need sophisticated intelligence assets to be fully aware of the problem. According to well-connected PRC scholars, Mao was concerned that the development of SEATO and a U.S.-ROC alliance would augur a more stubborn “Taiwan problem” if the PRC did not take preventive action in the near term.⁷⁹

Beijing was gravely concerned that inclusion of the Republic of China on Taiwan in the alliance system would strengthen and encourage Chiang militarily and politically. Moreover, this linkage between the United States and Taiwan would occur at a time when China was recovering from the Korean War and Chiang still had strong irredentist claims on the mainland that could be fulfilled only with American support. In the past when the United States had upgraded its military relations with Chiang’s Republic of China on Taiwan, Chiang quickly became more belligerent, accelerating harassment of the mainland and the seizing of tiny offshore islands just off the mainland coast.⁸⁰ More important still, inclusion of Taiwan in an alliance would seem to lock the United States permanently in the Chinese Civil War with long-term implications for cross-Strait unification and the mainland regime’s security, as the United States would be providing assistance to anticommunist forces on Taiwan who wanted to use military means and subversion to overthrow Mao’s regime.⁸¹

In Mao’s eyes, a related dangerous pattern was a diplomatic trend in the region, partially supported by Beijing’s own diplomacy in Korea and Vietnam: the settlement of Asian civil wars by internationally recognized DMZs and political separation lines that created the appearance of two, geographically distinct legitimate governments in Korea and Vietnam. Such an outcome, if it were going to become a precedent, clearly ran counter to Mao’s desire to unify both sides of the Taiwan Strait under CCP leadership and to gain universal diplomatic recognition of Beijing as the sole legitimate government of all of China.⁸² He did not want a permanent or semi-permanent division of his own nation and, therefore, wanted to take actions to prevent such an outcome. Ironically, then, Beijing’s moderate stance in Korea in mid-1953 and Vietnam in mid-1954 created precedents that would lead to Chinese national security concerns and would, eventually, encourage CCP belligerence in the Taiwan Strait in 1954. In order to stem these developing trends in the region, Mao decided to launch concerted artillery attacks on the KMT-controlled offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu (Jinmen and Mazu) in September 1954, thereby sparking a major crisis with both Taiwan and the United States over the next several months.

In his sometimes surprisingly frank 1992 open-source book, Jinmen Zhi Zhan (The Battle for Quemoy), Colonel Xu Yan of the National Defense University sums up the foregoing factors behind Mao’s decision when he writes,

Xu goes on to state that Mao’s decision in summer 1954 did not represent a decision for large-scale military attack across the Strait (daguimo de duhai zuozhan) but rather Mao’s efforts to affect real or perceived negative trends in international politics and domestic politics by the coercive use of force.

According to Xu, in addition to these international political objectives, there was also a domestic dimension to the operations in 1954–55. As a revolutionary, Mao emphasized the psychology of struggle as necessary for his populace to meet the domestic goals set by the Communist Party. The land reform campaign and the pacification of the West was carried out during the Korean War and, according to Xu, Mao hoped that the successful implementation of the First Five Year Plan (1953–57) would be assisted by reminding the population that the international environment was hostile and that struggle was needed for the PRC to meet its goals. Although I see less consistent hard evidence of this in the 1954–55 case than in the later case of 1958, the goal of domestic mobilization would clearly become a theme in the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis, itself a result of long-term strategic thinking in Beijing, albeit of a radically different sort.⁸⁴It is noteworthy that one important Central Committee document from July 1954 supports all of Xu Yan’s points, with some emphasis on the domestic component. In a telegram to Zhou Enlai in Geneva, the Central Committee called for preparation for struggle against the prospect of a U.S. defense treaty with Chiang, perhaps linked to a future SEATO, by stating, “The introduction of the task is not just for the purpose of undermining the American-Jiang plot to sign a military treaty; rather, and more importantly, by highlighting the task we mean to raise the political consciousness and political alertness of the people of the whole country; we mean to set up our people’s revolutionary enthusiasm, thus promoting our nation’s socialist reconstruction.”⁸⁵

As in Korea in late 1950, in late summer 1954 Mao believed international forces were shifting against the PRC and that brash action needed to be taken to alter the trend lines. In this case, Mao used limited force to send a message to the United States and to Chiang about the costs of forming a formal alliance. Mao’s policy backfired and, if anything, only hastened the formation of a formal U.S.-ROC alliance. Discussing this case, He Di, formerly a leading scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argues that “Mao Zedong had long believed in using warfare for political objectives.”⁸⁶

In January the U.S.-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty would be ratified. The PLA upped the ante and attacked and seized the offshore island of Yijiangshan off of Zhejiang, and in February the PLA took the Tachens (Dazhens), also off of Zhejiang, after they were evacuated by ROC troops. According to He Di, the assaults on the Yijiangshan and the seizing of the abandoned Dazhens, were of more military significance than political significance as they provided good practice for a weak PLA amphibious capability. The islands were very far from Taiwan, weakly defended, but had provided a base for engaging in irritating harassment and blockade activities launched by the ROC. But Mao had apparently recognized that full-scale invasion of the most important ROC offshore garrisons on Quemoy and Matsu was impractical given the strong fortifications on the island and the weak state of PLA amphibious forces. The motivation for the artillery attacks on those islands, which sparked the crisis with the United States, was apparently largely political.⁸⁷ It is hardly clear that Mao would have wanted to seize all of the offshore islands even if he believed the PLA to be more capable. As part of Fujian province, the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu provided a notional political bridge between Taiwan and the mainland. Cutting that bridge, especially with no hope of taking Taiwan itself soon thereafter, would serve the perceived American goal of permanently wresting Taiwan away from the mainland. Although He Di traces the long history of PLA preparation for invading the small islands first before the larger islands, at least the timing of the January 1955 attacks still seems politically motivated.

Despite Mao’s ire at the United States, he clearly wanted to avoid provoking a war with the superpower. Apparently one of the great constraints on the scope of Chinese actions—the attacks on Quemoy and Matsu in September 1954, the shelling of Yijiangshan in November 1954, the taking of Yijiangshan in January 1955, and the recovery of the abandoned Dachens in February 1955—was Mao’s consistent desire to avoid escalation by engaging American forces directly.⁸⁸

Beijing was not driven in this period by its desire to impress upon the Soviets Mao’s revolutionary credentials, as it was in 1949–51. In fact, the crisis made the Soviets quite nervous by all accounts, and there was little indication in Washington or Beijing that the Soviets wanted to risk World War III over Taiwan.⁸⁹Even though Sino-Soviet relations seemed to be at their apex during the Geneva Conference and the 1954–55 Taiwan Strait crisis, there was a clear difference of opinion in Moscow and Beijing over the importance of solving the Taiwan issue on Beijing’s terms. This is why in the middle of the crisis, January 1955, Mao decided that China needed its own nuclear weapons and developed an indigenous program, albeit with large amounts of Soviet support in the program’s early phases.⁹⁰ Nor was Mao driven by any sense of competition with the Soviet Union for ideological leadership of the international movement, a pretense that Mao would only begin to develop after two or three years of Khrushchev’s rule.

Mao seemingly miscalculated by failing to appreciate Washington’s reluctance to meet Chiang Kai-shek’s requests for a bilateral alliance in 1953–54. In so doing, he underestimated how PRC belligerence might encourage U.S. leaders to accede to Chiang’s entreaties, rather than dissuade them from doing so. To return to the terms discussed in chapter 1, Dulles and Eisenhower feared entrapment by a smaller ally, Chiang’s KMT, just as the Truman administration had feared entrapment by Syngman Rhee’s ROK in 1945–53. Washington had no desire to be dragged into the Chinese Civil War and was, therefore, rather nervous about signing a defense pact with Taipei, particularly anything that would offer an unconditional defense commitment, including under circumstances in which Chiang had provoked the mainland by launching attacks of which Washington did not approve in advance. So, for most of 1954 the Eisenhower administration resisted signing a defense pact. Although it is difficult to say if and when a U.S.-ROC defense pact would have been signed in any case, Mao’s military actions in the Taiwan Strait, beginning in late summer and early fall, only enabled and accelerated the process of U.S.-ROC alliance formation.⁹¹

Even when the U.S.-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty was created in December 1954 and ratified in January 1955, U.S. concerns about entrapment were still very real, as demonstrated by a secret addendum to the treaty stating that the United States need not honor its commitment to Taiwan’s defense if the latter were to launch an attack on the mainland without prior consultation with and approval from Washington. As Dulles explained to the NSC in discussing the proposed treaty in October, “The treaty should be defensive in nature and this aspect should be accepted by the ChiNats. It would not be consistent with our basic policy of non-provocation of war were the United States to commit itself to the defense of Formosa, thus making it a ‘privileged sanctuary,’ while it was used, directly or indirectly, for offensive operations against the ChiComs.”⁹² A second aspect of the treaty designed to avoid entrapment was the vague wording regarding the U.S. commitment to defend offshore islands held by the KMT other than the main islands of Taiwan and Penghu. By not mentioning the offshore islands nearest the mainland by name, instead referring to “such other territories as may be determined by mutual agreement,” the United States suggested it would help defend the smaller offshore islands closer to the mainland, such as the Tachens, Quemoy, and Matsu, only if the threat to those islands also posed a threat to the main islands of Taiwan and Penghu.⁹³ This fear of entrapment would create conditions that helped undercut deterrence in the second Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958, which is discussed in chapter 5.

One reason why Mao likely overestimated Washington’s desire to ally with Taiwan formally and underestimated the tensions in U.S.-ROC relations was the general trend in the Eisenhower administration’s East Asia policy in 1954 during and just after the Geneva talks. Although the creation of SEATO was designed to create stability and deter communist aggression in the region, the process of creating SEATO helped undercut U.S. coercive diplomacy by undermining assurances that Chinese passivity would protect PRC core interests. Washington, Taipei, and other regional actors seemed to respond to the PRC peace offensive with policies that appeared to the Chinese communists to threaten Beijing’s national security interests. In 1954, because of real and perceived U.S. alliance policies in the region, Beijing saw a closing window of opportunity or an opening window of vulnerability, depending on one’s perspective, in which it could either prevent such an alliance from forming or, at a minimum, make sure that, if one was formed, everyone involved would understand that the project would not be cost free.

Aside from Beijing’s nationalistic reaction in the Taiwan Strait, Chinese foreign policy would be relatively moderate in the middle 1950s and fully in tune with Soviet designs for a breathing spell in the Cold War. This was demonstrably true before and during the Geneva Conference in 1954. Espousing the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” in April 1955 Zhou Enlai would play a leading role at the Bandung Conference of African and Asian states in Indonesia, a precursor of the Non-Aligned movement. Although such a conference was designed to challenge the world leadership of the European powers and the United States, what was notable for our purposes was Beijing’s distinct lack of commitment to Third World communist revolution. A major theme of the conference was noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, a theme that does not accord well with leadership of world revolution. After the 1954–55 Taiwan Strait crisis wound down in spring, the PRC also opened up ambassadorial talks with the United States in Geneva.⁹⁴ Hardly anything concrete was accomplished at these meetings, which would last through 1957, but they were, by their very existence, a sign of reduced U.S.-PRC tensions. Finally, under Zhou Enlai’s leadership in the 1955–57 period, China would adopt a posture of seeking peaceful liberation of Taiwan, if such a process were possible. This was as close as Mao’s government would come to Khrushchev’s own policy line of peaceful transformation to socialism and peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world.⁹⁵ In a nutshell, in the mid-1950s Mao’s PRC and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union seemed mostly to be on the same page in international affairs, and aside from the Taiwan Strait crisis, a big beneficiary of the cohesion in the communist alliance was the United States and its regional security partners. In comparison to the earlier period of communist alliance formation (1950–51) and the later period of communist intramural tensions and rivalry (1958–69) the communist movement was less aggressive when Mao’s China was a secure but subordinate member of a Soviet-led alliance. Where conflicts existed, as in Indochina in 1954, peace was also easier to negotiate than it would be in the 1960s.