China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation

The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation

New York

1994

Introduction

In October 1950, one year after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong and the Beijing leadership sent "Chinese People's Volunteers" (CPV)to Korea to fight against United Nations forces moving rapidly toward the Chinese-Korean border. Although China's intervention saved Kim Il-sung's North Korean Communist regime from imminent collapse, it was unable to fulfill the Beijing leadership's hopes of overwhelming the UN forces. Therefore, when the Korean War ended in July 1953, Korea's political map remained virtually unchanged, while America's military intervention in Korea and China's rushing into a conflict with the United States finally buried any hope for a Sino-American accommodation, and the Cold War in Asia entered a new stage characterized by a total confrontation between the PRC and the United States that would last nearly twenty years.

The newly established Chinese Communist regime faced enormous problems during its first year, including achieving political consolidation, rebuilding a war-shattered economy, and finishing reunification of the country. Why then did Mao decide to assist North Korea in fighting a coalition composed of nearly all the Western industrial powers? How was the decision made? What were the immediate and long-range causes leading to Beijing's decision to enter the Korean War? Finally, was there any opportunity that might have prevented the direct confrontation between the PRC and the United States? More than forty years after the end of the Korean War, scholarly answers to these questions are still limited and remarkably inadequate.

In the 1950s, Western scholars, strongly influenced by the intensifying Cold War, generally viewed China's entrance into the Korean War as a reflection of a well-coordinated Communist plot of worldwide expansion, believing that the entire international Communist movement was under the control of Moscow, and that neither Beijing nor Pyongyang had the freedom to make their own foreign policy decisions. The Korean conflict, therefore, was seen as an essential part of a life-and-death confrontation between the Communists on the one hand and the "free world" on the other. ₁

The North Korean invasion of the South, as viewed by President Harry Truman-and many later students of the Korean War-represented the first step in a general Communist plot to "pass from subversion" to "armed invasion and war" in their scheme of world conquest. ₂ Correspondingly, Beijing's entrance into the Korean War was regarded as an action subordinate to Moscow's overall Cold War strategy. Scholars in the West widely believed that Beijing's policy was aggressive, violent, and irrational.

In 1960, Allen S. Whiting published his landmark study, China Crosses the Yalu, ₃which has strongly influenced a whole generation of scholars. Using Western intelligence sources and Chinese journal and newspaper information, Whiting argued that unlike the Soviet Union, Communist China had not directly participated in the planning for the North Korean invasion of the South. After the outbreak of the Korean War, Whiting believed, Beijing tried to terminate the conflict through political settlement, and only after the attempts for a political solution failed in late August 1950 did Beijing begin necessary military preparations in early September. Whiting emphasized that after the Inchon landing Beijing tried through both public and private channels to prevent UN forces from crossing the 38th parallel. Beijing entered the war only after all warnings had been ignored by Washington and General Douglas MacArthur and, therefore, in the Beijing leadership's view, the safety of the Chinese-Korean border was severely menaced. Whiting thus concluded that Beijing's management of the Korean crisis was based primarily on the Chinese Communist perception of America's threat to China's national security. Lacking access to Chinese archival materials, though, Whiting's study had to focus more on the analysis of the environment in which the Beijing leadership made their decision to go to war than on a close examination of the decision-making process.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a more critical perspective on the Sino-American confrontation in Korea emerged in the wake of the American debacle in Vietnam, the normalization of Sino-American relations, and the declassification of new archival documentation. Building on Whiting's thesis, scholars paid more attention to Chinese Communist Party (CCP)leaders'concerns for China's national security as the decisive factor underlying their decision to enter the Korean War. They generally argued that Beijing did not welcome the Korean War because China faced difficult tasks of economic reconstruction and political consolidation at home and gave priority to liberating Nationalist-controlled Taiwan. Many of these scholars stressed that Beijing's decision to enter the Korean War was simply a reluctant reaction to the imminent threats to the physical security of Chinese territory. And while most scholars believed that the American decision to cross the 38th parallel triggered China's intervention, some speculated that if UN forces had stopped at the parallel China would not have intervened. ₄ A large majority of Chinese scholars seem to share these assumptions, as can be seen in Chinese publications on the "War to Resist America and Assist Korea" that appeared in the 1980s. ₅

As a lecturer at Shanghai's East China Normal University in the early 1980s and then during my pursuit of doctoral studies in the United States, I became increasingly interested in the emergence of Sino-American confrontation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In my study I too believed in the standard interpretation of China's reasons for entering the Korean War. Not until 1988-1990, when the work on my dissertation led me to fresh Chinese sources, did I begin to feel doubts. For example, to my surprise, I found that early in August 1950, more than one month before the Inchon landing, Mao Zedong and the Beijing leadership had been inclined to send troops to Korea, and China's military and political preparations had begun even a month earlier. I also found that the concerns behind the decision to enter the Korean War went far beyond the defense of the safety of the Chinese-Korean border. Mao and his associates aimed to win a glorious victory by driving the Americans off the Korean peninsula. It was no longer possible to accept the well established view of Chinese and American historians.

The reexamination of the Korean case led me into a broader question concerning the proper understanding not only of Communist China's foreign policy but also, probably, that of any sovereign country: is it appropriate to comprehend the foreign policy behavior of a country, especially one that had historically viewed itself as a "Central Kingdom," as totally reactive and without its own consistent inner logic? The assumptions underlying most of the existing scholarship on China's entrance into the Korean War, though seemingly critical of Washington's management of the Korean crisis, emerge ironically as American-centered in a methodological sense. Lacking a real understanding of the logic, dynamics, goals, and means of Communist China's foreign policy, they treat Beijing's management of the Korean crisis simply as a passive reaction to the policy of the United States. They thus imply that American policy is the source of all virtues as well as evils in the world-if something went wrong somewhere, it must have been the result of a mistake committed by the United States. It was time to rethink Beijing's entrance into the Korean War.

This study retraces China's road to the Korean War with insight gained from recently released Chinese materials. It argues that China's entry into the Korean War was determined by concerns much more complicated than safeguarding the Chinese-Korean border. To comprehend China's decision to enter the war, one must first examine the CCP leaders'perception of China's security interests and their judgment of to what extent and in which ways such interests had been challenged during the Korean crisis. This examination requires an extended analysis of a variety of basic factors shaping the CCP leadership's understanding of China's external relations. Among these factors, the most important ones include CCP leaders'perception of the outside world and China's position in it, the nature and goals of the Chinese Communist revolution and their impact on the CCP's security strategy and foreign policy, the influence of the CCP's domestic policies on the party's foreign behavior, and the leverage of historical-cultural factors (such as the Chinese emphasis of the moral aspect of China's external relations, Chinese ethnocentrism, and Chinese universalism)upon Mao and the CCP leadership. Only with a better understanding of the logic and dynamics of the CCP's outlook is it possible to construct the interactions that led China and the United States into a major confrontation in Korea. ₆

My three-part, seven-chapter study begins with an analysis (in chapter 1)of Communist China as an emerging revolutionary power. Focusing on the pre-1949 period, I discuss the domestic sources of the CCP's foreign policy, the party leadership's perception of the outside world and China's position in it, and Mao's central role in the CCP's policy-making structure. The second part (chapters 2-4), explains how the conflict between the CCP and the United States escalated and the strategic cooperation between Beijing and Moscow developed in 1949 and the first half of 1950-on the eve of the Korean War, Beijing and Washington had perceived each other as a dangerous enemy, and a stage for Sino-American confrontation had been set up. The third part (chapters 5-7) examines Beijing's management of the Korean crisis from late June to mid-October 1950, focusing on how the decision to enter the war was made and how it withstood both internal and external tests. Emphasizing that Beijing's decision to enter the war was based on the belief that the outcome of the Korean crisis was closely related to the new China's vital domestic and international interests, I argue that there was little possibility that China's entrance into the Korean War could have been averted.

A note on the Chinese sources used in this study is appropriate here. Since the mid-1980s, thanks to China's reform and opening policies, many fresh and meaningful materials concerning China's entry into the Korean War have been released, which offer the basis for this study. These new sources include personal memoirs by those who were involved in Beijing's intervention in Korea, ₇ scholarly articles and monographs by Chinese researchers with archival accesses, ₈ official academic publications using classified documents, ₉ openly or internally published collections of CCP Central Committee's and regional bureaus'documents, ₁₀ and the internally and openly published collections of Mao Zedong's papers. ₁₁ While it is apparent that these sources have created new opportunities for fresh studies, it is also clear that they were released on a selective basis and, sometimes, for purposes other than a desire to have the truth known. Indeed, unless scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, are offered free and equal access to the original historical documentation, there is always the possibility that a study might be misled by its incomplete databases. Fully aware of this danger, I have made every effort to doublecheck my citations as much as possible (such as checking documents with information from interviews, and vice versa, and comparing Chinese materials with non-Chinese ones). Wherever necessary, I have pointed out what I consider to be dubious sources in the notes.

This study is also based on my four research trips to China respectively in 1987, 1991, 1992, and 1993. During these trips I established and updated my research databases, and interviewed those who were involved in Beijing's policy-making during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and those who have access to classified CCP documents (because of the political sensitivity involved in the issues under discussion, unless authorized by the interviewees, I will not identify their names, but I will restrict using unidentified interviews only if it is absolutely necessary). I have not been able to get close to Beijing's CCP Central Archives (which, by the way, is located in the city's remote western suburb). But by a combination of effort and good luck, I accessed some important classified documents (including correspondences and telegrams of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other CCP leaders, and a few minutes of CCP leaders'decision-making conferences)for the 1948-1950 period. To compromise the need to protect my sources with the general practice of Western scholarship, I cite them in this study by pointing out their forms (telegram, correspondence, or minute), dates, and where their originals are maintained (the Chinese Central Archives or Chinese Military Archives). I believe that this is the best one can do in the current circumstances. It is my hope that China, my motherland, will follow the internationally accepted practice of declassifying historical documents on a legal basis, so that all researchers, including myself, will soon be able to get free access to them.

Notes

Note 1: Except for a few books written by journalists, such as Isidor F. Stone's The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952), this approach dominated the study of the origins of the Koreans War in the 1950s and part of the 1960s. See, for example, Robert T. Oliver, Why War Came in Korea (New York: Fordham University Press, 1950); Philip E. Mosley, "Soviet Policy and the War," Journal of International Affairs , 6 (Spring 1952): 107-114; Alexander L. George, "American Policy Making and the North Korean Aggression," World Politics 7, no. 2 (January 1955): 209-232; and Tang Tsou, America's Failure in China, 1941-1950(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 555-556. In his classic study of the Korean War, Korea: The Limited War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 18-20, David Rees continued to draw a picture reflecting a well-coordinated Communist plot to start the war. For summaries of various scholarly interpretations of the origins of the Korean War based on the assumption that the North Korean invasion obeyed Moscow's grand strategic design, see Denna F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 2: 605; and Kim Hak-joon, "Approaches and Perspectives to the Origins of War," in War Memorial Service-Korea, comp., The Historical Reillumination of the Korean War (Seoul: Korean War Research Conference Committee, 1990), pp. 1-9. For general historiographical discussions of the origins of the Korean War, see John Merrill, Korea: The Peninsula Origins of the War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), chapter 1; Philip West, "Interpreting the Korean War," American Historical Review, 94, no. 1 (February 1989): 80-96; Rosemary Foot, "Make the Unknown War Known: Policy Analysis of the Korean Conflict in the Last Decade," American Historical Review, 15, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 411-431. Back.

Note 2: Truman's statement, June 27, 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1950, 7: 202-203. Back.

Note 3: Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu, The Decision to Enter the Korean War (New York: Macmillan, 1960). Back.

Note 4: These interpretations are evident in Robert R. Simmons, The Strained Alliance: Peking, Pyongyang, Moscow and the Politics of the Korean Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1975); Melvin Gurtov and Byong-Moo Hwang, China Under Threat: The Politics of Strategy and Diplomacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 25-62; Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War (London and New York: Longman, 1986), pp. ix, 189-201; Ronald Keith, The Diplomacy of Zhou Enlai (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), pp. 45-47; Richard Whelan, Drawing the Line: The Korean War, 1950-1953 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), pp. 236-238. Back.

Note 5: This approach can be found in a wide range of Chinese publications, such as Shen Zonghong and Meng Zhaohui et al., Zhongguo renmin zhiyuanjun kangmei yuanchao zhanshi (History of the War to Resist America and Assist Korea by the Chinese People's Volunteers, Beijing: Military Science Press, 1988), chapter 1; Han Nianlong et al., Dangdai zhongguo waijiao (Contemporary Chinese Diplomacy, Chinese Social Sciences Press, 1987), pp. 37-38; Hao Yufan and Zhai Zhihai, in "China's Decision to Enter the Korean War: History Revisited," The China Quarterly, 121 (March 1990), attempt to offer an alternative to Whiting's thesis but generally follows Whiting's stress on Beijing's concerns for the safety of the Chinese-Korean Border. Back.

Note 6: In a series of recent studies, scholars in the U.S. have begun to use the new Chinese sources. Russell Spurr's Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War against the U.S. in Korea (New York: Newmarket, 1988) was the first one in this regard. Allegedly supported by "information from extensive interviews," this book is virtually based on hearsays and fiction-style imagination. Harrison Salisbury devotes a whole chapter to China's decision to enter the Korean War in his new book, The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), which is based on a few interviews and a random reading of secondary Chinese sources. Lacking support of corroborating documentary sources, this book contains a lot of errors. The studies by Michael Hunt and Thomas Christensen represent the best efforts in reinterpreting China's entrance into the Korean War with the support of new Chinese sources. Hunt, in "Beijing and the Korean Crisis, June 1950-June 1951" Political Science Quarterly, 107, no. 3 [Fall 1992]: 453-478), offers enlightening analyses of Beijing's management of the Korean Crisis and Mao's direction of the CPV's first-year operations in Korea. Christensen, in "Threats, Assurances, and the Last Chance for Peace: The Lessons of Mao's Korean War Telegrams" (International Security, 17, no. 1 [Summer 1992]: 122-154), uses Beijing's response to the Korean crisis to challenge the traditional view based on deterrence theory. Also of note is Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), which offers interesting, though sometimes highly speculative, interpretations of the Sino-Soviet alliance and its relations with the origins of the Korean War. Back.

Note 7: The most important ones include Chai Chengwen and Zhao Yong-tian, Banmendian tanpan (The Panmunjom Negotiations, Beijing: People's Liberation Army Press, 1989; second edition, 1992); Du Ping, Zai zhiyuanjun zongbu: Du Ping huiyilu (My Days at the Headquarters of the Chinese People's Volunteers: Du Ping's Memoirs, Beijing: People's Liberation Army Press, 1988); Hong Xuezhi, Kangmei yuanchao zhanzheng huiyi (Recollections of the War to Resist America and Assist Korea, Beijing: People's Liberation Army Literature Press, 1990); Nie Rongzhen, Nie Rongzhen huiyilu (Nie Rongzhen's Memoirs, Beijing: People's Liberation Army Press, 1986); and Shi Zhe, Zai lishi j�ren shenbian: Shi Zhe huiyilu (Together with Historical Giants: Shi Zhe's Memoirs, Beijing: The Central Press of Historical Documents, 1991). Back.

Note 8: For example, Qi Dexue, Chaoxian zhanzheng juece neimu (The Inside Story of the Decision-making during the Korean War, Liaoning: Liaoning University Press, 1991); Xu Yan, Diyici jiaoliang: kangmei yuanchao zhanzheng de lishi huigu yu fansi ( The First Test of Strength: A Historical Review and Evaluation of the War to Resist America and Assist Korea, Beijing: Chinese Broadcasting and Television Press, 1990); Yao Xu, Cong yalujiang dao banmendian (From the Yalu River to Panmunjom, Beijing: People's Press, 1985); and Zhang Xi, "Before and After Peng Dehuai's Appointment to Command Troops in Korea," (hereafter cited as "Peng's Appointment") Zhonggong dangshi ziliao (Materials of the CCP History), no. 31 (1989): 111-159. Back.

Note 9: Good examples in this category include Tan Jingqiao et al., Kangmei yuanchao zhanzheng (The War to Resist America and Assist Korea, Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 1990); and Han Huaizhi and Tan Jingqiao et al., Dangdai zhongguo jundui de junshi gongzuo (The Military Affairs of Contemporary Chinese Army, Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press, 1989), 2 vols. Both volumes are part of the "Contemporary China" series. Back.

Note 10: The most useful ones include Zhonggong dangshi jiaoxue cankao ziliao (Reference Materials for Teaching CCP History, Beijing: National Defense University Press, 1986), vols. 18-19 (1945-1953); Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian xuanji (Selected Documents of the CCP Central Committee, hereafter cited as ZYWJXJ, first edition, Beijing: CCP Central Academy Press, 1983-1987), 14 vols. Both collections were published for "internal circulation" only. An open and generally enlarged version of the second collection has been published in 1989-1992, but a few important documents are not included. Back.

Note 11: Mao Zedong junshi wenxuan ((Selected Military Works of Mao Zedong, Beijing: Soldiers' Press, 1981, hereafter cited as MJWX); and Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao Zedong's Manuscripts Since the Founding of the People's Republic, Beijing: The Central Press of Historical Documents, 1987, 1989, hereafter cited as MWG), vol. 1, September 1949-December 1950, and vol. 2, January 1951-December 1951. Both collections are "for internal circulation" only. Also useful are the openly published Mao Zedong junshi wenji (A Collection of Mao Zedong's Military Papers, 6 volumes, Beijing: Military Science Press and the Central Press of Historical Documents, 1993, hereafter cited as MJWJ), and Pang Xianzhi et al., Mao Zedong nianpu, 1893-1949 (A Chronology of Mao Zedog, 1893-1949, 3 volumes, Beijing: People's Press and the Central Press of Historical Documents, 1993, hereafter cited as MNP).1. Revolutionary Commitments and Security Concerns: New China Faces the World Back.