The formation of the anti-Japanese national united front between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD), and Moscow's role in it, has attracted much historical inquiry. Our knowledge about it is enriched with the appearance of John Garver's and Kui-Kuong Shum's recent works. However, there are some important issues raised by them worth further discussion, and some factual evidence which needs more study.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Sino-Soviet conflict intensified and at the same time the Sino-American rapprochement was well under way. When the Americans began to search for an answer to the question of ‘Why Vietnam’, some US foreign relation documents in the later 1940s were released, which indicated that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had made certain friendly overtures toward the United States. Since then, it has become a widely-accepted interpretation among scholars that Washington ‘lost a chance’ to win over the CCP from Moscow in the late 1940s. The fundamental premise of this interpretation is that the CCP earnestly bid for American friendship and support as a counterweight to pressure from the Soviet Union. It is argued that the CCP sincerely sought the US recognition right up to the middle of and that it was only after their bids for American support were rejected by Washington that the Communists had to choose the ‘lean-to-one-side’ policy. In short, Washington's shortsighted policy in 1949 ‘forced Beijing into Moscow's embrace’, and therefore set in motion a train of disastrous events: the Korean War and the Vietnam War. A promising postwar Asian balance in favour of the US was ruined.
This article reexamines the Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954—55 and 1958, and the initial Sino—Soviet conflict, with particular attention to Mao's dominant role in the events. In contrast to previous scholarship, based on newly available sources it finds Mao to have been an erratic dictator who micromanaged China's military and political operations in the Taiwan Strait against the U.S.—Taiwan alliance with neither a long-term strategy nor a short-term plan. Mao's grandiose ambition to be the leader of the communist world led him into a conflict with Moscow, and the Sino—Soviet alliance began to unravel when China most needed allies. In the end, Mao's policy behavior was counterproductive and self-defeating; China's national interest, which Mao thought he was protecting and enhancing, suffered a great deal of damage.
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