Mao's China and The Cold War

mao’s china and

the cold war

the new cold war history

John Lewis Gaddis, editor

mao’s china and

the cold war

chen jian

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 2001

The University of

North Carolina Press

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Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chen Jian.

Mao’s China and the cold war /

Chen Jian.

p. cm. — (The new cold war

history)

Includes bibliographical references

and index.

isbn 0-8078-2617-0 (alk. paper) —

isbn 0-8078-4932-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. China—Foreign relations—1949–

2. Cold War. I. Title. II. Series.

ds777.8 .c4314 2001

327.51—dc21 00-067240

05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

Versions of Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 appeared

earlier, in somewhat different form, respectively,

in Chen Jian, ‘‘China in 1945: From Anti-Japanese

War to Revolution,’’ in 1945 in Europe and Asia:

Reconsidering the End of World War II and the

Changes of the World Order, edited by Gerhard

Krebs and Christian Oberländer (Tokyo:

Deutschen Institut für Japanstudien der Philipp￾Franz-von-Siebold-Stiftung, 1997) (reprinted by

permission); Chen Jian, ‘‘The Myth of America’s

‘Lost Chance’ in China: A Chinese Perspective in

Light of New Evidence,’’ Diplomatic History

(Winter 1997) (reprinted by permission); Chen

Jian and Yang Kuisong, ‘‘Chinese Politics and the

Collapse of the Sino-Soviet Alliance,’’ in Brothers

in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance,

1945–1963, edited by Odd Arne Westad (Wash￾ington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press

and Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)

(reprinted by permission); and Chen Jian, ‘‘China

and the First Indo-China War, 1950–1954,’’ China

Quarterly, no. 133 (March 1993), and Chen Jian,

‘‘China’s Involvement in the Vietnam War,

1964–1969,’’ China Quarterly, no. 142 ( June 1995)

(reprinted by permission of Oxford University

Press).

For my wife, Hong Hong

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contents

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

chapter 1

The Chinese Civil War and the Rise of the Cold War in

East Asia, 1945–1946 17

chapter 2

The Myth of America’s Lost Chance in China 38

chapter 3

Mao’s Continuous Revolution and the Rise and Demise of

the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963 49

chapter 4

China’s Strategies to End the Korean War, 1950–1953 85

chapter 5

China and the First Indochina War, 1950–1954 118

chapter 6

Beijing and the Polish and Hungarian Crises of 1956 145

chapter 7

Beijing and the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958 163

chapter 8

China’s Involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964–1969 205

chapter 9

The Sino-American Rapprochement, 1969–1972 238

epilogue

The Legacies of China’s Cold War Experience 277

Notes 285

Bibliographic Essay 373

Index 387

maps, illustrations, and table

maps

China 18

Korea and China’s Northeast 86

Indochina 119

Eastern China and the Taiwan Strait 164

illustrations

Soviet Red Army soldiers with Chinese Communist soldiers in

Manchuria 30

Mao Zedong with Anastas Mikoyan 45

Stalin and Mao Zedong 53

Draft of Mao Zedong’s telegram to Stalin, 2 October 1950 57

Mao Zedong and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the celebration

rally for the fortieth anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik revolution 71

Mao Zedong greets Nikita Khrushchev at the Beijing airport,

31 July 1958 76

Chinese People’s Volunteers commander Peng Dehuai and

North Korean Communist leader Kim Il-sung 94

Chinese delegation attending the Geneva conference of 1954 139

Zhou Enlai speaking to Hungarian Communist leader János Kádár 160

Chinese-American ambassadorial talks at Warsaw 195

Chinese party and government delegation visiting Hanoi 235

Chinese soldiers patrolling at Zhenbao Island 241

Zhou Enlai and Aleksei Kosygin at the Beijing airport 248

Mao Zedong and Edgar Snow at the top of Tiananmen 255

Chinese Ping-Pong player Zhuang Zedong and American player

Glenn Cowen 260

Zhou Enlai greets Richard Nixon at the Beijing airport 274

Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon at Zhongnanhai, Beijing 275

table

Table 1. China’s Military Aid to Vietnam, 1964–1975 228

acknowledgments

The completion of this book would have been impossible without the gener￾ous institutional and financial support I have received in the past decade. In

particular, I would like to acknowledge a Norwegian Nobel Institute fellow￾ship in 1993, a Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave Program Fellowship from

the State University of New York in fall 1994, a summer fellowship and a two￾year special research grant from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale

in 1996 and 1997–99, and a senior fellowship at the United States Institute of

Peace in 1996–97.

John Lewis Gaddis, Michael Schaller, Jonathan Spence, and Odd Arne

Westad read the entire manuscript and provided me with critical comments

and suggestions. William Turley and David Wilson, my teachers and col￾leagues at Southern Illinois University, have constantly served as sources of

friendship and unfailing support. Jim Hershberg, David Wolff, and Christian

Ostermann, who have directed the Cold War International History Project

at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for the past de￾cade, helped me in many ways—including providing encouragement, offering

forums for me to test my ideas, and, together with the staff at the National

Security Archive in Washington, D.C., sharing with me newly declassified

Cold War documentation. Charles Bailey, David Tamerin, and David Wer￾lich, the three department chairmen with whom I have worked at SUNY￾Geneseo and Southern Illinois University, have been most supportive as col￾leagues and friends. Zhang Shuguang, Michael M. Sheng, and Zhai Qiang,

fellow Chinese scholars working on Cold War studies in the United States, as

well as Vladislav Zubok, a renowned Russian Cold War scholar who shares a

birthday with me, have enhanced my understanding of the Cold War history

in many discussions over the years.

I also wish to thank a number of friends, colleagues, and fellow scholars

who either have read part of the manuscript during various stages of its making

and offered critical comments or have provided support in other valuable ways:

William Burr, Warren Cohen, Thomas Christensen, Roger Dingman, John

Garver, Leszek Gluchowski, He Di, Michael Hunt, Li Haiwen, Geir Lunde￾stad, Niu Jun, Krzysztof Persak, Shen Zhihua, R. B. Smith, Tao Wenzhao,

Marc Trachtenberg, Nancy Berncropf Tucker, Xu Yan, Xue Litai, Yang Kui-

song, Marylyn Young, Kathryn Weathersby, and Zhang Baijia. Brian Dea￾son, Hu Shaohua, Li Di, and David Snyder served as my research assistants at

Southern Illinois University and the U.S. Institute of Peace and have contrib￾uted to the completion of this project.

Earlier versions of several chapters were previously published: Chapter 1

first appeared in Gerhard Krebs and Christian Oberländer, eds., 1945 in Europe

and Asia: Reconsidering the End of World War II and the Change of theWorld Order

(Tokyo and Berlin: Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien, 1997); Chapter 2 in

the winter 1997 issue of Diplomatic History; Chapter 3 (which I coauthored with

Yang Kuisong) in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall

of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963 (TheWoodrow Wilson Center Press and

Stanford University Press, 1999); and Chapters 5 and 8 in the March 1993 and

June 1995 issues of The China Quarterly. They all have been substantially re￾vised and are included in this volume with permission from the original pub￾lishers.

Portions of this manuscript have been presented at various lectures, work￾shops, and conferences at Beijing Capital Normal University; the University

of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Cam￾bridge University; Colgate University; Columbia University; the University

of Connecticut; East China Normal University; Fudan University; Hong

Kong University; George Washington University; Guangxi Normal Univer￾sity; the Korean National Defense University; the Institute of Contempo￾rary China in Beijing; the Norwegian Nobel Institute; Oxford University; the

University of Southern California; the University of Virginia; the University

of Wisconsin, Madison; the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.;

Yale University; Yonsei University; and panels at the annual meetings of the

Association for Asian Studies, the American Historical Association, Chinese

Historians in the United States, and the Society for Historians of American

Foreign Relations. I have benefited greatly from the comments these presen￾tations elicited.

The editors at the University of North Carolina Press deserve great credit

for their valuable assistance in improving this manuscript and bringing it to

publication. In particular I am grateful to Lewis Bateman, David Perry, Alison

Waldenberg, and Mary Laur. Mary Caviness did a superb job of copyediting,

making this a more accurate and much better book.

I owe a great deal to my father, Chen Liqiang, especially, for his help in col￾lecting Chinese source materials for me over the years. This book is dedicated

to my wife, Chen Zhihong, whose love makes my life more meaningful.

x acknowledgments

abbreviations

ccp Chinese Communist Party

cmag Chinese Military Advisory Group

cmc Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party

cpsu Communist Party of the Soviet Union

cpv Chinese People’s Volunteers

cpvef Chinese People’s Volunteer Engineering Force

drv Democratic Republic of Vietnam

gmd Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party)

icp Indochina Communist Party

jcp Japanese Communist Party

kpa Korean People’s Army

nato North Atlantic Treaty Organization

nebda Northeast Border Defense Army

panv People’s Army of North Vietnam

pla People’s Liberation Army

prc People’s Republic of China

puwp Polish United Workers’ Party

un United Nations

vwp Vietnamese Workers’ Party

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mao’s china and

the cold war

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