China during the Cold War Period - Book Report/Review Example

China during the Cold War period 2007 Jian, Chen, Mao's China and the Cold War, The of North Carolina Press 2000 Chen Jian's study, Mao's China and the Cold War (2000), is an input for knowledge on China's relation with the Cold War. It exposes the vital role Beijing took in the course of the Cold War and the tussle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Jian is a professor of History and an expert of Chinese-American Relations teaching at a number of Chinese and American Universities. His study is derived from primary sources from Chinese Archives supplying new info and study of the country's leader Mao Zedong's actions in the Cold War era and also including present studies on Chinese security concerns (like Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross's The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, 1997; Philip Short's Mao: A Life, 1999, and Ross Terrill's Mao Zedong: A Biography, Stanford Univ., 2000). Jian's study includes two vital factors: First, he contends that Mao's decisions were mainly made to uphold "continuous revolution" in China and strengthen his own authority. And, second, that Mao used the Chinese people's paranoia about being persecuted by distant powers to gather public opinion in his favor. The author examines many cases, together with the rise of the Cold War, America's "loss" of China, the Sino-Soviet agreement, the Korean War, the first and second Indochina War, the Polish-Hungarian disaster, and the Taiwan Strait crisis (Library Journal, amazon.com, Library Journal). The author, of course admits in the introduction that: "To be sure, with a Communist regime remaining in Beijing (no matter how quasi it actually is today), China still has a long way to go before "free academic inquiry" becomes a reality, but the contribution of China's documentary opening to the study of the Chinese Cold War experience cannot be underestimated" To explain China's position in the Cold War Jian says, the place of Mao's China in the Cold War, in many important ways key, was not marginal but vital in the Cold War, albeit a conflict mainly between the two opposing "superpowers" that is, the United States and the Soviet Union. He thinks that in this case, the study made by political scientists Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross undoubtedly strike remarkable and he quotes those authors saying: "During the Cold War, China was the only major country that stood at the intersection of the two superpower camps, a target of influence and enmity for both" (as cited in the Notes, Introduction, Chen Jian). To Jian, China's sheer size mainly becomes the reason of its influencing the Cold War. With the biggest population figure "occupying" the third biggest land in the world, China could not be disregarded either by Russia or by the U.S. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Mao's China tactically associated with the Soviet Union, the United States instantly felt endangered. In its attempts to "roll back" the Soviet/Communist threat, the United States got engaged in the Korean and the Vietnam War, overstretching itself in a worldwide conflict with the Soviet/Communist block. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the state of affairs turned totally around after China's rift with the Soviet Union and re- establishing ties with the United States. Thus, he concludes, to face the West and China concurrently, the Soviet Union strained its strength adding considerably to the final flop of the Soviet Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jian thinks, the role of China in the cold war also changed its philosophical perspectives also , since China's surfacing as a "revolutionary country" spectacularly changed the insight of the Cold War as a war between "good" and "evil", making the battle more openly and widely encased by ideologies. This was especially true as, the author intends to make clear by a concise comparison of the two Communist countries where he asserts Mao's China as being more revolutionary in its activities than the Soviet Union by the late 1940s. The Chinese Communist regime, Jian says in the first chapter, was formed by splitting away from the Yalta system. With the birth of "new China" the Chinese Communist Party leadership resolved to separate from the tradition of the "old" China, to "make a fresh start" in "China's foreign affairs", and to tilt to the side of the Soviet-guided socialist camp (Xue Mouhong et al as cited in the Notes, Introduction, Chen Jian). Since the beginning, according to the author, Mao's China dare defy the Western powers on the whole and the United States particularly by doubting and, therefore, denying the authority of the "norms of international relations," as Mao and his associates read them. Mao's China, comments Jian, had its own style and theories, its own principles and attitudes regarding external policies. The author also admits that this, certainly, also implied that Mao's China would defy not only the United States and other Western powers, but the Soviet Union as an overriding world authority also. Jian considers that the revolutionary Chinese foreign policy, blended with the reality that the Cold War's real stress was then changing from Europe to East Asia, unavoidably made the global Cold War to have a moral face, thanks to Chinese intervention. 2. Yu, Maochun, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War, Yale University Press, 1997 In OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (1997) by Maochun Yu (a historian of the U.S Naval Academy) an absorbing account of the intelligence activities of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the originator of the CIA) in China during World War II has been told. Yu here studies President Roosevelt's decision to send envoys out to England, China, and the war-tattered Mediterranean area in 1941. The author then narrates how OSS' China director General William Donovan employed Koreans as substitutes in China to develop an intelligence kingdom. Derived from ordinary sources in US archives and on present studies on China, the author narrates the war among the 20 US bureaucratic agencies and dozen independent intelligence , the main competitors of which were the US army commanders Stilwell and later Wedemeyer; Tai Li, the head of Chinese intelligence; Milton Miles, the head of naval intelligence; William Donovan, selected by Roosevelt to establish the OSS, the hard American ambassador Gauss; and a churning hoard of rival individuals and agencies , both the British forcing themselves and disrupting others. In his study, Yu shows the conspiracy, disorder, and bureaucratic backbiting in those Cold War days and the operation of the OSS, the most important of which as already mentioned are the topics of inter-service competition and the issue of a central authority. The OSS's vibrant and showy director, William J. Donovan, according to the author frequently fought with the Joint Chief's of Staff over who would be in charge of OSS's intelligence collection and special operations in China. Besides these, Maochun Yu also studies barely known sides that openly influenced OSS' China operations. For example, British control and handling of OSS was not intended to assist the U.S. and China beating the Japanese intruders, but to a certain extent to only guard Britain's colonial domain in Asia. Another factor was the Communists in Yenan and their democratic frontage covertly trying to permeate into Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist intelligence activities and then into OSS, in company with the Communist's clandestine partnership with lackey managed areas, delaying the KMT-U.S. collaboration and allied war attempts on the mainland. An important feature of OSS IN CHINA is Yu's gradual account of the Chinese Communist murder of OSS agent John Birch, which according to some was the first shot to be heard in the cold war. OSS could get going and flourish amidst all these problems in its China operations. Those who are interested about how the US government got drowned into the swamp in South East Asia in the fifties Yu's study would be of much benefit. In Until t the OSS records were made public through the National Archives some years back , a lot of information were concealed except glanced in a few journals. But the OSS, the State Department s and the other US departments' points of view are inevitably prejudiced and contradictory. So is also Chinese sides- both the Reds and the Nationalists. But all these points taken together could point out to those difficult years to an extent, perhaps and that is exact what the author has done here. He used memoirs and histories now accessible from mainland China to grow this history. 3.Vogel, Ezra F et al. The Age of Uncertainty: The US-Japan-China Triangle from Tiananmen (1989) to 9/11 (2001), Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 2004, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/asiactr/publications/pdfs/Vogel_Age_of_Uncertainty.pdf Historical issues stemming from the World War II continued to plague Sino-Japanese relations during the Cold War period. While China has been of the view that Japan had not sufficiently acknowledged its role in the aggressions in the Far East during the War, Japan claimed that China deliberately played upon the "history issues" to justify its aggressive behavior. The war crime trials and the visits by Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni shrine that honors the 14 A class war criminals and other Japanese dead during the war despite Japan's acknowledgement of responsibility to wartime aggression have been sources of tension between the two countries. Yet, the period between 1972-89 have been considered by many analysts like Vogel as the Golden Period of Sino-Japanese-US relations after which each of the countries became more inward-looking in their approach towards international relations. The year 1972 was a watershed year for the Asia-Pacific relationship between China, Japan and the United States. The three countries' strategic interests in terms of political ideologies and geographical locations were always at the heart of much of the tension between them as well as the congeniality. The strategic interests of the countries during this period were also designed towards its common agenda of containing the USSR, which was spreading its imperialist wings across Asia. While Japan had already been allied with the US to contain the USSR, China too turned against its former ally and fellow communist nation, the USSR. Taking up the cue, the US initiated diplomatic relations with China in the early 1970s and Japan was thus forced to adopt a conciliatory tone towards its Asian rival. The Nixon Administration accepted PRC as the government of China and gave up the official recognition of Taiwan. The common agenda of the three powers - United States, Japan and China - was then targeted against the USSR and the soviet bloc of countries that ultimately culminated into the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party. However, the interactions between China and Japan during the 1970s and the 1980s were very limited and were managed by only a small group of people. Through the Cold War years, the perceived fear of the Soviet bloc directed all aspects of national and strategic interests. Through the tenures of President Nixon, Ford, Kissinger and Carter of the US, development of Sino-US relationship followed the pattern laid out by the Shanghai Communique. Even in the 1978 normalization communiqu signed by Carter, the "one China: Taiwan part of China" principle was acknowledged. However, although the US broke diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, military relations continued uninterrupted, which was sanctioned by the Taiwan Relations Act. Since 1978, however, China's open-door economic policy and shift towards a "socialist market economy" made its ideological opposition to Taiwan redundant. The Reagan administration, essentially a conservative government, resumed diplomatic relationship with Taiwan, with Reagan himself visiting Taiwan in 1982. In 1985, anti-Japanese student protests broke out in China and the US-Japan military alliance became the focal point of Sino-US relations. This suited the US business since it felt at a disadvantage to follow the ideology-related trade relations with Japan and saw Japanese imports eating into the US markets. Politically and economically, the US indirectly supported the anti-Japan sentiments in China, which began to brew from the mid-1980s. Earlier, China had seen the US-Japanese military alliance as an insurance against Japanese militarism in Asia Pacific but gradually, with the unresolved Taiwan issue and the US-Taiwan treaty still in place, China began to see it as a threat. 4. "New Phase in the Relationship: U.S. Fear of Chinese-Russian Reconciliation" This article was originally published in The CQ Researcher on February 4, 1977 The new developments in Sino-Soviet relation during 1977, that is, two years after Mao's death has been extensively studied in this article in context of the worries and concerns of the Unites States regarding this new state of affairs. Even on the basis of very little information available the article finds that that there has been a slight softening in the bitter confrontation between the two communist countries and that Peking ( that is, Beijing) would like to renovate some of their divergent opinions. The article that recalled the origin of the ideological rivalry that extended subsequently to border disputes and over dominance in world politics indicated how the Unites States by its two "policy options" profited out of such tensions between the Soviet Union and China, firstly as evoked by Henry A. Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford governments presuming that Russia and China will find it nearly impossible to square fully and that China is militarily, economically and politically to feeble to defy chthe Soviet Union or the United States, a hypothesis denied by the opponents who hold American visitors to China i have found the growing Chinese intolerance to Washington's lack of enthusiasm in executing the Shanghai Communiqu, signed by President Nixon and Premier Chou En-lai on Feb. 27, 1972 that required "progress toward the normalization of relations" between the two countries. The article is of the opinion that even if a total reconciliation is impossible, there are several chances for bringing the Communist giants nearer or pushing them to further distance, new theories revolving around on the role of Mao's heir, Hua Kuo-feng. The article has the major drawback of not taking into account of the new possible fical policy changes that would also emerge after Mao's death or the collapse of Soviet Russia and the subsequent end of the Cold War, giving the world politics a totally new look, more dependent on market economy, high tech growth and totally at war with the increasing religious fundamentalism. 5. John W. Garver"Sino-American Relations" The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, 2e. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Richmond.9 November 2007 This article discussed the shift of Sino-American relation from the beginning of the Cold War to the end. Although the United States had attempted to dissociate the Chinese civil war and build diplomatic relationships with the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1948, the latter's tilt towards the Soviet Union came in the way. Through the 1950s, the United States kept up its attempts to break the Sino-Soviet relationship but the preoccupation of both parties with the Vietnam War during the next decade took the focus away. By the early 1970s, however, the rise of Soviet power made it a common target of apprehension for both China and the US, bringing the two together. Through the decades of 1970s and 1980s, both the US and China strove to build diplomatic relations till the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Garver notes that the presence of a large number of American media persons in Beijing for a landmark diplomatic visit by the Soviet President Mikhail Gorvachev for the first time since 1959 took the incident to global proportions. Garver compares that the tremendous adverse public opinion towards China over the issue with that in favor of China during 1937 over the Sino-Japanese war, with 1950 when the world view Japan more favorably during the Sino-Japanese war and against the Red Scare in China. However, the fall of communist regimes in East Europe mellowed the US' hostility towards PRC. There was no threat of communist regimes turning against the US and building cordial relationship with China would provide a huge market for American businesses, it was felt. Chinese markets had already been growing for a decade as the government had been liberating the economy internally. US political leaders realized that heavy military expenses in the stand-off with China as well as being shut out of China were not only bad economic policy for US interests but also endangered public opinion among the domestic electorate. Simultaneously, the events across East Europe changed the mood within the Chinese Communist Party. While some of the members suffered from siege mentality, as Garver notes, Deng Xiaoping came out of it and moderated the attitude. Deng had already been arguing for economic reforms and opening the doors of China for foreign investments, which had been trickling in since 1978. Read More