The Rise of China during the Cold War - Essay Example

________________ d: June-28-2008 The rise of China during cold war IR in context with the potential critics which in the eyes ofmany theorists are prone to the relativistic nature of IR theory, anything short of universal deconstruction is not likely to win their approval for various incidents that occurred in the name and as a consequence to World War II. Liberalist scholars who favoured the notion that mutual gain could only be achieved by cooperation and that war only brings destruction typically fall far short of Marxist, critical, post structural and feminist visions of international relations, to name only a few liberationist perspectives. On the other hand Realist or classical realist IR scholars and practitioners emphasized upon being updated with the modern day military and economic power responsible for the conviction that mishandled the problems at hand threatens to forestall all possible futures. Communism is another universalistic system of thought that offered Americans a way to feel themselves tied to the larger world (Klein, 2003, p. 30). In the conflict between liberalist and realists scholars, IR was decided to fate upon the ‘Realism’ where political strength through World War II left not just a single power vacuum in that part of the world, as in Europe, but several other parts as well. Japan’s defeat destroyed an empire that had dominated northeast Asia for decades. The rise of China during cold war was followed by the weakening rule of Nationalist government and strengthened its long-time Communist rivals, preparing the way for renewed and intensified civil conflict. Elsewhere Japanese victories undermined the authority of European colonial regimes, encouraging independence movements on the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia (Gaddis, 1998, p. 55). The Cold War alignments let the Chinese to harden Cold War alignments through choices they themselves made. The European pattern had been one of the Soviet Union imposing its authority and the United States being invited to respond, in China the situation was reversed. The Chinese people chose to transfer their allegiance from the Nationalists to the Communists, hence Mao’s great victory in 1949. The Mao’s powerful government, both for ideological reasons and because it feared an American attack, sought China’s incorporation within a Soviet sphere of influence. By 1950, a fundamental shift in the balance of power had taken place where nearly overnight the communist world appeared almost to have doubled its extent. Realist school of thought have always succeeded in appearing self-evident, for it has done more than any other discourse to define international politics in terms of logic of conflict between power-hungry statesmen and generals in the absence of authoritative international governmental structure. If we put a quick glance at the most widely read journals in the field today, it suggests that realism is still a fixture, it is equally obvious that it shares the spotlight with theories from liberal and, even, critical perspectives. Nonetheless, we can argue that realism has provided the foundation of the formal discipline of IR, one that derives principally from a select group of American and European scholars (Stoett & Laferriere, 1999, p. 75). After the Nationalists were internationally recognized as the government of China even the Soviet Union acknowledged their legitimacy and the Communists acted more than an obscure group of revolutionaries who engaged in long marches, lived in caves, and lectured one another on their own peculiar understanding of Marxism-Leninism. Washington did not begin to take the Nationalist Government of China seriously until 1944, when it became apparent that their military assistance like that of the Russians might make up for the Nationalists’ incompetence in fighting the Japanese. Even so, the relationship was a distant one, partly because of the continuing United States commitment to Chiang Kaishek, but partly also because the Americans were already worrying that Moscow’s influence might spread throughout China if Mao and his followers should ever win the civil war there. One reason Washington supported a strengthening of ties between Stalin and Chiang in 1945, paradoxically, was the hope the Soviet leader would use his influence to restrain Mao Zedong. The possibility of an anti-Soviet variety of communism, therefore, seemed real enough in China, where Mao’s movement owed little to Moscow but a great deal to a nationalist tradition contemptuous of foreign influences whatever their source. There was a threat to Truman and his advisers that Stalin might use Chinese communism to his advantage; nor did they ever go so far as to welcome a communist victory in China but such an outcome did not horrify them either. The fact that Marshall sought so persistently to include the Chinese Communists within a Nationalist-led coalition precisely the kind of settlement he was opposing in Europe at the time suggests that he had in mind the possibility of dealing in some way with Mao and his followers (Gaddis, 1998, p. 61). Congress supporters along with the media did not share the view that their pressure would force the administration to continue military and economic assistance to Chinese Nationalists, not least as a condition for supporting the Marshall Plan in Europe. However it was assured by the State Department that a communist China would not upset the overall balance of world power. Japan, the most important industrial-military centre in East Asia, was under firm American control and the pressure from Washington, had begun to shift his policies from an emphasis on punishing war criminals and reforming society to one that stressed rapid economic recovery. American perspectives failed to take into account how Mao Zedong himself assessed the feasibility and the desirability of cooperation with the United States. Therefore Chinese sources suggested clearer purposes and a freer hand, the administration’s attempts to lure the Chinese Communists away from the Soviet Union would not have succeeded. IR theorists firmly believe that if Mao ever hoped for cooperation with the Americans, those expectations appear to have ended with the first phase of the Marshall mission early in 1946. From then on he seemed to have convinced himself that the United States was the chief adversary of the Chinese Communist revolution, and that he could ensure the success of that enterprise only by resisting the Americans. Mao sensed that the United States strategy was to apply some game therefore Mao went out of his way to assure Stalin that he was not about to become an ‘Asian Tito’ for which the Chinese Communist Party bitterly condemned the Yugoslavs’ defection, and it appears that the hitherto-puzzling incarceration of American Consul General Angus Ward in Shenyang late in 1948 was an effort to allay Soviet suspicions about the continuing presence of Western diplomats in Manchuria (Gaddis, 1998, p. 65). When the Communist government ruled China, Stalin while knowing that the Soviet Union would eventually have to give up the ports and naval facilities it had secured in Manchuria at the end of World War II. The new Sino-Soviet Treaty provided for their transfer by 1952 enabled Stalin to insist on a secret protocol requiring that the Chinese prohibit economic involvement in Manchuria by the citizens of third countries and that Mao agreed to this reluctantly and with considerable embarrassment. The Americans on the other hand had made no secret of their relative lack of interest in Korea. Not only had they withdrawn their troops in 1949, but Secretary of State Acheson, in a well-intentioned but carelessly worded speech on 12 January 1950, had publicly excluded both South Korea and Taiwan from the American ‘defensive perimeter’ in the Western Pacific. Acheson had not meant to write off either territory, what he trying to explain American strategy at the time was contrary to Mao’s impressions to avoid military conflicts on the Asian mainland and to stay out of the Chinese civil war. Liberalism pledges the notion that peace can only be pursued simultaneously through several avenues which include cosmopolitanism, which echoes the writings of Immanuel Kant, emphasizing a gradual cultural convergence of individuals and nations. This resounds what IR contributes particularly loudly in the age of supposed globalization where common reference for liberalism in IR theory refers to the opening up of possibilities within a world of sovereign states. Liberal scholars viewed this perspective of IR in the ways American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau has viewed, that significance as a radical political ecologist should not be de-emphasized, for his pamphlet on civil disobedience influenced not only the entire anarchist tradition, but also any thinking which postulates a relationship between the control of human beings and the control of nature (Stoett & Laferriere, 1999, p. 54). Chinese political development, in many ways, ran at a digression to developments in world politics. At the beginning of 1947 the country was wracked by a civil war which had proceeded in fits and starts since the 1920s. China reckoned as a great power among and was among the five permanent members of the UN security council but it was the Nationalist government of the Kuomintang (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek rather than the increasingly victorious Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which was recognised by both the United States and the Soviet Union. China’s civil war was thus discrete from the European ‘civil war’ of 1939-45 which had ruptured the existing international order (Ball, 1998, p. 35). Whereas the Second World War is usually regarded as coeval with this European war, beginning with the German invasion of Poland, China’s Second World War had, arguably, begun in 1937 with the invasion of China by Japan and only finished with the Japanese defeat of August 1945 (Ball, 1998, p. 35). Political struggle was on its peak between individuals and ideas rather than the in-fighting of courtiers around Stalin when China’s emerging communist leadership played a central role in shaping the Cold War, largely because they possessed certain latitude in deciding their own foreign policy orientation. Mao’s belief in the internal crisis of capitalism may have been drawn from the same sources as Stalin’s similar belief, but CCP foreign policy was also based on the conviction that China had been a peculiarly unfortunate victim of European and American imperialism. The underlying theme of CCP policy was a form of nationalism to which China must be cleansed of foreign domination. Mao believed the imperialists to have always looked down on the Chinese people, for which they needed a good lesson, so that their minds will no longer be so muddled. At an early stage the CCP leadership were convinced that their international future lay with the Soviet Union. In one perspective this was seen as an alliance of two countries with comparable revolutionary experience, where this shared experience merely created the general preconditions for amity. The CCP actually wanted two things from the Soviet Union, investment in economic reconstruction and protection from outside intervention. This created a need for the liberal theorists to concern and favour realism. For the Chinese this would be an alliance of convenience, they could not turn to the United States or Britain for economic aid since such aid might challenge the CCP’s developing grip on political power. The CCP leadership urgently needed economic aid for two reasons, one for the short term the ravages of the civil war needed to be ameliorated and secondly this sought-after amelioration was simply part of larger plans for the reshaping of China’s political economy. When in 1948 Mao told the CCP that the Soviet Union will assist in preparing for the transition from the completion of new democracy to socialism by helping develop the economy, the CCP needed to build a regime which would guarantee its own permanent hold on power. IR theorists believe that if a huge population was to be successfully controlled, the CCP had to solve the problem of clothing and food for the people and how to arrange production and reconstruction. Further than this, however, the aim was not only to restore production but to strive to construct a new, modernised, and powerful national economy. By the autumn of 1948, Mao had decided that the best way forward was to copy the Soviet experiences of the two economic recovery and reconstruction periods, that is, the periods after the success of the October revolution and after the end of the Second World War. The most pressing necessity of this politico economic programme was to secure the most direct route to political power through a reorganised and transformed People’s Liberation Army (Ball, 1998, p. 38). However the beginning of 1949 brought the liberalist theorists to see that Soviet protection against foreign intervention was far from being an entirely defensive measure. The Chinese leadership had a fairly astute grasp of likely American policy and as CCP forces prepared to move against the Nationalists in southern China the leadership certainly took into account the possibility that the US government may send troops to occupy some of the coastal cities and fight. So, it is clear why by the end of the Great War Japan positioned up by the ‘Realism’ IR theory to exploit the political divisions and economic distress of China to establish its predominance there (Keylor, 2001, p. 227). Works Cited Ball S. J., (1998) The Cold War: An International History, 1947-1991: Arnold: London. Crawford M. A. Robert, (2000) Idealism and Realism in International Relations: Beyond the Discipline: Routledge: London. Gaddis John Lewis, (1998) We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History: Oxford University Press: Oxford. Klein Christina, (2003) Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. Stoett J. Peter & Laferriere Eric, (1999) International Relations Theory and Ecological Thought: Towards a Synthesis: Routledge: London. Keylor, R. William, (2001) Twentieth Century World: An International History, fourth edition. Oxford University Press. Read More