KOREA & U.S. SUPPORT OF CHIANG KAI-SHEK

KOREA AND AMERICAN SUPPORT OF CHIANG KAI-SHEK: SETTING THE

PATTERN OF POST-1949 CHINESE-AMERICAN CONFLICT

This research paper traces and analyzes the factors which contributed to the victory in 1949 of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Chiang) and to the worsening tensions between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) between 1949 and the end of the Korean War.

Many indigenous and exogenous factors influenced the outcome of the Chinese civil war of 1946-1949. The most important of these were the chaotic conditions which prevailed within China and the Japanese invasion and occupation of the mainland. The CCP achieved in the early postwar period decisive military and political superiority over a weakened and corrupt Nationalist state. The United States provided substantial support to the Nationalists during and after the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 which it could not leverage to produce a political settlement within China and which earned it the intense hostility of the CCP. Their mutual enmity was further deepened by policy decisions taken by both the PRC and the United States in 1949-1950 and in connection with the Korean War.

Pre-War Nationalist-Communist Struggle

The thirty year struggle (1920-1949) for power between the Nationalists and the CCP was preceded by a long period of decay and disintegration of the Manchu Dynasty which was ousted by the Revolut

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recipitously as they suffered progressive disadvantages under the government's mismanagement of critical programs" (p. 237). Meanwhile, the war afforded the CCP under Mao Zhedong's inspired leadership the opportunity to consolidate its control over northeastern China, mobilize support among the peasantry and working class and play a leading role in liberating large sections of the countryside from Japanese rule. According to Chi, "after 1940, it [the Kuomintang] must have become acutely aware that it was generally losing the race against the Communists, even as it managed to force a stalemate upon the Japanese" (p. 130). Throughout the war, Chiang reserved some of his best troops (on the average 20 of 90 divisions) for blockading the communist People's Liberation Army (PLA) in northern Shensi Province and other areas the PLA liberated from the Japanese (Crozier, 1976, pp. 237-238). Prompted by reports that the PLA was putting up more effective resistance to the Japanese than the Nationalist Army, the Americans made a determined effort in 1944-1945 to generate military cooperation and/or a political coalition between the Nationalists and the Communists. Opinions then and later as to why such efforts failed differed. Ambas

Category: Foreign - K