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 Revolution of 1911. Sun Yat-sen (Sun), revolutionary leader and founder of the Kuomintang Party, was forced to acquiesce in the military dictatorship of General Yuan Shih-kai (1912-1916). In the 1920s, China suffered a "progressive collapse of both central and local government, . . . an increase in civil strife, banditry and anarchy" and famine (Pelissier, 1963, p. 260). On the orders of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the CCP subordinated itself to the Kuomintang w...