U.S.-China Relations(2)-1949 to 1970s

China and the United States held the most confrontational attitudes towards each other from 1949 to the beginning of 1970s. Even though there were some conciliating events between the U.S. and China during this period, conflicts and containment are the main themes for this bilateral relationship, including ideology conflicts from China’s perspective and strategic containment and conflicts from America’s perspective.

Ideology Conflicts from China

The Cold War was from the beginning a confrontation between two contending ideologies-communism and capitalism. The compositions of the two Cold War camps were defined along ideological lines, and the conflict between them, at its core, represented not only a contest to determine which side was stronger but also, and more importantly, a competition to demonstrate which side was superior.

As far as the foreign policies of Mao’s China are concerned, the role played by ideology is evident. The CCP leadership adopted the “lean-to-one-side” approach when it established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which, in a practical political sense, meant allying China with the Soviet Union as well as other socialist countries and confronting the American leading “imperialist powers.”In a series of internal discussions and correspondence, Mao used highly ideological language to argue that if China failed to intervene, the “Eastern revolution” and the world revolution would suffer. Throughout this period, even longer, Beijing’s foreign policy towards the United States consistently demonstrated a strong ideological color. For example, Chinese Communist leaders launched domestic mass ideological propaganda campaigns to root out pro-American influence and seize control of U.S. cultural, religious, and business organizations that remained in China. In the mid- 1960s, Beijing, under the banner of fulfilling China’s duties of proletarian internationalism, provided Vietnamese Communists with substantial support, including the dispatch of 320,000 Chinese engineering and anti-aircraft troops to fight against America-backed forces in North Vietnam.

Ideology matters for China’s foreign policies towards the United States, yet not without fundamental limits. As indicated by China’s Cold War experience, while ideology was central in legitimizing important foreign policy decisions, ideological terms alone could not guarantee “legitimacy.” Thus Mao and his comrades always tried to present important foreign policy decisions towards the U.S. in terms of both ideological and other concerns. For example, when Beijing’s leaders decided to enter the Korean War, they announced to the Chinese people and the whole world that if they did not participate China’s security interests would be seriously jeopardized. In the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958, the CCP argued, according to Chen Jian, that shelling Jinmen was necessary to prevent the U.S. imperialists from permanently separating Taiwan from the socialist motherland. In these cases, security concerns were real, but they also help justify decisions made primarily based on the leadership’s ideological commitments.

What that generation went through in that period of time strongly sharpened what they are thinking now. My father is a perfect example. He was born 1960s and educated by anti-Americanism. Although the reality in current world makes him reevaluate America and realize that what he learned as a child is not the total truth, he still always criticizing America’s politics with many harsh words.

Strategic Conflicts and Containment from the U.S.

At the start of the Cold War, Asia seemed secondary in U.S. strategy. When the Korean War broke out unexpectedly, the United States abruptly began what became massive commitments of military power and related assistance to stop the spread of perceived communist expansion in Asia.

 Longstanding U.S. interest in sustaining a balance of power in East Asia favorable to the United States, as well as ongoing U.S. interests in fostering free economic access to the region and the spread of American values there, now were seen to require the United States to undertake the leading role in bearing the major cost, risks, and commitments associated with a system of containment that came to dominate U.S. policy in Asia in the 1950s and 1960s and to determine the course of American policy toward China during this period. The United States began wide-ranging U.S. strategic effort to contain the expansion of Chinese power and Chinese-backed Communist expansion in Asia. A strict U.S. economic and political embargo against China; large U.S. force deployments, eventually numbering between one half and one million troops; massive foreign aid allocations to U.S. Asian allies and supporters; and a ring of U.S. defense alliances around China were used to block Chinese expansion and to drive a wedge between China and its Soviet ally. The American approach saw strategic concerns with shoring up the regional balance of influence against communist expansion in Asia dominate the U.S. foreign policy calculus towards China. Strong efforts by the U.S. government to mobilize domestic American support for the costs and risks associated with U.S. leadership of the containment effort overshadowed private calculations of American leaders and strategists that appeared to favor a more nuanced and flexible American approach that would have allowed for possible efforts to seek contacts and accommodation with Communist-ruled China. Eventually, U.S. elites and supporting groups began to chafe publicly in the 1960s at what they saw a counterproductive U.S. tendency to try isolating China as part of the Cold War containment strategy in Asia. Their efforts to encourage greater U.S. flexibility in dealing with the Chinese Communists failed in the face of strident Chinese opposition to the United States and a wide range of other adverse foreign influences at the start of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the concurrent large increase in U.S. combat forces fighting Chinese-backed Communist forces in Vietnam.  

The dramatic and massive shifts in China’s domestic policy and direction occurred frequently in conjunction with crisis and confrontations with the United States and its allies and associates around China’s periphery in Asia. At one level, the Chinese determination to work against and confront the US-backed forces in Indochina and the Taiwan Strait reflected a deeply held determination to confound and wear down the American-fostered containment system. The Chinese Communist leadership held a strong revolutionary commitment to change the international order dominated by the United States and its allies and to support Communist-led forces struggling against this foreign imperialism.

The U.S. efforts also directly threatened China’s national security and sovereignty, often in graphic and severe ways. The Eisenhower administration threatened China with nuclear attack in order to push it toward an armistice in Korea, and the U.S. government used the threat of nuclear attack at other times in the face of perceived Chinese provocations in the 1950s. Mao’s China had no viable defense against U.S. nuclear weapons and put top priority on developing Chinese nuclear weapons to deal with such repeated U.S. intimidation. At the same time, the Chinese Communist leaders also were seen to continue to use the crisis atmosphere caused by confrontations with outside threats posed by the United States and its allies as a means to strengthen their domestic control and their mobilization of resources for advancement of nation-building and administrative competence.  

During 1970s, Sino-American relations experienced a big turn. What is that exactly and how did it evolve? Please see my next post U.S.-China Relations(3)-1970s to present.