In 1949 communist armies led by Mao Zedong defeated the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. The communists took control of the Chinese mainland, establishing the People's Republic of China, while Chiang Kai-shek, who had received U.S. support during the conflict, fled to the island of Taiwan. China, previously a loyal U.S. ally and a country Americans felt particularly familiar with because of the strong presence of American Christian missionaries, overnight became one of America's most bitter enemies. With the post–World War II world starkly divided into American and communist spheres of influence, the Chinese shift was seen as a serious loss. From the establishment of the People's Republic of China well into the Korean War and the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, a debate raged in Washington about whom to blame for the loss of China to communist forces. At the time, most of the blame fell on the administration of President Harry Truman, as well as fellow-travelers and subversives. Studies in the late twentieth century, however, challenged this view and emphasized Chiang Kai-shek's own weaknesses. Although without the urgency of the 1940s and 1950s, the debate over "who lost China" recurrently appeared within American society during the second half of the twentieth century. The debate has informed American responses to crises in the region as well as within China itself, such as the Tiananmen Square repression in 1989.
Chinese Civil War and the Beginnings of the Red Scare
Even the most unsympathetic scholars of the Truman presidency have had to admit that Truman inherited a nearly impossible position in China. During the Second World War, Roosevelt had managed to avert a Chinese civil war by persuading both Mao's communists and the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek's political party, that a coalition between them was necessary to fight the Japanese occupation. Roosevelt had also reached an agreement at Yalta for limited Soviet influence on Chinese affairs. In December 1945 Truman appointed General George C. Marshall as his special representative to China and instructed him to pursue the creation of a coalition government in which the Kuomintang would be predominant. Marshall was initially successful, but increasing Cold War tensions and Chiang Kai-shek's military attack on the communists in 1946 revived the civil war, which Mao won three years later.
During these three years, Chiang proved a difficult and unmanageable ally for the United States. His dictatorial methods as well as the corruption of his reactionary government boosted support of the Communist Party. Yet, in the midst of the Cold War, American right-wing analysts like Ohio Senator Robert Taft managed to persuade the American people that the State Department had "been guided by a left-wing group who obviously have wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose." Nevada Senator Pat McCarran went even further, claiming "our own State Department peddles the Communistic propaganda line … it is time that something was done about it." These statements soon escalated into a search for communist infiltrators in the public administration and led to the ascent of Senator Joseph McCarthy who, in February 1950, claimed to have a list of 205 protected communists in the State Department.
The fall of China to the communists contributed to the Red Scare, a period during which some Americans were investigated and their loyalty and patriotism questioned because of their beliefs and associations. Diplomats such as John Patton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and O. Edmund Clubb, academics such as historians Owen Lattimore and John K. Fairbank, and many journalists who had chronicled the events of the Chinese civil war saw their careers put in jeopardy by the suspicion of being communist sympathizers. They were contemptuously nicknamed "China hands." In the paranoid climate of the early 1950s, foreign ideological threats were thought to have already invaded the United States. New Deal liberals and their allies were seen not as supporters of democracy but as pawns of America's enemies. Homosexuals and communists were the main targets of this climate of hysteria. People tagged as such were said to be manipulative and cynical, to abhor religion and reject middle class morality, and to be eager to put their own cause above the national one. "Pinko-faggot" became the worst insult of the era.
The Failure of Containment
The debate over who lost China to communism informed the military response of the Truman administration to North Korea's invasion of South Korea in 1950. Truman sent troops to stop the spread of communism by force. His doctrine on the containment of communism had already been badly damaged in the Asian continent by the communist victory in China, so Truman could not afford to lose another country in the same area. He feared another such loss might prompt critics of his administration's policy in Asia to block European aid and projected increases in military spending. China's direct involvement in the Korean War in 1950 further precluded possible diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, as did Truman's commitment of the American Seventh Fleet to the patrolling of the Taiwan Strait, which Mao denounced as an act of war. The United States refused to negotiate with Mao's government until Richard Nixon's visit in 1972. The resumption of diplomatic relations began in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter.
Ongoing Controversy
Controversy over U.S. relations with China has never ceased. During his first presidential campaign, Bill Clinton criticized George H. W. Bush bitterly for secretly sending his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, on a diplomatic mission to China just a few months after the Tiananmen Square bloodshed. Yet, once he became president, Clinton himself favored cordial diplomatic and business relations with the Chinese government despite the country's appalling record on human rights. According to Patrick Tyler's history, A Great Wall, when Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited China in 1994, Li Peng, the Chinese leader, indicated that China "was fully prepared for Clinton to revoke Beijing's most-favored-nation privileges. America would suffer, too … Li said that it had taken men like Nixon and Kissinger to have the vision to open relations with China, but Clinton and Christopher had no such vision. They would be blamed for 'losing' China." As Tyler notes, Li Peng clearly understood the lingering power of the "who lost China" debate in American politics (p. 390).
The Impact on American Society
The controversy over who lost China had a substantial impact on Americans in the early years of the Cold War (1946–1991). Accusations of subversion added to fears that the United States was being undermined by some of its own citizens, who exchanged the nation's ideals for the communist ideology. The desire to affirm patriotism led to the imposition of loyalty oaths. Critics of those who hunted subversives were often silenced or voluntarily kept quiet to avoid the appearance of being unpatriotic or sympathetic with communism. The debate raised questions as to the need to protect civil liberties at a time when national security required greater power by the government for surveillance.
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