Chap Omatic
GMAP P230, International Politics
Prof. Lee
In the discussion board for the class,
much was made of the decisions the Truman administration made to not meet with
Asian Communist leaders shortly after World War Two. Two specific examples were Ho Chi Minh of Communist Viet Nam, who
at one point approached the United States, and Mao Tse Tung of Communist China,
who also was rebuffed about the time Chiang Kai-Shek was routed from mainland
China. This paper sketches the
circumstances surrounding both attempts at contact, describes some of the
common feeling in the Truman administration that colored the decisions, and
attempts to characterize situations that would have changed those decisions.
In January 1945, Chou En-Lai and Mao
Tse Tung jointly sent a communiqué from Yenan, offering to travel to the United
States to discuss the future of China.
World War Two was still raging as well as a civil war, and there was a
significant amount of intrigue amongst the different factions inside China as
well as fighting against the Japanese.
The factions inside China broadly narrowed down to the Kuomintang,
Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek, and the Chinese Communists, led
primarily by Mao Tse Tung. Chiang had
already been a presence in the United States.
Both he and his wife were regarded as safe, known quantities despite
their corruption and weak organization.
Mao and Chou, on the other hand, were well known to China hands[1],
but not to Washington hands. When the
U.S. Army General Joseph Stillwell was relieved by General Patrick Hurley as a
result of Chiang’s insistence on a more sympathetic troop commander, the
American mood in China changed from a pragmatic, sympathetic attitude towards
the Communists, to a view that the Communists were too weak and small to be
regarded and just like the Soviets as a threat. As the civil war within China simultaneously was fought along
with the war against the Japanese, the belief of weak Communists spread to the
rest of the United States. U.S. Army
units didn’t fight much alongside the People’s Liberation Army, either;
official Army histories barely mention the presence of the Chinese Communists
in the same theater of operations.[2] Hurley facilitated the derailing of any
potential rapprochement between Chinese Communists and Americans, with the
support of virulent anti-Communists in Congress. Hurley, despite being fired by Truman upon making his
accusations, spearheaded a drive to not only reject Mao but also to ostracize
the American fighters and diplomats in China who predicted the Communist
victory and recommended contact with the Communists.[3]
Details about what actually happened in
the U.S. State Department about China at the end of World War Two were
essentially suppressed until decades later.
The 1944 log was not released to the public until 1967, and the 1946 log
was not released until the year President Nixon visited China.[4] The decisions were considered so sensitive
(especially in the context of “losing China”) that the subject just wasn’t
mentioned for years.
There were other considerations
affecting the issue. The Soviets well
knew that they could more easily acquire industrial aid by stealing it from the
Chinese mainland immediately after the Japanese surrender, and played both
sides to have a more sympathetic government in China. The American worry about the Communist aggression after WWII also
helped to color views of Chinese Communists; COMINTERN efforts to spread
governments friendly to the Soviet Union were assisting more overt efforts all
over the world. To add to the frenzy,
the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt had started in full
swing, preventing more experienced views such as those of John Davies or John
Service from carrying the day.
It appears that the timing of the chaos
of the war, the start of the Red scare, the public campaign in favor of Chiang,
the Yalta decision to ignore the Chinese Communists, and the concentration of
American China experts outside the United States all worked together to drive
the decision to rebuff the Communists.
In February of 1946, a telegram from
Ho Chi Minh to President Truman stated, in part:
“I THEREFORE MOST EARNESTLY APPEAL TO YOU PERSONALLY AND TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO INTERFERE URGENTLY IN SUPPORT OF OUR INDEPENDENCE AND HELP MAKING THE NEGOTIATIONS MORE IN KEEPING WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ATLANTIC AND SAN FRANCISCO CHARTERS.”[5]
So
why did this telegram get ignored? A
different view of the world than today that considered Vietnam unworthy of
independent life, a perceived need to support the recently liberated France in
rebuilding to its former state, the limited appeal of Ho to American decision
makers, and no champion for the Vietnamese Communists in the decision making
process swiftly killed any consideration of assistance.
The
French had been requesting American assistance for at least a year
earlier. The same American fighters
involved in China were giving token support to the French, who were trying to
expel the Japanese and Chinese from Vietnam.[6] There was a strong push from the French to
support the French effort, and not much of a push inside the US to support the
Vietnamese. Very few meetings took
place even in Vietnam between the Americans and the North Vietnamese[7]. Clark Clifford, former Special Assistant to
President Truman, recalls Indochina as having been a minor issue compared to
all the other postwar issues at the time.
He later recalled the general feeling in the administration about
Indochina:
“It
was more the attitude that now that the Second World War was over, we would
attempt to help the nations of Western Europe reconstruct. France had owned
Indochina. The reason they'd lost it was due to Japanese aggression. We were, I
believe, attempting to take those steps which would tend to return areas of
that kind to the status quo. I don't recall taking part in any kind of
discussion or policy debate about whether we should assist the French in their
colonial or imperialist attitude. I would be rather surprised if there was much
of a debate in that regard because it seemed to me to be the rather settled
policy that we were attempting
to return conditions to those that had existed prior to the changes that had
taken place in the Second World War as the result of Communist
aggression--Communist or Japanese aggression.”[8]
Other former colonies, such as
Indonesia, got a different reaction within the Truman administration. Other administration officials such as
Frederick Nolting later compared the difference between the Vietnam and
Indonesia questions, concluding that Indonesia’s Sukarno was regarded “rightly
or wrongly” as a nationalist, while Ho was anything but. Nolting also pointed out that the Dutch and
French offices were actually two different organizations within State, and the
offices acted differently in each situation.[9]
The North Vietnamese situation with Ho
Chi Minh is contemporary to the Chinese situation with Chou En-Lai and Mao Tse
Tung, and many of the timing issues discussed previously are germane to
both. For Vietnam, though, there wasn’t
even a group of Americans in North Vietnam who deeply knew the situation, and
not only the Soviets but also the French were intervening in the
situation. Only deeper knowledge of the
situation, a better counter to French pressure on the United States, and a
reassessment of the importance of Vietnamese independence, would have saved Ho
from the 1946 rebuff.
[1] Such as interactions between Chou, Mao, and Gen. Henry Byroade, as described in interview by Neil Johnson, oral history transcript, Truman Library, September 1988.
[2] An example description is in Theresa L. Kraus, China Offensive: The U.S. Army Campaigns of W.W.II. U.S. Army Center for Military History brochure, September 2000.
[3] Davies, John Paton, Dragon By The Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters With China and One Another. W.W. Norton, New York, 1972.
[4] John Gitlings, “A Shameful Tale”. Review of Dragon By The Tail, as cited above. New York Review of Books, 16 November 1972, pp. 7-12.
[5] Letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Harry S Truman, 28 Feb 1946. Record Group 226, Office of Strategic Services files, 1919-1948, United States National Archives and Records Administration.
[6] Philip F. Dur, "The American Ambassador's Views of French Policies in Indochina, 1946-1949," Proceedings of the Sixth and Seventh Annual Meetings of the French Colonial Historical Society, 1980- 1981, ed. James J. Cooke (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982)
[7] Dur, ibid.
[8] Interview of Clark Clifford by Jerry Hess, July 1971, Truman Library, oral history.
[9] Interview of Frederick Nolting by Richard D. McKinzie, June 1975, Truman Library, oral history.