In the aftermath of the provocative North Korean shelling of a South Korean island, some now blame China for not reining in its North Korean Communist comrades. In the recent mid-term election campaign, nearly thirty candidates -- from both parties -- ran TV ads accusing their opponents of being "too sympathetic to China," and claiming Americans suffered loss of jobs as a result.
This is not the first time America has looked at China for scapegoats. In this insecure winter of our discontent, a new season of scapegoating China seems to be taking shape. Once again bitter domestic partisan politics may dangerously limit our national policy options.
Americans need to understand the threads of history woven into the fabric of our current relations with Korea, China and Taiwan, or the dangerous desire to find scapegoats will grow. The story of diplomat John Service offers a cautionary tale.
In 1945, on the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died and Harry Truman was sworn in, a young Foreign Service officer arrived in Washington after secret talks with Mao in war-torn China. John Service had been sent behind Japanese lines by the U.S. Army commander to learn as much as possible about the Communist guerrillas when the army urgently needed allies willing to fight against the Japanese. Service had grown up in China, spoke several dialects, and had already traveled extensively throughout the chaotic country carved up among rival forces: Nationalist Chinese, Japanese occupation troops, rival warlords, and Mao's guerrillas. In village tea shops he heard peasant complaints about the growing corruption and repression of Chiang Kai-shek's dysfunctional central government and their fears of a renewed civil war.
Once Service arrived in Mao's "other China," he discovered that the Communists were building a grassroots revolutionary movement. He predicted that unless Chiang's Nationalists went as far as Mao's Communists in initiating moderate economic and land reforms, the battle for "hearts and minds" of the people would be lost. Mao assured Service that his guerrillas would cooperate with the U.S. Army, and he expressed a desire for American businessmen to help rebuild war-ravaged China after the war ended.
At the time, Mao's China was off Washington's radar screen. John Service became a man with a mission, urging high officials to deal realistically with the reality of the two Chinas. He had two objectives: to prevent the renewal of China's bitter civil war, fearing it would impede our fight against the Japanese; and to protect American national interests in a postwar China he felt certain Mao would control. However, no serious policy review took place in Washington. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy, aided by Hoover's FBI and Taiwan's intelligence service, targeted John Service for having "lost China" to the Communists. He was also blamed for the Korean conflict , then costing many American lives.
Service spent the rest of his life trying to restore his reputation. A unanimous 1957 Supreme Court decision returned him to the Foreign Service, but true vindication only came after Nixon's historic handshake with Mao in 1972.
For decades, his ordeal had a chilling effect. Some Foreign Service officers and U.S. intelligence agents found it safer to be politically correct than to report their honest observations and recommendations. At a State Department luncheon in 1973 honoring all the old China hands unfairly persecuted during the McCarthy era, Service reminded his audience of some truths about the conduct of foreign policy we still need to remember today :
Foreign Service reporting becomes vital as we move toward countries that may be small, less developed, non-white or with cultures and institutions drastically different from our own...
If we keep ourselves in ignorance and out of touch with new popular movements and potentially revolutionary situations, we may find ourselves again missing the boat.
Certainly, the entire arc of Soviet-Chinese relationships bears this out. Deterioration of relationships even resulted in in periodic border skirmishes in the 70s.
Nixon was sophisticated enough to take advantage of that, despite his anti-communist stance.
Republicans of today are far more dogmatic in their approach to strategic relationships.
1931 - First Sino Japanese war starts
1945 - WW2 ends
1949 - Chinese civil war ends
1950 - Korean war begins
1953 - Korean war ends
China was in total war mode for almost 22 years, as in the entire country did everything it could in order to win.
And this is precisely why Mao Zedong is worshiped in China, when Mao Zedong took over China in 1950 China had a GDP pretty much equivalent to Africa. While the USA had 7 times the GDP of China.
Yet with Mao Zedong managed to defeat the USA in the Korean war with a bunch of peasants armed with AK-47's and hand grenades managed to win despite the impossible odds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Volunteer_Army
Historian and Korean War veteran Bevin Alexander had this to say about Chinese tactics in his book How Wars Are Won:
"The Chinese had no air power and were armed only with rifles, machineguns, hand grenades, and mortars.
And under Mao, the chinese became the 4th nation in the world to build a thermonuclear weapon and develop ICBM.
All of this with the nation having the GDP of Africa and suffering from a worldwide embargo.