Sino-American Confrontation
The United States was
a passive observer to these internal Communist machinations. It
explored no middle ground between stopping at the 38th parallel and
the unification of Korea, and ignored the series of Chinese
warnings about the consequences of crossing that line. Acheson
puzzlingly did not consider them official communications and
thought they could be ignored. He probably thought he could face
Mao down.
None of the many
documents published to date by all sides reveals any serious
discussion of a diplomatic option by any of the parties. The many
meetings of Zhou with the Central Military Commission or the
Politburo reveal no such intent. Contrary to popular perception,
Beijing’s “warning” to Washington not to cross the 38th parallel
was almost certainly a diversionary tactic. By that point, Mao had
already sent ethnic-Korean PLA troops from Manchuria to Korea to
assist the North Koreans, moved a significant military force away
from Taiwan and toward the Korean border, and promised Chinese
support to Stalin and Kim.
The only chance that
might have existed to avoid immediate U.S.-China combat can be
found in instructions Mao sent in a message to Zhou, still in
Moscow, about his strategic design on October 14, as Chinese troops
were preparing to cross the Korean border:
Our troops will continue improving [their] defense works if they have enough time. If the enemy tenaciously defends Pyongyang and Wonsan and does not advance [north] in the next six months, our troops will not attack Pyongyang and Wonsan. Our troops will attack Pyongyang and Wonsan only when they are well equipped and trained, and have clear superiority over the enemy in both air and ground forces. In short, we will not talk about waging offensives for six months.58
There was no chance,
of course, that in six months China could have achieved clear
superiority in either category.
Had American forces
stopped at the line, from Pyongyang to Wonsan (the narrow neck of
the Korean Peninsula), would that have created a buffer zone to
meet Mao’s strategic concern? Would some American diplomatic move
toward Beijing have made any difference? Would Mao have been
satisfied with using his presence in Korea to reequip his forces?
Perhaps the six-month pause Mao mentioned to Zhou would have
provided an occasion for diplomatic contact, for military warnings,
or for Mao or Stalin to change his mind. On the other hand, a
buffer zone on hitherto Communist territory was almost certainly
not Mao’s idea of his revolutionary or strategic duty. Still he was
enough of a Sun Tzu disciple to pursue seemingly contradictory
strategies simultaneously. The United States, in any event, had no
such capacity. It opted for a U.N.-endorsed demarcation line along
the Yalu over what it could protect with its own forces and its own
diplomacy along the narrow neck of the Korean
Peninsula.
In this manner, each
side of the triangular relationship moved toward a war with the
makings of a global conflict. The battle lines moved back and
forth. Chinese forces took Seoul but were driven back until a
military stalemate settled over the combat zone within the
framework of armistice negotiations lasting nearly two years,
during which American forces refrained from offensive
operations—the almost ideal outcome from the Soviet point of view.
The Soviet advice throughout was to drag out the negotiations, and
therefore the war, as long as possible. An armistice agreement
emerged on July 27, 1953, settling essentially along the prewar
line of the 38th parallel.
None of the
participants achieved all of its aims. For the United States, the
armistice agreement realized the purpose for which it had entered
the war: it denied success to the North Korean aggression; but it
had, at the same time, enabled China, at a moment of great
weakness, to fight the nuclear superpower to a standstill and
oblige it to retreat from its furthest advance. It preserved
American credibility in protecting allies but at the cost of
incipient allied revolt and domestic discord. Observers could not
fail to remember the debate that had developed in the United States
over war aims. General MacArthur, applying traditional maxims,
sought victory; the administration, interpreting the war as a feint
to lure America into Asia—which was surely Stalin’s strategy—was
prepared to settle for a military draw (and probably a long-term
political setback), the first such outcome in a war fought by
America. The inability to harmonize political and military goals
may have tempted other Asian challengers to believe in America’s
domestic vulnerability to wars without clear-cut military
outcomes—a dilemma that reappeared with a vengeance in the vortex
of Vietnam a decade later.
Nor can Beijing be
said to have achieved all its objectives, at least in conventional
military terms. Mao did not succeed in liberating all of Korea from
“American imperialism,” as Chinese propaganda claimed initially.
But he had gone to war for larger and in some ways more abstract,
even romantic, aims: to test the “New China” with a trial by fire
and to purge what Mao perceived as China’s historic softness and
passivity; to prove to the West (and, to some extent, the Soviet
Union) that China was now a military power and would use force to
vindicate its interests; to secure China’s leadership of the
Communist movement in Asia; and to strike at the United States
(which Mao believed was planning an eventual invasion of China) at
a moment he perceived as opportune. The principal contribution of
the new ideology was not its strategic concepts so much as the
willpower to defy the strongest nations and to chart its own
course.
In that broader
sense, the Korean War was something more than a draw. It
established the newly founded People’s Republic of China as a
military power and center of Asian revolution. It also built up
military credibility that China, as an adversary worthy of fear and
respect, would draw on through the next several decades. The memory
of Chinese intervention in Korea would later restrain U.S. strategy
significantly in Vietnam. Beijing succeeded in using the war and
the accompanying “Resist America, Aid Korea” propaganda and purge
campaign to accomplish two central aims of Mao’s: to eliminate
domestic opposition to Party rule, and to instill “revolutionary
enthusiasm” and national pride in the population. Nourishing
resentment of Western exploitation, Mao framed the war as a
struggle to “defeat American arrogance”; battlefield
accomplishments were treated as a form of spiritual rejuvenation
after decades of Chinese weakness and abuse. China emerged from the
war exhausted but redefined in both its own eyes and the
world’s.
Ironically, the
biggest loser in the Korean War was Stalin, who had given the green
light to Kim Il-sung to start and had urged, even blackmailed, Mao
to intervene massively. Encouraged by America’s acquiescence in the
Communist victory in China, he had calculated that Kim Il-sung
could repeat the pattern in Korea. The American intervention
thwarted that objective. He urged Mao to intervene, expecting that
such an act would create a lasting hostility between China and the
United States and increase China’s dependence on
Moscow.
Stalin was right in
his strategic prediction but erred grievously in assessing the
consequences. Chinese dependence on the Soviet Union was
double-edged. The rearmament of China that the Soviet Union
undertook, in the end, shortened the time until China would be able
to act on its own. The Sino-American schism Stalin was promoting
did not lead to an improvement of Sino-Soviet relations, nor did it
reduce China’s Titoist option. On the contrary, Mao calculated that
he could defy both superpowers simultaneously. American conflicts
with the Soviet Union were so profound that Mao judged he needed to
pay no price for Soviet backing in the Cold War, indeed that he
could use it as a threat even without its approval, as he did in a
number of subsequent crises. Starting with the end of the Korean
War, Soviet relations with China deteriorated, caused in no small
part by the opaqueness with which Stalin had encouraged Kim
Il-sung’s adventure, the brutality with which he had pressed China
toward intervention, and, above all, the grudging manner of Soviet
support, all of which was in the form of repayable loans. Within a
decade, the Soviet Union would become China’s principal adversary.
And before another decade had passed, another reversal of alliance
would take place.