Background[edit]
During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt had assumed that China, under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership, would become a great power after the war, along with the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.[2] John Paton Davies Jr. was among the "China Hands" who were blamed for the loss of China. While they predicted a Communist victory, they did not advocate one. Davies later wrote that he and the Foreign Service officers in China reported to Washington that material support to Chiang Kai-shek during the war against Japan would not transform the Nationalist government, adding that Roosevelt's poor choice of personal emissaries to China contributed to the failure of his policy.[2] Historian Arthur Waldron argues that the president mistakenly thought of China as a great power securely held by Chiang Kai-shek, whose hold on power was actually tenuous. Davies predicted that after the war China would become a power vacuum, tempting to Moscow, which the Nationalists could not deal with. In that sense, says Waldron, "the collapse of China into communism was aided by the incompetence of Roosevelt's policy."[2]
Aftermath[edit]
The "loss of China" was portrayed by critics of the Truman Administration as an "avoidable catastrophe".[8] It led to a "rancorous and divisive debate" and the issue was exploited by the Republicans at the polls in 1952.[9] It also played a large role in the rise of Joseph McCarthy,[10] who, with his allies, sought scapegoats for that "loss", targeting notably Owen Lattimore, an influential scholar of Central Asia.[11]
In his speech on 7 February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia before the Ohio County Women's Republican Club, McCarthy blamed Acheson, whom he called "this pompous diplomat in striped pants", for the "loss of China", making the sensationalist claim: "While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205...a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department".[12] The speech, which McCarthy repeated shortly afterwards in Salt Lake City, made him into a national figure. [13] In the early 1950s, the Truman administration was attacked for the "loss" of China with Senator McCarthy charging in a 1950 speech that "Communists and queers" in the State Department, whom President Harry S. Truman had allegedly tolerated, were responsible for the "loss" of China.[14] In a speech that said much about fears of American masculinity going "soft" that were common in the 1950s, McCarthy charged that "prancing minions of the Moscow party line" had been in charge of policy towards China in the State Department while the Secretary of State Dean Acheson was a "dilettante diplomat who cringed before the Soviet colossus".[14]
The report of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1951 written by Senator Pat McCarran concluded that China was indeed "lost" because of the policy followed by the State Department, declaring: "Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent were influential in bringing about a change in United States policy [...] favorable to the Chinese Communists."[15] Although McCarran was careful not to call Lattimore a Soviet spy in his report, which would have allowed him to sue for libel, he came very close with the statement: "Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy."[15]
In response to the McCarran report, an editorial in the Washington Post attacked the thesis, stating "that China was a sort of political dependency of the United States to be retained or given away to Moscow by a single administrative decision taken in Washington. It was not. China was-and still is-a vast continental land, diverse and disunited, peopled by some half a billion human beings-most of them living at a level of bare subsistence, immemorially exploited by landlords and harassed by warlords, in the throes of revolutionary pressures and counter-pressures that have been felt the world over. The United States has never at any time been in a position to exercise more than a minor influence on China's destiny. China was lost by the Chinese."[15]