Quick questions on Communist victory in China 1949: HSC Modern History Cold War in Asia

The Civil War between Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists (Kuomintang or KMT) resumed in earnest after the Japanese surrender. The Marshall Mission (December 1945 to January 1947) tried to broker a coalition and failed.

Truman's "loss of China" was framed by the Republican opposition as a Democratic failure. The State Department's China White Paper (5 August 1949) argued that the Nationalists' collapse was caused by their own corruption and incompetence and that "nothing the United States did or could have done" would have changed the outcome. The argument was unconvincing in Congress.

Mao's 30 June 1949 speech declared the new China would "lean to one side" (yi bian dao) in the Cold War, with the USSR. He travelled to Moscow on 16 December 1949, his first trip abroad, and stayed until 17 February 1950. Stalin's reception was cool. Negotiations were difficult.

The combination of the Soviet atomic test (29 August 1949) and the communist victory in China triggered a strategic review. NSC-68, drafted by Paul Nitze's Policy Planning Staff and delivered to Truman on 7 April 1950, described an "implacable" Soviet ideological challenge, recommended a tripling of American defence spending from about $13 billion to $40 to $50 billion, and called for "an extraordinary effort in the United States and Western Europe."

The Acheson Press Club speech (12 January 1950) had defined a "defensive perimeter" running from the Aleutians through Japan, the Ryukyus, and the Philippines, excluding Korea and Taiwan. After June 1950 the exclusion was reversed. Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait on 27 June 1950, neutralising the strait and protecting Chiang.

Orthodox accounts treated Mao as a Soviet proxy; the Sino-Soviet Treaty appeared to confirm the view. Revisionist scholarship from the 1970s (Akira Iriye, Michael Hunt) restored Chinese agency. Post-Soviet archives (Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War, 2001; Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War, 2017) show that the Mao-Stalin relationship was tense from the start, that Stalin had supported the CCP only intermittently, and that the alliance was a marriage of ideological necessity rather than Soviet command.

China was not America's to lose; the Nationalists collapsed for Chinese reasons.

Mao was junior partner but not satellite. Sino-Soviet tensions began in the 1950s.

April 1950 (drafted), September 1950 (approved). Korea made it possible.