Seventy-five years ago China fell to the communists. Revisionist history can be a touchy subject, especially when it attempts to correct an “accepted” version of history that has been passed on to generations of Americans by teachers in high schools and universities, book publishers, historical essays, and the media.
Truman’s China policy was nothing short of a disaster.
The question “Who Lost China?” in the mid-to-late 1940s was at one time an open question and a serious and consequential political issue. When the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, Americans asked, “What happened?’ and “Who is to blame?” Republicans said it was the Democrats fault. Democrats blamed Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt regime. Senator Joe McCarthy and others blamed communists within the government and the negligence or worse of key government officials.
The media mostly blamed Chiang but spent more time demonizing McCarthy. The loss of China set the stage for the destructive and indecisive Korean War, and in the long run resulted in the current Cold War between China and the United States. The question “Who lost China?” is as relevant today as it was in the late 1940s-early 1950s.
It is relevant because since the end of the Cold War against the Soviet Union (which China helped us win), there has been a debate in this country about whether we should “engage” with China, “compete” with China, “contain” China, or “defeat” China in what some analysts have called “Cold War II.”
Since the end of Cold War I, the “engagers” have mostly won this debate, even though our engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) helped to fuel China’s economic and military rise to superpower status. Some of the engagers have conceded that we also have to compete with China, but they seldom support containment of, or victory over, China. Since Xi Jinping gained power in 2012 and moved China in a more overtly aggressive global posture, more American elites have shifted to favor containment.
But there are very few U.S. elites who view the U.S.-China conflict as a zero-sum rivalry that will end only when one side wins and the other side loses.
Historically, the Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Biden administrations have favored some form of engagement mixed with competition. The first Trump administration, as Josh Rogin documented in his book Chaos Under Heaven, began with engagement/competition but later shifted to containment led by China hawks like Robert O’Brien, Matt Pottinger, Mike Pompeo, and Elbridge Colby, with a few “superhawks” (Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro) calling for victory over the CCP.
Trump’s announced picks for national security positions in his second term — Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Peter Navarro, Michael Anton, John Ratcliffe, Pete Hegseth — are mostly China hawks.
Back in the mid-to-late 1940s, there were China hawks who tried to persuade the Roosevelt-Truman administration to wholeheartedly support the Chinese Nationalists — who were an important ally in World War II — to enable them to successfully defeat the challenge of the Chinese communists.
This group included Time publisher Henry Luce, businessmen Alfred Kohlberg and Frederick McKee, Senators William Knowland and Joseph McCarthy, Congressmen Walter Judd and Richard Nixon, writers James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, Generals Albert Wedemeyer, Douglas MacArthur, and Claire Chennault, Admirals William Leahy and Ernest King, and many others.
But there were others in and outside the U.S. government that actively worked to shift U.S, policy against the Nationalists and, therefore, in favor of the communists. It is a story well told by Diana West in American Betrayal, which initially received a respectable reception when it was first published in 2013, but was later attacked and then ignored because it strayed too far from acceptable history.
West began her book by identifying what she judged to be the beginning of an “era of American betrayal,” when in the mid-1930s, Democratic members of Congress actively discredited and shut down an investigation into sensational allegations made by Dr. William Wirt, a respected school superintendent, that a secret, communist-led revolution was underway in Washington, D.C. that involved government officials.
Wirt testified before a House committee that he had attended meetings and a dinner party where New Deal radicals plotted to “overthrow … the established American social order.” Wirt, however, was not allowed by the Democratic-led committee to read his opening statement, have counsel present, or rebut false charges that he had sided with the Germans during World War I.
Wirt named certain officials within the government that were involved in this plot, but the committee voted 3 (Democrats) to 2 (Republicans) against calling those Wirt named to testify before the committee. Wirt, West writes, soon became the butt of jokes by Roosevelt administration officials, including FDR himself, and the media.
Wirt had indeed identified employees in the U.S. Education Office, the Agriculture Department, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Public Works Administration (PWA) that were later shown in KGB archives to be secret communists. Later in 1940, former congressman John O’Connor (D-NY) admitted that he and the other Democrats on the committee had deliberately sought to discredit Wirt’s testimony, that those named by Wirt had later met to rehearse their public denials of Wirt’s allegations, and regretted that most of what Dr. Wirt said before the committee turned out to be true. By then, Wirt was dead and forgotten.
One year before O’Conner’s revelations, Time magazine writer Whittaker Chambers disclosed to the State Department’s top security official the existence of communist cells within the U.S. government. Chambers, who admitted his own secret communist past, identified members of the cells and sympathetic government officials, including Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, Lawrence Duggan, Harold Ware, Nathan Witt, Harry Dexter White, Lee Pressman, John Abt, Noel Field, and Frank Coe. Berle brought Chambers’ allegations to the attention of FDR, who did nothing about them.
West also judges that during World War II, FDR adopted what she phrased as a “Soviet First” policy with a focus on Europe instead of the Pacific, generous lend-lease provisions to Soviet forces that continued well after it became clear that Soviet expansion to Eastern and Central Europe would be a by-product of Hitler’s defeat, and diplomacy with Stalin that Robert Nisbet characterized as “courtship.”
FDR (and later Truman) also conspired to conceal Soviet crimes committed during the war (Katyn Forest, the expansion of the Gulag, forcible repatriation of Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks who ended up shot or in the Gulag). West also notes that the Truman administration concealed the crimes of Soviet judges and Soviet officials during the Nuremburg trials, which undermined the legitimacy of the courts and any “justice” meted out by them.
Soviet spy and agent of influence Alger Hiss was assistant secretary of state and was part of the U.S. delegation to the wartime Yalta conference, where the Allies effectively ceded Eastern Europe to Soviet control. Harry Dexter White was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury who played a role on behalf of the Soviets to impose stringent sanctions on Japan in the late 1930s so that Japan would go to war against the United States instead of the Soviet Union — “Operation Snow.”
Lauchlin Currie was a communist asset on FDR’s White House staff. FDR’s Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, was a Soviet sympathizer. So, too, was FDR’s third-term vice president Henry Wallace. There is even evidence that FDR’s top aide Harry Hopkins was at the very least a Soviet sympathizer.
And there were many, many more. West noted that experts “now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s and 1940s as exceeding five hundred.” “Washington, D.C.,” West concludes, “was … a giant hive of Soviet intelligence activity. A massive communist conspiracy did, in fact, exist. There was indeed a ‘Red Plot against America,’ orchestrated by an extensive network of American traitors.”
Most relevant to the loss of China was the infamous Amerasia spy case. In 1954, James Burnham, in The Web of Subversion, provided a summary of the findings of congressional committees about the relationship between the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and its journal Amerasia, communist agents and pro-communist sympathizers within the government, and U.S. policy toward China in the mid-to-late 1940s.
Later, Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh wrote a book-length exposure of the case and its cover-up by the Truman administration. West in American Betrayal notes that the FBI learned that Amerasia published material from classified documents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Six people connected to the IPR and Amerasia were arrested on espionage charges, but Lauchlin Currie, Democratic Party fixer Tommy Corcoran, and Truman’s Justice Department managed to have the charges dropped and concealed the influence of IPR and communist agents on Truman’s China policy.
Truman’s China policy was nothing short of a disaster. Truman tasked Gen. George Marshall to attempt to arrange for a coalition government between our ally Chaing Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and Mao Zedong’s communists who were attempting to dislodge Chiang from power and seize control of China. Marshall’s mission failed because Truman’s policy was flawed — treating a long-time, wartime ally as just one party to negotiation with its sworn enemy in the midst of a brutal civil war.
Marshall received the blame from Sen. McCarthy and others, but the buck stopped at Truman’s office. By then, the IPR and pro-communist elements within the government and in the media had portrayed Mao’s communists as “agrarian reformers” better suited to rule China than Chiang’s corrupt regime.
When some aspects of communist infiltration of the government publicly surfaced in the Hiss case, Truman’s White House showed what West rightly characterizes as an “appalling indifference to … basic constitutional responsibilities to safeguard the nation.” Truman called allegations against Hiss a “red herring.” Dean Acheson publicly stated that he would not “turn his back” on Hiss. Truman aides Clark Clifford and George Elsey and Attorney General Tom Clarke discussed indicting Hiss’s accuser — Whittaker Chambers — instead of Hiss.
West concludes that “the concerns of the Truman White House centered not on what … Soviet agents might have done or were still doing to the U.S. government, but rather on what impact exposure of their deeds might have on the Democratic Party and the 1948 presidential election.” Even after Truman won the 1948 election, he asked his attorney general to draft a statement critical of the efforts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Agents of influence are often more damaging to a country’s interests than outright spies. Diana West, James Burnham, M. Stanton Evans, and others have provided powerful evidence to support the conclusion that agents of influence in this country affected U.S. policy toward China in the late 1940s.
The communist conquest of China was not inevitable. It was the result of many factors — but one of those factors was U.S. policy. Indeed, more recently investigative journalist Roger Faligot in his important book Chinese Spies notes that in the 1940s, Mao and Zhou Enlai “set out to influence foreign parties and governments and obtain the support of public figures to help build a ‘new China.’” Those Soviet and Chinese efforts were successful in the United States.
Communist China’s rise from the 1990s to the present also was not inevitable. It, too, was multicausal — but, again, one of those factors was U.S. policy. Peter Schweizer in Red Handed wrote about how American political and economic elites helped to facilitate China’s rise because of greed, naivety, and indifference. James Fanell and Bradley Thayer in their recent book argue that America’s “embrace” of China during this time period was our greatest strategic failure.
If this essay opens old wounds, so be it. The modern challenge of the Chinese Communist Party to U.S. national security was made possible by those who “lost” China in the mid-to-late 1940s.
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