On China (20 page)

At its face value, this extraordinary communication seemed to assert that Stalin was ready to go to war with the United States to prevent Korea from becoming part of America’s strategic sphere. A united, pro-American Korea—to which, in Stalin’s eyes, sooner or later a resurgent Japan would become a partner—presented, in that analysis, the same threat in Asia as the emerging NATO in Europe. The two together might be more than the Soviet Union could handle.

In the event, when put to the test, Stalin proved unwilling to undertake the all-out commitment he had pledged to Mao—or even any aspect of direct confrontation with the United States. He knew that the balance of power was too unfavorable for a showdown, much less a two-front war. He sought to tie down the American military potential in Asia and to involve China in enterprises that magnified its dependence on Soviet support. What Stalin’s letter does demonstrate is how seriously Soviet and Chinese strategists assessed the strategic importance of Korea, if for quite different reasons.

Stalin’s letter placed Mao in a predicament. It was one thing to plan intervention in the abstract partly as an exercise in revolutionary solidarity. It was another actually to carry it out, especially when the North Korean army was on the verge of disintegrating. Chinese intervention made imperative Soviet supplies and, above all, Soviet air cover, since the PLA had no modern air force to speak of. Thus when the issue of intervention was put before the Politburo, Mao received an unusually ambivalent response, causing him to pause before giving the final answer. Instead, Mao dispatched Lin Biao (who had refused the command of the Chinese forces, citing health problems) and Zhou to Russia to discuss the prospects of Soviet assistance. Stalin was in the Caucasus on vacation but saw no reason to alter his schedule. He obliged Zhou to come to his retreat even though (or, perhaps, because) Zhou would have no means of communication with Beijing from Stalin’s dacha except through Soviet channels.

Zhou and Lin Biao had been instructed to warn Stalin that, without assurances of guaranteed supplies, China might not, in the end, carry out what it had been preparing for two months. For China would be the principal theater of the conflict Stalin was promoting. Its prospects would depend on the supplies and direct support Stalin would make available. When faced with this reality, Mao’s colleagues reacted ambivalently. Some opponents even went so far as to argue that priority should be given to domestic development. For once Mao seemed to hesitate, if only for a moment. Was it a maneuver to obtain a guarantee of support from Stalin before Chinese forces were irrevocably committed? Or was he truly undecided?

A symptom of internal Chinese divisions is the mysterious case of a telegram from Mao to Stalin sent on the night of October 2, of which two contradictory versions are held in the archives of Beijing and Moscow.

In one version of Mao’s telegram—drafted in Mao’s handwriting, filed in the archives in Beijing, published in a
neibu
(“internal circulation only”) Chinese collection of Mao’s manuscripts, but likely never actually dispatched to Moscow—Mao wrote that Beijing had “decided to send some of our troops to Korea under the name of [Chinese People’s] Volunteers to fight the United States and its lackey Syngman Rhee and to aid our Korean comrades.”
⁵³
Mao cited the danger that absent Chinese intervention, “the Korean revolutionary force will meet with a fundamental defeat, and the American aggressors will rampage unchecked once they occupy the whole of Korea. This will be unfavorable to the entire East.”
⁵⁴
Mao noted that “we must be prepared for a declaration of war by the United States and for the subsequent use of the U.S. air force to bomb many of China’s main cities and industrial bases, as well as an attack by the U.S. navy on [our] coastal areas.” The Chinese plan was to send twelve divisions from south Manchuria on October 15. “At the initial stage,” Mao wrote, they would deploy north of the 38th parallel and “will merely engage in defensive warfare” against enemy troops that cross the parallel. In the meantime, “they will wait for the delivery of Soviet weapons. Once they are [well] equipped, they will cooperate with the Korean comrades in counterattacks to annihilate American aggressor troops.”
⁵⁵

In a different version of Mao’s October 2 telegram—sent via the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, received in Moscow, and filed in the Russian presidential archives—Mao informed Stalin that Beijing was
not
prepared to send troops. He held out the possibility that after further consultations with Moscow (and, he implied, pledges of additional Soviet military support), Beijing would be willing to join the conflict.

For years, scholars analyzed the first version of the telegram as if it were the sole operative version; when the second version emerged, some wondered whether one of the documents might be a fabrication. Most plausible is the explanation put forth by the Chinese scholar Shen Zhihua: that Mao drafted the first version of the telegram intending to send it, but that the Chinese leadership was so divided that a more equivocal telegram was substituted. The discrepancy suggests that even as Chinese troops advanced toward Korea, the Chinese leadership was still debating about how long to hold out for a definitive commitment of support from its Soviet ally before taking the last irrevocable step.
⁵⁶

The two Communist autocrats had been trained in a hard school of power politics, which they were now applying to each other. In this case, Stalin proved the quintessential hardball player. He coolly informed Mao (via a joint telegram with Zhou) that, in view of China’s hesitation, the best option would be to withdraw the remnants of the North Korean forces into China, where Kim Il-sung could form a provisional government-in-exile. The sick and disabled could go to the Soviet Union. He did not mind Americans on his Asian border, said Stalin, since he already faced them along the European dividing lines.

Stalin knew that the only outcome Mao wanted less than American forces at China’s borders was a provisional Korean government in Manchuria in contact with the Korean minority living there, claiming some kind of sovereignty and constantly pressing military adventures into Korea. And he must have sensed that Mao had passed the point of no return. China’s choice, at this point, was between an American army on the Yalu, directly threatening the half of Chinese industry within easy reach, and a disgruntled Soviet Union, holding back on supplies, perhaps reinvoking its “rights” in Manchuria. Or else China would proceed along the course Mao had continued to pursue even while bargaining with Stalin. He was in a position where he had to intervene, paradoxically in part to protect himself against Soviet designs.

On October 19, after several days of delay to await a guarantee of Soviet supplies, Mao ordered the army to cross into Korea. Stalin pledged substantial logistical support, provided only that it involved no direct confrontation with the United States (for example, air cover over Manchuria but not over Korea).

Mutual suspicion was so rampant that Zhou had no sooner returned to Moscow, from where he could communicate with Beijing, than Stalin seemingly reversed himself. To prevent Mao from maneuvering the Soviet Union into bearing the brunt of equipping the PLA without getting the benefit of its tying down American forces in combat in Korea, Stalin informed Zhou that no supplies would start moving until Chinese forces had, in fact, entered Korea. Mao issued the order on October 19, in effect without an assurance of Soviet support. After that, the originally promised Soviet support was reinstated, though the ever cautious Stalin confined Soviet air support to Chinese territory. So much for the readiness expressed in his earlier letter to Mao to risk a general war over Korea.

Both Communist leaders had exploited each other’s necessities and insecurities. Mao had succeeded in obtaining Soviet military supplies to modernize his army—some Chinese sources claim that during the Korean War he received equipment for sixty-four infantry divisions and twenty-two air divisions
⁵⁷
—and Stalin had tied down China into a conflict with the United States in Korea.

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:

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.