The White Paper sought to account for the imminent communist victory in 1949 in the Chinese civil war.
The White Paper, officially entitled “United States Relations with China,” was a Department of State document issued August 5, 1949, under the auspices of Secretary of
State Dean Acheson. The 1,054-page document offered a justification of American foreign policy toward China, specifically the rationale for ceasing to aid the Nationalist Chinese regime of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). The White Paper argued that nothing short of American military intervention would be sufficient to save Jiang’s regime, as it was too weak politically, militarily, and economically to stop the communist Chinese forces under Mao Zedong from winning the war in China. Rather than heading off criticism of American policy, the White Paper was greeted with mass skepticism, and when the Nationalist Chinese forces fled to Formosa (Taiwan,) Acheson and President Harry S. Truman were widely accused of “losing China” to communist forces.
The Chinese civil war had been going on for years and continued through World War II, even as the opposing sides both actively fought Japanese aggressors. Jiang Jieshi’s Nationalist regime was recognized as legitimate by not only the United States but also the Soviet Union. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and his government in Moscow were primarily concerned with maintaining stability in China, and nearly until the end of the war they believed that Jiang offered the best chance to ensure that. In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union called for a coalition government, but, by October 1946, fighting had resumed.
With the resumption of fighting, Jiang and the Nationalists held the advantage, as they had plundered Manchurian industry and retaken control of the Chinese eastern railway. Mao’s forces were largely cleared out of north China and Manchuria, but in so doing, Jiang badly overextended his army. By the end of 1947, Communist forces were counterattacking throughout China, and the Nationalists were badly exposed. The United States initially attempted to remain aloof from the fighting, but started formally funding Jiang to fight the communists in May 1947. In spite of this aid, Mao’s forces captured Peking (Beijing) and Tientsin in January 1949, and they continued their offensive into southern China.
These events prompted Acheson and the Department of State to issue the White Paper. Alleging that “nothing the United States did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed the results [of the Chinese civil war],” the officials explained in the White Paper in great detail how the Nationalists had brought their problems upon themselves. By “reasonable limits of its capabilities,” the Department of State meant that only American armed intervention in China could have saved Jiang’s regime, and this was not a step the American government was willing to take. The document portrayed Jiang as inefficient and surrounded by corruption, whereas it depicted Mao, although a communist, in a neutral light.
On October 1, 1949, the communists officially proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union recognized the new regime the next day. Jiang’s forces were forced to flee to Formosa, where Jiang claimed that he remained the rightful leader of China. This debate spilled over into the United Nations, where the United States refused to allow the Communist Chinese delegate to be seated as the official representative from China.
In the United States, the fall of China to Mao and the communists constituted a foreign policy disaster. The principle of containment, as outlined by George F. Kennan and subsequently proclaimed in the 1947 Truman Doctrine, called for preventing the expansion of communism. Although containment was initially conceived to be applied specifically to Europe, China was a gigantic loss, and Truman and Acheson received much of the blame for failing to contain communist forces in China. While the White Paper’s assessment of Nationalist weaknesses was difficult to refute, many felt that an insufficient attempt had been made to aid Jiang, especially in light of the multibillion-dol-lar Marshall Plan intended to prop up an economically devastated Western Europe and protect it from communist insurgency. Actions such as the Berlin airlift had demonstrated that the United States would go to great lengths to stop the spread of communism, so the perception that the United States had not adequately funded Jiang, whether correct or not, made Truman’s and Acheson’s policy toward China look weak. The timing of Mao’s victory was especially bad for Truman, as it came shortly after the first successful Soviet atomic bomb test. As fears of communism at home fed the growing red scare, the fall of China to communism deepened cold war animosities.
The failure of the White Paper to deflect criticism from the Truman administration became important to policy makers in 1950 when the Korean War broke out. Truman could not allow another country to fall to communism, so American forces, under the banner of the United Nations, joined the war alongside South Korea. The fallout from the fall of China and the American unwillingness to recognize the Communist regime also had a significant lasting impact, as the U. S. government did not extend diplomatic relations until the 1970s.
Further reading: Michael Schaller, The United States and China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
—Phil Huckelberry
World History
