China

China is one of the book’s principal settings for the unraveling of the wartime alliance and the pressures of the early Cold War. It enters the account first as an issue in postwar diplomacy, then as a country whose Nationalist government was losing control to Communist forces, and finally as the source of a military intervention in Korea that threatened to widen the conflict. Across these stages, the book follows not only events in China but also the American arguments over what had happened there, who was responsible, and how far the United States should go in response.

China in the Postwar Settlement

At Potsdam, China’s place in the emerging peace arrangements became a point of disagreement among the Allied leaders. In a conversation with Truman, Stalin said the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan by mid-August, as agreed at Yalta, and asserted that it recognized Manchuria as part of China and would not interfere in its internal political affairs. The assurance placed China at the intersection of two issues: the Soviet role in the final phase of the war against Japan and the political future of Manchuria.

China also figured in the proposed organization of postwar diplomacy. When the conference opened, Truman proposed creating a Council of Foreign Ministers to prepare for a peace conference. Stalin questioned whether China should participate in a European settlement. The question resurfaced when the leaders discussed whether China should be included in preparations for the peace conference: Churchill considered its participation an unnecessary complication, while Stalin suggested referring the matter to the foreign ministers. Truman said he would accept their decision to leave China out. The exchange reveals that China’s status as a major wartime ally did not settle how much voice it would have in shaping the postwar order, especially on European affairs.

China was also included in the Allied statement addressing Japan’s surrender and occupation. Issued in the names of Truman, Clement Attlee, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, it promised that the Japanese people would not be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation. It tied the withdrawal of occupation forces to the elimination of Japan’s capacity to wage war, the establishment of freedom of speech and religion, and the election of a responsible, peaceably inclined government. China thus appeared not only as a subject of diplomatic discussion but as a signatory to the public terms for Japan’s future.

The Nationalist Collapse and the China White Paper

By 1949, the political crisis inside China had become increasingly difficult for the Truman administration to treat as a distant concern. The Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek was crumbling before the advance of Communist forces. In April, a Communist army of one million crossed the Yangtze River into the remaining provinces loyal to Chiang. By spring, the country’s complete fall to Communist control was widely regarded in the book’s account as a foregone conclusion; the outcome had been implicit in George Marshall’s report after his unsuccessful year in China in 1946.

The situation became an immediate American political controversy as well as a military and diplomatic one. The Berlin Airlift remained a major concern, while victories by Communist forces in China intensified anxiety. Douglas MacArthur warned from Tokyo that China’s fall imperiled the United States. Meanwhile, critics at home increasingly connected the change in China to broader fears about Communist influence and American policy.

On August 4, Truman announced the release of a substantial State Department account, United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949. The report ran to 409 pages, with another 645 pages of appended documents. Truman said it had been compiled as a frank record of American policy, intended to make the administration’s handling of China clear. Its scale reflected the attempt to place the controversy before the public as a documentary record rather than leave it to accusation and counteraccusation.

The report did not quiet the dispute. Many Americans felt affection for China, shaped in part by generations of Sunday School contributions to missionary work and by the popularity of Pearl Buck’s books about Chinese peasant life. Chiang and his wife had also been familiar, photogenic allies during the war. Against this background, the State Department’s account that China had been lost to communism landed as a shock. Intended by Truman and Dean Acheson to relieve suspicion, the report instead intensified it. The New York Times criticized the record as a series of well-meaning mistakes; more hostile critics alleged that it concealed deliberate distortion and shielded pro-Communist officials. The report’s attempt to document policy therefore became part of the political fight over how that policy should be judged.

Domestic Dispute over Responsibility

The charge that the administration had lost China treated the outcome as though the United States had possessed the power to determine China’s political future. The China Lobby advanced that accusation, and critics in Congress gave it additional force. Republican Senator William Knowland raised the possibility that Alger Hiss had helped shape China policy, though the account notes that he offered no evidence for the suggestion. Representative John F. Kennedy was among the Democrats who joined the criticism.

The dispute linked China to a wider climate of suspicion. Hiss had been indicted for perjury in December, and accusations about Communist influence made the administration’s record vulnerable to claims that its policy had been weak or compromised. The China White Paper was therefore more than a report on past decisions: its reception showed how the collapse of the Nationalist government could be turned into a domestic test of loyalty and competence. The evidence presented in the book distinguishes the documented account Truman sought to publish from the unsupported insinuations that accompanied the controversy.

Chinese Intervention and the Limits of War

China returned to the center of Truman’s attention as the Korean War developed. On the journey to the Wake Island meeting with Douglas MacArthur, Truman spoke of his concern about possible Chinese intervention. In their discussion, he made keeping the war limited his first concern and asked about the likelihood of Chinese or Soviet involvement. MacArthur judged intervention very unlikely. He cited Chinese forces in Manchuria, estimating that 300,000 men were there and that 100,000 to 125,000 were positioned along the Yalu River; he also emphasized that China had no air force and predicted that Chinese troops advancing toward Pyongyang would face devastating losses.

Chinese entry into the war soon became an established fact, although the number of troops involved remained uncertain. MacArthur estimated that 30,000 Chinese troops had entered and tended to discount their importance. As concern in Washington grew, he asked for authority to bomb the Korean ends of bridges across the Yalu to impede the flow of troops. Truman approved the request but drew a boundary around it: he warned MacArthur not to enlarge the war and specifically prohibited air strikes north of the Yalu, on Chinese territory. The distinction between striking crossings in Korea and attacking China itself embodied the administration’s effort to respond to intervention without turning the Korean conflict into a wider war.

The scale of the Chinese counterattack then sharpened the danger. Truman reported that 260,000 Chinese troops had launched a furious offensive and that MacArthur’s forces were moving onto the defensive. He repeatedly insisted on limiting the war and avoiding the trap of all-out military action against China. In retrospect, he wrote that he had no doubt the fighting in Korea must not be allowed to expand into a general war. The prospect was not simply an abstract strategic concern: a broader conflict would take the United States beyond the war it had undertaken to fight.

Yet Truman’s commitment to limiting the conflict coexisted with a strong reluctance to abandon South Korea. In discussions with Attlee, he argued that South Koreans who had fought alongside the United States could not simply be left to face defeat. He was also concerned that forces in Manchuria might enable bombing that could destroy American positions. The account presents him as worried about the military danger and troubled by the prospect of admitting defeat, but unwilling to desert allies when circumstances became difficult. China therefore became the point at which two obligations met: avoiding a potentially much larger war and standing by a country the United States had undertaken to help.

Narrative Significance

China’s role in the book changes with the scale of the story. At Potsdam, it is a question of diplomatic representation and the postwar settlement. In 1949, it is the setting for a political collapse that provokes a public reckoning over American policy. In Korea, it becomes a military power whose intervention forces Truman to define the limits of American action. The progression connects distant diplomacy, domestic accusation, and battlefield risk without treating them as separate problems.

The repeated tension is between the assumption that the United States could shape events in China and the evidence of limits to its influence. The China White Paper attempted to set out what American policy had been, but it could not prevent the political debate from turning the outcome into a charge of national failure. Later, MacArthur’s estimates of Chinese strength and his confidence that intervention could be defeated contrasted with Truman’s growing concern about escalation. In both cases, China exposed the difference between confidence in American power and the consequences of acting as though that power had no bounds.