Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton, Inc., 1969), pp. 355-358.
THE THEME OF CHINA LOST
The speech of January 12, 1950, "Crisis in China-An Examination of United States Policy," has been called "one of the most brilliant as well as the most controversial speeches ever made by Secretary Acheson." Both adjectives are interesting: the first, because how complimentary it was meant to be obviously depends upon the author's unknown opinion of my other speeches; the second, because, although there was an immediate outburst, the principal controversy arose later and involved not what was said about China, but inferences drawn about a wholly different subject, Korea. The speech was another effort to get the self-styled formulators of public opinion to think before they wrote, and do more than report as news the emotional or political utterances of political gladiators. On the preceding day, one of these, Senator Taft, had been widely quoted charging in the Senate that the State Department had "been guided by a left-wing group who obviously have wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose."2 Senator Vandenberg had rebuked him for saying this. At the time, Mao Tse-tung was in Moscow negotiating with Stalin what proved to be the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 14, 1950. It was a supercharged moment to be speaking on Asian matters.
I began with an explanation of how it seemed to me that good and effective policies develop. Relations between people, I said, depend upon the fundamental attitudes, interests, and purposes of those peoples. Day-to-day actions grow out of those attitudes, interests, and purposes and are developed into policies. To be good policies they must come about on both sides in this manner. To be effective, they must become articulate through all the institutions and groupings of national life-press, radio, churches, labor unions, business organizations. In Asia, population, differences in race, ideas, languages, religion, culture, and development are vast. But, throughout, run two deep common attitudes-revulsion against the poverty and misery of centuries and against more recent foreign domination. Blended, they had evoked throughout Asia the revolutionary forces of nationalism. Resignation had given way to hope and anger.
Many, I continued, bewildered by events in China, failed to understand this background, looked for esoteric causes, and charged American bungling. No one in his right mind could believe that the Nationalist regime had been overthrown by superior military force. Chiang Kai-shek had emerged from the war as the leader of the Chinese people, opposed by only one faction, the ragged, ill-equipped, small Communist force in the hills. Chiang controlled the greatest military power of any ruler in Chinese history, supported and given economic backing by the United States. Four years later his armies and his support both within the country and outside it had melted away. He was a refugee on a small island off the coast.
To attribute this to inadequate foreign support, I said, was to miscalculate entirely what bad been going on in China and the nature of the forces involved. The almost inexhaustible patience of the Chinese people had ended. They had not overthrown the Government. There was nothing to overthrow. They had simply ignored it. The Communists were not the creators of this situation, this revolutionary spirit, hut had mounted it and ridden to victory and power.
This, I suggested, was a realistic explanation of what had been going on in Asia and of the attitudes of its people. Throughout our history the attitude of Americans toward the peoples of Asia had been an interest in them not as pawns in the strategy of power or as subjects for economic exploitation, but simply as people. For a hundred years some Americans had gone to Asia to offer what they thought was the most valuable thing they had-their faith. They wanted to tell the Asians what they thought about the nature and relationship of man to God. Others had gone to offer what they knew of learning; others to offer healing for Asian bodies. Others, perhaps fewer, had gone to learn the depth and beauty of Asian cultures, and some to trade. This trade was a very small part of American interest in the Far East, and it was a very small part of American interest in trade.
The outstanding factor in the interest of the American people in Asia-the people in towns, villages, churches, and societies-was that over the years it had been parallel and not contrary to the interest of the peoples of Asia. In China, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Korea it had strongly, even emotionally, supported people working out their own destinies free of foreign control. To say that our principal interest was to stop the spread of communism was to get the cart completely before the horse. Of course we opposed the spread of communism; it was the subtle, powerful instrument of Russian imperialism, designed and used to defeat the very interests we shared with the Asian peoples, the interest in their own autonomous development uncontrolled from abroad.
For generations, long before communism, I pointed out, Russia had aimed to dominate Asian peoples, and none more persistently than those in north China. The Soviet Union had gone on with this policy, attempting to spread its influence even to the extent of detaching Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Manchuria. This most significant, most important, fact should not be obscured. We should not deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger and hatred of the Chinese people. Now, as in the past, we shared their view that whoever violated the integrity of China was their enemy. Those who proclaimed their loyalty to Moscow proclaimed loyalty to an enemy of China.
From the political theme, the speech turned to "the questions of military security." Its purpose was to bring home what the United States Government had done to defend vital interests in the Pacific, not to speculate on what it might do in the event of various exigencies in Asia. Our defense stations beyond the western hemisphere and our island possessions were the Philippines and defeated, disarmed, and occupied Japan. These were our inescapable responsibilities. We had moved our line of defense, a line fortified and manned by our own ground, sea, and air forces, to the very edges of the western Pacific. Less than a year before, on March 1, 1949, General MacArthur had discussed the same subject in an interview in Tokyo:
Our defensive dispositions against Asiatic aggression used to be based on the west coast of the American continent.
The Pacific was looked upon as the avenue of possible enemy approach. Now the Pacific has become an Anglo-Saxon lake and our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia.
It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska.
My defense line, called our defensive perimeter, followed General MacArthur's, but was described from northeast to southwest: "This defensive perimeter runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus. We hold important defense positions in the Ryukyu Islands, and these we will continue to hold.... The defensive perimeter runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands."
With the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General MacArthur behind me, it did not occur to me that I should be charged with innovating policy or political heresy. But to make sure that I would not be misunderstood or distorted, I added two more paragraphs to care for interests outside of our own defense line:
So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack. .
Should such an attack occur . . . the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations, which so far has not proved a weak reed to lean on by any people who are determined to protect their independence against outside aggression.
After a brief look at particular areas, I concluded that old relationships between East and West in Asia were ended. If new and useful ones were to succeed them, they must be based on mutual respect and helpfulness. We were ready to be helpful but could be so only where we were wanted and where the conditions of help were sensible and possible. So the new day just dawning could go on to a glorious noon or darken and drizzle out. Which would come about would depend on decisions of the Asian peoples, which no friend or enemy from the outside could make for them.
The press comment on the speech, moderate to favorable, was muffled by an event of far greater importance. On January 13, Jacob A. Malik, Soviet Representative on the UN Security Council, walked out of the chamber after announcing that the Soviet Union would not attend or recognize the legality of the council's actions until the Chinese Nationalist representative had been removed. This critical Russian error opened the way five months later to uniting the United Nations against the attack on South Korea.
However, the China bloc in Congress opened fire on me at once. Senator Styles Bridges demanded a vote of censure against the Administration and a withholding of funds until it changed its policy. The next day a new uproar followed announcement that the Chinese Communists had seized our consular premises and property in Peking, thus repudiating the treaties of 1901 and 1943. Senator Knowland demanded my resignation. Mr. Vishinsky attacked me from Moscow. However, the Democratic senators voted to support our Far Eastern policy.
On January 19 came a bitter and unexpected blow. "This has been a tough day," I wrote our daughter, "not so much by way of work, but by way of troubles. We took a defeat in the House on Korea, which seems to me to have been our own fault. One should not lose by one vote. [The vote was 193 to 192.] We were complaisant and inactive. We have now a long road back."
The vehicle of this trouble was not an important or controversial bill, but a comparatively small supplemental appropriation for aid to Korea in 1950. In accordance with resolutions of the United Nations sponsored by us at the request of the Pentagon to get our remaining divisions out of Korea, all foreign troops (that is, Soviet and American) were to leave Korea and did so by mid-1949. For our part, only an advisory group of about five hundred officers and men remained to complete equipping South Korean forces. We wished to boost South Korean morale by some economic action. Hence the bill. It seemed so small and harmless that we neglected our usual precautions and were caught off guard by a combination of China-bloc Republicans and economy-minded southern Democrats and defeated on a snap vote.
The President and I expressed our "concern and dismay" over what had occurred and called for its early remedy. An extension of the China Aid Act for a few months was joined with the Korean appropriation and a little sweetening added for congressional adherents of Chiang Kai-shek. The new bill became law on February 14, 1950. But the damage had been done. Later it was argued that my speech "gave the green light" to the attack on South Korea by not including it within the "defensive perimeter." This was specious, for Australia and New Zealand were not included either, and the first of all our mutual defense agreements was made with Korea. If the Russians were watching the United States for signs of our intentions in the Far East, they would have been more impressed by the two years' agitation for withdrawal of combat forces from Korea, the defeat in Congress of a minor aid bill for it, and the increasing discussion of a peace treaty with Japan.
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