Was China ever America’s to lose in 1949?

The short answer

• Why the Nationalists lost. In 1946 Chiang’s Nationalists appeared to hold the stronger hand: they had the major cities, American equipment and, by one estimate, three times their opponents’ troops. Yet hyperinflation destroyed pay and savings, corruption diverted aid, and armies sent deep into Manchuria were cut off and captured. Communist land reform offered peasants a reason to support Mao in a country about 85 percent rural. Stalin’s advice to Mao to stop at the Yangtze shows how far this outcome was from a plan directed by Moscow.
• A design and an industry. Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall and the Rosenberg network provided information that confirmed the plutonium-implosion route and may have saved the Soviet program one or two years. That information could shorten the work, but it could not do the work. Under Beria’s coercive administration, the war-devastated USSR built reactors and other facilities, and gulag labor mined uranium. The American search for spies helped feed McCarthyism. The strategic lesson was broader: a determined industrial state might be delayed in acquiring a bomb, but keeping it from one indefinitely would be difficult.
• NSC-68 and the cost of containment. Paul Nitze’s 1950 review assumed that Moscow intended to dominate Eurasia. If a setback anywhere damaged American credibility everywhere, the United States needed strength across the globe; negotiation could wait until that strength had been rebuilt. George Kennan and Charles Bohlen thought the threat inflated and the price excessive. The proposed response gave containment a military budget: defense spending rose from roughly $13 billion toward $50 billion within two years. The same concern for credibility would shape later choices over Vietnam.

What it changed

The arms race accelerates. Truman ordered work on a hydrogen bomb in January 1950, despite the objections of Oppenheimer’s advisory committee. The United States tested one in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953. Over subsequent decades arsenals grew from hundreds toward tens of thousands of warheads. Each side’s estimate of what the other might build helped justify building more.

An alliance with strains of its own. Mao spent two months negotiating in Moscow, often under humiliating conditions, before securing the Sino-Soviet Treaty in February 1950. China gained aid and advisers and later received nuclear assistance. But Stalin’s condescension and unequal terms also left resentment. To Washington the two powers could look like a single bloc; the strains within their alliance would help produce the split that changed the map in the 1960s.

Containment’s Asian frontier. After China’s revolution, American planners gave Asia greater attention and made occupied Japan an anchor of the Pacific alliance. In January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson described a defense perimeter that left Korea ambiguously outside its stated line. Stalin and Kim Il-sung read the speech and could consider what it suggested about an American response. North Korea invaded the South five months later.