Abstract
The construction of the US order in East Asia in the early decades of the post-war era was influenced by a series of events unforeseen during the key international conferences in 1943–1945. The extension of the containment doctrine to Asia and the US engagement in armed conflicts on the Asian mainland led to the overturning of the pro-China arrangements agreed at Cairo, Potsdam and Yalta, and to the building of a ‘liberal’, anti-communist order in the region. The US ontological insecurity created by the loss of China to the communists was to be rooted out domestically and (re)produced in a strong anti-communist identity. Anti-communism became the criterion for cultural acceptability and participation in the American-led order, premised on distinctly binary representations of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ and ‘tyranny’ versus ‘freedom’. A Chinese communist-dominated region would be completely delegitimised as a threat to American efforts to build a secure and viable liberal international order.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). In the wake of decolonisation, the racial hierarchy was replaced by a ‘hierarchy of development’ in the 1960s, albeit with a similar structure. This new hierarchy called for the Third World, a term coined by development theorists, to submit to Western tutelage. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 159–164.
- 2.
Paul J. Heer, Mr X and the Pacific: George Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2018), 33.
- 3.
Galia Press-Barnathan, Organizing the World: The United States and Regional Cooperation in Asia and Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 43, 66–67.
- 4.
Michael Schaller, “Securing the Great Crescent: Occupied Japan and the Origins of Containment in Southeast Asia,” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (1982): 392–414; Press-Barnathan, Organizing the World, 40.
- 5.
Alice Lyman Miller and Richard Wich, Becoming Asia: Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations since World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 104–106.
- 6.
The Truman Library, “Harry Truman and the Truman Doctrine,” Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, no date, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/teacher/doctrine.htm (accessed February 23, 2019).
- 7.
“FDR memo to Donald Nelson, April 18, 1944,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt, F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, ed. Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), 1529–30. Nelson was then the Chairman of War Production Board.
- 8.
H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 729. Churchill, in contrast, held the view that China’s status ‘as one of the world’s four Great Powers [was] an absolute farce’. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassel, 1964), 701.
- 9.
Wilson Center, “Yalta Conference Agreement, Declaration of a Liberated Europe,” February 11, 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, National Archives, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116176.pdf?v=66b99cbbf4a1b8de10c56b38cf4fc50d (accessed February 19, 2019).
- 10.
Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic papers, Conferences at Malta and Yalta 1945, Document 353, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Malta (accessed February 20, 2019).
- 11.
Walter La Feber, “Roosevelt, Churchill and Indochina: 1942–1945,” The American Historical Review 80, no. 5 (1975): 1277–1295 at 1280–1281.
- 12.
La Feber, “Roosevelt, Churchill and Indochina,” 1287–1288.
- 13.
La Feber, “Roosevelt, Churchill and Indochina,” 1287–1288.
- 14.
Secretary of State, George Marshall, established the Policy Planning Staff (PPS) in 1947, offering George Kennan the position of director. Kennan’s friend and colleague, John Patton Davies, was permanently assigned to the PPS staff. Their first challenge was to deal with the Chinese civil war. Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 24–25.
- 15.
Office of the Historian, “Will the Communists Take over China?” Foreign Relations of the United States, Memorandum by the Second Secretary of Embassy in China (Davies), Diplomatic Papers, 1944, China, Vol. VI (November 7, 1944), 670–671, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v06/pg_671 (accessed May 20, 2019).
- 16.
Office of the Historian, “Will the Communists Take over China?” 670–671.
- 17.
Davies’s reports, and his supposedly pro-communist inclinations, were blamed for the ‘loss of China’, for undermining the Nationalists and for their defeat in the Chinese civil war, when the debate erupted in the 1950s under McCarthyism. As a result, Davies was dismissed from the Foreign Service by John Foster Dulles in November 1954. Michael Kaufman, “John Paton Davies, Diplomat Who Ran Afoul of McCarthy over China, Dies at 91,” New York Times, December 24, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/24/world/john-paton-davies-diplomat-who-ran-afoul-of-mccarthy-over-china-dies-at-91.html (accessed February 23, 2019).
- 18.
The ‘China Hands’ were a small group of experts in the State Department (Foreign Service) Policy Planning Staff (PPS) who became scapegoats on account of their so-called pro-communist reporting from China in the 1930s and 1940s. Davies was born to missionary parents in China. Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 14–15. Davies was one of the main ‘China Hands’ labelled as communist sympathisers by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and held responsible for the ‘loss of China’.
- 19.
Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 19.
- 20.
Kennan was also concerned about Japan’s vulnerability to Soviet influence. Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 24.
- 21.
Kennan viewed the continuing domestic support for Chiang and the Chinese Nationalists as a fickle emotional attachment, not rooted in the practicalities of the situation on the ground. Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 31.
- 22.
John Patton Davies, China Hand: An Autobiography (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 302.
- 23.
For a detailed discussion of the PPS efforts to prepare a comprehensive assessment of the situation in China and US policy options, see Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 35–49.
- 24.
The China Lobby encompassed ‘American publicists, businessmen, military officers, politicians, churchmen and apostate Communists’, advocating for Chiang’s Nationalists. Davies, China Hand, 293–294.
- 25.
Davies, China Hand, 302.
- 26.
Davies, China Hand, 302.
- 27.
Although Congress approved the China Aid Act (April 1948), it significantly reduced American funding to China and was far short of Marshall’s requested amount of $570 million. Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 33.
- 28.
Office of the Historian, “The Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to the Secretary of State (Marshall),” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. I, Part 2: General; the United Nations, March 14, 1948, 531–538 at 531, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d6 (accessed May 20, 2019).
- 29.
Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 91.
- 30.
Office of the Historian, “The Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to the Secretary of State (Marshall),” 534.
- 31.
Stacie L. Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011 (Washington: RAND Corporation, 2012), 53.
- 32.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Souers) to the National Security Council,” December 30, 1949, g.2, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v07p2/d387 (accessed April 20, 2019).
- 33.
Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 97–99.
- 34.
Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 104–105.
- 35.
Heer, Mr X and the Pacific, 96.
- 36.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense (Johnson),” August 17, 1949, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, The Far East: China, Vol. 9, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v09/d414 (accessed June 30, 2019).
- 37.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Souers) to the National Security Council,” g. 1.
- 38.
The changing status of the islands in the South China Sea will be discussed later in the chapter.
- 39.
The US ceased diplomatic relations with Russia in December 1917, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, and it did not recognised the USSR until November 1933. Office of the Historian, “Recognition of the Soviet Union, 1933,” Foreign Relations of the United States, Milestones: 1921–1936, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/ussr (accessed June 30, 2019). Any softening of the Truman administration’s approach to official recognition of the PRC would be subsequently quashed by McCarthyism. The reasons for the tough anti-communist approach are discussed in the second part of this chapter.
- 40.
On February 14, 1950, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China signed a 30-year Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance which was ratified by both sides and entered into force on April 11, 1950. Office of the Historian, “Editorial Note,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, East Asia and the Pacific, Vol. 6, document 157, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v06/d157 (accessed May 21, 2019).
- 41.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by Mr. Charlton Ogburn, Jr., of the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, The Far East, China Vol. IX, November 2, 1949. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v09/d176 (accessed May 21, 2019).
- 42.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by Mr. Charlton Ogburn, Jr., of the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs”.
- 43.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” January 6, 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy, Vol. 1, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d52 (accessed May 21, 2019).
- 44.
Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System (London: Routledge, 2006), 3.
- 45.
Michael J. Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 268–9.
- 46.
Available at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, http://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/uploads/r/university-of-british-columbia-library-rare-books-and-special-collections/e/c/ecae1ed788d4c9e606fdf31329904e888a0583f89a38a9c5cc212614edae5799/9bed4ea1-519a-4a58-a5ed-f59a32d786c8-rbsc_arc_1135_30_15_001.pdf (accessed February 23, 2019). We thank Bill Hayton for his suggestion that a full citation of the statements about Japan be included.
- 47.
Available at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, http://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/uploads/r/university-of-british-columbia-library-rare-books-and-special-collections/e/c/ecae1ed788d4c9e606fdf31329904e888a0583f89a38a9c5cc212614edae5799/9bed4ea1-519a-4a58-a5ed-f59a32d786c8-rbsc_arc_1135_30_15_001.pdf (accessed February 23, 2019).
- 48.
Kimie Hara, “Rethinking the ‘Cold War’ in the Asia-Pacific,” The Pacific Review 12, no. 4 (1999): 515–536 at 517–18.
- 49.
Michael Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 2nd edition (London: Routledge 2006), 44.
- 50.
Kimie Hara, “The San Francisco Peace Treaty and Frontier Problems in the Regional Order in East Asia: A Sixty Year Perspective,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 10, no. 17 (2012), https://apjjf.org/2012/10/17/Kimie-Hara/3739/article.html (accessed June 30, 2019).
- 51.
Hara, “The San Francisco Peace Treaty and Frontier Problems in the Regional Order in East Asia.”
- 52.
The first five drafts (completed between March 1947 and November 1949) determined the recipients of each territory renounced by Japan. In late 1949, the US re-evaluated this position over the course of the remaining drafts until the eighteenth and final draft which were significantly shorter and vague over the territorial issues. Seokwoo Lee and Jon M. Van Dyke, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and Its Relevance to the Sovereignty over Dokdo,” Chinese Journal of International Law 9, no. 4 (2010): 741–762 at 747.
- 53.
George C. Herring, “The Truman Administration and the Restoration of French Sovereignty in Indochina,” Diplomatic History 1, no. 2 (1977): 97–117; Press-Barnathan, Organizing the World, 63, 67.
- 54.
Appalled that the peace treaty deliberations would not involve any ‘negotiations’, India refused to participate. India rejected the San Francisco Peace Treaty on three grounds: (1) the provisions which gave US control of the Ryukyus, (2) India argued that the military provisions of the treaty should be concluded after Japan’s independence and (3) Formosa should be returned to China. Expecting India’s participation, Truman responded angrily to India’s rejection. A separate India-Japan Peace Treaty was signed in June 1952. John Price, “Cold War Relic: The San Francisco Peace Treaty and the Politics of Memory,” Asian Perspective 25, no. 3 (2001): 31–60 at 41–42.
- 55.
Hara, “Rethinking the ‘Cold War’ in the Asia-Pacific,” 522.
- 56.
Hara, “Rethinking the ‘Cold War’ in the Asia-Pacific,” 522–3.
- 57.
Price, “Cold War Relic,” 53.
- 58.
Once the Peace Treaty came into effect in April 1952, the Japanese government stripped the Koreans of their Japanese citizenship. The US ignored South Korean demands for a seat at the table and set up a legacy of unresolved problems in Japan-South Korea relations. In South Korea, it was felt their exclusion enabled Japan to maintain its presumption of superiority over other Asians, with its wartime activities left unscrutinised and escaped condemnation. Price, “Cold War Relic,” 51.
- 59.
Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 121; Marwyn S. Samuels, Contest for the South China Sea (New York and London: Methuen, 1982), 78.
- 60.
Taiwan Documents Project, “Treaty of Peace with Japan”, signed September 8, 1951, http://www.taiwandocuments.org/sanfrancisco01.htm (accessed March 5, 2017).
- 61.
Seokwoo Lee, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and the Territorial Disputes in East Asia,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 11, No. 1 (2002): 63–146 at 102.
- 62.
United Nations, “Treaty of Peace with Japan (with two declarations). Signed at San Francisco, on 8 September 1951”, https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%20136/volume-136-i-1832-english.pdf (accessed February 23, 2019).
- 63.
Lee and Van Dyke, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and Its Relevance to the Sovereignty over Dokdo,” 759.
- 64.
In the absence of the Soviet Union’s accession to the San Francisco Peace Treaty, its continued occupation of the Kuril Islands/Northern Territories (seized in 1945 from the Japanese) remains disputed. No permanent peace treaty has been agreed between Moscow and Tokyo.
- 65.
Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific, 3–4.
- 66.
‘Nansei Shoto’, which included the Senkaku Islands, was included within the Okinawa Prefecture and further defined to be incorporated in the Ryukyu Islands in December 1953—all of which were administered by the US Civil Administration in the Ryukyu Islands until the end of US occupation of Okinawa in June 1971 with an agreement with Japan that saw the Senkaku Islands transferred to Japanese control. Both China and Taiwan challenged the legitimacy of the transfer. Lee, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and the Territorial Disputes in East Asia,” 90–91.
- 67.
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), 357.
- 68.
Hara, “The San Francisco Peace Treaty and Frontier Problems in the Regional Order in East Asia”.
- 69.
Hara, “The San Francisco Peace Treaty and Frontier Problems in the Regional Order in East Asia”.
- 70.
Henry Rhoel R. Aguda and Jesusa Loreto A. Arellano-Aguda, “The Philippine Claim over the Spratly Group of Islands: An Application of Article 76 of the UNCLOS,” Philippine Law Journal 83, no. 3 (2009): 573–608 at 583; Dzurek, “The Spratly Islands Dispute,” 14; Lee G. Cordner, “The Spratly Islands Dispute and the Law of the Sea,” Ocean Development and International Law 25, no. 1 (1994): 61–74 at 66. The Philippines had once held, after the ‘discovery’ of the Kalayaan Islands in 1956 (as will be discussed in detail below), that the Kalayaan Islands were res nullius , while the Spratly Islands were placed under the trusteeship of the Allied Powers and open to exploration by Filipinos. But this distinction was later dropped. Dzurek, “The Spratly Islands Dispute,” 16, 20, 46.
- 71.
Price, “Cold War Relic,” 56.
- 72.
G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal World Order,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 1 (2009): 71–87 at 76.
- 73.
Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, 297 and Peter Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 44–50.
- 74.
David W. Mabon, “Elusive Agreements: The Pacific Pact Proposals of 1949–1951,” Pacific Historical Review 57, no. 2 (1988): 147–177 at 150.
- 75.
Mabon, “Elusive Agreements,” 151.
- 76.
The other reason was the Department of Defense’s opposition to defending British-ruled Hong Kong, and the French Indo-China if the British idea were accepted. Miller and Wich, Becoming Asia, 108.
- 77.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan) to the Secretary of State”.
- 78.
Acheson refers to a press statement by Prime Minister Nehru of India who confirmed the US position that due to the internal conflicts in Asia, the ‘time was not ripe’ for a Pacific pact. Statement by Dean Acheson, “Pacific Pact Corresponding to North Atlantic Treaty Untimely,” The Internet Archive, “U.S. Dept. of State, Bulletin XX, Jan.-June 1949,” 696, https://archive.org/details/departmentofstat201949unit_0/page/696 (accessed May 21, 2019).
- 79.
Kennan’s suggestion was for the US to support the British Commonwealth as the best viable option for regional collaboration in the absence of any alternative solutions. Kennan also rejected too much US involvement on the basis that ‘immaturity and corruption in domestic administration, as well as deep seated demographic and social problems…place limitations on what any outsider can do to help’. Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan) to the Secretary of State”.
- 80.
Mabon, “Elusive Agreements,” 148.
- 81.
Mabon, “Elusive Agreements,” 173.
- 82.
Charles M. Dobbs, “The Pact That Never Was: The Pacific Pact of 1949,” Journal of Northeast Asian Studies 3, no. 4 (1984): 29–42 at 32.
- 83.
Office of the Historian, “Policy Planning Staff Paper on United States Policy toward Southeast Asia,” March 29, 1949, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v07p2/d317 (accessed February 15, 2019).
- 84.
Ben C. Limb, “The Pacific Pact: Looking Forward or Backward?” Foreign Affairs 29, no. 4 (1951), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/1951-07-01/pacific-pact-looking-forward-or-backward (accessed February 14, 2019).
- 85.
Cited in Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism,” International Organization 56, no. 3 (2002): 575–607 at 585.
- 86.
Limb, “The Pacific Pact”.
- 87.
Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?” 581.
- 88.
Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?” 584. In highlighting the factor of collective identity, Hemmer and Katzenstein argue that Southeast Asia was seen by the US ‘as part of an alien and, in important ways, inferior community’ (575).
- 89.
Limb, “The Pacific Pact”.
- 90.
In April 1955, 29 Asian and African states met in Bandung, Indonesia. The outcome of the Bandung Conference was the rejection of Western and Soviet ‘colonialism’ in all its forms. Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 30.
- 91.
The Philippines (August 1951) and Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS) (September 1951) and Japan (September 1951), followed by South Korea (signed October 1953), with Thailand (as part of SEATO’s Manila Pact, September 1954) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) in March 1955.
- 92.
See, for example, Joseph M. Siracusa and Glen St. John Barclay, “Australia, the United States and the Cold War, 1945–51: From V-J Day to ANZUS,” Diplomatic History 5, no. 1 (1981): 39–52. In the Australian case, it was post-war Australian governments which deliberately aligned themselves with the US and pushed for an alliance when none was forthcoming from the US.
- 93.
Siracusa and St. John Barclay, “Australia, the United States and the Cold War, 1945–51,” 41.
- 94.
Press-Barnathan, Organizing the World, 41.
- 95.
Green, By More than Providence, 285.
- 96.
Victor D. Cha, “Powerplay: Origins of the US Alliance System in Asia,” International Security 34, no. 3 (2009/10): 158–196 at 158.
- 97.
Cha, “Powerplay,” 158. Reflecting America’s sense of Western superiority, the same uncertainties did not apply to European reconstruction, and to the Western European collective security mechanism, NATO.
- 98.
Amitav Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 134.
- 99.
Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia, 134.
- 100.
Office of the Historian, “Memorandum by the Regional Planning Advisor (Ogburn), Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Allison),” January 21, 1953, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, East Asia and the Pacific, Vol. 6, Part 1, 260–262, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v12p1/d85 (accessed May 20, 2019). In the memorandum, Ogburn outlined the dangers of setting up a regional organisation with the other Western powers that precluded Asian nations as equals. While he was clear that a Western-led regional grouping would breed resentment among Asian nations, this was the US preference. He concluded that, ‘the plain fact is that any exclusively Western joint action in Asia must carry with it the clear implication that we do not take the Asians very seriously and in fact regard them as inferiors. We shall not be able to avoid this implication because that is indeed our attitude’ (262).
- 101.
Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia, 132.
- 102.
Office of the Historian, “Policy Planning Staff Paper on United States Policy toward Southeast Asia.”
- 103.
Office of the Historian, “Policy Planning Staff Paper on United States Policy toward Southeast Asia.”
- 104.
Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia, 134.
- 105.
Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 44.
- 106.
SEATO came into force with the signing of the Manila Pact in September 1954. It formally ceased operations in June 1977. Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 48.
- 107.
The treaty provisions also extended to non-signatories in Indochina (Cambodia, South Vietnam and Laos) through the French Indochina connection. Leszek Buszynski, “SEATO: Why It Survived until 1977 and Why It Was Abolished,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 2 (1981): 287–296 at 287.
- 108.
A.J. Stockwell, “Southeast Asia in War and Peace: The End of European Colonial Empires” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol. 2: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed., Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 325–386, at 373.
- 109.
Hemmer and Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia?”.
- 110.
Article IV of the Pacific Charter, signed in September 1954, proclaims the aim to ‘“counter by appropriate means” any attempt in the area to subvert freedom or destroy the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the treaty nations’. This provision is not found in any of the mutual defence treaties with Asian states, or in NATO’s Atlantic Charter. Ralph Braibanti, “The Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty,” Pacific Affairs 30, no. 4 (1957): 321–341 at 324–325.
- 111.
Wikisource, “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense/IV. A. 1. U.S. MAP for Diem: The Eisenhower Commitments, 1954–1960,” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_%E2%80%93_Vietnam_Relations,_1945%E2%80%931967:_A_Study_Prepared_by_the_Department_of_Defense/IV._A._1._U.S._MAP_for_Diem:_The_Eisenhower_Commitments,_1954%E2%80%931960 (accessed May 20, 2019).
- 112.
United Nations, “Pacific Charter, Southeast Asia Collective Defence Treaty,” Manila, September 8, 1954, 34, https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%20209/volume-209-i-2819-english.pdf (accessed May 20, 2019).
- 113.
Braibanti, “The Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty,” 329.
- 114.
Wikisource, “United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967”.
- 115.
Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia, 136.
- 116.
Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, “The Enduring Significance of the Truman Doctrine,” Orbis 61, no. 4 (2017): 561–574 at 565.
- 117.
Buszynski, “SEATO,” 287.
- 118.
Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 132.
- 119.
Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 2–3.
- 120.
Doty, Imperial Encounters, 3.
- 121.
Doty, Imperial Encounters, 5–6.
- 122.
Doty, Imperial Encounters, 5.
- 123.
Doty, Imperial Encounters, 34–35.
- 124.
Oliver Turner, “Sino-US Relations Then and Now: Discourse, Images, Policy,” Political Perspectives 5, no. 3 (2011): 27–45, http://www.politicalperspectives.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Sino-US-relations1.pdf (accessed May 11, 2019).
- 125.
Lee, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and the Territorial Disputes in East Asia,” 100.
- 126.
Lee, “The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and the Territorial Disputes in East Asia,” 102.
- 127.
Robert B. Oxnam, “Sino-American Relations in Historical Perspective,” in Dragon and Eagle: United States-China Relations, Past and Future, eds., Michel Oksenberg and Robert B. Oxnam (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 23–47 at 33.
- 128.
At the time of the Open Door policy, the US acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines extended discriminatory practices against ethnic Chinese to those Pacific islands. Warren I. Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” in Dragon and Eagle: United States-China Relations, Past and Future, eds., Michel Oksenberg and Robert B. Oxnam (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 54–106 at 64–5. The US had also instigated the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which restricted the immigration of Chinese labourers into the US for a period of ten years. It was not repealed until 1943.
- 129.
Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 62.
- 130.
Few Americans were cognisant that a generation of Chinese viewed Wilson’s acts at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations as a betrayal. Subsequent rises in nationalism were aimed at both the Americans and the Japanese. Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 67.
- 131.
Green, By More Than Providence, 94.
- 132.
Green, By More Than Providence, 103.
- 133.
Americans saw their role in China as very different from that of the other European powers. America was the only power that supported a strong, independent China and that when China once again was strong, it would throw out the imperial powers and open the doors to the US. Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 68.
- 134.
Oxnam, “Sino-American Relations in Historical Perspective,” 36.
- 135.
See Turner, “Sino-US Relations Then and Now,” 27–45.
- 136.
Paul A. Bové, “To Make a Way: Telling a Story of US–China Union through the Letters of Henry Adams and John Hay,” in Narratives of Free Trade: The Commercial Cultures of Early US-China Relations, ed. Kendall Johnson (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 150–162 at 157. The US was not prepared to go to war with Japan on an economic principle (to maintain the Open Door policy) following the Japanese Imperial Army’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and 1937.
- 137.
Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 55.
- 138.
A.T. Steele, The American People and China (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 1.
- 139.
Leigh Kagan and Richard Kagan, “Oh Say Can You See? American Cultural Blinders on China,” in America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations, eds. Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (New York: Random House, 1971), 3–39 at 5.
- 140.
The inherent contradiction in this view is that Christianity was also a foreign ideology/religion that was imported into China, mainly by American missionaries.
- 141.
Mike Mansfield, “Chiang is China,” Time magazine, January 22, 1945, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,791886,00.html (accessed May 11, 2019). Emphasis added.
- 142.
Lewis McCarroll Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy: McCarthyism and the Diplomacy of Hysteria, 1947–1951 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 11.
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Barbara Tuchman, Sand against the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), 355.
- 144.
Green, By More Than Providence, 210.
- 145.
During the 1940s, a series of polls recorded American attitudes towards China. In 1942, for instance, polls recorded substantial support for China among the American population, with 85 percent of Americans viewing China as a dependable partner for Americans after the war. During the course of the Chinese civil war, American support for Chiang dropped significantly. See Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 74–5.
- 146.
General Stilwell had first-hand experience of working with Chiang (1941–1944) as commander of US forces in the China-India-Burma theatre. Stilwell’s personal accounts of his difficult relations with Chiang were publicised in a collection of his personal papers. Joseph Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers (New York: William Sloane, 1948). Following General George C. Marshall’s failed Mission to China (1945–1947), there was consensus among US officials in China that the Kuomintang could not inspire a unified Chinese nation and was unlikely to administer a unified government or to cooperate with the Communists to avoid civil war. Office of the Historian, “The Ambassador in China (Stuart) to the Secretary of State, January 1, 1947,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, The Far East, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v10/d359 (accessed June 20, 2019).
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Green, By More Than Providence, 217.
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It is reported that Marshall explained the Bill of Rights to the Chinese, and read aloud the speeches of Benjamin Franklin. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, “The Marshall Plan That Failed,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/failed-marshall-plan/564905/ (accessed June 20, 2019).
- 149.
Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 78.
- 150.
Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy, 11.
- 151.
Nancy B. Tucker, comp., China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945–1996 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 62.
- 152.
Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy, 127.
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William A. Rintz, “The Failure of the China White Paper,” Constructing the Past 11, no. 1 (2009): 76–84, http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol11/iss1/8 (accessed March 26, 2019).
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Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy, 121.
- 155.
Cohen, “American Perceptions of China,” 78.
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Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy, 176.
- 157.
Relations between Stalin and Mao were testy, and the notion that the Chinese communists were indoctrinated by the Soviet communists ended with the commencement of the Sino-Soviet split in the wake of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation policy in 1956. Indeed, it was Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, not the Soviet Union, which led the revolutionary movements across Southeast Asia.
- 158.
HathiTrust, “Statement by Secretary Acheson: Basic Principles of US Policy toward the Far East,” State Department Bulletin, XXI, August 15, 1949, 236, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293008121190;view=1up;seq=276 (accessed May 17, 2019). Emphasis added.
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HathiTrust, “George F. Kennan: The International Situation,” State Department Bulletin, XXI, September 5, 1949, 324, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293008121190;view=1up;seq=364 (accessed May 17, 2019).
- 160.
See Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, especially Chapter 6.
- 161.
China’s decision to enter the Korean War in October 1950 followed the American dismissal of intelligence that the Chinese would cross the Yalu River to fight the American 8th Army if it advanced further than the 38th parallel. Acheson seriously underestimated the Chinese and their commitment to communism. The view in Washington, wrongly held, was that any decision to intervene in Korea would be made in Moscow and not in Beijing. Bruce Riedel, “Catastrophe on the Yalu: America’s Intelligence Failure in Korea,” Brooking Institution, September 13, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/09/13/catastrophe-on-the-yalu-americas-intelligence-failure-in-korea/ (accessed May 17, 2019).
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David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 138.
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Campbell, Writing Security, 140.
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Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon gained seats as a result of this election. See William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77.
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Campbell writes that the ‘Red Scare’ can be traced back to 1919, although it was not necessarily the point of departure for all subsequent Red Scares. Campbell, Writing Security, 140, 144.
- 166.
Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, 91.
- 167.
Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, 91.
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Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill Company, 1964), 4.
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Murray, Red Scare, 280.
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Campbell, Writing Security, 160.
- 171.
Chafe, The Unfinished Journey, 104.
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Murray, Red Scare, 281.
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Robert I. Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman Doctrine Speech,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1999): 570–591 at 570.
- 174.
Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever,” 577.
- 175.
Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever,” 570.
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‘Freedom’ involved ‘free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression’. Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever,” 580.
- 177.
Spalding, “The Enduring Significance of the Truman Doctrine,” 569.
- 178.
Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever,” 583.
- 179.
Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever,” 586.
- 180.
For more on the process of the ‘narrative shuffle’, see Felix Ciută, “The End(s) of NATO: Security, Strategic Action and Narrative Transformation,” Contemporary Security Policy 23, no. 1 (2002): 35–62.
- 181.
Campbell, Writing Security, 23.
- 182.
Ivie, “Fire, Flood and Red Fever,” 587–88.
- 183.
Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 2001), 77.
- 184.
Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy, 181.
- 185.
Paradoxically antithetical to US values of freedom and democracy, anti-communist governments, no matter how corrupt or authoritarian or unpopular, were able to receive US support throughout the Cold War.
- 186.
Kagan and Kagan, “Oh Say Can You See? American Cultural Blinders on China,” 27.
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James Peck, “The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America’s China Watchers,” in America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations, eds. Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (New York: Random House, 1971), 40–66 at 49–50.
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Heritage, A., Lee, P.K. (2020). American Construction of Regional Order in the Asia-Pacific, 1945–1955. In: Order, Contestation and Ontological Security-Seeking in the South China Sea. Governance, Security and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34807-6_3
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