Reddit warlords call to arms5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() Truman had allegedly tolerated, were responsible for the "loss" of China. In the early 1950s, the Truman administration was attacked for the "loss" of China with Senator McCarthy charging in a 1950 speech that "Communists and queers" in the State Department, whom President Harry S. The speech, which McCarthy repeated shortly afterwards in Salt Lake City, made him into a national figure. In his speech on 7 February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia before the Ohio County Women's Republican Club, McCarthy blamed Acheson, whom he called "this pompous diplomat in striped pants", for the "loss of China", making the sensationalist claim: "While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department". It also played a large role in the rise of Joseph McCarthy, who, with his allies, sought scapegoats for that "loss", targeting notably Owen Lattimore, an influential scholar of Central Asia. It led to a "rancorous and divisive debate" and the issue was exploited by the Republicans at the polls in 1952. The "loss of China" was portrayed by critics of the Truman Administration as an "avoidable catastrophe". Īt the time, Acheson's China White Paper with its catalog of $2 billion worth of American aid provided to China since 1946 was widely mocked as an excuse for allowing what was widely seen as a geopolitical disaster which allowed the formation of a Sino-Soviet bloc with the potential to dominate Eurasia. Everything American diplomats had achieved in Europe-the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO-momentarily seemed annulled by this disaster in Asia. But Chiang Kai-shek! Acheson's strategy to contain Red aggression seemed to burst wide open. Stalin's later treachery had been deplorable but unsurprising. Throughout the great war the United Nations Big Four had been Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Chiang. The China it knew- Pearl Buck's peasants, rejoicing in the good earth-had been dependable, democratic, warm and above all pro-American. ![]() The author William Manchester remembered the public reaction in 1949 in his 1973 book The Glory and the Dream: In 1949, the fall of the Kuomintang government was widely viewed within the United States as a catastrophe. In August 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson issued the China White Paper, a compilation of official documents to defend the administration's record and argue that there was little that the United States could have done to prevent Communist victory. In that sense, says Waldron, "the collapse of China into communism was aided by the incompetence of Roosevelt's policy." Davies predicted that after the war China would become a power vacuum, tempting to Moscow, which the Nationalists could not deal with. Historian Arthur Waldron argues that the president mistakenly thought of China as a great power securely held by Chiang Kai-shek, whose hold on power was actually tenuous. Davies later wrote that he and the Foreign Service officers in China reported to Washington that material support to Chiang Kai-shek during the war against Japan would not transform the Nationalist government, adding that Roosevelt's poor choice of personal emissaries to China contributed to the failure of his policy. While they predicted a Communist victory, they did not advocate one. was among the " China Hands" who were blamed for the loss of China. Roosevelt had assumed that China, under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership, would become a great power after the war, along with the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. In American political discourse, the " loss of China" is the unexpected Chinese Communist Party takeover of mainland China from the U.S.-backed Chinese Kuomintang government in 1949 and therefore the "loss of China to communism." Background ĭuring World War II, Franklin D.
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