Reexamining the Marshall Mission
US Policy toward the Unification of China
2005 Volume 2005 Issue 143 Pages 141-154,L15
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2005 Volume 2005 Issue 143 Pages 141-154,L15
My aim in this paper is to critically explore previous studies on “Marshall Mission” and to offer a new approach.
Most of previous studies can be reduced into two different views. The first school argues that the main purpose of the mission was to make a truce and form a united democratic government in China in an effort to minimize US intervention in Asia, particularly in China. The second school focuses on the northeast of China in which the United States had endeavored to support the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) efforts to regain territory and interprets the US policy as one of anti-communist “containment”. Each of the two schools emphasizes only one of the missions of Marshall, which in each case is considered unimportant by the opposing approach. Both of them fail to capture how the United States aimed at uniting the whole areas of China.
I will explore the US policy regarding China's unification. America's postwar Asian regional order was based upon the assumption of a “united China” whose territory and political regime had to be respectively restored and fixed. However, due to the lack of such a united China, the United States had to directly or indirectly intervene in the process of the unification. Thereupon, arguments over whether the formation of the “united democratic China” or a territorial restoration unilaterally by KMT should be given primacy appeared and continued to confuse US government policy at least from 1943 to 1947. The former was emphasized mainly by the State Department and the latter mainly by the War Department.
The Marshall Mission can be reexamined in this context. In this paper, by focusing on how the US government formulated the missions of Marshall from November to December of 1945, it is argued that the resulting missions were composed of the two directions mentioned above: the mission to the northeast of China reflects the policy advocated by the War Department; while that in “China proper” (except for the northern China) was decided according to the policy of the State Department; finally in the liberated areas of northern China we find a mixture of both policy approaches. Eventually, however, the Marshall Mission failed to achieve any of the missions and thereafter the United States gave up its policy aiming at the unification of China.
