America's Lost Chance in China? A Reappraisal of Chinese Communist Policy Toward the United States Before 1945

Abstract

Against the background of the Sino-Soviet conflict and the Sino-American rapprochement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some State Department documents were released, which suggest that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1944 and 1945 sought American support and friendship. The impact of these releases on Sino-American studies was sensational. The question asked then was 'What if Mao had come to Washington', of which the underlying message was that the US 'lost a chance' to win over the Chinese Communists from Moscow. As one scholar put it, 'Mao bid for American support as a counterweight to exclusive dependence on the Soviet Union right up to the middle of 1949." But Washington rejected Mao's bid for 'American friendship' in 1945-46, and again rebuffed the CCP's friendly overture in 1949. Thus, the 'short-sighted American policy... forced Peking into Moscow's embrace'.2 It has become a widely-accepted assumption that 'the Chinese Communists acted not according to some ideology or vision of world order, but simply in response to the situation they found themselves in'.3 Since the CCP was non-ideological and flexible, this line of argument inevitably leads to the conclusion that: had Washington dealt with the Communists even-