A true rift in the Sino-Soviet alliance had the potential to be an international game changer. If the ideological, economic, political, and military ties that bound Moscow and Beijing together frayed significantly or even snapped, Washington could suddenly have far greater maneuvering room. It might be able to fight the Cold War more effectively. The very nature of the Cold War could change. The Soviet Union might be more compliant. Red China might become more accommodating or more threatening. Moscow might find peaceful coexistence a valuable tool for shoring up its place in the Communist world. China, on the other hand, might enhance efforts to reach out to the emerging, decolonizing, nonwhite states of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East since it would no longer be constrained by deference to the Soviet Union.
Judging the depth and breadth of such a split, however, proved difficult with information so scarce and suspicion so pervasive. Even when sources existed on the Soviet side, Chinese actions remained opaque given the secrecy of the regime, the vagaries of upheaval, and the self-imposed U.S. isolation from the Chinese people. Thus, mounting Sino-Soviet differences gave some observers strong reason to lament restrictions that banned travel and made news reporting and intelligence gathering so difficult.
SINO-SOVIET RELATIONS
For Eisenhower and Dulles, evidence of friction in the Sino-Soviet bloc carried dangers as well as opportunities. It confirmed their conclusion that disunity lay beneath the facade of monolithic Communism. This might mean room for initiatives with Moscow against Beijing or with Beijing against Moscow. But they nevertheless publicly denounced Communism’s monolithic threat and promulgated policy documents such as NSC 166/1, which asserted that “conflicts of interest of both partners with the non-Communist world are for the present much more intense than conflicts of interest between the partners.”1 In other words, they and advisers around them concluded, and concluded repeatedly, that cohesiveness between Beijing and Moscow would remain more significant than discord.
Courtesy of the Army Times and the Editorial Cartoon Collection, McCain Library, University of Southern Mississippi.
Behind the rhetorical condemnation of a Sino-Soviet conspiracy bent on subversion and expansion, the president and secretary of state actually hoped for Titoism in China. The idea had been attacked by Republicans in the Truman years. Nevertheless, the vision of independence from Moscow’s control, as practiced by Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, held out hope for winning the Cold War through erosion of Soviet power and ideological influence.
Eisenhower and Dulles both believed that a Sino-Soviet split could be anticipated. As the administration’s basic national security policy asserted:
The Russians could hardly view with equanimity the development of an independent China on its frontiers which was powerful, well armed, industrially competent, and politically united.… As the inevitable differences in interest, viewpoint, or timing of actions develop between the Russians and the Chinese; as the Chinese tend to become importunate in their demands for Russian assistance or support; or as the role of the Chinese as viceregents for international communism in the Far East becomes too independent and self reliant—there will be strong temptation for the Russians to attempt to move in the direction of greater disciplinary control of the Chinese regime… [and then] the alliance will be critically endangered.2
Questions lingered over the speed and most effective path toward that goal. So as Dulles insisted at Bermuda in December 1953 to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, one approach would be heightening friction by forcing the Chinese to become more dependent on, and more demanding of, Moscow.3 Not all efforts were to be belligerent however. Eisenhower and Dulles also contemplated inducement.
Those who advocated constructive approaches to Beijing, because of, or in spite of, Moscow, however, discovered that opponents of change remained persistent and influential. When in July 1953 George V. Allen, ambassador to India and former ambassador to Yugoslavia, declared that Moscow could not control Beijing as it did Eastern Europe, Taipei charged that the United States favored Chinese Titoism so that it could befriend the Chinese. Six months later when Arthur Dean, head of the American delegation at the Korean War Panmunjom talks, called for better relations with the Chinese to lure them away from Moscow, the congressional China bloc denounced and ridiculed him, suggesting that he might be a tool of unsavory organizations they often targeted, like the Institute of Pacific Relations.4
Analysts and policymakers who tried to ascertain the actual status of Sino-Soviet relations for the president and secretary of state found it exceedingly difficult to penetrate the arcane recesses of Communist bloc affairs and of domestic U.S. disputes regarding bloc evolution. The lack of information proved chronic. Seeing new data in the context of set beliefs proved equally debilitating. Because experienced analysts assumed that the Sino-Soviet relationship was firm and stable, the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) they wrote minimized Sino-Soviet disagreements. Contrary judgments in 1952and 1953 did not gain wide currency. Not only were they deemed unconvincing, but leaders in the intelligence community and beyond preferred to play safe. Thus conflicting interpretations of unity and division persisted into the 1960s.5 Repeated forecasts in a long string of intelligence studies held that there would be no serious weakening of Sino-Soviet ties.
American intelligence and diplomats were not blind to evidence of Sino-Soviet stress even though a few analysts denied the existence of a rift. Espionage revealed that, during the Geneva conference, Moscow refused to pledge intervention in a Sino-American war over Indochina unless Washington used nuclear weapons. CIA analysts used the word “conflict” to describe Moscow-Beijing relations for the first time later that year.6 In the spring of 1955, intelligence sources attested to Soviet dismay at China’s “intransigence, and uncontrollability.”7 Allen Dulles reported to the NSC in October 1956 that the Chinese and the Soviets saw events in a rebellious Hungary quite differently. Beijing’s pleasure in Moscow’s distress could be “the beginning of the first rift between China and the U.S.S.R.”8 Observers pointed to a series of problem areas, including the Sino-Soviet border, patronizing and racist Soviet attitudes, Khrushchev’s 1956 de-Stalinization speech, and disputes regarding Chinese economic development. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov lamented to Bedell Smith, “you must…remember that China is always going to be China, she is never going to be European.”9
Eisenhower recognized the strains in the Sino-Soviet relationship. He understood that Moscow hoped to improve relations with the United States, freeing scarce resources for domestic development rather than defense. The president concluded, as he told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “I do not believe that Russia wants war at this time—in fact, I do not believe that even if we became engaged in a serious fight along the coast of China, Russia would want to intervene with her own forces.”10
Soviet assistance to Chinese technological and economic modernization, however, created confusion about the nature of Sino-Soviet relations. As Rand Corporation analyst Allen S. Whiting pointed out, China could not manufacture its first automobile until 1958, but Soviet assistance allowed it to deploy 1, 800 jet fighters.11 After Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leaders dissolved joint-stock companies and returned the Changchun rail line and the ports of Dalian and Port Arthur. Moscow sent technical experts to China, dispatching 5, 000 of them between 1954 and 1957 alone.12 Historian William Taubman writes that “Zhou Enlai got Khrushchev to fulfill obligations that Moscow had not in fact undertaken.”13 Although State Department assessments considered the amount of aid “niggardly,” Soviet support proved critical to realizing China’s first 5-year plan, placing experts and funds into construction projects, and manufacturing enterprises and energydevelopment.14
But cooperation hid, and did not eliminate, differences between Moscow and Beijing. Stalin had left a legacy of anger and suspicion, having repeatedly placed Soviet national security ahead of the needs of fraternal Communist parties. Particularly galling had been his secret negotiation of a friendship treaty with the Kuomintang in August 1945, his advice not to carry the civil war south of the Yangtze River, and his erratic assistance to the Chinese war effort in Korea.15 Mao objected also to Khrushchev’s declaring peaceful coexistence a basic principle of international affairs and the Soviet leader’s dismissal of the inevitability of an East-West war.16 Mao had long resented Stalin’s expectation of blind obedience and China’s subjugation, recalling that “I couldn’t have eggs or chicken soup for three years because an article appeared in the Soviet Union which said that one shouldn’t eat them.” Stalin had endangered the revolution by ignoring Chinese views on developments in China. Further, worship of Stalin had diminished Mao’s own status. He complained that “when Chinese artists painted pictures of me together with Stalin, they always made me a little bit shorter, thus blindly knuckling under to the moral pressure exerted by the Soviet Union.”17
But in spite of Mao’s resentments against Stalin, Khrushchev’s startling attack on Stalin in the so-called secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 struck Chinese leaders as irresponsible. Khrushchev’s unexpected and massive assault on orthodoxy left little of Stalin’s legacy untouched, posing a problem for China, where, notwithstanding Mao’s friction with Stalin, heavy borrowing from the Soviet system had occurred.
Mao resented Khrushchev’s lack of prior consultation and its implication that Beijing remained subservient to Moscow. In fact, after Stalin’s death, Mao believed that his seniority and rising status in the Communist movement, especially among Asians, mandated respect and deference from the younger, less experienced, new leaders in Moscow.18 Instead they ignored him and may have aimed indirectly to denounce his claims to infallibility along with Stalin’s cult of personality.19 Khrushchev “invariably insulted the sensitive Chinese,” observed historians Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov. “Where he had to be delicate, he was bombastic, where tact was required, he was downright rude.”20
When the secret speech ignited rebellion in Eastern Europe, Mao declared it confirmation that Khrushchev had destabilized the bloc.21 Khrushchev foolishly was “handing the sword to others, helping the tigers harm us.”22 China rendered Moscow moral and diplomatic support but utilized Soviet distress to leverage more material assistance. According to Marshal Nie Rongzhen, who ran China’s nuclear development program, for example, the Hungarian revolution of October 1956 provided Beijing with the ideal opening to secure a strategic technical accord.23 Further, Beijing expected a new balance of power to evolve, lessening Soviet domination and allowing more scope to domestic variations on international Communism.24 As Zhou Enlai asserted in March of 1957, “Marxism-Leninism… does not mean that all socialist countries… have… identical views on all questions at all times.”25
Eisenhower knew about the secret speech. Early reports suggested that it had been revolutionary, firmly ending the Stalin era. The president learned about it in greater detail when the CIA obtained a copy from Poland via Israeli intelligence in April 1956. Eisenhower approved its publication in the New York Times with the encouragement of Allen Dulles, who argued that a this would cause disarray in the Communist bloc.26 This had long been part of American strategy, using the media to emphasize Sino-Soviet resentments to drive the Soviets and Chinese apart. Washington pointed to Soviet imperialistic exploitation of Chinese territory in the northeast and sacrifice of Chinese soldiers in Korea, where US officials insisted that the Soviets refused to fight.27 There were also xenophobic strains among the Chinese people to be exploited, given the widespread intrusion of Russians into China’s urban areas and what many Chinese felt was the Russians’ arrogant demeanor. Simultaneously, VOA broadcasts to Soviet audiences emphasized China’s exploding population and exploited government fears of hordes flooding vast tracts of empty Soviet lands in the Far East.28
Soviet leaders did not have to be encouraged in their distrust of Beijing and fear of its recklessness. Stalin spied on Mao during the 1950 visit to Moscow, which produced the Sino-Soviet alliance treaty. Mao continually felt compelled to reassure Moscow that he would not be a Chinese Tito.29 Khrushchev saw Mao as a master of “cajolery, treachery, savage vengeance, and deceit” and complained about Mao’s “unwillingness to consider anyone else his equal.”30 Indeed, Khrushchev found the pretense of friendship burdensome and remained on guard around Mao. Khrushchev remarked in his memoirs that “conflict between us and China is inevitable.”31 Soviet leaders, who were every bit as Europe centered as their American counterparts, were preoccupied with the issue of Germany’s rearmament and its integration into NATO, leaving little extra energy to deal with Chinese irredentism regarding Taiwan. And although the Soviets recognized that the Chinese still were consolidating their hold on power, securing national boundaries, eliminating internal dissent, and hoping to uproot colonies and thwart imperialists in the region, they themselves had reached another stage of development. Soviet officials were more concerned about stability than revolution and more interested in détente with the West than challenging superior power for minimal gain.32
Suspicion and rivalry also developed over the future of decolonizing peoples. After Stalin’s death, Mao no longer felt the same constraints in reaching out to nonwhite peoples. Although Mao assured Moscow that “the USSR is the center of the socialist camp. There cannot be other centers,” he not only urged greater equality within the bloc but also sought a larger role for China among emerging states.33 His efforts in the third world blossomed after 1960, but even before that he championed China as the most potent model to be followed in efforts to overthrow imperialism, win independence, secure political rights, and develop backward economies. The fact that Beijing was to some extent discredited by the 1959 Sino-Indian border clashes and Beijing’s unrelenting Sinocentrism did not diminish this as a source of Sino-Soviet friction.34
Moscow’s successful launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile in August 1957 and Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, won China’s admiration but did not significantly ameliorate tensions. Mao Zedong asserted that a historic turning point had come; the United States could never hope to catch up. Indeed, he displayed “a greater confidence in Soviet strategic power than the Russians themselves had,” observed Soviet specialist Donald Zagoria.35 Just a month after the launch of Sputnik, Mao recanted the policy of peaceful coexistence, which no longer seemed necessary.36
China’s enthusiasm alarmed the Soviets, leading Moscow to try to assert more control over the Chinese. Moscow had been rebuffed in April and July of 1957 regarding proposals for a jointly owned naval fleet and a long-wave radio station on Chinese soil. China’s response had been a surprise to Moscow since in both cases Beijing had requested assistance. In fact, during1957, the Soviet Union helped China to build three low-power radio facilities based on common security imperatives. Khrushchev had believed that the Chinese would welcome a radio station on Hainan Island, which would support not just Soviet ships but also the new navy that Moscow was helping China to build.37 He went to Beijing to explain the Soviet proposal, but Mao angrily denounced it, replying, “Why don’t you take the whole Chinese seacoast?”38
Soviet space prowess frightened Americans even as the Chinese celebrated this socialist triumph. Eisenhower found that the public and its representatives believed the nation faced a serious challenge, forcing the government to appropriate large sums for research and science education and confronting the Republican administration with partisan attacks for allowing a missile gap to develop. Lyndon Johnson for one mocked Eisenhower’s claim that he would soon launch a more sophisticated satellite, saying, “perhaps it will even have chrome trim—and automatic windshield wipers.”39 It did not calm popular alarm or enhance Eisenhower’s authority that in the fall the president experienced a heart attack and remained hospitalized and convalescent for weeks.
UNITED NATIONS
Eisenhower and Dulles saw Moscow’s role in isolating China from the international community as a further source of Sino-Soviet friction. For instance, in 1950 Moscow walked out of the United Nations to protest Taipei’s control of the Chinese UN seat, but this was largely unnecessary since Washington had not yet formally opposed PRC admission. The Soviet action severely complicated Chinese entry into the UN. Ruth Bacon, of the State Department’s UN advisory staff, argued in 1953 that the Soviets understood the workings of the organization too well to have inadvertently chosen tactics that ensured that Beijing would not be admitted. Early in 1954, Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, dismissed Soviet statements on China’s behalf as “perfunctory.”40
China’s exclusion from the UN had not originally been Washington’s intention, and it did little to try to prevent Chinese representation. The People’s Republic made its desire to join clear.41 But with the outbreak of the war in Korea and China’s direct involvement, all that changed. The United States led the effort to brand the People’s Republic an aggressor state and to impose a UN trade embargo. Washington concluded that Taipei’s Security Council vote had been crucial to facilitating UN action in Korea and could not be spared in future crises. The United States decided it would keep China out.
Beijing, at the same time, grew more apprehensive about the UN. The Chinese found their national security threatened by a United Nations army under American command. Although Beijing would continue to claim the UN seat under universal charter principles, it also became disillusioned with the apparent subservience of the institution to American policies.42
The “Chirep” question, as the confrontation over which Chinese government would control China’s UN seats was known, aroused considerable passion among Americans in the 1950s due to the casualties incurred in the Korean War. Having fought the Chinese on a United Nations battlefield, many Americans opposed admission of the enemy into the inner sanctum of peacemaking. The China Lobby believed the issue perfect for shaping national policy on China and created the Committee for One Million against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations in the summer of 1953. Although the precise pedigree of the organization remains mysterious and may have involved the CIA, it received its impetus from hearings in the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Far East, chaired by Walter Judd (R-MN), and throughout its history wielded its greatest influence on Capitol Hill. Indeed, even before the Committee for One Million had been inaugurated, resolutions proposed by Senators William Knowland (R-CA), William E. Jenner (R-IN), and Everett Dirksen (R-IL) sought to ban contributions to, or withdraw the United States from, the UN if the members approved China’s entry.43 By July 1954, the committee’s petition drive to block China’s inclusion had collected one million signatures.
When the Committee for One Million sought support, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) along with the Catholic and Jewish War Veterans, the Gold Star Mothers, the American Legion, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs willingly complied.44 The AFL proved especially active, having battled Communism in the labor movement since the 1930s. Both AFL President George Meany and Vice President Matthew Woll lobbied assiduously against Beijing.
Public opinion polling reflected more diverse opinions, especially as the decade advanced. In 1954, although just a minority favored leaving the UN were China to be admitted (some 59 percent believed that the United State sought to accept the will of a UN majority), a decided majority opposed China’s admission (78 percent against to 7 percent in favor).45 By May 1957, a Chicago Daily News poll revealed that support for a new administration policy existed among Democrats (70 percent favored China’s admission) but not in the president’s party (just 25 percent of Republicans agreed).46 Prominent newspapers also began to question whether the time had come to change inflexible attitudes.47 In the Senate, votes for excluding China from the United Nations remained overwhelming even as individual members privately acknowledged that the U.S. position on the issue could not be maintained indefinitely.48
The evidence from the documentary record, however, shows that neither Dwight Eisenhower nor John Foster Dulles agreed with barring China from the UN even when much of their public rhetoric stimulated popular passions on the question. Eisenhower resisted closing doors. He openly opposed Senate efforts to cut off funding to the UN should China be admitted, arguing that the UN was too important to the United States. Meeting personally with Republican leaders, he reminded them that every nation must accept defeat occasionally and that it would be foolish to “tie our hands irrevocably” regarding China.49 Although it was also true that Eisenhower did not want to see a belligerent China shoot its way into the organization, he objected to emotional policies that simultaneously threatened the UN and American prestige.50 Thus he articulated moral objections to China’s accession but pragmatically accepted eventual Chinese membership.51
The secretary of state also suggested there might be circumstances under which China could be integrated into the world community. Dulles had written to Henry Luce in 1950 asserting that Peking should neither be isolated nor excluded from the United Nations on ideological grounds. If the new regime could effectively control the population and rule its territory, then it would merit entry.52 In the summer of 1954, although he told the press corps that his views had changed because of the Korean War, he nevertheless pursued the idea of admission with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Applying his Two Chinas preference, Dulles proposed that India be substituted for China in the United Nations Security Council and that both Chinas then be seated in the General Assembly.53 The following month he raised the point with John Dickey, an international lawyer, suggesting an amendment to the UN Charter that would change the composition of the Security Council. The prospect of having the Communist Chinese in the UN would not be quite so alarming if they would not have access to the veto power inherent in permanent membership in the Security Council.54
Accordingly, the president and secretary opposed the obvious tactic that would prevent China’s admission—use of the U.S. Security Council veto. Dulles’s disinclination to use the veto received broad support from State Department officials. Among Dulles’s close associates, Robert Bowie argued that “we were using up an enormous amount of effort to keep China out of the UN every year. We had to try to twist arms so that they could never get a majority.… My view was that it made more sense… not to use up all this political capital.” Instead Bowie advocated dual representation, assuming China would reject it but accepting China’s admission if it went along. Dulles, he believed, did not want to mount a fight over the issue because Dulles “didn’t think this was terribly important to American foreign policy.”55 United Nations specialists like Ruth Bacon insisted that conditions had not changed significantly from 1950, when the State Department had concluded that the issue was procedural and did not warrant application of the veto. A report by the officer in charge of international security issues for the Office of UN Political and Security Affairs contended that since the veto could ban China only from the Security Council, the United States and China might sit awkwardly together in all other UN venues.56
Pressure to use the veto, on the other hand, came from many sources. UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge insisted that Dulles authorize casting a veto to block China. To Chinese UN delegate T. F. Tsiang Lodge confided that he planned to veto China’s admission even though he had not obtained Dulles’s approval.57 Karl Rankin, whom Dulles considered extreme on the question, warned from Taipei that if Red China were accommodated without changing its government and policies, the UN would be discredited in the region and small countries would feel the need to harmonize their views with those of Beijing. Rankin made his views easier to ignore when he broadened his recommendation to advocate expelling the Soviet Union and other Communist countries for violating the principles of the UN Charter.58 More soberly, a joint Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs and Bureau of International Organization Affairs study in August argued that a number of good reasons existed to keep China out of the UN, including its actions in Korea, support for Ho Chi Minh, illegal detention of American citizens, suppression of human rights, and failure to assume China’s past treaty obligations. The UN might be a universal organization, but the report insisted that outlaw governments should not qualify.59 Similar opposition to a Beijing presence in the UN appeared in several official policy documents, including NSC 48/5 of May 17, 1951, and NSC 146/2 and 166/1 of November 1953.60
The key to Washington’s success in keeping China out, however, became the moratorium arrangement, not the veto. Through this mechanism, devised informally by Washington and London in May 1951, the question would be deferred rather than debated.61 During the course of the Korean War, few countries chose to confront Washington. But as fighting ended, various governments indicated that they wanted China in the world community, hoping such a move would prevent future wars.62 Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary General, urged Washington to consider the ecumenical character of the UN and abandon its inclination to make the UN a “good boys club.”63 Ironically, Taipei also rejected the moratorium procedure, preferring to establish a clear record of votes against China.64
To Washington’s chagrin, Britain soon became uncomfortable with continuing the moratorium policy. British officials put preservation of Anglo-American amity above equity for China—the prime minister noting that American feeling arising from wartime “losses and suffering” would not be “influenced by considerations of logic or expediency.” Nevertheless, the British complained that China’s exclusion grew increasingly indefensible to domestic constituents and members of the Commonwealth, not to mention the Chinese.65 New Delhi, in fact, pressed Dulles and Eisenhower even harder than did London. Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, India’s UN ambassador, who had been dismissed by the United States as untrustworthy and irritating, constantly urged greater flexibility and accommodation.66 London, meanwhile, argued that the United States ought to follow its lead and recognize China, which would simultaneously resolve the United Nations impasse.67
Caught between strong international and domestic views, London remained wary about conflict with Washington over Chinese affairs. A brief prepared in December 1954 anticipating talks in Washington noted that this remained “one of the major threats to closer Anglo-American understanding and to a concerted… approach on other quite unrelated issues.” Anthony Eden darkly concluded in an April 1955 paper he called “In the Soup” that Chinese and U.S. intransigence on the UN role in the Taiwan Strait dispute might plunge them into war. But Britons could not afford to alienate Washington even if the Americans “find elementary prudence unbearably galling.”68 Although the Chinese Nationalists and their American sympathizers protested that the British had too much influence over naive Americans, London complained it had far too little.69 To Eisenhower the issue seemed bigger than just China. When Churchill warned that the Communists must not be allowed to use Taiwan to divide them lest the Soviets then exploit rifts to aggravate more significant European problems, the president concurred.70
Dulles, however, was exasperated with Beijing’s belligerence, appalled by its repressive domestic policies, and hounded by American public opinion and insisted repeatedly to the British that his government had no choice but to bar China.71 His ire was further provoked in July 1954 as concessions were made to Communist forces in Indochina during the closing days of the Geneva conference. Dulles reflected his dismay by appearing to change U.S. policy on admission to the UN, declaring that the United States would use its Security Council veto if necessary to keep China out. He continued by observing that this was unlikely since China’s entry would be “an important question” under the UN charter and would require support from two-thirds of the members. Such a vote, he believed, would not be forthcoming. Nevertheless, U.S. policy seemed to have been reversed.72
The test of the administration’s position came, as it happened, not over the delicate China question but rather on the related issue of admitting Mongolia to the UN. The Soviet Union had been blocking the entry of fourteen applicants, including Spain, Ireland, Austria, and Italy, but in 1955, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson arranged to approve these countries in exchange for seating the People’s Republic of Mongolia in the General Assembly.73 Chiang Kai-shek denounced this move as unacceptable, for giving international standing to a Communist satellite state comprised of territory the Nationalist Chinese claimed as part of China. Chiang dismissed the fact that during World War II he had surrendered rights to Mongolia in exchange for a treaty with the Soviet Union. His concessions, he insisted, had come about under U.S. pressure.74
Eisenhower and Dulles argued to Chiang that using his veto power would be a patently self-destructive act.75 The United States had been committed since the 1948 Vandenberg Resolution to the view that permanent members of the Security Council ought not to use the veto on membership questions, in so doing thwarting the will of the majority. Should Taipei cast its veto, it could turn world opinion against the Republic of China.76
So even though a distraught Dulles had told the press in July that he would resort to the veto to keep China out of the UN, he did not approve of using the veto for that purpose. At a subsequent press conference on December 6, 1955, which has been overlooked by historians, he backtracked. Instead of calling the China issue an important question that would properly be subject to a veto, as he had in July, he declared it a matter of credentials. The United States, he asserted, had not yet decided whether credentials questions could be vetoed.77 Days later when Taiwan actually did veto Mongolia’s entry, Washington did not.
TRAVEL
Eisenhower and Dulles inherited Truman-era prohibitions against travel to China imposed during the Korean War and the People’s Republic’s responding ban in place. The regulations guarded against travel with a potential political edge, such as that in the 1930s and 1940s that had led some to join far-left popular front organizations and others to champion Italian fascism.78 The Manchurian Candidate, a novel published in 1959, made the dangers of exposure to Communism clear: you would be mistreated and exploited, emerging as a dupe, a spy, or an assassin.
The argument that a less opaque and isolated China would be a safer and more manageable China appealed to only a minority of Americans. The Eisenhower administration resisted its entreaties for information about, and access to, the Red Chinese. But newsmen, musicians, scholars, and doctors became increasingly dissatisfied with restrictions as they watched European colleagues benefit from traveling there.79 So when on August 5, 1956, Beijing unilaterally and unexpectedly asked representatives from fifteen news organizations to tour China for a month, it accomplished several purposes. The invitation not only created a broad coalition of journalists eager to go and hostile to U.S. government restrictions; it breached Washington’s cordon sanitaire, getting China the news coverage it had long sought in the U.S. media.80 As Kenneth Young, a former Foreign Service officer, observed, “it is ironic that the Communist regime in Peking, which controlled its press and citizens, initiated this matter of travel and contacts, while the United States government, with its dedication to freedom, opposed it.”81
The immediate U.S. response was, in fact, to refuse. Dulles had planned to use journalist trips as leverage to expedite prisoner releases after the Sino-American repatriation agreement was signed in 1955.82 But in 1956, with little progress on fulfilling the accord, Washington opposed travel, warning that more citizens could be arbitrarily detained.
An assortment of influential news organizations, in contrast, reacted with excitement, including the New York Times, Associated Press, United Press, the Christian Science Monitor, NBC, and CBS. The Washington Post pointed to the absurdity of government excuses: China was hardly likely to invite journalists in order to incarcerate them. Some editors, remembering a Dulles call in 1950 for greater knowledge about China, decried his inflexibility. Others cautioned that the administration’s stance signaled to the world that it was frightened of China and its ideas.83 The Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors called the State Department policy an imposition of an iron curtain.84 And several newsmen went to Hong Kong hoping to find an inconspicuous way to cross the border.85 Before the end of the year, three had defied the government ban only to have their passports revoked and access to their bank accountsthreatened.86
Dulles realized that the blunt rejection of Beijing’s offer could not be sustained. Ambassador Johnson, writing from the ambassadorial talks in Geneva, complained about adverse publicity, insisting that it had had a more negative impact on efforts to gain release of the American prisoners than would the dispatch of the newsmen.87 Dulles suggested that Johnson “intimate” that once all American prisoners were released, civilian as well as military, barriers against American travel to China would likely be dropped, giving China access to the favorable attention it coveted.88
Members of Congress, who otherwise agreed with barring travel to China, objected to stopping newsmen. Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), for one, recalled U.S. government protests in 1949, when the Chinese Communists first ejected reporters. If Americans had had a right to know what was happening inside China then, they did so now as well.89
Finally, in April 1957 Dulles offered a compromise, suggesting that a small pool of journalists be allowed to go without reciprocity for Chinese reporters to enter the United States.90 As Dulles’s information officer told the New York Times, the secretary wanted to move faster but had to tread carefully around the China Lobby outside, and inside, the administration. Dulles understood that a feud with the press would hurt Eisenhower’s presidency. Moreover, he believed that fair reporting from China could be useful in educating the American public. Allen Dulles, on behalf of the CIA, added that having Americans in China would facilitate efforts to collect information.91 By late summer, even unwillingness to provide reciprocity to Chinese journalists weakened once William Knowland came up with a scheme circumventing placement of visas in PRC passports, thus not risking indirect recognition of the Chinese authorities.92
The Chinese, however, spurned the final American posture. By this time, Chinese policies at home and abroad had swung left and compromise was no longer desirable.93 Beijing dismissed Dulles’s change of heart as a desire to facilitate espionage.94
CONCLUSION
In the heart of the Cold War, officials worried that flexibility on any one issue might open floodgates to concessions on many outstanding problems between the United States and the Communist bloc. As a result, the United States proved largely inflexible toward China. The administration’s rhetoric continued to portray Communism as monolithic, and its policy dictated efforts to isolate China internationally. The U.S. government fought Beijing’s admission to the United Nations. It shunned the idea of recognition. It failed to accept the reality of a Sino-Soviet split, with some arguing that Khrushchev implied trouble where none existed in order to mislead Americans.95
But to administration critics and Chiang Kai-shek supporters, more disturbing was the possibility that acknowledging a meaningful Sino-Soviet break could free Eisenhower and Dulles to seek reconciliation with Beijing. Dulles had, after all, suggested that U.S. policy would change if a split were to materialize. Increased dissatisfaction with the economic embargo and the self-defeating ban on travel pinpointed areas where simple changes could be popular and useful. Eisenhower and Dulles regretted antagonizing foreign friends and allies over China. They spoke of the impracticality of trying to keep the Chinese out of the international community and continuing to block UN entry. And they acknowledged that a Sino-Soviet split existed and was growing.
They did not, however, believe that they could defy political trends in the country, ignoring the China Lobby and the Republican right wing in order to repair relations with China. Nothing about that relationship seemed significant enough to risk the administration’s larger agenda. As Robert Bowie noted, “Dulles and Eisenhower tried to keep these people quiet by throwing them verbal bones and acquiescing in certain things which neither Eisenhower nor Dulles thought were terribly important, so as to have a free hand to deal with the other things which they did feel important.”96 In other words, Eisenhower and Dulles never effectively opposed China policies with which they did not agree because they were too busy protecting themselves. That this left the United States as an outlier in international affairs was just collateral damage.
