Allen S. Whiting.
China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War. New York: MacMillan, 1960.
Allen
Whiting’s China Crosses the Yalu is the result of Cold War cooperation
between academics and the United States government to “understand the
enemy.” A former member of the social
science division at the RAND Corporation, Whiting wrote the book at the behest
of the U.S. Air Force. Nonetheless, China
Crosses the Yalu offers valuable insights on the origins of Chinese
intervention in the Korean War.
One
of Whiting’s main hypotheses is that Chinese leaders were extremely reluctant
to enter the Korean War. Only after
China had exhausted all political and diplomatic measures, Whiting holds, did
Chinese troops finally cross the Yalu in October 1950. Whiting concludes that the American decision
to cross the 38th parallel, advance to China’s Manchurian border,
and unite all of Korea under United Nations control gave Chinese leaders little
choice but to intervene. Chinese troops
fought to protect Chinese national security, he writes, not as automatons
following orders from the Soviet Union.
Whiting draws upon Chinese propaganda and official statements to warn
against American “miscalculation” and “failure in communication,” and argues
that the United States failed to grasp China’s resolve to defend its borders
(pp. 168, 172). In Whiting’s final
analysis, China’s military successes in Korea bolstered the Communist regime
both at home and abroad.
Because
his source base was limited to official Chinese sources, Whiting’s findings are
highly speculative. Indeed, more recent
studies like Chen Jian’s China’s Road to the Korean War
(1994) have drawn upon newly released archival material to flesh out the
Chinese leadership’s decision-making process.
However, even given the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to dispute
Whiting’s contention that while China’s leaders did not welcome the Korean War
in 1950, they took maximum advantage of the opportunities offered by the war.
In fact,
recent scholarship largely overlooks
several important factors highlighted by Whiting, particularly Sino-Soviet
concern about American rearmament of Japan and how the Korean War permanently
postponed the invasion of Taiwan.
Considering the anti-communist atmosphere
that prevailed when Whiting wrote China Crosses the Yalu, his attempt to
analyze the months leading up to October 1950 from the “rational” perspective
of Chinese leaders is remarkably even-handed.
While later events would throw Mao Zedong’s rationality as a decision
maker into serious question, it is important to avoid projecting the radical
utopianism of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution backwards to the
1950s transition period.
Whiting
begins the book on shaky ground with an ill-advised chapter on the factors that
shaped the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy. The book’s main chapters tracing the path to full-blown
Sino-American military confrontation contradict Whiting’s characterization of
the Party as an isolated band of revolutionaries who had “xenophobic attitudes
with expansionist tendencies” (p. 2).
Whiting’s depiction of China’s diplomatic restraint in the face of a major security threat actually portrays a sophisticated, cautious regime.
Contemporary
reviews of the book were quite mixed.
Almost every reviewer faulted Whiting for his shaky sources. In a China Quarterly review, Chalmers
Johnson assailed the book for its superficial analysis, jargon-laden writing,
and lack of new information on certain unanswered questions about the Korean War. Johnson was particularly rankled by Whiting’s lack of emphasis on the phenomenon of Chinese nationalism, and
complained that the book’s “usefulness is greatly restricted by major defects”
(9.1, 1962, pp. 200-204). Although China
Crosses the Yalu has problems and is clearly a product of its time and
political environment, more recent scholarship has failed to invalidate
Whiting’s insights about what the Korean War meant for China.
Jeremy
Brown
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