Communist China Quotes
With the successful Chinese Communist Revolution, the Nationalists were driven off the mainland of China and occupied the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and had a small garrison of soldier on two tiny islands off the Chinese Coast, Quemoy and Matsu. The communist Chinese government wanted control of all three of the Nationalist held islands. It became a campaign issue or whether or not the United States should go to war to protect the two tiny islands from the communists even though there were no civilians on them and they had virtually no value other than symbolic. Nixon, took the position that the Chinese Communists must be stopped as they had world conquest as their objective. Philosophically, many Communists of the time, following Marxist theory, actually believed that Capitalism would crumble and communism would take its place. In that sense many felt that the world would be communist. China, as we now know, was more concerned with counterrevolution by the nationalists, expansionism and growth of Vietnam (her ancient enemy), the rise of Japan, border wars with India, and constant threats from Russia and China had no military plans for world conquest.
Commenting on the fact that China was eliminating it's Constitutional requirement that government leadership had to change every 10 years.
King had just publicly advocated the UN seating of Red China. The negative reaction from politicians who were friends of the Civil Rights Movement was just what Levison was worried about – see {637661}.
Both President Truman and Genera MacArthur, in command in Korea, received this report and several confirmation reports in the subsequent days. On October 30, 1950, 100,000 Chinese troops attacked across the border almost driving MacArthur’s forces into the sea. The Chinese then pushed Allied forces all the way back to the 38th parallel—the divide between North and South Korea. This is yet another stunning example of the major international security events where the Central Intelligence Agency was in the dark and misadvised the administration. See {634967} for another quotation on this Central Intelligence Agency weakness.
Zhou, more than any other Chinese official, was responsible for the dramatic change in the Chinese economic shift from a classical socialist model to a modern market driven competitive economy.
The Communists under Mao won the Civil War easily as the Nationalists were not only corrupt and very unpopular, but they were not very interested in the welfare of the Chinese peasants. Further Chiang was a ruthless dictator. At the time there was great pressure for America to support any faction that was anti Communist regardless of how bad they were themselves. Davies and others who thought that we should have communications with the Communists who would soon control China, were viciously attacked by Senator McCarthy who accused Davies of “loosing China” and the Senator and some other Americans thought that the Nationalists could win the Civil War. We now know that they never had a chance, but at the time they did a very good job of promoting their cause and capability in the United States and especially in Washington. None the less, in the Red Scare, Davies was fired, only to thereafter be awarded the highest civilian award in the nation in recognition of his great and patriotic work.
