Chapter 6: China Confronts Both Superpowers
1 “Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk addresses China
Institute in America, May 18, 1951,” as reproduced in “Editorial
Note,” Fredrick Aandahl, ed., Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1951, vol. 7,
Korea and China: Part 2 (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 1671–72.
2 Due to differences in dialect and methods of
transliteration, Quemoy is elsewhere known as “Jinmen,” “Kinmen,”
or “Ch’in-men.” Matsu is also known as “Mazu.”
3 Xiamen was then known in the Western press as
“Amoy”; Fuzhou was “Foochow.”
4 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the
Congress on the State of the Union: February 2, 1953,” no. 6,
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United
States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1960), 17.
5 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold
War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005),
131.
6 Robert L. Suettinger, “U.S. ‘Management’ of Three
Taiwan Strait ‘Crises,’” in Michael D. Swaine and Zhang Tuosheng
with Danielle F. S. Cohen, eds., Managing
Sino-American Crises: Case Studies and Analysis (Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006),
254.
7 Ibid., 255.
8 “The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the Atom
Bomb: January 28th, 1955 (Main points of conversation with
Ambassador Carl-Johan [Cay] Sundstrom, the first Finnish envoy to
China, upon presentation of his credentials in Beijing),”
Mao Tse-tung: Selected Works, vol. 5
(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 152–53.
9 “Text of the Joint Resolution on the Defense of
Formosa: February 7, 1955,” Department of
State Bulletin, vol. 32, no. 815 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1955), 213.
10 “Editorial Note,” in John P. Glennon, ed.,
Foreign Relations of the United States
(FRUS), vol. 19, National Security
Policy, 1955–1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1990), 61.
11 Suettinger, “U.S. ‘Management’ of Three Taiwan
Strait ‘Crises,’” 258.
12 Strobe Talbott, trans. and ed., Khrushchev Remembers : The Last Testament (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1974), 263.
13 “Memorandum of Conversation of N. S. Khrushchev
with Mao Zedong, Beijing: 2 October 1959,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin
12/13 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, Fall/ Winter 2001), 264.
14 Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Random House,
2005), 389–90.
15 Zhang Baijia and Jia Qingguo, “Steering Wheel,
Shock Absorber, and Diplomatic Probe in Confrontation:
Sino-American Ambassadorial Talks Seen from the Chinese
Perspective,” in Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds.,
Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China
Diplomacy, 1954–1973 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), 185.
16 Steven Goldstein, “Dialogue of the Deaf? The
Sino-American Ambassadorial-Level Talks, 1955–1970,” in Ross and
Jiang, eds., Re-examining the Cold War,
200. For a compelling history of the talks making use of both
Chinese and American sources, see Yafeng Xia, Negotiating with the Enemy: U. S.-China Talks During the
Cold War, 1949–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006).
17 “Text of Rusk’s Statement to House Panel on U.S.
Policy Toward Communist China,” New York
Times (April 17, 1966), accessed at ProQuest Historical
Newspapers (1851–2007).
18 Ibid.
19 Talbott, trans. and ed., Khrushchev Remembers, 249.
20 Lorenz M. Lüthi, The
Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 38.
21 The October Revolution refers to the Bolshevik
seizure of power in October 1917.
22 Stuart Schram, The Thought
of Mao Tse-Tung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 113.
23 Ibid., 149.
24 Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet
Split, 50, citing author examination of 1956 Chinese
“Internal Reference Reports” and Wu Lengxi, Shinian lunzhan, 1956–1966: ZhongSu guanxi huiyilu
[Ten Years of Debate, 1956–1966: Recollections
of Sino-Soviet Relations] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian,
1999), (memoirs of the former head of China’s official Xinhua news
agency).
25 Ibid., 62–63.
26 Li Zhisui, The Private Life
of Chairman Mao, trans. Tai Hung-chao (New York: Random
House, 1994), 261–62.
27 Talbott, trans. and ed., Khrushchev Remembers, 255.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 260.
30 “Playing for High Stakes: Khrushchev speaks out
on Mao, Kennedy, Nixon and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” LIFE 69, no. 25 (December 18, 1970),
25.
31 The Nationalist Party, also known as the
Kuomintang.
32 “First conversation between N. S. Khrushchev and
Mao Zedong: 7/31/1958,” Cold War International
History Project: Virtual Archive, Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, accessed at www.cwihp.org.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003), 392.
36 “Discussion Between N. S. Khrushchev and Mao
Zedong: October 03, 1959,” Archive of the President of the Russian
Federation (APRF), fond 52, opis 1, delo 499, listy 1–33, trans.
Vladislav M. Zubok, Cold War International
History Project: Virtual Archive, Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, accessed at www.cwihp.org.
37 Ibid.
38 Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet
Split, 101; Wu Lengxi, “Inside Story of the Decision Making
During the Shelling of Jinmen” (Zhuanji
wenxue [Biographical
Literature], Beijing, no. 1, 1994), as translated and
reproduced in Li Xiaobing, Chen Jian, and David L. Wilson, eds.,
“Mao Zedong’s Handling of the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958:
Chinese Recollections and Documents,” Cold War
International History Project Bulletin 6/7 (Washington,
D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Winter
1995), 213–14.
39 Wu, “Inside Story of the Decision Making During
the Shelling of Jinmen,” 208.
40 Ibid., 209–10.
41 Gong Li, “Tension Across the Taiwan Strait in
the 1950s: Chinese Strategy and Tactics,” in Ross and Jiang, eds.,
Re-examining the Cold War, 157–58; Chen
Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001),
184.
42 Chen, Mao’s China and the
Cold War, 184–85.
43 “Statement by the Secretary of State, September
4, 1958,” in Harriet Dashiell Schwar, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS),
1958–1960, vol. 19, China
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996),
135.
44 “Telegram from the Embassy in the Soviet Union
to the Department of State, Moscow, September 7, 1958, 9 p.m.,”
FRUS 19, 151.1.
45 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Letter to Nikita
Khrushchev, Chairman, Council of Ministers, U.S.S.R., on the
Formosa Situation: September 13, 1958,” no. 263, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United
States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1960), 702.
46 Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1990),
251–52.
47 Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet
Split, 102.
48 Ibid., 102–3.
49 “Telegram from the Embassy in the Soviet Union
to the Department of State, September 19, 1958, 8 p.m.,”
FRUS 19, 236.
50 “Discussion Between N. S. Khrushchev and Mao
Zedong: October 03, 1959.”
51 Xia, Negotiating with the
Enemy, 98–99.
52 On September 30, 1958, six weeks into the second
offshore islands crisis, Dulles gave a press conference in which he
questioned the utility of stationing so many Nationalist troops on
Quemoy and Matsu, and noted that the United States bore “no legal
responsibility to defend the coastal islands.” Chiang Kai-shek
responded the next day by dismissing Dulles’s remarks as a
“unilateral statement” that Taipei “had no obligation to abide by,”
and Taipei continued to defend and fortify the islands. Li,
“Tension Across the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s: Chinese Strategy
and Tactics,” 163.
53 “Memorandum of Conversation, Beijing, February
24, 1972, 5:15–8:05 p.m.,” in Steven E. Phillips, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS),
1969–1976, vol. 17, China
1969–1972 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 2006), 766.
54 Talbott, trans. and ed., Khrushchev Remembers, 265.