A New Perspective on the Korean War:
NORTH, ROBERT C.
WRITERS and WRITING A New Perspective on the Korean War China Crosses the Yalu. By Allen S. Whiting. Macmillan. 219 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Robert C. North Associate Professor of Political...
...Events had "proved" the Communist prophecies "correct" and had made militant retaliation "rational" and "justified...
...Inevitably, such words and deeds stirred hostile public and Congressional opinion in the United States, leaving the Truman Administration little choice but to withhold recognition from the People's Republic of China...
...On the one side, "Chinese Communist calculations depended primarily upon Soviet interpretations of American and UN interventions...
...Korean developments, Whiting believes, were also affected by the absence of direct relations between Peking and Washington...
...Within a month Communist authorities placed all American diplomatic personnel there under house arrest...
...militant Communist doctrine...
...Concurrently, a virulent anti-American propaganda campaign was put in motion from Peking...
...Thus, the Korean War, according to Whiting, provides an instructive warning about the dangers of communications failure in limited-war situations...
...Although the White House repudiated those spokesmen who urged more aggressive action, Whiting believes that such public assertions had an important effect which later denials did little to alleviate...
...Reviewed by Robert C. North Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University In a clear, unemotional way this book cuts beneath the charges, countercharges and doctrinal propaganda associated with the Korean War and suggests the crucially important role of faulty communications in drawing the Chinese Communists into that confused and indecisive conflict...
...the second emerged from alleged air intrusions over Chinese territory...
...To some degree the Chinese may have interpreted the repudiations as crude efforts to conceal the "true aims of American imperialism" inadvertently revealed...
...Rather, the Chinese appear to have been impelled into the Korean War by fear that conditions inside China "might be exploited by a determined, powerful enemy on China's doorstep...
...The first took shape from demands by highly placed American officials for a more aggressive policy against the Communist bloc...
...Three phenomena, the author believes, are particularly significant in the shaping of foreign policy in Peking: traditional Chinese xenophobia and a tendency toward expansion...
...These developments influenced the later interaction between Peking and Washington in the Korean War by reinforcing the xenophobic and aggressive elements in the Chinese and ideological components of policy...
...The author's initial purpose was to determine the effect of the developments attending the Korean War on Chinese policy, but in preparing this volume he developed a further concern: the Korean War as an illustration of the general problem of limited war and the difficulties inherent in confining a localized conflict...
...A member of the Social Science Division of the RAND Corporation, Whiting is a scholar with wide experience in problems of Chinese Communist foreign policy and Sino-Soviet relations...
...In the past, I think, entirely too much attention has been given to demonological theories of contemporary international politics and too few attempts have been made to analyze with clinical objectivity the cultural, sociological and psychological determinants of world affairs...
...In "retaliating" against this predicted "imperialist" behavior, Mao and his regime frequently goaded the United States into actions that Communists everywhere could identify as a "disrupt, fail, disrupt again, fail again" pattern...
...Whiting has taken a long step toward putting the Korean War into this refreshing analytic perspective...
...Yet he has made remarkably economical and judicious use of the available sources, and his analysis—done in terms of reciprocal images of act and intent—has produced a valuable and highly stimulating study...
...Later, several of the detainees were imprisoned and tried for alleged abuses of their servants...
...Hence Chinese calculations exaggerated the threat posed by American policy, while American calculations down-graded the seriousness of Chinese concern...
...It was not the particular problems of safeguarding electric power supplies in North Korea or protecting the industrial base in Manchuria that aroused Peking to military action...
...In any case, Whiting feels, the combination of publicly stated aggressive statements and repudiations at that particular time had special significance for Communist analysts...
...Then, as Whiting points out, "this non-recognition policy, largely a result of Chinese Communist behavior, was in turn taken as further confirmation of Mao's strictures against American imperialism...
...Disrupt, fail, disrupt again, fail again, till their doom," Mao once asserted, "that is the logic of imperialism and all reactionaries in this world...
...Thus it was the perception—or rather the misperception—of an American threat to Chinese security that triggered Chinese aggression...
...In undertaking this inquiry, he was severely limited by the non-accessibility of adequate research materials concerning the Korean conflict...
...Nor was the Chinese attitude at that time notably self-assertive or expansionist...
...Because there were no diplomatic ties with China, official exchanges were limited to public communication and open diplomacy, a hazardous situation in which political prestige limits the choice of action to what seems popularly acceptable...
...the denials may also have been accepted as evidence of "contradictions in imperialist circles...
...and an empirical factor resulting from the years of struggle against Kuomintang and Japanese opponents...
...These elements provide Chinese policy-makers with a number of powerful and highly stereotyped expectations about the probable intentions and decisions of other nations...
...The author identifies three types of "imperialist challenge" perceived —however mistakenly—by Chinese and Russian policy-makers...
...For a variety of reasons, this circumstance made such information difficult and sometimes impossible to evaluate...
...the third was encouraged by official public warnings by President Truman and UN Ambassador Warren Austin against Chinese intervention in Korea...
...Whiting describes with chilling clarity how distorted Communist views of international relations became self-fulfilling prophecies...
...From these misperceptions, miscalculations and distortions-mirroredin-distortions, an "entirely new war" emerged as the Chinese committed their troops in Korea...
...On the other side, "American knowledge of Chinese Communist views came, to a considerable degree, through Indian channels...
...This introduced a Soviet bias into the information available to decisionmakers in Peking...
...When Nationalist forces evacuated Manchuria in 1949, United States consular officials remained in Mukden to establish formal contact with the new regime...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 11
