Gen. George Marshall’s impossible mission in China: Stop a civil war

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan's book The China Mission was reviewed in the Washington Post.

The telling of George C. Marshall’s failed mission from 1945 to 1947 to end China’s civil war has always been a hostage to history. As China descended into communist rule in the 1950s, it was used by some Americans such as Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, and even an ambitious Democratic congressman from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, as an example of America’s “moral retreat” from its responsibilities to save China. Marshall’s loss of China, McCarthy thundered in a speech in 1951, “must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Undergirding these charges was the belief that no problem was beyond the capacity of America, which stood astride the world following World War II, to solve. Marshall’s failure to unite China’s Nationalist and Communist parties, which had been at war since 1927, into one government and one army must have been part of a communist plot, the charges went, because if it had wanted to, America could have accomplished anything.

On the other side of the ledger were those Americans, such as the historian Barbara Tuchman, who argued that Marshall and America failed to recognize that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were a spent force and that the ineluctable logic of history was going to propel Mao Zedong’s Communists to victory. The United States suffered a “lost chance” in China, their argument went, by not tempting Mao, like it had the independent-minded Yugoslav revolutionary Josip Broz Tito, to distance himself from Moscow.

Again, this view was deeply paternalistic because at root, it denied the Chinese responsibility for their affairs. Ignored were Mao’s decisions to side with the U.S.S.R. and gin up hatred of America. Tuchman’s lost chance in China held that China was America’s to lose.

These days, however, instead of standing astride the globe, Americans are far more conscious of the limits of their power to build nations, win wars and even manage their own affairs. Against this historical backdrop, diplomat and journalist Daniel Kurtz-Phelan has written an engaging book, The China Mission: George C. Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947, that stresses the unavoidability at times of “a kind of failure ultimately accepted as the best of terrible options.”