War in Korea and Indochina } 79
Chinese side conceded far more of its demands than did the US side. On July
12, 1951, two days after the start of negotiations, Zhou Enlai laid out five condi-
tions for peace. Beijing would achieve none of these objectives. Every one was
rejected by the US/UN side, and China would, one by one, concede each point
to move negotiations forward. Zhou’s five conditions were:
- All foreign troops were to be withdrawn from Korea
- US military forces were to be withdrawn from the Taiwan Strait
- The Korean issue would be settled by the Korean people themselves
- The PRC would assume China’s seat at the United Nations and the
KMT expelled - An international meeting would be convened to discuss signing a
peace treaty with Japan^45
Two CPV generals sat at the negotiating table for China, but negotiations
were overseen by vice foreign minister and longtime head of military intelli-
gence Li Keneng and head of the foreign ministry’s International Information
Bureau Qiao Guanghua. Li and Qiao guided the CPV generals from a spe-
cial facility set up a kilometer or so behind the negotiating site. Zhou Enlai
and, ultimately, Mao in turn guided Li and Qiao, receiving daily reports from
them. Mao’s instruction to his negotiating team was to wage a “political bat-
tle” and not show any hurried desire for peace. Throughout the twenty-four
months of negotiations, the CPV continued limited offensive operations to
keep up the American desire for a negotiated settlement by forcing them to
pay a continuing price in blood.
Once talks began, it quickly became apparently that the United States
would not accept consideration of any of the issues enumerated in Zhou’s
list of “conditions.” From the US standpoint, the only issue to be settled was
ending the fighting in Korea. Withdrawal of foreign (non-Korean) troops
from Korea was a key Chinese objective going into the talks. The day after
talks began, Mao ordered his negotiators to push hard on this: “[We] must
insist that all [foreign]forces withdraw.”^46 After two weeks of persistent US
refusal to discuss the issue, Mao informed his negotiators that they need no
longer insist on the withdrawal of foreign forces, but could leave that issue
to be handled by the postarmistice conference. After several months of US
refusal to pursue “political issues,” Beijing again agreed to narrow the focus
of the talks, assigning all “political issues” issues to a future international
meeting to deliberate over them. A conference would eventually be held in
Geneva in 1954, with nothing of significance regarding Korea accomplished.^47
By July 1951, China’s leaders also recognized that Chinese forces would not
be able, at least as then constituted, to drive US forces out of Korea. They
concluded, however, that China had already won a great victory by overcom-
ing US technological superiority and pushing the United States out of North
Korea, thereby recovering for the KWP its original territorial base north of