82 { China’s Quest
went a long way toward meeting the US/UN position. Shortly after Stalin’s
death, Zhou flew to Moscow to discuss matters with the Soviet Union’s new
leadership. The two sides agreed to end the war on the basis of “reasonable
compromises with the enemy.”
As noted earlier, Beijing achieved none of the negotiating objectives laid out
by Zhou Enlai for the armistice talk. US forces remained in South Korea, and
the United Nations remained deeply involved in the Korean question. China
remained outside the UN for nearly twenty more years. US military forces
remained in the Taiwan Strait. And China would not sign a peace treaty with
Japan until 1978. China nonetheless deemed the war a success. There were
good grounds for this judgment. Beijing had confronted the United States
and fought it to a standstill on Korean battlefields. It had forced the United
States to give up its demand for a demarcation line north of Pyongyang and,
more substantially, to abandon its fall 1950 objective of unifying Korea under
US tutelage. “Korea’s revolutionary forces” were re-established in their terri-
torial bastion. The United States was also forced to accept the PRC as an equal
at the bargaining table and agree to an international conference with PRC
participation to discuss a political settlement in Korea and the Far East. (This
would be the 1954 Geneva Conference.)
Most substantially of all, and irrespective of the give and take at the nego-
tiations, PRC willingness to go to war with the United States from a position
of great weakness and against seemingly overwhelmingly American power
profoundly altered the US perception of the PRC and its power. The United
States began to take PRC power quite seriously. “Communist China” was
quite ready for war with the United States, Americans concluded. The PRC
was a dangerous power. This “lesson of Korea”—don’t discount or underes-
timate China’s power—would underlie two decades of US effort to “contain
Communist China” and another PRC-US war, this one indirect, in Vietnam.
“The lesson of Korea,” underestimating communist-ruled China’s readiness
for war with the United States, would also be a fundamental determinant of
the US strategy of “gradual, limited escalation” during the Vietnam War of
the 1960s.
An interesting discrepancy exists between American and Chinese views
regarding the role of US nuclear threats in ending the Korean War. US lead-
ers of the Eisenhower Administration believed, both during the final stage
of the peace negotiations and subsequently, that US threats to use nuclear
weapons unless the war was swiftly concluded were instrumental in per-
suading Beijing to end the war. The evidence of this belief in top levels of
the Eisenhower Administration is solid. Far less solid is the evidence that US
nuclear threats substantially motivated China’s decision to end the war. Chen
Jian found no discussion of this matter in his review of Chinese documents.
Other scholars have marshaled evidence of relative Chinese lack of con-
cern with the US threat. PLA deputy chief of staff Nie Rongzhen told Indian