593 }
War in Korea and Indochina
Consequences of the Korean War
The war that began on June 25, 1950, with an all-out North Korean invasion
of South Korea and which concluded on July 27, 1953, with an armistice (a
formal ceasefire, not a peace treaty) signed by China, the United States, and
North and South Korea had a deep impact on PRC foreign relations. It com-
pleted the collapse of the US strategy of driving a wedge between “Chinese
Titoism” and the Soviet Union. Coming barely four months after signature of
the PRC-USSR treaty of alliance, North Korea’s attack signified to US leaders
that Beijing and Moscow were committed to a common effort to expand the
communist realm in East Asia. Washington responded by attempting to con-
tain that expansionist push, first on the battlefields of South Korea, then in
Indochina, and ultimately all around China’s periphery, from Northeast Asia
through the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia to South Asia. Containment
became the new US strategy in Asia and was to remain in place for twenty
years. The Korean War transformed the PRC into America’s number one
enemy in Asia, and for the next two decades the United States built up posi-
tions of military strength around China while attempting to isolate it diplo-
matically and economically.
The PRC responded in kind to US containment, and for two decades the
PRC and the US waged an intense struggle against one another, each using
virtually all means short of outright war to punish and injure the other. The
Korean War marked the beginning of what historian of Sino-American rela-
tions Warren I. Cohen called the twenty-year “great aberration” in a broader
pattern of generally cooperative Sino-American relations.^1 The flip side of
alienation of the United States was consolidation of PRC ties with the USSR
and of China’s position as leader of the Asian revolutionary movement.
China’s decision to go to war with the United States to rescue the North
Korean regime from extinction finally convinced Stalin that Mao and the