60 { China’s Quest
CCP were genuine communists. Soviet assistance became more generous
now that there were no doubts about China’s global alignment.
Another major consequence of the Korean War was the alienation of
the island of Taiwan from the de facto jurisdiction of the PRC.^2 As will be
discussed below, by late 1949 US leaders had decided to sacrifice Taiwan
to PLA invasion and CCP rule as part of the strategy of driving a wedge
between Soviet and Chinese communists. The February 1950 treaty, fol-
lowed so shortly by North Korea’s invasion, transformed the geopolitical
significance of Taiwan, leading Washington to place Taiwan under US
military protection. US re-engagement with the Nationalist regime led
over several decades to the gradual transformation of the US-Taiwan rela-
tion. Sixty-five years later (in 2015), Taiwan still lies beyond the de facto
sovereignty of the PRC. This traces directly to the Sino-Soviet alliance
and the Korean War.
The PRC’s three year war against the United States reconfirmed China’s
bona fides as a major power. If the Republic of China’s secondary role in the
defeat of Japan had left any doubt about China’s right to sit at the high table of
leading world powers, Mao’s 1950 decision to confront the United States, and
then the success of Chinese forces in fighting the US military to a standstill
in Korea, removed any doubt: China was a major power, able and willing to
defend its interests as it defined them.Historiography of the Origins of the Korean WarThe first question to be asked regarding the Korean War is: who started it?
At the time, North Korea and its allies in Beijing and Moscow insisted that
the war began with a South Korean attack on the North, which the North
first rebuffed and then expanded into an all-out war to “liberate” the south,
opening the way to unification of the Korean nation and peninsula under the
leadership of Kim Il Sung and his Korean Workers Party (KWP). There was
some market for this “the South shot first” perspective even in the United
States.^3 This is still the perspective taught to Chinese citizens as part of their
“patriotic education” by the CCP. The Dictionary of Patriotic Education pub-
lished in Beijing in 1991 to “provide a complete and systematic reference book
on patriotic education by the broad masses of youth ... and workers in polit-
ical thought in party organizations and enterprises,” for example, says this
to open the section on the Korean War: “On June 25, 1950, the United States
instigated the South Korean clique of Syngman Rhee to attack the People’s
Democratic Republic of Korea and then sent the Seventh Fleet to China’s
Ta iw a n .”^4 Another book for use in patriotic education in primary schools
explains the onset of the Korean War in this way: