China, U.S. Military Involvement in

China, U.S. Military Involvement in. The United States maintained a military presence in China or its territorial waters from 1835, when it established the East Indies Squadron, through the 1950s, when it actively supported the defense of the Republic of China on Taiwan against an attack from the Communist‐led People's Republic of China (PRC).

From the 1830s to 1911, American forces came into contact with a declining empire, dispatching Marines ashore to protect American missionaries and businesspeople, establishing in 1891 the Yangtze River patrol, and during the Boxer Uprising in 1900 contributing three regiments to a multinational force to relieve foreign legations in Peking (now Beijing). When in 1911 a revolution overthrew the Manchus and ended imperial rule in China, the United States between 1911 and 1914 used two infantry regiments and units of Marines to defend U.S. treaty rights and protect American lives and property.

Following World War I, the U.S. Asiatic Squadron was upgraded to a fleet, and the army increased its interest in China. American forces faced a grave challenge in 1927 when the Nationalists (Kuomintang), led by Chiang Kai‐shek, marched north from Canton to unify the country. Fearing antiforeign attacks, the United States eventually put 5,000 American soldiers and Marines in China. The Japanese Army seized Manchuria in 1931 and invaded China south of the Great Wall in 1937. As conditions in China worsened, the U.S. Army's 15th Infantry Regiment, in China since 1912, left Tientsin in 1938. After the Panay incident, American gunboats ceased patrolling the Yangtze River in late 1940. The 4th Marines, which had become a symbol of the American commitment to the “open door” in China since 1927, left Shanghai in November 1941.

During World War II, U.S. Army officers like Gen. Joseph Stilwell pushed their Chinese allies to build and use the army to repulse the Japanese. Stilwell's first priority was the opening of the Burma Supply Road into China. U.S. Gen. Claire Chennault, commander of the Fourteenth Air Force, touted airpower as the key to victory in China. Chiang preferred Chennault's strategy for political reasons. As Stilwell predicted, the Japanese responded to Chennault's attacks by overrunning the poorly defended airfields. Stilwell was mistaken, however, in believing that the Pacific War would be won in China. By 1944, American advances in the Pacific made China a strategic backwater. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer replaced Stilwell later the same year.

In September 1945, after Japan's surrender, approximately 46,000 Marines occupied Tientsin and Tsingtao in northern China to repatriate Japanese troops and civilians and to prevent the Chinese Communists from seizing North China until Kuomintang troops could arrive from the southwest, transported by American planes and ships. Following V‐J Day, the U.S. Army and Navy created the Military Advisory Group in China to continue the modernization of Nationalist forces. To avert full‐scale civil war between Nationalists and Communists, President Truman dispatched retired Gen. George C. Marshall, who negotiated an uneasy truce.

In early 1947, the truce broke down. Chiang believed that American support would be unstinting. The Communists, led by Mao Zedong, distrusted the Americans. As the Communists overwhelmed Kuomintang forces, the Truman administration concluded that the Nationalists were beyond help. Most of the Marines left China in 1948, and Chiang, defeated, fled to Taiwan in 1949.

The third phase of American involvement began with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 and lasted until the early 1970s. After the North Korean invasion of the South, President Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet to “neutralize” the Taiwan Strait to prevent the capture by the Communists of Chiang's Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. In December 1950, after U.S.‐led UN forces drove the North Koreans back to the Chinese border, Chinese Communist “volunteers” intervened, driving back American troops and freezing Sino‐American relations in a state of implacable hostility for nearly two decades. Subsequently, the United States resumed its advisory mission on Taiwan. In 1954, in the midst of the first offshore islands crisis, the two governments concluded a mutual defense treaty. In 1958, during the second attempt by the PRC to seize the Nationalist‐held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the Seventh Fleet alerted 140 ships for possible action in the strait. But Nationalist pilots, flying F‐86 Saber jets armed with modern sidewinder missiles, eliminated any possibility of a Communist attack.

During the 1960s, the looming presence of the PRC, which exploded its first nuclear device in 1964, led the U.S. government to restrict its operations in the Vietnam War. The process of detente, begun in 1972 by President Nixon, was completed with U.S. recognition of the PRC in 1979. During the 1980s, the United States sold the PRC military equipment to help modernize its forces. The Chinese also began building a “blue‐water” navy, augmented after 1991 by purchases from the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's collapse, growing trade friction with China, and Beijing's ambitious military program reawakened U.S. fears of PRC dominance in Asia.

In 1995, renewed U.S. arms sales to the ROC and political developments on Taiwan led the PRC to hold threatening military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. Although the U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan had ended in 1979, Washington placed the Seventh Fleet on alert for possible action in the strait. By early 1996, tensions had decreased. But the nettlesome Taiwan problem and the PRC's expanding military power raised troubling questions.
[See also China‐Burma‐India Theater; China Relief Expedition; Chinese Civil War, U.S. Involvement in the.]

Bibliography

Charles Romanus and and Riley Sunderland , Time Runs Out in CBI, 1959.
Joe C. Dixon, ed., The American Military and the Far East: Proceedings of the Ninth Military History Symposium, 1980.
Marc Gallicchio , The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1988.
Warren I. Cohen , America's Response to China: A History of Sino‐American Relations, 1990.
Dennis L. Noble , Eagle and Dragon: The U.S. Military in China, 1901–1937, 1991.
Rosemary Foot , U.S. Relations with China Since 1949, 1995.

Marc Gallicchio