Chapter 10.2 The Spread of Communism
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Describe how the Korean War began
- Explain why the United States took part in the wars in Indochina
In the immediate postwar period, Europe was the focus of US anti-communist anxiety. The United States expended billions of dollars in Marshall Plan aid to stave off the expansion of communism there. It was in Asia, however, that the policy of containment was most strongly challenged.
The Korean War
In 1949, the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army decisively defeated the forces of the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China, which had retreated to the island of Taiwan. On October 1, 1949, Chinese leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in a ceremony in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The United States refused to recognize the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) government as legitimate and maintained that Nationalist-led Taiwan was the “real” China. Mao was undeterred. He pledged industrial development, universal education, equality between the sexes, land reforms for peasants, and civil liberties for all, including freedom of expression. Mao and the CCP moved quickly to enact their promises, beginning immediately on the task of giving peasants ownership of the land they worked.
Along with making dramatic changes in China’s domestic policy, Mao also plotted a new course for China in foreign policy. In February 1950, the PRC and the Soviet Union signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. Under its terms, they were to combat any renewed Japanese aggression, work to advance their mutual interests, and refrain from entering into any alliances that were hostile to the other party. All this was part of China’s new “Lean to One Side” foreign policy position, in which the country would favor socialist nations and assist those seeking to free themselves from control by imperialist powers. China soon found its new commitments tested by the need to support a fellow communist nation and counter a threat to its own borders in Korea.
On August 15, 1945, the nation of Korea, which had been occupied by Japan during World War II and had been a Japanese colony for many years before that, was divided in half at the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude. The United States assumed responsibility for disarming the southern part of the Korean peninsula, and the Soviet Union took on the task of disarming the northern half. At the Moscow Conference held in December 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union agreed that they and China would jointly govern Korea for a period of five years, after which it would be reunified and given its independence. The Korean people’s opposition to the division of their nation and its subjection to foreign rule was ignored.
In the years since the original division of the nation, however, North Korea’s Communist Party, supported by the Sov