History - Past and Perspective
Giving China to the Communists

Giving China to the Communists

Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek was a loyal ally to America during WWII, but a handful of U.S. leaders poisoned American policy toward him, while building up the communists. ...
Steve Byas

“He who controls China controls the world.” So said Vladimir Lenin, the first communist dictator of the Soviet Union. American communist leader William Z. Foster similarly remarked, “The civil war in China [between the forces of Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek and the communists, led by Mao Tse-tung] is the key to all problems on the international front.”

And it was not just communists who understood the strategic importance of China. General Claire Chennault, the commander of the famed Flying Tigers, writing in his book The Way of a Fighter, put it bluntly: “China is the key to the Pacific.” And not only the Pacific. Chennault added, “If China remains friendly to the United States, the Russians will not dare move deeper into Europe, leaving vitals exposed on their Asiatic flank.”

Had mainland China not fallen to the communists in 1949, the United States would have had a powerful ally, checking all Soviet ambitions in eastern Asia. There would have been no Korean War and no Vietnam War, which together cost America about 100,000 lives. The communist oligarchs who ruled China during the dark days of Mao Tse-tung were responsible for the deaths of between 34 and 64 million people by the time the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security published its study The Human Cost of Communism in 1971.

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