The Argument For Sino-American Accommodations

The ‘lost chance’ argument for Sino-American accommodation was undermined by the ideology of both parties. There never existed a chance in 1949 whereby the United States could detach the People’s Republic of China from the Soviet sphere of influence. Chinese diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were too intimate despite the tensions that arose between Mao and Stalin throughout the late 1940s. The cultural and historical context that the Chinese Communists evoked when dealing with the Western powers had a deeper impact than the material aid and support offered to the Chiang Kai-shek regime, unless the Chinese Communists were treated as equals there could be no meaningful engagement with the United States and her allies. The Chinese, like the Soviets saw themselves as a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary regime; they did not inherit the treaties and debts of previous administrations. The ‘lost chance’ was not a realistic option because of the Chinese relationship with the Soviet Union, their guiding foreign policy principles, the ideology of the post-war United States and the long term objectives of the Revolution.
Due to the dynamics of Cold War foreign policy, the Communist Chinese state would align to one side at the expense of the other. The natural ally for …show more content…
The Chinese Communist Party would firstly ‘clean the house before inviting guests’; this meant that all previous diplomatic ties would be removed before opening foreign diplomatic channels with the Western powers. It was a policy of self-imposed isolation and had the result of shutting the door for mutual contact with Washington and her allies. The address by Zhou to the Politburo on the 8th of January 1949 embodied the spirit of the Communist Party’s policy of