Name: ___________________________
On October 1, 1949, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC). The announcement ended the costly full-scale civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), which broke out immediately following World War II and had been preceded by on and off conflict between the two sides since the 1920’s. The creation of the PRC also completed the long process of governmental upheaval in China begun by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The
“fall” of mainland China to communism in 1949 led the United States to suspend diplomatic ties with the PRC for decades.
-U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/chinese-rev
Source 1: Dean Acheson on the outcome of the Chinese Revolution (1949). In August 1949, with the defeat of Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] and his government imminent, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson reported that the outcomes of the Chinese Revolution were beyond US control. http://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/dean-acheson-chinese-revolution-1949/
The reasons for the failures of the Chinese National Government… do not stem from any inadequacy of American aid. Our military observers on the spot have reported that the Nationalist armies did not lose a single battle during the crucial year of 1948 through lack of arms or ammunition. The fact was that the decay which our observers had detected in Chungking early in the war had fatally sapped the powers of resistance of the Guomindang. Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops bad lost the will to fight and its Government bad lost popular support.
The Communists, on the other hand, through a ruthless discipline and fanatical zeal, attempted to sell themselves as guardians and liberators of the people. The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale cannot survive the test of battle.
The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not. A decision was arrived at within China, if only a decision by default.
In the immediate future, our historic policy of friendship for China must be profoundly affected by current developments. It will necessarily be influenced by the degree to which the Chinese people come to recognize that the
Communist regime serves not their interests but those of Soviet Russia and the manner in which, having become aware of the facts, they react to this foreign domination. One point, however, is clear. Should the Communist regime lend itself to the aims of Soviet Russian imperialism and attempt to engage in aggression against China’s neighbors, we and the other members of the United Nations would be confronted by a situation [that violates] the principles of the United Nations Charter and threatens international peace and security.

Source 2: Chassin on why the CCP won the Chinese Civil War (1952): Lionel Max Chassin was a general in the French Air Force during the late 1940s. Here, writing in his 1952 memoir, he offers his view about the
CCP victory over Jiang Jieshi in the Chinese Civil War. http://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/chassin-ccp-chinese-civil-war-1952/
At the outset, Mao’s chances of success were very slim. Clearly outclassed in numbers and materiel, he dominated only a small territory; he had no money, no resources, no allies. Worst of all, the masters of Russian communism had abandoned him; they had recognized Jiang Jieshi, his mortal enemy, as the leader of China, and yielded Manchuria to Nationalist sovereignty.
Opposing Mao was [Jiang Jieshi], a man to whom propaganda had given the stature of a giant, a prospective member of President Roosevelt’s world-governing Big Four, the master of more than 350 million people, of war-hardened armies, of enormous stocks of modern military materiel, an ally assured of the total support of the great American republic, which in 1945 was the world’s most powerful state. Between these two champions, who could have hesitated in his choice?
Four years later Jiang Jieshi, the Chinese hero, was to find himself a vanquished refugee on the small island of
Formosa [Taiwan], while his adversary set himself up in Beijing as the master of 480 million human beings. What happened? What were the causes of an event which means so much in the history of humanity?
The profound lesson of the drama that was the Chinese Civil War is this: Even now, in this era of materialism and mechanization, spirit is always predominant, and it is morale that wins battles.
Mao had only to follow a beaten track. His external theme was the eternal theme of xenophobic nationalism, of the struggle against foreign imperialists, who themselves but barely emerged from barbarism, had ‘enslaved’ the higher civilisation that was China. As for internal themes, he cleverly appealed to the instincts of social justice and proprietorship which are so strong in the human heart.
Source 3: Quotations from Chairman Mao, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/quotes.htm
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We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts. o “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 74.
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We Communists must be able to integrate ourselves with the masses in all things. If our Party members spend their whole lives sitting indoors and never go out to face the world and brave the storm, what good will they be to the
Chinese people? None at all, and we do not need such people as Party members. We Communists ought to face the world and brave the storm the great world of mass struggle and the mighty storm of mass struggle. o “Get Organized!” (November 29, 1943), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 158.
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Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people. Every word, every act and every policy must conform to the people's interests, and if mistakes occur, they must be corrected - that is what being responsible to the people means. o “The Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan” (August 13,
1945), Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 16.
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The atom bomb is a paper tiger that the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the people decide the outcome of a war, not by one or two new types of weapon. o “Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong” (August 1946), Selected Works,
Vol. IV, p. 100.

Source 4: Albert Feuerwerker, Chinese Historiography, 1965
Feuerwerker was one of the generation of Cold War scholars who established the field of Area Studies. At the
University of Michigan, Feuerwerker was a key organizer of the field of Chinese studies. He served as first director of the Center for Chinese Studies, 1961-1967, and again from 1972 to 1983 http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/66630/10.1177_000944556500100205.pdf?sequence=2
The Chinese Communist reinterpretation of China’s history has, in considerable part, been offered as propaganda designed to perpetuate support of the present regime among the Chinese people. But there is something more to it than this. Historical writing in China today, as viewed by her nation’s leaders, represents a genuine attempt to find legitimisation in China’s past for the developments of her most recent present. For the Confucian ideology of imperial
China, the Communist government in Peking has, of course, substituted a still developing Maoist version of Marxism-
Leninism as the touchstone for the assessment of the past. But it would be misleading to suppose that what was peculiarly
Chinese, either in motivation or in substance, has been totally expunged from the historiography of China by the
Communist revolution.
Source 5: John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China A New History. ( Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992) pp. 365-
366
Mao regarded the emergence of elites as a failure of the revolution and saw the aim of government to be the wealth and indoctrination of the local peasant masses, not merely a “wealthy state and strong army. . .” but this flatly denied one of the main tenets of Chinese political tradition, that the masses must be governed by a carefully trained and loyal elite. With accusations of Revisionism. . .” Mao promoted and manipulated this social convulsion and staged an instinctive attack on the establishment, even though he had helped set it in place. This centered on his analysis of class struggle, which he felt still continued under socialism – and used as an example the
USSR where the ideal of socialist government had been subverted by a corrupt bureaucracy,
Source 6: Ross Terrill , historian, China specialist and Research Associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for
Chinese Studies, Author of Mao: A Biography, 1999 http://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/historiography-of-the-cultural-revolution/
We will know more about Mao in the future than we do now. It is possible to identify present-day barriers to further knowledge. One is our inability to study Chinese military archives. A second is unavailability of the notes and/or tape recordings of thousands of Mao’s informal talks and conversations… a third is the political reputation of people still alive or in high favour… In an important sense we will not know what many segments of Chinese society think of Mao until
Leninist rule comes to an end, for the expression of opinion on Mao within China always occurs within a specific political context.