China Syndrome

Given the prominence today of China as a global power, it's a surprise to learn that the country was not admitted to the UN and the Security Council until as late as 1971 - 22 years after the birth in October 1949 of the People's Republic of China (PRC) led by Mao Zedong's Communist Party, victor in a brutal and protracted civil war. Until 1971, the China seat at the UN was held by Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists (the Kuomintang or KMT) in the name of the Republic of China (ROC), which had borne the brunt of the fighting against the invading Japanese between 1937 and 1945. If American support for Chiang was, in practice, often limited and relations between the two sides frequently fractious, nonetheless Nationalist China was officially the wartime ally of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union. And so when the war ended, though Mao's communists now had a million men under arms and shared a fragile coalition with the KMT, it was Chiang who took the formal Japanese surrender in September 1945. Four years later, however, the Nationalists had been forcibly ejected from the mainland and taken refuge on the island of Formosa (later Taiwan), where Chiang's ROC would now be based for years to come. For the Americans, the 'loss' of China to the Communists in 1949 came as a huge shock - prompting a bitter internal debate over who was to blame - but with the Cold War hardening (in August that year the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb), US loyalties lay resolutely with the Nationalists on Taiwan. Indeed, the ROC was a founding member of the UN and, in recognition of its longstanding battle against Axis aggression, the first country to sign the charter. In protest at the PRC's exclusion from the UN, the Soviet Union boycotted its proceedings for most of 1950 - during which time the Korean War broke out, involving some 300,000 Communist Chinese troops fighting the US-led coalition. Thus for decades there were two Chinas - the de facto Communist regime of the mainland and the 'official' government in Taiwan. In fact, until the 1990s (long after Chiang's death in 1975) it remained ROC policy to retake the mainland - an agenda forgotten today amid Xi Jinping's sabre-rattling threats to seize Taiwan. Those who regard the current confrontation between America and China as the way it's always been - well, it hasn't. Remember Nixon's astonishing rapprochement with Deng Xiaoping's China in 1972? On that occasion, China was at loggerheads with the Soviet Union, as it so often was during the Cold War years. That was then. Now Putin and Xi are apparently best buddies. Geopolitical circumstances can make a big difference. And geopolitics can change.

Lt-General Joseph Stilwell, US chief of staff to General Chiang Kai Shek, presents his boss with the Legion of Merit in 1943. The two men did not get on.

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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