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The Whole Picture

4 Mar, 29 tweets, 32 min read

At the end of February, another agreement regulated the integration of the armed forces - there should only be one communist fighter for each soldier in the previous national army.
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American officer - General George Marshall. As Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, he had laid the decisive organizational foundations for victory in World War II.

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Marshall is even more famous today, not as a general, but as Foreign Minister from 1947 to 1949 and father of the Marshall Plan, the colossal aid program for the war-torn countries of Europe.
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The Marshall Plan has long since become a magic word when the call for a massive investment of money rings out somewhere in the world. Then a “new Marshall Plan” is called for, whether for the climate, against poverty in Africa or now for overcoming the corona crisis
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What has largely been forgotten, however, is that after leaving the army and before his time as foreign minister, Marshall pursued another mission - the search for peace between communists and nationalists in China.
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At that time (1946) Mao commanded a “people's liberation army” with almost a million fighters nationwide.
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Even if the communists were far inferior in numbers and equipment to the armed forces of the nationalist Kuomintang government under President Chiang Kai-shek, they were convinced of their superior morale.
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In any case, your cooperation was of central importance for Marshall's peacekeeping mission.
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At that time, the USA integrated China into the UN and other international organizations in order to use China as a partner in the fight against Soviet influence in East Asia.

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At that time, the USA was already playing an important military role in China. The USA had 100,000 men stationed there at the end of 1945.
A good half of them had fought against the Japanese occupiers on Chinese soil.
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It was a matter of repatriating the defeated imperial units - around three million people - to Japan and at the same time relocating the troops of the Chinese national army to the liberated areas.
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The US wanted to prevent a security vacuum after the withdrawal of the Japanese at all costs, so as not to leave power to the communists.
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Truman's mission was to reconcile the two civil war parties and thus create the conditions for the Americans to withdraw soon - an objective that sounds very familiar in the context of today's American military operations in the Islamic world.
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The US promised China generous financial aid as an incentive.
After negotiations in Chongqing, the provisional capital of China, the three sides signed an armistice agreement on January 10, 1946.
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At the end of January, Mao approved the proposals for a coalition government under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership.
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Communists and nationalists committed themselves to a democratic way, the legalization of all parties and the unification of their armies.
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A constituent assembly should adopt a new, liberal constitution in May.

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For nationalists as well as communists, the negotiations were just a tactical tool to win American favor. As soon as it came to renouncing concrete power, they stepped on the brakes.
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Hardliners in Chiang's camp deeply distrusted the communists and preferred a military decision. The only important thing for them was that the logistical help from the Americans did not run dry.
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For Mao, on the other hand, diplomacy seemed only a continuation of the war by other means. It was no problem for him to add the need for a "democratic phase" before the transition to actual communism to the Marxist doctrine without further ado.
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At the beginning of 1946 he felt abandoned by Stalin because Moscow had backed the idea of a "democratic China" under Chiang Kai-shek in the negotiations between the great powers.
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The situation changed when the Soviet forces withdrew from Manchuria in the spring and Mao's troops helped occupy the cleared territory. Skirmishes broke out with units of the National Army, which also rushed to the northern region.
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The planned coalition government and the common constitution did not materialize.

Marshall tried to mediate for months, but left the country on January 8, 1947, resigned.

The corrupt and unpopular Chiang regime collapsed in the years that followed under growing pressure from the communists.

In 1949 Chiang fled with his government to the island of Taiwan, which remained the last refuge of the "Republic of China" and which Beijing has regarded as a breakaway province to this day.

Politicians in Washington learned the lesson that it would be better not to expose oneself to the accusation of having "lost" a country to the communists. Enormous military operations in Korea and Vietnam were the result.

The failure of Marshall also allows another conclusion: The general had probably correctly recognized that certain tasks are beyond the powers of a superpower.