2025/06/24 by Brian Masaru Hayashi · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Political Conflict and Governance
paper · doi:10.1093/dh/dhaf046
openalex publication_date 2025/06/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Did the United States miss an opportunity to meaningfully engage the Chinese Communists prior to their establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949? That opportunity came in late 1944 when the US Army in the China theater under the command of General Joseph Stilwell dispatched a small group of personnel to the Chinese Communist stronghold in Yan’an, China to assess their forces’ military effectiveness against Imperial Japanese forces. Dubbed the Dixie Mission because they entered territory held by Chinese rebels against the Nationalist government, they represented a serious possibility of rapprochement in the minds of some of the early chroniclers of the mission. Carolle J. Carter, in Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists, 1944–1947 (University Press of Kentucky, 1997), for example, asserts that the Dixie Mission was neither a success nor a failure, but managed to accomplish some of its important aims. She based her findings on English-language documents and her interviews with many top US leaders involved in the Dixie Mission and those decision-makers in Washington, DC. However, once some important Chinese-language sources of top Chinese Communist Party leaders became available, scholars like Michael Sheng, in Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin, and the United States (Princeton University Press, 1998), and Chen Jian, in Mao’s China and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), conclude there was little possibility of any meaningful dialogue between the two sides due to the Communist Party’s firm commitment to decolonization and opposition to making compromises with capitalists. Their findings mesh with those by Miles Maochun Yu in OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (Yale University Press, 1996), who portrays the Yan’an Communists as primarily concerned with purchasing arms from the Japanese with which to fight Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, not the Japanese.