lost chance intro1s

Introduction

Although politicians have often justified their wars as “the war to end all wars” or the war to bring about “a genera- tion of peace,” the fact is that war has a nasty habit of breed- ing more war. Either the factors which produced war in the first place remain to ensure its future repetition, or in the chaos and bloodshed of battle, new seeds are sown and new forces born which develop into new kinds of wars. In Asia in the middle of the twentieth century, the second pattern would occur. World War II ended the century of struggle between the Great Powers for the domination or division of the Asian continent. Japan was militarily crushed and psychologically scarred by atomic dust, the British quickly beat a diplomatic retreat from Empire, the French spent their blood and treas- ure and honor to no avail in the jungles of Vietnam, and both Russia and the United States slowly discovered that Asia was too much for either of them. Meanwhile, on the Asian main- land, revolutionary forces of nationalism and Communism rose phoenix-like from the ashes of war—emboldened by the hard- won support of the peasant masses and strengthened by the setbacks of imperialism and its domestic allies during the course of the world war. When the United States decided to commit its economic and military resources to the containment of these popular revolutions, the stage was set for the Cold War in Asia and its hotter by-products—Korea and Vietnam.

Nowhere was this process more evident than in China. The Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomin- tang (KMT) grew weaker with every passing month. Driven by the Japanese attacks of 1937-1938 from its political base in the Westernized treaty ports of the coast, the KMT was forced to rely on the most reactionary groups of inland China.