lost chance intro1

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.