On August 13, China’s 13th Army Corps held a conference of senior military leaders to discuss this mission. Though expressing reservations about the August deadline, the conference participants concluded that China “should take the initiative, cooperate with the Korean People’s Army, march forward without reluctance, and break up the enemy’s dream of aggression.”43

  In the meantime, staff analysis and map exercises were taking place. They led the Chinese to conclusions Westerners would have considered counterintuitive, to the effect that China could win a war against the American armed forces. American commitments around the world, so the argument ran, would limit U.S. deployment to a maximum of 500,000, while China had an army of four million to draw on. China’s proximity to the battlefield gave it a logistical advantage. Chinese planners thought they would have a psychological advantage too because most of the world’s people would support China.44

  Not even the possibility of a nuclear strike daunted the Chinese planners—probably because they had no firsthand experience with nuclear weapons and no means of acquiring them. They concluded (though not without some prominent dissenters) that an American nuclear response was unlikely in the face of the Soviet nuclear capacity, as well as the risk, due to the “jigsaw pattern” of troops on the peninsula, that an American nuclear strike on Chinese troops advancing into Korea might destroy U.S. forces as well.45

  On August 26, Zhou, in a talk to the Central Military Commission, summed up the Chinese strategy. Beijing should “not treat the Korean problem merely as one of concerning a brother country or as one related to the interests of the Northeast.” Instead Korea “should be regarded as an important international issue.” Korea, Zhou argued, “is indeed the focus of the struggles in the world. . . . After conquering Korea, the United States will certainly turn to Vietnam and other colonial countries. Therefore the Korean problem is at least the key to the East.”46 Zhou concluded that due to recent North Korean reversals, “Our duty is now much heavier . . . and we should prepare for the worst and prepare quickly.” Zhou stressed the need for secrecy, so that “we could enter the war and give the enemy a sudden blow.”47

  All of this was taking place weeks before MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon (which a Chinese study group had predicted) and well over a month before U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel. In short, China entered the war based on a carefully considered assessment of strategic trends, not as a reaction to an American tactical maneuver—nor out of a legalistic determination to defend the sanctity of the 38th parallel. A Chinese offensive was a preemptive strategy against dangers that had not yet materialized and based on judgments about ultimate American purposes toward China that were misapprehended. It was also an expression of the crucial role Korea played in China’s long-range calculations—a condition perhaps even more relevant in the contemporary world. Mao’s insistence on his course was also probably influenced by a belief that it was the only way to remedy his acquiescence in the Kim Il-sung and Stalin strategy of invasion. Otherwise he might have been blamed by other leaders for the worsening of China’s strategic situation by the presence of the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait and of American forces on China’s borders.

  The obstacles to Chinese intervention were so daunting that all of Mao’s leadership was needed to achieve the approval of his colleagues. Two major commanders, including Lin Biao, refused the command of the Northeast Border Defense Army on various pretexts before Mao found in Peng Dehuai a commander prepared to undertake the assignment.

  Mao prevailed, as he had in all key decisions, and preparations for the entry of Chinese forces into Korea went inexorably forward. October saw American and allied forces moving toward the Yalu, determined to unify Korea and to shelter it under a U.N. resolution. Their purpose was to defend the new status quo with these forces, technically constituting a U.N. command. The movement of the two armies toward each other thus acquired a foreordained quality about it; the Chinese were preparing a blow while the Americans and their allies remained oblivious to the challenge waiting for them at the end of their march north.

  Zhou was careful to set the diplomatic stage. On September 24 he protested to the United Nations what he characterized as American efforts to “extend the war of aggression against Korea, to carry out armed aggression on Taiwan, and to extend further its aggression against China.”48 On October 3, he warned the Indian Ambassador K. M. Panikkar, that U.S. troops would cross the 38th parallel and that “[i]f the U.S. troops really do so, we cannot sit by idly and remain indifferent. We will intervene. Please report this to the Prime Minister of your country.” 49 Panikkar replied that he expected the crossing to occur within the next twelve hours, but that the Indian government would “not be able to take any effective action” until eighteen hours after the receipt of his cable.50 Zhou responded: “That is the Americans’ business. The purpose of this evening’s talk is to let you know our attitude toward one of the questions raised by Prime Minister Nehru in his letter.”51 The talk was more making a record for what was already decided than a last plea for peace, as it is so often treated.

  At that point, Stalin reentered the scene as the deus ex machina for the continuation of the conflict he had encouraged and which he did not want to see ended. The North Korean army was collapsing, and another American landing on the opposite coast was expected by Soviet intelligence near Wonsan (wrongly). Chinese preparations for intervention were far advanced but as yet not irrevocable. Stalin therefore decided, in a message on October 1 to Mao, to demand Chinese intervention. After Mao deferred a decision, citing the danger of American intervention, Stalin sent a follow-up telegram. He was prepared, he insisted, to pledge Soviet military support in an all-out war should the United States react to Chinese intervention:

  Of course, I took into account also [the possibility] that the USA, despite its unreadiness for a big war, could still be drawn into a big war out of [considerations of] prestige, which, in turn, would drag China into the war, and along with this draw into the war the USSR, which is bound with China by the Mutual Assistance Pact. Should we fear this? In my opinion, we should not, because together we will be stronger than the USA and England, while the other European capitalist states (with the exception of Germany which is unable to provide any assistance to the United States now) do not present serious military forces. If a war is inevitable, then let it be waged now, and not in a few years when Japanese militarism will be restored as an ally of the USA and when the USA and Japan will have a ready-made bridgehead on the continent in a form of the entire Korea run by Syngman Rhee.52

  At its face value, this extraordinary communication seemed to assert that Stalin was ready to go to war with the United States to prevent Korea from becoming part of America’s strategic sphere. A united, pro-American Korea—to which, in Stalin’s eyes, sooner or later a resurgent Japan would become a partner—presented, in that analysis, the same threat in Asia as the emerging NATO in Europe. The two together might be more than the Soviet Union could handle.

  In the event, when put to the test, Stalin proved unwilling to undertake the all-out commitment he had pledged to Mao—or even any aspect of direct confrontation with the United States. He knew that the balance of power was too unfavorable for a showdown, much less a two-front war. He sought to tie down the American military potential in Asia and to involve China in enterprises that magnified its dependence on Soviet support. What Stalin’s letter does demonstrate is how seriously Soviet and Chinese strategists assessed the strategic importance of Korea, if for quite different reasons.

  Stalin’s letter placed Mao in a predicament. It was one thing to plan intervention in the abstract partly as an exercise in revolutionary solidarity. It was another actually to carry it out, especially when the North Korean army was on the verge of disintegrating. Chinese intervention made imperative Soviet supplies and, above all, Soviet air cover, since the PLA had no modern air force to speak of. Thus when the issue of intervention was put before the Politburo, Mao received an unusually ambivalent response, causing him to pause before giving the final answer. Instead, Mao dispatched Lin Biao (who had refused the command of the Chinese forces, citing health problems) and Zhou to Russia to discuss the prospects of Soviet assistance. Stalin was in the Caucasus on vacation but saw no reason to alter his schedule. He obliged Zhou to come to his retreat even though (or, perhaps, because) Zhou would have no means of communication with Beijing from Stalin’s dacha except through Soviet channels.

  Zhou and Lin Biao had been instructed to warn Stalin that, without assurances of guaranteed supplies, China might not, in the end, carry out what it had been preparing for two months. For China would be the principal theater of the conflict Stalin was promoting. Its prospects would depend on the supplies and direct support Stalin would make available. When faced with this reality, Mao’s colleagues reacted ambivalently. Some opponents even went so far as to argue that priority should be given to domestic development. For once Mao seemed to hesitate, if only for a moment. Was it a maneuver to obtain a guarantee of support from Stalin before Chinese forces were irrevocably committed? Or was he truly undecided?

  A symptom of internal Chinese divisions is the mysterious case of a telegram from Mao to Stalin sent on the night of October 2, of which two contradictory versions are held in the archives of Beijing and Moscow.

  In one version of Mao’s telegram—drafted in Mao’s handwriting, filed in the archives in Beijing, published in a neibu (“internal circulation only”) Chinese collection of Mao’s manuscripts, but likely never actually dispatched to Moscow—Mao wrote that Beijing had “decided to send some of our troops to Korea under the name of [Chinese People’s] Volunteers to fight the United States and its lackey Syngman Rhee and to aid our Korean comrades.”53 Mao cited the danger that absent Chinese intervention, “the Korean revolutionary force will meet with a fundamental defeat, and the American aggressors will rampage unchecked once they occupy the whole of Korea. This will be unfavorable to the entire East.”54 Mao noted that “we must be prepared for a declaration of war by the United States and for the subsequent use of the U.S. air force to bomb many of China’s main cities and industrial bases, as well as an attack by the U.S. navy on [our] coastal areas.” The Chinese plan was to send twelve divisions from south Manchuria on October 15. “At the initial stage,” Mao wrote, they would deploy north of the 38th parallel and “will merely engage in defensive warfare” against enemy troops that cross the parallel. In the meantime, “they will wait for the delivery of Soviet weapons. Once they are [well] equipped, they will cooperate with the Korean comrades in counterattacks to annihilate American aggressor troops.”55

  In a different version of Mao’s October 2 telegram—sent via the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, received in Moscow, and filed in the Russian presidential archives—Mao informed Stalin that Beijing was not prepared to send troops. He held out the possibility that after further consultations with Moscow (and, he implied, pledges of additional Soviet military support), Beijing would be willing to join the conflict.

  For years, scholars analyzed the first version of the telegram as if it were the sole operative version; when the second version emerged, some wondered whether one of the documents might be a fabrication. Most plausible is the explanation put forth by the Chinese scholar Shen Zhihua: that Mao drafted the first version of the telegram intending to send it, but that the Chinese leadership was so divided that a more equivocal telegram was substituted. The discrepancy suggests that even as Chinese troops advanced toward Korea, the Chinese leadership was still debating about how long to hold out for a definitive commitment of support from its Soviet ally before taking the last irrevocable step.56

  The two Communist autocrats had been trained in a hard school of power politics, which they were now applying to each other. In this case, Stalin proved the quintessential hardball player. He coolly informed Mao (via a joint telegram with Zhou) that, in view of China’s hesitation, the best option would be to withdraw the remnants of the North Korean forces into China, where Kim Il-sung could form a provisional government-in-exile. The sick and disabled could go to the Soviet Union. He did not mind Americans on his Asian border, said Stalin, since he already faced them along the European dividing lines.

  Stalin knew that the only outcome Mao wanted less than American forces at China’s borders was a provisional Korean government in Manchuria in contact with the Korean minority living there, claiming some kind of sovereignty and constantly pressing military adventures into Korea. And he must have sensed that Mao had passed the point of no return. China’s choice, at this point, was between an American army on the Yalu, directly threatening the half of Chinese industry within easy reach, and a disgruntled Soviet Union, holding back on supplies, perhaps reinvoking its “rights” in Manchuria. Or else China would proceed along the course Mao had continued to pursue even while bargaining with Stalin. He was in a position where he had to intervene, paradoxically in part to protect himself against Soviet designs.

  On October 19, after several days of delay to await a guarantee of Soviet supplies, Mao ordered the army to cross into Korea. Stalin pledged substantial logistical support, provided only that it involved no direct confrontation with the United States (for example, air cover over Manchuria but not over Korea).

  Mutual suspicion was so rampant that Zhou had no sooner returned to Moscow, from where he could communicate with Beijing, than Stalin seemingly reversed himself. To prevent Mao from maneuvering the Soviet Union into bearing the brunt of equipping the PLA without getting the benefit of its tying down American forces in combat in Korea, Stalin informed Zhou that no supplies would start moving until Chinese forces had, in fact, entered Korea. Mao issued the order on October 19, in effect without an assurance of Soviet support. After that, the originally promised Soviet support was reinstated, though the ever cautious Stalin confined Soviet air support to Chinese territory. So much for the readiness expressed in his earlier letter to Mao to risk a general war over Korea.

  Both Communist leaders had exploited each other’s necessities and insecurities. Mao had succeeded in obtaining Soviet military supplies to modernize his army—some Chinese sources claim that during the Korean War he received equipment for sixty-four infantry divisions and twenty-two air divisions57—and Stalin had tied down China into a conflict with the United States in Korea.

  Sino-American Confrontation

  The United States was a passive observer to these internal Communist machinations. It explored no middle ground between stopping at the 38th parallel and the unification of Korea, and ignored the series of Chinese warnings about the consequences of crossing that line. Acheson puzzlingly did not consider them official communications and thought they could be ignored. He probably thought he could face Mao down.

  None of the many documents published to date by all sides reveals any serious discussion of a diplomatic option by any of the parties. The many meetings of Zhou with the Central Military Commission or the Politburo reveal no such intent. Contrary to popular perception, Beijing’s “warning” to Washington not to cross the 38th parallel was almost certainly a diversionary tactic. By that point, Mao had already sent ethnic-Korean PLA troops from Manchuria to Korea to assist the North Koreans, moved a significant military force away from Taiwan and toward the Korean border, and promised Chinese support to Stalin and Kim.

  The only chance that might have existed to avoid immediate U.S.-China combat can be found in instructions Mao sent in a message to Zhou, still in Moscow, about his strategic design on October 14, as Chinese troops were preparing to cross the Korean border:

  Our troops will continue improving [their] defense works if they have enough time. If the enemy tenaciously defends Pyongyang and Wonsan and does not advance [north] in the next six months, our troops will not attack Pyongyang and Wonsan. Our troops will attack Pyongyang and Wonsan only when they are well equipped and trained, and have clear superiority over the enemy in both air and ground forces. In short, we will not talk about waging offensives for six months.58

  There was no chance, of course, that in six months China could have achieved clear superiority in either category.

  Had American forces stopped at the line, from Pyongyang to Wonsan (the narrow neck of the Korean Peninsula), would that have created a buffer zone to meet Mao’s strategic concern? Would some American diplomatic move toward Beijing have made any difference? Would Mao have been satisfied with using his presence in Korea to reequip his forces? Perhaps the six-month pause Mao mentioned to Zhou would have provided an occasion for diplomatic contact, for military warnings, or for Mao or Stalin to change his mind. On the other hand, a buffer zone on hitherto Communist territory was almost certainly not Mao’s idea of his revolutionary or strategic duty. Still he was enough of a Sun Tzu disciple to pursue seemingly contradictory strategies simultaneously. The United States, in any event, had no such capacity. It opted for a U.N.-endorsed demarcation line along the Yalu over what it could protect with its own forces and its own diplomacy along the narrow neck of the Korean Peninsula.

  In this manner, each side of the triangular relationship moved toward a war with the makings of a global conflict. The battle lines moved back and forth. Chinese forces took Seoul but were driven back until a military stalemate settled over the combat zone within the framework of armistice negotiations lasting nearly two years, during which American forces refrained from offensive operations—the almost ideal outcome from the Soviet point of view. The Soviet advice throughout was to drag out the negotiations, and therefore the war, as long as possible. An armistice agreement emerged on July 27, 1953, settling essentially along the prewar line of the 38th parallel.