![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
16-08-2022, 07:27 AM
In January 1950, three months after the Communist victory in China’s civil war, President Harry Truman issued a statement. America, he declared, would not intervene militarily to help China’s defeated Nationalists, who had fled to the island of Taiwan.
Mao Zedong was already preparing an invasion and probably would have succeeded had the Korean war not erupted in June that year.
The conflict prompted Truman to change tack, backing South Korea and ordering the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan in a bid to halt the spread of communism in Asia. Four years later, when Chinese forces attacked some of Taiwan’s outlying islands, American officials threatened nuclear strikes on China, forcing Mao to back down again.
Although the crisis is far from over, it already looks set to usher in a dangerous new era of hostility between China and America.
https://www.economist.com/china/2022/08/...-relations
Mao Zedong was already preparing an invasion and probably would have succeeded had the Korean war not erupted in June that year.
The conflict prompted Truman to change tack, backing South Korea and ordering the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan in a bid to halt the spread of communism in Asia. Four years later, when Chinese forces attacked some of Taiwan’s outlying islands, American officials threatened nuclear strikes on China, forcing Mao to back down again.
Although the crisis is far from over, it already looks set to usher in a dangerous new era of hostility between China and America.
https://www.economist.com/china/2022/08/...-relations
