China White Paper

The China White Paper is the common name for United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944—1949, published in August 1949 by the United States Department of State in response to public concern about the impending victory of Chinese Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. Secretary of State Dean Acheson directed his staff to prepare it in order to answer critics of American policy who blamed the administration for the "Loss of China". The introduction by Acheson became controversial. Acheson wrote: "The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the Civil War in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed the result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it."

Background

During the presidential campaign of 1948, as Cold War fears of communist global expansion mounted, critics of the Truman administration heatedly raised the question "Who Lost China?." Criticism mounted after Truman's surprising victory in the election as the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong steadily defeated Chinese Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek and was winning the Chinese Civil War. In November 1948 John Paton Davies proposed a collection of documents to explain and defend American policy in China to the American public, an idea that Secretary of State Dean Acheson ordered his staff to prepare. The group was headed by the Director of the Far Eastern Division, Walton Butterworth but much of the work was done by Charles W. Yost, John F. Melby who had served for the State Department in the Soviet Union and China during the war, and by Philip Jessup. The 1054 page volume was published August 1949, as Mao and his retinue were about to enter Beijing.

Content

The document consisted of 412 pages of narrative covering relations from 1944 to 1949, and 642 pages of documents as an appendix. It was based entirely on documents from the State Department files.