Both the White Paper on United States Relations
with China released
by the U.S. Department of State in
1949 and the letter from
Secretary of State Dean
Acheson to President Harry S. Truman
admitted that,
guided by its conceived global strategy and national
interest considerations, the U.S. government gave full
support to
the Kuomintang, providing it with
money, weapons and advisors to
carry on the civil war and
block the advance of the Chinese people's
revolution. In
his letter Acheson said: "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 was left undone by
this country has contributed to
it. It was the
product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this
country tried to influence but could
not."
At the time of the founding
of the People's Republic of China, the
then U.S.
administration could have pulled itself from the quagmire
of China's civil war. But it failed to do so.
Instead, it adopted a
policy of isolation and
containment of New China. When the Korean
War broke out,
it tore up all international agreements about
non-interference in China's internal affairs. In his
statement on
June 27, 1950 President Truman
announced: "I have ordered the
Seventh Fleet to
prevent any attack on Formosa." Thus the Seventh
Fleet invaded the Taiwan Straits and the U.S.
13th Air Force entered
Taiwan and was stationed
there. In December 1954 the United States
concluded with
the Taiwan authorities a so-called "Mutual Defense
Treaty", placing China's Taiwan Province
under U.S. "protection".
The
erroneous policy of the U.S. government of continued
interference in China's internal affairs led to the
prolonged and
intense confrontation in the Taiwan
Straits area and henceforth the
Taiwan question
became a major dispute between China and the United
States.