Marshall Mission
마셜 사절단
The mediation of December 1945 to January 1947 in which President Truman’s envoy George Marshall tried to bring the Communists and the Kuomintang into a single government. It produced the truce and the Political Consultative Conference of January 1946, but both parties used the talks to prepare for the next war, and it failed when full-scale civil war broke out in June 1946.
In depth
Marshall arrived in China on 20 December 1945. Washington’s aim was a strong non-Communist China as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. A truce was arranged through American mediation in January 1946, and the Political Consultative Conference held at Chongqing from 10 to 31 January adopted twelve resolutions including government reorganisation and revision of the draft constitution. But forces in the Kuomintang such as the Gexin movement strongly opposed the mission, and in Manchuria the Soviet withdrawal was followed by the battle of Siping. To press for peace the United States suspended arms and ammunition sales to the Nationalist government from 29 July 1946 to May 1947.
In January 1947 the mission admitted failure and withdrew, and Marshall soon became Secretary of State. In 1951, during the Korean War, MacArthur called it one of the greatest blunders in American diplomatic history, and McCarthy blamed Marshall for the “loss of China”, charging that his arms embargo had tied the Nationalists’ hands and opened the way to Manchuria for the Communists. The mediation efforts of Marshall and Leighton Stuart are also recorded in the Zhou Enlai–Deng Yingchao memorial hall in Nanjing.