The Western Attitude to China

Extract

For more than a decade Western policy towards revolutionary China has been dominated by the attitude which the United States adopted in early 1950, before the Korean war broke out. This attitude arose out of conditions prevailing in the United States rather than in the Far East. Almost at once American policy lost any flexibility it might otherwise have had, when the Chinese intervened in the Korean war, an event which might have been avoided altogether if the American posture towards China had been different.