The United States, China, and the Far East at the Close of World War II

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Intermediate Diploma Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - Topic: International relations, grade: 1, 7, King`s College London, language: English, abstract: Next to European reconstruction, political stability in Far East Asia was an equally important factor in the post-war thinking of American authorities at the time. Particularly the fate of China, a country not only occupied by the Japanese Army but also deeply riven by internal strife between nationalist and communist forces and thus dangerously teetering on the brink of civil war, was a matter of profound disquiet to senior officials in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. There existed several reasons for why China was given such a pre-eminent standing in American post-war designs. For one, as President Roosevelt had said in 1943, recent developments in world history had demonstrated that the personal freedoms of every American 'increasingly depend upon the freedom of his neighbours in other lands'. After all, a war which had started in seemingly remote areas such as Poland or China had soon spread to every continent, touching before long upon the lives and liberties of other peoples as well. Unless the peace which followed that war therefore recognized that the whole world was 'one neighbourhood and does justice to the whole human race', Roosevelt argued, 'the germs of another world war will remain as a constant threat to mankind'. Hence for Roosevelt, who regarded China as one of the great democracies in the world, it was self-explanatory that the United States had to render as much assistance as possible to shore up China, both during and after the war, all the more so since he counted China among the four nations with great military power which, if they stuck together in their common determination to keep the peace, would deny aggressor nations all possibility to start another world war.