[13] U. S. Dept of State, _United States Relations With China_ (Washington, U. S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1949), 357.
“The unfortunate but inescapable fact,” concluded the United States State Department in 1949, “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 those capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country could have contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not. A decision was arrived at within China, if only a decision by default.”[14]
As a result, Mao Tse-tung’s forces could claim a sweeping victory by the end of 1949. Only the island of Formosa was left to Chiang Kai-shek and his battered remnants. Meanwhile, it grew increasingly plain that Korea was destined to be the scene of the next great tug-of-war between Communism and the free nations.
Not only had the Russians made the 38th Parallel a political boundary in Korea; they had also resisted all American attempts at unification. This meant that economic recovery was badly handicapped. For the mines, heavy industries and hydroelectric plants were located in the north, while the south had most of the agriculture. Products once exchanged with mutual benefit now had to be imported from abroad.
Trusteeship was hotly resented by all Koreans, even though few of them had gained administrative or technical experience under the Japanese. This prejudice was exploited by Soviet propagandists who denounced the “undemocratic” American policy of bringing in administrators, technicians and educators. As a consequence, the United States military government made a poor showing at first in comparison to the puppet government of Communist-trained Koreans installed at Pyongyang by Russians pulling the strings behind the scenes. Anti-American propaganda won converts to the south as well as north of the 38th Parallel, with General Hodge being accused of maintaining a harsh military rule.
At the Moscow Conference of 1945 the Soviet Union had agreed with the United States that the whole of Korea was to be given a democratic government after passing through the trusteeship phase. A Soviet-American Joint Commission was to meet and make recommendations for this purpose; but as early as 1946 it became evident that the Soviet representatives had been instructed to sabotage any attempt to create a united Korea with its own government.