Stalin wanted the war, Kim started it, and Mao enabled it – all prior to the attack on South Korea?

I have been objecting to the statement “The Korean War was started by an international Communist camp” and have not denied the existence of a communist camp. My issue is that there is no evidence to support the claim that China was a participant in the planning before hostilities broke out, which is precisely what can be be concluded from the statement. Stalin and Kim discussed the upcoming conflict without consulting Mao, and Mao didn’t even believe Kim when he told him Stalin had agreed to hostilities when Kim met with Mao in Beijing in May, 1950. China didn’t know the war had broken out until significantly after the fact. China provided no troops or arms. Hence I conclude that the statement “The Korean War was started by an international Communist camp” grossly overstates China’s interactions with Kim.

I think this is a reasonable objection given the facts we know, and the fact that parties that acquiesce to a conflict and pledge conditional future support in conflicts they are not involved in materially in some kind are typically not viewed as having ‘started a war.’ I’ll refrain from mentioning examples to keep our discussion focused.

That Mao’s pledged to pitch in instead of the Soviet Union and to send Chinese troups – providing the counterinsurance for Kim’s military aggression – makes it “unfathomable” that “this can be construed to be support for that conflict”?

I’ll quote Enoch:
“Don’t have a problem with analogies, just find it tiring when people bring up an analogy or a case off the cuff, are then shown that the analogy/case does not support their argument, and in response they bring up other equally implausible analogies/cases. I think it’s arguing in bad faith. I’m respectful, bring in evidence to make my case, admit when I’m wrong, but am now getting accused of excusing aggression and using history to ‘relativise breaches of law’. Oh well.”

Yes, exactly!

Please don’t impugn my motives, and let’s stick to fact and interpretation.

1) The author (Stueck) of one the books claimed to support the ‘international Communist camp’ thesis, in a review of Cumings’ book, says: “newly released documents show that Beijing was largely left out of the pre-war planning while Moscow was intimately involved.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091002925.html

This fits with all the evidence we’ve seen here, that China was clueless about a possible conflict until May 1950, when it was presented with a fait accompli by Kim and Stalin. China did not object. Of course there is some dispute on this point, since the Shen book justrecently sent has Peng Zhen later adamantly arguing that Mao was opposed to the war.

2) In addition to not objecting, Mao pledged to support the north militarily if the US sent troops to fight. But China *sent no troops*. The ‘releasing of divisions’ you refer to were themselves troops from Korea, which is why every account I’ve read has referred to this as the ‘return’ of divisions. Hence they cannot be viewed as Chinese support. In sum, China had pledged to stay out of the conflict unless other parties entered, and made good on this pledge. I find it unfathomable this can be construed to be support for that conflict.

I also fail to see why *who* was involved in the partition of a state matters as to whether a later conflict should be considered a civil war or not. What matters is that all the parties (including the UN) at the time viewed Korea as one nation, and that the (original) parties to the conflict were Korean. The 38th parallel was a complete contrivance that had everything to do with big power politics, nothing to do with Korea. There was no historical basis for the division. As a result, this was ‘brother fighting brother’, until third parties intervened. In other words, a civil war.

At any rate, I don’t know if whether or not there was a conspiracy between Stalin, Mao, and Kim, is decisive of anything. No doubt a similar decision-making process was undertaken before North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam in force in 1975, but this would not have made an intervention by other powers more or less necessary.

The debate on whether or not the Korean war was a civil war is also not really decisive of anything, unless you want to legitimise North Korea’s attack on South Korea as actually being a continuation of a conflict rather than the beginning of one, and thus also legitimise the invention of other powers on North Korea’s side. The obvious suspicion is that, rather than this being the most convincing explanation of what happened in June 1950, this is actually just the most convenient explanation now that the Chinese government no longer tries to maintain the fiction that the North was engaged in a counter-attack.

At any rate, the classic examples of civil war (the English, American, Chinese, Spanish, Russian civil wars) all involved a start-state of a unitary state which was then divided into two or more parts by actors from within the same state. By contrast, the 2008 South Ossetia war involved an attempt to re-unify a country that had previously been divided by civil war and was not called, at least to my knowledge, a civil war.

You might want to take a look at the Shen book, which is available at google books preview. It concludes precisely the opposite of what you claim. See the introduction (sorry don’t have page numbers), “Shen’s book…points out that all the war planning and implementation of the war plan was accomplished secretly between Stalin and Kim Il-sung, that is, between Moscow and Pyongyang. China neither participated nor was informed in any detail about the war plan and its implementation.”

Also, the Stueck book that justrecently sent to bolster the “international Communist” claim explicitly states that, “Kim not only declined Chinese assistance beyond the return of Korean units that had fought in the Chinese Civil War, he did not inform Mao of the date of his planned attack on the south,” adding that “Kim wanted to carry out the task of unification as much as possible on his own.” (103)

The two pieces of evidence submitted by justrecently hardly support the case for a conspiracy that involves China, and bolsters my claim that it’s highly misleading to claim that “The Korean War was started by an international Communist camp.”

I am familiar with the concept of conspiracy. Speaking in general terms this makes it an offense for two or more people to agree to something that requires, if the agreement is carried out as intended, the commission of a crime by one of them. Is the Mafia boss who merely gives permission to one of his subordinates to murder another, and takes no other part in the killing, guilty of conspiracy to murder? This is a tidy little question, but suffice it to say that yes, it can be, so long as there is at least an actual agreement rather than mere fore-knowledge.

Kim would not have invaded South Korea without Stalin giving his permission to do so – this is not implying guilt by inaction. Kim would, arguably, not have invaded South Korea without Mao’s approval, which, if Shen is correct, he received. Even though neither Stalin nor Mao took part in the inital attack, they did help in its commission and, apparently, approved of it being carried out. Was there a conspiracy to attack South Korea in 1950 between the leadership of the USSR, the PRC, and the DPRK? Arguably, yes.

The question is that this may be a defensible way of interpreting events, but is it the best? Does it lead to new conclusions?

Thanks for the cites. Based on them, I see that Stalin in the spring of 1950 acquiesced to Kim’s plan to reunify Korea by force (after many previous attempts to convince Stalin by Kim), but told Kim that the Soviets wouldn’t send troops or planes, etc., and Kim would have to turn to Mao for help. But Shen’s book argues that China “neither participated nor was informed in any detail about the war plan and its implementation.” So Kim was given the green light by Stalin, and then told to rely on China, who didn’t even know what was going on. It’s very hard for me to interpret this as evidence for the claim “The Korean War was started by an international Communist camp.”

I agree that China felt indebted directly to Koreans for their participation in the fight against the Japanese and later the KMT alongside the CCP, and were prepared to make good on this debt. But China’s actions show suggest that in this conflict it operated on a different principle of internationalism (in the link you sent): “In the fight for complete liberation the oppressed people rely first of all on their own struggle and then, and only then, on international assistance.”