Why did the US care enough about stopping communism to send the Navy to defend Taiwan after the Nationalists ran away...

Not him, but if you want to read up on it, I would recommend Stilwell and the American Experience in China, by Barbera Tuchmann.

The U.S. had been supporting the KMT since before the war with Japan officially broke out, but when open war erupted, they sent Joseph Stilwell and some troops to advise and modernize the Nationalist Chinese. At the time, the KMT and its constituent warlords had around 5-6 million men under arms, and the thought was that if they could close the quality gap between the Chinese and Japanese, bring them more up to Western standards, they'd be able to easily sweep the Japanese aside, and crush a major source of manpower and deny the Japanese a huge chunk of the resources fueling their war machine.

It didn't work out so great. Who exactly you want to blame for it gets complicated, but the mission was a failure. There were no real reforms of the KMT's military structure, which remained almost 12th century feudal in nature, a bunch of local commanders of their own troops who are loyal to the local commander and not to a notion of "China" as a whole, and each unwilling to do much to shoulder the burden of the war, preferring someone else do the bleeding and dying. China did not modernize, did not liberalize, and did not effectively fight Japan, and by the time Stilwell was ultimately dismissed, he was recommending that Chiang and the KMT are useless, and that the Communists would be more effective allies. While that did not become official policy in Washington, there was deep antipathy towards the KMT.

Damn, that's really interesting. Thanks.

whole US cold war strategy was based on memes and autism

As an aside, the distaste of Stilwell and other American officials with the ludicrous levels of corruption in the KMT as well as Stilwell's personal dislike of Chiang Kai-shek is a large reason why the West, for a very long time, bought into the CCP propaganda that the KMT were more interested in fighting the CCP than the Japanese, and that it was the CCP who were doing all the fighting against the invaders.

Nowadays though it's generally accepted by most historians that for all their faults and failures it was still the KMT's National Revolutionary Army that was doing the bulk of the fighting against the Japanese (many of their best troops were lost in the savage battles to hold and defend Shanghai which they managed to do for two months), whereas it was the CCP who were sitting back and contributing very little in order to conserve their strength to fight the KMT after the war.

>bought into the CCP propaganda that the KMT were more interested in fighting the CCP than the Japanese, and that it was the CCP who were doing all the fighting against the invaders.
[Citations needed]

Some of that is also that the deployment of "Core" (that is, the ones personally loyal to Chiang) KMT forces were predominantly against the CCP, and guarding areas well behind the main lines, Chongqoing and Chengdu and that plateau; and most of the KMT guys that were fighting the Japanese were various warlord secondments, mostly from guys who had territory right on the contested areas.

Both sides were really more coalitions of various regional interests than they were modern political units the way you'd think of in a western country, and as a result attributing who did what and why gets a little complicated at times.

You are responding to the /pol/fucker kmt shill.

He considers a 2014 article from ForeignAffairs to be his source for everything in WW2, and constantly quotes a single sentence from one CCP general in January 1940.

In reality, who cares who fought? War "contribution" is the biggest nationalist autism meme around.

We do know that OBJECTIVELY, Chiang and the KMT decided to not fight the Japanese 1930-1936 because they wanted to finish off the communists. Chiang repeatedly states that the Japanese are better than the Communists. Those are historical facts.

Harmsen, "Stalingrad on the Yangtze: the Battle for Shanghai"

Taylor, "The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China"

Rana Mitter, "Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945"

Ienaga Saburo, The Pacific War

Spector, Ronald H. "In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia"

Barbara W. Tuchman: "Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945"

And yet in spite of being more worried about communists than Japanese, the KMT managed to inflict substantially more damage against the Japanese forces than the communists, who after the useless Hundred Regiments offensive basically just raided Japanese supply lines every now and again and moved in to occupy territory left abandoned by the Japanese during Operation Ichigo.

This is the correct answer.

Plus it was right after WWII. USA had more important, even vital things at hand, than sending the lads that had just came back home from Europe and the Pacific to engage in a massive continental war in China. Not to mention the USSR wouldn't have tolerated it.

there was no appetite to send ground troops into china a couple years after the end of WWII. furthermore, the nationalists and especially chiang kai-shek were terrible allies, repeatedly ignored US advice, and were just generally bad at everything they did. eventually the americans just gave up because chiang absolutely refused to listen to them. there is no helping someone like that, so all the US could do was sit back and watch.

>There were no real reforms of the KMT's military structure, which remained almost 12th century feudal in nature

oh no doubt. i remember one time in reading some book on the nanjing decade on how the nationalists would roll into villages and literally rope together men and drag them off. then they'd put them in uniform and redeploy them on the other side of the country to repeat the process.

Because before the 1950s the U.S. State Department was full of communist sympathizers like Owen Lattimore and John Service, check out the "Institute of Pacific Relations", a known Soviet front, and the Amerasia affair.

Not to mention there was a lot of U.S. journalists criticizing the KMT and portraying the CCP as the good guys, people like Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Brooks Atkinson etc. You can't underestimate the role they played, just like you can't underestimate the role Herbert Matthews played in the Cuban Revolution, they put the American public against the nationalists and in a pro-communist mood. Some people were even naive enough to think the Chinese Communist Party wasn't really "communist", and that Mao was just an "agrarian reformist".

By the way, Barbara Tuchmann was a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Just keep that in mind when reading her criticizing of the KMT and complimenting of the communists. She had work at a communist front some years before.

Slightly off-topic, but I like the history of Barbara Tuchman's family, it provides such an insight in the history of globalism.

Her father was a banker, owner of The Nation, her mother was a member of the Morgenthau family. She was herself a communist agent and progressive historian, while her daughter is a former president of the "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" and member of the Bilderberg Group.

The entire history, social basis, and political, cultural and economical institutions of the globalist elite in three generations.