Research Seminar: A Just War versus a Dignified Peace? Discourses about War and Peace in the Peace Negotiations between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party in 1949

By late 1948, the Nationalist Party (GMD) had lost so many battles in the civil war, which it had been fighting against the Chinese Communist Party since 1945, that it was clear that it was going to lose the war. It therefore sued for peace in early 1949. The Communists had no motivation to enter a negotiated compromise peace, as they could easily fight the war to victory and then dictate any peace they wanted. Simultaneously, however, they had acquired a (self-)image of being peaceful, which they did not want to lose due to rejecting the Nationalists’ peace offering. 

In this talk, Dr Forster draws on public speeches, diaries, letters and memoirs to analyse how the Communists stopped the peace while still seeming peace-loving. She argues that they squared this circle by deploying just war theory and by using it to create conditions for the peace that were such that the Nationalist Party was unable to accept them. On a theoretical level, this sheds light on some of the dangers inherent in just war theory.

Elisabeth Forster is Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of Southampton. She has recently finished a monograph with the title Peaceful China? Peace, Conflict and the Idea of Just War in 20th-Century China. She is currently developing an interdisciplinary project with the philosopher at Stockholm University, Dr Isaac Taylor, exploring the lessons philosophy can learn from studying the application of just war theory in Chinese politics in the 20th century. Previously, she worked on China’s May Fourth Movement and her book 1919 – The Year That Changed China was published with DeGruyter in 2018.