Late 1946 was a time of anticlimax in the history of Sino-American relations. For four years since the outbreak of the
Pacific War, thousands of American servicemen had been in China rubbing shoulders with the Chinese. When victory
finally came, more United States troops (mainly the marines of the Third Amphibious Corps) poured in, and the
Chinese hailed them as heroes. In less than a year, however, as hostilities between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closed in, the Americans were caught in the crossfire. Along the communication
lines in North China, armed clashes between US and CCP forces escalated; in the cities, anti-American rallies became
daily occurrences. The Chinese now became hostile to its erstwhile allies; wherever US servicemen went, they received
boos from the locals. The rupture seemed to be irreversible: US forces started to evacuated, George Marshall, the
presidential envoy to China, also ended his yearlong mediation, thus bringing the extraordinary intercourse between
the two nations to an anticlimactic conclusion.
