When Henry Truman became the thirty-third president of the United States on April 12, 1945, he inherited from the FDR administration a China policy the purpose of which his Secretary of State James Byrnes defined as to build ‘a strong, united, and democratic China’ (May 1974, 10). However, when Truman passed the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower on January 20, 1953, not only did China remain divided between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan, but the United States had done its share in perpetuating such a division by fighting the Korean War with the PRC under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and by forging a political and military alliance with Taiwan under the rule of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, GMD). Examining this episode of Sino-US relations in the context of the twentieth-century US China policy that began with John Hay’s Open Door Notes, Warren Cohen, a renowned historian of modern China and US foreign relations, calls the Truman administration’s China policy after 1950 the ‘great aberration’ caused by the fear of Communism that made the American people and their leaders forget ‘the sound geopolitical, economic, and ethical basis of their historic desire for China’s well-being’ (Cohen 2019, 198).