"Peacetime Minutemen"

Excerpted from this link:

"There did remain some hostile fire for the Marines in Asia-but not in Japan. The Marines soon had to go back to China, where they had been intermittently active for decades. Whether they arrived in ships at the mouth of the Hai River or in the railway station, throngs of boisterous Chinese greeted the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines with cheers and wide grins. Children waved, laughed, and scurried about amid the novelty of seeing such large, tough-looking American troops. The 3/7 was in the vanguard of General Keller Rockey's III Amphibious Corps force of fifty thousand Marines en route to duty in war-wracked northern China.

"The first landing of Marines in China had taken place in Canton in 1844 to protect an American trading post. In 1856, Marines had led a combined navy-Marine assault on several barrier forts manned by Chinese who sought to prevent the U.S. Navy from resupplying the U.S. legation in Canton. More famously, the Marines engaged in heavy combat in Peking and Tientsin in defense of American and other foreign nationals during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. They stayed from 1900 to 1941, giving rise to the term China Marines.

"The new deployment marked a departure, for postwar North China duty was the first of many inspired by the Cold War. For the next four years ever-smaller numbers of Marines found themselves embroiled in the bizarre, highly unpredictable, and often violent landscape of China's civil strife. Sino-American diplomacy of this era was attended by more than a little naivete on the part of American policy makers, and the costs of America's well-intentioned but wrongheaded policies were paid in large measure by Rockey's force of Marines. The China deployment would come to an abrupt conclusion in May 1949 with the Marines' evacuation of American dependents in Tsingtao, just as Mao Tse-tung's troops were about to crush the remnants of Nationalist resistance and give birth to the People's Republic of China."