The main challenge for both sides, the Americans assumed, was to manage and improve the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic, within the context, of course, of their mutual fears of the Soviet Union. The United States was deeply concerned about the marked increase in Soviet arms spending, which, or so analysts feared, was bringing Soviet forces up to equality with American ones. Unless the arms race and, indeed, the whole competition between the Soviet Union and the United States were brought under control, the future of the world would be grim indeed.3 For all that they denied trying to play a China card, Nixon and Kissinger were convinced that the Soviet Union had become more amenable to negotiations after the first word of the American opening to China. For their part, the Chinese, so the Americans believed, wanted the United States as a counterweight to the Soviet Union in Asia.4 While this was clearly true, the Chinese had reservations about the reliability of the United States. Talk of détente between the Soviet Union and the United States made them uneasy. Would the lowering of armaments and tensions in Europe, for example, simply give the Soviets a freer hand against China? Were the Americans foolishly appeasing the Soviets? “Take care!” Mao warned the Americans in 1973. “The Polar Bear is going to punish you.”5
To Nixon and Kissinger, Vietnam was an obstacle to a better relationship between the United States and China, but one that, they fervently hoped, was in the process of being removed. What they perhaps never entirely realized was that the Chinese Communists did not see Taiwan as merely one of several irritants in the relationship between China and the United States. Taiwan, in the Communist view, belonged to China, and that was as important to them as their troubles with the Soviet Union. “That place is no great use for you,” Chou said to Kissinger in July 1971, “but a great wound for us.” In their very first conversation, Kissinger assured Chou that the United States did not back the permanent separation of Taiwan from China. “As a student of history,” Kissinger said, choosing his words with care, “one’s prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which Prime Minister Chou En-lai indicated to me.” Chou replied at once, “The prospect for a solution and the establishment of diplomatic relations between our two countries is hopeful.” John Holdridge, who was present as one of Kissinger’s aides, was convinced that without that statement from Kissinger, the talks could not have continued.6
Taiwan, the People’s Daily claimed during Kissinger’s second visit, “has been China’s sacred territory since ancient times.”7 In fact, for much of its history Taiwan, or Formosa, as generations of Europeans had known it, had gone its own way, free from outside interference. Almost a hundred miles off China’s coast, it had been too far away and too wild to be subdued. It was only in the late seventeenth century that the Qing dynasty had managed to incorporate Taiwan into its empire. The historical claim was dubious, but that was beside the point. For the Chinese Communists and, indeed, for most Chinese nationalists, the separation of Taiwan from the mainland was a legacy of the past, yet another example of the way in which outside imperialists had humiliated and exploited China.
In 1895, following a devastating loss in a war with Japan, China had surrendered the island, which then became part of the growing Japanese empire. The Taiwanese, a mix of the indigenous inhabitants and Chinese immigrants, learned Japanese at school and were encouraged to adopt Japanese customs. In the twentieth century, another war brought a change of masters. At the Cairo conference of 1943, Allied leaders decided to return Taiwan to the government of China, still in those days that of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1945, after Japan’s surrender, Chiang’s forces moved in to claim it. The Guomindang officials were both corrupt and brutal, and in 1947, the Taiwanese rose up in opposition. Chiang cracked down; the island was increasingly important to him as a possible refuge.
As the civil war in China went in the Communists’ favor, hundreds of thousands of Guomindang troops and officials, along with many private citizens, abandoned the mainland for Taiwan. By 1949, Chiang had shipped China’s remaining silver and gold reserves, a large part of the national archives, and the pick of the treasures from the old imperial palaces to Taiwan. (The National Palace Museum in Taipei remains one of the great depositories of Chinese art and artifacts to this day.) At the start of December 1949, as the Communists closed in on Chengdu, one of the last cities to hold out, Chiang climbed aboard a plane and took off in heavy fog for Taiwan.
He fully intended to come back in triumph to the mainland. “I should become aware,” he wrote in his diary on Christmas Day, “that the new undertaking and history should begin from today.”8 Chiang, after all, had known both setbacks and triumphs before, and he remained firmly convinced that destiny had singled him out. An elder in his village described him as “stubborn, jealous, tactless, bad-tempered and egotistical.”9 A boy from a modest merchant family, he had made his way upward in the turbulent China of the years before the First World War. Like his contemporaries Mao and Chou, he was a great nationalist; unlike them, he never moved to the left. He remained deeply conservative in his social and political attitudes. His second wife, the beautiful Soong Meiling, encouraged his increasingly dictatorial and chauvinist tendencies. “Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power” was how Roosevelt’s wartime military emissary General Joe Stilwell described her in his diary. “No concession to the Western viewpoint in all China’s foreign relations. The Chinese were always right; the foreigners were always wrong.”10
As a young man, Chiang had become a soldier and had fought in the revolution of 1911. In the 1920s, he had moved into the leadership of the new nationalist party, the Guomindang, and in 1927 had successfully led the Northern Expedition, which had brought unity to China for the first time in a decade. He also turned on his Communist allies and did his best to exterminate them. In 1937, he had become a hero to millions of Chinese when he had agreed to lead a new coalition of the Guomindang and the Communists, this time in opposition to Japan. When the Japanese had responded by invading China, he and his armies had retreated inland to their wartime capital of Chongqing. He had returned in triumph in 1945 to the great coastal cities of China and become head of China’s government. In the next three years, in the opinion of many of his own generals and of American observers, he did much to throw it all away through policies that alienated his supporters and bad military decisions and so eased the way of the Communists into power.
After their victory, the Chinese Communists made it clear that Taiwan was unfinished business in the work of reclaiming what they regarded as China’s proper territory. They had tried unsuccessfully, in October 1949, to capture the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu from Chiang’s forces. In 1950, they took Hainan Island, off China’s southern coast, and occupied Tibet. That summer they also moved significant numbers of troops into Fujian Province, on the Chinese side of the Taiwan Strait. As Chiang brooded in Taiwan, his wife did her best in Washington to rally American policy makers and American public opinion to come to his and the island’s defense.
The Truman administration had no stomach for what most of its members regarded as a futile cause. “The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated,” said Dean Acheson, the secretary of state; “they disintegrated.” The U.S. military chiefs recommended only that the United States send some military supplies, but they opposed sending any American troops. President Truman concurred and said publicly in January 1950 that the United States had no intention of giving help to Guomindang forces on Taiwan. In what later became a notorious statement, Dean Acheson defined the defensive perimeter of the United States in the Pacific as including Japan and the Philippines; significantly, he did not mention Taiwan. The State Department prepared a draft of the statement to be issued when the Communists finally took the island.
What changed Truman’s mind and that of many Americans was the Korean War, which broke out in June 1950. The United States hastily assembled a coalition of forces for Korea, and Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet into the T
aiwan Strait to protect Taiwan, now suddenly seen as a vital strategic asset for the United States in the face of worldwide Communist aggression. (The fleet was also there, although this was not admitted openly, to prevent Chiang from attacking the mainland.) Shortly afterward, the United States made a significant shift in its views on the status of Taiwan; Taiwan was no longer part of China, but what it was remained to be decided. (Chiang Kai-shek’s view, not surprisingly, was that Taiwan was the only legitimate China, the Republic of China; until the 1990s aging deputies in Taiwan’s parliament still claimed to represent provinces of the mainland.) Chou described the patrols by the Seventh Fleet as “armed aggression against the territory of China,” but the Chinese Communists reluctantly accepted that they would have to abandon hope of invading Taiwan for the time being. One of the first things Chou did when he and Kissinger met in the summer of 1971 was to remind the Americans that Truman had prevented Taiwan from being reunited with the motherland and that, to add insult to injury, Dulles had signed an “illegal” defense treaty with Chiang Kai-shek. It also rankled the Chinese that the Americans maintained a military mission on the island, which, at the height of the Vietnam War, reached some ten thousand men.11
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Taiwan issue not only contributed to keeping the United States and the People’s Republic apart, it also threatened to engage them in conflict. Chiang continued to dream of his triumphant return, and he got considerable support and encouragement from the U.S. military, the CIA, and parts of the State Department, as well, of course, as the China lobby. By the mid-1950s, the United States was giving Taiwan $200 million a year in aid, much of it for military purposes. American and Taiwanese intelligence bases in Taiwan worked together to eavesdrop on Communist radio transmissions, and American planes with Taiwanese pilots flew over the mainland on spying missions. Radio transmitters on Taiwan beamed rousing calls to the mainland Chinese to rise up against their Communist masters, and balloons drifted across the Taiwan Strait bearing leaflets with similar messages. Guomindang raiding parties blew up railway lines and harbors on the mainland. Chiang’s naval forces harassed Chinese Communist shipping and occasionally captured fishermen from the mainland, who would be given lavish meals and then escorted back. Another remnant of Guomindang power, a body of troops, survived the Communist victory for years in the north of Burma, near the border with China. They had support from the United States and Taiwan. Although the Americans eventually concluded that the exercise was pointless, Chiang continued to support these forces throughout the 1960s. Whether he gained anything beyond irritating the Americans is doubtful; the Guomindang forces, who found themselves in one of the great opium-growing areas of the world, developed an increasingly successful and absorbing occupation as drug dealers.12
The Chinese Communists complained loudly, and from time to time the Americans themselves tried to rein in Chiang and the Guomindang. “We tried to discourage the use of force,” said Marshall Green, a senior American diplomat, “making them realize that, if they could live a life of virtue, this would radiate out and, in time, would have a favourable impact on all of China.”13 In a way that happened. The move to Taiwan was good for the Guomindang. Some of its most conservative and corrupt supporters had been thoroughly discredited, and Chiang himself recognized the need for reform. The Guomindang had failed to provide effective government for the whole of China, but in the smaller arena of Taiwan, it proved over the years to be reasonably competent. It helped, of course, that Taiwan received American aid and American investment. An island that had a grand total of four paved roads in 1950 was by the 1960s one of Asia’s success stories.
The United States found, as great powers frequently do, that its client would not listen when it urged him to concentrate on building up Taiwan and to leave the Communist regime on the mainland to its fate. In the late 1950s, Dulles and American diplomats were seriously concerned by Chiang’s nonchalance about the prospect of using nuclear weapons; they would have been even more worried if they had known that Chiang had guessed, rightly, that the United States could not afford to abandon him once it had made its commitment in the early 1950s.14 Any American government that had done so would have faced a huge uproar at home and run the risk internationally of showing weakness in the face of the Communist threat. As a result, the United States repeatedly faced crises over Taiwan that threatened to drag it into a major war with China and, at least until the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, with the Soviet Union itself.
Just off the coast of China, a string of little islands, some of them no more than large rocks, that Guomindang troops had seized and fortified were, like Berlin in Europe, particular flashpoints. On the south end, Quemoy was at the entrance to the important port of Xiamen (Amoy). (For the People’s Republic, as one American diplomat said, it was like having Manhattan held by an enemy force.)15 At the north, Matsu sat a few miles off another major port, Fuzhou. From time to time, tensions would flare up, either because of Guomindang activities or because of Communist attacks, in the form of either commando raids or shelling from their shore batteries.
The worst crisis came in August 1958, when Mao suddenly decided on a serious and sustained bombardment, possibly because the Americans were preoccupied with a crisis in the Middle East but more likely because he needed something to rally the Chinese people as the Great Leap Forward lurched into its most radical phase. In two rousing and widely publicized speeches to the Supreme State Council, he called on the Chinese people and the peoples of the world to resist American imperialism.16 The Eisenhower administration felt itself obliged to respond. Although its treaty with Taiwan did not include protecting the islands, Congress had subsequently passed a resolution authorizing the president to use armed force in their defense. Eisenhower sent a huge flotilla to reinforce American naval forces in the Taiwan Strait, and American warships started escorting the vessels from Taiwan resupplying the beleaguered island garrisons. The supplies included American guns capable of firing nuclear warheads. “Such a few shots,” said Mao. “I did not expect the world to get so stirred up over it.” The possibility of a major war between the United States and the People’s Republic of China was very real during those tense weeks of late August and September. The Soviet Union, which privately was dismayed at Mao’s belligerence and apparent willingness to risk even nuclear war, issued a public warning that it could not stand by if its ally was attacked. Chiang Kai-shek urged the Americans to take a strong stand and threatened to send his own planes in to bomb the Communists’ shore batteries.17
Fortunately, the Americans had no intention of being drawn into a major war by Chiang or by Mao. American naval vessels were careful to stand well away from the islands, out of range of Communist shells. Dulles told a press conference that the question of the Guomindang returning to the mainland was “highly hypothetical,” and he and Chiang issued a joint statement that had been carefully crafted in Washington to the effect that the United States supported the Guomindang’s desire to restore freedom to the mainland but that this would be done mainly through political means. Mao, for all his talk about not fearing a nuclear war, was similarly cautious, sending impossible orders to his local commanders to dispatch their shells so that they hit only Guomindang military and ships and not American. The American and Chinese representatives in Warsaw resumed their talks, and the shelling from the mainland petered out. Both sides claimed victory. The United States, though, had made it clear that it did not want Taiwan to precipitate it into a war with the People’s Republic. Mao later boasted to Edgar Snow that he had forced the Americans to send in their troops, and then, by ending the shelling, left them with nothing to do: “Therefore the American troops are subject to transfer at our mere beckoning, a bit like Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.” Behind the scenes, the Soviet and Chinese Communists had taken another big step toward their eventual split.18
After 1958, the Communists did not try seriously to retake the islands. They contented themselves with bombarding their garrisons with loud
propaganda and issuing “serious” warnings, about a thousand over the years, to the United States about its naval vessels coming too close to the Chinese shoreline. When Nixon visited China the warnings suddenly stopped. Mao claimed it suited the Chinese Communists to leave the islands in Guomindang hands: “We will let them hang there, neither dead nor alive, using them as a means to deal with the Americans.”19 And the islands kept open a possible link to the Guomindang and Taiwan. If Chiang were to abandon them, the gap between the mainland and Taiwan would suddenly lengthen physically, from a few to a hundred miles, and perhaps in thought as well.20
When he talked to Nixon in February 1972, Chou claimed that the Communists had let Chiang know this: “We advised him not to withdraw by firing artillery shells at them—that is, on odd days we would shell them, and not shell them on even days, and on holidays we would not shell them. So they understood our intentions and didn’t withdraw.”21 The Chinese Communists, with their insistence that Taiwan was and always had been part of China, did not want to encourage any thought that there might be a China on the mainland and a separate state out in the Pacific called Taiwan or simply two Chinas. For years the People’s Republic had refused to join organizations where Taiwan was represented or to have full diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the government of what the Guomindang insisted was the Republic of China.
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