Accidental State

by Hsiao-ting Lin

  Chiang’s sangfroid was a vivid contrast to his and his government’s loud threats of an imminent counteroffensive against Communist China, but his inner sobriety and realism can be traced to recent events. Since 1949, when the defeated Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, Hainan, and the island groups off China’s southeastern coast, both the rapidly diminishing territorial control on the mainland and the transformation of these islands as a new power base had prompted the Nationalist authorities to gradually abandon their mainland-oriented military strategy. In June 1949, soon after Shanghai fell to the Communists, the Nationalists proclaimed the closure of territorial waters lying along the coast of Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces, including key ports such as Tianjin, Shanghai, Wenzhou, and Ningbo. Forbidding entry into these port cities, the Nationalists warned that they would take prompt action against violators and that responsibility for any resulting harm would rest with the violating vessel. Despite protests lodged by foreign countries, such as the United States and Britain, the Nationalists in February 1950 extended the blockade to cover the southern part of China, including the ports of Fuzhou, Amoy, Swatow, and Guangzhou.6

  During this critical period, although the Nationalist military lacked the strength to launch effective counterattacks on the mainland, its navy was at least able to stop and search ships flying the flags of either Nationalist China or the PRC in the territorial waters surrounding Taiwan and other Nationalist-controlled isles to prevent military supplies from reaching Communist-held ports.7 The shelling of an American merchant ship Flying Arrow off Shanghai in early January 1950, along with mine-laying operations conducted by the Nationalist Navy in waters off Shanghai, as the CIA observed, demonstrated the Nationalists’ weak but still functional naval capacity.8 Meanwhile, during the months before the outbreak of the Korean War, given Chiang Kai-shek’s reliance on Charles Cooke and his STP staff, and the admiral’s specific emphasis on strengthening Taiwan’s naval defense, land-mindedness had gradually given way to sea-mindedness on the part of the island-based Nationalists so as to fit into a changed military environment. As a result, the maritime strategy, the main spirit of which was to check Communist operations in China’s littoral areas and defend the KMT island redoubts, had irreversibly taken root and become an inevitable choice in the Nationalist strategic thinking and policy formulation.9

  After Communist China entered the Korean War, a continued Nationalist imposition on the closure of its territorial waters and key ports under Communist control was now in the interest of the United States. When President Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet to intervene in the Taiwan Strait, military chiefs in Washington believed that this did not require a cessation of Nationalist naval activities.10 Rather, as the Fox mission concluded in its report of September 1950, the Nationalist Navy, operating alone, would be of particular value to the United States should the efforts of the Seventh Fleet be reduced due to other commitments at some critical period.11 From a broader strategic perspective, as George Kennan argued forcefully in his two separate memoranda to Dean Acheson in the summer of 1950, after the war broke out in Korea, one troublesome issue confronting the United States was its serious lack of information in the Communist-controlled coastal areas. Although by no means confident about Chiang Kai-shek and his leadership, Kennan held that a well-trained Nationalist force under U.S. control could improve the current “highly dangerous and not really tolerable” situation in the Far East.12 In other words, utilizing Nationalist military strength to monitor mainland China, rather than for the war in Korea, would best serve such a purpose.

  RECONQUERING THE MAINLAND: WHO NEEDED IT?

  It is important to note that, when the Korean War stood out as the most imperative issue confronting the Truman administration, military chiefs in Washington were no less impulsive than their Nationalist counterparts in planning a counteroffensive against the PRC. Although it was Chiang Kai-shek who dreamed of a military recovery of the mainland, it was the Pentagon who began transforming Chiang’s military slogans into detailed courses of action. On December 27, 1950, a national intelligence estimate commissioned jointly by the State Department, army, navy, and air force looked unfavorably on the possibility of deploying Chinese Nationalist troops in Korea. It argued that the use of Chiang’s forces would remove whatever chance might remain of a political solution to the Korean conflict and would make Washington’s policy of neutralizing Taiwan more difficult. More practically, since a majority of UN nations would simply reject such an idea, deploying Nationalist troops would give impetus to, or at least providing the pretext for, increased militancy on the part of Communist China, which in turn might develop into a global war.13

  And yet, as the situation in Korea worsened after Mao Zedong rejected the UN cease-fire resolution, the U.S. Joint Strategic Plans Committee issued a report calling for the creation of conditions that would bring about “the eventual overthrow of the Chinese Communist government.” To reduce Communist Chinese military capability with a minimum expenditure of U.S. forces and resources, and to contain Communist forces within mainland China, the U.S. Army proposed a three-phase operation to be undertaken largely by the Nationalist troops in Taiwan. The first phase (within six months) would secure Taiwan with the currently available forces, followed by a military mission that would provide logistical support for Nationalist forces. The second phase (from the next six months, up to 18 months) would intensify and augment guerrilla and subversive activities on the Chinese mainland to undermine Chinese Communist armies, build up Nationalist forces for anticipated operations on the mainland, and liberate Hainan Island with Nationalist Chinese forces. The third and final phase would encourage and supply Nationalist Chinese forces so they could conduct operations on the mainland and overthrow the Communist regime.14

  The army version of that course of action was supported by both the navy and the air force, whose hawkish chiefs promoted the immediate removal of the restrictions imposed by President Truman (after the war in Korea) on deploying Nationalist forces against the Chinese Communists.15 A month later, on January 27, 1951, the Joint Strategic Plans Committee completed another thorough investigation of a probable Nationalist counteroffensive against the mainland. The committee reemphasized its previous stance, arguing that if the Nationalist forces provided with effective leadership, modern equipment, and strong logistic support, their deployment in any war with Communist China would be “most desirable from a military viewpoint.” The report underscored the fact that the Nationalist forces constituted the only immediately available ground forces for use on the mainland, and that their acceptance and use would inspire hope among millions of non-Communist Chinese on the mainland and non-Communist sympathizers throughout Asia. In the most optimistic scenario, the report delineated how, with strong and active logistical support of landing operations by U.S. air and naval units, the Nationalists could maintain several large-scale guerrilla bases in South China. By coordinating with amphibious operations, the Nationalists could also retake and hold airstrips in such southwestern provinces as Guangxi or Yunnan; thus widespread guerrilla activity could be fostered in an area that had previously been difficult for the central authorities to control. The 10,000 to 15,000 troops would remain ashore in South and Southeast China for an extended period of time, sowing seeds of rebellion that might in the long term succeed in overthrowing the Chinese Communist regime but in the short term would keep perhaps one-third of the Communist first-line troops busy, in addition to an estimated one-third of the Communist second-line troops currently engaged against guerrillas on the mainland. In its final analysis, the report claimed that, if taken in conjunction with the other courses of action now under consideration for the Far East, the combined results might well distract Communist Chinese attention from Korea; eliminate Communist logistic support in Indochina; deny all of China south of the Yellow River to communism; disrupt the economy in the remainder of China; banish the threat of armed aggression in other parts of Asia; reduce the effectiveness of Communi
st Chinese military forces; and counter the myth of communist invincibility throughout the world.16

  As discussions about a possible Nationalist military counterattack were undertaken in Washington and awaiting a conclusion, Chiang Kai-shek was working hard to avoid such a possibility, at least for the time being.17 Jay Taylor points out that, at this stage, a U.S.-PRC war involving Taiwan could end up in a stalemate and thus be a further incentive for a Beijing-Washington détente, in which case Chiang and Taiwan would likely end up worse off.18 More realistic reasons, however, might lead Chiang to eschew a war at any cost. On January 8, 1951, he admonished core members of the KMT Central Reform Committee to dispel any illusions they may have had about the timing of the war in Korea making it possible to mount military offensives against the mainland. Without first strengthening their central power and consolidating their revolutionary base, Chiang warned, any prospect of victory would prove to be short-lived or unrealistic.19

  Behind this unusual cautiousness lay a deeper political calculation. In early 1951, when State Department bureaucrats considered the best course of action against the Chinese Communists, they favored first replacing Chiang Kai-shek. In a top-secret memorandum dated January 24, they urged President Truman to set up a “central operations group” that would utilize and augment existing anti-Communist resistance forces on the mainland. In the meantime, the memorandum went as far as proposing that Washington undertake the “alteration of the leadership on Formosa” on an urgent basis. To achieve this end, it was believed that a coup d’état following preliminary measures to assure suitable conditions would best serve the U.S. interests. “With the removal of the Generalissimo and the more undesirable of his cronies,” some of Acheson’s aides advocated, “the Chinese on Formosa will accommodate themselves to the new circumstances as indicated by the United States” and would establish a regime more generally suitable to the purposes of mainland recovery. Following the changes in the leadership in Taiwan, the State Department staff further proposed that a small training and operations group be established there to revamp the command structure, train amphibious landing teams and other ground forces, provide logistical support, and, most important of all, provide any necessary liaison between the new Taiwanese regime and the U.S. military establishments.20

  These ideas might sound too wild to be executed and may have been hypothetical in nature, but they touched into the most sensitive nerve of the KMT power structure. Sun Liren, obviously aware of Washington’s plans for military operations against the mainland, had, since early January 1951, worked to persuade Chiang to entrust him with command power in the event of a military counterattack or, he said, he would consider resigning.21 In Chiang’s eyes, military recovery of the mainland was thus closely and delicately related to the Nationalist internal power structure in Taiwan and thus must be handled with extreme care. Chiang surely knew that, were a counteroffensive to occur under U.S. patronage, Sun, always the Americans’ favorite, would play a major role. To have Sun catapulted into a higher position and take over command of the Nationalist military was the last thing Chiang wanted.22

  It therefore came as no surprise that, despite being militant about recovering the mainland in his official rhetoric, Chiang privately instructed his military staff to prepare for Taiwan’s “defense.” In a meeting with his military staff on January 17, 1951, Chiang posited that were the UN to be driven out of Korea the Chinese Communists would redirect their attention to Taiwan. In his worst-case scenario, Taiwan would be massively bombed in March, followed by an amphibious invasion, probably in May.23 To Chiang, it was ironic indeed that the safety of his island redoubt had occurred largely because the U.S. Army in Korea was under threat of a massive Communist Chinese offensive. Although Chiang was delighted that Taiwan was now included in America’s defense perimeter, he saw making Taiwan a U.S. military launching pad against China as foolhardy, particularly when the distinction between the island at risk and its government were blurred in the minds of Washington policymakers and when the Nationalist leadership was just about to be restructured. In early December 1950, considering the tension on the Korean Peninsula, a wary President Truman noted in his diary that “I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here.”24 Truman probably never realized that the man widely perceived as longing for that very World War III had quietly placed his Nationalist regime and power consolidation on Taiwan, rather than engaging in a risky war with Communist China, as a top priority.

  In February and March 1951, in the darkest hours of the UN military action in Korea, a flurry of policy planning concerning using Nationalist Chinese forces to relieve pressure on the peninsula was underway among Washington’s top military and intelligence brass. Under consideration was America’s covert support of the alleged 700,000 anti-Communist guerrillas on the mainland, some 300,000 of whom professed allegiance to the Nationalist authorities.25 In Taipei, Karl Rankin and Charles Cooke were sounding out Chiang’s top aides on how best to utilize Nationalist troops “in areas outside Taiwan,” as well as how to transform the island into a UN base of operations in the Far East. Rankin urged the State Department to reach a firm agreement with Taipei that would make it possible to use Nationalist forces in South China when and if the Chinese Communists invaded Indochina. Cooke went one step further, trying to persuade Chiang to launch an immediate expeditionary operation to recapture Hainan Island as the first step toward recovering the entire mainland.26

  Discussions of what role the Taiwan-based Nationalists should play during the Korean War occurred not only in Washington’s executive branches but also in Congress. On February 12, 1951, House minority leader Joseph Martin delivered an inflammatory speech in New York, charging that President Truman was preventing “800,000 [sic] trained men” in Taiwan from opening “a second front in Asia,” declaring that there was “good reason to believe” that General MacArthur and “people in the Pentagon” favored this as “the cheapest operation” that could be mounted in the Far East. On March 8, the congressman sent MacArthur a copy of his speech, inviting comment.27 Two weeks later, MacArthur echoed Martin’s call for a U.S.-backed second front on the Chinese mainland using Nationalist forces, arguing that such a strategy was in conflict neither with “logic” nor the “tradition” of invariably “meeting force with maximum counter-force.” When the statement reached extremely partisan Washington, it stirred a political earthquake that would seal the general’s fate. On April 11, an agitated Truman relieved MacArthur of his command.28

  One would think that Chiang Kai-shek would have been worried about losing such a strong supporter of the Nationalist military recovery of the mainland. But on hearing of MacArthur’s dismissal, Chiang wrote that although he felt sorry about the injustice done to the general, he was having “more joy than worry” (leduo youshao) about future developments.29 Considering that a substantial amount of military aid promised by Washington was pending, along with the potential challenges from Sun Liren and perhaps other members of the Nationalist military over who would lead the military command, Chiang thought it out of the question to adopt an immediate mainland strategy, the price of which might be his paramount leadership within the Nationalist hierarchy and Taiwan’s national security.30 Chiang’s best policy, therefore, was to keep the extent of the mainland counteroffensive acceptable and manageable so as to ensure the legitimacy of his rule in Taiwan, which was now also the symbol of “Free China.” It was also in Chiang’s best interest to capitalize on the momentum of the hoped-for mainland recovery to secure maximum U.S. aid for Taiwan’s defense at a time when no comprehensive military action was being taken and thus avoid risking his leadership.31 In hindsight, Chiang’s reluctance to contemplate mainland recovery at the height of the Korean War may have inadvertently shaped Taiwan’s military as defensive rather than offensive in nature, providing a basis for Washington’s readiness to reach a mutual defense pact with Taipei in late 1954.

  THE HAINAN OPERATIONS AND COASTAL RAID
S

  Although there was no shortage of Nationalist military planning to defend Taiwan, it was not until July 1951, more than twelve months after the war in Korea had begun, that Nationalist military chiefs, with advice from Admiral Charles Cooke, came up with a relatively detailed scheme for a military counteroffensive against the Communist mainland, code-named “3–7–5.” According to that plan, “once readily prepared” the Nationalist forces would launch amphibious landings on Hainan Island and the Fujian provincial coast, where preliminary beachheads could be created for follow-up operations.32 Chiang’s reaction to the plan, however, was tepid. He scolded his military subordinates for the limited geographic scope of the proposed military operations and ordered a reevaluation. Privately he began to wonder whether any mainland counterattack would occur during his lifetime. On August 8, a week after the proposal was presented, Chiang admitted in his diary that the restoration of the country was “almost impossible” in the foreseeable future and that henceforth every plan must be designed “for the success of my successors, not for my own success.”33 When Cooke pursued the issue of retaking Hainan with Chiang in late 1951, an unimpressed Chiang grumbled privately that the idea was a plot hatched by the Western imperialists to fulfill their goals at the expense of Nationalist military strength.34