Having decided that consolidating his Taiwan powerbase was his top priority, Chiang then came up with two crucial guidelines for dealing with Eisenhower’s new administration. While Chiang would be willing to contribute up to three divisions to assist the South Koreans, in return he would seek the following two crucial promises from Washington: the signing of a mutual security pact and the continuation of military aid regardless of how the situation in Korea evolved.25 As the cease-fire on the Korean Peninsula became a reality toward the middle of 1953, Chiang’s concern about the future position of the Taiwan-based Nationalist government grew more apparent. In early June, in a meeting in Taipei with Admiral Arthur Radford, Chiang decided to test the American reaction by claiming to want to launch a “unilateral” counteroffensive against the mainland. Radford responded by proposing the creation of a “joint” command structure that would restrict any unilateral military actions. Without hesitation, Chiang immediately agreed that the United States should lead such a joint command if it were created.26 Later on, in late July, concerned that Taiwan’s geo-strategic value might be undermined by the forthcoming armistice in Korea, Chiang decided he would either urge continued U.S. military aid under the pretense of retaking the mainland or lodge an official request to Washington for signing a mutual defense pact.27
For reasons not difficult to understand, namely, to maintain his supreme leadership as Free China’s only hope of reconquering the Communist mainland, Chiang decided to take the first option. On December 28, taking advantage of Arthur Radford’s short stopover in Taipei, Chiang handed over a detailed plan codenamed “Kai” for the admiral’s perusal. The new program, a reincarnation of Baituan’s Guang program, aimed at building and training a total of sixty divisions of Nationalist ground forces within three to four years, to be used to regain South China, and to divert and tie down Chinese Communist divisions that could otherwise be engaged in, say, Indochina. Deliberately spooking the Americans with the plan’s extraordinary scale and budget ($1.3 billion in total), a shrewd Chiang immediately proposed an alternative for Washington to consider: Taipei would reduce the number of required divisions from sixty to forty-one, and shorten the period of training and preparation envisaged from the original three to four years to about eighteen months. As Chiang explained, this would hugely reduce the cost while swiftly enhancing Nationalist military capability, with which Taiwan could contribute to the anti-communist cause in the Far East.28 Unprepared for this “Kai” Plan that Chiang had so unexpectedly presented, an outwardly lukewarm Radford was willing to accept it only after making it clear to Chiang that he did so solely in a private capacity, a move that caused Chiang to feel humiliated.29
The “Kai” plan received a rather negative response from the United States. MAAG, then in the process of reforming the Nationalist military establishment and reorganizing its forces, felt that much of the plan was “completely infeasible of execution” and that nearly every aspect of it would require vast augmentation to meet U.S. standards. In a political sense, as the plan called for recruiting at least 300,000 local Taiwanese reserve personnel, General Chase doubted whether these islanders would support combat operations on the mainland. From a purely practical point of view, Chase analyzed that the Nationalists simply showed no appreciation of the logistical base needed to support the training or deployment of a fighting force capable of gaining a foothold on the mainland.30
U.S. Embassy personnel in Taipei also viewed the plan as beyond the scope of the existing mutual security program. Nevertheless, Karl Rankin in quite a sympathetic tone argued that the Kai plan revealed the differences between Nationalist and American policy. As Rankin perceived, not quite precisely though, while Chiang Kai-shek was dedicated to the liberation of the mainland, the United States had undertaken no commitment either to support him in this purpose by using American forces or to provide Chiang with arms and equipment beyond what might be needed for the defense of Taiwan.31 In Washington, planning-level officials at the State Department generally believed that the submission of the Kai plan had successfully caused the United States to take a new look at the aid program from the standpoint of maximum utilization of the Nationalist Chinese potential, instead of the usual standpoint of the strategic reserve concept. Their conclusion was that, in the long run, U.S-favored limits on the Nationalist forces’ offensive capabilities would become utterly unacceptable to Taipei.32
Still, many doubted whether Chiang Kai-shek genuinely believed he could launch a successful military operation against Communist China. Notwithstanding the impracticability with which it was perceived, the Kai plan did increase Taipei’s bargaining position in its dealings with Washington, bringing about a reconsideration of U.S. military policy toward the island-based Nationalists after the Korean cease-fire. In mid-March 1954, in a session between top Nationalist officials and U.S. representatives in Taipei, with the Kai plan still in abeyance, Chiang successfully persuaded MAAG to temporarily accept that the total number of Nationalist infantry divisions on the island should be twenty-four, rather than the twenty-one MAAG had initially proposed. Chiang was also able to secure MAAG’s promise to keep intact the additional 7 divisions and total of 15,000 irregulars then deployed on the offshore islands.33
Chiang knew there was no realistic hope of launching a “mainland counteroffensive,” but used the idea primarily to achieve other goals. So it is not surprising that he would modify its concept to suit Taiwan’s other diplomatic and military-strategic purposes. To secure continued military aid from the United States, in the spring of 1954 Chiang shifted from his original stance to favoring the recovering Hainan Island and the Leizhou Peninsula opposite Hainan. He understood that their geographical proximity to Indochina was of considerable security interest to the United States.34 On April 7, President Eisenhower publicly opposed a negotiated settlement to end the war in Indochina between the French and the Vietminh on the grounds that it would lead to a Communist-controlled Vietnam and a “falling row of dominoes” in Southeast Asia. After the fall of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, military analysts in the CIA wrestled with the question of deeper U.S. intervention to support France. At one point, key elements in the Eisenhower administration, including Vice President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson urged the use of nuclear weapons against Ho Chi Minh.35
On May 13, when Eisenhower’s special envoys, General James Van Fleet and Assistant Secretary of Defense Wilfred McNeil, visited Taipei, speculation was circulating as to the chief purpose of their visit. The British were specifically wary of the alleged formation of a northeast Asia defense organization, encompassing not only Taiwan, but also Hong Kong.36 As it turned out, Chiang made efforts to push for the Kai plan and retaking Hainan. Chiang claimed that he had changed his attitude toward the Hainan operation. Instead of arguing that reconquering the Communist-occupied Hainan would damage the morale and cost the Nationalists dearly, which was what he had said two years earlier, Chiang now claimed that, with U.S. assistance, it would not be too difficult for the Nationalists to occupy the Leizhou Peninsula and to recover Hainan, goals that would be of great help in solving the Indochina issue. Given an increasingly complex diplomatic and military landscape in East Asia, with Mao Zedong’s government visibly active, the American visitors responded with little more than a polite thank-you.37
THE OFFSHORE ISLAND CRISIS AND THE TREATY
After this tepid response from the United States, a concerned Chiang Kai-shek turned his focus to the second option, the signing of a defense treaty with Washington. In March 1953, shortly after Eisenhower was sworn in, Nationalist Chinese ambassador Wellington Koo first broached the subject in his meeting with the new secretary of state. Although John Foster Dulles welcomed the idea of a general pact of mutual security for Asia, he nevertheless had reservations about forging a bilateral treaty with Taipei, especially whether the KMT-held offshore islands should be included in such a treaty. In a nutshell, Dulles saw that t
he exclusion of offshore islands would impair the prestige of the Nationalist government, whereas their inclusion would entail a responsibility that the United States was not as yet ready to assume.38 The State Department’s cold response toward Taipei’s initial request about the defense pact might also explain why Chiang chose the rearmament of his forces, embodied in the Kai plan, as the priority strategy to deal with the new Republican administration in Washington.
The signing of the U.S.-South Korean Security Treaty in October 1953 seemed to rekindle momentarily Taiwan’s interest in obtaining a similar pact. But at that moment Chiang was still endeavoring to persuade Washington to accept the Kai Plan and the professed counteroffensive initiative. On October 1, when Chiang Ching-kuo met with Dulles in Washington, the Generalissimo’s son did not hesitate to stress the need for increasing the U.S. military and economic assistance to Taiwan, ideally from $70 million to over $81 million.39 Meanwhile, from Washington’s point of view, any announcement of the conclusion of a security treaty with Taiwan before the convention of the Geneva Conference on April 26, 1954 would not be palatable to its allies, Britain and France. Thus, in the first few months of 1954 the Eisenhower administration decided to shelve any discussions between Taipei and Washington about the issue for the time being.40
A very different landscape emerged in the summer of 1954 when Chiang was about to run out of patience with Washington as a result of its continued shunning of his rearmament program. On June 21, finally realizing that no massive military aid as imagined in the Kai plan would be forthcoming, Chiang dismissed Sun Liren as commander-in-chief of the Nationalist ground forces. It was a gesture full of political implications. As Chiang put it in his personal diary, he no longer deemed Sun useful as a liaison for acquiring U.S. aid.41 A week later, on June 28, in a meeting with Karl Rankin, Chiang formally expressed his desire to sign a mutual defense pact with the United States. To eliminate concerns that he would take unilateral counteroffensive operations against the mainland, thus risk embroiling the United States in a war with China, Chiang pledged that, after the treaty was concluded, he would obtain U.S. permission before taking any military action.42
Chiang’s appeal, again, was received very negatively within the State Department. Walter Robertson, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, pressured Dulles for a treaty with Taipei, which he argued would serve to maintain the current status of Taiwan against Communist China. His argument, however, was met with strong opposition from almost every corner of the Department, whose chiefs were largely concerned that such a treaty could only increase the misgivings of countries of the Third World that recognized Beijing as the legitimate government of China. It would, for example, antagonize India and might drive it closer to Communist China. Ultimately, the opposition view got the upper hand. Thus, on September 1, 1954, before John Foster Dulles departed for the Philippines to join the Manila Conference to found the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), he decided to delay setting a date for the treaty negotiations with Taiwan, because, again, of the complexities of the offshore island problem.43
The Chinese Communists, ironically and unwittingly, contributed to the final conclusion of a mutual security pact between Taipei and Washington. Beginning on September 3, the PLA launched a massive shelling attack on Quemoy. The Nationalists retaliated by bombing the Communist military infrastructure in Amoy.44 At one point, the offshore crisis escalated to such a pronounced extent that the Taiwan Strait was deemed likely to become the Cold War’s next theater. The timing of the Quemoy bombardment was deliberate, as it coincided with Dulles’s arrival in Manila, and Mao Zedong intended the action to forestall extending the protection of the SEATO to Taiwan.45 Such a calculated action, however, provided Chiang Kai-shek with perfect justification to push Washington toward the desired defense treaty. On September 9, during Dulles’s five-hour stopover in Taipei on his way back to the United States, Chiang emphasized the importance of finalizing a bilateral pact. Chiang refuted the argument that Taiwan should not have a defense treaty because the situation was “fluid” by stating that the “fluid” situation was caused exactly by the absence of such a pact. Uncommitted, Dulles nevertheless assured Chiang that he valued what Chiang had said and that “it had not fallen on barren ground.”46
The secretary of state’s short visit was widely seen as an important sign of U.S. support for the Nationalists, and it increased Chiang Kai-shek’s confidence in handling the Quemoy crisis. On the day after the departure of Dulles, Chiang went on a retreat with his family to Sun Moon Lake. Realizing that the situation was turning favorable for him, Chiang wrote in his diary that he felt relaxed, cheerful, and invigorated.47 More importantly, Chiang seemed to get a sense of how to maneuver the Quemoy crisis and play a double game with the Americans. A few days after returning from his restful retreat in central Taiwan, Chiang met with Karl Rankin and General William Chase in Taipei. Displaying great impatience and irritation, Chiang bitterly complained that no support from the United States for an increase over the existing Nationalist military strength levels was evident. He said he was deeply disappointed, telling them that when Korea or Indochina was attacked, American aid was immediately stepped up, but when the Nationalist government was fighting a fierce war that was threatening the Free World, the United States seemed “indifferent.” In the end, Chiang insisted that his concerns be conveyed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.48
Taipei’s growing show of impatience began paying dividends. In Washington, in the face of the Communist bombardment of Quemoy, which John Foster Dulles described as “a horrible dilemma,” the majority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now hardened their stance, viewing the retention of the Nationalist-held offshore islands of very great importance, and recommended the use of U.S. armed forces, if needed, to prevent a Communist seizure of them.49 Nonetheless, dissenting voices remained. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, for instance, fretted that American intervention could involve Washington in a Chinese civil war, and the defense of the offshore islands would come closer to war with China than if the United States had tried to save Dien Bien Phu.50 To solve this dilemma, Dulles planned to present the offshore island question to the UN Security Council, where Washington would seek an injunction against changing the status quo on the ground that the Communist action was a threat to world peace. Dulles was convinced that a United Nations-arranged ceasefire would secure support from America’s Western allies, preserve the offshore islands for Taipei, and avoid a war between Washington and Beijing. In mid-September 1954, London was informed of the UN plan, now codenamed “Oracle,” to be broached by New Zealand. Whitehall welcomed this proposal with the hope that it would lead to a wider settlement of the Taiwan issue, including American recognition of the PRC and its admission into the United Nations.51
10.1 A house on the island of Quemoy wrecked by Communist Chinese shells during the first offshore island crisis, ca. September 1954. (Courtesy of the KMT Party History Institute)
In the midst of the Quemoy crisis, in his report back to Whitehall, the British consul in Tamsui, A. H. B. Hermann, observed that when the shelling around Quemoy died down toward the end of September and tension abroad abated, apprehension of an invasion of Taiwan itself seemed oddly enough to become more marked in Nationalist circles.52 If the British representative on the island was smart enough to see through Chiang Kai-shek’s tactics, Chiang’s supporters on Capitol Hill were apparently not. Throughout the crisis, pro-Taiwan senators and congressmen in Washington had been clamoring for a strong policy toward Beijing. Meanwhile, with the proposal of Oracle, key figures within the administration, such as Admiral Arthur Radford and Walter Robertson, tended to agree to it, chiefly in the belief that the resolution would ultimately create a situation that would lay the groundwork for UN acceptance of American assistance to the Nationalists in holding the offshore islands.53
Anticipating that the Nationalists would consider Oracle as yet another Yalta by which they were to be sold down the river as a result of secret
bargains made behind their backs, Karl Rankin urged Washington to take other offsetting steps for the sake of demonstrating U.S. determination to help defend Free China. Rankin’s suggestion was soon incorporated into a long memorandum, dated October 7, 1954, prepared by Walter Robertson for Dulles, in which Robertson emphasized that the time had come for an immediate conclusion of a security treaty with Taipei. As Robertson saw it, such a mutual defense pact was not only an essential move to offset the negative effects of Oracle in the United Nations, but was also the best means of deterring a Communist attack against Taiwan. As to the difficult question of the Chinese territory to be covered by the treaty, Robertson argued that it should precisely reflect the existing situation as to U.S. military commitments to the Nationalist government in Taiwan, which would neither extend present U.S. military commitments nor reduce them.54
Dulles decided to begin the treaty discussions with Taipei the very next day, after he got a green light from President Eisenhower, who insisted that Chiang Kai-shek should assume a more passive posture and accept a truly defensive treaty. In other words, both Eisenhower and Dulles now viewed the treaty as a way to rein in Chiang and his regime.55 There were also practical reasons for signing a treaty. An official alliance with the Nationalist government would provide an important legal basis for the U.S. acquisition and operation of military bases and installations on Taiwanese soil. It might also provide a stable framework within which the programs designed to enhance Taiwan’s military and economy could go forward. The signing of a defense pact with Taipei, moreover, might be followed by the prospective placement of U.S. land, air, and sea forces on Taiwan, and an exclusive U.S. control over the island’s military sites, the result of which would be a further strengthening of American position in the Cold War’s East Asian theatre.56
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