Accidental State Read online

By the time the seat of the crumbling Nationalist government was moved to Taipei in late 1949, Nationalist China’s territorial scope had been reduced to Taiwan, Hainan Island, and a string of offshore islets along China’s southeastern littoral. When the Truman administration reiterated its hands-off policy toward China in January 1950, the future of the island-based Nationalist Chinese state seemed doomed. Worse still, the severe challenge Chiang Kai-shek faced was multifaceted. Internally, the surviving Nationalist authorities on Hainan Island posed a political embarrassment and added a logistical burden to the trouble-ridden government in Taipei; and the Hainan Nationalists’ appeal for American support generated much diplomatic uneasiness to Chiang Kai-shek. The trouble from the Hainan Nationalist authorities was coupled with rumors and intrigues against Chiang. In the early months of 1950, a coup to topple Chiang was discussed from time to time, and also served as an alternative scenario in the State Department’s “hypothetical” planning before the war broke out in Korea. Externally, U.S. covert support for the Hong Kong-based anti-Chiang Third Force movement and the Tokyo-headquartered Taiwan independence movement was perceived by Taipei, with much apprehension, as undermining its already weak political legitimacy. As a corollary, to consolidate Nationalist rule in Taiwan and reestablish Chiang’s supreme position, the KMT national security apparatus began campaigns of terror to root out communist networks and sympathizers and to extend the reach of surveillance and cells down to the grass roots. Those relatively successful campaigns were intended to stabilize a still-weak accidental state in the island; with them the Chinese Nationalists began the long process of building political legitimacy among a population that had every reason to despise the ruling elites.

  On the other hand, it was also at this darkest formative moment of Nationalist rule in Taiwan that an unofficial American and primarily personalized Nationalist China policy began to take shape and play a crucial part. With the advisory assistance from the retired former commander of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Charles M. Cooke, and his “Special Technician Program” in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek was able to withstand a critical stage of his political career in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War. An individually influenced U.S. approach to Nationalist China policy-planning structure that centered on Charles Cooke and his special program in Taiwan led to major decisions that culminated in the abandonment of Hainan and Zhoushan islands, as well as arms contracts and procurements that were crucial to Taiwan’s security and defense. The retired admiral also served a vital role in bringing together a deserted Chiang and General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo. For a period of time surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War, the American policy toward the Nationalist authorities on the islands of Taiwan, Hainan, and Zhoushan was substantially going underground and considerably privatized. Broadly speaking, this uniquely informal advisory experience helped to prolong the weakened Nationalist regime’s survival in Taiwan. However, as this study will demonstrate, in this critical formative stage of the Republic of China on Taiwan, the U.S. government may have been playing a two-, three-, or several-sided game with the Nationalists, involving not just Chiang Kai-shek, but also Chen Cheng, Sun Liren, K. C. Wu, the anti-Chiang Third Forces, pro-Taiwan independence elements, and the Nationalist guerrillas on the mainland.

  From the spring of 1949 through June 1950, the United States attempted to offer the Chinese Communists normalization of bilateral relations and cooperation as part of using Chinese Titoism to contain Soviet Russia in the Far East. Mao Zedong was aware of this, but chose instead to form a close military alliance with Moscow. Leaders in Beijing then worked with the Soviets and the North Koreans to launch a war to take over South Korea. These contingent factors all played critical roles in the “accidental” formation of the Nationalist state in Taiwan. The war on the Korean Peninsula, undoubtedly the biggest contingency of all, and the subsequent interposition of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait were the most critical linchpins for Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist cohorts. Their dispirited and decimated regime was now reinvigorated, while a Nationalist Chinese state virtually rooted on the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores also began to take permanent shape. The Korean War led to a game-changing contingency that prompted the overnight rethink of the Truman administration and its about-face on issues surrounding Taiwan. Indeed, although Chiang Kai-shek continued to be despised, his island regime was saved. In hindsight, this “game-changer,” which took place surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War, also made the about-face of the extra-official activity of Douglas MacArthur, Charles Cooke, and others easier to accomplish.

  In the process of this state-making in Taiwan, several issues deserve careful contemplation. Before the Korean War, Chiang Kai-shek had hoped for a World War III to bring his dying Nationalist regime back to life. After the outbreak of war in Korea, and with a more secure island redoubt at hand, launching a military rollback against the Communist mainland as part of a new world war became less realistic to Chiang. Instead, he began initiating party reforms and promoting limited democracy in Taiwan for the sake of deepening the KMT’s social base and strengthening the legitimacy of its rule on the island. With Taiwan now at the forefront of the international Cold War, Chiang’s idea of a military recovery of the mainland served as useful political rhetoric, both to attract more U.S. aid and to maintain the Nationalists’ morale and legitimacy on their maritime domain.

  The conventional wisdom argues that, after the war broke out in Korea, Chiang Kai-shek strongly favored a military reinvasion of the Chinese mainland so as to restore his role in China. The Truman and Eisenhower presidencies, on the other hand, were inclined to simply contain the Chinese Communists. A crosscheck of both Chinese and English declassified documents now reveals that as the Korean War entered a stalemate, it was actually the military and intelligence chiefs in the Pentagon who took the lead in transforming the Nationalists’ grandiose but empty “military rollback” slogan into detailed courses of action for the purpose of U.S. geo-military interests in the Far East. While Washington urged Taipei to launch a military counteroffensive against the Communist-controlled territories of Hainan Island and the Southeast mainland, it was Chiang Kai-shek who now tried to avoid such an operation so as to keep his military supremacy intact within the Nationalist hierarchy, in addition to assuring Taiwan’s defense interests. In other words, in the early 1950s, when the American-favored General Sun Liren remained a perceived threat, Chiang placed political deliberations ahead of any other issue, giving priority to the consolidation of his Taiwan power base without truly thinking about a genuine counterattack on the mainland to overthrow Mao Zedong. In the eyes of Chiang, mounting localized and relatively small-scale raids along China’s coast, thus maintaining the façade of attempts at military recovery of the mainland, would best suit his interests. Chiang’s reluctance to, if not resistance against mainland military recovery at the height of the Korean War might have unwittingly shaped Taiwan’s military as purely defensive in nature, thus providing a conceptual basis for Washington’s readiness to conclude a mutual defense pact with Taipei in 1954–1955.

  A revitalized U.S. military aid to the Nationalists in Taiwan no doubt strengthened Chiang Kai-shek’s position in both domestic and international arenas. Nonetheless, this renewal of aid was coupled with U.S. pressure to reform Chiang’s military and to transform the hitherto inept Nationalist military command and decision-making structure into more capable ones. The result of such a pressure was a substantial reduction of Chiang’s authority over Taiwan’s military and defense affairs, transforming a perennially Chiang-centered Nationalist military decision-making into a virtually U.S.-dominated one. With the Nationalist government’s military budget and troop deployment being largely subject to U.S. approval by mid-1953, when the active stage of war on the Korean Peninsular ended, and when Washington no longer saw the military confrontation with the PRC as feasible, a Nationalist military power projection capability limited only to Taiwan and the Pescadores was basica
lly in place.

  In the early 1950s, during the nascent period of the Nationalist state in Taiwan, the signing of two treaties further reinforced both the legality and the political actuality that the territorial and jurisdictional scope of Nationalist China was to be confined to the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores only. One was the 1952 peace treaty between Taipei and Tokyo, and the other was the 1954 mutual defense pact between Taipei and Washington. These two treaties legitimized Nationalist governance on Taiwan, elevated the international status of the Nationalist government, and made Chiang’s island redoubts more secure against Communist military threat. On the other hand, whether the Nationalists liked it or not, the content, spirit, and scope of application of these two treaties also bore strong implications that would eventually lead to the legalization of an islands-rooted Nationalist Chinese state. In retrospect, while Chiang Kai-shek endeavored to legitimize his Taipei-based regime as the central government representing the whole of China by entering into more international agreements, ironically, the two treaties he signed with Japan and the United States only demystified such a claim.

  As the Korean War came to a halt in the summer of 1953 with the signing of an armistice, the withdrawal of two exiled Nationalist forces in northern Burma and Vietnam signified the end of the marked Nationalist military presence on the East Asian continent. Chiang Kai-shek was deft enough to try to utilize the two withdrawal operations to seek more U.S. support for other military ends. Yet the political coloration that the absence of Nationalist forces on the Asian mainland brought about was not unremarked. Henceforth, any Nationalist government official statement about or expression of a hoped-for military return to the Chinese mainland could only prove increasingly less persuasive.

  The realignment between the United States and Taiwan-based Nationalist China in 1954–1955 was depicted by Chiang Kai-shek as his greatest achievement since the end of World War II. To the Americans, the official alliance with the Chinese Nationalist government provided a legal basis for their acquisition and operation of military bases and installations on Taiwanese soil. It also led to the disposition of U.S. land, air, and sea forces on the island, a crucial step forward following the agreements reached in 1951–1952, when the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was given access to Taiwan’s airfields and port installations on an ad hoc basis. Accordingly, the 1954 mutual defense pact bore great significance in terms of America’s military security buildup in the Cold War’s East Asian theatre.

  And yet, for Chiang, reentering a coalition with the Americans was not without its costs. He could not have been unaware that one key consequence of such realignment would be stronger U.S. influence, if not control, over his future military enterprises against the Chinese mainland, and the existence of two de facto political entities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. A politically pragmatic Chiang was also a man with a strong will and a lot of determination. In the years that followed, he did try to challenge, if not break, the framework created by the 1954–1955 realignment and contemplated resorting to military means to recover the mainland, first in the late 1950s and then again in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, the complicated historical developments at the formative stage of the Nationalist Chinese state on the island of Taiwan, as delineated in the this text, had made such a plan virtually impossible. In this regard, the “patron-client state relationship” framework is useful in reexamining the bilateral interactions between the two sides.2 Being a client state, small Taiwan could never guarantee its security without support and assistance from the United States. When dealing with the United States, Chiang could be extremely adept at manipulating his American patrons and, for all intents and purposes, sometimes successful in enlarging his room for maneuver, even as he chafed against restrictions put in place by his paymasters in Washington.

  Within a relatively short decade, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, Taiwan was transformed from a Japanese colony to a province of postwar China, and then from an island frontier to the center and the final power bastion of the exiled Nationalist Chinese state. The process of making an island state was intriguing, contingent, inadvertent, full of political bitter-sweetness, and never intended when the fate of Taiwan and the Pescadores was first planned in the middle of World War II. In hindsight, perhaps a more striking fact was that the United States, from the government organization down to various individuals, with their policy planning and theorizing, actions and inactions, had played a crucial role in the formative years of this state.

  This book explores the creation of an accidental island state of Taiwan, with special emphasis on the roles the Chinese Nationalists and the Americans played. To be sure, the actions and inactions, successes and failures of the third party—the CCP/PRC—are no less consequential in the making of this unintended state and deserve future study. With the further release of declassified U.S. official records and accessibility of the personal papers and files of top Nationalist leaders during the past decade, a reevaluation of the formation of the Nationalist Chinese state in Taiwan, with an emphasis on the unique role the United States played, is not only possible but necessary, particularly when, in recent years, a school of thought has begun to argue that the United States should “abandon” Taiwan in return for a better relationship with the PRC.3 A thorough investigation of the historical formation of the separate ROC state on Taiwan and the roles the Americans played in this state formation will help us see the “abandoning Taiwan” thesis more clearly. It is my hope that this book will provide a first step toward understanding the history of a complicated and intricate triangular game, the repercussions of which continue to be felt today.

  1

  Taiwan in the Balance

  DURING THE FIRST DAYS of November 1943, Chiang Kai-shek was hard pressed to prepare for an important event unprecedented in China’s recent history. On October 31, in the midst of his long war with Japan, he received a cordial invitation from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to partake in a summit that was to be held in Cairo within a month. Chiang was fully aware of the enormous historical significance of representing Nationalist China, now recognized as one of the Big Four powers1 in the world, to meet with top leaders from the United States and Britain. Chiang, who should have been much elated and excited, nevertheless confessed that the forthcoming summit had made him feel rather “hesitant and uneasy.”2 In the weeks that followed the invitation, Chiang and his top aides were hastily forging the agenda to be discussed with their Allied counterparts. This was no easy task. On the morning of November 18, 1943, just a few hours before his special flight was about to take off from Chongqing, Nationalist China’s wartime capital, Chiang finalized a list of seven outstanding issues to be broached in Cairo. The restoration of China’s various “lost territories” was one of them; and with much deliberation, it was determined that the return of two territories from the Japanese, Manchuria and Taiwan (including the Pescadores), should be presented at the conference table.3

  For the Nationalist Chinese, adding Taiwan to their “lost territories” category awaiting restoration was a long and evolving process, entangled in both political calculation and uncertainty. From a real political perspective, up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Nationalist officials had not considered Taiwan to be in the same category as other mainland territories lost to Japan in more recent years, notably Manchuria. The island had been officially ceded by the Qing imperial court to Tokyo in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki after China’s defeat in the war with Japan. In contrast, Japan’s conquest of Manchuria and its subsequent sponsorship of the puppet “Manchukuo” regime in the early 1930s had never resulted in Nationalist China’s relinquishing its claim of sovereignty there. Along with its formal declaration of war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, the Nationalist government nullified all treaties between the two countries. Only then did Chiang Kai-shek and his associates formally and publicly include the recovery of Taiwan in their war aims.4

  Regarding Taiwan’s relations with the Ch
inese mainland, it should be noted that Chiang Kai-shek had harbored shifting perceptions and mindsets at different stages of his political career. His ever-changing attitudes toward the island-mainland relationship, to a considerable extent, also reflected how other top Nationalist government leaders perceived the issue. In October 1921, while still a young revolutionary struggling for the very survival of the KMT power base in southern China, Chiang stepped onto the soil of Taiwan for the very first time. Having conducted a business trip to Guangzhou (Canton), where he met his mentor Sun Yat-sen, Chiang set out for Shanghai via the sea route. While taking a short transit break in Keelung, the island’s northernmost port, Chiang observed that the port was ill-managed and the staff poorly disciplined, which led him to note in his diary that “the fate of imperial Japan is doomed.”5

  Chiang’s preliminary, negative impression of Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan was not, however, coupled with any indication that he was thinking about the island’s return, whether immediately or in the future, to the Chinese motherland. By the spring of 1927, the Northern Expedition under Chiang’s leadership was under way. On March 11, in his field headquarters in Nanchang, Chiang hosted a private meeting with an unusual visitor from Japan, Yamamoto Jotaro, the personal envoy of Tanaka Giichi, a heavyweight politician who would become Japan’s new prime minister within a few weeks. Exchanging viewpoints about the future of East Asia, Chiang advised his Japanese guest that in order to build a lasting friendship between China and Japan, both Korea and Taiwan should be free from colonial rule. If Tokyo was willing to assist the Koreans and the Formosans in achieving their national liberation, Chiang stated, it would fully demonstrate Japan’s goodwill and friendship toward its East Asian neighbors.6

  The “lost territories” depicted in Sun Yat-sen’s notable 1924 Three People’s Principles included all or parts of Korea, Vietnam, Burma, the Ryukyu Islands, Bhutan, Nepal, Taiwan, and the Pescadores. Always claiming to be Sun’s faithful follower, Chiang would no doubt keep his mentor’s words as his personal goal.7 On various occasions, Chiang unhesitatingly made known to the outside world that his government and party would endeavor to restore the territories China had previously lost to the imperialist powers, a political and rhetorical message that had almost become a cliché. Nevertheless, throughout most of the 1920s and the 1930s, no leader of the Chinese central government, whether located in Peking or, after 1928, in Nanjing, made any serious effort to claim that Taiwan was a legal part of Republican China. When Chinese constitutions were drafted in 1923, 1925, 1934, and 1936, recognizing practical realities, Taiwan was never claimed as a province or even a special region of China.8