Accidental State Read online

  Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, indeed, the Nationalist government acted in a manner consistent with viewing Taiwan as a foreign-ruled territory. In 1929, following negotiations with the Japanese government, the nascent Nationalist regime in Nanjing agreed to open a consular post in Taipei under the jurisdiction of its legation in Tokyo. In April 1931, when the Chinese Consulate General was officially established in Taipei, Lin Shaonan, a close associate of Chiang Kai-shek, was made Nationalist China’s first consul general on the island. The consular post operated well for several years. It was not until February 1938, seven months after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, that the Nationalist consular staff was forced to leave the island.9

  The Japanese all-out invasion of China in the summer of 1937 brought no immediate change in the Nationalist attitude toward Taiwan. When addressing his party cadets in April 1938, shortly after the Nationalist Consulate General was shut down in Taipei, Chiang Kai-shek argued from a pragmatic and strategic perspective that his government should endeavor to defy Japanese colonial rule of Korea and Taiwan and to set free the peoples of the two territories so as to consolidate war-threatened Nationalist China’s defense line against Japan’s military encroachments. However, Chiang did not call for Taiwan’s return to China. Nor did he mention how the Nationalists should define or redefine their relations with these two Japanese colonies after their political liberation from Tokyo.10

  As China’s war with Japan continued, more and more Taiwanese staked their future with the Nationalist Chinese in political and military terms. Beginning in late 1938, the islanders who had fled to the mainland, later known as “half-mountain people” (banshan ren), and their sporadic anti-Japanese organizations had gradually come together to formally establish the Taiwan Revolutionary League (Taiwan Geming Tongmenghui) in February 1941. Earlier, in September 1940, the Taiwan Party Headquarters Preparatory Office had also been established under the supervision of the KMT Central Organization Department, thus marking the beginning of the Nationalist official connection with the Taiwanese. In a meeting held in March 1942, members of the Taiwan Revolutionary League discussed the formation of a Taiwanese army, establishment of a Taiwan provincial government under the KMT aegis, and support for China’s repossession of the island. Shortly afterward, an editorial published in Yishibao (Social Welfare), a Chongqing newspaper, advocated that “the Chinese government should make a fresh declaration of its claim of sovereignty over the island removing from the minds of other nations the conception of Formosa as a colony, and encouraging the Formosans themselves to redouble their efforts against the enemy.” American diplomats surmised that the league had begun agitating for Taiwan’s return to China because of public discussion of independence for Korea, which Chongqing had previously viewed on a par with Taiwan.11

  Nonetheless, top Nationalist echelons moved cautiously with regard to the Taiwan issue. In April 1943, the aforementioned Taiwan Party Headquarters Preparatory Office was expanded into a “KMT Centrally Administered Taiwan Executive Committee” when Chiang Kai-shek found it imperative to create a political mechanism to accommodate more “half-mountain people.”12 Although it was always directly attached to the KMT Central Party Headquarters, as were KMT’s provincial party headquarters elsewhere, the term “province” never appeared in any pre-recovery name of the Taiwan Party Headquarters. Nor had Chiang expressed his consent to the idea of creating a Taiwan provincial government-in-exile on the mainland, as proposed by some pro-Nationalist Taiwanese elites in China. As of mid-1942, planning-level officials within the Nationalist hierarchy remained cautious, if not uncertain, about Taiwan’s return to China.13 Both U.S. military intelligence analysis in the early 1940s and contemporary researchers have argued that at this juncture Japanese colonial Taiwan’s future relations with China were quite murky. It remained undetermined whether the island would become a province of China, or a special district under Chinese or Allied control following Japan’s surrender.14

  As the summit in Cairo neared in November 1943, understandably, Chiang Kai-shek and his top aides found it imperative to work out a clear definition of China’s territories “lost” to the Japanese. At this juncture, geostrategic concerns came to dominate top Nationalist leaders’ attitude toward this issue.15 Just half a year prior to the Cairo Conference, Chiang published China’s Destiny, in which he drew an idealized picture of postwar China’s territorial and defense landscape. According to Chiang, China’s peripheral areas, including Manchuria, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and even the remotest Pamir and Himalayan regions, were all “strategically essential” for the country’s postwar national defense.16 Chiang’s grand statements, dealing with such sensitive subjects as China’s likely territorial expansion, momentarily invited both mixed reaction and speculation from abroad. While the British were apprehensive about Chiang’s professed ambitions toward Tibet and adjacent territories under the British Raj, the Americans seemed comparatively relieved. President Roosevelt, for example, was more than pleased to have the Ryukyu Islands return to postwar China, an idea he had advanced to the Nationalists in 1942.17 As the summit became imminent, however, Chiang was at least perspicacious enough to differentiate idealism from realpolitik when dealing with international affairs. To persuade the other Allied leaders that it was in their best interest to support China’s territorial restoration after V-J Day, Chiang needed to place pragmatic considerations at the forefront.

  Legally speaking, the Ryukyu Islands, a quasi-independent kingdom paying tribute to the Qing imperial court, had never been a formal part of China. Whereas the Qing lost Taiwan and the Pescadores as a result of its war with Japan in 1894–1895, it had lost its tributary patronage over the Ryukyu Islands through an ambiguous and gradual process. In 1879, Tokyo officially made the islands into its “Okinawa Prefecture,” thus marking the end of the kingdom’s tributary ties with China. The defeat of Qing by the Japanese in 1894–1895 further dimmed all possible hope of the islands’ return to China’s jurisdiction, even nominally.18

  If “legality” and “historical legitimacy” were concerns that might have discouraged Chiang from accepting Roosevelt’s goodwill and claiming the Ryukyu Islands back, pragmatism and realism, especially the consideration of war-torn China’s physical strengths in East Asia, played the most decisive part in determining the islands’ future. As Chiang Kai-shek argued on a later occasion after the Cairo summit, Nationalist China would continue to be in a very difficult position to govern Ryukyu even if the islands were returned to its territorial sway, due to a serious lack of naval capability in the foreseeable decades.19 Considering the fact that both Ryukyu and Korea were once imperial China’s tributaries rather than innately integrated parts of the empire, Chiang at the last minute decided to remove both territories from the list to be discussed in Cairo, thus leaving Manchuria and Taiwan as the Nationalists’ main targets to be reclaimed with the support of their Allies.20

  EARLY U.S. PERCEPTIONS OF TAIWAN

  The Cairo summit, as it turned out, was a huge propaganda success for Chiang Kai-shek and his war-torn Nationalist regime, as well as a morale booster to the Chinese nation as a whole. The press communiqué issued on the last day of the summit, commonly known as the Cairo Declaration, stated that both President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill concurred that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China.”21 Back in Chongqing, the Chinese mass media viewed the summit as a great success, both in dealing with territorial issues and in strengthening Allied common war efforts against Japan until the latter’s unconditional surrender. The American embassy in Chongqing observed that the Chinese officials and people were greatly inspired, and were now “holding in high esteem the farsightedness of President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill.”22

  Both the Chinese officials and the people surely had reasons to celebrate Allied support of China’s “lost territories” issue. Jus
t a year before, in August 1942, a committee of editors of Time, Life, and Fortune published a memorandum entitled “The United States in a New World, II: Pacific Relations.” Regarding the structure of a new peace order in the postwar Pacific region, a section of this article was devoted to “a trans-Pacific highway.” The authors proposed that a U.S.-United Nations defense belt be built across the Pacific, beginning with Hawaii in the east and ending with Taiwan in the west as “the logical anchor of the line and the mighty western terminus for the air armadas of the United Nations.” Under this new dispensation, they argued, China could have predominant interest in Taiwan, where the Chinese customs service and currency system could be introduced into the island. “But,” the authors argued, to make Taiwan a Chinese territory “seems impolitic in view of the necessity for a United Nations base there.”23 Readers in war-beleaguered China had been shocked and astonished that certain of their influential American friends argued for some sort of a United Nations mandate under which the Chinese population of the island would enjoy full autonomy and civil rights, but with foreign affairs, military forces, and security measures of the island controlled by the postwar UN authorities.24

  Despite a somewhat different stance toward Taiwan on the part of the Nationalist government, the article ignited strong Chinese reaction. It was probably this article that pushed the Nationalists to become more forthcoming in their official intentions. In October 1942, in a private meeting with Wendell Willkie, President Roosevelt’s special envoy, Chiang Kai-shek told the American visitor that Taiwan, together with China’s coastal fortresses like Lushun and Dalian (Port Arthur), must be returned to China after the war.25 A month later, on November 3, 1942, in his first press conference since becoming Chinese foreign minister, T. V. Soong firmly told a group of foreign and domestic correspondents that China “will recover Manchuria, Formosa, and the Ryukyu Islands after the war.”26 Shortly thereafter, on New Year’s Day 1943, Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen’s son and then president of the Legislative Yuan, published an article in the KMT official organ, Central Daily, attacking the Time-Life-Fortune memorandum for “ignoring China’s determination to recover Taiwan.”27 Sun’s statement was followed the very next day by an article written by Shao Yulin, director of the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, published in the influential Da Gong Bao (The Impartial Daily) and in Central News Agency dispatches. Shao expressed his astonishment that anyone should place the issue of security above the principle of self-government. He asserted that China’s allies should not expect its cooperation on matters of international security unless Chinese sovereignty over the lost territories was unconditionally restored.28

  These strong reactions prodded Washington to clear the air with Nationalist high officials. In a meeting with T. V. Soong in March 1943, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles stressed that “the Chinese, the British and the Americans were very much in accord” concerning the steps to be taken in the Far East after the war was won. Welles particularly assured Soong that Formosa must be returned to China, and that Chinese sovereignty should once more be reestablished over Manchuria.29 Although the Nationalists had secured Washington’s promise that Taiwan would be returned to China, differing voices arguing for Taiwan’s postwar internationalization and U.S. special interests on the island persisted. A memorandum issued by the U.S. Office of War Information in mid-1942 emphasized that Taiwan had long been a natural and strategic springboard for Japan’s program of conquest. More saliently, as Washington’s military and intelligence chiefs noted, there had been a large increase in electric power and war manufacturing on the island, which might be of considerable strategic value to the United States.30 In his response to inquiries from the Chinese mass media about Taiwan’s future status, John K. Jessup, a special advisor to Fortune magazine, still insisted that Taiwan’s internationalization was the best way to stabilize and revive a struggling, postwar Far East. Jessup’s incendiary argument, translated and circulated in Chongqing, did nothing but intensify the cross-Pacific debates over the island’s future in the postwar era.31

  George H. Kerr’s ideas about Taiwan represented yet another example of how an amorphous and somewhat “politically incorrect” concept about the island’s political future was gaining currency in the United States during wartime. Born in Pennsylvania, Kerr was a student in Japan from 1935 through 1937, after which he went to Taiwan and became a teacher of English language in Taipei until 1940. Given his personal experience in Japan and colonial Taiwan, Kerr became a Taiwan expert in the navy after he returned to the United States to serve as a lieutenant in the navy reserves.32

  In early 1942, while working as an analyst and consultant on Taiwan in the War Department, Kerr drafted a memorandum that explored possible alternatives for the island after the war, advocating some form of international control; the creation of a security base on the island in the south; and the use of Taiwan’s abundant agricultural, forestry, and water resources in a postwar reconstruction program. The draft was developed into an official memorandum in July, when the chief of the Far Eastern Division of the Military Intelligence Service was asked to state the division’s views about Taiwan’s occupation as part of a general strategy. In the memorandum, Kerr suggested that China would not be able to assume exclusive control of Taiwan for two reasons: There were not enough Chinese administrators and technicians available to manage the island’s complex economy, and there were ever-present dangers of intolerable exploitation by Nationalist political leaders, army, and party cliques, “who were a curse to China.”33 It was evident to Kerr that Taiwan was many years more advanced than the Chinese mainland in terms of technological organization, as well as in its general standard of living. As Kerr saw it, the Nationalist government had “no surplus of trained manpower to spare for the job” which would have to be carried out in Taiwan.34

  The timing of this memorandum, in retrospect, is intriguing. It came at almost the same time as the “trans-Pacific highway” concept appeared in Fortune. Despite Sumner Welles’s assurances to T. V. Soong regarding Taiwan, behind-the-scenes discussions on the island’s future status persisted within the U.S. military intelligence establishment until October 1944. To cite Kerr’s own account, three alternatives were brewing in these discussions. First of all, theoretically Taiwan might be made independent and given self-government, but in practice this would be difficult to bring about, even if the Taiwanese wanted it and the Allied nations all agreed. A second course would ensure the prompt transfer of the island to China. A third program would provide for a temporary Allied trusteeship, during which the islanders themselves would prepare for a plebiscite to determine their ultimate political fate.35 This “trusteeship” notion, as it turned out, would provide a crucial theoretical framework for Taiwan’s early independence movement in the postwar years.

  GOING REALISTIC

  The Potsdam Proclamation, signed in July 1945 by leaders of the United States and Britain with the concurrence of Nationalist China and subsequently agreed to by the Soviet Union, stated that the terms of the Cairo Declaration were to be carried out. This meant that the promised return of Taiwan to postwar China would be honored by the Allies. The issuance of these declarations did not hamper the ongoing U.S. war and strategic planning in the Pacific theater. Nor did such a diplomatic gesture play a crucial role in modifying U.S. military operations against the Japanese facilities in Taiwan, or in slowing draft plans for U.S. military occupation of the island as a first step toward an all-out invasion of Japan proper.36 More realistically, despite an Allied concurrence regarding restoring China’s sovereignty in the “lost” territories, the issue was how to define Taiwan sovereignty. For example, while President Roosevelt agreed that Manchuria should be returned to the Chinese, he also spoke of a “free zone” for solving a likely Chinese-Soviet dispute there after the war.37 On Taiwan, from the Cairo Declaration until the Japanese surrender in the summer of 1945, questions had never ceased to be raised among Washington’s top strategists regarding Allied operatio
nal planning for the initial postwar treatment of that island. For instance, what would be the legal status of the island between the time of a Japanese surrender and the formalizing of a Japanese transfer of it to China under a peace treaty? If Taiwan were handed over to China for administrative purposes, would it become sovereign at the same time? The general thinking was that, by signing the Instrument of Surrender, Japan would relinquish sovereignty over the island and the Chinese would reoccupy Taiwan and assume an interim administrative authority. It was reckoned, however, that Chiang Kai-shek’s forces did not have the requisite shipping capability to ferry needed personnel over to the island to assume administrative functions, to say nothing of the military strength that would be needed if armed resistance were encountered. It was obvious that the Nationalist government would need American assistance to effect a successful reoccupation.38

  Based on the above rationale, a majority in Washington’s military intelligence circles were convinced that U.S. military operations to assist the Chinese reoccupation of Taiwan should be under an American theater commander, who would be responsible for the establishment and the conduct of the military administration of civil affairs there. Moreover, it was contemplated that such an administration would continue, pending the regularization by treaty of the future status of Taiwan.39 On the other hand, for the State Department bureaucrats, one important geo-strategic issue to be resolved was whether Taiwan would be returned to China with the understanding that “a base or bases” would be given to the United States, and whether it would be for exclusive American use or be operated jointly with China or collectively with other allied nations. Whatever the solution, a general consensus within the State Department was that the question of military bases should be kept entirely separate from the transfer of sovereignty, and that any effort to seek rights for bases “for general international security purposes” should be considered after Taiwan was fully restored to Chinese sovereignty.40