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Chapter 1
Retreat from Yunnan
By January 1950, most of Mainland China had fallen to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist armies after a long, bitter civil war. One of the rapidly shrinking enclaves still held by Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Nationalists was the southern Yunnan city of Mengtze (Mengzi), some 40 miles north of where the Red River entered Tonkin, French Indochina. At Mengtze’s small airfield, under a chilly, gray winter sky, Chinese National Army (CNA) Lieutenant General (Lt. Gen.) T’ang Yao pondered his dwindling options. He knew there was little chance of holding off People’s Liberation Army (PLA) formations closing in on what remained of his defeated army. Most of T’ang Yao’s 30,000 troops would within a matter of weeks desert, surrender, or fall to pursuing PLA formations. Some 3,900 would reach the safety of internment in French Indochina and eventual repatriation to Taiwan. Another 1,500 of those defeated soldiers would make their way into a remote corner of northeastern Burma’s Shan State.
Those that reached Burma would become the nucleus of a secret Cold War army popularly known as the Kuomintang, or simply by its KMT1 acronym. That army would in 1951 unsuccessfully invade Yunnan, only to thrown back into Burma. There they would remain until coordinated Sino-Burmese military operations in 1960–1961 drove thousands of them into neighboring Laos and Thailand. In Laos, they fought briefly as mercenaries for rightist forces in that country’s civil war. In Thailand, they served alongside government forces to suppress communist insurgents during the 1970s and early 1980s, for which their contributions were rewarded with permanent residence and, for most, Thai citizenship.
Over their years in the “Golden Triangle,” supported to varying degrees by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC) and, briefly, by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), those KMT remnants brought chaos to large swathes of Burma. By allying themselves with a kaleidoscopic collection of anti-Rangoon insurgents and drug trafficking groups, they helped prevent the newly created Union of Burma from consolidating political control over much of its territory, thereby impeding the economic and social development essential to nation building. An unintended consequence of American support for that KMT army, both directly and indirectly as Chiang Kai-shek’s primary patron, was a prolonged legacy of mistrust in US-Burma relations.
Collapsing Nationalist Armies
Only weeks earlier, in the denouement of China’s long civil war, three commanders from Chiang Kai-shek’s collapsing armies in Yunnan—Lu Han, Yu Ch’eng-wan, and Li Mi—nervously eyed both approaching PLA armies and one another. As many suspected, Governor Lu Han was secretly plotting to throw his lot in with the communists. In Yunnan’s capital Kunming (Yünnanfu), Lu Han was the last in a line of powerful warlords, or chünfa, to govern Yunnan. Like their counterparts in other provinces during China’s Republican Era, Yunnan’s chünfa paid lip service to a unified China and accepted central government political and military appointments. In practice, however, they maintained their own provincial armies, or tienchün, and jealously guarded their autonomy. They governed with little outside interference until China’s 1937–1945 war with Japan forced Lu Han’s immediate predecessor reluctantly to allow central government armies into Yunnan to confront the common enemy that had invaded by way of Burma.
With Japan’s defeat, Yunnan’s warlord struggled to regain his former autonomy as Chiang Kai-shek sought to check that effort. The July–August 1945 Potsdam Conference gave China responsibility for accepting surrender of Japanese forces in Indochina north of the sixteenth parallel while the British performed that task in the south. Anxious to loot and perhaps annex portions of northern Vietnam and Laos, Yunnan’s governor accepted Chiang Kai-shek’s proposal that his tienchün join central government forces in disarming surrendering Japanese. He then sent his cousin Lu Han with the bulk of Yunnan’s army to Hanoi, where Yunnanese efficiency in pillaging led Vietnamese nationalists Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap to label them the “most rapacious and undisciplined of the entire Chinese army.”2
With Yunnan’s army in Indochina, central government forces remaining in Kunming easily packed Yunnan’s governor off to a meaningless military advisory position in the ROC capital of Nanking.3 As Lu Han, still in Hanoi with his army, succeeded his cousin as governor, Chiang Kai-shek sent the bulk of that army by sea from Tonkin to battle resurgent communist armies in Northeast China and Manchuria. Little of that army returned to Yunnan. Weakened, and powerless to shake off Chiang Kai-shek’s grip, a resentful Lu Han set about rebuilding his army as he maneuvered for an accommodation with the communists. By late 1949, however, his hastily recruited regiments numbered fewer than 20,000 poorly trained and ill-equipped men, despite his claims of two or three times that figure.4
Standing between Lu Han and a deal with the communists were the Nationalist armies of Yu Ch’eng-wan and Li Mi. The stronger was Lt. Gen. Yu Ch’eng-wan’s Twenty-sixth, composed primarily of CNA 93rd Division veterans from China’s southern provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. The 93rd was well known in Yunnan and in neighboring Burma’s Kengtung state, where it had fought Japanese forces and their Thai allies during the Sino-Japanese War. Upon the division’s return to familiar ground in Yunnan, the government had expanded it into the Twenty-sixth Army, which carried out relatively successful post-war operations against communist “bandits.” Its primary mission in late 1949, however, was to prevent Lu Han from joining the communists.
Yu Ch’eng-wan claimed 28,000 troops. He probably had only half that number,5 but his Twenty-sixth remained above average among Nationalist armies. Two of its three divisions were in southern Yunnan near his Kaiyuan headquarters. The third was at Chanyi (Zhanyi), northeast of Kunming and in the path of advancing PLA forces. While boasting that he would fight to the bitter end from Indochina if Yunnan fell, Yu Ch’eng-wan secretly assured the communists that he was ready to make a deal. Lu Han likely knew of Yu Ch’eng-wan’s maneuverings, but his primary concern was to keep CNA combat elements away from Kunming to limit possible interference with his own plans to defect.6
Of the three commanders in Yunnan, only Lt. Gen. Li Mi remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist cause. His undermanned Eighth Army in the province’s northeast, however, was poorly equipped, months behind in its pay, and still rebuilding from devastating losses in the decisive 1948–1949 Huaihai campaign in eastern China. Yu Ch’eng-wan jealously dismissed the Eighth Army as “useless” despite the national attention that Li Mi had achieved through successes against the Japanese in both the 1944–1945 Salween Campaign and against communist armies in Shantung during the renewed civil war following Japan’s surrender. In late 1949, Li Mi remained one of Chiang Kai-shek’s favored generals as he worked to reconstitute his battered army as it replaced Twenty-sixth Army troops leaving Chanyi to rejoin Yu Ch’eng-wan in the south.7
The Kunming Incident
The immediate cause of T’ang Yao’s predicament at Mengtze was a series of Nationalist military setbacks in Southwest China during November 1949. That month, the ROC wartime capital of Chunking (Chongqing) collapsed into chaos and conditions in the temporary capital of Chengtu (Chengdu) grew desperate. Regional CNA military commander, Lt. Gen. Chang Ch’un, flew to Kunming on December 8 with several Chinese National Air Force (CNAF) transport aircraft to arrange an airlift of troops from Chengtu to Kunming—one of the last things Lu Han wanted as he negotiated his defection.8
On the other hand, Lu Han was keeping his options open should he be unable to reach a deal with the communists. American Vice Consul in Kunming, Larue R. Lutkins, had issued US entry visas for Lu Han and his family, who were already safe in Hong Kong. During a December 9 farewell dinner for Lutkins and the local Civil Air Transport (CAT)9 station manager, Lu Han advised the Americans that he would soon be unable to guarantee their safety and that they should leave Yunnan promptly.10
Bidding the governor good night after dinner, Lutkins noticed Chang Ch’un and several other senior Nationalist officers arriving for a 9:00 p.m. conference, ostensibly to plan for an imminent Chiang Kai-shek visit. As Chang Ch’un, Li Mi, Yu Ch’eng-wan, their senior officers, and the local Kuomintang secret police chief gathered for the meeting, Lu Han had them arrested and sent individually in his personal car to detention at Wuhuashan Palace, Yunnan’s government offices. Separately, Lu Han’s soldiers arrested deputy Eighth Army commander Major General (Maj. Gen.) Liu Yuan-lin at Li Mi’s headquarters and Maj. Gen. Fu Ching-yun, the Eighth Army’s 237th Division commander, at a friend’s home.11 Those two men would later play major roles in Li Mi’s army in Burma.12
Kunming awoke on December 10 to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) flag flying over Wuhuashan Palace and wall posters urging the populace to remain calm and obey martial law. As Lu Han’s troops occupied the city’s Wuchiapa airfield, he assured Lutkins that his consulate staff, CAT personnel, and any aircraft then on the ground would be allowed to leave. Delayed en route by fighting between Yunnanese and central government troops, Lutkins finally reached the airfield around 5:30 p.m. to find a Philippines-registered Trans Asiatic Airways plane and its two American pilots. After Lu Han vouched for the safety of the Trans Asiatic crew, Lutkins and his party left on the last CAT aircraft for Hong Kong via that airline’s Sanya station on Hainan Island.
As Lutkins departed, Kunming radio announced Lu Han’s change of sides, claimed both Yu Ch’eng-wan and Li Mi as members of an interim government, and reported that their armies were surrendering to the communists. Radio broadcasts from Taipei threatened CNAF aircraft would bomb Kunming unless Chang Ch’un and his staff were released, so Lu Han allowed the Trans Asiatic aircraft’s crew to fly those senior Nationalist prisoners to Hong Kong.13 That gesture apparently did not satisfy Taipei officials, as CNAF aircraft still bombed parts of Kunming.
While events in Kunming played out, Taipei appointed T’ang Yao to command its remaining military forces in Yunnan. With Yu Ch’eng-wan and Li Mi held at Wuhuashan Palace, one of Yu Ch’eng-wan’...
