Crisis and Commitment

United States Policy Toward Taiwan, 1950-1955

Robert Accinelli

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807857045, 9780807822593
• eBook ISBN: 9780807872918
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This analytical study examines in comprehensive detail the making of the American military and political commitment to Taiwan during the first half of the 1950s. Starting with President Truman’s declaration in January 1950 that the United States would not militarily assist Taiwan’s Nationalist Chinese government, Robert Accinelli shows why Washington subsequently reversed this position and ultimately chose to embrace Taiwan as a highly valued ally. Accinelli analyzes this critical reversal within the context of shifting international circumstances and domestic developments such as McCarthyism and the Truman-MacArthur controversy. In addition to describing the growth of a close but uneasy relationship between the United States and the Nationalist regime, he focuses on the importance of the Taiwan issue in America’s relations with the People’s Republic of China and Great Britain. He concludes his study with an analysis of the 1954–55 confrontation between the United States and China over Quemoy and Matsu and other Nationalist-held offshore islands. According to Accinelli, neither the Korean War nor the Indochina War divided the United States and China more fundamentally during this period than did the issue of U.S.-Taiwanese relations.

Originally published in 1996.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1: The Taiwan Conundrum

In a brief four-paragraph statement presented to reporters on 5 January 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the United States would not provide military aid or assistance to safeguard Taiwan. The practical effect of this declaration was to leave the island, the final refuge of the Nationalist regime recently expelled from the mainland, exposed to an expected Chinese Communist takeover. The presidents statement bore on a knotty problem that had privately occupied foreign policy decision makers since early in the previous year: how to keep this strategically important territory from falling into Communist hands without incurring unwanted responsibilities or liabilities. During the course of 1949 decision makers had secretly searched in vain for a satisfactory solution to this problem. Portending the loss of Taiwan, Truman’s statement appeared to mark an unsuccessful end to that search. In the spring of 1950, however, the quest resumed again in earnest, and it was still in progress when the Korean War erupted.

A Nonmilitary Policy

The year 1949 was a crucial one for the future of both China and Taiwan. The Chinese Communists vanquished the Nationalists on the mainland, establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October; the deposed government of the Republic of China (ROC) relocated to Taiwan in December, maintaining its claim as the legitimate government of China. Even before being ejected from the continent, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his loyalists had looked to Taiwan as their last stronghold. The island, which lay approximately 100 miles off China’s southeastern coast and was home to approximately six million Taiwanese, had come under Nationalist sway following the Pacific war. During the previous half century Japan had ruled the island as a colony along with the nearby Penghu Islands (Pescadores), having wrested both from China after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The Cairo Declaration jointly issued in December 1943 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek had prescribed the restoration of this territory to the Republic of China after Japans defeat. In July 1945 the United States, Britain, and the ROC reaffirmed the terms of the Cairo Declaration in the Potsdam Proclamation, which the Soviet Union and France subsequently endorsed. The Nationalist government accepted the Japanese surrender of Taiwan in October 1945 and, in accordance with wartime declarations, assumed control over it.¹

Under Taiwan’s first Nationalist governor, Chen Yi, the island’s inhabitants experienced the misrule that had become a byword for Kuomintang (KMT) governance on the continent. The abysmal conduct of the Nationalists was a major cause of a short-lived uprising beginning on 28 February 1947, whose tragic and brutal suppression left the embittered Taiwanese in the firm grip of the KMT. In December 1948 Gen. Chen Cheng, one of Chiang’s oldest and most trusted lieutenants, became governor.²

Chen Cheng’s appointment was a sign that the Generalissimo had chosen Taiwan as a final redoubt for himself and his die-hard followers. As the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) advanced victoriously through northeast China in late 1948, Nationalist troops, party and government officials, and accompanying civilians began to stream to the island in large numbers, commencing an exodus that deposited 1.5 million refugees on Taiwan by the fall of 1949. By years end Chiang himself had escaped the mainland. Despite his official retirement from the presidency in January 1949, he retained de facto control over the government and military establishment.³

As the Communists had marched relentlessly southward, Chiang maneuvered to procure more aid and support from an increasingly balky American government to shore up the crumbling Kuomintang position on the mainland. After fleeing to Taiwan, he continued to place his hope in Washington for the salvation of his regime. The longtime Nationalist leader regarded himself as the indispensable instrument of China’s destiny, the successor to the anti-Manchu revolutionary patriot and KMT leader Sun Yat-sen, and the guardian of a traditional Chinese way of life now in danger of being entirely overwhelmed by an alien revolutionary ideology. Convinced that his defeat was temporary and that the inevitable outbreak of a third world war between the United States and the Soviet Union would present an opportunity to regain his lost territory, he made the goal of “mainland recovery” the principal raison d’être and rallying cry of his exiled regime. He espoused a strategy of counterattack that envisaged the eventual repossession of the mainland by his armed forces with American assistance. In the short term, he spared no effort to ensure the survival and security of his island base while awaiting his chance to drive the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) usurpers from power. He sought to regain lost American confidence in his government and to secure sufficient aid and support to maintain Nationalist jurisdiction over the island.⁴

American officials in 1949 viewed China and the Nationalist government with very different eyes than had President Roosevelt at the wartime Cairo conference. Roosevelt, in agreeing to turn over Taiwan to the Republic of China, had acted in the expectation that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists would continue to exercise authority over China after Japans surrender. He envisioned a postwar policy founded on close cooperation with a united, stable, and friendly China that would sustain U.S. interests in East Asia. By 1949 the framework of American policymaking toward China had radically changed. When Dean Acheson succeeded Gen. George C. Marshall as secretary of state in January 1949, the dominant reality in American official perceptions of China was the expected triumph of the Chinese Communists over Chiang’s corrupt regime and China’s transfer to the camp of the Soviet Union. During Marshall’s tenure in the State Department, the Truman administration had rejected both an all-out commitment to save the Nationalists from defeat and a complete break with them, settling on a policy of limited economic and military assistance. The disintegration of KMT forces in late 1948 left no doubt in the minds of State Department officials that Chiang’s cause was beyond recovery.⁵

As he had with Marshall, President Truman gave Acheson wide latitude in directing the nations foreign relations. The chief executive, who was contemptuous both of CCP chairman Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionaries and Chiang and his minions, participated only erratically in the formulation of China policy. Though Acheson had gained exposure to the problems of China as undersecretary of state from 1945 to 1947, he was an Atlanticist with no abiding interest in that strife-torn nation or special understanding of it. He viewed China as an area of secondary importance, from the perspective of America’s global competition with the Soviet Union. He and his subordinates at Foggy Bottom were disdainful of the Generalissimo and his ossified regime.⁶

China policy after Acheson took charge at the State Department was fluid, provisional, and ridden with conflicting purposes. Anticipating the impending Kuomintang defeat, the department chose not to cut all American links with Chiang but instead to distance the United States from his doomed government, narrow the conduit of aid, and retain freedom of action in China. The American posture toward the Chinese Communists was neither actively accommodationist nor unreservedly hostile. The State Department did little to reach out diplomatically to CCP leaders and basically viewed them with antipathy and distrust. At the same time, it did keep open the options of regulated Sino-American and Sino-Japanese trade and of eventual diplomatic recognition when conditions were right. The department simultaneously pursued a “wedge” strategy whose objective was to loosen the ties between China and the USSR so as to prevent the Communist victory from augmenting Soviet power. The expectation was that Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism would in time turn against Moscow, particularly because of Soviet inroads in Chinas northern provinces. In one potential scenario, CCP leaders would follow the deviationist path of Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Tito. Yet most State Department officials were doubtful that a Sino-Soviet split would materialize in the near term. And they disagreed about how best to foster a rift, whether by means of inducements such as trade and recognition or by coercive tactics to convince CCP leaders that cozying up to the Kremlin did not serve their best interests.⁷

Bureaucratic conflict between the State and Defense Departments complicated the formulation and implementation of China policy. Unlike the State Department, the Pentagon favored a strict hard-line policy toward the CCP and generous assistance to the KMT on Taiwan and to anti-Communist forces on the mainland.⁸ Exacerbating these policy differences was the strained personal relationship between the urbane, self-assured Dean Acheson and Louis Johnson, the flamboyant, outspoken, and politically ambitious Washington attorney who became secretary of defense in March 1949. A stalwart pro-Nationalist advocate, as were various underlings in the Defense Department, Johnson exerted influence on behalf of the KMT within the policy-making community and may have conveyed inside (including top secret) information to Nationalist contacts.⁹

The administration conducted its China policy within an increasingly turbulent domestic political environment in 1949. Especially troublesome for the White House and State Department was the China bloc, a small band of influential pro-Nationalist enthusiasts in Congress, mostly Republicans, who were critical of the administrations past and present conduct of China policy and who pushed for more assistance to the Republic of China. Exercising its leverage on Capitol Hill, this bloc did have some limited success in keeping aid flowing to the Nationalists. It carried on its activities in a political milieu fast becoming more charged with partisanship as a result of Republican disappointment following President Truman’s unanticipated victory in the 1948 election.¹⁰

As was the case in Congress, pro-Nationalist zealots among the articulate public were in a minority and wielded only limited influence. The so-called China lobby—a loose collection of Americans and Chinese who championed the cause of the Nationalist government and agitated for U.S. assistance—was still in its infancy; it possessed neither broad public support nor a fearsome reputation. The lobby’s thesis that the “loss of China” was the result of neglect and incompetence, if not outright disloyalty, within the State Department under Roosevelt and Truman had yet to gain wide currency.¹¹ Public attitudes toward China were malleable. Americans were undeniably shaken by the momentous shift in power in the world’s most populous country, and only small minorities favored trade with a Communist-controlled China or diplomatic recognition. Still, a plurality of citizens rejected intervention in the civil war and held unfavorable opinions of Chiang Kai-shek.¹²

As the Truman administration plotted its China policy during the denouement of the civil war, it struggled with the tangled problem of Taiwan. Military and civilian decision makers alike were in accord that the island was strategically important. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (jcs) concluded in November 1948 that the seizure of the island by Kremlin-oriented Communists would have “seriously unfavorable” strategic implications for national security: it would give a wartime enemy the capability to dominate the sea lanes between Japan and Malaya and to threaten the Philippines and Ryukyu Islands, would deprive the United States of a base for strategic air operations and control of nearby shipping lanes, and would eliminate the island as a source of food and raw materials for Japan under war conditions.

From his Tokyo headquarters, Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur warned that a Taiwan in unfriendly hands would “invite [the] rupture of our whole defense line in the Far East.”¹³ As supreme commander for the allied powers in Japan (SCAP), commanding general of the U.S. Army in the Far East, and head of American forces in the Far East Command, this imperious general was a power in his own right. Having spent much of his military career in Asia, he held strong convictions about its overall strategic significance. By late 1948 he was on record as an advocate of a more activist policy in China (which as a navy theater was not under his command) in support of Chiang Kai-shek and his beleaguered Nationalist government. This stance endeared the general, who had presidential ambitions, to pro-Nationalist partisans within the Republican party.¹⁴

In evaluating Taiwan’s strategic value, the JCS and the Far Eastern commander drew on the experiences of the Second World War. Besides being a valuable component in Japans war economy, the island had been a major base for military operations against China and in Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific.¹⁵ In addition, as historian John Lewis Gaddis has shown, American military and civilian planners assessed the islands strategic worth in relation to the evolving concept of an American-dominated island defensive perimeter in the western Pacific stretching from the Aleutian Islands to the Philippines.¹⁶

The paramount American interest in Taiwan lay in the strategic advantage derived from retaining access to the island as a potential wartime base for U.S. military operations while foreclosing its military exploitation by the Soviet Union, particularly in the event of hostilities. From the perspective of the military establishment, whether or not the island remained under friendly control could seriously affect the American security posture throughout the western Pacific. In its November 1948 report, the JCS did not (as one study of Acheson’s Asian policies has contended) define the dominant American interest solely in terms of Taiwan’s strategic location athwart Japans sea lanes and its potential resumed role as a major source of food and other resources for its former metropole. Rather, the island was viewed in relation to broader regional security concerns that also included the safety of the Ryukyus and the Philippines. Moreover, what made the prospect of a restored trading relationship between Taiwan and Japan most worth preserving for the JCS was that this would better ensure that the latter would be a boon rather than a burden during wartime. An appraisal of Taiwan’s strategic value produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (cia) on 3 January 1949 echoed the basic conclusions of the JCS report and further argued that the islands economic assets were by themselves not significant enough to warrant “direct US measures” to deny it to Communist control. The CIA analysis, while acknowledging that Taiwan could provide peacetime Japan with a nearer and more dependable source of food than Southeast Asia as well as a market for its manufactures and consumer goods, still regarded the island’s military utility as decisive in determining its strategic importance.¹⁷

Despite placing a high strategic value on Taiwan in their November 1948 assessment, the JCS recommended using only diplomatic and economic means to deny the island to the Communists. In a subsequent report in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1: The Taiwan Conundrum
• 2: Intervention in the Taiwan Strait
• 3: A New Crisis, a New Commitment
• 4: Defining the Commitment at Home and Abroad
• 5: Drawing Closer Together
• 6: In the Footsteps of the Old
• 7: In the Shadow of Geneva and Indochina
• 8: A Horrible Dilemma
• 9: A Worsening Crisis
• 10: Stalemate in the Strait
• 11: An Uneasy Relationship
• Conclusion: A Guarded Commitment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index