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Inside the Asian Cold War Intrigues: Revisiting the Taiwan Strait crises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2018

RUPING XIAO
Affiliation:
Department of History, Zhejiang University Email: xiaoxiaotu1973@163.com
HSIAO-TING LIN
Affiliation:
Hoover Institution, Stanford University Email: htlin@stanford.edu

Abstract

This article revisits the issue of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War. Benefitting from archival materials only recently made available, specifically Chiang Kai-shek's personal diaries, CIA declassified materials, Taiwanese Foreign Ministry files, and rare publications from the Contemporary Taiwan Collection at the Library of the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, this research examines the cloud of suspicion surrounding the secret contacts between Taipei and Beijing leading up to and during the 1958 offshore islands crisis, elucidating how such a political tête-à-tête, and the resultant tacit consensus over the status of the islands, gradually brought about an end to the conflict between Taiwan and Communist China. In hindsight, the crises over the offshore islands along China's southeast coast momentarily brought the United States closer to war with Communist China, while putting the relationship between Taipei and Washington to a serious test. The end result, however, was that, while these isles were technically embedded in the unfinished civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, they provided, ironically, an opportunity for secret communications and, ultimately, a kind of détente between the two supposedly deadly enemies across the Taiwan Strait. A close examination of the details of these crises, along with their attendant military, political, and diplomatic complexities, reveals an amazing amount of political intrigue at both the local and international levels that has not been fully realized until now.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*Our thanks go to the two anonymous readers and Professor Joya Chatterji, editor-in-chief of Modern Asian Studies, for their useful comments, criticism, suggestions, and encouragement. We also express our deep appreciations to the Yintai Foundation and its research initiative on the Chiang family and modern Chinese history for its support and encouragement. Special thanks also go to staff in the following libraries and archives for their assistance: the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (California), British National Archives (London), Library of the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo (Tokyo), Archives of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica (Taipei), and Academia Historica (Taipei).

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25 Ibid..; CKSD, 25 and 27 April 1955, Box 51.

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51 Xiaopeng, Tong, Fengyu Sishinian [Forty years of wind and rain] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), Vol. 2, p. 275Google Scholar. Apparently Chiang did not take this new coverage too seriously, as there was no way to predict when a genuine armed conflict would take place, given the already tense situation across the Strait. Hundreds were killed in Quemoy after the shelling started that evening, including three of Chiang's high-ranking generals and two American advisers.

52 Kaufman, Confronting Communism, pp.133–135; Taylor, The Generalissimo, pp. 493–494.

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58 Initially not entirely confident about the authenticity of Cao's messages, Chiang Kai-shek was rather surprised that leaders in Beijing had really kept their promise to stop the shelling. See CKSD, 6 October 1958, Box 66.

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63 Ibid., pp. 17–18; Tang Zong, ‘Report on the party affairs at the ninth KMT National Congress’, 12 November 1963, pp. 39–41, CTC, no. CD6:1679.

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65 For the final text of the Chiang-Dulles joint communiqué of October 1958, see FRUS 1958–1960, Vol. 19: China, pp. 442–443.

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67 ‘Peking-Taipei Contacts’, pp. 17–18. Accounts given by Cao Juren's family suggest that Chiang Ching-kuo was in fact pressured by the CIA, whose agents had been keeping an eye on the ongoing secret cross-Strait communications, into reluctantly handing over all the secret letters to the Americans. See Zheng, Guogong Xiangjiang Diezhan, p. 154.

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78 Tong, Fengyu Sishinian, Vol. 2, p. 276.

79 Taylor, The Generalissimo, pp. 509–510; CKSD, 17 and 28 October 1960, Box 68.

80 Memorandum from George C. McGhee to Dean Rusk, 10 March 1961, FRUS 1961–1963, Vol. 22: Northeast Asia, pp. 27–28; Memorandum from A. E. Steeves to Rusk, 15 April 1961, ibid., pp. 48–49.

81 Memorandum from Robert Komer to MacGeorge Bundy, 2 May 1961, ibid., pp. 53–54.

82 ‘Highlights of discussion at Secretary of State Rusk's planning meeting’, 13 July 1961, ibid., pp. 93–94.

83 Memorandum from McGhee to Bundy entitled ‘The Offshore Island—Alternative Courses and Probable Consequences’, 25 August 1961, in Robert E. Lester (ed.), John F. Kennedy National Security Files: Asia and the Pacific, 1961–1963 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1987), microfilm, reel 1.

84 Such rationales were revealed by Cao Juren to the Chinese Nationalists as early as the spring of 1960, again through his secret channel with Taipei. See Li, Cao Juren zhuan, pp. 368–369; ‘Peking-Taipei Contacts’, pp. 23–24.