Introduction
Small islands that are geographically situated between two or more political entities have often tended to become a source of dispute, leading to armed conflicts. For example, the tiny, uninhabited rocky islet of Perejil Island off the southern shore of Gibraltar has generated much trouble between Spain and Morocco, including an exchange of gunfire in 2002. In the Caribbean, controversies surrounding the ownership of the San Andrés y Providencia Islands have also sparked diplomatic quarrels between Nicaragua and Colombia. And in the present-day Asia Pacific region, ‘small islands’ have almost become synonymous for potential conflicts involving multiple players, with a tendency to turn diplomatic spats into regional wars, which in turn involve world powers such as the United States of America or the People's Republic of China (PRC). Notable examples include Tsushima Island (Daemado in Korean) located between Japan and Korea; the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku in Japanese) scattered between Japan, China, and Taiwan; and the islands of the South China Sea, which consist of over 250 isles, atolls, cays, shoals, reefs, and sandbars, and involve half a dozen countries with differing religions, social systems, and political ideologies and motivations.
Looking back over the past century, perhaps the most striking example that demonstrates how small islands have played a large role in causing international strife was the struggle for control over the small island groups situated in the Taiwan Strait between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist-Chinese controlled Taiwan and the Communist Chinese mainland under Mao Zedong. On two separate occasions during the 1950s, Mao's forces bombed the islands, and the United States responded by actively intervening on Chiang's behalf.Footnote 1 It is no secret that at the height of the two offshore islands crises, the staunchly anti-communist Eisenhower administration more than once openly threatened Mao's regime with the use of nuclear weapons. Tensions resulting from the dispute over these small islands escalated to such an extent that at one point, people around the world feared that a ‘shooting war’ between Taiwan and the PRC might escalate into a third world war between the United States and the Soviet Union.Footnote 2
This article re-examines the issue of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait from a fresh angle by revisiting how they were once at the centre of the Washington–Taipei–Beijing triangular relationship during the Cold War. With the benefit of archival materials only recently made available, this research shows, for the first time, the cloud of suspicion surrounding the secret contacts between Taipei and Beijing, leading up to and during the 1958 offshore islands crisis. It elucidates 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 not only between Taiwan and Communist China, but also between the Soviet Union and the United States, thus playing a role in the shaping of American Cold War policy.
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 Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and were, by proxy, part of a larger international Cold War, 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.
The 1954–55 offshore crises: an island state embedded
As the situation on the Korean peninsula came to a relatively peaceful resolution after the July 1953 armistice, Mao Zedong turned his attention southwards to Taiwan once again. Communist Chinese source materials recently made available reveal that by the early summer of 1953, Mao's top military men had worked out a secret five-year plan for the PRC's military endeavours in which the takeover of the offshore islands, which were still under KMT control, would become Beijing's top priority. In the eyes of Mao's strategists, occupying the Nationalist-held isles along China's southeast coast was not purely a matter of national unification, but was closely related to the PRC's national defence and security. It was particularly important to Mao as Chiang was now backed by the ostensibly friendlier, more supportive, and substantially more anti-communist Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House. The newly professed policy of ‘de-neutralization’ of the Taiwan Strait, announced only two weeks after Eisenhower took office in early 1953, or ‘unleashing Chiang Kai-shek’ as many dubbed it, was perceived by Beijing as a grave threat to its territorial integrity and national survival.Footnote 3
Indeed, after Taipei concluded the Peace Treaty with Japan in 1952, thus securing its status as one of the victorious allies, and the Republicans regained control over the White House, Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist cohorts began pushing hard for a joint military pact with the United States. In late 1951, with the intervention of John Foster Dulles, then a legal adviser to the US Department of State, the reluctant Japanese opened negotiations with the Nationalists over the peace treaty. From Taipei's perspective, the signing of the treaty meant it had succeeded in turning Japan away from concluding an agreement with the PRC, embedding the island firmly in a new political order in East Asia designed by the United States.Footnote 4 In 1954, Dulles, now President Eisenhower's secretary of state, welcomed the idea of concluding a general pact of mutual security for Asia, but nevertheless he had reservations about forging one with Chiang. To put it in a nutshell, while Dulles recognized that the exclusion of Nationalist-held offshore islands in such a treaty would impair Chiang's prestige, he also felt that their inclusion would entail a responsibility that Washington was not as yet ready to assume.Footnote 5 Chiang was frustrated, but the many efforts made by his indefatigable subordinates, and all the publicity as well as mass media speculation surrounding these efforts, were quite enough to keep Mao and his top officials nervous and suspicious about the United States’ true intentions.Footnote 6
Beijing's extreme anxiety regarding American intentions reached its climax in the autumn of 1954. On 1 September, before John Foster Dulles departed for the Philippines to attend the inauguration of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), he decided to delay setting a date for possible treaty negotiations with Taipei. At this juncture, the Chinese Communists ironically and unwittingly contributed to the final conclusion of a mutual security pact between Taiwan and the United States. In an attempt to forestall the possibility of extending the protection of SEATO to Taiwan, or at least to try to keep the geographical scope of such protection to a minimum, on 3 September Mao ordered the launch a massive shelling of Quemoy.Footnote 7 Mao's actions, however, gave Taipei the perfect excuse to push Washington for a desired mutual security treaty. On 9 September, during Dulles's five-hour stopover in Taipei on his way back to the United States, Chiang argued strongly that the ‘fluid situation’ surrounding the offshore islands was caused by the absence of a mutual aid pact, rather than a reason to forgo such a pact. Although Dulles left Taipei uncommitted, his short visit was widely seen as a strong sign of American support for Taiwan against communism.Footnote 8
As the Communist shelling around Quemoy continued, both Eisenhower and Dulles now viewed a security pact with Taiwan as a feasible way to rein in Chiang, whom they thought should assume a more passive stance and accept a purely ‘defensive’ treaty. Meanwhile, to dissipate apprehension, both within and outside the administration, that defending the offshore islands would bring the United States closer to war with Communist China, the State Department planned to present the offshore crisis to the UN Security Council, where it would seek an injunction against changing the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. Dulles was convinced that a UN-arranged ceasefire, codenamed ‘Oracle’, would secure support from the United States’ Western allies, preserve the isles for Chiang, and avoid a war between Washington and Beijing.Footnote 9
Chiang Kai-shek and his top aides were kept in the dark about both Oracle and the American decision to begin treaty negotiations. On the evening of 12 October, on the arrival of the chartered flight bringing Walter Robertson (John Foster Dulles's assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs slated to open negotiations with the Nationalists) to Taipei, an unsuspecting and unprepared Chiang was still in the midst of his retreat outside the capital.Footnote 10 On the following day, following a three-bout negotiation held over 24 hours, Chiang vigorously objected to Oracle, deeming the internationalization of cross-Strait issues detrimental to the morale of both his people and government. But when Robertson stated that Oracle, combined with a mutual defence pact, would surely improve Chiang's position, an alert Generalissimo caught the message right away and changed his tune.Footnote 11 A week later, George Yeh, Chiang's foreign minister, was already in Washington for treaty discussions with his counterparts from the State Department.
The opening of negotiations over a mutual defence pact between Taiwan and the United States certainly alarmed the Communist leaders in Beijing. On 1 November, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) started bombing Upper and Lower Dachen off Zhejiang as a way both to test the United States’ resolve and to influence the ongoing treaty negotiations.Footnote 12 During the lengthy negotiating process, the definition of the territorial scope of American military commitments became a source of controversy. In terms of the territory that was to come under the scope of the treaty, George Yeh tried to prevent specifying only Taiwan and the Pescadores so as to avoid giving the impression that Nationalist Chinese territory was limited to these two island regions and did not encompass the mainland. Dulles refused: he was only willing to state that the treaty would be ‘applicable to such . . . territories [other than Taiwan and the Pescadores] as may be determined by mutual agreement’. Chiang eventually backed down.Footnote 13 Meanwhile, to underscore that the pact was purely defensive in nature, the State Department insisted that, without mutual consent, the Nationalists should not take any offensive action that might provoke retaliation by the Chinese Communists. Yeh initially refused to renounce publicly the right of his government to liberate the mainland, but as the Americans continued to hold their ground on this issue, Taipei again yielded, only requesting that the provision be kept secret so as not to cause any damage to the prestige of ‘Free China’.Footnote 14
Before the mutual defence treaty was signed by George Yeh and John Foster Dulles on 2 December 1954, both sides also reached an understanding about the deployment of Chiang's forces within KMT-ruled territory. Worried that Chiang might provoke Beijing by stationing a large number of his troops on the offshore islands, thus creating a serious problem for the United States in terms of its commitment to the defence of Taiwan, the State Department insisted on taking a strong view about Nationalist military deployment. In the end, Taipei agreed to rephrase the wording of the pact to state that the forces stationed on Taiwan and the Pescadores should not be reduced ‘to a degree which would substantially diminish the defensibility of such territories’.Footnote 15 By intentionally not mentioning the offshore islands in the treaty's main text, Washington hoped to deter Beijing from attacking Nationalist positions there while simultaneously discouraging Taipei from using the islands as a springboard from which to invade the mainland. More significant from a historical perspective, the 1954 mutual defence treaty not only confined Nationalist territorial jurisdiction to Taiwan and the Pescadores, it also virtually shattered any real hope of Chiang's military recovery of the mainland. The content, spirit, and scope of the treaty ultimately laid the groundwork for what would gradually lead to the legalization of an island-based Nationalist Chinese state.Footnote 16
Chiang Kai-shek was outwardly pleased when he heard about the conclusion of the bilateral treaty, which he saw as a ‘marvellous achievement’ considering the disgrace and humiliation he had endured over the previous decade, as well as the bitter struggle for his very survival since the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949.Footnote 17 If the Generalissimo was elated that his last power base in Taiwan was now secured and the position of his once precarious regime consolidated, his arch rivals across the Strait were certainly not. Beginning from early November 1954, the PLA launched a series of assaults against Nationalist-guarded isles off southeast China. On the evening of 14 November, the Communists torpedoed and sank a Nationalist destroyer escort near the Dachens. It became the first positive indication that the PLA was capable of using torpedoes in night work. If the United States wanted to avoid a military clash with the PRC, the top brass in the Pentagon argued, withdrawing Nationalist troops from the offshore islands seemed unavoidable.Footnote 18
On 10 January 1955, Mao Zedong ordered a massive attack on the Dachens. Eight days later, about 10,000 Communist forces launched a successful air-amphibious-land operation to occupy Yijiangshan, approximately nine miles north of Upper Dachen. They inflicted heavy casualties on the roughly 1,000 Nationalist defenders on Chiang Kai-shek's northernmost island outpost. In the face of the renewed Taiwan Strait crisis, John Foster Dulles proposed an American-assisted evacuation of all the Nationalist-held offshore islands except Quemoy (and later, Matsu) in combination with a defensive commitment to the latter. Despite some strenuous objections from his national security advisers, President Eisenhower stood firmly behind Dulles's idea.Footnote 19 To Chiang, abandoning the Dachens, the last territorial hold of his home province of Zhejiang, was distasteful, but he was aware both of their vulnerability and their diminishing value to the defence of Taiwan. He reckoned that their loss was part of a tacit quid pro quo without which Taipei could not count on American assistance to protect the more strategic Quemoy and Matsu. In addition, refusing to accept Dulles's proposal might generate a negative atmosphere at the very moment when Congress was in the process of ratifying the mutual defence treaty already negotiated.Footnote 20
With the Generalissimo on board, President Eisenhower delivered his message, now dubbed the ‘Formosa Resolution’, to Congress on 24 January. It delegated to the president the power to employ American armed forces to defend Taiwan and the Pescadores, by providing the authority for the ‘securing and protection of such related positions and territories of that area now in friendly hands’ and the taking of ‘such other measures as the president would judge to be required or appropriate in assuring the defence of Taiwan and the Pescadores’.Footnote 21 In Taipei, Chiang was disappointed at the deliberate omission of Quemoy and Matsu in the Formosa Resolution, but he made no further move to pursue the issue with Washington. Privately, he viewed the passing of the Resolution on Capitol Hill ‘a blessing for the fate of his nation’, something which brought him much comfort and satisfaction.Footnote 22 The evacuation of the Dachens was completed by 11 February 1955, and soon thereafter the Communists peacefully occupied the empty isles.
The comfort and satisfaction that the passing of the Formosa Resolution had provided Chiang Kai-shek proved to be short-lived. As tensions across the Taiwan Strait gradually died down in the spring of 1955, the idea that the Nationalists should abandon the offshore islands altogether so as not to drag the United States into war with Communist China took hold among Washington's top echelons, including President Eisenhower himself. On 24 April, the president sent Walter Robertson and Arthur Radford (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) to Taipei to persuade the Generalissimo either to turn the offshore islands into outposts, with a much reduced defence force stationed there, or to withdraw from them completely and accept an American-policed ‘maritime zone’ that would take the place of the islands as a first line of warning and defence for Taiwan.Footnote 23 In the end, instead of giving Chiang both options, Eisenhower's envoys presented only the latter, more extreme, alternative; if Taipei withdrew from the offshore islands under American naval protection, the United States would join with it in creating an interdiction line running 400 miles through the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the East China Sea, from Swatow in Guangdong in the south to the port of Wenzhou in Zhejiang. The purpose of the joint interdiction would be to search all ships in the area, foreign or Chinese, and seize all ‘contraband and war-making materials’. The interdiction force would also replace Quemoy and Matsu as the early line of defence to any Communist invasion force from the mainland. The joint naval action, as Radford stressed to Chiang during their long, arduous meeting at the latter's private residence, would in effect be ‘a blockade of China's coast’ and it would demonstrate to the whole world the United States’ determination to take strong measures, including fighting a war, to defend Taiwan.Footnote 24
Chiang, unprepared for this surprising scheme, was flabbergasted and annoyed. Without first consulting his close aides, he turned down the envoys’ proposal outright, insisting that his government would defend Quemoy and Matsu with or without American help. To jettison the islands would be to lose the respect of the Chinese people, the Generalissimo exclaimed.Footnote 25 Privately, Chiang's reaction was much more extreme; he confided in his diary that the Americans were ‘completely deceiving’ and ‘naïve and ignorant’ to think he would believe them. While regarding Radford at least as a ‘gentleman’, Chiang went as far as to call Robertson ‘a son of a bitch’.Footnote 26 Predictably, the drawn-out meeting was neither a harmonious nor a pleasant one. Before closing the meeting, Robertson urged the Generalissimo to give ‘full consideration to all implications’ of the interdiction proposal. An apparently agitated and impatient Chiang replied that he had made up his mind and he no long wanted to discuss the matter, reiterating that if he pulled out of Quemoy and Matsu, the Chinese people would not support him and then the Americans ‘would have to find another Chiang Kai-shek’. Unwilling to bear a repeat of what he had already said and heard, and in what by diplomatic standards was considered an incredibly rude act for one's most important ally, the next day Chiang simply cancelled his scheduled meeting with the Americans, leaving his wife and subordinates to keep the American diplomats occupied.Footnote 27
Back in Washington DC, after reading John Foster Dulles's report on what had happened in Taipei, Eisenhower took a sympathetic stance towards Chiang. The president noted in a secret memorandum to his secretary of state that Chiang's response ‘made it not only what I predicted but what I think I would have made had I been in his place’. While lamenting that Chiang had failed to see the wisdom of the interdiction formula and the unique opportunity to trim his offshore island garrisons down to a reasonable level, the president could not help commenting that, ‘in a sense, we are still on the horns of the dilemma that you and I have discussed a number of times’.Footnote 28 It took a relatively three short years to prove that Eisenhower was indeed correct.
A cross-strait rendezvous
Chiang Kai-shek's refusal to accept the American proposal came at the same moment his Chinese Communist rivals moved to calm the cross-Strait crisis and change their stance, presumably under pressure from the Soviet Union and other communist bloc and Third World countries, none of which wanted the crisis to escalate into a larger conflict. It therefore untangled a diplomatic dilemma for both Taipei and Washington, at least temporarily. During the Bandung Conference in April 1955, the PRC premier Zhou Enlai declared that the Chinese people were friendly towards the American people and that Beijing was willing to sit down and negotiate with the American government over how to relax tensions in the Far East, especially in the Taiwan Strait area. The announcement pleased many Americans who were eager to defuse the conflict. In July, Eisenhower and Dulles sent messages through the British that they were prepared to negotiate with the PRC in Geneva at the ambassadorial level. Zhou responded positively and talks began the following month—these would continue on and off for the following decade and a half.Footnote 29
A little-known fact is that when the Chinese Communists expressed their desire to reduce tensions in the Far East, they meant not only by seeking to open a dialogue with the Americans, but also with the Nationalists on Taiwan. In the months following the opening of the first US-PRC ambassadorial talks in early August 1955, Beijing entrusted Cao JurenFootnote 30 to send three secret letters to the Generalissimo's son.Footnote 31 Cao, bearing private messages from Beijing regarding a settlement of the cross-Strait dispute, asked his ‘old friend’ Ching-kuo to dispatch a confidant to Hong Kong to receive ‘important information’ about a CCP-KMT reconciliation. Rumour had it that Ching-kuo soon sent Huang Jici, a noted calligrapher who had been the Chinese tutor for Faina Epatcheva Vahaleva (Chiang Fang-liang), Ching-kuo's Belarusian wife, to Hong Kong and Tokyo to contact Communist Chinese messengers, including Cao Juren. This would be the first known cross-Strait contact after Chiang Kai-shek's expulsion from the mainland in 1949.Footnote 32
In fact, Cao Juren was by no means the only intermediary during this wave of behind-the-scenes political contact between Taipei and Beijing. From the autumn of 1955 to the spring of 1957, according to the CIA, clandestine communications in the form of an exchange of letters and verbal messages across the Taiwan Strait via Hong Kong were quietly underway, involving high-profile former Nationalists, including Zhang Zhizhong, Zhang Shizhao, Fu Zuoyi, and Shao Lizi on the CCP side, and Vice-president Chen Cheng, Vice-premier Huang Shaogu, and one of Chiang's senior presidential advisers Wu Zhongxin, on the KMT side.Footnote 33 By the early weeks of 1956, newspaper reports concerning cross-Strait contacts had become so prevalent that Chiang was obliged to instruct his propaganda chiefs to clarify with the outside world that no such contacts were happening. Privately, however, he was convinced that every possible means, ‘whether harmful or not’, should still be attempted as long as it would result in the ultimate goal of annihilating the PRC.Footnote 34
In June 1956, by which time the Communists had established their ‘peaceful liberation’ posture and formally declared their readiness to negotiate with Taiwan, details of specific steps and terms for negotiations were covertly conveyed to Chiang Kai-shek through secret channels. Cao Juren was reportedly entrusted, this time by the Chiangs, father and son, through a local KMT contact in Hong Kong, to conduct a fact-finding trip to the Chinese mainland. Cao gladly accepted the task, and he met with Zhou Enlai in Beijing shortly after the CCP announced its peace overture towards Taiwan.Footnote 35 Among those confidential messages passed on to Taipei via Cao were Mao Zedong's ‘heartfelt desire’ to reconcile with Chiang and to invite him to return to the mainland, where, Mao asserted, he could stay wherever he liked, he would be treated with the highest courtesy, and his security would be guaranteed. Mao also expressed great hope for sincere cooperation between Chiang Ching-kuo and Chen Cheng, the two top political rivals within the KMT, so as to avoid a split in the Nationalist hierarchy.Footnote 36 When Mao's messages, along with Cao's mainland inspection reports, reached Taipei in early August 1956, Chiang Kai-shek spent two full days carefully reviewing and contemplating their contents, noting in his personal diary that he found them ‘extremely useful’.Footnote 37 As a result of Cao's clandestine visit to the mainland, arguably on behalf of the KMT, Chiang became determined to expand Taiwan's existing intelligence base in Hong Kong, where, he felt, it was imperative to appoint a capable figure to handle matters relating to Communist China.Footnote 38
By the spring of 1957, Chiang Ching-kuo was extremely upset to learn that he alone was being portrayed by the world's media as the chief architect behind the ongoing cross-Strait peace negotiations. This was partly because in the last months of 1956, Huang Difei, a brother of Huang Shaogu who had joined the CCP after 1949, attempted to fly to Taiwan from Hong Kong to establish relations with the KMT. He was denied an entry visa at the last moment, but the episode was big enough to create the impression that cross-Strait negotiations were imminent. Then in late December 1956 and early January 1957, news began circulating in the United States, Japan, and Britain that Ching-kuo was already in Beijing representing his father at the KMT-CCP negotiation table. This caused a flustered and exasperated Ching-kuo to inform CIA staff in Taipei that there was no basis to the reports.Footnote 39
While Chiang Ching-kuo had reason to be angry at what he saw as the CCP's political intrigues to destroy him, it is interesting to note that his father actually saw the advantage: this was an opportunity to use the widely reported secret cross-Strait communications both as leverage to offset the US-PRC ambassadorial talks and to solicit more military aid from Washington. Throughout February 1957, Chiang Kai-shek constantly referenced the use of the Communist peace offensive to attract more support from the Eisenhower administration, including a commitment to assist his military recovery of the mainland.Footnote 40 In April of that year, rumours began to circulate that Chiang had sent a Hong Kong-based KMT legislator named Song Yishan as a messenger to Beijing to meet with Zhou Enlai and other Communist leaders, and to undertake another inspection tour of the mainland. A month later, Cao Juren made yet another extraordinary visit to Fenghua County in Zhejiang Province, Chiang's home town. Apparently with permission from Beijing and as a gesture of goodwill, Cao worshipped at the Chiang family graveyard and stayed in Chiang's former residence. He then dutifully passed on the photographs of his activities in Fenghua to Taipei via a KMT contact in Hong Kong.Footnote 41 After a while, stories about the imminent cross-Strait peace talks started to find foreign believers, especially in embassies and foreign offices around the world where rumours were traded and reported on. American diplomatic and intelligence officers in Taipei and Hong Kong were urged to evaluate the possibility that Taipei-Beijing negotiations were about to occur or were already in progress.Footnote 42 Secret communications across the Taiwan Strait came to an abrupt halt in the early summer of 1957 when Mao launched his ‘anti-rightist’ campaign, and a relatively moderate political era in China gave way to a hardened one.Footnote 43
Despite the surge of ‘peaceful liberation’ initiatives on the part of the Chinese Communists and the establishment of private contacts across the Taiwan Strait between 1955 and 1957, the situation surrounding the offshore islands remained very unstable. As has been noted earlier in this article, by mid-1953 top PRC military strategists, mostly hawks in the bureaucracy, had laid out a five-year formula to strengthen Communist China's national defence and border security, including the takeover of the offshore islands. The end of the first offshore islands crisis in the spring of 1955 did not deter Mao Zedong's top security chiefs from planning their next military move. In November of that year, when cross-Strait political feelers had just begun to be put out, Mao vetoed a course of action already approved by the PLA to attack and occupy Quemoy.Footnote 44 But a few months later, when Mao's military staff proposed the creation of a new Fujian military region to be carved out of the Nanjing military region for the sake of dealing with Quemoy and Matsu, Mao found it hard to veto again. As the new railway connecting Jiangxi Province and Amoy in southern Fujian neared completion, thereby hugely increasing PLA mobility in the south of China, Mao's hawkish military men began pushing even harder for advancing the Communist Air Force into Fujian.Footnote 45
In the early autumn of 1956, Nationalist and Communist forces exchanged fire in the Matsu area. The incident caused a nervous Generalissimo to request more American aid to defend the offshore islands, while Chiang's equally hawkish military subordinates urged retaliation by parachuting in hundreds of irregulars to sabotage the Communist infrastructure in south China.Footnote 46 Then in the early months of 1957 armed conflict flared again in the waters off Matsu, and in the last week of June, heavy fire was exchanged between Quemoy and Amoy, the fiercest since 1954.Footnote 47 During the last months of 1957 several brief battles were fought in both Matsu and Quemoy waters, with each side claiming victories over the other. By the early summer of 1958, the Chinese Nationalists forecast trouble across the Strait, while the Americans and the British were also aware that Beijing was preparing for some kind of drastic action. Conflict over the offshore islands seemed inevitable.
On the evening of 23 August, the PLA began a massive artillery bombardment of Quemoy and threatened invasion. Communist patrol boats blockaded the island group against Nationalist resupply efforts. This was accompanied by an aggressive propaganda assault on the United States, threats against American naval ships, and a declaration of intent to ‘liberate’ Taiwan.Footnote 48 Those ‘damned little offshore islands’, which President Eisenhower had said he sometimes wished would sink, had come back to haunt Washington again.
The 1958 offshore crisis re-examined
Numerous scholarly works have researched the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958, but few (if any) have examined the delicate situation surrounding the secret KMT-CCP channels of communication built up during the previous years, as well as how it played out in the geopolitics of the Cold War, especially between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mao's decision to shell the offshore islands was made ostensibly because China wanted both to express its support for the Arab struggle against ‘imperialist aggression’ and also because it hoped the bombardment would divert American attention from the Middle East. However, it has also been suggested there were other reasons for the bombardment. One was that Mao wanted to instigate a conflict to serve the goal of domestic reform—the Great Leap Forward—which he had launched in early 1958. Other reasons were that he also wanted to test American resolve, waste American resources, and weaken US-Taiwan ties by triggering conflicting expectations and demonstrating Taiwan's total and embarrassing dependence on the United States.Footnote 49
While all these reasons may have contributed to Mao's decision, another important but unspoken reason was that the PLA needed a pre-emptive shelling of the KMT-held isles along China's south-eastern coast (at the moment when the United States was preoccupied with its war in Lebanon) to ensure the smooth introduction and build-up of its Air Force in Fujian, a plan that had been on the agenda as early as the autumn of 1956. A successful reinforcement of Communist air power in the Fujian military region, including jet planes, missiles, and other military infrastructure, would allow the PRC to gain vital air dominance along its southeastern coastal borders, and this was what Mao's top military advisers had repeatedly urged.Footnote 50
No matter the reasons for Mao's decision, he nevertheless did give a green light to the bombardment plan, but before the shelling started, he decided that Chiang Kai-shek should be informed in advance. A couple of days before the bombing was to begin, Mao summoned Cao Juren to Beijing and told him to leak the news of the upcoming bombardment through the Nanyang Business Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper run by Cao himself. As a result, in the early morning of 23 August, 12 hours ahead of the shelling, people in Hong Kong were able to read a brief but succinct front-page news article stating that ‘The battle of artillery in Quemoy is imminent.’Footnote 51 In Washington, on hearing about the renewed crisis in the Taiwan Strait, President Eisenhower complained to his colleagues in the White House that even though Chiang had ignored his advice to reduce his forces on the offshore islands, the Generalissimo once again came ‘whining to us’. But publicly, as in the past, he did not hesitate to declare that American forces would be used for the protection of Quemoy. To the amazement and consternation of the United States’ allies worldwide, the President even claimed that he could not rule out the use of atomic weapons.Footnote 52
On 4 September, in an effort to prevent American naval vessels from approaching Quemoy, Beijing announced the establishment of its territorial waters at 12 nautical miles and declared that no foreign aircraft or vessels would be allowed to cross that boundary. Washington responded two days later by issuing a statement emphasizing that, increasingly, the protection of Quemoy and Matsu, had become related to the defence of Taiwan, which the United States was bound by treaty obligation to defend. In the same statement, however, Washington also indicated its willingness to resume the ambassadorial talks which Mao had broken off in early 1958 after the American representative, U. Alexis Johnson, was reassigned and not subsequently replaced. Zhou Enlai responded the next day by expressing Beijing's intention to sit down at the negotiating table with the Americans to discuss the elimination of tension in the Taiwan Strait. Presumably under heavy pressure from the Kremlin, whose leaders were annoyed at not being informed of the shelling in advance and who were by no means willing to be dragged into a nuclear war over the offshore islands, Mao and his close confidants began to revise their stance.Footnote 53
The policy shift over the crisis on the part of the Chinese Communists was not only directed toward the Americans, but also aimed at the Nationalists. On 10 September, five days before Beijing and Washington reopened the Warsaw ambassadorial talks, Zhou Enlai again called Cao Juren to Beijing for another urgent meeting. The premier wanted Cao to convey fresh messages to Taipei, which Cao dutifully did through his private letters to Chiang Ching-kuo, Defence Minister Yu Dawei, and Huang Shaogu, now newly appointed as Chiang's foreign minister, all of which were dated 25 September.Footnote 54 Cao notified Taipei that if Chiang Kai-shek agreed to abandon his ‘reliance’ on American military protection and the ‘self-conceit’ that he harboured over his special relations with the Americans, then Beijing promised it would not attack Taiwan. Cao also guaranteed that, starting from 6 October, the PLA would halt the siege of Quemoy as long as the United States stopped providing protection for Nationalist ships. And, most significantly, he conveyed Mao's secret message that Beijing actually ‘concurred with Chiang’ that the Nationalists should continue to hold the offshore islands, adding that top CCP leaders now harboured no intention of destroying Chiang's forces on these islands. In addition, Cao indicated that Mao proposed the evacuation of Nationalist troops from the offshore islands so as to create a ‘demilitarized’ Quemoy and Matsu, and then to transform these two island groups into free economic zones across the Strait. It was Mao's wish, Cao further noted, that direct port-to-port shipping lines between Taiwan and the mainland would be opened in the near future. At the end of his secret letters, Cao stated that if Taipei agreed to publicize the ongoing CCP-KMT secret communications, Mao would move the current US-PRC ambassadorial talks back to Geneva from Warsaw, where Chiang could send his representatives to join them.Footnote 55
Based on a private account by a very senior CCP official in 1994 (allegedly Qiao Shi, then chairman of the PRC National People's Congress), Jay Taylor's 2009 book makes the claim that during the 1958 offshore island crisis Chiang sent a message to Zhou Enlai via a secret messenger to the effect that if the PLA did not stop its shelling, he would have ‘to do what the Americans wanted’—withdraw from the offshore islands—and, as a result, over time this move would threaten the indivisibility of China.Footnote 56 Whether this is true or not, it is intriguing that on 27 September 1958, only two days after Cao sent his letters to Taipei, Chiang confided in his personal diary the following rambling thoughts: ‘only the Chinese [ourselves] truly understand the way we do business; this is particularly true when it comes to [our] understanding of the Chinese Communist activities and their mentality’.Footnote 57 It is possible that Cao's three private letters to Taipei might have served as Beijing's response to Chiang's secret threat to withdraw from the islands. To be sure, more archival evidence is needed before one can solve this historical puzzle.
One thing is certain, nevertheless. As Beijing and Washington resumed bilateral talks in Warsaw, President Eisenhower began thinking about pressuring Chiang to seriously reconsider evacuating the offshore islands, or at least to reduce the level of Nationalist troop strength on these islands. Chiang's refusal to comply with Eisenhower's wishes coincided with Beijing's announcement in the early hours of 6 October that it would halt the shelling for seven days, a move about which Cao had informed Chiang the previous week.Footnote 58 By October 1958, it had become apparent that the Eisenhower administration was seeking Beijing's commitment to a non-military policy in dealing with the Taiwan issue. In turn, Washington offered to push Chiang to withdraw from the offshore islands and give up his plan for the military recovery of the mainland. Seeing such a design of ‘trading Quemoy and Matsu for Taiwan and the Pescadores’ as a dangerous formalization of the separation between Taiwan and China, leaders in Beijing shifted their stance once again and moved closer to their Nationalist adversary's position. On 13 October, Cao hurriedly flew to Beijing again, and this time Mao asked him to make it known to Taipei that Mao was resolved to leave the offshore islands in Chiang's hands, thereby maintaining a mainland connection with Nationalist-ruled Taiwan and avoiding a de facto ‘two-China’ situation. Instead of requesting the withdrawal of Chiang's forces from Quemoy and Matsu, as suggested in Cao's 25 September letters, Mao now unequivocally favoured a continued Nationalist military presence on these isles.Footnote 59 Coincidentally, Chiang's top aides were also working on a statement explaining why the Nationalists could not abandon the offshore islands. The CCP's peace overtures became one critical element that Taipei sought to include to convince the Americans that a spontaneous withdrawal from Quemoy or Matsu was dangerous.Footnote 60
Beijing's secret proposal arrived at the very moment when Washington was ready to apply more pressure on Chiang Kai-shek over the island issue. When John Foster Dulles's motorcade drove through the grimy city of Taipei on 20 October, the PLA temporarily resumed its shelling of Quemoy as a gesture of protest. But the purpose of the secretary of state's visit to Taipei was not to boost Taiwan's attempt to continue its fight against the Communists, as had been perceived all around the world. Rather, Dulles criticized the KMT as militaristic and likely to precipitate a world war, as well as judging it to have only ‘a limited life expectancy’. He then gave the Generalissimo a list of things Taipei had to do if it wished to prevent itself from being liquidated. These included seeking an ‘armistice’ with the Chinese mainland, avoiding commando raids and ‘alike provocations’, and accepting any solution to the offshore islands problem as long as the civilian population on Taiwan would not be turned over to the Communists.Footnote 61
While Chiang Kai-shek was faced with Dulles's startling criticism and list of demands in Taipei, Mao proffered his arch-rival yet another option: an immediate cross-Strait agreement engineered to push back against American pressure. On 23 October, Beijing informed Taipei through the Cao Juren channel that Mao's decision to restart the shelling was in fact a ‘blessing in disguise’, as such a move would ‘scare’ the Americans and reinforce Chiang's bargaining position vis-à-vis Dulles, thus allowing Taipei to ‘extort’ more military and economic aid from Washington. Cao reiterated Mao's willingness to allow the offshore islands to remain in Chiang's possession, and conveyed Mao's suggestion that bilateral meetings between the CCP and KMT be held in Hong Kong without delay.Footnote 62 Cao further stipulated that issues to be discussed might include the election of Taiwan's future leadership and the maintenance of Taiwan's autonomous status, the transformation of offshore islands into a pivot for cross-Strait economic exchange, and the dispatch of a KMT military delegation to inspect the Chinese mainland as a first step towards reducing mutual hostility.Footnote 63 To show that he was really serious, Mao sent Zhang Shijao (a respected revolutionary under Sun Yat-sen who had also participated in the 1949 KMT-CCP peace negotiations) to Hong Kong to await the arrival of Chiang's envoy. Fully authorized by Mao to negotiate, Zhang went so far as to inform a KMT contact in Hong Kong that Beijing was ready to return to Taiwan the Upper and Lower Dachen islands that Chiang had evacuated in early 1955, as long as Chiang agreed to cool his relationship with the United States.Footnote 64
During the last week of October 1958, Chiang Kai-shek thus seemed caught in the horns of a dilemma: he would have to choose between undertaking the political drama of conducting a secret dialogue with the Chinese Communists or continuing to endure his difficult alliance with an overbearing American patron. One irony here is that the United States was eager to end the military conflict over the offshore islands so as to protect Taiwan from being attacked by the PRC, even though this would weaken Chiang Kai-shek's political myth that the offshore islands were a stepping stone to the promised invasion of the mainland. On the other hand, Chiang might actually want to prolong the confrontation with the PRC through the offshore islands crisis for his own purposes, even though a continued military standoff might severely damage the internal stability of Nationalist rule in Taiwan. But if such a ‘dilemma’ did exist, it was ephemeral; before leaving Taipei on 24 October, Dulles bent Chiang to his will by getting him to agree to publicly renounce the use of military means to restore Nationalist rule to the Chinese mainland. Dulles's ‘strong recommendation’ (euphemistically rephrased in the joint communiqué to read ‘the principal means’) for restoring freedom to the Chinese people on the mainland would be ‘implementation of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People’, and that ‘the foundation of this mission resides in the hearts and minds of the Chinese people and not in the use of force’.Footnote 65 In essence, the communiqué would transform the nature of Chiang's policy towards the mainland from a crucial ‘incentive’ to spark anti-communist revolution to a ‘response’ in the event of such a revolution. Beijing responded by announcing the next day that the shelling would continue only on alternate days, thus permitting Chiang's forces to be resupplied and the islands to remain in Nationalist hands. Thus the second offshore islands crisis virtually came to an end.Footnote 66
Towards the end of an issue
Both CIA declassified materials and published Chinese source materials reveal that around this critical and dramatic final week of October 1958, Ching-kuo began showing Ray S. Cline, the CIA station chief in Taipei, all the secret letters previously received from Cao Juren and other Nationalist-turned-Communist messengers. It was also at this juncture that top Nationalist leaders became convinced of the need to clear the air regarding a new flurry of rumours about their possible negotiations with Beijing and to avert any serious problems in US-Taiwan relations.Footnote 67 On 31 October, before Huang Shaogu departed for Rome to attend the new Pope's coronation, Chiang Kai-shek abruptly instructed Huang to cancel his scheduled transit flight through Hong Kong so as not to generate further speculation about a suspected possible contact with Zhang Shizhao.Footnote 68 Chiang then asked his vice president Chen Cheng to arrange an interview with a local newspaper; in it Chen fiercely denounced the Chinese Communist peace campaign as ‘typical, evil and treacherous’, maintaining that it amounted to nothing more than a way to cover up Beijing's failure to seize the offshore islands.Footnote 69 In another effort to regain American confidence and set the record straight, a week after Dulles returned to Washington, Chiang advised the KMT Central Standing Committee to formulate, and then heavily publicize, a series of new demarches aimed at ‘smashing the Communist plot of peace negotiations’.Footnote 70
The signing of the Chiang-Dulles communiqué renouncing a military recovery of the mainland, followed by a cluster of political gestures to dismiss the rumoured secret dealings across the Strait, all reinforced the impression that Chiang Kai-shek had to comply with the United States’ wishes regarding the troubled offshore islands, and that he had no other recourse than to comply with the wishes of his American patrons. This may well be true, but the irony is that the second Taiwan Strait crisis finally quietened down not only as a result of American pressure on Chiang to declare, at least temporarily, an end to his goal of recovering the mainland, but also because of the attitude of CCP leaders who decided that a continued Nationalist presence on the offshore islands would best serve their interests.
From a historical perspective, the second Taiwan Strait crisis offered a useful opportunity for both sides of the Strait to settle on a mutually agreed-on understanding over the status of the offshore islands. Although such a ‘tacit consensus’ (i.e. keeping the islands in Chiang's hands so as to avoid a ‘two-China’ situation) did not wholly rule out cross-Strait tensions in the years to come, it did marginalize the offshore islands and prevent them from becoming a major source of potential military confrontation between Washington, Beijing, and Taipei. The subsequent scanty exchanges of gunfire between the KMT and the CCP in the offshore island area served only as a ‘symbol of the continuing civil war’ and their ‘dedication to one China’, as the Americans observed in the 1960s.Footnote 71 The existence of diplomatically useful personal connections between the CCP and the KMT leadership in the 1950s also paved the way for subsequent contacts across the Taiwan Strait. One notable example took place in 1982 when, after coming to power, Deng Xiaoping mobilized Liao Chengzhi, Ching-kuo's erstwhile fellow classmate from the Moscow era, to contact Taipei to foster reconciliation. Apparently, Deng sought to make use of figures like Liao, whose connections with the KMT leadership were bound by personal relations and with an elite code of conduct, to manage the intricate cross-Strait relationship.Footnote 72
In April 1960, Chiang Kai-shek was annoyed by an American intelligence report that Mao might renew the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu as a way to ‘congratulate’ Chiang on his re-election as ROC president.Footnote 73 It took a timely, secret letter from Cao Juren to reassure the Chiangs, father and son, that no military actions were imminent in the foreseeable future and that Beijing's stance toward the islands remained unchanged.Footnote 74 Indeed, nothing precipitous would happen that spring.
And yet something extraordinary did happen in the early summer of that year. When President Eisenhower visited Taiwan on 18 June, the PLA resumed its bombardment of Quemoy for the first time since August 1958. Within 48 hours between 17 and 19 June, over 160,000 shells were fired at the Quemoy island group.Footnote 75 The resumed shelling quickly led to a new round of policy re-examination within the State Department. The focal point was whether Washington should raise with Chiang the old subject of evacuating the offshore islands, or whether the United States should decide which of the islands was to be defended (excluding a few relatively sizeable, isolated isles separate from the Quemoy and Matsu groups which Taipei was determined to defend).Footnote 76 It took the State Department almost two months to conclude, on 5 August, that it was contrary to American interests to induce Taipei to abandon the offshore islands.Footnote 77 But before that, in July, Zhou Enlai had secretly reassured Taipei, via Zhang Shizhao (then still in Hong Kong) and the KMT-sponsored Hong Kong Times, that Beijing harboured no intention of reversing its current stance and occupying the islands.Footnote 78
While the ‘tacit consensus’ over the status of KMT-held offshore islands remained effective across the Strait, issues around these islands continued to dominate the United States’ domestic politics. During the 1960 presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy openly stated that the United States should not defend Quemoy and Matsu simply because they were ‘symbols of freedom’, whereas the Republican candidate Richard Nixon argued for American protection of the islands as part of the fight against communism. Chiang rebuffed the Kennedy line by repeating that his government would fight to the death for Quemoy and Matsu. ‘Naïve’, ‘near-sightedness’, and ‘impractical’ were some of the terms Chiang used in his diary to characterize the young Democratic presidential candidate.Footnote 79
Deciding policy for the offshore islands went on to become one of the new Democratic administration's key tasks immediately after Kennedy took office. As the youngest president ever elected in American history, Kennedy promised the American people a ‘New Frontier’, a fresh approach to government policy initiatives. Under such political circumstances, Kennedy's foreign policy and national security advisers saw an opportunity to implement a new China policy. They sought to establish a new basis for US-Taiwan relations under the terms of which Washington would be willing to support Chiang's government in Taiwan, but not his mainland ambitions. Among the new proposals put forward by the State Department was one to persuade Chiang to evacuate the offshore islands as an inducement for Washington's allies to share the commitment to defend Taiwan. If they succeeded in getting Chiang to abandon the islands, Kennedy's aides foresaw the liquidation of a potentially dangerous confrontation and a means whereby the China-Taiwan conflict might be turned into ‘a period of a de facto peace, with a hundred miles of blue water between the contestants, in which the needed free-world consensus about Taiwan's right to a separate future might grow’.Footnote 80
In the spring of 1961, there was indeed a sense of urgency in the new Kennedy White House regarding a solution to the problem of the offshore islands as well as to the overall China policy. Washington did not intend to desert Chiang Kai-shek, nor would it jettison Taipei's representation in the United Nations. However, Kennedy's core policy makers felt an urgent need to push Chiang to ‘rationalize’ his position on the offshore islands, an issue which many in Washington saw was losing the support of most Free World countries. As these islands continued to serve as an ideal target for Chinese Communist military intimidation, and thus haunted America's domestic politics, an eventual disengagement from them was felt to be in the best interests of the United States.Footnote 81
By July 1961, a draft proposal entitled ‘Contingency Planning for Possible Renewed Chinese Communist Attack on the Offshore Islands’ was being carefully discussed and debated among White House and State Department staff. It concluded by clearly defining that American national interests lay in the withdrawal of Nationalist forces from the islands.Footnote 82 At this point, there were already too many troubling issues to be settled between Taipei, China, and Washington, including Chinese representation in the UN, the political status of Outer Mongolia and its possible entry to the UN, and the American decision to grant an entry visa to a leader of the Taiwanese Independence Movement, Thomas Liao. Ultimately, no concrete action was undertaken by Washington to force Chiang to change the status quo of the offshore islands, especially as the American military establishment still argued for the importance of keeping the islands in Nationalist hands.Footnote 83
More significant from a historical point of view, the policy debates and discussions over the KMT-held offshore islands in the early months of the Kennedy administration turned out to be the American government's last serious involvement in the issue except for a brief interlude in the summer of 1962. Beijing's loss of interest in taking control of the islands was certainly the direct consequence of a much quieter offshore situation. The rationale for the Chinese Communists was probably multi-faceted, such as a growing confidence in PRC military technology which would allow the PLA to launch a direct attack on Taiwan, bypassing the offshore islands, and the fear that any military movement against the islands in the south would generate an adverse impact on China's northern defences vis-à-vis the increasingly hostile Soviet Union.Footnote 84 And of course, the secret cross-Strait communications and the tacit understanding between the KMT and CCP, generated during the 1958 crisis, certainly played a role in reducing the importance of the issue so that it ceased to be a critical factor in the triangular relationship.
