The First Taiwan Strait Crisis
Beijing and Taipei
proclaimed what amounted to two competing versions of the same
Chinese national identity. In the Nationalist view, Taiwan was not
an independent state: it was the home of the Republic of China’s
government-in-exile, which had been temporarily displaced by
Communist usurpers, but which—as Nationalist propaganda insistently
proclaimed—would return to assume its rightful place on the
mainland. In Beijing’s conception, Taiwan was a renegade province
whose separation from the mainland and alliance with foreign powers
represented the last vestige of China’s “century of humiliation.”
Both Chinese sides agreed that Taiwan and the mainland were part of
the same political entity. The disagreement was about which Chinese government was the rightful
ruler.
Washington and its
allies periodically floated the idea of recognizing the Republic of
China and the People’s Republic of China as separate states—the
so-called two China solution. Both Chinese sides vociferously
rejected this proposal on the ground that it would prevent them
from fulfilling a sacred national obligation to liberate the other.
Against its initial judgment, Washington affirmed Taipei’s stance
that the Republic of China was the “real” Chinese government,
entitled to China’s seat in the United Nations and other
international institutions. Assistant Secretary of State for
Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk—later to become Secretary of
State—articulated this stance for the Truman administration in
1951, stating that, despite appearances to the contrary, “The
Peiping [then the Nationalist appellation for Beijing] . . . regime
is not the Government of China. . . . It is not Chinese. It is not
entitled to speak for China in the community of nations.”1 The People’s
Republic of China with its capital in Beijing was, for Washington,
a legal and diplomatic nonentity, despite its actual control over
the world’s largest population. This would remain, with only minor
variations, the official American position for the next two
decades.
The unintended
consequence was American involvement in the Chinese civil war. It
cast the United States, in Beijing’s conception of international
affairs, as the latest in a string of foreign powers perceived as
conspiring for a century to divide and dominate China. In Beijing’s
view, so long as Taiwan remained under a separate administrative
authority receiving foreign political and military assistance, the
project of founding a “New China” would remain
incomplete.
The United States,
Chiang’s primary ally, had little appetite for a Nationalist
reconquest of the mainland. Though Taipei’s supporters in Congress
periodically called on the White House to “unleash Chiang,” no
American President seriously considered a campaign to reverse the
Communist victory in the Chinese civil war—a source of profound
misapprehension on the Communist side.
The first direct
Taiwan crisis erupted in August 1954, little more than a year after
the end of active hostilities in the Korean War. The pretext for it
was a territorial quirk of the Nationalist retreat from the
mainland: the remaining presence of Nationalist forces on several
heavily fortified islands hugging the Chinese coast. These offshore
islands, which were much closer to the mainland than to Taiwan,
included Quemoy, Matsu, and several smaller outcroppings of
land.2 Depending on one’s view, the offshore
islands were either Taiwan’s first line of defense or, as
Nationalist propaganda proclaimed, its forward operating base for
an eventual reconquest of the mainland.
The offshore islands
were an odd location for what turned into two major crises within a
decade in which, at one point, both the Soviet Union and the United
States implied a readiness to use nuclear weapons. Neither the
Soviet Union nor the United States had any strategic interest in
the offshore islands. Neither, as it turned out, did China.
Instead, Mao used them to make a general point about international
relations: as part of his grand strategy against the United States
in the first crisis and against the Soviet Union—especially
Khrushchev—in the second.
At the closest point,
Quemoy was roughly two miles from the major Chinese port city of
Xiamen; Matsu was similarly close to the city of Fuzhou.3 The islands were
visible with the naked eye from the mainland and within easy
artillery range. Taiwan was well over a hundred miles away. PLA
forays against the offshore islands in 1949 were turned back by
strong Nationalist resistance. Truman’s dispatch of the Seventh
Fleet to the Taiwan Strait at the outset of the Korean War forced
Mao to postpone the planned invasion of Taiwan indefinitely and
Beijing’s appeals to Moscow for support in the full “liberation” of
Taiwan were met by evasions—a first stage toward the ultimate
estrangement.
The situation grew
more complex when Eisenhower succeeded Truman as President. In his
first State of the Union address on February 2, 1953, Eisenhower
announced an end to the Seventh Fleet’s patrol in the Taiwan
Strait. Because the fleet had prevented attacks in both directions,
Eisenhower reasoned that the mission had “meant, in effect, that
the U.S. Navy was required to serve as a defensive arm of Communist
China” even while Chinese forces were killing American troops in
Korea. Now he was ordering it out of the strait, since Americans
“certainly have no obligation to protect a nation fighting us in
Korea.”4
In China, the Seventh
Fleet’s deployment to the strait had been seen as a major American
offensive move. Now, paradoxically, its redeployment set the stage
for a new crisis. Taipei began reinforcing Quemoy and Matsu with
thousands of additional troops and a significant store of military
hardware.
Both sides now faced
a dilemma. China would never abandon its commitment to the return
of Taiwan, but it could postpone its implementation in the face of
overwhelming obstacles such as the presence of the Seventh Fleet.
After the fleet’s withdrawal, it faced no comparable obstacle
vis-à-vis the offshore islands. For its part, America had committed
itself to the defense of Taiwan, but a war over offshore islands
that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described as “a bunch of
rocks” was another matter.5 The confrontation became more acute when
the Eisenhower administration began negotiating a formal mutual
defense treaty with Taiwan, followed by the creation of the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
When faced with a
challenge, Mao generally took the most unexpected and most
intricate course. While Secretary of State John Dulles was flying
to Manila for the formation of SEATO Mao ordered a massive shelling
of Quemoy and Matsu—a shot across the bow of Taiwan’s increasing
autonomy and a test of Washington’s commitment to multilateral
defense of Asia.
The initial artillery
barrage on Quemoy claimed the lives of two American military
officers and prompted the immediate redeployment of three U.S.
carrier battle groups to the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait. Keeping
to its pledge to no longer serve as a “defensive arm” of the
People’s Republic of China, Washington now approved retaliatory
artillery and aircraft strikes by Nationalist forces against the
mainland.6 In the meantime, members of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff began developing plans for the possible use of
tactical nuclear weapons should the crisis escalate. Eisenhower
demurred for the moment at least, and approved a plan to seek a
cease-fire resolution at the U.N. Security Council. The crisis over
territory nobody wanted had become global.
The crisis had,
however, no obvious political objective. China was not threatening
Taiwan directly; the United States did not want a change in the
status of the strait. The crisis became less a rush to
confrontation—as the media presented it—than a subtle exercise in
crisis management. Both sides maneuvered toward intricate rules
designed to prevent the military
confrontation they were proclaiming on the political level. Sun Tzu
was alive and well in the diplomacy of the Taiwan
Strait.
The outcome was
“combative coexistence,” not war. To deter an attack caused by a
misapprehension as to American resolve—as in Korea—Dulles and the
Taiwanese ambassador in Washington, on November 23, 1954, initialed
the text of the long-planned defense treaty between the United
States and Taiwan. However, on the matter of the territory that had
just come under actual attack, the American commitment was
ambiguous: the treaty applied specifically only to Taiwan and the
Pescadores Islands (a larger group of islands about twenty-five
miles from Taiwan). It made no mention of Quemoy, Matsu, and other
territories close to the Chinese mainland, leaving them to be
defined later, “as may be determined by mutual consent.”7
For his part, Mao
prohibited his commanders from attacking American forces, while
laying down a marker to blunt America’s most intimidating weapon.
China, he proclaimed, in the incongruous setting of a meeting with
the new Finnish ambassador in Beijing, was impervious to the threat
of nuclear war:
The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system . . . if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor. The people of the whole world will support us.8
Since both Chinese
sides were playing by wei qi rules, the
mainland began moving into the gap left by the treaty’s omissions.
On January 18, it invaded the Dachen and Yijiangshan Islands, two
smaller island groups not specifically covered by the treaty. Both
sides continued to carefully define their limits. The United States
did not attempt to defend the small islands; the Seventh Fleet, in
fact, assisted with the evacuation of Nationalist forces. PLA
forces were prohibited to fire on American armed
forces.
As it turned out,
Mao’s rhetoric had a greater impact on his Soviet allies than on
the United States. For it confronted Khrushchev with the dilemma of
supporting his ally for a cause that reflected no Russian strategic
interest but involved risks of nuclear war, which Khrushchev
increasingly described as unacceptable. The Soviet Union’s European
allies with their tiny populations were even more terrified of
Mao’s utterances about China’s capacity to lose half its population
in a war and eventually prevail.
As for the United
States, Eisenhower and Dulles matched Mao’s dexterity. They had no
intention to test Mao’s endurance with respect to nuclear warfare.
But neither were they prepared to abandon the option of defending
the national interest. In the last week of January, they arranged
for the passage of a resolution of both houses of the United States
Congress authorizing Eisenhower to use U.S. forces to defend
Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, and “related positions and
territories” in the Taiwan Strait.9 The art of crisis management is to raise
the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner
that avoids a tit for tat. On that principle Dulles, at a press
conference on March 15, 1955, announced that the United States was
prepared to meet any major new Communist offensive with tactical
nuclear weapons, which China did not have. The next day, Eisenhower
confirmed the warning, observing that so long as civilians were not
in harm’s way, he saw no reason the United States could not use
tactical nuclear weapons “just exactly as you would use a bullet or
anything else.”10 It was the first time the United States
had made a specific nuclear threat in an ongoing
crisis.
Mao proved more
willing to announce China’s imperviousness to nuclear war than to
practice it. He ordered Zhou Enlai, then at the Asian-African
Conference of Non-Aligned countries in Bandung, Indonesia, to sound
the retreat. On April 23, 1955, Zhou extended the olive branch:
“[T]he Chinese people do not want to have a war with the United
States of America. The Chinese government is willing to sit down
and enter into negotiations with the U.S. government to discuss the
question of relaxing tension in the Far East, and especially the
question of relaxing tension in the Taiwan area.”11 The next week China
ended the shelling campaign in the Taiwan Strait.
The outcome, like
that of the Korean War, was a draw, in which each side achieved its
short-term objectives. The United States faced down a military
threat. Mao, aware that mainland forces did not have the capacity
to occupy Quemoy and Matsu in the face of concerted opposition,
later explained his strategy as having been much more complex. Far
from seeking to occupy the offshore islands, he told Khrushchev
that he had used the threat against them to keep Taiwan from
breaking its link to the mainland:
All we wanted to do was show our potential. We don’t want Chiang to be too far away from us. We want to keep him within our reach. Having him [on Quemoy and Matsu] means we can get at him with our shore batteries as well as our air force. If we’d occupied the islands, we would have lost the ability to cause him discomfort any time we want.12
In that version,
Beijing shelled Quemoy to reaffirm its claim to “one China” but
restrained its action to prevent a “two China solution” from
emerging.
Moscow, with a more
literal approach to strategy and actual knowledge of nuclear
weapons, found it incomprehensible that a leader might go to the
brink of nuclear war to make a largely symbolic point. As
Khrushchev complained to Mao: “If you shoot, then you ought to
capture these islands, and if you do not consider necessary
capturing these islands, then there is no use in firing. I do not
understand this policy of yours.”13 It has even been claimed, in a one-sided
but often thought-provoking biography of Mao, that Mao’s real
motive in the crisis had been to create a risk of nuclear war so
acute that Moscow would be obliged to assist Beijing’s fledgling
nuclear weapons program to ease the pressure for Soviet
assistance.14 Among the many counter-intuitive aspects
of the crisis was the apparent Soviet decision—later revoked as a
result of the second offshore islands crisis—to help Beijing’s
nuclear program in order to put a distance between itself and its
troublesome ally in any future crisis by leaving the nuclear
defense of China in China’s hands.