The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis
On August 23, 1958,
the People’s Liberation Army began another massive shelling
campaign of the offshore islands, accompanying its bombardment with
propaganda salvos calling for the liberation of Taiwan. After two
weeks, it paused, and then resumed the shelling for a further
twenty-nine days. Finally, it settled into an almost whimsical
pattern of shelling the islands on odd-numbered days of the month,
with explicit warnings to their inhabitants and often avoiding
sites of military significance—a maneuver Mao described to his
senior associates as an act of “political battle” rather than
conventional military strategy.38
Some of the factors
at work in this crisis were familiar. Beijing again sought to test
the limits of the American commitment to defend Taiwan. The
shelling was also partly a reaction to American downgrading of the
U.S.-China talks that had resumed after the last offshore island
crisis. But the dominant impetus seems to have been a desire to
stake a global role for China. Mao explained to his colleagues at a
leadership retreat held at the outset of the crisis that the
shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was China’s reaction to American
intervention in Lebanon, where American and British troops had been
landed during the summer:
[T]he bombardment of Jinmen [Quemoy], frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time? . . . Americans started a fire in the Middle East, and we started another in the Far East. We would see what they would do with it.39
In that sense the
shelling of the offshore islands was a blow in the contest with the
Soviet Union. Soviet quiescence in the face of a strategic American
move in the Middle East was being contrasted with Chinese
ideological and strategic vigilance.
Having demonstrated
its military resolve, Mao explained, China would now rejoin the
talks with the United States and have available “both an action
arena and a talk arena”40—an application of the Sun Tzu principle of
combative coexistence in its modern version of offensive
deterrence.
The most significant
dimension of the shelling was not the taunting of the American
superpower so much as the challenge to China’s formal ally, the
Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence had made
the Soviet Union, in Mao’s eyes, a problematical ally and perhaps
even a potential adversary. Thus, Mao seems to have reasoned, if
the Taiwan Strait Crisis were pushed to the brink of war,
Khrushchev might have to choose between his new policy of peaceful
coexistence and his alliance with China.
In a sense Mao
succeeded. What conferred a special edge to Mao’s maneuvers was
that the Chinese policy in the Strait was being carried out
ostensibly with the blessing of Moscow so far as the world was
concerned. For Khrushchev had visited Beijing three weeks before
the second Taiwan Strait Crisis—for the disastrous encounters over
the submarine base issues—much as he had been there in the opening
weeks of the first crisis four years earlier. In neither case had
Mao revealed his intentions to the Soviets either before or during
the visit. In each instance Washington assumed—and Eisenhower
alleged as much in a letter to Khrushchev—that Mao was acting not
only with Moscow’s support but at its behest. Beijing was adding
its Soviet ally to its diplomatic lineup against its will and
indeed without Moscow realizing that it was being used. (A school
of thought even holds that Mao invented the “submarine base crisis”
to induce Khrushchev to come to Beijing to play his assigned role
in that design.)
The second Taiwan
Strait Crisis paralleled the first with the principal difference
being that the Soviet Union participated in issuing nuclear threats
on behalf of an ally that was in the process of humiliating
it.
Roughly one thousand
people were killed or wounded in the 1958 bombardment. As in the
first Taiwan Strait Crisis, Beijing combined provocative evocations
of nuclear war with a carefully calibrated operational strategy.
Mao initially asked his commanders to conduct the shelling in such
a way as to avoid American fatalities. When they responded that no
such guarantee was possible, he ordered them not to cross into the
airspace over the offshore islands, to fire only on Nationalist
vessels, and not to return fire even if fired on by U.S.
ships.41 Both before and during the crisis, PRC
propaganda trumpeted the slogan “We must liberate Taiwan.” But when
the PLA’s radio station undertook a broadcast announcing that a
Chinese landing was “imminent” and inviting Nationalist forces to
change sides and “join the great cause of liberating Taiwan,” Mao
declared it a “serious mistake.”42
In John Foster
Dulles, Mao met an adversary who knew how to play the game of
combative coexistence. On September 4, 1958, Dulles reiterated the
U.S. commitment to the defense of Taiwan, including “related
positions such as Quemoy and Matsu.” Dulles intuited China’s
limited aims and in effect signaled American willingness to keep
the crisis limited: “Despite, however, what the Chinese Communists
say, and so far have done, it is not yet certain that their purpose
is in fact to make an all-out effort to conquer by force Taiwan
(Formosa) and the offshore islands.”43 On September 5, Zhou Enlai confirmed
China’s limited aims when he announced that Beijing’s goal in the
conflict was the resumption of U.S.-China talks at the
ambassadorial level. On September 6, the White House released a
statement taking note of Zhou’s remarks and indicating that the
United States ambassador at Warsaw stood ready to represent the
United States at resumed talks.
With this exchange,
the crisis should have been over. As if they were rehearsing a
by-now familiar play, the two sides had repeated timeworn threats
and had arrived at a familiar deus ex machina, the resumption of
ambassadorial talks.
The only party in the
triangular relationship who did not grasp what was taking place was
Khrushchev. Having heard Mao proclaim his imperviousness to nuclear
war in Moscow the year previously and recently in Beijing, he was
torn between contradictory fears of nuclear war and of the
potential loss of an important ally if he failed to stand by China.
His dedicated Marxism made it impossible for him to understand that
his ideological ally had become a strategic adversary, yet his
knowledge of nuclear weapons was too great to integrate them
comfortably into a diplomacy that constantly relied on threatening
their use.
When a rattled
statesman confronts a dilemma, he is sometimes tempted to pursue
every course of action simultaneously. Khrushchev sent his foreign
minister, Andrei Gromyko, to Beijing to urge restraint, which he
knew would not be well received, and, to balance it, to show the
Chinese leaders a draft letter he proposed to send Eisenhower,
threatening full support—implying nuclear support—for China should
the Taiwan Strait Crisis escalate. The letter stressed that “an
attack on the Chinese People’s Republic, which is a great friend,
ally and neighbor of our country, is an attack on the Soviet Union”
and warned that the Soviet Union “will do everything . . . to
defend the security of both states.”44
The initiative failed
with both addressees. Khrushchev’s letter was politely rejected by
Eisenhower on September 12. Welcoming the Chinese willingness to
rejoin ambassadorial talks and repeating Washington’s insistence
that Beijing renounce the use of force over Taiwan, Eisenhower
urged Khrushchev to recommend restraint to Beijing. Oblivious to
the reality that Khrushchev was an actor in a play written by
others, Eisenhower implied collusion between Moscow and Beijing,
noting that “[t]his intense military activity was begun on August
twenty-third—some three weeks after your visit to Peiping.”45
In a public address
delivered roughly simultaneously on September 11, 1958, Eisenhower
justified American involvement in the offshore islands in sweeping
terms. The shelling of Quemoy and Matsu, he warned, was analogous
to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s occupation of
Ethiopia, or (in a comparison that must have particularly vexed the
Chinese) the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in the
1930s.
Gromyko fared no
better in Beijing. Mao responded to the draft letter by speaking
openly of the possibility of nuclear war and the conditions under
which the Soviets should retaliate with nuclear weapons against
America. The threats were all the safer to make because Mao knew
the danger of war had already passed. In his memoirs, Gromyko
recounts being “flabbergasted” by Mao’s bravado and quoted the
Chinese leader as telling him:
I suppose the Americans might go so far as to unleash a war against China. China must reckon with this possibility, and we do. But we have no intention of capitulating! If the USA attacks China with nuclear weapons, the Chinese armies must retreat from the border regions into the depths of the country. They must draw the enemy in deep so as to grip US forces in a pincer inside China. . . . Only when the Americans are right in the central provinces should you give them everything you’ve got.46
Mao was not asking
for Soviet help until American forces had been drawn deep into
China—which he knew was not going to happen in the already
completed scenario. Gromyko’s report from Beijing seems to have
shocked Khrushchev. Though ambassadorial talks had already been
agreed between Washington and Beijing, Khrushchev undertook two
more steps to prevent nuclear war. To calm what he understood to be
Beijing’s fear of American invasion, he offered to send Soviet
antiaircraft units to Fujian.47 Beijing delayed a response and then
accepted when the crisis was already over, provided that Soviet
troops were placed under Chinese command—an improbable
outcome.48 In a further demonstration of his
nervousness, Khrushchev sent another letter to Eisenhower on
September 19, urging restraint but warning of the imminence of
nuclear war.49 Except that China and the United States
had, in fact, already settled the issue before Khrushchev’s second
letter arrived.
In their meeting on
October 3, 1959, Khrushchev had summed up the Soviet attitude
during the Taiwan crises to Mao:
Between us, in a confidential way, we say that we will not fight over Taiwan, but for outside consumption, so to say, we state on the contrary, that in case of an aggravation of the situation because of Taiwan the USSR will defend the PRC. In its turn, the US declare that they will defend Taiwan. Therefore, a kind of pre-war situation emerges.50
Khrushchev had
enabled Mao to lure him into so futile a course by trying to be
both clever and cynical. Especially when ultimate decisions of
peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs
may be called and must take into account the impact on his future
credibility of an empty threat. On Taiwan, Mao used Khrushchev’s
ambivalence to entice him into making a nuclear threat that he had
admitted he had no intention of carrying out, straining Moscow’s
relationship with the United States on behalf of an issue
Khrushchev considered unimportant and of an allied leader who
despised him.
One can only imagine
Mao’s bemusement: he had goaded Moscow and Washington into
threatening nuclear war against each other over some of the world’s
least vital geopolitical real estate in what was an essentially
nonmilitary piece of Chinese political theater. Moreover, Mao had
done so at a time of his choosing, while China remained vastly
weaker than the United States or the USSR, and in a manner that
allowed him to claim a significant propaganda victory and rejoin
Sino-U.S. ambassadorial talks from what his propaganda would claim
was a position of strength.
Having triggered the
crisis and brought it to a close, Mao asserted that he had achieved
his objectives:
We fought this campaign, which made the United States willing to talk. The United States has opened the door. The situation seems to be no good for them, and they will feel nervous day in and day out if they don’t hold talks with us now. OK, then let’s talk. For the overall situation, it is better to settle disputes with the United States through talks, or peaceful means, because we are all peace-loving people.51
Zhou Enlai offered an
even more complicated assessment. He saw the second Taiwan Strait
Crisis as a demonstration of the ability of the two Chinese parties
to engage in tacit bargaining with each other across the barriers
of opposing ideologies and even while the nuclear powers were
fencing about nuclear war. Nearly fifteen years later, Zhou
recounted Beijing’s strategy to Richard Nixon during the
President’s 1972 visit to Beijing:
In 1958, then Secretary Dulles wanted Chiang Kai-shek to give up the islands of Quemoy and Matsu so as to completely sever Taiwan and the mainland and draw a line there. Chiang Kai-shek was not willing to do this.52 We also advised him not to withdraw from Quemoy and Matsu. We advised him not to withdraw by firing artillery shells at them—that is, on odd days we would shell them, and not shell them on even days, and on holidays we would not shell them. So they understood our intentions and didn’t withdraw. No other means or messages were required; just by this method of shelling they understood.” 53
These brilliant
achievements must be balanced against the global impact of the
crisis, however. The ambassadorial talks deadlocked almost as soon
as they resumed. Mao’s ambiguous maneuvers, in fact, froze
Sino-American relations into an adversarial posture from which they
did not recover for over a decade. The notion that China was
determined to eject the United States from the Western Pacific grew
into an article of faith in Washington that deprived both sides of
options for a more flexible diplomacy.
The impact on the
Soviet leadership was the opposite of what Mao had intended. Far
from abandoning the policy of peaceful coexistence, Moscow was
panicked by Mao’s rhetoric and unsettled by his nuclear
brinkmanship, his repeated musing on the likely positive effects of
nuclear war for world socialism, and his failure to consult Moscow.
In the aftermath of the crisis, Moscow suspended nuclear
cooperation with Beijing, and in June of 1959 withdrew its
commitment to provide China with a model atomic bomb. In 1960,
Khrushchev withdrew Russian technicians from China and canceled all
aid projects, claiming that “[we] couldn’t simply stand by,
allowing some of our best-qualified specialists—people who’d been
trained in our own agriculture and industry—to receive nothing but
harassment in exchange for their help.”54
Internationally Mao
achieved another demonstration of China’s hair-trigger response to
perceived threats to its national security or territorial
integrity. This would discourage attempts by China’s neighbors to
exploit the domestic upheaval into which Mao was about to plunge
his society. But it also started a process of progressive isolation
that would cause Mao to rethink his foreign policy a decade
later.