An Orphan From the Beginning / Michael Cole
A review of David M.
Finkelstein’s Washington ’s
Taiwan Dilemma, 1949-1950
The Naval Institute Press’
reissue of David M. Finkelstein’s Washington’s Taiwan Dilemma, 1949-1950,
first published in 1993, allows us to revisit a period in Taiwan’s early modern
history — that is, following the end of hostilities in World War II and Japan’s
relinquishing of what had been its most successful colony — when its survival
seemed highly uncertain and a Communist takeover written in the stars.
As is the case today, the U.S. was Taiwan ’s
principal guarantor of security and the main buffer against China . But from
very early on, Washington
was growing uncertain of the wisdom of propping up Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Chinese Nationalist Party
(KMT). Finkelstein’s fascinating account of the institutional infighting that
occurred between the various branches of the U.S. government, starting in 1947,
is accompanied by many useful excerpts from key government documents: PPS 39,
NSC 37 and NSC 48 show the vacillations of a government that was struggling to
cope with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) victory in the Chinese civil war
just as the Cold War was starting to congeal ideological camps into place.
The reasoning that prevailed at
the time, and which silenced those few who sought to help Chiang whatever the
cost, was that the U.S. ,
facing the Soviet camp, could not afford to “lose” China (having already “lost” it to
the Communists) to the Soviets. Therefore, Washington ’s
best hope in the context of the Cold War was to encourage “Titoism” in Beijing — a split in the Communist camp akin to what had
occurred in Yugoslavia under
Josip Broz Tito, and which, it was hoped, would deepen following expected
Soviet adventurism in China ’s
north. “State was prepared to subordinate Taiwan ’s salvation to the larger
policy objective of fostering Titoism on the mainland,” Finkelstein writes. The
U.S.
was thus banking on “Mao Tse-Tito,” and hopes of such an outcome, based on
predictions of Mao’s future problems with the Soviets, became the guiding
policy.
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Overarching every other
consideration at the time was the need to contain the Soviets. Although Dean
Acheson and his advisers had little desire to abandon Taiwan to the CCP, their
Taiwan policy, if one can call it that, was first and foremost about the Cold
War; even China was secondary. Above all, planners in Washington feared that open support, in the
form of defense articles, money, and political backing, for Chiang would only
alienate Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and
force him, along with “angry Chinese,” into the Soviet camp — the exact
opposite of the desired split between the CCP and the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU). The better option, therefore, was to abandon Chiang, who
was increasingly regarded as a failure and unwilling to implement the reforms
that were necessary to improve the lot of the Taiwanese whose homeland had been
taken over by the Chinese. It was soon clear that Chiang only acquiesced to
calls for reform, and then never followed through, if doing so ensured his
political survival. The KMT’s abysmal handling of Taiwan
after its retreat to the island in 1949, punctuated by rampant abuse, mass
murder, and quick nationwide impoverishment, undoubtedly made Washington ’s decision to bet on Mao Tse-Tito
a lot easier. From that point on, propping up Chiang’s regime was never again a
policy in Washington ,
though limited economic aid, it was hoped, would help delay a Communist
takeover.
NSC 37/8, issued on October 6,
1949, summed up the state of affairs. Taiwan ’s
problem was the result of “… the transfer of the Island of the ills and
malpractices that have characterized the Kuomintang in China .”
Despairing with Chiang and the KMT, the Truman administration feared that any
assistance to Taiwan
on the scale desired by Chiang and his supporters would be counterproductive.
“Were the U.S. to now engage in an expanded program of military and economic
assistance, then, it was argued, the rulers on the island would be lulled into a
false sense of security that Washington felt Taiwan so important strategically
that it would never let it go under,” Finkelstein writes.
For contemporary readers, it is
also interesting to note how, as early as 1947, U.S.
defense officials were already of the opinion that while strategically
important, the American military was not prepared to sacrifice its young men
and women for Taiwan ’s
defense, or to base troops on the island to deter a Chinese invasion. That
isn’t to say that there were no dissenting voices. Surprisingly, George Kennan
briefly proposed a bold course of action that included American military action
to depose the Nationalist government. General Douglas MacArthur, ensconced in Tokyo , warned that the loss of Taiwan
would cost the U.S.
access to the entire Pacific (his apocalyptic visions and insubordination
during the Korean War would lead to his dismissal) and used independent
channels to initiate assistance to Chiang, though those efforts did not avail
to much.
Nevertheless, the majority of
defense officials in Washington , including the
Joint Chief of Staff, were of the opinion that Taiwan
was not vital to U.S.
interests. Such beliefs linger today, at a time when the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) is a much more formidable — and mobile — force than it was at the
time. The perception that Taiwan is not a vital interest to the U.S. accounts
for the doubts that the American military would intervene in a Taiwan scenario,
regardless of whether Taipei “provoked” war or not. (Of course, the advent of
anti-access/area-denial capabilities, not to mention the tremendous economic
interdependence between the U.S.
and China ,
are factors that weigh heavily today but did not exist at the time.) Another
consideration, this one laid out in NSC 48, was the fear in Washington that
military aid to Taiwan would anger the Chinese and undermine its credibility in
Asia, “where we wish to be on the side of nationalist movements and avoid
supporting reactionary governments,” Acheson said at the time.
Despite the general, though by
no means universal, agreement in Washington
that the sovereignty of Taiwan
was only secondary to the imperative of fostering a CCP/CPSU split, a few
officials recognized that indigenous Taiwanese had had a raw deal. Some
acknowledged the right of Taiwanese to self-determination, aspirations that
were in vogue across Asia following the collapse of the Japanese empire and
which Washington, as we just saw, wanted to be seen as supporting, if only to
prevent them from being hijacked by the CPSU. For a while, plans were discussed
to spark a rebellion in Taiwan and use the chaos as justification for military
intervention or a takeover by the U.N. American officials established contact
with some pro-independence leaders, but this came to naught after it was judged
that their chances of success against the relatively well-armed and
battle-hardened KMT forces on the island were next to nil. Moreover, as is
still true today, Taiwanese self-determination was problematic and highly
inconvenient, even if, in principle, it was perfectly justifiable.
One wonders what the
consequences of abandonment, what alternative future, would have been like had
Fortune not intervened, which it did in the form of North Korea’s decision to
invade the South on June 24, 1950. The invasion overturned years of debate and
careful policy planning in Washington, and forced President Truman to
neutralize Taiwan by interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait — a
decision, Finkelstein reminds us, that did not signal renewed political support for
Chiang but that was purely made for military-strategic reasons. Without the
Korean War and Beijing ’s involvement on Pyongyang ’s side, Taiwan would likely have fallen to
the Communists. CIA assessments from 1949 expected this to happen sometime in
1950. The Cold War froze this likeliest of developments and inadvertently, as
this was not Washington ’s policy, bought Taiwan
sufficient time — decades, in fact — to liberalize and democratize, a process
that further widened the chasm between the island and the PRC and that led to
the situation we face today.
There are important lessons to
be learned from the period explored in Finkelstein’s book, lessons that have
significance today. Washington ’s policy at the
time was guided, as we saw, by a desire to avoid angering China and to
foster Titoism in the PRC as part of its Cold War strategy of Soviet
containment. The policy therefore was neither “pro-Taiwan” nor “pro-China,”
although its outcome tended to be favorable to the latter. The same could be said
of Nixon’s opening to China
and Washington ’s recognition of Beijing as the sole government of China in 1979,
though this time the Vietnam War was an additional element.
Though there are signs that
this might be changing, Washington ’s Taiwan policy today is once again pinned to
Chinese imperatives, minus the Soviet element, which disappeared with the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. This
time, China is not a
secondary but the direct object of Washington ’s
Taiwan policy, and the
desired outcome of that policy is the emergence of a more liberal regime in China and for Beijing
to become a responsible stakeholder and strategic partner of the U.S. In both
cases, the aspirations of Taiwanese suffered; self-determination, a principle
that is openly supported by American citizens, has taken a back seat to
strategic considerations. Ironically, in both instances the careful
consideration of Chinese sensitivities has failed. In 1950, Beijing
rewarded Washington by entering the Korean War
on the side of Pyongyang and Moscow . Today, after two decades of playing
nice to Beijing and showing great patience at
the slow yield of dividends, Washington has
been repaid by a China that,
though having modernized, remains brutal, intolerant, authoritarian, and
increasingly expansionist, as the current crises in the East and South China
Seas U.S. “policy” on Taiwan , Cold War notwithstanding,
has been surprisingly constant.
From Abandonment to Salvation
By David M. Finkelstein
380 pages. Naval Institute Press, 2014 (reissue)
Further Reading :
Strait Talk: United
States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China , by Nancy Bernkopf-Tucker
George F. Kennan: An American
Life, by John Lewis Gaddis
J. Michael Cole is editor in
chief of Thinking Taiwan, a senior non-resident fellow at the China Policy
Institute, University of Nottingham , and an Associate researcher at the French Center
for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Taipei .
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