With the beginning of the Korean War in June 1950, the USN was tasked to create the Taiwan Strait Patrol to neutralize the strait and protect Taiwan from a PRC attack. On August 27, 1950, President Truman wrote to Congressman Warren R. Austin to emphasize that

Furthermore, as a result of this US policy “Formosa is now at peace and will remain so until someone resorts to force.”

On September 21, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson addressed a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations explaining the US government's policy toward Taiwan and certain offshore islands, like the Penghus. He began by citing the December 1, 1943, Cairo declaration stating Formosa would be returned to “Republic of China.” Thereafter, the July 1945 Potsdam declaration confirmed Cairo's terms and in General Order No. 1 the Japanese forces in Formosa were ordered to surrender to “Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.” From 1945 onward, the Republic of China retained administrative control over Formosa, the Penghus, plus a number of other offshore islands. On April 28, 1952, Japan signed a peace treaty renouncing its claim to Formosa and the Penghus, although “in whose favor Japan was renouncing was not stipulated.” Thereafter, Japan and the ROC signed their own peace treaty, effective August 5, 1952, where Japan repeated this renunciation, but again without saying which state it was ceding its rights to.

While title over Formosa and the Penghus might be vague, the ROC had occupied these areas continuously since 1945: “There is no question that the Republic of China is today and at all times since the effective date of the Japanese Peace Treaty, has been in effective possession of and exercising administrative control over Formosa and the Pescadores.”

Tensions during the 1950s between the PRC and Taiwan were focused mainly on offshore islands in or near the Taiwan Strait. The US government was concerned that a spark in this critical theater might erupt into war, perhaps even a global war between the United States and the Sino-Soviet “monolith.” Washington usually sought to deescalate tensions over the offshore islands through its diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But at other times the US government actively sought to exert military pressure—by means of “unleashing Chiang”—in order to force the PRC to reallocate military units away from north and move them to the south. As Senator Alexander Smith told Secretary of State Dulles during April 1955, if Korea and Indochina were the two flanks then Taiwan was the center, and that “we should keep open a threat to the center in order to protect the two flanks.” In this regard, the Taiwan Patrol Force acted much like a Vernier light switch, allowing the USN to “dial” up or down cross-strait tensions to suit US larger policy objectives throughout East Asia.

Truman's refusal to become involved in China's civil war saved the United States from becoming bogged down in a quagmire. On January 11, 1949, the NSC explained that while the “objective of the U.S. with respect to China is the eventual development by the Chinese themselves of a unified, stable and independent China friendly to the U.S.,” this goal was “not likely to be accomplished by any apparent Chinese group or groups within the foreseeable future.” On September 26, 1952, Truman received a fan letter quoting Republican Senator Lehman from a speech the previous day as admitting that China “could have been saved, if at all, [only] by all-out military intervention on our part.” Not only would the United States have “become bogged down in the immense expanse of China, in a war to keep Chiang-Kai-Shek in power, [but it] […] would have cost us millions of men and billions of dollars.”

US diplomacy with Chiang Kai-shek proved to be one of the greatest challenges. As the Department of State warned on January 19, 1949, when working with Taiwan the “choice is not between satisfactory and unsatisfactory courses of action but rather of the least of several evils or an amalgam of the lesser of them.”

To most outside observers, the opposing forces facing each other across the Taiwan Strait during the early 1950s may have seemed unevenly matched on the side of the United States and its allies. However, asymmetric warfare can give advantages to both sides. For example, China's enormous manpower allowed it to send “human waves” in the Korean War against its United Nation's opponent. Therefore, the possibility of being forced to use atomic weapons was seriously discussed, in particular against an approaching surface and subsurface invasion force aimed at Taiwan.

During the early 1950s, atomic bombs were often thought of much like regular bombs. The use of the A-bomb was considered in Korea, and later in Vietnam during the Dien Bien Phu crisis. With regard to Taiwan, during July 1950 Truman authorized the movement of B-29 bombers to Guam. These planes were capable of carrying atomic bombs. Meanwhile, an air unit in Guam was given control of non-radioactive atomic bomb components, with the nuclear core to be provided only during an emergency. This information was leaked to the New York Times so as to give the PRC pause before they decided to attack Taiwan.

During times of crisis, planning sessions often included discussion on using atomic bombs. For example, on September 12, 1954, the NSC submitted a Top Secret paper discussing the ongoing Taiwan Strait crisis. It warned that a war with China over the offshore islands would necessarily include a sharp rise in tensions that could “probably lead to our initiating the use of atomic weapons.” Clearly, the use of atomic weapons was considered to be an important element in the defense of Taiwan.

Consideration of the nuclear option

It is still unclear whether the US government would have actually used Abombs in Korea or to halt a PRC invasion of Taiwan. In 1950, MacArthur evidently told Harriman during their talks on August 6–8 that if there were a PRC attack against Taiwan then Seventh Fleet ships, fighter jets from the Philippines and Okinawa, B-29s, and other aircraft could destroy any invasion attempt that might be made. He further stated that it would be a one-sided battle: “Should the Communists be so foolhardy as to make such an attempt, it would be the bloodiest victory in Far East history.”

Tensions between the PRC and Taiwan remained high after the first Taiwan Strait crisis in 1954–55. The Nationalist blockade of the PRC continued, albeit at a reduced level, after the Dachens were evacuated. The blockade halted a lower percentage of international shipping with the PRC, since its range was more strictly limited to southeast China. However, the combined effects of the blockade plus the US-sponsored strategic embargo, which lasted until 1971, had a significant impact. To make up for the loss of international seaborne commerce, the PRC was forced to turn to the Soviet Union, conducting an ever larger share of trade via the trans-Siberian railway.

During the late 1950s, the PRC sought to break away from its overreliance on the USSR. China's debts to the USSR were equal to well over a billion US dollars, with one estimate of China's total debt equaling $1.5 billion rubles (almost $2 billion in 1962 dollars). In 1957, there was increasing opposition by the British, Japanese, Germans, Canadians, and French to the Chinese sanctions. In early May 1957, the British argued that the “China differential should be completely abolished.” Dulles wrote to Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd, offering to try to meet Britain halfway, but that: “In our opinion, this differential has a real significance in retarding the buildup of Communist China's vast military potential.”

A similar message from Eisenhower to Prime Minister Macmillan warned “that many of the items which you would take off the China list will in fact appreciably help the Chinese Communists to build up the military potential which threatens us in this area and which we have the primary responsibility to resist.” Occurring as it did in the midst of the Nationalist retightening of the blockade, the second Taiwan Strait crisis during 1958 was linked to the PRC goal of halting the blockade once and for all, and thereby diversify its international trade away from the USSR. To try to catch up with the West, Mao Zedong even adopted unsound economic policies like the 1958 “Great Leap Forward,” which eventually produced a nationwide famine that killed millions of average Chinese. Beijing's renewed attacks during 1958 on Jinmen—the Nationalists’ main blockade base—put extreme pressure on Taiwan.

ASW Anti-Submarine Warfare

BRI Belt and Road Initiative

CCF Chinese Communist Forces, or PLA

CHINCOM Chinese Communists; Chinese Committee

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CinCPac Commander-in-Chief, US Pacific Command

CinCPacFlt Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet

CNAF Chinese Nationalist Air Force

CNO Chief of Naval Operations

CO Commanding Officer

COCOM Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls

DDC Dachen Defense Command

DDCAT Dachen Defense Command Advisory Team

DOD Department of Defense

EEZ Exclusive Economic Zone

GIMO Generalissimo

GNP Gross National Product

GRC Government of the Republic of China

JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff

LCM Landing Craft Mechanized

LST Landing Ship, Tank

MAAG Military Assistance Advisory Group

NDB Nuclear Depth Bomb

NGRC Nationalist Government of the Republic of China

NHHC Naval History and Heritage Command

NSC National Security Council

NWC Naval War College

ONI Office of Naval Intelligence

PLA People’s Liberation Army

PLAAF People’s Liberation Army Air Force

PLAN People’s Liberation Army Navy

PRC People’s Republic of China

R&D Research and Development

RCN Republic of China Navy

ROC Republic of China

ROE Rules of Engagement

SAR Search-and-Rescue

SLOC Sea line of communication

SRBM Short-Range Ballistic Missile

TAA Taiwan Assurance Act

TRA Taiwan Relations Act

UN United Nations

USN United States Navy

USTDC United States Taiwan Defense Command

WEI Western Enterprises Incorporated

ZPG Zhejiang Provincial Government

This book will examine the role of offshore islands in twentieth-century East Asian history, and in particular those islands located in the Taiwan Strait that were disputed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) during the 1950s and afterward, and how these apparently insignificant islands impacted Cold War history. The history of the 1945–91 Cold War can be divided into three parts: (1) breaking apart the Sino-Soviet monolith, (2) forging Sino-US cooperation against the USSR, and (3) the two-front destruction of the USSR. The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library contain especially pertinent information on the first of these three periods, allowing for a greater understanding of how and why Washington adopted polices with the strategic goal of breaking apart the Sino-Soviet alliance.

For much of this period, from 1950 to 1979, the US Navy (USN) conducted a buffer operation in the Taiwan Strait to neutralize the region. The most important goal of this USN operation was to ensure that neither side attacked the other, an action that might lead to global war. While it is often assumed that the US government's focus was just on the Taiwan Strait, in fact there were equally valid concerns that after “China is Communized, the remainder of Asia and the islands to the south and east will be vulnerable to rapid Communization”; due to East Asia's geography, “there are no natural barriers to the advance of Communism from China to Indo-China, Siam, Burma and thence to Malaya, India, Indonesia and the other islands of the Western Pacific.” Because of the enormous Nationalist losses, by late 1949 America's defense line had moved from the China's Pacific Coast to the various islands from the Aleutians, down through the Kurils, Hokkaido, the main Japanese islands, Okinawa, Formosa [Taiwan], and the Philippines. In particular, “Formosa is in the direct line—in fact, it is the center of our whole defense.”

Seen in this perspective, the defense of Taiwan was essential to the defense of all of East Asia.

The February 8–11, 1955, evacuation of the Dachens was a massive undertaking. The USN used a total of 132 ships and 400 aircraft to evacuate 14,500 civilians, 10,000 Nationalist troops, and approximately 4,000 guerrilla fighters, along with over 40,000 tons of military equipment and supplies. To protect the evacuation, the Seventh Fleet assembled a “backbone” of six aircraft carriers. China was warned not to interfere. USN forces “have instructions not to provoke incidents but they also have instructions not to accept any tactical disadvantages.” Or, put another way, “American airmen were not to get ‘altruistically shot down’.”

The international reaction to the Dachen evacuation was mixed. To the Australians, the loss of the Dachens was compared to the 1938 fall of Czechoslovakia, while the PRC threat to invade Taiwan was compared to the 1939 invasion of Poland. In a February 1955 Gallup poll, 66 percent of Australians “declared themselves in favour of Australia joining the United States in any war which might result from United States efforts to prevent Chinese Communists from invading Formosa.” In a letter from April 1955, Australian Prime Minister Menzies advocated the “desirability of giving Formosa military and political strength to ensure the future will be decided peacefully and not as a result of Communist policies of force.”

What follows is a summary of the Army History entitled “Evacuation of the Tachen Islands.” This final corrected copy dates to May 19, 1956. While protecting the Dachen evacuation was up to the USN, the US Army was put in charge of the actual evacuation of civilians, guerrillas, and military personnel, plus destroying anything of value. It was a mammoth undertaking, as reflected in the name of the operation “Operation King Kong.”

Planning the evacuation of the Dachens

While it is true that the MAAG had sent an advisory team to the Dachens as early as 1953, it had normally consisted of but a single officer. Just prior to the Yichiang landing the total advisory effort on these islands consisted of Colonel Robert L. Walton and a three-man radio team. These personnel were serving a fixed tour on this offshore position after which they were scheduled for rotation to other duties on Taiwan proper.

Following the Nationalist defeat on the mainland in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his followers retreated to Taiwan, reforming the Republic of China (ROC). To many it seemed almost certain that the People's Republic of China (PRC) would attack and take Taiwan, perhaps as early as summer 1950. Control over a number of offshore islands, especially Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu), became a deciding factor in whether the PRC could invade Taiwan or, conversely, the ROC could invade the mainland. Twice in the 1950s tensions peaked, during the first (1954–55) and second (1958) Taiwan Strait crises. During both events the US government intervened both diplomatically and militarily.

This work provides a short, but highly relevant, history of the Taiwan Strait and its significance today. This small body of water—often compared to the English Channel—separates the PRC and Taiwan and has been the location for periodic military tensions, some threatening to end in war. During the 1950s, the two outbreaks appeared like they might result in a global war. During the evacuation of the Dachen Islands, for example, the US Navy sent seven aircraft carriers and was authorized to nuke three Chinese coastal cities if the PLA tried to interfere.

In the modern era, the Taiwan Strait separates the democratic Taiwan from the authoritarian PRC. This study will discuss the origins of these conflicts, the military aspects of the confrontations, and in particular the complicated and largely secret diplomatic negotiations—including two previously unknown Eisenhower–Chiang secret agreements—going on behind the scenes between the US government and the Nationalist government in Taiwan. This book will end with a short discussion of the ongoing COVID crisis and how the PRC might take advantage of this crisis to extend its political, and eventually military, control over Taiwan.

Rather than resort to force in the Taiwan Strait, the US government hoped to defuse military tensions and to focus instead on longer term goals, like breaking up the Sino-Soviet alliance. As early as November 3, 1948, the CIA hypothesized that “when the issue of subservience to Moscow has become more immediate than that of ‘US imperialism’, Chinese nationalism will prove stronger than international Communism.” A National Intelligence Estimate from September 10, 1952, identified three specific issues that might at some point undermine this alliance: (1) “the Chinese Communists might make demands upon the USSR, or even take action, incompatible with longrange Soviet global interests”; (2) “frictions might arise because of Soviet inability or disinclination to supply capital equipment”; and (3) resistance to “a Communist world dominated from Moscow.”

China was portrayed as the weak link in the Sino-Soviet alliance, since the Russians had surrounded themselves with friendly governments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe, while “in the Far East there was a more direct confrontation between the Communist and non-Communist world.” This was exemplified in the PRC–ROC standoff over the offshore islands, and in the determination of both Chinese governments to reunify all of China under their authority. In December 1954, for example, Taiwan's Foreign Minister Yeh had vehemently opposed any promotion of a “two-China” theory. But during a February 10, 1955, conversation with Yeh, Dulles stated that he believed the solution to the communist threat would take time. Instead of trying to “force Chinese unification by military means” the United States and Taiwan should instead focus on “the vulnerability of Communist regimes to economic and other pressures.”

Rather than resorting to war, the US government hoped to use economic tools to undermine the Sino-Soviet alliance. As early as January 17, 1951, the NSC had pointed out that making China more economically dependent on Russia “might strain their relations.” On May 4, 1951, a revised version of this report recommended “continue United States economic restrictions against China” and “persuade other nations to adopt similar positions” so as to “stimulate differences between the Peiping and Moscow regimes.”

By the summer of 1953, the Korean conflict stalemated. Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, helped break the negotiating deadlock. The Korean armistice was finally signed on July 27, 1953. Military pressure from the south, directed from Taiwan by means of the offshore islands, was crucial for bringing about the armistice. Soon afterward, the PRC began to redeploy troops from north to south. Tensions gradually grew throughout the south, particularly in the Taiwan Strait region. Soon after the first crisis ended, Secretary of State Dulles describing it as equivalent to “living over a volcano.”

On August 11, 1954, Zhou Enlai declared that the PRC must liberate Taiwan. On September 3, 1954, PLA forces began to bombard the offshore islands of Jinmen and Mazu. This renewed focus on reclaiming the offshore islands by force showed Mao Zedong's independence from Moscow. Another important PRC goal was to interrupt the Nationalist blockade. During November 1954, PRC leaders had explained to Jawaharlal Nehru, the visiting Indian Prime Minister, that the Nationalists from their offshore bases were conducting “nuisance raids and interference with shipping.” Upon his return, Nehru met with the British High Commissioner in India to warn him that China was “determined not to tolerate this situation any longer.”

The shelling of Jinmen and Mazu was also used as a cover to attack other Nationalist-controlled islands, in particular the most northerly of the Nationalist-held offshore island groups, the Dachens. In this overcharged political climate, the US government signed a security pact with Taiwan plus, later in January 1955, proclaimed the Formosa Resolution. After convincing Chiang Kai-shek to evacuate the Dachens, the USN provided the ships, training, and protection during the evacuation operations. This limited the Nationalist-controlled offshore islands to a much smaller area that encompassed Jinmen to the south and Mazu to the north.

The beginning of the 1954–55 Taiwan Strait crisis

Tensions over the offshore islands led to a crisis during fall 1954. In August 1954, Chiang Kai-shek had ordered additional deployments to Jinmen and Mazu. These actions had all of the outward appearances of supporting a future Nationalist invasion of mainland China. Certainly, the PRC leaders were sufficiently concerned to authorize PLA attacks against the Nationalistheld offshore islands, and in particular the northernmost islands of Yichiang and the Dachens.

The Taiwan Strait was ignored through the 1960s, especially after the USSR and PRC went to war in 1969. In 1972, President Nixon visited Beijing, and in 1979 President Carter recognized the PRC. From 1979 through 1989 the United States and the PRC actively cooperated against the USSR, with Washington authorizing sales of high-tech naval equipment to China. This helped to limit tension in the Taiwan Strait. In fact, after 1979 the need for the Taiwan Patrol Force itself seemed to be long past. However, the US government maintained a strong interest in Taiwan's defense and continued to sell it weapons. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, followed soon afterward by the 1991 collapse of the USSR, the unsteady balance of power in the Taiwan Strait began to shift once again.

These events gave China an unforeseen opportunity to expand its influence in Asia. It rapidly began to build up its naval forces, in part to fill the military vacuum left by the Soviet Union's retreat. With the help of the new Russian Federation—mainly sales of advanced naval equipment, including Sovremennyy destroyers and Kilo submarines—the PLAN began a long period of growth. The PRC also developed a large missile force, deployed mainly against Taiwan. Arguably, it has been this rapid military growth that has in recent years upset the PRC–Taiwan military balance.

The growth of the PLAN has, in turn, created a strategic shift that has produced in a sense an unofficial reinstitution of the Taiwan Patrol Force. During 1995–96, as a result of PRC missile testing off Taiwan, the USN responded by sending aircraft carriers and destroyers into the region. This naval demonstration was similar to the USN's response to the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s and early 1960s. In fact, these events represented yet another Taiwan Strait crisis.

The 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis

After 37 years of relative peace in the Taiwan Strait, tensions broke out again in 1995. The July 1995 missile tests by the PRC are often portrayed as a response to the granting of an American visa to Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui for an unofficial visit to Cornell University in early June. However, the real issue was the PRC's concern over Taiwan's rapid democratization and the growing separatist claims by large numbers of Taiwanese.