The Hoover Institution has recently received records from the Kuomintang (KMT) party archives in Taipei that provide a clearer understanding of how the discredited Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, along with half a million Chinese soldiers and some 2 million Chinese refugees, re-established the Republic of China on Taiwan.
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"It was one of the twentieth century’s great surprises: on June 27, 1950, President Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent the Chinese civil war from leaping across to the island of Taiwan, then known as Formosa. “The occupation of Formosa by communist forces,” Truman said, “would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces” in the area; he also called on the “Chinese government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland.”
Truman announced that Taiwan’s future “must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.”
Chiang Kai-shek owed his regime’s survival to the Korean civil war, which had erupted two days earlier. Suddenly protected from complete defeat after his 1949 rout by Mao’s communist forces on the mainland, Chiang was handed a new start—along with a surge in American military and economic aid that gave Chiang, his military forces, his followers, and thousands of refugees from the mainland enough time to establish a new party and state that would radically change Taiwan and the Asian-Pacific region. . .
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In the years ahead, the Kuomintang continued its authoritarian rule and remained committed to the eventual unification of China under the principles advanced by Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen. The KMT, rescued from demoralization and failure, could now exert its influence on the government and society in a way it never could while on the mainland.
. . .How this authoritarian party established legitimacy within Taiwan and persuaded Taiwan’s elites to embrace the Chinese vision for Taiwan’s future is another story. As the newly available KMT archival materials at Hoover indicate, social interaction between Taiwanese and mainland Chinese gradually improved relations between the two groups of ethnic Chinese in the 1950s. The Kuomintang leadership wanted Taiwan to serve as the model for how mainland China’s Communist Party might someday seek to reform China. As Chiang Ching-kuo said in 1986, “We must use the doctrine and spirit of Sun Yat-sen to unify China and Taiwan.”
Available from the Hoover Press is The Struggle across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China Problem, by Ramon H. Myers and Jialin Zhang. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
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