On China (22 page)

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.
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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.”
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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:

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.
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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.

One result of the crisis was the resumption of a formal dialogue between the United States and China. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 to settle the first Vietnam War between France and the Communist-led independence movement, Beijing and Washington had grudgingly agreed to maintain contacts through consular-level officials based in Geneva.

The arrangement provided a framework for a kind of safety net to avoid confrontations because of misapprehensions. But neither side did so with any conviction. Or rather, their convictions ran in opposite directions. The Korean War had put an end to all diplomatic initiatives toward China in the Truman administration. The Eisenhower administration—coming into office with the war in Korea not yet ended—considered China the most intransigent and revolutionary of the Communist powers. Hence its primary strategic goal was the construction of a security system in Asia to contain potential Chinese aggression. Diplomatic overtures to China were avoided lest they jeopardize still fragile security systems such as SEATO and the emerging alliances with Japan and South Korea. Dulles’s refusal to shake hands with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference reflected both moral rejection and strategic design.

Mao’s attitude was the mirror image of Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s. The Taiwan issue created a permanent cause of confrontation especially so long as the United States treated the Taiwan authorities as the legitimate government of all of China. Deadlock was inherent in Sino-U. S. diplomacy because China would discuss no other subject until the United States agreed to withdraw from Taiwan, and the United States would not talk about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had renounced the use of force to solve the Taiwan question.

By the same token, the Sino-U.S. dialogue, after the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, ran into the ground because so long as each side maintained its basic position, there was nothing to talk about. The United States reiterated that the status of Taiwan should be settled through negotiations between Beijing and Taipei, which should also involve the United States and Japan. Beijing interpreted this proposal as an attempt to reopen the Cairo Conference decision that, during the Second World War, declared Taiwan part of China. It refused as well to renounce the use of force as an infringement of China’s sovereign right to establish control over its own national territory. Ambassador Wang Bingnan, the principal Chinese negotiator for a decade, summed up the deadlock in his memoirs: “In retrospect, it was impossible for the US to change its China policy at the time. Under the circumstances, we went directly at the Taiwan question, which was the most difficult, least likely to be resolved, and most emotional. It was only natural that talks could not get anywhere.”
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Only two agreements resulted from these discussions. The first was procedural: to upgrade existing contacts at Geneva, which had been held at the consular level, to ambassadorial rank. (The significance of the ambassadorial designation is that ambassadors are technically personal representatives of their head of state and presumably have somewhat greater latitude and influence.) This only served to institutionalize paralysis. One hundred thirty-six meetings were held over a period of sixteen years from 1955 until 1971 between the local U.S. and Chinese ambassadors (most of them in Warsaw, which became the venue for the talks in 1958). The only substantive agreement reached was in September 1955, when China and the United States permitted citizens trapped in each country by the civil war to return home.
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Thereafter, for a decade and a half, American policy remained focused on eliciting a formal renunciation of the use of force from China. “We have searched year after year,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March 1966, “for some sign that Communist China was ready to renounce the use of force to resolve disputes. We have also searched for some indication that it was ready to abandon its premise that the United States is its prime enemy. The Chinese Communist attitudes and actions have been hostile and rigid.”
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American foreign policy toward no other country had ever been submitted to such a stringent precondition for negotiation as a blanket renunciation of the use of force. Rusk did take note of the gap between the fierce Chinese rhetoric and its relatively restrained international performance in the 1960s. Still, he argued that American policy, in effect, should be based on the rhetoric—that ideology was more significant than conduct:

Based on these attitudes, in 1957, using the Chinese refusal to renounce the use of force over Taiwan as a pretext, the United States downgraded the Geneva talks from the ambassador to the first secretary level. China withdrew its delegation, and the talks were suspended. The second Taiwan Strait Crisis followed soon after—though ostensibly for another reason.

In 1953, Stalin died after more than three decades in power. His successor—after a brief transitional period—was Nikita Khrushchev. The terror of Stalin’s rule had left its mark on Khrushchev’s generation. They had made their big step up the ladder in the purges of the 1930s when an entire generation of leaders was wiped out. They had purchased the sudden rise to eminence at the cost of permanent emotional insecurity. They had witnessed—and participated in—the wholesale decapitation of a ruling group, and they knew that the same fate might await them; indeed Stalin was in the process of beginning another purge as he was dying. They were not yet ready to modify the system that had generated institutionalized terror. Rather they attempted to alter some of its practices while reaffirming the core beliefs to which they had devoted their lives, blaming the failures on the abuse of power by Stalin. (This was the psychological basis of what came to be known as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, to be discussed below.)