THE END OF WORLD WAR II AND THE RETURN OF TAIWAN TO CHINA

As the tide was turning against the Axis powers in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo to discuss the status of Japan’s colonies. The Cairo Declaration of December 1943 determined that all of the territories Japan had taken from China by force were to be returned to China as a condition of Japanese surrender. This decision was further codified in the Potsdam Proclamation of July 1945, which reinforced the conditions set forth in the Cairo Declaration.

The resolve on the part of the Allied powers did not, however, clear up some of the matters pertaining to international law. At what point would the legal status of Taiwan be determined? Was a treaty officially recognizing Taiwan as part of China needed before the transition would be complete?³² What role would American forces play in the process of Japanese withdrawal and Chinese administration? China had been devastated militarily in the war and by some accounts had neither the maritime nor other military resources needed to take back and pacify the island on its own.³³

Though a great deal of planning had been given to the handover at the State Department and within the joint chiefs of staff, no officials had suspected the rough landing that Chiang’s regime would make on Taiwan. The Taiwanese people had by and large rejected Japanese culture, but they had come to embrace Japanese political and economic institutions. They enthusiastically greeted the reunification with China because they saw the Chinese people as their cultural brethren and believed that reunification would blend the best of both worlds: modern political and economic systems coupled with cultural identification with the parent country.³⁴

Accordingly, much of the strategizing had been based on the erroneous assumption that China would retake Taiwan as a normal province of the country. That did not happen. In the words of one U.S. official: “The [Taiwanese] people anticipated sincerely and enthusiastically deliverance from the Japanese yoke. However, [administrator] Chen Yi and his henchmen ruthlessly, corruptly, and avariciously imposed their regime upon a happy and amenable population. The Army conducted themselves as conquerors.”³⁵ Resentment toward the Chinese who retook Taiwan lasted for years. As late as 1964, many Taiwanese expressed the view that “[t]he dogs [the derogatory term used for the Japanese] treated us better than the pigs [the term for mainland Chinese].”³⁶

One reason that the Chinese reacted in such a way may have been simple surprise. When Taiwan was wrested from the Chinese in 1895, it was backward and provincial even by the standards used to judge China under dynastic rule. When the Chinese landed on Taiwan in September 1945, they found a relatively educated populace that was governed by some degree of law and had grown accustomed to stability and a relatively modern way of living. From the look of things in 1945, the fifty years apart had been much kinder to Taiwan than they had been to mainland China.

Chen Yi had been chosen as administrator of Taiwan in 1945 largely because of his expertise in dealing with Japan. Though most people expected the Japanese to leave without incident, the Chinese thought it wise to have an administrator who knew how to deal with the Japanese.³⁷ In addition, Chen was a close acquaintance of Chiang and was vested with full authority over Taiwan.

The Chinese under Chen went forward with a program not of integration but domination. They proceeded to nationalize the great majority of assets on Taiwan, reasoning that they were Japanese property and as such the rightful spoils of a war they had won. The indigenous people were treated not as Chinese welcomed back into the fold but as the inhabitants of conquered territory. Economic output shrank dramatically, and the expectation for political representation was quickly dispelled. It was this lack of economic and political opportunity, as well as Taiwan’s overall poor treatment by the Chinese government, that caused a popular uprising in 1947.

On February 27, a woman selling cigarettes was accosted by agents of the tobacco monopoly, who accused her of selling untaxed tobacco. The confrontation escalated and the woman was killed. Thousands of Taiwanese marched the next day on the tobacco monopoly headquarters to protest her death. Chen’s soldiers fired on the protestors, killing several of them. But Chen did not have adequate forces to put down an all-out insurrection, so he requested reinforcements from the mainland. Chiang granted the request and sent more troops while Chen employed strong-arm diplomacy to prevent an all-out rebellion in Taipei. Once the reinforcements, numbering nearly fifty thousand, arrived, they proceeded to slaughter thousands of indigenous Taiwanese and crush the protests.³⁸

In the wake of the riots on Taiwan, Chiang removed Chen from his post as governor-general on May 15, 1947. (Chen would later join with the Communists on the mainland.)³⁹ The attitude of Taiwanese toward reunification went from hopeful anticipation to disenchantment and despair in a remarkably short period of time, and the riots and barbarism that accompanied China’s regaining sovereignty over Taiwan contributed to the birth of the Taiwan independence movement. The riots in many ways also served as a wake-up call for the KMT, and its heavy-handed management of Taiwan gave way to more local control and more power vested in the hands of the Taiwanese themselves. These two factors would set the stage for the political and economic transformation that would occur in the subsequent decades.⁴⁰ But the overall animosity of Taiwanese toward the mainland authorities did not abate.

After Chen was deposed, conditions on Taiwan improved, but only marginally. It was not until 1948, when defeat became imminent for the KMT on the mainland, that Chiang started thinking seriously about the prospect of cultivating Taiwan as a base of operations for the Nationalist regime.⁴¹ By early 1949, Chiang had appointed a new governor of Taiwan, Chen Cheng, who started the process of seriously reforming KMT rule of Taiwan. By the time the Nationalists lost the mainland later in 1949, the situation on Taiwan had improved but the hostility to the government lingered.

NOTES:

32. For example, General Douglas MacArthur believed that legal clarification was necessary. See Jon W Huebner, “The Abortive Liberation of Taiwan,” China Quarterly, no. 110 (June 1987): 262. Additionally, the position that Taiwan’s legal status was undetermined became official U.S. policy by 1950. See, for instance, President Truman’s letter to Warren Austin dated August 27, 1950, available from the Truman Presidential Library at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_ collections/korea/large/sec3/mac_6_1.htm.

33. Ballantine, Formosa, p. 54.

34. Tse-han Lai, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou, A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 44-49.

35. General Albert Wedemeyer, cited in ibid., pp. 65-66.

36. Douglas H. Mendel, Jr., “Japanese Policy and Views toward Formosa,” Journal of Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (May 1969): 513-534.

37. Some reports indicate Chen may actually have developed “a lucrative clandestine trade” with the Japanese as governor of Fukien province, and in some quarters his allegiance was suspect. See, for example, F. A. Lumley, The Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek (London: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd., 1976), p. 55.

38. Ballantine, Formosa, pp. 62-63.

39. Lai, Meyers, and Wou, “A Tragic Beginning,” pp. 180-182.

40. Ibid., pp. 192-193.

41. Fred W Riggs, “Chinese Administration in Formosa,” Far Eastern Survey 20, no. 21 (December 12, 1951): 209-215.

SOURCE: Ted Galen Carpenter, “America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan“, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.