THE CCP TAKES OVER MAINLAND CHINA

While conditions on Taiwan were deteriorating for the Nationalists, a dire situation was emerging on the mainland. There had been periodic skirmishes between the Nationalist government and the Chinese Communist Party for roughly twenty years, but the government was always in a position of strength. The CCP had been making large relative gains in support and strategic advantage until the Japanese mounted a large-scale invasion from Manchuria into eastern China in 1937, which led the country to rally around the government to oppose the foreign occupiers. Even during this period of détente, however, there were rather precise delineations about which faction was supposed to be where, and when CCP units moved outside their approved area of operations skirmishes would erupt with the KMT, even amid fighting against the Japanese.
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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.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MODERN STATE IN CHINA

After the staggering defeat suffered in the Sino-Japanese War, it became increasingly difficult to deny the need for modernization and political transformation in China. Between the end of the war and China’s retaking of Taiwan in 1945, there were three periods of fundamental reform in China. Although they were ideologically and functionally different, each was staggering in scope.
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JAPAN’S OCCUPATION OF TAIWAN, 1895-1945

Although the Chinese government had had reluctantly agreed to transfer the island to Japan, people living on Taiwan had their own agenda. On May 23, Taiwan declared itself a republic and set up an independent government. With that government came an army and a mobilization to resist occupation by the Japanese. The founders of the 1895 Taiwanese “republic” shrewdly took Western political labels and applied them to ad hoc institutions, unsuccessfully attempting to obtain French support against the Japanese occupation.²⁰ It took the Japanese military five months to pacify the island, and for four more years the Taiwanese mounted an insurgency campaign that wore on the Japanese.²¹ As one Japanese baron put it: “Japan had made no preparations whatever for the administration of the island at the time of its acquisition.”²²

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THE END OF THE WAR AND THE TREATY OF SHIMONOSEKI

The early diplomatic efforts to end the war consisted of numerous unrealistic Chinese proposals and staunch Japanese refusals.¹⁴ During the negotiations the war ground on, and the Chinese were continuing to lose large numbers of forces (indeed, Weihaiwei was taken after the Chinese had started its attempts at diplomacy). Japanese military officials had begun to think about which Chinese territories Tokyo should demand as part of peace negotiations, but the army and navy were divided on what lands should be annexed.¹⁵ The army proposed the more unrealistic of the schemes: it wanted possession of the Liaotung peninsula, a part of the Chinese mainland that was in striking distance of both Peking and the ancestral home of the Qing dynasty, Mukden. Japanese occupation of the Liaotung peninsula would thus not only have been of critical strategic concern to the Chinese; because of the proximity of foreign occupiers to the symbolic town of Mukden, it would have been a near-total loss of legitimacy for the ruling government. The Japanese navy, on the other hand, wanted to annex Taiwan and the Penghu Islands. In the wake of the stunning Japanese military victory, it was becoming increasingly evident in the West that a new important player was emerging in East Asia. The general wariness in the West regarding that new regional power, combined with the talk in Japan about taking mainland territory from China, caused some Japanese to fear intervention by Western powers.¹⁶ Demanding Taiwan and the Penghus, the navy reasoned, would be less provocative yet would provide a good strategic outpost to buffer Japan from a potential Western incursion.
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THE ORIGINS OF THE TAIWAN PROBLEM, 1895-1979

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Taiwan experienced both colonization by Western powers and occupation and governance by the Ming and Qing dynasties.¹ The Penghu Islands, a small island group off the west coast of Taiwan now considered part of Taiwan, were considered part of China as far back as the fourteenth century. The Dutch and Spanish jockeyed for imperial influence on Taiwan itself in the seventeenth century, with both states establishing a presence on the island.

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2013: How the War Began

dThe war that erupted between the United States and China in 2013 was a classic case of miscalculation by both parties. Neither Beijing nor Washington thought that the other side would escalate the long-standing tensions over Taiwan to the point of armed conflict. Yet armed conflict was the result, and the world has been paying the price ever since. For a quarter century, the world’s two leading powers have been locked in a cold war that has been at least as intense as the earlier surly confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The prospects for global peace and prosperity that looked so promising in the 1990s following the end of the first cold war have turned to ashes. U.S. policymakers have undoubtedly asked themselves many times whether the brief but intense war that broke out in July 2013 could have been avoided. They probably have asked themselves at least as many times whether defending Taiwan was worth the price.

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America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan: Introduction

THE DANGER OF A COLLISION COURSE

On the surface, America’s relations with China seem to be rather cordial. Tensions spiked in April 2001 over the incident in which a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter plane, but that quarrel soon receded, and ever since the September 11 terrorist attacks China and the United States have cooperated in the campaign against radical Islamic terrorism. More recently, Washington and Beijing have worked together to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the important economic relationship has continued to grow, with bilateral trade now exceeding $160 billion a year.

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America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. 2013: How the War Began
2. The Origins of the Taiwan Problem, 1895-1979
3. The Taiwan Problem Evolves: 1979-2000
4. Some Ominous Trends in Taiwan
5. Some Ominous Trends in the PRC
6. Washington’s Muddled Policy
7. The Dynamic Military Balance
8. Avoiding Calamity