Chiang Kai-Shek and the USA: Puppet and Puppeteer, but Which Was Which? by David White

*****

Forty years ago, Chiang Kai-Shek died after a half-century on the international stage. For the last 26 years of his life, Chiang ruled over a domain which had shrunk from the most populous country in the world to the offshore island of Taiwan. Sustained in power by the United States, this apparent client-dependency relationship was not at all straightforward. Almost every strategy and policy considered or enacted by either party was influenced by the perceived effect upon, or reaction of, the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC). Furthermore, in the case of the USA the repercussions upon her relationship with the Soviet Union, and upon Sino-Soviet relations, played a part in decision-making. Although both the United States and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China (ROC) embodied solidly and stridently anti-communist doctrines throughout the period 1949-1975, they often did so for very different reasons. Among the most fundamental of these was the very question of whether one China or two should exist on the world stage. For the USA this was a political and geostrategic issue, but for Chiang and the Kuomintang it was an existential one, defining their very raison d’être. They had absolutely no desire for genuine de jure independence from mainland China, thus creating the peculiar situation of being a state which was not a nation, yet was not only a member of the United Nations, but also had a permanent seat on the Security Council until 1971.

From 1945 until 1975 (and beyond), American foreign policy was driven in very large measure by an anti-communist ideological imperative. Defined by President Truman’s Containment Doctrine in 1947 and reinforced in 1954 by President Eisenhower’s Domino Theory, it was the guiding star and prism through which all decision-making passed. Communism was accepted as a real and immediate threat to the existence of the USA and the “free world” by every successive president until the collapse of the Soviet Union. No distinction was made between differing interpretations of communist ideology or the particular national situations which shaped communist policies in different countries. Above all, the USA clung to the wrong-headed belief until deep into the Korean War that the PRC was a satellite state of the Soviet Union, by which time this belief had led it to make all sorts of counter-productive decisions in its dealings with Mao Zedong’s China.[1] Whether the threat of Soviet or communist global expansionism was real or not, the fact that it was believed by those who made policy was sufficient to create the self-fulfilling prophecy of a global struggle between two competing ideologies which produced the Cold War. The United States saw this struggle as so fundamental and crucial that it swung dangerously towards an acceptance of the doctrine of the ends justifying the means. It certainly led to repeated cases of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, causing the USA to back such unsavoury figures as General Suharto in Indonesia, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam and Manuel Noriega in Panama, and later the Mujahideen in Afghanistan who gave rise to the Taliban. Arguably this was also the case in its support for Chiang Kai-Shek.

The United States had long harboured a desire to break into the Chinese market which it saw as potentially lucrative. Disguised as a doctrine seeking to maintain Chinese sovereignty and prevent its partition, the Open Door Policy was still cherished in the early 1940s by President Roosevelt who hoped to see China enrolled as a client state in a post-war world order. Although Roosevelt did not foresee a role for China as a bastion against a Bolshevik world takeover, even at this stage Chiang was deeply involved in his own battle against Mao’s communist forces, a civil war which had dragged on since 1927. So intent was he upon defeating the “enemy within”, that 500,000 of his best troops who could have been used to fight the Japanese invaders were blockading the communists in Shaanxi province – despite the fact that Mao’s forces were also fighting the Japanese. In spite of being given hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, vast amounts of equipment and American air support, Chiang still refused to commit all but a small proportion of his military forces to the fight against what the Americans viewed as the “real” enemy. On the political front, Roosevelt pledged US support for the return of all lands occupied by Japan – including Formosa/Taiwan which had been a Japanese colony since being taken from China in the war of 1895.[2]

Even at this very early stage of US-Kuomintang relations, we can see that Chiang was willing and able to take what he could from the Americans while offering little in return. When the perceptive General Joe Stilwell, American Commander-in-Chief in the China and India theatre, confronted him with a demand for more action, Chiang succeeded in getting him removed by obliquely threatening to conclude a separate peace with the Japanese.[3]

Stilwell’s replacement in dealings with the Kuomintang leader was much more to Chiang’s liking. Ambassador Patrick Hurley was bluff and brash, but intellectually out of his depth. Despite apparent evidence pointing to the value of Mao’s resistance to the Japanese and despite Hurley’s own staff recognising the need to work with the communists and pointing out the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Kuomintang, the ambassador was taken in by Chiang and supported his case for not forming a united front against the Japanese. Historians disagree over the actual extent and effectiveness of communist resistance to the Japanese and whether Mao was similarly holding back his forces to strike against the Kuomintang when the war ended, but they agree that Chiang manipulated individual Americans and deftly exploited divisions among his US allies.[4]

Following the surrender of Japan, President Truman attempted, through the offices of General George Marshall, to mediate a ceasefire in the still-smouldering civil war and if possible negotiate a coalition government encompassing both Nationalists and Communists. This proved hopeless in the face of the intransigence of Chiang, and when he sent a large Kuomintang force into communist-controlled Manchuria, full-scale civil war erupted. The USA reluctantly threw in on Chiang’s side and supplied him with $3 billion of aid over the next four years. Despite this, Chiang proved to be an incompetent commander-in-chief and poor political leader. Defeat after defeat occurred as a result of inept strategy, while corruption and a total failure to implement desperately needed land reform drove not just disgruntled peasants into the communist camp, but also thousands of defectors from his own army. By 1949 and the victory of Mao, both Truman and his secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had come to despise Chiang and see him as a near-hopeless case. As for Chiang, he had come to view the USA as a nation which could not be trusted ever since Marshall’s attempt to negotiate détente and cooperation in 1945-46. Chiang was very much an all-or-nothing personality. If you did not give him your total support, then you were part of the problem rather than part of the solution.[5]

By the end of 1949 Chiang, two million Kuomintang refugees and China’s gold reserve had all crossed the 100 miles of the Formosa Strait and were holed up on the large island of Taiwan. Still claiming to be the legitimate government of China, Chiang vowed that he and his still substantial army would one day soon return to reclaim the mainland by force for the Republic of China. The US administration realistically saw that Chiang had no hope of doing this and believed that the fall of Taiwan was imminent. Consequently on the second last day of 1949, National Security Council resolution 48/2 was signed, ruling out American commitment to defend Taiwan and signalling an end to any further US involvement in the civil war. Taiwan was decreed expendable.[6]

Two factors saved Chiang and ensured the continued existence of the ROC. The first was a significant misreading of Sino-Soviet relations by the United States. The Soviet Union had supplied Mao with very little help in the civil war and, during the struggle against the Japanese, Stalin had directed almost all aid and support to Chiang. However, when the USA refused to recognise the PRC and Truman forbad any response to feelers Mao put out to America, Mao turned towards the USSR seeking a treaty of friendship. Although victorious in the civil war, he felt his position was vulnerable to attack by a revived Japan, a hostile USA, a vengeful Chiang, or a combination of all three. To the Americans his “leaning to one side” merely confirmed the concept of a communist monolith.[7] “This communist government is really a tool of Russian Imperialism,”[8] said Dean Acheson, echoed by his deputy Dean Rusk, “The [Beijing] regime may be a colonial Russian government – a Slavic Manchukuo on a larger scale. It is not the Government of China.”[9]

The second factor was the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. The Truman policy of containment originally envisaged such a scenario based upon island strong-points such as the Philippines and Japan, but not Taiwan.[10] Although Truman regarded Chiang and the Kuomintang as “grafters and crooks”[11], the unexpected invasion of South Korea could not go unanswered, especially since it was in violation of the charter of the recently founded United Nations. Taiwan’s relationship with the USA proved especially significant here. Because the Americans were refusing to seat the PRC in the UN, which could well have led to the expulsion of the ROC and Mao taking its Security Council place with its attendant veto, the Soviet Union was boycotting the assembly. Hence it missed the vote which effectively allowed the US to intervene in Korea under the formal auspices of a UN action. The US 7^th Fleet was dispatched to the Formosa Strait (where it remained for nearly a quarter century), and Truman reversed the policy of abandoning Taiwan. An American military presence was established on the island and vast amounts of weaponry were supplied to the ROC, while aid and investment on a huge scale were channelled to infrastructure and military outfitting. Truman undertook this as much to prevent a Kuomintang attack on the mainland as an attack on Taiwan by Mao. As part of the aid, he ordered that Chiang’s operations against the mainland should cease, a price Chiang agreed to in return for the vast upgrading of his island’s military capacity.[12]

It has been plausibly suggested that Stalin’s approval of the North Korean attack and then his subsequent failure to support it with ground or air power arose from a calculation that the Americans would respond by renewing support for Chiang, thereby driving a wedge even more deeply and possibly permanently between the USA and the People’s Republic of China.[13] Whether this is true is a moot point, but the outcome was very much along those lines and the USA found itself tied to defending Taiwan for reasons of global credibility as well as geopolitics. Bevin Alexander argues that Truman effectively turned Taiwan into a protectorate of the United States,[14] but if so it was a unique protectorate very much with a will of its own.

Truman never envisaged a “two-Chinas” policy and never considered independence for Taiwan. In this respect he was in full accord with both Chiang and Mao, but the reality of the situation was that the USA was de facto upholding such a situation. The Eisenhower regime was more ambiguous about this, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles often openly advocating it as a solution.[15] Eisenhower was also prepared to use Taiwan as a lever to persuade the PRC to accept an armistice in the Korean War. He announced in 1953 that the 7^th Fleet would no longer impede any Kuomintang attacks on the mainland (although it would remain stationed there), thereby “unleashing” Chiang who, however, did not have sufficient capability for a proper invasion.[16]

Aware that the Eisenhower administration, while ardently anti-communist and hard-line, might well come to terms with Beijing if they could be sure that the PRC would break with Moscow, Chiang did not allow himself to be passively manipulated for the benefit of US strategic policy. In 1954, in response to the shelling of the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy which lay just four miles off the mainland coast, he persuaded the Americans that defence of these outposts was absolutely essential – their loss might prove a fatal blow to the morale of the Kuomintang and lead to the collapse of his regime. Enlisting the aid of the publisher of the highly influential Time magazine, Henry R. Luce, who was a close friend of Chiang’s American-educated wife, Meiling Soong, and appealing to the powerful China lobby within the Republican Party, within a few weeks Vice-President Richard Nixon was declaring that these small islands, dismissed shortly before by Dulles as “a bunch of rocks”[17] had become “stakes… in the poker game of world politics”.[18] By early 1955 Eisenhower was threatening the use of nuclear weapons which he now stationed permanently on Taiwan, while Chiang received his wish for a mutual defence pact between the USA and the ROC – with the added bonus of the Formosa Resolution passed by Congress giving the President virtual carte blanche to deal with the fortifying and support of Taiwan. US combat forces now began to be stationed on the island in ever-increasing numbers. John L. Gaddis sees this as a case of the “tail wagging the dog” and the ability of the weak to obtain power over the strong in certain circumstances during the Cold War,[19] while H.W. Brands declares that, “Chiang, not Eisenhower and Dulles, was the big winner.”[20]

Even though the crisis was averted, Chiang continued to stir up incidents to keep the USA focused on Taiwan and, if possible, ultimately to embroil America in war with the PRC. Faced with Mao’s huge military might, this was realistically the only way he could ever hope to launch a successful attack on the mainland, reopen the civil war and take back control of China. To do this, Chiang worked assiduously and unrelentingly at exploiting divisions within the US political and military establishments and appealing directly to the American public, usually through his highly photogenic, charismatic and persuasive wife who received much sympathetic press and TV coverage throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Supported by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, and in defiance of Eisenhower’s wishes, Chiang spent the next three years building up a massive force on the highly exposed islands of Quemoy and Matsu. This was an utterly impractical military manoeuvre, useless as a base from which to attempt an invasion and, in the event of hostilities actually breaking out, the 90,000 men garrisoned there within artillery as well as aircraft range would have been massacred in short order.

Once more in 1958 a crisis arose over each side shelling the other. Rather than try to defuse the crisis, Chiang sought to escalate it by seeking US permission to use the Taiwanese airforce with its American-supplied planes to bomb the mainland and attack PRC military units. Once this tactic was begun, it was highly likely it would have to be augmented by US airforce strikes, because the  Taiwanese airforce simply was not large enough to sustain conflict with the technically inferior but vastly larger PRC airforce. Chiang was playing out a bluff in siting his troops on the doorstep of the mainland, but he was also prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of his own men if he thought it would lure the USA into major conflict with the PRC. Fortunately wiser military heads prevailed and Eisenhower was not snared by Chiang’s lure, nor by his threats to fight unilaterally, nor by his eternal siren song playing upon American fears of regime collapse.

It has been suggested there were secret talks between Kuomintang representatives and PRC officials around this time over a deal to prevent any overt change of American policy which sought to enforce a two-Chinas policy. Once more it is a moot point whether this is true, but the very fact that a rumour to that effect was circulating gave Chiang increased leverage over a USA in thrall to its own inflexible Cold-War anti-communist obsession.[21]

It is significant that Chiang remained absolutely adamant that he would never give up the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, even though the USA in 1954 had offered to impose a 500-mile blockade of the Chinese coastline in exchange for this. Although Chiang realised that this might possibly lead to war between America and the PRC, it was more likely that it would create a two-Chinas situation, and even the prospect of his longed-for war took second place to avoiding that scenario. Thus in both 1954 and 1958 he retained substantial garrisons on the islands after the crises abated, insistent that the Strait of Taiwan should not form the western boundary of his domain. It seems possible that Mao also never seriously contemplated seizing either island for precisely the same reason of avoiding the prospect of two Chinas becoming a reality.[22]

The 1960s witnessed just as much mutual mistrust between Taiwan and America. There were also divisions of opinion on the desirability of two Chinas within the USA, but neither President Kennedy nor President Johnson significantly altered US policy in this sphere. However the continuity was anything but smooth and only achieved by the push and pull of interaction between Chiang and the US administrations, most of the pull resulting from the USA having to rein in Chiang as he repeatedly geared up for war and invasion of the mainland. The other major factor was the increasingly erratic policies of Mao and world reaction to the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.[23]

For all his opposition to Eisenhower’s policies when in opposition, once in office Kennedy  showed himself just as hostile to the PRC. The principal difference was that Kennedy recognised the split between Mao’s China and the Soviet Union. His decision to lean towards peaceful co-existence with Russia (partly to prevent China receiving nuclear-development expertise from the USSR) created a fear in the PRC of a move towards an alliance aimed against China, while Chinese support for North Vietnam made the Americans in turn very suspicious and hostile. This hostility and the US’s increasing focus upon south-east Asia as an area of strategic importance led Kennedy to strengthen his

support for Taiwan and to reassure Chiang that he would veto any attempt in the UN to have the PRC replace the ROC. Emboldened by this unexpected increase in American support, and encouraged by the spreading chaos in mainland China which was attracting international disapproval, Chiang repeatedly attempted to get the Americans to agree to invasion plans, air strikes and the use of nuclear-tipped shells to bombard the mainland from Quemoy. All of these plans were rejected by the Kennedy administration, but not without extreme difficulty. Kennedy had to be seen domestically to be a firm anti-communist, had to appease the pro-Chiang China lobby, had to prevent Chiang sparking off a war with the PRC which would inevitably drag in the USA and might reunite Moscow and Beijing, and had to ensure that the Kuomintang regime was not undermined nor demoralised.[24]

While Kennedy was carrying out this balancing act, he felt the need to reject the two-Chinas option despite urgings from the State Department to the contrary. This led to intellectual contortions to try to square an impossible circle. If China was indeed indivisible, then the USA had no right to interfere in its civil strife and treat Taiwan as if it were a protectorate; and since both Chinese sides in the conflict were agreed there was only one China, this made justification of American involvement even more problematic. The only way to reconcile this appeared to be to fall back on the view that mainland China was being held in the grip of an international communist conspiracy and that its rulers were agents of a non-Chinese plot. Logically this must mean that they were being manipulated by the Kremlin, a contention so at odds with reality as to be untenable, and also a contradiction of Kennedy’s recognition of the Sino-Soviet split.[25]

President Johnson, obsessed and distracted by American involvement in Vietnam, carried forward this fiction which worked to Chiang’s advantage by leaving support for his regime unchanged and substantial. Aid and subsidy continued to pour in while Taiwan could still

strut upon the international stage, particularly in the UN with its seat on the Security Council and a veto wielded only by four other major powers. Yet the world was moving on and the unchanging preservation of this strangely artificial state could only last as long as the USA continued to act upon its inflexible anti-communist fixation, currently being played out in the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. Unexpectedly it was one of the most fervent anti-communist hawks who would cut the Gordian Knot – Richard Nixon.

In 1964, France broke ranks among the Western powers and recognised the PRC. Throughout the 1960s the number of countries joining her and those willing to ignore a US-sanctioned embargo on trade with Red China inched ever upwards. Even within the USA, public opinion began to shift towards improving relations with the PRC.[26] Nixon was still beholden to the orthodoxy of an international communist conspiracy when he came to office in 1968 and continued the pursuit of the Vietnam War as part of a “crusade” against this world-wide menace. At some point, however, his reasoning changed and he began to see there was no monolithic communist bloc, but rather a collection of individual states pursuing their own interests, only allying with each other when necessity dictated or when forced to do so by coercion. Aided by Henry Kissinger, his new view of a world of multi-polarity led to the opening of dialogue with the PRC and the start of an era of détente. While the PRC and the USA agreed officially that there was only one China, effectively the United States was now embarking on a de facto two-Chinas policy, made more real by US acquiescence to the replacement in the UN of Taiwan by the PRC who took their place on the Security Council. By being the only President in this whole era, including Truman, to actually adhere (eventually) to the Doctrine of Containment rather than roll-back, Nixon set Taiwan inexorably on a new path even though he did not cut aid or military assistance significantly, nor officially recognise the PRC, nor overtly endorse a two-Chinas policy.[27]

While all this historic diplomacy was being enacted, Chiang’s opinion was not sought nor was he kept in the loop. Kissinger appears to have regarded Taiwan not just as inconsequential, but as an actual impediment to US interests, while the inner circle of the Nixon administration deliberately kept the Taiwanese in the dark about plans and developments which would affect them.[28] Nixon’s only concession was to assure Chiang after the event that the USA would maintain its commitment to the Mutual Defense Agreement of 1955.[29] Chiang must have realised that official American acceptance of there being only one China along with the now inevitable recognition of the PRC (delayed till 1979) meant that the Kuomintang would never be able to regain the Chinese mainland, and that any reunification would be on the PRC’s terms. The only other option was full independence and that meant an end to the whole reason for the existence of Chiang’s regime. Taiwan was set firmly on a new path and the days of its one-dimensional national purpose were numbered.  By this late date Chiang’s popularity, indeed even his recognition factor, had declined substantially in the USA, and his power to intimidate successive presidents had come up against a man just as ruthless, thick-skinned, single-minded and devious as himself. It is also the case that, in the later 1960s and early 1970s, Taiwan’s once inexorable lobbying machine had lapsed into a degree of lethargy and complacency, the result one suspects of a habit of dependency and being spoon-fed assistance at any sign of disquiet.[30]

While there is no doubt that Chiang was a master manipulator of other power-players with whom he interacted, it remains to be asked how he managed to persuade so many powerful and not-so-powerful people in the USA whom he never met that his was a cause worth supporting. Taiwan, after all, was a one-party authoritarian regime which operated a repressive police state and denied freedom of speech and assembly to a degree not dissimilar to that of the PRC – scarcely a good advert for the free world of democracy. Furthermore, in order to legitimise his dictatorial rule, Chiang presented himself as the personification of Chinese history and culture, creating a personality cult remarkably similar to that of Mao.[31] As stated earlier, part of Chiang’s appeal to Americans was his implacable anti-communism, and the constituency in the USA which responded well to that also contained large numbers who endorsed his conservatism, his espousal of family values, his selective modernisation, and his Christianity.

Although born into a Confucian family, Chiang converted to Christianity in 1930, a year after marrying his devout Christian wife, Meiling Soong. Chiang never disavowed the worth of Confucianism, interpreting the Christianity which he embraced as actually confirming its validity as a belief system. This allowed many non-Christian Chinese to support him. His religious as well as political views were transmitted to the American public largely by his wife, with her straightforward unmediated Christianity, during the long periods she spent in the USA as the spokesperson and public face of Chiang and the

Kuomintang. Chiang unreservedly portrayed the fight against communism as a Holy War, stating that it was not just a political duty but a supreme religious and spiritual ideal in which one must have complete faith and for which one must display self-sacrifice in the fight against this “Satanist” rival of Christianity. This struck a chord with that section of middle America where Christian fundamentalism has always found fertile ground. His further dictum that Christianity was a religion which preferred reform to revolution undoubtedly reinforced these conservative-sounding views.[32]

However, there was a side to Chiang’s political philosophy which was not emphasised for an American audience. The “centrally directed national faith” which he advocated required that family and nation be thoroughly integrated to a degree which would not have sat well with American ideals of personal liberty.[33] The “Christianisation” which many Americans wished to see spread to mainland China was an extremely authoritarian, paternal one which first found expression in the New Life Movement founded by Chiang in 1934 in Nanking and restarted in the 1950s in Taiwan. Its aim was to “sustain the national purpose”[34] and was essentially a form of extreme social engineering. With the purpose of “a revival of native morality” it was set up as a movement to initiate hygienic and behavioural reform designed to revitalise what Chiang saw as a backward and morally degenerate China.[35]

Utilising a questionable methodology, it held that structural change and moral improvement would result from the alteration of everyday behaviour, suggesting that social and economic change would follow in the wake of people stopping spitting in the street, standing up taller and washing their clothes more often. The preposterous expectations of this doctrine produced almost zero results despite initial enthusiasm. However, when it failed to elicit any improvements, Chiang’s reaction was to start all over again and keep at it, believing that no great change was possible before small changes were established. This “controlled popular mobilisation”[36] has been described as a counter-revolutionary attempt to thwart and channel new social forces which were emerging in China among peasants, urban workers and students, and to dragoon these into the service of state and party. There is a certain resemblance to the Cultural Revolution which Mao later instigated in the PRC in the 1960s, and an equal resemblance to its abject failure. What Chiang was setting up was closely supervised change directed from the top, with the movement’s organisations staffed and run by the Kuomintang, in particular its Christian elements.[37] What he was seeking was the ideal Chinese, a sort of “soldier-citizen” whose make-up and personality was designed by the state for the purpose of “national cohesion and unity of purpose”,[38] that purpose also being laid down by the state.

The fact that Chiang managed to hide all these adverse, un-American, state-dominated aspects of Kuomintang philosophy from his supporters in the USA (not to mention the endemic corruption and graft of his Chinese and Taiwanese regimes), and succeeded in highlighting his anti-communism, Christianity and friendship for the United States is testament to the man’s enormous political skills. Most US political leaders and high-ranking generals knew of the shortcomings of his regime, but were prepared to overlook them in the interests of furthering American aims. This amoral realpolitik was fuelled by the one-dimensional view of communism which prevailed throughout the period in question until Nixon came to power.

Chiang played four successive presidents adroitly, using a mixture of bluff, threat and the prospect of the collapse of his regime. His skill was all the more remarkable because of the need to avoid precipitating America into deciding that a two-Chinas policy was best suited to dealing with the perceived menace of Mao. However, all his skill was directed towards an ultimately self-interested goal and an ultimately futile one which brought little or no benefit to the people of Taiwan – a permanently militarised state under a quarter a century of martial law existing in a state of half-nationhood. Taiwan may have occupied a position of high status within the UN and always featured among the priorities of the USA, but it could actually do and achieve nothing on the international stage beyond the clever trick of surviving – and ultimately even that depended upon the USA. Once Nixon broke the spell of the monolithic communist menace and viewed Taiwan in a different and more strategically realistic light, Chiang’s sorcery no longer worked. After he died in 1975, Taiwan was forced to face the real world and fall back on her own resources – something which she has actually succeeded in doing rather well.

[1] Bevin Alexander, The Strange Connection: US Intervention in China, 1944-1972 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 96 & 118-19.

[2] Thomas Paterson and Garry Clifford, America Ascendant: U.S. Foreign Policy Relations Since 1939 (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1995), 24-25.

[3] Tang Tsou, “The Quemoy Imbroglio: Chiang Kai-Shek and the United States.” The Western Political Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1959): 1078.

[4] Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai Shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003), 437-446; Paterson and Clifford, America, 25-28.

[5] Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 12.

[6 Alexander, Strange Connection, 91-92.

[7] William Stueck, The Road to Confrontation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 124-25.

[8] John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Penguin, 2005), 38

[9] Paterson and Clifford, America, 85.

[10] Gaddis, Cold War, 41

11] Paterson and Clifford, America, 84.

[12] Tucker, Strait Talk, 13.

[13] Kathryn Weathersby, “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1950.” Wilson Center. 1993. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB76.pdf (accessed October 19, 2013), 34-35.

[14] Alexander, Strange Connection, 99.

[15] Tucker, Strait Talk, 17.

[16] Paterson and Clifford, America, 120.

[17] Gaddis, Cold War, 131.

[18] Paterson and Clifford, America, 121.

[19] Alexander, Strange Connection, 147-60;  Gaddis, Cold War, 130-33.

[20] H.W. Brands, Jr., “Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait.” International Security 12, no. 4 (1988), 148.

[21] Tsou, “Quemoy Imbroglio”, 1075-85; Alexander, Strange Connection, 176.

[22] Brands, “Testing Massive Retaliation”, 130; Alexander, Strange Connection, 161-62 & 177.

[23] Tucker, Strait Talk, 17-28.

[24] Alexander, Strange Connection, 191-95

[25] Tucker, Strait Talk, 18-19; Alexander, Strange Connection, 192.

[26] Alexander, Strange Connection, 210.

[27] Alexander, Strange Connection, 213-226; Paterson and Clifford, America, 181-86.

[28] Tucker, Strait Talk, 36-38.

[29] Tucker, Strait Talk, 30.

[30] Tucker, Strait Talk, 31 & 37.

[31] Jeremy E. Taylor, “The Production of the Chiang Kai-Shek Personality Cult, 1929-1975.” The China Quarterly, no. 185 (2006), 97-99.

[32] Pichon P. Y. Loh, “The Ideological Persuasion of Chiang Kai-Shek.” Modern Asia Studies 4, no. 3 (1970), 216 & 230-37.

[33] Loh, “Ideological Persuasion”, 232.

34] Loh, “Ideological Persuasion”, 230.

[35] Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution.” The Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (1975), 945.

[36] Dirlik, “Ideological Foundations”, 947.

[37] Dirlik, “Ideological Foundations”, 945-57.

[38] Dirlik, “Ideological Foundations”, 976.

 

Sources

Alexander, Bevin. The Strange Connection: US Intervention in China, 1944-1972. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Brands, H.W. Jr. “Testing Massive Retaliation: Credibility and Crisis Management in the Taiwan Strait.” International Security 12, no. 4 (1988): 124-151.

Dirlik, Arif. “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution.” The Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (1975): 945-980.

Fenby, Jonathan. Chiang Kai Shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War . London: Penguin, 2005.

Loh, Pichon P. Y. “The Ideological Persuasion of Chiang Kai-Shek.” Modern Asia Studies 4, no. 3 (1970): 211-238.

Paterson, Thomas, and Garry Clifford. America Ascendant: U.S. Foreign Policy Relations Since 1939. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1995.

Stueck, William. The Road to Confrontation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Taylor, Jeremy E. “The Production of the Chiang Kai-Shek Personality Cult, 1929-1975.” The China Quarterly, no. 185 (2006): 96-110.

Tsou, Tang. “The Quemoy Imbroglio: Chiang Kai-Shek and the United States.” The Western Political Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1959): 1075-1091.

Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Weathersby, Kathryn. “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1950.” Wilson Center. 1993. http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB76.pdf (accessed October 19, 2013).