Abstract
The Republic of China was established by the Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) government in Nanking in 1912, but was forced to relocate to the island province of Taiwan in 1949 after the victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war. The KMT viewed the move as temporary, maintaining that it alone was the legitimate government of all China. It was supported in its claim by a Cold War climate that fostered the creation of two Chinas, one a member of the socialist bloc of states, the other without hesitation firmly encamped in the anti-Communist sphere and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Beijing’s abuse of foreign diplomats (especially from the US) immediately after the Communist seizure of power in 1949, together with an apparent disregard for diplomatic protocol and Mao Zedong’s eagerness to ‘lean to one side’ towards the Soviet Union, provoked a rather hostile response to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.2
If you Americans … want to curse people and back Chiang Kai-shek, that’s your business and I won’t interfere. … But remember one thing. To whom does China belong? China definitely does not belong to Chiang Kai-shek; China belongs to the Chinese people. The day will surely come when you will find it impossible to back him any longer.
Mao Zedong, 19451
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Notes
Quoted in William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, 2nd edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 103.
For an excellent account of this period, see Edwin W. Martin, Divided Counsel: The Anglo-American Response to Communist Victory in China (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1986).
Quoted by Warren I. Cohen, ‘Acheson, His Advisers, and China’, 1949–1950, in Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs (eds), Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations, 1947–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 23–4.
Quoted in George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966), pp. 386–7.
Quoted in Gerald H. Corr, The Chinese Red Army (London: Purnell, 1974), p. 72.
Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, vol. 2 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), p. 334.
See also Steve Tsang, ‘Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang’s Policy to Reconquer the Chinese Mainland, 1949–1958’, in Steve Tsang (ed.), In the Shadow of China: Political Developments in Taiwan Since 1949 (London: Hurst, 1993), pp. 48–72.
See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 70–5.
For details of US aid to the ROC during the Korean war see Hung-Mao Tien, The Great Transition: Political and Social Change in the Republic of China (Taipei: SMC,1989), p. 230.
Allen S. Whiting, ‘Morality, Taiwan and U.S. Policy’, in Jerome Alan Cohen, Edward Friedman, C. Harold Hinton, and Allan S. Whiting (eds), Taiwan and American Policy (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 86;
A. Doak Barnett, China and the Major Powers in East Asia (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1977), p. 244.
Shirley W.Y. Kuo, The Taiwan Economy in Transition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983), p. 14.
A discussion of the US-ROC relationship can be found in Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States, 1945–1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York: Twayne, 1994)
and A. James Gregor and Martin Hsia Chang, ‘Taiwan: The “Wild Card” in US Defense Policy in the Far Pacific’, in James C. Hsiung and Winberg Chai (eds), Asia and US Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1981).
For details of CIA operations in/from Taiwan, see Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974) especially pp. 302–3;
Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington DC: Acropolis Books, 1976).
Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 45; Cline (1976).
See Cord Meyer, Facing Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1980)
and Allan Michie, Voices Through the Iron Curtain (New York: Dodd Mead, 1963).
M. S. Dobbs-Higginson, Asia-Pacific: Its Role in the New World Disorder (London: Longman, 1994), p. 152.
Ray S. Cline, Chiang Ching-kuo Remembered (Washington DC: United States Global Strategy Council, 1989), pp. 50–1.
Memorandum by Secretary of State Dulles, 23 August 1958, FRUS 1958–60, XIX, China, pp. 69, 280.
Roy Godson, Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: US Covert Action and Counter Intelligence (London: Brassey’s, 1995).
John F. Copper, The Taiwan Political Miracle (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1997), p. 512.
An excellent overview of Britain’s policy towards both the ROC and the PRC can be found in Zhong-ping Feng, The British Government’s China Policy, 1945–1950 (Keele: Ryburn Publishing, 1994).
H. Maclear Bate, Report from Formosa (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952), p. 105.
Quoted in Michael Shea, To Lie Abroad (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), p. 41.
See G. R. Berridge, Talking to the Enemy (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 47.
A useful realist account of Britain’s reasoning set against the backdrop of the Korean war can be found in Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers: the War and Post-war Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Earl Attlee (London: Heinemann, 1961), pp. 231, 237, 239.
Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 374–5.
Quoted in Isaac Deutscher, Russia, China and the West, 1953–1966 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 229.
See M. J. Peterson, Recognition of Governments: Legal Doctrine and State Practice, 1815–1995 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997b), p. 206, n. 57.
James C. Hsiung, ‘China’s Recognition Practice and its Implications in International Law’, in Jerome A. Cohen (ed.), China’s Practice of International Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 26.
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 720–1.
Useful accounts of this process can be found in Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 5th edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), chapter 12;
Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), chapters 16 and 19;
Chia Chiao-hsieh, ‘Pragmatic diplomacy: foreign policy and external relations’ in Peter Ferdinand (ed.), Take-off for Taiwan? (London: RITA, 1996), p. 68.
See Harry Harding, A Fragile Relationship: the United States and China Since 1972 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution,1992), pp. 100–2.
Steven J. Hood, The Kuomintang and the Democratization of Taiwan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), p. 65.
The TRA is reproduced in John F. Copper, China Diplomacy: the Washington-Taipei-Beijing Triangle (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 159–167.
Françoise Mengn, Taiwan’s Non-Official Diplomacy. Discussion Papers in Diplomacy no. 5 (University of Leicester, May 1995), p. 17.
J. Terry Emerson, ‘The Taiwan Relations Act: Legislative Recognition of the Republic of China’, The Republic of China on Taiwan Today: Views From Abroad (Taipei: Kwang Hwa Publishing, 1990), p. 226.
The TRA is assessed from the perspective of Taiwan in James C. Y. Shen, The US and Free China: How the US Sold Out Its Ally (Washington DC: Acropolis, 1983), pp. 269–78.
See Ralph N. Clough, Reaching Across the Taiwan Strait: People-to-People Diplomacy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), p. 183.
Bruce J. Dickson Democratization in China and Taiwan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 30; Copper (1996), p. 191.
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© 2000 Gary D. Rawnsley
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Rawnsley, G.D. (2000). A Brief International History of the Republic of China. In: Taiwan’s Informal Diplomacy and Propaganda. Studies in Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403905345_2
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