The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis Re-examined: Chinese Diplomacy between the Two Superpowers

Reviewing the Cold War History

Abstract

On August 23, 1958, the People's Liberation Army of China began a heavy bombardment against the Quemoy Island, an island still under the control of the Chinese Nationalist regime in Taiwan. This action escalated tensions across the Taiwan Strait, leading to the direct military confrontation between China and the United States. In fact, the conflict was so serious that the United States considered using tactical nuclear weapons against the Communist China.
This paper explores why China chose to conduct such military activities despite risks of direct military engagement with the United States. China's decision to bombard the Quemoy is puzzling because it was fairly predictable that China's use of force would prompt the United States to respond militarily, bringing the two countries to the brink of a nuclear war. Why did China dare to take such risks and what were they trying to accomplish?
There are two schools of thought that attempt to explain China's behavior leading to the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. The first focuses on an external factor, that is, China's security environments. According to this view, China's decision to conduct bombardment against the Quemoy was driven by Chinese leaders' concerns about increasing military threats posed by the United States. The second school of thought, the so-called “domestic mobilization” school, argues that the main reason for China's use of force was the necessity to mobilize domestic support for “the Great Leap Forward, ” a radical communization program that Mao Tse-dong tried to promote. Recently, researchers who utilized new documentary evidence from China and the former Soviet Union emphasize the role of Mao's radical communist ideology, and they claim that the “domestic mobilization” argument combined with an explanation based on Mao's ideology, provides a better explanation for China's behavior. Chen Jian, for instance, argues that Mao, who was committed to radical communist internationalism, was concerned about the slow speed of communization in China, and tried to accelerate the speed by creating an external crisis.
While recognizing the importance of Mao's radical ideology, I argue that the importance of Mao's ideology was exaggerated because many of his radical statements were interpreted without analyzing contexts in which they were made. Furthermore, I point out evidence that shows that the Chinese leaders' decisions were driven by their concerns about China's security, not only because of increasing US threats but also because of the Soviet Union's pursuit for the “peaceful coexistence” with the West. In this sense, China's use of force was designed to serve two political purposes: warning the United States against increasing support for Taiwan and damaging what Chinese leaders considered to be Moscow's “appeacement” policy toward the United States.
In making the argument stated above, I analyze the Chinese leaders' statements and decisions from 1954 to 1958 by examining Chinese and Soviet primary documents made available through the Cold War International History Project. Special attention is paid to analyzing Chinese leaders' diplomatic decisions within the context of China's strategic environments, because doing so provides a more complete picture of how China decided to bombard the Quemoy. In conclusion, I not only summarize the research findings, but also attempt to derive some theoretical implications from this case study by utilizing the notion of a “building block approach” to theorizing international relations.