The extraordinary lengths to which the Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan went after 1949 to pursue a “One China” policy during the Cold War are well known. Recently declassified archives reveal, however, that Chiang Kai-shek's determination to maintain the geopolitical integrity of China went far beyond the suppression of a Taiwanese independence movement and lukewarm support for the 1959 Tibetan uprising. The exodus of several thousand Uighur and Kazakh refugees from Xinjiang, a mostly Muslim province only loosely integrated into the modern Chinese state, provided a rare opportunity for the Nationalist government in exile to make overtures to a vulnerable non-Han population whose Cold War loyalties were up for grabs. This study of the historically unique and nearly unknown Office for the Chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Government in Taiwan demonstrates the Nationalist commitment to preserving the non-Han borderlands of China while in exile, even if the immediate beneficiary of such efforts was the Communist government on the mainland.
The lack of official government attention to Japanese war crimes during the Mao years has been widely acknowledged. Yet in the summer of 1956, years of preparatory work by Zhou Enlai culminated in the little-known and summarily dismissed trials of 1,062 self-confessed Japanese war criminals in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The extraordinarily lenient sentences given to 45 of the worst offendersand wholesale pardons of 1,017were prompted by larger geopolitical considerations that effectively hamstrung PRC authorities from bringing the trials into closer alignment with previous ones in Europe and Japan. Zhou's determination to adopt a "policy of leniency" towards the Japanese prisoners, however, was sorely at odds with the sentiments of the general public. The need to prepare the people for a counterintuitive mass clemency saw a sudden and drastic shift in media discourse in 1954, followed by a series of remarkable cultural and intellectual campaigns that were designed to persuade the Chinese people that they should henceforth let bygones be bygones.
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