Taiwan's propaganda cold war: The offshore islands crises of 1954 and 1958

From “Mystification” to “Massification”: Canton Counterespionage Films and Cold War Geopolitics

“…Though this battle was regional, its implications were global (Fu 238; Lombardo 64). The US consulate in Hong Kong, the largest in the world, was a major conduit for intelligence about the mainland and abundantly funded several anti‐communist organizations plotting clandestine action on the mainland and guerrilla raids against coastal provinces (Rawnsley 98). Many explosives and weapons seized from Nationalist agents by Hong Kong authorities were of US origin (Lombardo 77), a fact foregrounded by Chinese fantepian .…”

“…By September 1955, just three months after the official launch of the latter campaign, the police had received more than 120,000 tip‐offs from mass informants and had identified 2,000 cases of organized spying, espionage, and counterrevolution (Dutton 185). According to an interview with a local public security officer, there were three main types of espionage organizations operating in the Guangdong province in the 1950s: agents sent from Taiwan to establish new spy networks; remnants of the Nationalist government, who concealed themselves to collect intelligence; and former Nationalist soldiers and police officers, who committed infrastructure sabotage (Gu 53; Qiu and Xie). Exposure and eradication of spy activities thus represented a significant battleground after 1949—as suggested by the title of one of the earliest fantepian , The Invisible Battlefront ( Wuxing de zhanxian , Yi Ming, 1949), which refers to one of Mao Zedong’s 1949 speeches: “After the enemies with guns have been wiped out, there will still be enemies without guns; they are bound to struggle desperately against us, and we must never regard these enemies lightly” (Mao 364).…”

Overcoming the poverty of Western historical imagination: Alternative analogies for making sense of the South China Sea conflict

“…From the day the shelling began in September 1954, the US was faced with a painful dilemma: stand by its promise to assist the Kuomintang militarily against the PRC, but do so without risking a major war with the Chinese communists. This was no easy feat, not least because of a highly ambitious and stubborn Chiang Kai-shek, who, like Mao, tried to exploit the crises as much as possible to get the US bogged down in the region (Rawnsley, 1999: 94). The contradictory aspirations in US foreign policy lie at the heart of so-called strategic ambiguity , a sophisticated balancing act that constitutes the basis of America’s strategy regarding the PRC and Taiwan even today (Pinsker, 2003).…”

“…Indeed, by 1958, the US had already become reluctant to satisfy all of Chiang’s demands precisely because the administration was able to read what the game was really about for the communists, and it doubted that the Kuomintang would ever be able to retake the mainland anyway. As Dulles explained to Selwyn Lloyd, the British Foreign Secretary, the PRC’s attitude in the conflict seemed to be “essentially political and propaganda rather than military” (Rawnsley, 1999: 90). Once this revealing assessment was made, Chiang’s repeated calls to invade the mainland with heavy US military involvement fell on deaf ears in Washington.…”

‘The Great Movement to Resist America and Assist Korea’: how Beijing sold the Korean War

“…'All our efforts must go into production and rehabilitation,' said Zhou ... No-one in China expected confl ict. (Han, 1994: 223) The recovery of Taiwan, lost to the KMT, was the only foreseeable fl ashpoint; and given that the Truman administration was not prepared to support Chiang Kai-shek's KMT to militarily 'liberate' the mainland (Kerr, 1966: 386-7;Corr, 1974: 72;Cohen, 1980: 23-4;Rawnsley, 1999) -after all the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had on 12 January 1950 defi ned America's defence perimeter in the Asia-Pacifi c region, omitting Taiwan and Korea -the Communist regime prepared for invasion. Again, this was seen as a minor disturbance, an internal matter that would be settled quickly, and on 1 May 1950, Liu Shaoqi said:…”