FOREIGN POLICY : Taiwan Thriving Four Decades After CIA Predicted Its Fall

For more than four decades, Taiwan has managed to survive, prosper and preserve its autonomy under the shadow of one of the world’s largest military forces, China’s People’s Liberation Army.

Ironically, it turns out the United States wrote off the island’s chances as hopeless 43 years ago.

According to files recently released by the CIA, U.S. intelligence officials concluded March 20, 1950, that Mao Tse-tung’s new Communist regime in Beijing would succeed in conquering Taiwan within less than a year.

“Considering these weaknesses of the Nationalist position on Taiwan and the military potentiality of the Chinese Communists, the latter are estimated to possess the capability for carrying out their frequently expressed intention of seizing Taiwan during 1950, and will probably do so during the period of June-December,” the CIA informed the Truman Administration.

The CIA’s prediction underscores the fact that Taiwan’s current autonomous status is the legacy of the Korean War.

(Today, China continues to claim the island is part of its territory, while the Nationalist government in Taipei claimed for years to be the legitimate government for all China.)

Within a week after fighting broke out on the Korean Peninsula on June 25, 1950, President Truman moved the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, effectively blocking any Chinese invasion of Taiwan and, at the same time, blocking the Nationalists from trying to provoke a renewed civil war with the Communists.

Meanwhile, China soon dispatched its troops as volunteers to fight Americans in Korea. And by the time the Korean armistice was signed three years later, U.S. foreign policy had changed; the United States had decided to support and defend Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.

The CIA’s forecast of Taiwan’s collapse was contained in documents made public a few weeks ago by the agency’s new Historical Review Program, in which the agency is slowly beginning to make public a few of its forecasts and estimates from the 1950s. Scholars say the CIA’s forecast of the fall of Taiwan bolsters what was already known about the period.

Historians have long been aware that Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had decided by early 1950 to abandon U.S. support for Chiang’s Nationalist regime on Taiwan. The document made public by the CIA shows the intelligence analysis underlying Truman’s policy.

What might have happened to Taiwan without the Korean War is one of the fascinating what-ifs in the history of America’s Cold War relations with Asia.

Would the United States have forged a good working relationship with China in 1950, more than two decades earlier than it did, perhaps producing an early split between Mao’s Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union?

In one study of the period, Georgetown University historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker wrote that by early 1950, on the eve of the Korean War, Truman and Acheson were preparing to grant diplomatic recognition to Beijing--a move that the war and its aftermath postponed until 1978.

“As Taiwan’s fall neared, the State Department moved to eliminate other obstacles to recognition,” Tucker wrote in her book, “Patterns in the Dust.”

Or would America’s defense needs somehow have worked to keep Taiwan separate from China, even without the Korean War?

A leading Korean War historian, Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago, recently concluded that in the weeks just before shooting broke out, some U.S. policy-makers and intelligence operatives were trying to engineer a coup against Chiang’s Taiwan government by a Nationalist general, Sun Li-jen.

Such a coup would have paved the way for the United States to come to Taiwan’s aid and help defend it against a Chinese invasion.

Ironically, Chinese historians suggest that the CIA may have been wrong. A respected Chinese scholar of U.S. studies, He Di, wrote recently that at the time the CIA was forecasting an imminent Chinese invasion, Mao and his generals were deciding they didn’t have enough military strength to conquer Taiwan that year.