If we do not recognize that Taiwan is or vital importance to Japan, we are someday going to be very surprised and outraged by the ultimate Japanese reaction to the situation. Failure to support Taiwan independence will be seen by Japan as the final episode in the collapse of U.S. power in East Asia and the Western Pacific.
On 19 October 1949, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then publisher of The New York Times, wrote to General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Far East Commander in Tokyo, seeking guidance for a forthcoming editorial on the future of what was then Formosa.1 “Would we be warranted,” Mr. Sulzberger asked, “in putting American troops [on the island] for preserving the status quo [i.e., keeping the island out of the hands of the Chinese Communists]—or whether Japanese troops might not be organized [to reoccupy the island] under American supervision?”
Japan had taken control of the island in 1895, after defeating China in the first of the series of wars that would lead to the Pacific phase of World War II. In the Cairo Declaration of 1 December 1943—one of the “summit” conferences by which the Allies worked out war aims—the United States had pledged to restore Formosa to the Republic of China. That pledge was honored in 1945. By 1949, all that was left of that Nationalist Republic of China was on Formosa, renamed by both the Nationalists and the Communists as Taiwan.
In his 28 October reply to Mr. Sulzberger, MacArthur chose not to discuss the merits of reinstalling a Japanese garrison on the island, nor did he think it necessary to send Americans other than as a military mission. “Our Pacific victory,” MacArthur wrote, “[shifted] our strategic frontier to embrace the entire Pacific Ocean, which has become a vast moat to protect us as long as we hold it. . . . We control it to the shores of Asia by a chain of islands extending in an arc from the Aleutians to the Mariannas. . . . The fall of Formosa to the Communists . . . would seriously breach this defense line and place a potentially hostile force on our flanks, establishing a dangerous wedge between Okinawa and the Philippines.” That paragraph articulated a strategic concept that had been evolving since U.S. trade began with East Asia in the latter part of the 18th century. In a dispatch to the State Department on 12 February 1857, the first U.S. consul in Canton, Dr. Peter Parker, wrote, “The subject of Formosa is becoming one of great interest to a number of our enterprising fellow citizens.” In the interests of “humanity, civilization, navigation and commerce,” he urged seizure of the island by the United States.2
Whether by coincidence or design, Parker’s dispatch supported an identical assessment by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, based on the report of officers Perry had sent to look at the island.3 Another second—especially significant as concerns current strategic relationships in East Asia—came from the first U.S. diplomatic representative to Japan, Townsend Harris. Harris urged support for the Parker proposal because “Formosa [is] in the direct route of commerce between China and California and Japan. [It] should be protected by the United States of America.”4 By inference, Parker and Perry were telling the State Department that Formosa was up for grabs. Harris recognized that there was, in fact, a Chinese claim to the island and proposed purchase rather than outright occupation.
That Chinese claim was less a claim than a vague consciousness that the island existed.5 Indeed, the first settlers were not Chinese, but Proto Malaysians, their descendants still a part of the island’s population today. The first Chinese settlers were freebooters and refugees from various mainland upheavals, very much like the original settlers of North America. China, however, exercised nothing like the degree of control England exercised over its American malcontents. It was not until 1886 that an expiring Manchu dynasty formally asserted control by designating Taiwan as a province. It was the Portuguese, in 1590, who gave the island the name Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island). It was the Dutch who gave the island its first government, beginning in 1624.
The first distinctly “Chinese” ruler of the island was, also, a product of this crossroads ethnic mix, and a rebel against the mainland regime. A half-Japanese pirate known to history as Koxinga, he overthrew the Dutch in 1661, not on behalf of China, but on behalf of himself as self-proclaimed king of an independent country. It was not until the 1680s that the mainland Ching dynasty was able to assert China’s first-ever firm claim to the island.
The notion of independence did not die with that assertion of Chinese control. Except for a few decades, the island enjoyed a quasi-independent status as the Ching dynasty decayed throughout the following 200 years. No sooner did the Chings collapse under the Japanese onslaught in 1895 than a new attempt was made by the island’s population to assert independence.
Japan quickly imposed control.
One of the reasons it sought to do so has an important bearing on current strategic relationships in East Asia. Until the 1870s, Japan’s control over the Ryukyus was as amorphous as China’s over Taiwan. Indeed, China asserted a firmer claim over the southern Ryukyus than it asserted over Formosa/Taiwan; the Ryukyus chieftains had paid tribute to China until very recent times. Meiji Japan sought to resolve the dispute by exacting redress from China for the murder of some Ryukyu islanders on Formosa. Interestingly, China denied that it had any responsibility whatever for the affairs of Formosa.
In a sense, therefore, the Treaty of Shimonoseki by which Japan gained control of Formosa in 1895 merely ratified the fact that China exercised no practical control of the island.
Senior Japanese strategic thinkers claim that the Japanese colonial rule over what they prefer to call Formosa, 1895-1945, was considerably more benign than was the case elsewhere, and that claim is supported by Western historians.6 Reform and improvement of agriculture on the island and related development of industrial and transportation infrastructure set the stage for the spectacular economic development of the past 40 years. The same can be said for Japanese-initiated improvements in health and education, the latter of which produced a bilingual middle class ideally suited to interact with post-Korean War Japanese economic expansion.
Some long-term American students of the island believe that the Japanese influence began, not in 1895, but with Koxinga in the 17th century and that the Sino-Japanese chief is seen by the emergent independence movement as personification of the island’s proper role as an independent intermediary between China and Japan. This Japanese connection also should be seen as the focal point of U.S. interests in the future of Taiwan.
Americans have great difficulty in looking at a strategic problem from any point of view but their own. Thus, it went unnoticed in the United States that immediately following the U.S. opening to Communist China in 1972, 100 members of the Japanese Parliament formed a Parliamentary League of Friendship “to foster better relations between Japan and Taiwan.”7 When, later, the United States announced its decision to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the Japanese newspaper Sankei editorialized, “We grieve at this decision. ... It is a grave breach of faith against an Asian ally. . . . The safety of Taiwan is directly connected with the safety of Japan.”8 In the same week, an unnamed Japan Defense Agency official told a Yomiuri reporter that “stable navigation through the Taiwan Straits is absolutely indispensable for our country’s security.”9
Our diplomats and journalists have no more been able to understand what Sankei and that anonymous Defense Agency official were trying to convey than an earlier generation of U.S. diplomats and journalists were able to understand the certain consequences of imposing an embargo on Imperial Japan in 1940.
What U.S. diplomacy did do was “smoke up” the Taiwan issue to a degree that the Japanese found tolerable. Asked by a Japanese reporter to explain how reopening of the U.S. relationship with mainland China in 1972 would affect the future of Taiwan, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Marshall Green replied, “All that we can say is that the situation will be settled peacefully by the people living on either side of the Taiwan Strait.”10
“In other words,” the reporter replied, “the [government on Taiwan and the government in Beijing] settling it?”
“That is not what I said, you know,” Green replied. “I am certainly trying to be extremely careful in my choice of words. 1 do not want it rephrased carelessly.”
To the Japanese that meant an endless status quo, understood but not expressed as a de facto independent Taiwan."
Inevitably, Green’s careful words have been “rephrased carelessly” by an American press incapable of handling such nuances. And that careless rephrasing has been expertly manipulated by Beijing so that, today, scarcely any U.S. reporter, columnist, or editorialist fails to give obeisance to “One China,” defined as ultimate mainland control of Taiwan. Yet as Dennis Van Vranken Hickey points out in his 1994 history and analysis of the U.S.-Taiwan-Peoples Republic of China relationship, all official U.S. documents from 1972 to the present “reveal that the United States has consistently stated only that it acknowledges [Hickey’s emphasis] the PRC’s position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.”12
The bellicose Chinese behavior toward Taiwan in the early months of 1996 has blown away the smoke.
If we do not recognize that Taiwan is of vital importance to Japan in the most literal sense of that term, we are someday going to be very nearly as surprised and outraged by the ultimate Japanese adjustment to the situation as we were on 7 December 1941. Put bluntly, failure of the United States to support de facto and ultimately de jure Taiwan independence will be seen by Japan, and not only by Japan, as the final episode in the collapse of U.S. power in East Asia and the Western Pacific, dating from the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975.
Japan has the capacity to deploy fairly quickly a fleet of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. Seen from the Japanese point of view, that is likely to be the only plausible choice in a situation in which the United States is seen as having abandoned its hard-won strategic position in East Asia. In a stunning departure from the elaborately nuanced warnings of the past. Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the 19 June 1996 New York Times as saying that “without the security partnership with Washington, Japan might fully rearm and acquire nuclear weapons.” Almost as much as Korea, and more than the “Northern Territories” (Kurile Islands), the status of Taiwan is one of the crucial underpinnings of that security relationship.
The geography underlying General MacArthur’s assessment of the U.S. position in the Pacific has not changed. Political and economic development along the entire periphery of East Asia, now including Siberia, has been greatly in our favor. But that pattern of development has been possible only because of a visible, powerful U.S. military presence. It may be possible to reduce some of the more visible aspects of the U.S. presence, such as on Okinawa and eventually in Korea, but there must be an end to the ambiguity with regard to Taiwan.
Charged with the defense of Japan in June 1950, the United States responded to the North Korean attack on South Korea exactly as the Japanese Imperial General Staff would have done—we put an army into Korea and we sent a fleet to ensure that Taiwan would not be used as a base to reassert Chinese influence against Japan’s southern flank. Indeed, MacArthur was thinking in Japanese terms when he wrote that “the fall of Formosa . . . would . . . place a potentially hostile force on our flanks.”
As to how seriously we should take the current Chinese claims to control of Taiwan as an essential element of the Chinese national identity, we need to reflect on the fact that, in 1936, Mao Tse-tung told U.S. journalist Edgar Snow that Taiwan should become independent.13 Did Mao see an independent Taiwan as an important means to neutralize the Sino-Japanese rivalry that had led to disaster? Whether he did or not, that is exactly the role that an independent Taiwan can play as a crucial element of long-term stability along the periphery of Asia, all the way from the Indian Ocean to the North Pole.
1 Copies of the correspondence were found among the papers bequeathed to Yale University by the late Hanson W. Baldwin, former military editor of the Times.
2 Quoted by Richard O’Connor in Pacific Destiny (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), p. 108.
3 W. G. Goddard, Formosa: A Study in Chinese History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1966), p. 116.
4 Ibid.
5 Before the 17th century, Taiwan is barely mentioned in Chinese history.’’ Collier's Encyclopedia, vol. 22, p. 39. No Western historian disputes that statement, or the summary of the island's history presented here.
6 The Japanese strategic assessment here is based on interviews in Washington and Japan with LGen. Yoshio Takenaka, initially as Defense Attaché in Washington and later as Commandant of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Staff College, Tokyo, supported by additional interviews and continuing contacts with senior Japanese officers, academicians, and journalists from 1976 to the present.
7 U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, Daily Summary of the Japanese Press, 20-22 June 1973, p. 9.
8 Ibid., 23-26 December 1978. p. 1.
9 Ibid., p. 12.
10 U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, Summary of Selected Magazines, February 1973. p. 14. Interview with Marshall Green by Kaoru Nakamaru of Jiyu.
11 “Status quo" was the universal response throughout the past 20 years from all Japanese contacts in and out of government to the question, “What do you think should be the future status of Taiwan/Formosa?"
12 Dissertation. University Microfilms International, p. 66; later published by Praeger. Westport. CT, 1994.
13 Quoted by Edward E. Rice in “The Sino-U.S. Ddtente: How Durable?” Asian Suney. vol 13. no. 7, July-December 1973, p. 810.
Colonel Kennedy served as an enlisted man in Japan and China, 1946-47, and as an intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command, 1953-55. From 1967 to 1984 he served as a civilian Northeast Asia specialist with the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. He is author of The Chinese War Machine (London: Salamander, 1981). His articles on national strategy and military affairs have appeared in all major U.S. newspapers.