Taiwan must be liberated! We must liberate Taiwan.
―CCP Propaganda Slogan
Our story of an emerging threat begins in the past, where the thorny problem first took root. The PLA’s early strategy for conquering Taiwan was developed over a one-year period. From June 1949 to June 1950, generals under Mao Zedong undertook intensive battle planning and preparations for what was to become the PRC’s formative strategic challenge. An unexpected turn of history kept Mao and his generals from putting their Taiwan invasion plan into action. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and President Truman swiftly decided to save South Korea’s friendly government, while also ordering the U.S. Seventh Fleet to prevent a possible Chinese invasion across the Taiwan Strait.
As a consequence, the PRC aborted the Taiwan invasion, and many of the forces that had been training for the mission were subsequently redeployed to the Sino-Korean border area. In October 1950, China intervened on the side of North Korea, sending a flood of “volunteers” equipped with jungle warfare kits into frigid battles against the United Nations forces led by America. This intervention resulted in what was to become a drawn-out stalemate, both on the Korean Peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait. Operations to conquer Taiwan and end the Chinese Civil War were postponed, but not forgotten.
The knowledge and experience gained in 1949 and 1950 continue informing Chinese war planning to this day. PLA generals still face many of the same basic operational problems that confronted their fathers and grandfathers. They view these past experiences, though forgotten by most in the West, as both relevant and inspirational. Like serious military planners everywhere, they hope that by looking into the past they might find lessons for the future. The director of the Chinese Academy of Military Science’s Historical Research Institute, Senior Colonel Zhao Yiping, has put it the following way:
The entire nation and all the military, especially the units responsible for the mission of conducting Taiwan attack operations, gained and accumulated practical experiences in preparing (from June 1949 to June 1950) and they still get important guidance and workable ideas from that experience that are relevant for preparing for the military struggle against Taiwan in this new period of history.[52]
What were the origins of the Taiwan invasion plan? Who was responsible for its production and execution? Which units were assigned, equipped, and trained for the mission? How did the plan develop over time, and why was it not put into action sooner? Theoretically, what might have happened if there had been no Korean War and this operation had been launched instead? What happened to the PLA after the Korean War,? Why has China’s military yet to prosecute its long cherished battle plan?
The Battle of Taiwan was intended to be the final chapter in the Chinese Civil War, a conflict that had ravaged China from 1927 to 1949, interrupted by the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria and Eastern China during the Second World War. Mao and his communist forces were essentially on the defensive throughout the first two decades of their insurgency. They lurched from one battlefield defeat to the next, husbanding their strength and avoiding any decisive losses. The scene suddenly changed in late 1948 and early 1949, when they took the upper hand against the ROC Army, winning a series of crushing campaigns across northern and central China.
Their victories were unexpected, and like other unforeseen windfalls, served to make them more ambitious. In March 1949, Mao ordered his generals to add Taiwan to the list of strategic objectives to be captured. Previously, the strategy for 1949 had been to seek the “liberation” of nine provinces in China. After the dramatic series of battlefield victories, the list of provinces to seize by the end of the year was expanded to seventeen, including Taiwan. The propaganda slogan: “Taiwan must be liberated! We must liberate Taiwan,” was first published by the Communist Party mouth-piece, Xinhua News, on March 15, 1949.[53]
Events developed rapidly. Within just a few months of the policy shift, PLA troops had captured Nanjing and Shanghai and were marching down the eastern seaboard of China on their way to Fujian Province, across from Taiwan. At this moment, Mao decided to reach out to the star commander of 3rd Field Army, General Su Yu, and his chief of staff, General Zhang Zhen.[54] On June 14, 1949, Mao directed them via telegram to find out whether Taiwan could be taken in a short timeframe and told them to plan a large-scale military operation to capture the island.
In his message, Mao alluded to the possibility of using covert actions to get Nationalist forces to defect at the key moment―something his undercover intelligence officers in Taiwan were already preparing. A week later, Mao sent his war architects another telegram, in which he expounded on the strategic importance of quickly occupying Taiwan. He asserted that if the island was not taken, the ROC military would have a permanent base for its navy and air force, which it would use to hold Shanghai at risk. He told his generals that by capturing Taiwan, they could break free of foreign blockades and gain hundreds of thousands of tons of commercial shipping assets.[55]
General Su and his staff officers wasted little time. They soon acquired maps of the Taiwan Strait and began battle planning. They first looked into the geographical layout and logistical realities of the area. They discovered to their chagrin that the straight-line distance between mainland China and Taiwan was approximately 80 miles at the nearest point, and the locations of ports and other staging areas meant that army groups would have to be transported and supplied across 90 to 140 miles of seawater. The PLA, having almost no navy to speak of, was totally unprepared to execute this type of operation.
Making matters worse, Su discovered that the Nationalists were fortifying a chain of island groups running down the mainland coast. These islands controlled the shipping channels into and out of southeastern China’s natural harbors, bays, and ports―the very places where the assault troops would need to assemble and embark aboard ships. Su concluded that these offshore islands represented a dagger at the throat of his invasion plans. As long as the Nationalists held these islands, they could launch devastating surprise attacks on any armadas he assembled, sinking his ships and drowning his troops before they even had a chance to get underway. The offshore islands represented a formidable defensive perimeter, giving the Nationalists abundant warning time, tactical flexibility, and strategic depth. Su knew he would have to break through. But how to proceed?
Two competing approaches were explored by Su and his top lieutenants for dealing with the offshore islands. The first option called for storming and seizing each in turn. Once they were “liberated,” he could concentrate his main forces on the big island of Taiwan and launch ships across from all the opened staging areas. The second option was to utilize American island-hopping or “leap-frog” tactics developed during World War II. This strategy envisioned units storming Xiamen (then known as Amoy) and Kinmen Island (then known as Quemoy), breaking the center of the offshore island chain. With these critical islands in hand, Su could launch his attack from one central staging area. Troops along the coast could use artillery bombardments and feints to pin down the Nationalist forces garrisoning the other island groups.
In this way, the archipelagos of Zhoushan, Tachen, Matsu, Penghu, and Hainan, could all be circumvented at low cost. This option was founded on the logic that frontal assaults on each of the island citadels would cause unnecessary force attrition and weaken and exhaust offensive units. By attacking Taiwan from Xiamen and Kinmen, the Communists could better concentrate an overwhelming force on the enemy’s center of gravity. Once Taiwan fell, the remaining island garrisons would be isolated and could be expected to collapse in piecemeal fashion, without much of a fight.[56]
Mao and his advisors on the Central Military Commission in Beijing weighed both options and, despite the promised efficacy of island hopping, decided in favor of the strategy to capture each offshore island group. There were several compelling reasons why the more conservative of the two approaches was selected. First, the Nationalists had air superiority and sea control throughout the entire region. This meant that Su’s amphibious ships could be discovered and destroyed in detail as they concentrated on Xiamen. Without an air defense umbrella protecting vulnerable troops as they embarked and sailed, there was simply no way to move an organized force against the prime target. In addition, they worried that, once the invasion campaign began, garrisons on the offshore islands could evacuate their forward positions to reinforce the defense of Taiwan, or they might instead fling themselves against vulnerable mainland ports nearby, cutting frontline PLA troops off from their rear area supply lines. In either event, there would be no way to stop them.
Chiang Kai-shek’s strong air and naval advantage meant that his Nationalist forces could move freely throughout the theater. It would have been impossible to pin them down. Moreover, Su’s officers had zero experience conducting modern amphibious warfare and no dedicated ships for the mission. They could use motorized sailboats and wooden Chinese junks to assault offshore islands close to the mainland, with the dark of night as cover, but small boats were incapable of crossing the notoriously rough waters of the Taiwan Strait. They would need time to build a real navy. In the interim, Mao reasoned that Su and his men could accumulate valuable amphibious combat experience assaulting small island groups.[57]
Once the overall strategy had been decided upon, Su began striking his designated targets. From August to October 1949, elements of the 3rd Field Army stormed Pingtan Island, Xiamen Island, and several smaller islands along the Chinese coast across from Taiwan. Initially, the strategy appeared to be working. Chiang’s forces seemed to be crumbling all over southeastern China. However, in late October, an amphibious attack on the vital stepping-stone of Kinmen was decisively defeated. Nearly ten thousand PLA troops were lost.[58]
Mao, buoyed by victories elsewhere, took the loss in stride and concluded that the local commander had simply underestimated the resolve of the island’s defenders and attacked too hastily to gain the initiative. He advised Su and his generals to be more cautious in the future.[59] Soon thereafter, an assault on Dengbu Island in the Zhoushan Island group was also repulsed, resulting in another heavy loss for the PLA. Stunned by his second major defeat in a matter of weeks, Mao halted further amphibious operations. The early winter months of 1949 were a sobering time for the would-be invaders of Taiwan. They would try again the next year, once the final plan was hammered out.[60]
In the summer of 1949, the blueprint for assaulting Taiwan began to take shape. The first version of the invasion plan was entitled, “Draft Plan for Operations to Liberate Taiwan.” According to official PLA accounts, the plan was comprised of seven sections:
On September 21, 1949, the draft plan was sent to all 3rd Field Army commanders at the division level and above.[62] It envisioned a force of eight corps-level units, totaling between 320,000 and 400,000 soldiers, who would carry out the attack. The 3rd Field Army’s subordinate 9th Army Group, made up of four corps-level units, was to spearhead the amphibious assault. The second wave of the attack was envisioned to include four army corps held in reserve until beachheads had been secured and ports opened for their use. Toward the end of 1949, the number of troops allotted to the campaign was increased. The PLA’s 24th Corps was added to first wave, and an additional three corps added to the second wave, for a total of twelve army corps. The invasion of Taiwan now had approximately 500,000 troops assigned to it.[63]
After the failed attempts to capture Kinmen and Dengbu, Su realized that he had a considerable challenge ahead of him. From mid-December 1949 to mid-January 1950, he assembled his generals in Nanjing for a major war planning conference. Their mission was to study and solve the problems associated with the coming operations. During the conference, they shared their respective lessons learned from the island landings so far undertaken. Seminars were held on sea-to-land operations and amphibious training, the naval and air balance, and airborne (parachute) assaults.
Su had ten years of meteorological data collected and analyzed. He emphasized to his officers the need to familiarize themselves with the tactical layout of the area, the local weather, and the island’s geography. He told them to study public sentiment in Taiwan and look for ways to exploit it to their advantage. He pressed ship captains to study the tides, winds, currents, and clouds, and the locations of fog banks and hidden reefs. He exhorted them to train their crews in navigating the open sea, repairing ships, sailing in formations, and loading and unloading troops for amphibious landings. After the lectures and seminars were over, Su organized exercises on the nearby Yangtze River to experiment with beach obstacle clearing and amphibious landing techniques.[64]
By the end of the Nanjing Conference, the 3rd Field Army’s supreme commander and his staff had developed four basic tenants for the campaign. The first was to focus on the importance of time. The enemy had significantly reduced their defensive lines, making them more concentrated than before. While they were thought to be “hanging by their necks” on the one hand, on the other hand their powers of resistance were believed to have grown. Su told his generals they were not to be rushed in equipping and training their men, since time was on their side. In recent campaigns, lightning-quick strikes had been emphasized to take the initiative and keep the Nationalists off balance. This time they would unfold operations in a deliberate fashion, delaying the invasion as needed in order to make sure assault forces were adequately prepared.[65]
The second tenant was the importance of sufficient amphibious strength. Their overall naval fleet had to be larger than that of the enemy, and the first wave of troops to land on Taiwan had to be sufficiently well equipped to fight for at least three days on their beachheads. The envisioned transport fleet supporting them would be slow given the protracted logistical turn-around times across the Strait, and ships would be exposed to enemy naval and air attacks during daylight hours. The first wave of troops to storm ashore thus had to be able to quickly secure their assigned beachheads without the support of covering fires. If the first wave got mauled and pinned into small pockets along the coast, it would only be a matter of time before enemy counteroffensives drove them back into the sea. Complications were expected to deny the initial landing forces air support and slow reinforcements, so the first wave needed to land a powerful and decisive blow.[66]
The third tenant dealt with problems associated with actually crossing the Strait. Su knew it would take ships a long time to cross, unload on Taiwan, and then turn around and sail back to Chinese ports. He worried that vulnerable transports might suffer grievous losses during the first wave of the assault. It was thus agreed, in principle, not to recycle transports. If at all possible, the second wave of the attack would be equipped with its own seaworthy vessels and not rely upon those used by forces spearheading the offensive.[67]
The fourth tenant was to emphasize modern combined operations, with army, navy, and air force units working together in a coordinated fashion as one team. The 3rd Field Army’s strategists believed the invasion of Taiwan would be an operation the likes of which they had never attempted before. They viewed coordination and centralized command to be particularly important for achieving victory. At the end of the Nanjing Conference, they staged a simple combined operations drill that failed to inspire any confidence. After it was over, Su warned, “If we can’t learn to do this (combined operations) right, it will greatly weaken the power of our every tactic and weapon.”[68]
The problem of command and control for combined amphibious operations continued to be a key issue that they struggled with in the months that followed. On January 17, 1950, at the close of the Nanjing Conference, the chief of staff, General Zhang, summarized the five critical command challenges facing them. These were the difficulty of: (1) leaving the Chinese mainland at high tide and arriving in time to attack Taiwan’s beaches at low tide; (2) sailing across the Strait at maximum possible speeds without disrupting ship formations; (3) landing along a wide front at multiple points and then joining up and concentrating forces to push inland; (4) conducting simultaneous attacks with dispersed forces operating in multiple waves; and (5) using ultra shortwave radio communication channels that could result in each command post unintentionally jamming the others’ radios.[69]
Su and his generals had their work cut out for them, but there was cause for optimism. A critically important political development had occurred during the Nanjing Conference. In January 1950, President Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, publically announced that Taiwan, like South Korea, was now to be considered outside America’s defense perimeter in Asia. Official Washington, and especially the State Department, had lost faith in America’s old ally, Chiang Kai-shek, after he had retreated off the mainland of China. By all appearances, the U.S. government had decided to throw its erstwhile allies to the wolves. This sudden policy shift electrified Chinese strategists working on the Taiwan invasion campaign.[70]
Mao had previously predicted that the United States would probably not intervene on Chiang’s behalf once it was clear that the Communists were going to be victorious on the mainland. His logic was that the more powerful his forces became, the more likely it would be that America’s leaders would abandon their support for a Nationalist government they saw as hopeless. Nonetheless, Mao had told Su to plan for the worst-case scenario: American military intervention. This caveat had made plans for the invasion of Taiwan more academic than practical because there was no possible way the PLA could realistically operate in the Strait once the Seventh Fleet juggernaut arrived from its homeport in the nearby Philippines.[71]
After the American policy shift, however, the Chinese leadership approached the campaign to “liberate” Taiwan with new energy and optimism. This moved Mao and his top advisors to allocate financial resources needed for conquering Taiwan. They intended to grasp the potentially fleeting opportunity and were willing to adjust the national budget radically, if necessary. Su zealously wrote, “In spite of the costs, the center is determined that expenses will not get in the way. So if we have to fight on empty stomachs, we will still fight. Only then can the revolution be completed.”[72]
It was widely accepted in Beijing’s leadership circles that the Taiwan landing campaign would be their most expensive undertaking yet and require them to commit massive national resources. On February 7, 1950, Su reported to Beijing that, “Victory or defeat in modern warfare is not only about political factors, it ultimately hinges upon the overall competition in manpower, equipment, wealth, and weapons ... whoever has the advantage in all will achieve victory.”[73]
Mao, who was in Moscow visiting Stalin, then made a radical move, offering his ally 10 percent of China’s grain harvest in return for armaments needed to conquer Taiwan. In addition to grain shipments, Mao negotiated for an additional loan of US$300 million. As a result, the newly established People’s Republic of China sank deeper into debt and hunger. Cost estimates took into account what was needed for hauling troops, equipment, weapons, vehicles, and horses across the Taiwan Strait. They initially assumed that 500,000 soldiers would have to be transported by ship, with each man occupying a claustrophobic 6.5 square feet of space. They assumed troops would need some 130,540 tons of equipment to sustain them. Based on these logistical realities, they calculated the PLA would need 575 ships, each displacing 1,000 tons or more, and 2,000 small landing craft, which would take the first wave of 60,000 troops ashore.[74] These numbers, already colossal, would continue to grow as plans firmed up.
On April 23, 1949, the precursor to the PLA Navy’s East Sea Fleet was founded. Within a few months, Su initiated emergency measures across southeastern China to build the fleet up as fast as possible and, in August, the fleet was given to his direct command. When Guangzhou fell to communist forces that November, it became the fleet’s temporary homeport until ships could move north to Shanghai. At that time, the fleet was made up of a mere seven captured ROC frigates, nine gunboats, and a ragtag force of 600 landing craft, mostly local fishing boats that had been impounded by the Communists. This tiny fleet was a mere fraction of what was needed.
The Central Military Commission ordered that all civilian fishing boats from the coastal provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Fujian be confiscated, and their crews forcibly pressed into military service. In addition, local shipbuilding was mobilized and large numbers of Soviet vessels were purchased. To avoid being detected and attacked by Chiang’s patrols along the mainland coast, landing craft were loaded onto trains and transported to Hangzhou and Shanghai, where the invasion armadas were forming up.[75]
By March 1950, a total of some 1,300 landing craft of all types had been brought together, but the PLA was still far from reaching its goals. In Moscow, Mao had attempted to convince Stalin to send Soviet naval and air force “volunteers” to China to help invade Taiwan. The Chinese had a battle-tested ground force, but little in the way of sea or air capabilities. Mao proposed a joint PRC-USSR campaign, with China providing the army and Russia the ships and aircraft. Both nations, according to his proposal, would go into combat shoulder-to-shoulder.
Stalin, fearing that direct Soviet involvement would draw his country into World War III with America, rebuffed Mao and instead offered huge arms contracts to keep his Chinese friend placated. These deals included most of the ships and advisors the PLA so desperately needed. However, the promised naval deliveries were slow to arrive. By April 1950, the PLA had met only a sliver of its naval requirements. A meager 38,000 sailors and 92 vessels were in service, and only 52 of the ships were seagoing. Moreover, Su and his staff had increased total operational requirements to nearly 2,300 landing craft, and debates were underway about pushing the number even higher.[76]
Su was keenly aware that Chiang’s forces on Taiwan would have a significant advantage over him in terms of air power. As early as July 1949, PLA intelligence analysts estimated that the Nationalists had 200 to 250 combat aircraft to defend against invasion. To gain local air superiority, the PLA armaments plan called for a flying force of 300 to 350 combat planes. This air fleet was to be divided between fighters and bombers in a two-to-one ratio. In August 1949, the Chinese Communists asked the Soviet Union to sell them the aircraft. At first, Moscow only tentatively agreed. It was not until February 1950, that Mao and Stalin signed a final deal, increasing the total number of aircraft to 586, including 280 fighters and 198 bombers.[77]
The Soviet-built air force, like the navy, was slow to arrive. In May 1950, the PLA Air Force, with the help of Soviet advisors, graduated its first class of flying professionals, a paltry 89 pilots, 20 navigators, and 107 ground support personnel. The 4th Composite Air Brigade was subsequently established in Nanjing with the objective of supporting the coming operation. This flying force was comprised of 30 fighter planes, 30 fighter-bombers, and 20 bombers. Shortly thereafter, the PLA established an airborne unit in Shanghai which was intended to be developed over time into a crack brigade of 5,000 paratroopers, armed with specialized equipment including light fighting vehicles, mortars, artillery, machine guns, and sniper rifles.[78]
Mao and his supreme commander, General Su, had initially hoped to invade Taiwan before the end of 1950, but the tremendous financial pressure associated with the buildup and the need to acquire giant fleets of ships and planes from the Soviets contributed to a decision in the spring of 1950 to push the invasion date back to July 1951. There were other factors at play as well. While the buildup was an important factor, it seems likely that nothing did more to delay the Battle of Taiwan than the Cai Xiaogan spy case.
The PLA needed more than ships, planes, and troops to conquer Taiwan. For the plan to work, the army needed a large network of secret agents buried in Taiwan’s society, whose cardinal mission was to recruit ROC military commanders, convincing them to defect (preferably with their entire units intact) to support communist operations when the landings began. Beyond enticing Nationalist officers to betray their cause, secret agents were needed for fomenting social unrest, organizing riots, and engaging in acts of sabotage all across the island. The effort dated back to April 1946, when the top secret “Taiwan Works Committee” was established in China. Over time, this covert action group developed an extensive web of undercover operatives, who were spun across Taiwan and poised to strike at the key moment.[79]
At the dark heart of these operations was Cai Xiaogan, the spymaster who served as the PLA’s station chief in Taipei. Born in 1908, Cai was a Taiwanese native who had grown up under Japanese colonial rule. In the 1920s, he left Taiwan as a teenager to attend school in Shanghai, apparently because tuition was cheaper there. On campus, far from home, Cai was lonely and confused, making him easy prey for communist recruiting efforts. After a long period of cultivation, Cai joined Mao’s insurgency against the Republic of China government.
Cai’s intellectual potential was readily apparent, and like all the best and the brightest he was assigned to the Red Army’s political department. He excelled at writing and was given a coveted position as a propaganda officer. Eventually he became the only Taiwanese native to survive the Long March. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II), Cai became an expert in interrogating and reprogramming Japanese prisoners and translating and analyzing their documents. Born a Taiwanese subject of Imperial Japan, he was a fluent speaker of Japanese. Over time, Cai’s skills became so renowned that he was asked to write teaching materials to guide other spies who would follow in his footsteps.[80]
In early 1946, just months after the Empire of Japan surrendered to the Allies, Cai arrived in Shanghai and began preparing for his next mission. He had been hand-picked to lead a group of secret operatives against Nationalist forces in Taiwan. In July 1946, he adopted a new identity and infiltrated back into his native island. It took him and his team little time to blend in and establish themselves. Reports indicate that they developed and recruited nearly 70 local agents within their first six months, and by 1948 they controlled an estimated 285 agents.
In 1949, Nationalists forces began a mass exodus to Taiwan, and Cai’s spy network surged in the depressing tumult. In December 1949, undercover operatives under his control reportedly numbered up to 1,300 agents. Additionally, Cai estimated that up to 50,000 civilian assets, almost all of them unwitting, could be mobilized for factory strikes, protest marches, and campus riots. He told his 3rd Field Army superiors that his covert forces would be ready to play their part in eroding support for Chiang’s regime just before the landings started. He recommended that the invasion be launched in April 1950, when the weather would be most favorable for amphibious operations.[81]
In late 1949, Cai had good reason to be optimistic. He had a prize agent, a two-star ROC general, Wu Shi, who had retreated to Taipei from Nanjing. General Wu had been assigned to the MND General Staff Department, a position which gave him access to war plans and other highly sensitive strategic information. Wu met repeatedly with Cai, handing over top secret documents, including military maps showing the locations of landing beaches, troop dispositions, and military bases on Taiwan. Wu also purloined documents on troop deployments and artillery emplacements on the Kinmen and Zhoushan islands. These documents were subsequently smuggled into mainland China through a trusted female officer named Zhu Fengzhi. It is not clear whether or not these intelligence jewels arrived in Nanjing in time for General Su’s winter planning conference. Nonetheless, great damage had been done to the defense of Taiwan.[82]
Unbeknownst to Cai or Wu, a net was slowly closing around them both. In the fall of 1949, Chiang Kai-shek began to consolidate his retreating forces on Taiwan. Having experienced a fatal hemorrhaging of intelligence and the defection of key military units in mainland China, he was determined to eradicate undercover spies who had infested Taiwan. It was a race against time. Chiang needed to clean up his ranks before communist agents could lure away his displaced and demoralized officers. Recognizing the perils facing him, he made counterintelligence and counterespionage operations his emergency government’s top priority, placing the MND Counterintelligence Bureau in charge of the dragnet.
The first breakthrough for Chiang’s spy catchers came in September 1949, when they uncovered a spy ring and underground printing press in the port city of Keelung. As a consequence, they were able to track down the official in charge of PLA underground intelligence work in southern Taiwan. They arrested him in Kaohsiung that November. Cai’s long-cultivated spy network then quickly came unglued, as one secret agent after the next was apprehended and compromised.
By January 1950, Taiwan’s men in black had closed in on Cai himself. Counterintelligence officers discovered his home address in Taipei and quickly moved to arrest him. The arrest came as a surprise to Cai, but did little to knock the wind out of his sails. Cai, himself a seasoned interrogator, knew exactly what to do in jail to turn the tables on his captors. It didn’t take long. After a brief period of interrogation, Cai convinced MND officers that he had defected and would help them. They allowed him to visit a certain phone booth in downtown Taipei, where he promised to take a call luring in his commanding officer. Despite being escorted through the streets by a large contingent of plainclothes officers, Cai was able to make a successful escape and vanish into the city nightlife.
A manhunt ensued over the following weeks, with counterintelligence officers spending their Chinese New Year holidays tracking down Cai. It was the year of the tiger, and they were hunting. The trail led them to his rural hometown of Changhua, in central Taiwan, where they finally found him. After being on the run for weeks, Cai was cold, destitute, filthy, and homeless. His spy ring was broken and he had lost all his friends. As dusk drew across the land, he was surrounded in a rice paddy. Armed counterintelligence officers circled and closed in. Seeing no way to escape, Cai’s last reserves of courage evaporated and he gave himself up without a fight. Although he could have committed suicide, Cai still had too much to live for. He was desperately in love with a young girl who had been captured by counterintelligence officers.[83]
March 1, 1950, was a pivotal date in the history of cross-Strait relations. That evening, after a long interrogation session, Mao’s spymaster in Taiwan cracked under pressure and defected. He became a ROC military officer and, in return, gained his girlfriend’s freedom, a huge sum of gold, and a high-ranking position in the military. To earn his generous reward, Cai fingered General Wu Shi and Agent Zhu Fengzhi, and revealed the identities of his other collaborators, exposing every major communist officer on the island. Cai’s information allowed MND officers to make a clean sweep, clearing out enemy spy rings and underground cells across Taiwan. Life-shaking dramas played out quietly. In Taiwan and on the outer islands, PLA operatives were arrested as they filled out forms in government offices, lounged in military barracks, or attempted to cross military checkpoints.
Chairman Mao and General Su Yu were oblivious to the tectonic shifts taking place underneath their feet. They found out in early June 1950, when the Republic of China government went public with the round up, publishing front page newspaper pictures of Wu Shi, Zhu Fengzhi, and two other subordinate collaborators, both before and after they were executed in downtown Taipei by firing squad. In total, 80 separate communist operations were neutralized and over 400 secret agents were arrested. The survivors fled the island and made desperate escapes back to China.[84] Cai’s once formidable intelligence apparatus on Taiwan had been thoroughly decimated, its demise guided by the hands of its own maker.[85]
News of the Cai Xiaogan spy case, with all its bleak military implications, shook Su, who was in Beijing meeting with Mao and the other party elders when word arrived. He attempted to resign his command, claiming the overriding strategic importance of the Taiwan campaign meant that Mao himself should now serve as supreme commander. Too savvy to take direct ownership of such a high-stakes operation, Mao refused the position. Su then attempted to haggle for an additional four army corps and several paratrooper divisions, something that would have brought the planned invasion force up to 16 total corps, or around 675,000 men.[86] Sources vary on whether or not his request for more troops was granted.[87]
According to its official history, the final weeks of planning for Taiwan “liberation” operations saw the PLA leadership make some critically important changes to their battle plan. Beijing decided to increase the size of the first wave and reduce the size of the reserve force. The Communists had recently wrested Hainan and the Zhoushan Islands from ROC control, but neither operation had resulted in a decisive victory. More than 100,000 Nationalist troops had retreated to Taiwan, giving the island a defense force of over 300,000 ground troops. They were supported by an estimated 250 combat aircraft, 200 navy ships, and many additional troops on Kinmen and Penghu, making the overall defense force 500,000 strong.
Su now knew he would have no deep cover agents in Taiwan to crumble Chiang’s army from within and worried he would also lack numerical superiority. In the face of these unfavorable facts, he pinned his diminishing hopes on the ability of his first wave assault force to punch through Taiwan’s coastal defenses. Su added an option for doubling the number of first wave attackers to the plan, subject to the availability of landing ships, and planned rigorous pre-invasion training as a means of giving the PLA Third Field Army some qualitative advantage.[88]
His final timetable called for nine months of basic amphibious training before the invasion. From July 1950 to March 1951, individual units would practice their roles. Next, they were to undertake two months of combined exercises, where land, sea, and air units would learn to operate as one team. These drills were set for April and May 1951. Su planned to use captured equipment and facilities on Zhoushan to conduct the tri-service exercises. In July 1951, once his force’s skills were sufficiently sharp, they were to marshal in Fujian and make the plunge across the Strait.[89]
As of June 1950, the campaign reportedly envisioned a large-scale invasion of Kinmen in August 1950, followed by a grueling series of battles against the offshore island chain, and then a final mass attack on Taiwan’s northwestern coast. The battle plan had options for assaulting four Taiwanese beaches with 200,000 troops, or eight beaches with 360,000 troops. In either case, a large reserve force would have followed. Second echelon forces were tasked with capitalizing upon whatever beachheads and ports had been secured by the first wave. In addition, some 25,000 paratroopers were to conduct airborne assaults behind enemy lines to catch defenders by surprise, and a small mountain warfare detachment was to be inserted on the east coast of Taiwan to encircle the capital from the rear.
The plan anticipated that the operation would take approximately fifteen days to complete and cost the PLA an estimated 100,000 casualties.[90] However, these planning assumptions were highly optimistic, and the operation was recognized as a high-risk affair. In the afterlight, it is far from clear that the landings, had they occurred, would have borne fruit. It is quite possible that the invasion would have instead turned into a humiliating fiasco, even if the United States had not ultimately intervened to protect the ROC government on Taiwan.
It is unknowable whether or not China could have successfully invaded Taiwan in the summer of 1951 as planned. There exists no means of proving that an event which never occurred would have gone one way or another had it hypothetically occurred. The generally accepted narrative promoted after the fact by Chinese propagandists was that Taiwan’s demoralized and corrupt defenders would have fallen without much of a fight. This narrative claims that if it were not for the outbreak of the Korean War and American intervention, Taiwan would have been decisively defeated and China would be a unified country today. Anything is possible, of course, but this alternate history is questionable in light of information that has emerged in recent years.
Sources indicate that the Taiwan “liberation” plan was more a product of radical ideology than professional military thought. Many of the assumptions used by the Communists, when viewed in hindsight, appear fundamentally unsound. It seems doubtful that the invasion would have resulted in victory if it had been launched as planned. The operation was more likely to have proven to be an enormous disaster, even if the United States had stood by and done nothing. While any assessment of a non-event must be considered highly speculative, there is another Taiwan invasion plan contemporary to the PLA’s that can be used for the purposes of comparison.
During World War II, the United States military conducted intensive planning for the invasion of Taiwan (then called Formosa). In 1943 and 1944, Pentagon war planners considered its capture essential to their long-term plan to invade the Japanese home islands and bring the conflict to a close. On August 19, 1943, the tentative American plan for the invasion of Formosa was briefed to Winston Churchill and the British government at the First Quebec Conference.[91] By early 1944, the planned attack had become the central feature of American strategy in the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur’s return to the Philippines was considered a secondary and supporting campaign.[92]
The plan for the assault on Formosa was code-named “Operation Causeway.” It envisioned an attack force of approximately 300,000 soldiers and 100,000 marines, augmented by 4,000 ships and thousands of planes. It would have been a massive combined assault on Taiwan’s southwestern coast, centered on the large beachfront at what is today Fangliao Township. The total estimated number of American forces engaged would have been half a million.[93]
The basic rule of thumb Pentagon planners used was to ensure that American forces always outnumbered the Imperial Japanese by a minimum three-to-one ratio. However, the dense cities and mountainous geography of Formosa were so highly advantageous to the defender that planners concluded that they would need a five-to-one superiority to secure a victory. American intelligence assessed that Japan could have had up to 100,000 ground forces defending Taiwan by the spring of 1945, when the operation was scheduled. These might have been supported by significant numbers of air force and naval units based on the Japanese home islands and Okinawa. As a result, Operation Causeway was expected to require an assault force of at least 500,000 men. Moreover, it was anticipated that the battle could rage for as long as three months before American control was effected over the island.[94]
The American plan was straight-forward. After the initial landings on southern Formosa, marines and soldiers would fight a long hard slog up the urbanized western coast, slowly working their way up to Taipei and the port of Keelung. Meanwhile, tactical fighter squadrons and bombers would install themselves on captured airfields in the south, around what is today Pingtung and Kaohsiung, and support ground operations. Once the island fell, it would serve as a staging area and springboard for the invasion of Japan. Using data collected from the Battle of Saipan, the Pentagon estimated that the bloody house-to-house, jungle, and mountain fighting on Formosa would take a horrific toll: 150,000 American casualties.[95]
In late 1944, a number of considerations ultimately resulted in the decision to abort Operation Causeway. One of the most important was that American forces in the Pacific lacked needed manpower. Anywhere from 77,000 to 200,000 of the troops needed for the envisioned campaign (depending on the timetables and assumptions one used) were still fighting Germans in Europe. Early versions of the Operation Causeway plan hinged on a swift collapse of the Nazi regime, something that did not materialize nearly as fast as the Pentagon expected. Only after the war in Europe had ended would enough army divisions have been available to fight on Formosa. The extreme violence of the envisioned battle and high casualty estimates also argued against it. As a result of these and other considerations, Taiwan was not invaded. Instead, the United States blockaded the island with ships and submarines, neutralized its airfields and ports with bombers, and executed a “leap-frog” move around it to attack Okinawa.[96]
In light of the historical record, it seems fair to ask: if 500,000 Americans were required to overcome 100,000 defenders on Taiwan in 1945 at a projected cost of three months and 150,000 casualties, how could 500,000 PLA troops have defeated 500,000 defenders in 15 days with only 100,000 casualties in 1951? The American plan had the advantage of being informed by hard-earned amphibious experience, the likes of which the PLA lacked. American forces had vastly superior equipment and training over their foes. Most importantly, American ground forces would have been supported heavily from sea and air. By late 1944, there was no question in any planner’s mind about whether or not the United States had total sea control and air supremacy in the Western Pacific.
In contrast, PLA units in the early 1950s were plagued by shortcomings across the board, including shoddy equipment, food shortages, poor training, morale problems, and an officer illiteracy rate that stood at 67.4 percent.[97] We also now know that communist war planners assumed they would not be able to secure unchallenged control over the Strait in the face of a superior ROC navy and air force. Even more striking, the Communists planned to launch invasion operations during the month of July, right when Taiwan’s annual typhoon season starts. PLA strategists reportedly had good meteorological intelligence in hand, but chose to ignore it, possibly under pressure from Beijing. This case may be considered an example of how radical ideology undermines military professionalism and encourages incompetence, with potentially catastrophic results.
Today there is no way to know what might have occurred if one of the two invasion plans was put into action. However, new information available indicates that China’s planning assumptions were deeply flawed and maybe even suicidal. The PLA’s problems appear especially pronounced when their Taiwan plan is contrasted with the American plan, designed just six years prior. Having evaluated both, it seems likely that the long-running narrative is wrong and Chiang Kai-shek’s army would have repulsed the Chinese Communists if they attacked Taiwan in the early 1950s.
When North Korea attacked South Korea, President Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet, then based at Subic Bay in the Philippines, to sortie and neutralize the Taiwan Strait, keeping the PLA from attacking Taiwan. His official statement included the following lines:
The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war ... in these circumstances the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces.[98]
On June 29, 1950, the aircraft carrier Valley Forge, the heavy cruiser Rochester, and eight destroyers steamed into the Taiwan Strait, conducting a show of force within sight of the Chinese coast. Closely following this, armed American seaplanes deployed to the Penghu Islands, where they began to patrol the area in search of hostile movements toward Taiwan. American submarines sailed from Japan on secret intelligence-gathering missions, approaching the major Chinese ports of Shantou and Xiamen to confirm that no invasion was imminent. In late July 1950, two American cruisers and three destroyers made another show of force. A week later, in August, four destroyers deployed to the port of Keelung. These destroyers, backed up by planes and submarines, were ordered to patrol 16–20 miles off the Chinese coastline, with at least two ships in the Strait at all times to watch for signs of an invasion buildup. This mission was to continue for nearly three decades to come.[99]
The Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) began taking shape. On May 1, 1951, Major General William Chase arrived to head the MAAG. This organization had the mission of providing American training, logistics, and weapons to the ROC military, transforming it into a well-equipped, modern fighting force. In the decades that were to follow, the MAAG’s advisory teams modernized Taiwan’s entire military establishment. At one point, up to 2,347 American personnel were assigned to the mission. Air Force teams built and manned airbases and communications sites in Taipei, Linkou, Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan, and Kangshan. American ships and aircraft were stationed at refitted naval stations in Keelung, Kaohsiung, and Zuoying. U.S. Army and Marine Corps advisors established large training bases in Kaohsiung and Pingtung and organized joint training exercises, including amphibious landing drills on the beaches around Fangliao, the very place they would have assaulted in 1945 if things had gone differently in World War II.[100]
Chiang Kai-shek, safe from any immediate attack on Taiwan, refitted his tattered forces, preparing them to continue the war against his hated communist adversaries. His long-term goal was to defeat Mao Zedong and retake the mainland, but for the moment he was content to settle for fighting up and down the offshore islands. This made Washington nervous; U.S. policy was to contain the communists, not roll them back. In April and October 1952, respectively, Chiang launched two minor raids against Nanri Island in the Taiwan Strait. The PLA retaliated by attacking and seizing Nanpeng Island, breaking the blockade of Shantou harbor. Many American opinion leaders, outraged by Mao’s intervention in Korea, liked what Chiang was trying to do and urged him to light up the entire seaboard.
In February 1953, President Eisenhower made good on his campaign pledge to “unleash Chiang,” and lifted orders that restricted ROC forces from heavy attacks on the Chinese Communists. Chiang responded by ordering another raid, this time with 3,000 troops, who briefly stormed Meizhou Island.[101] Following this operation, Nationalist forces attacked Dongshan Island in July 1953, with a combination of 6,500 marines, paratroopers, and “sea guerillas,” who staged out of Kinmen. Chiang’s amphibious logistics capabilities were still weak and, after an initial breakthrough, the assault lost momentum and turned into a tactical failure. Despite his inability to hold Dongshan, his raiders had nonetheless achieved America’s strategic objective. The landings, in addition to other factors, helped put pressure on Beijing to come to terms on the Korean Peninsula.[102]
On July 27, 1953, PLA representatives signed an armistice in Korea. Soon thereafter, Mao began deploying enormous numbers of troops in southern China across from Taiwan, heightening cross-Strait tensions. To balance against the hostile buildup, Chiang sent an additional 58,000 troops to reinforce Kinmen and placed 15,000 more on Matsu. Mao apparently interpreted the buildup as preparations for an attempt to retake the Chinese mainland and sent even more soldiers to stand guard across from Taiwan. By August 1954, the balance had tipped toward the PLA. Buoyed by a groundswell of troops in Fujian, Mao’s top lieutenant, Zhou Enlai, publically declared that China must invade Taiwan and destroy the Nationalists. A few weeks later, the PLA began shelling Kinmen and Matsu, igniting the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. Not long after, they launched concurrent air and sea attacks on the Dachen Islands, 200 miles north of Taiwan. The objective of the attacks was to break free of the naval blockade the ROC Navy had been enforcing since 1950 in tandem with a tough American trade embargo.[103]
In November 1954, Mao initiated the heavy bombing of the Dachen group. He then concentrated amphibious forces on the northernmost ROC-held island base of Yijiangshan, located nearby. Using new Soviet equipment and tactics, the PLA executed an overwhelming assault on the island, which fell on January 18, 1955. In response, Chiang pressed for American naval and air support for his troops on the Dachens. Reinforcements arrived, but the islands were far from Taiwan, making them vulnerable and strategically unimportant. The United States was reluctant to commit the large naval forces that were needed for defending them over the long term. Facing Mao’s giant invasion force which had assembled close by, Chiang reluctantly agreed to retreat and abandon the entire coast of Zhejiang Province, where he had grown up, to his archenemy.
On February 8, 1955, Operation King Kong, the evacuation of the Dachens, was launched. American marines landed on the islands and helped ROC commanders organize an evacuation effort, safely transporting over 15,000 civilians, 11,000 troops, 125 vehicles, and 165 artillery pieces off the remote islands with no casualties. The Seventh Fleet supported Operation King Kong with an enormous task force of 70 warships, centered on seven aircraft carriers. Mao had hoped attacks on the Dachens would drive Washington and Taipei apart. Instead, the crisis and successful evacuation operation strengthened the relationship.
Washington signed a mutual defense treaty with Taipei in December 1954, and the Senate ratified the alliance in February. On March 3, 1955, the final ratification documents were formally exchanged. President Eisenhower concurrently requested permission from Congress to exercise special powers in the defense of Taiwan. This was granted in the form of the Formosa Resolution. Beijing, under mounting pressure from Moscow, began deescalating the fiery standoff. On May 1, 1955, the PLA stopped shelling Kinmen. Three months later, Mao released eleven captured American airmen, ending the 1954–1955 Taiwan Strait Crisis.[104]
Tensions remained high across the Strait. The PLA stationed an estimated 750,000 troops across from Taiwan, but its weak naval arm could do little to break free of the blockade, which continued to restrict China’s ability to trade with countries other than the Soviet Union. As a result of Taiwan’s siege warfare, port operations all along China’s seaboard were paralyzed. ROC Navy patrols used Kinmen and Matsu as bases from which they went out to sink communist vessels whenever they found them nearby and detained foreign trade ships on their way to or from China. In addition, the offshore islands were used to stage commando raids and to insert intelligence operatives into the mainland. Beijing worried these joint U.S.-ROC operations could be a precursor to a Nationalist-led invasion of Fujian, with Kinmen and Matsu being used as the stepping stones.[105]
On August 23, 1958, the simmering waters boiled over again. The PLA launched a surprise attack, ferociously shelling Kinmen with an enormous barrage of forty thousand shells during the opening phase of bombardment alone. Mao intended to test America’s bottom line, seeing if the threat of all-out war could get Washington to split with its new Cold War ally. He also hoped that by first softening up and then seizing Kinmen, the PLA could demoralize Nationalist forces stationed in Taiwan. The plan backfired. Chiang’s forces had already turned Kinmen into a rabbit warren of tunnels and bunkers, and his troops were able to weather the onslaught of shells with surprisingly few casualties. The PLA’s amphibious landing attempt on the tiny nearby island of (Dongding) failed, and artillery firepower directed against Matsu proved similarly ineffectual.[106]
The Seventh Fleet arrived on the scene of battle with four imposing aircraft carriers and a formidable host of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and amphibious ships. In a remarkable move, the fleet was equipped with tactical nuclear bombs, intended to be released in the event of a human-wave invasion of Kinmen, a tactic previously seen in Korea. Not only had Mao completely misjudged the resolve of the Americans, he also shocked his Soviet allies. Moscow was horrified by Mao’s provocative attacks and put pressure on him to back down.
Mao ignored the changing facts on the ground and continued shelling. Escalating the crisis, he ordered torpedo boats and artillery to attack Chiang’s resupply ships going to Kinmen. To get payback, Chiang ordered the ROC Air Force to draw up plans for large-scale strikes against targets on the mainland. On September 7, 1958, the U.S. Navy began to escort Nationalist convoy ships to Kinmen, protecting them with cruisers and destroyers. This obviated the immediate need for air strikes which could have escalated the conflict. From September 18th to 20th, the Americans clandestinely rolled ashore six giant 8-inch artillery guns capable of firing tactical nuclear rounds that could flatten any invading fleet. The nuclear shells were kept aboard nearby ships under control of American forces. But even with conventional rounds, the new mega artillery gave the frontline garrison a much needed boost in terms of both firepower and morale.
Five days later, a formation of American-made F-86 Sabres, flown by ROC fighter pilots, mauled a flight of PLA MiG-17 jets, splashing four of them into the ocean with the revolutionary new Sidewinder missile. Over the coming days, Nationalist pilots tallied up 33 enemy kills in return for the loss of four of their own. Mao finally began to realize his bluff had been called. On October 6, he directed his forces to back down and announced a cease-fire. To save face, the PLA continued to shell Kinmen on odd-numbered days for the next twenty years. The 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis was over, and Taiwan’s offshore island bases remained undefeated.
Mao’s Taiwan Strait gambits produced a series of tactical setbacks and resulted in unrequited strategic losses. He failed to drive a wedge between Washington and Taipei and instead pushed them closer together. The United States extended its nuclear umbrella over Taiwan, built up Chiang’s backward force into a high-caliber professional military machine, and gave his government a powerful seat at the United Nations. In the years and decades ahead, the United States nurtured Taiwan, helping it grow from a devastated wartime base of emergency operations into a stable and increasingly responsible world player. Taiwan flourished economically and then politically, becoming a miracle of the modern, post-war world.[107]
While Mao inadvertently strengthened his old nemesis on Taiwan, he also bit hard into the Soviet hand that had long fed him. The Sino-Soviet split, worsened in part by Beijing’s frightfully provocative behavior in the Taiwan Strait, began as a series of small ideological fissures in the mid-1950s. Over time, these fissures grew and developed into ever larger cracks. Finally, in 1960, the USSR angrily withdrew all its technicians and experts from China. Despite the growing spiral of deterioration, Mao indulged in radical tirades against the Soviets and channeled his unbridled hubris into aggressive and irrational acts against his former benefactor. In 1962, the two communist powers broke diplomatic relations and became openly hostile. The dark shadow of nuclear war and possible Soviet invasion spread over China. Facing this strategic peril, the PLA began to focus on protecting China’s long northern border. The Taiwan Strait standoff continued, but as a secondary theater of less consequence.
Mao’s failures at home and abroad prevented the PLA from posing a serious threat to Taiwan. His policies resulted in a horrific famine, lasting from 1958 to 1962, with the starvation compounded by domestic terror tactics and systematic violence in the collective farms he had masterminded. The outcome was tens of millions of innocent deaths. From 1966 to 1976, Mao purged and persecuted enormous numbers of CCP officials and systematically turned social groups against each other, all while cultivating a fanatical cult of personality around himself. The chaos and violence Mao orchestrated up until his death in 1976 represented an economic and above all human disaster that has no easy parallel in history.[108]
Taiwan’s security was bolstered by Beijing’s distraction and dysfunction. The PLA remained a low-quality military opponent centered on illiterate peasants whose main focus was the USSR, against whom they planned to fight a ghastly war of attrition. Consequently, the PLA developed little in the way of amphibious capability and had no way of taking control of the air and seas around Taiwan. In 1979, when President Jimmy Carter played the “China Card” against the USSR and switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, Taiwan suffered an earth-shaking strategic loss. From a purely military perspective, however, the balance was still unquestionably favorable to Taiwan and would remain that way for a long time to come. The PLA continued to focus on the danger of war with the Soviet Union, and events at home and abroad shook the Chinese military establishment, including the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the startling success of the American-led Operation Desert Storm.[109]
In the early 1990s, Taiwan found itself in China’s gun sights again. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the PRC’s main strategic objective once more became to liberate its “wayward province.” After Taiwan’s 1992 parliamentary elections, this mission appeared especially urgent to Beijing. Taiwan was transitioning to a democracy and becoming what might naturally be perceived by the post Cold War world as a legitimate, independent country. Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui, broke with the long-held KMT position and declared that his government no longer claimed to represent all of China. In his view, the Chinese Civil War was over and Taiwan was now the ROC, and the ROC was Taiwan. The communist regime in Beijing was still illegitimate, but Taiwan no longer had any ambition to claim sovereignty over the mainland.[110]
President Lee’s position, basically an indirect declaration of independence, infuriated China’s leaders. Making matters worse for them, Taiwan planned to hold its first free and fair presidential elections under American tutelage. In June 1995, President Lee went to his alma mater, Cornell University, to give a speech and share Taiwan’s democracy plans with his friends. In reaction, the Chinese conducted a series of ballistic missile tests in July, angrily firing rockets into the waters north of Keelung. The PLA also mobilized army units in Fujian Province and conducted live-fire naval exercises in August, accompanied by further missile firings. In November, the PLA followed through by carrying out a highly publicized amphibious assault drill.[111]
These military acts were all part of a psychological warfare operation whose objective appears to have been to pressure President Lee to call off the American-style election. If that failed, the secondary objective seems to have been to ensure that a pro-China candidate was elected instead of Lee. In March 1996, just before Taiwan’s elections, the PLA fired ballistic missiles into Taiwan’s territorial waters off the ports of Keelung and Kaohsiung, and implicitly threatened to turn a planned drill into a real invasion.[112]
President Lee knew that China’s threats were completely empty. While human-wave attacks could have been conducted against Kinmen and Matsu, the Chinese military had no actual ability to cross the Strait and land on Taiwan. Its amphibious lift situation was abysmal, and its units were poorly led, trained, and equipped. Lee, thanks to his spies in Chinese military circles, had superb intelligence on what was going on inside China and knew that Taiwan fielded a far superior ground force, air force, and navy.[113]
The United States played a pivotal role throughout the crisis. President Bill Clinton responded to Chinese provocations with alacrity, staging a show of American military might in the form of two carrier battle groups that were sent to international waters near Taiwan. The American demonstration of resolve and commitment to democracy was decisive. China deescalated the crisis, and Taiwan’s elections went ahead as planned. President Lee, bolstered by public support for his courageous policies, saw a surge at the polls and won the elections decisively. The 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis ended on a high note, but peace and stability were far from secure.[114]
In the following years, China began to sharply ramp up military spending on equipment and training. New advanced weapons systems and technologies poured in from Russia. The PLA was downsized and restructured to make it more lethal and light. Units staged increasingly large and sophisticated military exercises. Previously decrepit and blunt, the PLA grew more muscular and sharp, narrowing the gap with the ROC military.[115] Two decades after the missile crisis, the amphibious threat facing Taiwan now appears increasingly credible. Although the PLA continues to have many endemic weaknesses and probably still cannot execute a major landing operation, it is already a dangerous fighting force.[116]
The probability appears to be growing that at some point in the 2020s China’s military could be ready to launch a cross-Strait invasion. How might we know if that was about to happen?