EACH OF ASIA’S FAULT LINES CAN BE SOURCED BACK TO AN UNRESOLVED conflict (if not on paper, certainly in the minds of the participants), ranging from the Korean War, which ended in stalemate in 1953, to the Sino-Indian War of 1962, to Beijing’s inability to reunite with what it sees as its breakaway province of Taiwan.
To understand why President Xi Jinping deployed military engineers to build island bases hundreds of miles from its coastline, we need to grasp each of these bits of Chinese modern history, of which Taiwan is the most emotive.
In 1949, Mao Zedong’s communist forces defeated the US-backed nationalist government, which fled to Taiwan. Taiwan island itself is more than a hundred miles from the Chinese mainland, but the nationalists kept control of several islands much closer, some barely a mile from the mainland. Mao’s victory, almost seventy years before the South China Sea became a global flashpoint, marked the resumption of China’s attempt to secure its territory with an outer wall of defense. At the top of Beijing’s list back then was Taiwan itself, whose loss was seen as unfinished business and remains so today. Taiwan has now become a wealthy, democratic, self-governing entity, but China continues to threaten military action should it ever declare full, sovereign independence.
In October 1949, from the entrance of the fifteenth-century Forbidden City overlooking Tiananmen Square, forty-six-year old Mao announced the creation of a new nation. He appeared on the terrace of the ornate Gate of Heavenly Peace with its decorative orange and red curving roofs, figurative lions outside to ward off evil spirits. The choice of venue was important. As a communist, he could have made an address from a farm or a factory. But by choosing the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he was stating that he was the new emperor of the Middle Kingdom who ruled with a mandate from heaven. In many ways, this image contradicted Mao’s communist and atheistic ideology. But he understood China’s history and how the need for a tough decisive leader was deeply entrenched in its culture.
Yet despite controlling a country more than three thousand miles wide, bigger than India or even the United States, Mao’s forces had failed to capture these several outlying islands. Just three weeks after declaring victory on the mainland, he dispatched his exhausted troops to the island of Kinmen, barely a mile from the Chinese mainland, that was still held by nationalist forces. The hand-to-hand fighting around the northern village of Guningtou was brutal, with nationalist tank crews so low on ammunition that they ended up ramming straight into Chinese soldiers, crushing them under the tanks’ treads. Finally, Mao’s mainland troops were defeated. The Battle of Guningtou was fought over three days, October 25–27, 1949; it was essentially Asia’s first hot battle of the Cold War, and China lost.
Mao continued to mop up with a few skirmishes, but there was no more hard fighting. In May 1950 he took Hainan in the south, followed by Zhoushan in the east. But Kinmen continued to elude him, together with the smaller Lieyu, or Lesser Kinmen; Dadan; Erdan; Matsu, farther to the north; the Yijiangshan Islands; and others that on clear days loomed tantalizingly within sight of the communist-controlled mainland. The biggest prize of all lay 160 miles to the east: the large mountainous island of Taiwan.
All this unfolded against a wider backdrop of disarray and the restructuring of the global order. The Allies had won the Second World War; Germany and Japan lay in rubble. The United States and the Soviet Union squared off as the new superpowers. Britain and Europe shed colonies while clinging to their fading influence. The big Asian beasts, China and India, grappled with new freedoms. This was a time for the underdog to rise up, left against right, poor against rich, communism against capitalism, colonized against colonizer. Many of the fault lines that appeared then are alive today.
Britain had left India in August 1947, partitioning it from Pakistan. After three wars and more than a million dead in communal violence, India and Pakistan are still fighting. In January 1948, Britain gave independence to Burma, now Myanmar, which today is clawing its way out of years of military dictatorship, or perhaps toward another one. A month later, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, won independence and from the 1980s went on to suffer a quarter century of civil war. In May 1948, Britain’s mandate in Palestine ended with the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in the Middle East; there is no calm there either. The Netherlands pulled out of Indonesia in 1946, and the United States out of the Philippines, while France battled independence movements in its Indochina territories of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Over the following decades this would embroil America in the first war it would ever lose.
Having failed to regain Taiwan, Mao targeted Tibet—which, like Manchuria, Mongolia and Xinjiang, he planned to control as a buffer state. In Tibet’s case, the threat came from India. Mao invaded in October 1950, forcing a surrender that accepted Chinese sovereignty, but allowed Tibetan autonomy with the Dalai Lama, then only fifteen years old, as the Buddhist spiritual leader. There followed an uneasy quiet, which would erupt nine years later when the Dalai Lama fled to India. In the interim, Mao turned his attention toward the Korean Peninsula, where he shared an interest with the Soviet Union.
Like Germany at the end of the Second World War, Korea had been divided; Americans controlled the south and the Soviet Union the north, which was run by an ambitious dictator, Kim Il-sung, who harbored ambitions to take back control of the whole country. If he succeeded, it would be a victory for the spread of communism. In June 1950 Moscow gave Kim the green light to move, and if Taiwan’s Kinmen was the arena for Cold War’s first hot battle, then the Korean peninsula became the theater for its first full-blown proxy conflict.
America used the United Nations, then less than five years old, to authorize a US-led coalition force to repel the North Korean offensive, which it did. The American military soon controlled most of the north, unnerving Joseph Stalin, who asked for Mao’s help. Mao was reluctant—he had enough on his plate with Taiwan and Tibet—but he also needed to keep in with Stalin. American and Chinese troops fought brutally, face to face, often in close-quarter combat; so equally matched were they that it took more than two years of further war before both sides accepted a stalemate. Fighting ended on July 27, 1953, but with a cease-fire, not a truce, and the hostile atmosphere continues today.
WITH THE KOREAN WAR over, China returned its attention to the far more heartfelt problem of Taiwan, this time bringing the world to a brink of a nuclear war. To forfeit North Korea would have been a strategic setback, but to lose Taiwan would be unconscionable, and this patriotic sentiment was carried by both Mao and the defeated nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek, now ensconced in the capital, Taipei. Chiang nurtured a similar dream of taking back Beijing. He refused to unpack cartons of priceless treasures hauled over from the mainland on the grounds that they would soon be returned to their rightful home. They are still stored in the air-conditioned and humidity-controlled vaults of the Taiwan National Museum, so numerous that they are only displayed in rotation.
Although the island of Taiwan itself is far from the Chinese coastline, Kinmen—where Mao’s troops had been defeated four years earlier—is within easy artillery range. Only twenty miles long and fifteen wide, Kinmen is a low-lying island whose shape resembles a dragon’s tongue. During the 1950s the island suffered intensive artillery bombardment to such an extent that in 1958 the United States drew up plans for nuclear strikes along China’s eastern coastline. It had not used nuclear weapons in the Korean War because it did not have enough. But, by 1958, its stockpiles were secure. As with South Korea, America viewed any collapse of Taiwan as a trigger that would open the Asia-Pacific region to the control of Soviet communism.
Unbeknownst to the general public, in August and September 1958 China, Russia, and the United States became one presidential signature away from nuclear conflict.6 By mid-August 1958 the Pentagon had moved five Strategic Air Command B-47 bombers to the region to carry out nuclear attacks on the Chinese mainland with ten to fifteen kiloton bombs, each with a similar explosive force as was used on Hiroshima. The plan was to strike airfields around the main coastal city of Xiamen. As Chinese artillery pulverized Kinmen as if in preparation for an invasion, US Air Force headquarters sent a message to the Pacific Command in Hawaii signaling that it should prepare for the nuclear strike. “Assuming presidential approval, any Communist assault upon the offshore islands would trigger immediate nuclear retaliation,” the message said.7
Then Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union intervened warning that if the United States attacked China there would be a nuclear retaliation: an attack on China would be considered an attack on the Soviet Union. The prospect of war with the Soviet Union unfolded a far more terrifying scenario than carrying out strikes against a nonnuclear China. Khrushchev followed up with a second letter underlining the risk of a third world war.8
The brinkmanship played out among these three global powers foreshadowed the much better-known Cuban Missile Crisis four years later, and only came to light when documents were declassified in 2008.9 President Eisenhower overruled his military commanders and refused to approve a nuclear strike, citing the widespread casualties it would cause.
China did not invade, but the islanders of Kinmen lived in a state of siege. US warships in international waters loaded supplies onto high-speed Taiwanese craft that sped back and forth, often under Chinese fire. Artillery barrages continued on and off for another twenty years until January 1, 1979, when the current One China policy came into force whereby no government, nor the UN nor many international institutions, could recognize both Beijing and Taipei. For long spells China would send over artillery shells stuffed not with shrapnel and explosives but with propaganda flyers containing quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book and proclaiming how Chinese families were so much better off, with shiny bicycles and color televisions.
But Taiwan remains a point of risk that routinely flares up. On December 2, 2016, while still president-elect and spurred on by hawkish advisers, Donald Trump took a congratulatory phone call from the new Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, smashing the protocol that had kept peace there for more than forty years. Moments later, in one of his famous tweets, Trump questioned the bedrock of the One China policy itself, although later, in April 2017, when meeting President Xi at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump switched back again. Both China and Taiwan constantly update their detailed plans for war, and Trump’s actions indicated how swiftly something so crucial could fall apart. Later that year, he went further during his visit to Asia when he complimented Xi for being “a very special man” to whom Trump had an “incredibly warm” feeling. Less than a month earlier, at the Communist Party’s 19th Congress, Xi had been anointed China’s most powerful leader since Mao, presiding over an increasingly rigid authoritarian regime.
“Such scenes of an American president kowtowing in China to a Chinese president sent chills down the spines of Asia experts and United States allies who have relied on America to balance and sometimes counter an increasingly assertive China,” wrote Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Adviser in a New York Times articles entitled ‘Trump is Making China Great Again’. “The Chinese leadership played President Trump like a fiddle, catering to his insatiable ego and substituting pomp and circumstance for substance.”
Trump’s flip-flopping quickly proved disruptive as governments questioned US commitment to shoring up Asia’s delicate balance. Trump also appeared to be discarding those American bedrocks of democracy and human rights and it cast new uncertainty over Taiwan. Trump’s entrance into the foreign arena which began even before his presidency through his conversation with Taiwan’s President Tsai indicated how swiftly a ballast of global balance like the One China policy could be pulled apart. Both China and Taiwan continue to update their plans for war.
IN THE 1950S the United States was squeezing China on two fronts. Just a few months after the nuclear standoff with Taiwan, Mao lost his patience with unrest in Tibet that was being fueled by a CIA operation based in India. In March 1959 he sent in troops and the Dalai Lama, still only twenty-one, fled to India, where he was given sanctuary. Mao was furious and in 1962 decided India needed to be taught a lesson. He took advantage of running tension on the disputed border to order a full-scale cross-border invasion.
What unfolded in those weeks defined America’s future relationship with India. Beijing’s offensive coincided with the far higher-profile crisis developing off the American coast with Cuba. China invaded India on October 20, 1962, the day President John F. Kennedy announced a naval blockade to stop Soviet warships delivering missiles to the communist Caribbean nation that lies only a hundred miles from the US mainland. The standoff between the two superpowers created a worldwide fear of nuclear war, and the remote border conflict between China and India received scant public attention. The motive for China’s timing is not clear. One school of thought is that Mao was trying to win back Soviet favor by attaching the invasion to the wider cause of international communism. By 1962, the Sino-Soviet friendship had cooled and was no longer the force that had brought the Soviet Union to China’s aid over Taiwan in 1958. But Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s attention was on the Caribbean and not the Himalayas and the farthest Moscow went publicly was to publish support for China in the communist newspaper Pravda, blaming India for causing the war. Yet President Kennedy did view the Chinese invasion as part of the same fight against communism and immediately became involved.
Kennedy asked Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, what help was needed and, just over a week after the Chinese invasion, US military advisers, weapons and other supplies began arriving at Indian military air bases. Washington let Beijing know that bomber and fighter squadrons based in the Philippines were being readied for strike. Although there is no evidence that the nuclear threat was raised, it remained fresh in the minds of the Chinese. “We were in an impossible position,” retired general Xu Guangyu told me in Beijing, where he was then with the Chemical Defense Research Institute, tasked with protecting China against weapons of mass destruction. “China had no nuclear weapon. We had no idea how to protect our people from a nuclear attack. Over Taiwan and then India we were sure the Americans would strike. We had no choice but to pull back.”
China announced a unilateral cease-fire on November 21, the day after the United States ended its Cuban blockade. It kept control of Aksai Chin in Ladakh, now governed as part of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, but withdrew from Tawang in Arunchal Pradesh, which remains disputed territory but under Indian control.
By now the Cold War divide might have had the appearance of falling into a predictable pattern, the world’s two biggest democracies lined up against the communist giants of China and the Soviet Union. But things did not unfold like that. India’s primary enemy was Pakistan, whose growing relationship with China became pivotal to the global balance and remains so today.
A year after the border war, Pakistan ceded territory in Jammu and Kashmir to China as part of formal border agreement. The problem was that the four thousand square miles of Aksai Chin was also claimed by India. Pakistan then initiated a series of border skirmishes, until India responded with a full-scale invasion in 1965. The UN, the United States, and the Soviet Union were drawn into brokering a cease-fire. The fighting ended in less than three weeks, but it included the biggest tank battle since the Second World War.
Pakistan found itself in a unique position of being both an ally to China and to the United States, which paradoxically saw this Islamic country as a firewall against the spread of communism. When President Richard M. Nixon came to power in 1969, Pakistan’s military leader, Mohammed Ayub Khan, acted as an unofficial emissary with Mao to test the waters on Sino-US rapprochement, an initiative that led to the current One China policy.
Nixon announced in 1971 that he would be visiting China, prompting India immediately to forge an alliance with the Soviet Union which in turn prompted Washington to view democratic India as a Cold War hostile power. India hit back at Pakistan by sponsoring an independence movement in West Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The resulting civil war once again skewed the global alliances. Pakistan’s military operation to suppress the independence movement led to massacres of up to three million people.10 Ten million refugees fled to India, which intervened on the grounds that it needed to stop the killings.
The United States came down against India on the side of Pakistan, sending warships to the Bay of Bengal. India activated its new agreement with the Soviet Union, which deployed its own warships and submarines to deter the United States. Once again in 1971 the United States and Soviet Union were facing each other down, as they had in 1950 in North Korea, 1958 in Taiwan, and 1962 in Cuba.
Britain’s Royal Navy reinforced the Americans, creating a situation whereby the world’s two leading democracies were taking military action against the world’s most populated democracy that was being protected by the most powerful communist dictatorship. In South Asia there was none of the Cold War clarity so talked up in recent years. Pakistan surrendered on December 17, 1971, and the new nation of Bangladesh was created.
The constant state of war and hostilities within Asia also prompted a nuclear arms race. China carried out its first test in 1964, two years after the border war with India. In 1974, three years after being threatened by American warships, India conducted its own test, driving it further from the United States.
After the 1962 war Mao embarked on his two destructive internal policies: the Great Leap Forward, aimed at reforming agriculture but leading to famine that killed tens of millions, which was followed by the murderous, ideologically-driven Cultural Revolution, which brought the country to paralysis. To the outside world China became the communist giant, sleeping behind the bamboo curtain until it emerged again in the late twentieth century.
The components that created the earlier balance of South Asia’s power remain in place today. Moscow is India’s main weapons supplier; Pakistan and India continue with their hostility; and there is deep suspicion between China and India. As America once again seeks black-and-white clarity, India veers toward the gray, one moment seeking strategic support, the next advocating its nonaligned independent status. Both the US and India governments have returned to the platform of being great democracies. Each is unsure if either can be relied upon when the chips are down.
Given China’s aim to control the South China Sea, Delhi and Washington are concerned about its intentions in South Asia, where it is constructing a network of commercial and military havens across the Indian Ocean. Trade routes have always linked the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, but the speeding up of reclamation work around the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands in 2012 set off alarm bells.