If it were not for Taiwan’s transfer of political power, I am sure few would remember that this year is the 50th anniversary of the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis and that the president would not have chosen to go to Kinmen to give a commemorative speech. On Aug. 23, 1958, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) ordered People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces to launch an intense artillery bombardment of Kinmen, later referred to as the 823 Artillery Bombardment.
For 44 days, the PLA fired more than 470,000 shells at Kinmen, about 3,000 for each square kilometer of the island, but the troops there still managed to hold their ground.
Why did Mao want to bombard Kinmen? The CCP claims it was only trying to assess US support for Taiwan and that it conceded Kinmen on purpose to force a continuing relationship between Taiwan and China.
The CCP is good at fabricating history and this sounds like an excuse for Mao’s conduct.
I think a more feasible version is mentioned in Chang Jung’s (張戎) book Mao: The Unknown Story, in which she claims Mao wanted to use the tension caused by the bombardment to blackmail the Soviet Union into providing atom bomb technology.
We must ask if Mao really wanted to take Kinmen. By firing so many shells, he obviously wanted to annihilate the forces there. If all the defenders had been killed, could he not have wanted to take the island?
On the first day of the bombardment, after more than 50,000 shells were launched, communist troops dropped leaflets over Kinmen saying that: “More than 36,000 enemy soldiers have already been killed.”
This was wishful thinking on behalf of the CCP, based on estimates of the area and its population. Miraculously not even 600 people on the island died, because defense commander Hu Lien (胡璉) had predicted a war and mobilized troops to dig tunnels beneath Kinmen’s granite mountains and moved his military facilities there. These defensive measures, unknown to the communists, avoided annihilation and the forces were able to launch a counterattack.
The US provided a lot of assistance to Taiwan, though mainly in the form of firearms. Given these circumstances, the garrisoning of Kinmen by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who left Kinmen on the eve of the bombardment, and the efforts of his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), the leadership of Yu Tai-wei (�?�) and Hu and the troops at Liaoluo Bay (料羅灣) turned the situation around.
If Kinmen had been lost, it is hard to say what would have happened to Taiwan. It is easy to imagine the fear the loss of 100,000 soldiers in Kinmen would have caused in the Taiwanese.
Just a month before the bombardment, the first people’s commune was set up in Henan Province and the Great Leap Forward started to sweep across China. In the three years after, at least 30 million people died in a disaster surpassing even the Cultural Revolution. Because Kinmen was held, Taiwan escaped the catastrophe of being “liberated” by the PLA.
For the sake of cross-strait conciliation, it is only to be expected that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) would offer China an olive branch during his commemorative speech. However, apart from looking to the future, he should remind Taiwan of this part of history and the serious threat it posed to our security.
Ma should also pay respect to those soldiers who sacrificed their lives when defending Kinmen — even if this upsets Beijing.
Huang Jui-ming is a professor of law at Providence University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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