The Future Strategic Environment of East Asia: Implications of a PRC-Taiwan Reunification
Abstract
When the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, no one anticipated that six decades later the two sides of the Taiwan Strait would still be separate political entities. Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan a small outpost of Chinese territory that had only recently returned to China after 50 years of Japanese colonization fully anticipating that his struggle with the new leaders of the People s Republic of China (PRC) was not over. Still, both he and his rival Mao Zedong declared that mainland China and Taiwan were part of the same country, and must be reunified under a single government. Most observers assumed that it would be only a short time before Taiwan fell to the Communist forces. President Truman made a strategic decision not to intervene with U.S. military force in the face of an anticipated PRC invasion of Taiwan in the spring of 1950.1 Only with the onset of the Korean War in June 1950 did the U.S. armed forces take on the deterrent posture in the cross-Strait situation that persists today.2
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA564976
Entities
People
- Alison Kaufman
- Larry Ferguson Ii
- Maryanne Kivlehan-wise
Organizations
- Center for Naval Analyses