Most people in China and Taiwan might think they know
what happened after the long and bloody civil war between the
Chinese Nationalist Party and the Communist Party ended in
1949.
But recently declassified government archives have revealed a
previously unknown secretive plan by Taiwan's late President Chiang
Kai-shek to take back mainland China.
Chiang and his troops had fled to Taiwan after losing the war to
the Communists but, despite great obstacles, he was obsessed with
the idea of taking back the land he had lost.
According to
these newly-revealed government documents, by the 1960s Chiang
thought the time was right to launch a counter-attack, given the
devastating famine Mao Zedong's leadership had unleashed and the
possibility China would soon have a nuclear
weapon.
The US was fighting the Vietnam War then, and Chiang knew he
needed US military assistance if he were to succeed so he offered
to help the Americans fight the war in Vietnam in exchange for US
support.
Washington objected to Chiang's suggestions, but Chiang went
ahead with his preparations anyway.
Top secret
The declassified information - photocopies of which went on
public display in Taiwan for the first time in May - show that
Chiang's planned offensive, called the Guo Guang [National Glory]
Project, involved 26 operations including land invasions, special
operations behind enemy lines and raids against the enemy.
Chiang also
instructed his son Chiang Ching-kuo to come up with a plan to
launch an airborne attack on southern China's Fujian and Guangdong
provinces.
All of this was top secret at the time.
In 1965, the
plans were ready. Soldiers and officers drew up their wills, while
the top brass were trying to choose the most suitable "D-Day" to
deploy their troops, according to the archives.
But Beijing
had discovered the plan. On 6 August 1965, two
Taiwanese naval vessels assigned to transport troops on a
reconnaissance mission were sunk by Communist forces. About 200
soldiers were killed.
In November the same year, another vessel sent to drop off
supplies for soldiers stationed on one of Taiwan's outlying islands
was hit by Communist torpedoes, killing some 90 soldiers.
The heavy loss of life surprised Chiang Kai-shek. He then
realised China had significantly improved its naval capability.
Chiang was forced to scale back and eventually abandon his
plan.
But according to Gen Huang Chih-chung, who was an army colonel
at the time and was part of the planning process, Chiang never completely gave
up the desire to take back China.
"Even when he died, he was still hoping the international
situation would change and that the Communists would be wiped out
one day."
Shift in focus
The failure of Chiang's plan changed the course of Chinese and
Taiwanese history.
The Taiwanese "shifted the focus to modernising and defending
Taiwan instead of preparing Taiwan to take back China," said Andrew
Yang, a political scientist specialising in Taiwan-China relations
at the Taipei-based Council of Advanced Policy Studies.
Chiang's son, who later succeeded him as president, focused on
maintaining peace between the mainland and Taiwan.
Details of this chapter in history were kept secret for 44
years, and were only revealed when the tourism department in
Taoyuan County managed to convince the ministry of national defence
and the national library to give it access to the archives.
"There were 26 planned operations, but the department of defence
only kept documents on 10 of them. The others were all destroyed,"
said Hsieh Shyang-ling, a spokeswoman for the Taoyuan tourism
department.
"Chiang Kai-shek didn't want people to know. What we have access
to are only some of the documents."
It remains unclear how many soldiers died in the preparations
leading up to the plan that was never actually carried out.
"To this day, some of their families might not even know how
they died," Andrew Yang said.
The documents are now displayed in what was once a secret
command centre in the scenic mountains of Taoyuan, which the
tourism department opened to the public for the first time in
May.
Hundreds of tourists visit the area each day, including some
Chinese tourists.
"We feel that since this history existed, we should not hide it.
We want to tell people there was this part of history," Ms Hsieh
said.
The now elderly Gen Huang said he hoped lessons could be learned
from history.
"Relations between Taiwan and China have totally changed now. I
hope it will develop peacefully," he said. "There's no need for
war."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8183412.stm