Maos Sealion, Part 3

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Mao’s Sealion:

The Abortive Chinese Communist Plot To Invade Taiwan During World War III

By Chris Oakley Part 3 (based on the “Stop ‘Em At The 38th Parallel” series by the same author)

Summary: In the first two installments of this series we reviewed the creation of Special Operation A-13, Mao Zedong’s strategy for invading Taiwan, just after the Korean conflict escalated into World War III; the circumstances leading to A-13’s subsequent cancellation; the great political unrest confronting Mao’s regime in the months after A-13 was called off; and Mao’s eventual assassination in 1958. In this chapter, we’ll recall the horrific 1960 Tienanmen Square massacre.

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In the spring of 1960, Zhou Enlai had ruled China for nearly two years. While his country had been spared the nuclear horrors that had triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was most assuredly in a bad way thanks largely to the economic and political miscalculations of his predecessor Mao Zedong. The unity for which Sun Yatsen had once fought when he launched the revolution that toppled the Manchu dynasty in 1911, and which Mao had hoped would be the cornerstone for Marxist power in China when the Communists won their civil war against Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists in 1949, was in danger of crumbling away.

For Zhou, who hoped China would step into the void left at the head of the Communist movement when the Soviet Union collapsed, this was an intolerable state of affairs. He wanted his fellow Chinese to think and act as one, and instead they seemed to be veering off in a thousand separate directions to the detriment of the Communist regime and its supporters. Such a state of affairs could not be endured for long if the People’s Republic were to survive in its existing form, a point he made emphatically clear to his ministers in a cabinet meeting on April 22nd; the CPC general secretary spent most of the three-hour session ranting and raving about what he called “wicked deviationists” and “counterrevolutionaries”. As one of Zhou’s peers observed in his memoirs years later, it was a wonder everyone else in the room didn’t go deaf from Zhou’s yelling.

So it couldn’t have helped Zhou’s temper much when, on the morning of May 28th, student demonstrators began assembling in the middle of Beijing’s Tienanmen Square to hold a rally calling for the Zhou government to ease long-standing restrictions on political and religious activities in mainland China. Sure enough an enraged Zhou blasted the protestors as “counterrevolutionary hooligans” and vowed to root them out by any means necessary-- including, he told his cabinet at a meeting on May 29th, the deployment of PLA troops to break up the protest. Ironically, however, some of the participants in the Tienanmen Square demonstrations were themselves soldiers; this meant in essence that the PLA would be at war with itself if Zhou made good on his threat to smash the protestors by force.

Also in the ranks of the demonstrators were veterans of the ill- fated Chinese intervention in Korea who were seeking compensation for their wounds and felt that the Beijing government had abandoned them. Their presence at Tienanmen Square alarmed Zhou and his cronies even more than that of the student demonstrators-- Beijing’s propagandists had gone to a great deal of trouble to depict the PLA as a monolithic, unified force unswervingly loyal to the Communist regime, and now that concept was being emphatically challenged before the eyes of the whole world. The last straw for Zhou came on the evening of June 3rd when two groups of such veterans erected a statue within the heart of Tienanmen Square that depicted the Chinese ruler as a latter-day Scrooge; taking the statue as a personal insult, he finally made up his mind to smash the demonstrations by force of arms. Orders went out to four loyal PLA divisions stationed just outside Beijing, and with that the wheels had been set in motion for one of the most horrific massacres of all time.

On the morning of June 4th the Tienanmen Square protestors awoke to the rumble of tanks and the tramping of boots on pavement. Minutes later, the screams of protestors being shot down like dogs mingled in the air with the chattering of automatic rifles. The PLA descended on the Tienanmen Square demonstrators like a tidal wave as they moved to carry out Zhou’s directive to smash the protests. The Zhou-as-Scrooge statue was destroyed in seconds, a victim of repeated volleys of tank fire. Even now, survivors of the horrific events of that day can still remember the carnage they witnessed as demonstrators were either run over by tanks, gunned down by loyalist PLA infantrymen eager to follow Zhou’s orders, or blown to pieces by tank cannons.

By noon Beijing time at least a hundred and fifty people lay dead with at least as many more wounded; dozens of additional demonstrators were arrested and hustled off to detention camps or military jails to await judgment by so-called “people’s courts” that were in fact simply Stalinesque show trials where guilty verdicts had already been decided in advance and the participants simply wanted to browbeat the accused into confessing their alleged “crimes” before the inevitable execution by firing squad or the noose. Most of the rest, driven to despair as a result of the apparent failure of their effort to reform Beijing’s way of governing its people, either committed suicide or fled the country. The largest number of emigrants, following a precedent established in the late 19th century, crossed the Pacific Ocean to resettle in America and become an integral part of the business and political communities on the West Coast.

But the demonstrators had only lost a battle-- the war to abolish hard-line Marxism in China would go on. In January of 1961 the Chinese pro-democracy movement would gain a charismatic new ally in Washington with John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as President of the United States. As a member of Congress Kennedy had consistently been an outspoken and uncompromising opponent of Mao’s dictatorship; as the Democratic vice- presidential candidate in 1956 he’d been vocal in advocating increased U.S. diplomatic and political support for Chinese dissident groups; in his first presidential debate with Richard Nixon he’d taken the former vice-president apart for his lukewarm reaction to the Tienanmen Square massacre; and in his first major foreign policy statement after he won the 1960 presidential election he had made it clear the United States wouldn’t simply sit on the sidelines if the Zhou government inflicted another Tienanmen Square-style massacre against its own citizens. Last but not least, Kennedy was getting tired of the Zhou regime’s attempts to subvert the government of Cuba and wanted to give Beijing a dose of its own medicine.

One of Kennedy’s first official foreign policy acts as President was to sign an executive order authorizing the U.S. State Department to provide financial and diplomatic support to Chinese pro-democracy organizations. A codicil to this executive order made provisions for the CIA’s Far East branch to step up anti-Marxist propaganda efforts on the Chinese mainland; by August of 1961 fully a quarter of the Far East division’s annual operation budget was being devoted to utilizing radio, print, and other media to undermine Zhou’s government. And as the White House deepened its commitments to defending the governments of Cuba and South Vietnam against Chinese Communist attempts to subvert them, so too did it increase its support for pro-democracy factions in mainland China. Even as the Laotian Missile Crisis of September 1962 threatened to start World War III, Washington was still giving material and diplomatic aid to the largest of China’s pro-democracy organizations.

In response, the Chinese Communist regime made a secret effort to court U.S. domestic leftist organizations as a means of sticking it to the Kennedy Administration. By the spring of 1963 no less than 60 left- wing political groups were receiving direct financial assistance from Beijing and twenty others were getting funding through third parties. The FBI even picked up disquieting signs that Chinese Communist agents were encouraging some of the more radical factions on the American left to stockpile weapons and learn terrorist tactics in preparation for an armed uprising in the future. For FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a staunch lifelong anti-Communist, this was an intolerable state of affairs; fully determined not to let Beijing have its way on American soil, he gave his agents carte blanche to do everything legally possible to bust up Chinese spy rings wherever they were found.

It was a privilege they were quick to use-- and in some cases misuse. In what amounted to a mini-Red Scare, three hundred and nineteen people were falsely arrested on espionage charges during the months immediately prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. The scandal which eventually ensued over these false arrests touched off widespread outrage among the public and nearly forced Hoover’s resignation. It also served to give the FBI as a whole a black eye and provide Beijing with a golden opportunity for anti-American propaganda; the Chinese Communist government’s official radio network churned out a daily torrent of editorials demonizing Hoover as “a lackey of Wall Street” and “a gangster worse than any of the crooks he ever put in jail”.

Still, the scales in this ideological chess game between Beijing and Washington were tilting largely in the Kennedy Administration’s favor; memories of the Chinese Communists’ backing of the now-defunct North Korean dictatorship were still fresh in the minds of millions of people living in the rest of Asia, so few people were inclined to yell too loudly in defense of the Zhou Enlai government. If anything, the popular sentiment in most parts of the Asian mainland was quite strongly against Zhou. India in particular took a hard line towards Zhou’s regime: during the summer of 1962 Communist China had attacked India’s northern border, touching off a short but intense war in which both sides endured massive casualties and Russia was nearly drawn into the conflict by its long-standing interests in the sub-continent. At the time JFK was shot, the Indian army still maintained a number of divisions along its northern frontier to guard against another Chinese invasion, and there were rumors Delhi was seeking to acquire a nuclear weapons capability for the express purpose of deterring a Chinese attack.

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When Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president, was sworn in to succeed Kennedy as commander-in-chief following JFK’s assassination, Zhou Enlai heard the news with a sinking heart. His top intelligence advisors had warned him Johnson would be an even tougher opponent of the Chinese Communist regime than Kennedy had been, and LBJ would soon prove those warnings were correct. His first major foreign policy act as the new President of the United States was to push for substantial increases in military aid to the governments of South Vietnam and Cuba as they fought Chinese-backed Marxist insurgencies. His second one was to renew outstanding U.S. agreements with Chinese pro-democracy groups to furnish them with financial and diplomatic backing for their actions.

During Johnson’s first year in the White House, there was a spike in the number of asylum requests granted by the State Department to Chinese refugees seeking to flee the repressive Zhou regime. The spike leveled off slightly in his second year as president, but the number of political refugee admissions never diminished. Indeed, by the time that Johnson left the White House for good in 1969, the rate of applications by Chinese dissidents for political asylum in the United States would be on the rise again...

To Be Continued

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