Japan-U.S. China Strategy: Centered on the White Terror in Taiwan
The author | Lin Shuyang
Under the anti-communist dichotomy mode of thinking, the Jiang Gang's group undoubtedly believed that the shocking mass struggle in japan in the east was undoubtedly an "international communist conspiracy" instigated by the Chinese and Soviet Communists, and that Japanese society was being eaten away by two poisonous ideological trends that endangered the country and the nation, "red" (Marxism) and "Western-style liberal democracy), and thus launched a sick defense structure.
(3-1) Overview and Characteristics of Taiwan-Japan Relations (c. 1950-1960)
From 1949 to 1952, it was the peak of the White Terror in Taiwan. In Japan, it was the third Yoshida cabinet period. At the end of 1948 the previous year, the headquarters of the occupying forces conveyed to the Japanese Government the request of the United States Government, instructing it to implement the so-called "Nine Principles of Economic Stability.", ostensibly hoping that the Japanese people would tighten their belts, get rid of their dependence on US subsidies at an early date, and quickly seek a self-reliant cloud for the national economy. In fact, this policy was deliberately arranged by the United States in the early Cold War strategy. At that time, the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists in the Chinese mainland, the overall decline of the Kuomintang government forces was already obvious, and among the decision-makers in the United States, some people advocated that before China was fully "redwashed", it was necessary to force Japan out of the economic crisis and build a defensive line in time to the east of communist China that would emerge in the near future.
In a tight economy, the lives of the wage earners, especially the working masses, are in a state of severe deprivation. As left-wing forces such as the Japanese Communist Party and the Socialist Party increased their dominance in the trade union movement, the Yoshida regime and the occupation army authorities became more and more resistant to the resistance movement. With the outbreak of the Korean War as a turning point, the occupation forces' "democratic transformation plan" became aimed at the establishment of an "anti-communist breakwater." Amid a storm of recession and unemployment, the government proposed plans to fire 100,000 people from the state railways. Against the backdrop of the rapid deterioration of labor relations, the Down-Yama, the Mitaka, and the Matsukawa Incident, social unrest generally increased.
The reactionary position of the Japanese Government is expressed in the way in which the peace treaty issue is handled. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing in October 1949, the Kuomintang government moved to Taipei. With the outbreak of the Korean War and the March of the People's Volunteers marching into the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. policy toward China changed from passive wait-and-see to active intervention in aiding the National Government. In line with this, the Japanese government abandoned the position of "comprehensive peace talks", including China and the Soviet Union. The Korean War brought huge "special demand" profits, and the Yoshida regime intended to use this as an opportunity for Japan's economic recovery and then use economic growth as the basis for "rearmament". Marshal Mai ordered the establishment of a reserve of seventy-five thousand national police, while adding eight thousand members of the Maritime Self-Defense Force. Fifty-two invited countries were invited in July 1951 at the San Francisco Peace Conference, and the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait were not invited. By September 8, the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic, and Poland among the invited countries refused to sign, and the other 49 countries signed the final agreement.
During the preparatory period, the United States requested Japan several times to invite the Taipei State Government to represent China at the peace conference. However, the Japanese government is concerned about the future relationship with the Beijing government, and has rejected the US proposal several times. The reason why Yoshida hesitated was because the left-wing forces within Japanese society [although after the Japanese version of the White Terror, which was jointly carried out by the Japanese government and the occupation army authorities, declared the Japanese Communist Party illegal and ordered that all the Japanese Communist Central Committees be expelled from public office, and the cadres of large non-governmental enterprises related to the public dissemination of culture and people's livelihood were punished by more than 10,000 people in one year.] There are 1,200 government offices. The underground Japanese communist transfer to the fierce martial arts route] seems to have a potential growth trend, bringing Yoshida a scruples. But in December 1951, Yoshida sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Dulles expressing his intention to negotiate a peace treaty with the Nationalist government in Taiwan. It is also stated that the expected Sino-Japanese peace treaty will be applied to all territories under the control of the current Kuomintang government and that may be included in the jurisdiction in the future. The Japanese government has no intention of entering into a peace treaty with the communist regime. Yoshida made this statement because the U.S. government warned that if Japan did not recognize the Nationalist government as the sole government representing China, the U.S. Senate would shelve the ratification of the peace treaty with Japan. Thus the Sino-Chiang Kai-shek Peace Treaty between the Taipei Government and the Japanese Government was signed in Taipei on April 28, 1952, the day the San Francisco Peace Treaty entered into force. Effective August 5.
In July 1952, in order to strengthen public order after the withdrawal of the occupying forces, the Japanese government enacted the "Law on the Prevention of Sabotage Activities", established the Public Security Investigation Department on the 21st, and changed the "Police Reserve" to the "Security Force" on the 31st to further enhance its military character and became the predecessor of the "Defense Agency" in the future. In October of the same year, in the first parliamentary elections after leaving the occupied position, the Left and Right Socialist Party had a total of 116 seats, an increase of 2.4 times. However, in the early post-war period, former bureaucratic, military, and political figures who were punished for directly or indirectly implementing war policies and were dismissed under the anti-communist priority policy after the Korean War re-entered politics, and in the election, about 30% of the total seats were elected, including the majority of Kishi Nobusuke's "Japan Re-establishment Company". It can be seen that as soon as Japan's de jure sovereignty was restored, the organizational strength of the left and right wings of the people was improved. The Fifth Yoshida Cabinet continued to pursue its conservative policy of repression and repression of the people, with a view to establishing political authority after the occupation forces had left. In 1953, the Act on the Regulation of Strikes in the Thermal Coal Industry was passed, and the Japan-U.S. Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement was passed. In 1954, a second law restricting education for the purpose of teachers' unions was introduced, amendments to the police law strengthening the powers of the national police, etc. were introduced.
In early 1954, the Left Socialist Party issued a so-called "Left Social Program" "aimed at the Japanese form of proletarian dictatorship", which triggered a major backlash from the capitalist clique. It also promoted the luck of the great alliance of conservative forces. In 1957, Japanese power fell into the hands of Kishi Nobusuke. Kishi is a conservative rightist who has visited the United States and Southeast Asia in succession to revise the security treaty between Japan and the United States and further strengthen Japan-US relations as its biggest policy goal. He also visited Taipei several times and had in-depth talks with Chiang Kai-shek on the anti-communist situation in Asia. Chiang's anti-Soviet and anti-CCP views of the Shore clan are highly appreciated. However, the large wave of the broad popular opposition movement triggered by the Kishi Cabinet's attempt to revise the peace constitution and japan-US security also had a great impact on Chiang Kai-shek. In particular, when the Socialist Party visited the CENTRAL Committee to make a statement in Beijing that "US imperialism is the common enemy of the Japanese and Chinese people," the common hostility of Chiang Kai-shek and the Shores must have been very high. At that time, Taiwan's white terror and martial law system had lasted for a decade, and the growing leftist movement in Japan must have brought alarm to the Chiang regime's long-term anti-communist civil war.
In 1960, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of anti-security people, the Kishi Cabinet used police force to suppress the opposition in Parliament and forcibly passed the new security. The scale of the June 4 anti-security demonstrations reached 500,000 to 600,000 (nationwide). There have been numerous bloody incidents. Finally, the landing of US President Eisenhower, who was scheduled to exchange contracts in The 10th, was finally prevented. However, the Senate, surrounded by 300,000 anti-security people, violated the law and did not try, allowing the new covenant to pass naturally. The Kishi Cabinet resigned on the 23rd after completing the formalities for the replacement of the contract. His successor, Ikeda, soon put forward the slogan of "doubling national income by ten years", heralding the advent of a new phase of economic command.
The 1950s were undoubtedly a time of turmoil. The class structure that continued before the war, as the Miike Coal Mine Incident was called the "Great Showdown Between Total Capital and Total Labor," was going through a critical period of post-war reorganization. In the gap between the Cold War between The East and the West, Japan's new monopoly capital bloc strives to pursue the external conditions of the political and legal system of the new system of exploitation. Taiwan's 1950s were a decade of white terror, and at the same time Japan was not another form of parliamentary democracy under the cover of white terror?
In that crucial decade, although Japan ended its occupation, it was due to the restrictions of the defeated countries and a certain moral burden on the psychology of the people; More importantly, the national economy, which has been regularized after the heavy project of war disasters and war reparations, is not yet able to actively operate a certain intensity of economic imperialism abroad. Its policy stance toward Taiwan is only one of the same members of the anti-communist alliance in Asia, facing the pressure of Communist China. Therefore, certain aspects of international politics, such as the signing of peace treaties, the maintenance of diplomatic relations, and the protection of the rights and interests of the Taiwan government in Japan (such as disputes between the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait over property rights in Japan), are a kind of "good faith" support under normal diplomatic relations; For the Taipei State Government, which was carrying out the White Terror, the effect of those assists was indirect. It is only because there is competition from the CCP regime on the mainland that even indirect assistance is highly valued. As for some ideological forms, or because of the "Japanese-aware faction", "pro-Japanese faction" and other special connections used to some of modern Chinese dignitaries, "under-the-table politics" is quite precious because of the relative weakness of the Taipei government in international relations. For example, when the Japanese Government's peace policy of targeting Taipei but not Beijing became more and more apparent, it is said that some senior cadres of the former state government who were exiled to foreign countries on the eve of the change of color on the mainland, including intelligence cadres, reapplyed to come to Taiwan to return to the army.
The political turmoil in Japan over the past ten years, the organization of class forces, and the deepening of conflicting ideas, such as the relative growth of the so-called "protection of revolution" forces, the revision of the peace and non-war constitution, and the issue of armaments, the masses of the common people who demand social justice, and the capital group that has rapidly expanded reproduction and ensured the highest profits, have undoubtedly brought considerable enlightenment and vigilance to the Taiwan government. In particular, under its anti-communist dichotomy mode of thinking, the shocking mass struggle in japan in the east is undoubtedly an "international communist conspiracy" instigated by the Chinese and Soviet Communists. Remember that under the ideological control of that year, there was the so-called theory of two toxins: one is the idea of redness, which refers to Marxism; The other is Westernized thought, that is, Western-style liberal democratic thought. Both are seen as heresies that endanger the nation and the nation. The jiang gang no doubt believes that Japanese society is being encroached upon by two poisonous ideological trends. His so-called "incitement to public opinion" and "propaganda for bandits" in the magazine "Free China" is nothing more than the result of this pathological defensive mentality.
In summary, the White Terror in Taiwan from 1950 to 1960 was ostensibly not formally supported by the Japanese government's deliberate state actions, but provided some social manipulation reference systems for the Taiwanese government with the fierce class struggle within society. Moreover, conservative elders such as Yoshida, Kishi, and Ishii often came to Taiwan in their personal capacity to exchange views on the anti-communist situation in Asia with Chiang Kai-shek, Zhang Qun, He Yingqin, Gu Zhenggang, and other high-level cores. For example, the famous "Three Arrows Plan" was a forced launch plan of unconstitutional state violence, and it can be believed that through some kind of hidden channel, the Kuomintang secret service system has long been understood. In addition, the regular exchange of information and mutual assistance (including secret arrests and extradition operations) between the Taiwan and Japanese governments, either directly or through the United States media, should not have been interrupted in terms of dynamic information of the CPSU, especially the specific information of espionage work. This point is maintained even if there are still individual conflicts of interest between the two parties.
In short, Taiwan needs to prevent the Japanese government from leaning toward Beijing between the two sides of the strait, and Japan needs the support of the Taipei State Government, which occupies a permanent seat on the Security Council, before entering the United Nations. The relationship between the two in the 1950s also had objective elements in international political reality.
[Seminar on East Asian Peace and Human Rights in Jeju Island, August 1998 / Excerpt from Lin Shuyang's Collected Writings (2) / Taipei: Human Publishing House]
