China | Danger ahead

How the crisis over Taiwan will change US-China relations

The showdown looks set to usher in a perilous new era of hostility

(220805) -- NANJING, Aug. 5, 2022 (Xinhua) -- A soldier looks through binoculars during combat exercises and training of the navy of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the waters around the Taiwan Island, Aug. 5, 2022. The Eastern Theater Command on Friday continued joint combat exercises and training in the waters and airspace around the Taiwan Island. (Photo by Lin Jian/Xinhua)

Aug 11th 2022|BEIJING, TAIPEI AND WASHINGTON, DC

In january 1950, three months after the Communist victory in China’s civil war, President Harry Truman issued a statement. America, he declared, would not intervene militarily to help China’s defeated Nationalists, who had fled to the island of Taiwan. Mao Zedong was already preparing an invasion and probably would have succeeded had the Korean war not erupted in June that year. The conflict prompted Truman to change tack, backing South Korea and ordering the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan in a bid to halt the spread of communism in Asia. Four years later, when Chinese forces attacked some of Taiwan’s outlying islands, American officials threatened nuclear strikes on China, forcing Mao to back down again.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Danger ahead”