The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [147]
Since United States backing was key to Taiwan’s survival, the KMT devoted tremendous resources to maintaining good relations with Washington. At the vanguard of what would become known as Taiwan’s “China Lobby” in the United States were two of Chiang Kai-shek’s brothers-in-law: T. V. Soong, the finance minister of the Republic of China, and H. H. Kung.43 In 1954, in part because of the influence of the China Lobby and its supporters, the United States pledged to safeguard Taiwan by signing a mutual defense treaty. For the next three decades the United States recognized the Nationalist regime as the official government of China. Indeed, until 1971, more than twenty years after the Nationalists were driven from the mainland, U.S. power in the United Nations enabled a government that exerted effective control over only one small island of less than 20 million people to hold one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council, while the People’s Republic of China, the de facto government of a billion people, was not even a UN member. So powerful was the China Lobby in American politics that U.S. News and World Report later ranked its influence as an international lobby in Washington second only to that of the state of Israel.
But while the Nationalists gained powerful friends in Washington, they were much less concerned about winning the hearts of those at home. Within a few years, Chiang’s island regime rivaled its former mainland regime in cronyism and corruption. The new administration threw thousands of native bureaucrats out of work and suspended all national-level elections on the island on the pretext that Communist occupation of the mainland prevented a fair vote on Taiwan. In their view, the civil war was far from over, entitling all elected Nationalist politicians to keep their positions until the Communists were driven from the mainland and new elections could be held. On March 1, 1950, Chiang Kai-shek became, once again, the president of the Republic of China. In 1960, the government revised the constitution to eliminate the two-term limit on the presidency during “the period of Communist rebellion,” so that Chiang could parlay his position into a lifelong dictatorship.
The period of the 1950s was known as the reign of “White Terror,” during which Chiang’s National Security Bureau harassed thousands of people suspected of being pro-Communist, often solely on hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The government silenced, jailed, and in some cases executed or assassinated members of the intellectual landowning elite, and laws were applied retroactively to punish innocuous activities committed long before the Nationalists had even arrived on the Island.44 The Nationalist crackdown bred a deep hatred of the KMT on the island and fostered the growth of secret organizations of natives for Taiwanese independence.
To ensure their control into the future, the KMT went about indoctrinating a mindset of unquestioning loyalty in the youth on the island. “By grade school, they had already started to brainwash you,” recalled Dick Ling, a Taiwanese American engineer now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He remembered the school assemblies and the Chinese Boy Scout meetings designed to instill in him a sense of Sun Yat-sen as an almost mythic hero and of the Three People’s Principles of the Nationalist Party as beyond challenge. In junior high, he endured interminable flag-raising ceremonies, in which the school principal and his assistant addressed motivational speeches to their captive audience: how they all must “work hard, study hard, be loyal to the country, and help Chiang Kai-shek, the savior of China, recover the mainland to rescue the people from Mao Zedong.” As in many cult-based dictatorships, pictures of Chiang appeared everywhere—in classrooms, hallways, the streets. On October 10, National Day, Ling said, students would wave flags in front of the presidential palace and sing, “Long live Chiang Kai-shek! May he