MCLC: To Return Home or Return to Taiwan diss review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: To Return Home or Return to Taiwan diss review
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Source: Dissertation Reviews: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2050

A review of To Return Home or “Return to Taiwan”: Conflicts and Survival
in the “Voluntary Repatriation” of Chinese POWs in the Korean War, by
David Cheng Chang.

The most destructive phase of Korea’s unending civil war began with a
North Korean invasion in 1950 and ended with a 1953 armistice. Almost all
of the dramatic exchanges of territory, including the four falls of the
Korean capital Seoul to invading armies, took place in the course of the
first year as American-led UN and Chinese forces flooded onto the
peninsula. During the two years of stalemate and bitter negotiations that
began in the summer of 1951, one issue towered above all others as the
obstacle to the cessation of hostilities: the American refusal to force
the repatriation of all POWs.

In his dissertation on the Chinese POWs of the Korean War David Cheng
Chang takes us deep into the lives of Chinese soldiers who faced a new
kind of civil war within the prison camps of Koje and Cheju islands. By
the end of the war, around two thirds of some 21,000 POWs chose to
“return” to Taiwan, dealing a propaganda coup to Chiang Kai-shek’s regime.
Making use of rich interviews, memoirs, and archive sources from China,
Taiwan, and the United States, the dissertation gives us the most detailed
and persuasive account to date of camp life, the complexities of the
screening process that determined the final fate of each POW, and the
events surrounding several of the extremely violent clashes between
prisoners and camp authorities in 1952. In evaluating the decisions made
by Chinese prisoners in the prisons, Chang argues that the pre-Korean War
experiences in China’s own civil war environment had a deep impact, while
also showing the powerful role of camp leaders who were able to establish
control as a result of the early failures of U.S. POW policies.

An opening chapter introduces some of the previous scholarship that has
attempted to explain the unexpectedly large number of prisoners who chose
to refuse repatriation to China. Chang argues against suggestions that the
POWs, including the two thirds who were formerly Nationalist soldiers,
were simply bitter at being used as cannon fodder, were moved by
Nationalist agent infiltrators, or the idea that the U.S. desired to send
large numbers of prisoners to Taiwan. Instead, the majority of prisoners
followed the, “choice of prison compound leaders, for reasons of
conviction, interest calculation, coercion, and threat of retribution from
leaders” (p. 16).

The second and third chapters look at the backgrounds of a wide variety of
former Chinese POWs. Chang looks at differing regional and class origins,
ranging from Taiwan to Sichuan and from farmers to well-off grocers. He
looks at differing formative experiences–from an infantrymen repeatedly
changing sides, and a radicalized Tsinghua student, to the Whampao
military academy graduate–but also different experiences with Communist
party control, ranging from admiration for its discipline to horror at its
liquidations.

Chang zooms out in the fourth chapter to consider the highly complex
picture of interactions between Chiang Kai-shek’s regime and the fractured
powers that together formed United States policy in East Asia. In
particular, we are given a close look at the perspective on the war from
the view of Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries, the independent minded Douglas
MacArthur, and the frustrations of President Truman and U.S. Ambassador to
Korea John Muccio. Overall, the chapter offers a nuanced look at the
confused contradictions of U.S. policy that resulted in some of its
earliest failures in Korea and its policy towards Chinese POWs.

Chapters 5 and 6 take us from the moment of surrender, defection, and
capture of Chinese soldiers in the Korean War, through the early rise to
power of the anti-Communist POWs, and explains the failures of Communist
Party and pro-repatriation officers to organize as effectively as North
Korean prisoners did in nearby compounds. Chapter 6 brings us up to the
coercion and violence that preceded the April, 1952 screening of POWs that
determined their view on repatriation to China and segregated the bitterly
opposed sides. The chapter effectively combines an analysis of the
failures to prevent coercion from playing its role within the camp, with a
broader consideration of the consequences and contradictions of the
humanitarian policy adopted by President Truman that came to be known as
“voluntary repatriation.”

Chapters 7 and 8 offer a rich examination of two of the most violent
chapters in the POW history of the Korean war: the June takeover of the
Korean prison Compound 76 on Koje island, that resulted in 41 deaths
(including over a dozen liquidations of “traitors”) from among its 6,800
POWs, and the October attack on the Chinese sub-Compound 7 on Cheju island
that killed 56–some 11% of the compound’s prisoners, and also left a full
quarter of them wounded. While tracing the American failures that brought
about the crisis on Koje island, Chang avoids the simplistic massacre
narrative found in some scholarship to offer a fascinating contrast
between a problematic but highly disciplined action on Koje, with the
disastrous combination of poor American leadership and a desire by Chinese
POW leaders to maximize the propaganda victory purchased by their blood.

Chapter 9 and the conclusion focus on the final months leading up to
repatriation or “return” to Taiwan. Even in this period of relative calm
we learn of the atmosphere of terror within the camps up to the end, as
the liquidation of suspected spies and those with wavering loyalties
continued on both sides. A moving epilogue then offers us a look at the
humiliation, isolation, and in some cases execution faced by many of the
Chinese who had already survived torture and abuse at the hands of
anti-Communists in the camp in order to reach their homes.

This dissertation brings an important human and personal dimension to a
history of these POWs through the integration of rich interview and memoir
material from both Taiwan and China, while at the same time offering a new
look at the complex history of “voluntary repatriation” and the camp
strife of the Korean War. This work on the Chinese POWs of the war is a
timely and extremely well-researched contribution. It not only complements
a growing body of scholarship focusing on the Korean camps during the war,
but the rewards of its close focus on the prisoner experience can serve as
an excellent model for future research.

Konrad M. Lawson
Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow
European University Institute, Florence, Italy
konrad.lawson at eui.eu

Primary Sources:

Interviews, oral histories, and published memoirs
Chiang Kai-shek diaries (Hoover Institute, Stanford University)
Haydon L. Boatner Papers (Hoover Institute, Stanford University)
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Archives, NARA
Ministry of Defense Archives, the Republic of China (Taiwan)
Archives of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei
Archives of the Kuomintang, Taipei
Academia Historica 國史館, Taipei

Dissertation Information:

University of California, San Diego. 2011. 460 pp. Primary Advisor: Joseph
Esherick.