In October 1958, Communist China was firing thousands of shells each day at Chinese Nationalist forces entrenched on the tiny island of Quemoy, just two miles from the mainland. The island had become a Cold War flash point, and the Eisenhower administration feared that the shelling would soon be followed by a Communist attempt to capture Quemoy and with it the tens of thousands of Nationalist troops garrisoned there. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rushed to Taipei to meet with Chiang Kai-shek and discuss the complete withdrawal of Nationalist forces from the island.
According to an account in Jay Taylor's new book The Generalissimo, Chiang then sent a message to his enemies in Beijing warning that unless the shelling stopped he would be forced "to do what the Americans wanted." The day after Dulles left Taipei, the Chicoms announced they would limit their shelling to even-numbered days, leaving the Nationalists free to resupply their forces on odd-numbered days and bringing an end to the crisis. Zhou Enlai, the first premier of Red China, would later tell Henry Kissinger that Mao's Chinese Communist party (CCP) and Chiang's Kuomintang (KMT) had "cooperated to thwart the efforts of Dulles," who was pushing the withdrawal as part of a larger American strategy to permanently split Taiwan from the mainland.
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