The Bandung Era } 101
More importantly, the power of the PRC was a reality of which Washington
would have accepted. In Korea, the PRC had denied the United States its
goal of a united, US-aligned Korea and fought US forces to a standstill. In
Indochina, PRC-supported Viet Minh forces had just delivered a death blow
to US-backed French forces. Confronted by the reality of China’s power, and
with calculations of the global balance in mind, the United States would dis-
engage from Taiwan. At least that was Beijing’s plan.
Late in May 1954, at the Geneva conference, the US representative pro-
posed, via a British intermediary, that the United States and the PRC talk
about the release of US citizens being held in China. Zhou Enlai immediately
convened a meeting to consider the US proposal. Here was an opportunity,
Zhou said, to use the US desire for release of its citizens to open a direct chan-
nel to the Americans. Zhou proposed that China seek direct negotiations with
the United States (i.e., not via the British or other intermediaries). Zhou also
proposed that China link the question of the forty or so Americans held in
China with the status and return to China of the 170 or so Chinese nationals
being detained in the United States. These Chinese citizens had been involved
in defense sector work in the United States, and once the Korean War began,
Washington barred their return to China on the grounds that they would
contribute to China’s war effort.^21 Zhou also proposed that China’s response
to the United States should hint at the possibility of broader relaxation of ten-
sions between the PRC and the United States. The CCP Politburo approved
Z hou’s propos a l.
In June and July 1954, while the Geneva Indochina Conference was still
underway, Wang Bingnan, China’s ambassador to Poland, and U. Alexis
Johnson, US ambassador to Czechoslovakia, met four times in Geneva. No
progress was made. The United States refused to equate US prisoners in China
with Chinese nationals detained in the United States and broke off the talks
when Wang proposed a communiqué linking the two categories of nation-
als.^22 Secretary of State Dulles was aware that Beijing was using the Geneva
Conference and the bilateral talks with the United States to raise its inter-
national visibility and weaken the isolation engineered by the United States
over the previous several years. Dulles responded to communist successes
in Korea and Indochina and to the PRC’s increasing international position
by building up collective security positions of strength around the periphery
of the Sino-Soviet bloc. Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration gener-
ally viewed Nationalist China as an important element in “the position of
strength” containing Communist China. This doomed Beijing’s effort to per-
suade Washington to disengage from Taiwan.
Nationalist Taiwan was very much interested in participating in the US
collective security structure. In March 1953, very shortly after the Eisenhower
administration took office, the Republic of China (ROC—Nationalist China
on Taiwan) ambassador to the United States, Wellington Koo, proposed the