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States and the Chinese Nationalists that the military purpose of the bom-
bardment was to prevent resupply of the islands, forcing their garrisons to
surrender.^55 Intense artillery bombardment continued until October 6, when
Defense Minister Peng Dehuai announced a ceasefire. After that, bombard-
ment was reduced to every other day, effectively ending the danger to resup-
ply of the island garrisons. The bombardment was preceded and paralleled by
an intense propaganda campaign calling on the country to prepare to defeat
a US invasion and liberate Taiwan, both of which events were proclaimed to
be imminent.
In 1958, as in 1954, there were disagreements between Washington and
Taipei over the wisdom of strong defense of Jinmen and Mazu. Over the pre-
ceding several years, Chiang Kai-shek had deployed to those two islands some
30 percent of Nationalist military forces, in defiance of US advice that Taiwan’s
defense perimeter be drawn down the middle of the Taiwan Strait. Chiang
Kai-shek rejected US advice, seeing it as part of US support for “Taiwan inde-
pendence” and designed to separate Taiwan from the China mainland—a
perennial suspicion of Chiang’s, one not entirely without some basis in US
policy, and one which he shared with his hated rival in Beijing, Mao Zedong.
In any case, the deployment of such a large portion of Nationalist military
power to the offshore Islands meant that their fall to the PLA by blockade and
non-resupply would, in fact, grievously diminish the defensibility of Taiwan
itself, through both the loss of troop strength and KMT demoralization
caused by anger at US betrayal. Consequently, US leaders decided to commit
US power to the defense of the two tiny islands. The largest concentration of
US naval power in the Pacific since 1945, and the most powerful nuclear navy
yet seen, soon assembled in the vicinity of Taiwan. The United States also
conspicuously deployed eight-inch howitzers capable of firing tactical nuclear
warheads. The US navy drew up plans to bomb Chinese military bases as far
north as Shanghai. In the event, US warships escorted convoys of Nationalist
resupply ships only up to the twelve-mile territorial limit around the islands,
while PLA artillery carefully abstained from targeting US warships. But while
both Beijing and Washington eventually acted with restraint, the 1958 Taiwan
Strait confrontation was real and carried the danger of escalation, inadvertent
or possibly intentional, to the level of a PRC-US war.
As with virtually all of Mao’s decision, the offshore bombardment involved
a combination of international and domestic factors aimed at promoting rev-
olution. According to Wu Lengxi, the primary objective of the 1958 bombard-
ment was to warn the Nationalists not to make trouble along the China coast.^56
The Nationalists had been conducting small-scale intelligence and reconnais-
sance raids along the China coast. Mao was preparing to plunge China into
the most radical phase of the Great Leap Forward and wanted to discourage
the KMT from trying to utilize the inevitable discontent. A secondary objec-
tive behind Mao’s launching of the crisis, according to Wu Lengxi, was to