The Overlooked Crisis: Revisiting China's Approach to the 1962 Taiwan Strait Crisis

Scholars have misrepresented and underestimated the 1962 Taiwan Strait Crisis. By extensively analyzing available sources from various countries with a particular focus on those related to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), this article shows that the PLA's sudden, large-scale military buildup in Fujian province and mobilizations throughout the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the summer of 1962 were a response to a perceived new threat: a possible surprise attack by the United States and its allies. The PLA's threat perception began to increase in 1959, and it intensified further after the 22 June 1962 Sino-American negotiations in Warsaw. Although the crisis intensified divergences within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hierarchy and helped Mao Zedong to gloss over the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, it also enabled him to radicalize his domestic and foreign policies throughout the 1960s, with far-reaching repercussions for the Sino-Indian War of October 1962, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Vietnam War.