American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy by Stephen G. Craft (review)

One spring evening in 1957, in a small house outside Taipei, the wife of U.S. Army Master Sergeant Robert G. Reynolds screamed for her husband. Someone had peeped at her through a bathroom window while she was in the shower. Reynolds grabbed his pistol, rushed outside, and shot a Chinese man, Liu Ziran, who was in their garden. In keeping with bilateral agreements, a U.S. military court in Taipei tried Reynolds for manslaughter. On 23 May 1957 the court found the sergeant innocent, and a U.S. Air Force plane flew him and his wife to the Philippines the next day, provoking an uproar in the Taiwan press. Liu’s widow tearfully protested in front of the U.S. embassy in Taipei, and her woes were broadcast throughout the island. Hundreds of young demonstrators began gathering outside the U.S. embassy to protest the acquittal, and by midday the original crowd of 200 had swelled to 6,000. In mid-afternoon, rumors that Reynolds had departed Taiwan sparked riots that escalated into violent rampages against the embassy and the nearby U.S. Information Agency (USIA) facility. Order was not restored until the evening of 24 May, when 33,000 Nationalist troops were deployed. Two days later, President Chiang Kai-shek offered his personal apologies to the U.S. government, and U.S.-Taiwan relations returned to normalcy shortly thereafter. Both the U.S. embassy and the USIA subsequently received compensation from Taipei.

The May 1957 Taiwan riots, which Stephan G. Craft deftly recounts in his book, provide a crucial case study of the cultural fault lines between Taipei and Washington and a poignant example of the curious intersection of state politics, nationalism, and cultural and racial prejudices. Thanks to Craft’s thorough analysis of this incident, we have a unique opportunity to see the way many U.S. officials were prejudiced in their views of the riots and of one of their closest allies during the Cold War. That the U.S. military court-martial could absolve Reynolds of voluntary manslaughter within four days of hearings highlights shoddy investigative work and injustice. The riots, then, not only gave insights into Taiwan’s fractured cultural and nationalistic resentments against the United States but also demonstrated the complex relations between the Taiwanese and their U.S. counterparts. In the aftermath of the riots, as Chiang Kaishek offered his public apology and the Nationalist authorities’ report straddled the domestic demands for justice and upholding the international needs of the state, the oratory and roles of ritualized apologies stood out. The way the riots were handled underscored that nationalistic impulses and demands of justice could be subdued by the needs of the state only with great difficulty. The sound and fury of the event became a leitmotif for the uneasy relationship between Taipei and Washington throughout the 1950s.

By carefully sifting through available archival materials, including the personal diary of Chiang Kai-shek now stored in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, Stephan G. Craft provides an excellent account of both the 1957 Taipei riots and the implications for U.S. foreign policy at the height of the Cold War. Looking back more than half a century, the controversies surrounding Reynolds seem to be, as Craft puts it, “much ado about nothing” (p. 198). The U.S.-Taiwan relationship was resilient enough to survive a true crisis, and those who hoped that Washington would recognize the People’s Republic of China, who sought United Nations trusteeship over Taiwan, or who wanted to see the United States thrown out of Taiwan were deeply disappointed. But the incident must also been appraised in a larger context. As Craft writes, the riots “need to be seen as part of the growing resistance or backlash to U.S. hegemony by its allies prior to the Vietnam War” (p. 199). The riots were a warning of the...