The desire to try to avoid war also led Eisenhower and Dulles to push China and Taiwan to accept the existence of “two Chinas”—just as there were an East and West Germany and a North and South Korea. Both the president and the secretary of state spent years unsuccessfully trying to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to withdraw his troops from a few specks of land hard along China’s southern coast. Politically, those islands—Quemoy (Jinmen), Matsu (Mazu), and Dachen—constituted Chiang’s sole remaining claim to be the ruler of all China. Militarily, they were a tinderbox.
