Realignment with the Imperial Enemy: Taiwan and Japan in the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL), 1955–60

Since the convention of the first conference in 1954, Taiwan had been actively converting the APACL from an Eastern NATO to a quasi-intergovernmental institution that preached postcolonial Asian solidarity for state-building and national development by anti-Communist countries. This paper studies how the Republic of China (ROC) government led this transformation by fighting to include Japan in the APACL. It argues that the Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) was convinced by the geopolitical weight of post-imperial Japan in its new united front against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its exploitation of the Bandung Conference representing the peak of Asian-African Internationalism. To resist both China and Bandung, Taiwan propagated that Communism was the ‘authentic’ reincarnation of pre-1945 imperialism in East and Southeast Asia.

The ROC government further contended that to destroy imperialism indeed and realize national liberation for postcolonial Asian states, one must aggressively fight and eventually defeat Communism rather than favoring the Bandung Conference as a ‘Third Force.’ Driven by this conviction, Taiwan helped develop the APACL as the new bastion for an anti-Communist version of anti-imperialism centered on the geopolitical reconciliation with and including Cold War Japan.

While scrambling for Japan’s entrance, some of the APACL’s organizational principles, operational creeds, and approaches to collective decision-making became crucially enacted and implemented. Taiwan’s endeavor to admit Japan also attracted increasing participants from the anti-Communist and non-Communist groups of Asian-African Internationalism, who opposed Bandung as the orthodox version of Third World solidarity. Although Japan finally secured its membership in 1960 due to the South Korean acceptance under new leadership, Taiwan’s above efforts substantially paved the way for the APACL’s cooperation with other anti-Communist regimes beyond the orbit of continental Asia, leading to the formation of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1967.