FORMOSA: End of a Career

• Share

General Sun Li-jen, 55, has long been known as one of the ablest, bravest, as well as one of the most "Western-minded" leaders in the Chinese Nationalist high command. He learned his trade at Virginia Military Institute (class of '27) and practiced it heroically in smashing Japanese armies in Burma in World War II. Ordered to Formosa in 1946 to train new armies, he organized Chiang Kai-shek's forces for the liberation of the mainland and from 1950 to 1954 held the job of army commander in chief. Last week the Taipei government abruptly announced that General Sun had resigned his post as Chiang's personal chief of staff. Major Kuo Ting-liang, a member of the general's own staff, said the communiqué, had confessed to working secretly inside the army as a Communist agent, and another half a dozen junior officers were implicated in "an attempt to create an incident of a subversive character." The general, "as an admission of negligence," had handed in his resignation papers. There would be a court of inquiry.

Double Dissent. The news was a sensation in Formosa. Nobody accused General Sun himself of conspiring with the Communists—only of not knowing about and not quelling subversive activities on his staff. Nevertheless, many who are engaged in Formosa's involved politics wondered how the general had survived as long as he had. Short, taut and outspoken, Sun was burning with the conviction that Formosa could not go on under its present leadership and its foreseeable prospects. Unique among top commanders in his fluency in English (learned at V.M.I, and Purdue), he had often privately confided to visitors that the defeats on the mainland the troubles in the army command and the confusions on Formosa all traced straight to the Gimo's insistence upon personalizing his regime and identifying the Nationalist and anti-Communist causes with himself.

In 1953 Sun Li-jen's dissent took on a broader basis than his estimate of the Gimo's personal defects. He had always believed that the Nationalists' only chance of regaining the mainland turned on the readiness of the U.S. to lend active military support. When events—as he read them—indicated finally that the U.S. Republican Administration was not apt to do more than a Democratic Administration to put the Formosa troops back on the mainland, he abandoned hope. He argued that the Nationalists must give up the idea of returning to the mainland and make the best of things on Formosa.

Double Cross? Last year Sun was kicked upstairs to the empty job of personal chief of staff to Chiang, and installed in a pair of tiny, dark rooms. People said that the Gimo was keeping him near enough to watch. He was almost never asked to high command conferences.

Major Kuo, the Communist agent, had served with Sun in Burma and Manchuria, and was trusted by him. He arrived on Formosa as a refugee from the Communist mainland, but was in effect, said the Nationalists, a Communist plant. "I had no idea," said General Sun. "It came as a surprise to me."

Chiang Kai-shek appointed a nine-man commission to judge the general's conduct. Whatever its decision, General Sun's military career had plainly come to an end.