High Seas Buffer: The Taiwan Patrol Force, 1950–1979

Between 1950 and 1979, during the Cold War, much of the U.S. Navy’s relationship
with China centered around the Taiwan Patrol Force, whose duties included patrolling
the international waters off mainland China’s Fujian Province, which separates
the mainland from the island of Taiwan. Based on Taiwan at Keelung in the north and
at Kaohsiung in the south, U.S. Seventh Fleet sailors who were assigned to those patrol
duties—mainly in destroyers and destroyer escorts—found on the island the only direct
relationship available to them to interact with China and Chinese culture. Mainland
China remained distant and obscure, sensed only by the distinctive smell of the land
that many a sailor commented on in approaching the Chinese coast, even before it became distantly visible from the deck. American sailors in those years could get closer
only during the occasional port visit to the British crown colony of Hong Kong, where
they could take an opportunity to go to the far side of Hong Kong’s New Territories to
peer across the closed border into the People’s Republic of China and to try to imagine
what the mainland was really like.
In this volume, Bruce Elleman, research professor in the Maritime History Department
at the Naval War College, applies his expertise as one of the College’s specialists in
Chinese language and history to provide a pioneering history of American naval experience
in the Taiwan Patrol. His focus reflects the Naval War College’s interests in the policy,
strategy, and operational levels and is designed to provide a historical complement
to other work on current issues being done at the Naval War College—in the China
Maritime Studies Institute and in other departments.