On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of
murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny
shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US
military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic
immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of riots across Taiwan
that became an international crisis for the Eisenhower administration
and raised serious questions about the legal status of US military
forces positioned around the world.
In American Justice in Taiwan,
author Stephen G. Craft provides the first comprehensive study of the
causes and consequences of the Reynolds trial and the ensuing protests.
After more than a century of what they perceived as unfair treaties
imposed by Western nations, the Taiwanese regarded the special legal
status of resident American personnel with extreme distrust. While
Eisenhower and his advisers considered Taiwan to be a vital ally against
Chinese communism, the US believed that the Taiwanese government had
instigated the unrest in order to protest the verdict and demand legal
jurisdiction over GIs. Regardless, the events that transpired in 1957
exposed the enormous difficulty of applying the US’s Uniform Code of
Military Justice (UCMJ) across cultures.
Employing meticulous
research from both Western and Chinese archives, Craft demonstrates that
the riots were only anti-American in that the Taiwanese rejected the
UCMJ, the affording of diplomatic immunity to occupying US forces, and
the military courts’ interpretation of self-defense. His compelling
study provides a new lens through which to examine US–Taiwan relations
in the 1950s, US policy in Asia, and the incredibly charged and complex
question of the legal status of US troops on foreign soil.
A few blurbs:
An excellent microhistory of an intrinsically interesting series of
events: the murder of a Taiwanese civilian by an American serviceman,
his subsequent trial, and the riots that followed his acquittal. . . .
[It] makes significant contributions to the history of U.S. relations
with Taiwan, to the history of the Cold War in Asia, and to the history
of US overseas forces. -- Robert McMahon
Craft does a superb job of placing a specific legal
event, crime, and trial into a much broader historical context. The
great strengths of the study are its use of a particular seemingly
routine trial to shed light on the inherent tensions in the US–Taiwan
relationship . . . and its very complete use of Chinese primary sources
to supplement what has traditionally been a Western focus on the Taiwan
riots. -- Michael Schaller
More information is available
here.
