Project National Glory
Based on Wikipedia: Project National Glory
For nearly three decades after 1949, the leaders of Taiwan maintained an elaborate plan to invade mainland China with hundreds of thousands of troops, recapture the territory they had lost, and reunify the nation under their rule. They called it Project National Glory—Guoguang in Mandarin—and it was not a fantasy sketched on napkins. It was a comprehensive military operation with detailed landing plans, casualty estimates, mobilization schedules, and a dedicated planning staff that reported directly to Chiang Kai-shek himself.
The plan was never executed. But understanding why Taiwan's leaders believed it could work—and why they clung to this ambition for so long—reveals something profound about how defeated regimes process loss, how Cold War alliances actually functioned, and how nuclear weapons changed everything.
The Retreat and the Promise
When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan in 1949, they did not view it as a permanent exile. They had lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong's Communists, but they had not accepted defeat. Taiwan was a temporary refuge—a base from which to rebuild, rearm, and eventually return.
This was not mere propaganda for domestic consumption. The Nationalists genuinely believed reconquest was possible, and they took concrete steps to make it happen. They reformed their armed forces, which had performed poorly in the civil war. They established a conscription system designed to build up a trained reserve that could be mobilized for an invasion. They even brought in former Japanese military officers—members of a secretive group called the White Group—to help with planning and training. These were men who had fought against China during World War Two but who now offered their expertise to their former enemies.
The Americans formalized their military support with the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, signed in 1954. By the end of that decade, Taiwan's armed forces had transformed from the demoralized army that had lost the mainland into an effective defensive force. The question was whether they could become an effective offensive one.
Probing the Mainland
While building up conventional forces, Taiwan also tested Communist defenses through unconventional means. From 1951 to 1954, irregular forces trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency—operating under the rather dramatic name of the Anti-Communist Salvation Army—conducted raids along the Chinese coast from islands that Taiwan still controlled near the mainland.
These were not major military operations. They were probing attacks, intelligence-gathering missions, and psychological warfare. But they kept alive the idea that the mainland was not impregnable.
Taiwan also looked for opportunities to launch a larger offensive when China's attention was diverted elsewhere. During the Korean War, when Chinese troops were fighting American-led forces on the Korean Peninsula, Chiang offered to attack the mainland. The Americans said no. Taiwan considered supporting guerrilla operations along the border between China and Burma (now Myanmar). It contemplated getting involved in Vietnam as a way to distract China from a cross-strait invasion. None of these schemes materialized.
What Taiwan needed was the right moment—a crisis within China that would give an invasion a realistic chance of success.
The Great Leap Forward Opens a Window
By 1961, Taiwan's leaders believed that moment had arrived.
The People's Republic of China was in turmoil. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward—his catastrophic attempt to rapidly industrialize China through collective farming and backyard steel furnaces—had produced the deadliest famine in human history. Tens of millions of Chinese people starved to death between 1959 and 1961. The Communist Party's legitimacy was shattered. The economy was in ruins.
Meanwhile, the alliance between China and the Soviet Union was fracturing. The Sino-Soviet split, as historians call it, meant that Beijing could no longer count on Moscow's support in a conflict. China was isolated, weakened, and distracted.
Project Guoguang's planners later identified this as the ideal scenario for an invasion: attack when the mainland was consumed by political strife, or at war with rebels or neighboring countries. In 1961, all of these conditions seemed to be converging.
On April 1, 1961, Chiang Kai-shek formally established the Guoguang Operation Office. It was led by a lieutenant general who reported directly to Chiang himself, bypassing the normal military chain of command. This was not a staff exercise or a contingency plan. This was serious preparation for war.
Preparing for Invasion
The Taiwanese government began mobilizing on multiple fronts. It created organizations for wartime administration. It established something called the Special Defence Budget. It even imposed a new tax—the Special Defence Levy—to help fund the preparations. Foreign observers noticed these moves and wondered what Taiwan was planning.
Along the coast, Taiwanese agents and paramilitary forces shifted from gathering intelligence to conducting probing attacks. In 1964, Chiang ordered the construction of a new military headquarters behind his residence at Cihu, complete with air raid shelters. He was planning for a war that could come back to Taiwan itself.
The centerpiece of Project Guoguang was an amphibious assault on Xiamen, a major port city in Fujian province, directly across the strait from Taiwan. The operation would use the island of Jinmen—which Taiwan still controlled, just a few miles off the mainland coast—as a forward operating base.
The planners were not optimistic about surprise. They calculated that Chinese reinforcements would begin arriving five days before the landing. This meant the invasion force would face an immediate counterattack the moment it hit the beaches. The estimated butcher's bill: fifty thousand casualties. The required force: two hundred seventy thousand troops, roughly a third of Taiwan's total mobilized strength.
This was just Phase One.
What came after was deliberately vague. The plan called for Taiwan to advance into the mainland by "covertly fomenting, or taking advantage of unrest" in Communist China. But how exactly this would work was never specified in detail. The planners recognized this was a problem—you cannot draw up operational orders for a popular uprising that may or may not happen—and so detailed planning never progressed beyond the initial amphibious assault.
Even Phase One stretched Taiwan's capabilities to the breaking point. The operation required more troops than Taiwan could realistically deploy and more ships and aircraft than it possessed for transport and logistics.
The American Problem
There was another problem, one that would ultimately prove insurmountable: the United States opposed the entire enterprise.
Washington did not want the Chinese Civil War to resume. American policy was to contain Communism, not to roll it back through a war that could escalate into a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. The Americans communicated their opposition through diplomatic channels. More pointedly, they kept close tabs on Taiwan's preparations through the Military Assistance Advisory Group—essentially making it clear that they knew what was being planned and did not approve.
Taiwan needed American support. It needed American ships to transport troops. It needed American logistics to sustain an invasion. It needed American air power and perhaps American ground forces if things went badly. Without the Americans, Project Guoguang was a fantasy.
Faced with American opposition, Taiwan put the invasion on hold.
The Nuclear Trigger
Then, in October 1964, China detonated its first atomic bomb.
This changed Chiang Kai-shek's calculus completely. If China developed a nuclear arsenal—and delivery systems to use it—Taiwan's window for invasion might close forever. A nuclear-armed China could deter any attack, no matter how favorable the internal conditions might be. The time to act was now, before it was too late.
On June 17, 1965, Chiang addressed officers at the Republic of China Military Academy and told them the invasion was imminent. A final decision would be made on July 20. Officers who had been mobilized, and personnel deployed to Kinmen (the staging island near the mainland), were required to prepare their wills and testaments.
This was not a drill.
Disasters at Sea
The summer of 1965 should have been Taiwan's moment. Instead, it became a catalogue of military humiliations.
On June 24, an amphibious landing exercise in southern Taiwan went horribly wrong. Strong waves overturned five amphibious assault vehicles. More than ten soldiers drowned. It was a grim omen for a military that needed to cross one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world.
Worse was to come.
On August 6, two Taiwanese warships carrying troops on a reconnaissance mission toward the mainland were intercepted near Dongshan Island by torpedo boats from the People's Liberation Army Navy. Both ships were sunk. Two hundred Taiwanese personnel died. The operation had been so poorly coordinated that the Taiwanese Air Force was unaware the mission was even happening—a communication breakdown that left the ships without air support.
The disaster repeated itself in November. Two more warships—the Shan Hai and the Lin Huai—were intercepted while traveling to pick up wounded troops from offshore islands. The Lin Huai took two torpedoes and sank. Another ninety men died.
In less than six months, Taiwan had lost four warships and nearly three hundred sailors in skirmishes that were supposed to be minor reconnaissance and support operations. If the Taiwanese navy could not even conduct limited missions near the mainland without catastrophic losses, how could it possibly support a full-scale amphibious invasion?
The invasion planned for 1965 never happened.
One Last Chance
Taiwan's leaders did not give up. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, plunging China into a decade of political chaos, factional violence, and institutional destruction. Party officials were purged. Military commanders were denounced. The economy ground to a halt as young Red Guards roamed the country destroying anything associated with the old order.
To Chiang Kai-shek, this looked like the opportunity he had been waiting for since 1949. The Communist regime was tearing itself apart. In 1967, he was confident that the instability would not be short-lived. He approached the Americans one more time, asking for support to launch an invasion.
The Americans refused. Again.
This was the last serious attempt to revive Project Guoguang. The Guoguang Operation Office was renamed the less ambitious-sounding Operation Planning Office in 1966. The dream of large-scale amphibious invasion was quietly set aside.
The Long Retreat from Reconquest
What replaced the invasion plan was something more modest: hope that the Communist regime would collapse on its own, and that Taiwan could then intervene to support an anti-Communist revolution. Think Hungary in 1956, when Hungarians briefly rose up against Soviet rule—except this time, the uprising would succeed because Taiwan would be there to help.
This new strategy required a fundamental shift in priorities. Instead of building an invasion force, Taiwan would focus on economic development. A strong economy would support eventual military operations while also demonstrating that the Nationalist model of governance was superior to Communism. In the meantime, Taiwan would wage psychological warfare, broadcasting propaganda to the mainland and training special forces to infiltrate and incite rebellion.
The "Wang-shih" plan envisioned using special operations forces to spark uprisings inside China. The "Ku-an" plan focused on defense while maintaining some offensive capabilities. Neither was as concrete as Project Guoguang had been.
Power was also shifting within Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek, the man who had never stopped dreaming of reconquest, was aging. In September 1969, he was injured in a car accident and began withdrawing from politics as his health declined. His son, Chiang Ching-kuo, gradually took over policy-making. The younger Chiang was more pragmatic. He understood that the international situation had changed.
And change it did. In 1971, the People's Republic of China took Taiwan's seat at the United Nations. In 1972, President Richard Nixon visited Beijing, beginning the process of normalizing relations between the United States and Communist China. The Shanghai Communiqué, issued at the end of Nixon's visit, announced that American troops would eventually withdraw from Taiwan.
The message was clear: the United States was not going to help Taiwan reconquer the mainland. Taiwan needed to think about defense, not offense.
On July 20, 1972, the Operation Planning Office—the successor to the Guoguang Operation Office—was abolished. The institutional infrastructure for planning an invasion of China was dismantled.
The Final Abandonment
Old habits died hard. Even after 1972, some planning documents still contained references to eventual offensive operations. A 1987 revision of the nominally defensive Ku-an plan included a section—never completed—about attacking the mainland. Taiwanese paratroopers continued training for offensive operations. The armed forces remained organized, at least on paper, as an offensive force.
But these were vestiges of a policy that no longer made sense. When Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, he was succeeded by Lee Teng-hui, the first native-born Taiwanese to lead the country. Lee had no emotional attachment to the mainland. He had grown up in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule and had no memories of a China that the Nationalists had governed.
In 1990, Lee formally abandoned the policy of pursuing reunification through force. Taiwan's military adopted a fully defensive posture starting in 1991. The decades-long dream of reconquering the mainland—of undoing the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War—was officially dead.
What Project Guoguang Reveals
Reading about Project Guoguang today, it is tempting to dismiss it as delusional. How could Taiwan, an island of perhaps fifteen million people, have seriously contemplated invading a country of several hundred million? How could Chiang Kai-shek have believed that an amphibious assault requiring a third of his mobilized forces and expecting fifty thousand casualties in the first phase alone had any chance of success?
But context matters. The Nationalists had not simply lost a war; they had lost their country. They had retreated to Taiwan with their government, their gold reserves, their best troops, and their conviction that they remained the legitimate rulers of all China. The Communist regime in Beijing was, in their eyes, a usurper—illegitimate, brutal, and ultimately doomed to collapse.
The Great Leap Forward seemed to prove them right. When tens of millions of people starve because of government policy, surely revolution cannot be far behind? The Cultural Revolution reinforced this belief. Mao was destroying his own regime from within. All Taiwan needed was the right moment and the right level of support.
What Taiwan's leaders consistently underestimated was the resilience of the Communist state. They expected uprisings that never came. They expected defections that never materialized. They expected the Chinese people to welcome them as liberators, not as the losers of a civil war returning to settle old scores.
They also overestimated American willingness to support their ambitions. The United States wanted to contain Communism, not to restart wars that might escalate into nuclear confrontation. As China developed nuclear weapons, American caution only increased. Taiwan was a useful ally for keeping pressure on Beijing. It was not a springboard for World War Three.
Project Guoguang was formally declassified in 2009, with documentation displayed at the Cihu Mausoleum—the site where Chiang Kai-shek had once ordered his command bunker built in anticipation of the war that never came. Visitors can now examine the plans, the organizational charts, and the strategic assessments that sustained the dream of reconquest for more than a decade.
It is a reminder that wars are not only fought on battlefields. They are fought in planning rooms and ministries, in the minds of leaders who cannot accept that a cause is lost. Sometimes the most consequential military operations are the ones that never happen—the invasions that are prepared but never launched, the wars that remain forever on the edge of beginning.
For Taiwan, the abandonment of Project Guoguang marked the beginning of a new identity: not as the government-in-exile of all China, but as a distinct society with its own interests and its own future. The question of Taiwan's relationship with the mainland remains unresolved. But the era when Taiwan seriously planned to resolve it through amphibious assault is history now—a strange, almost unbelievable chapter that shaped the island's development for decades.