On January 3rd, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, discussing an escalating confrontation with Iran, told reporters: “In the coming hours to days, we will unleash Chiang.” The phrase ricocheted across Taiwan's political spectrum. Supporters of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party heard a leash — a dog being set loose. The opposition Kuomintang heard something closer to reverence. Both interpretations, in their own way, missed the point.
To understand why Rubio — a Cuban-American senator from Florida, now America's top diplomat — would reach back seven decades for a Cold War reference when talking about Iran, you have to understand a history that stretches from the missionary halls of 1930s Shanghai to the exile communities of Miami. That history, and what it means for Taiwan today, is what Samuel Hui (許劍虹) has spent years piecing together.
The Old Republicans and Their Complicated Love
Huiis a Chinese-American writer who has spent more than a decade studying the military and diplomatic history of the Republic of China and its tangled relationship with the United States. He is careful, even-handed, and reluctant to overstate — qualities that make his analysis on this subject worth taking seriously.
“The word ‘unleash' doesn't necessarily imply a dog,” he said. “There used to be a beverage advertisement in America with the slogan ‘Unleash the Power.' Dogs have a very positive image in America anyway. Taiwan doesn't need to read it that way.”
What Rubio's phrase does invoke, Huiargues, is a specific Republican tradition — one that goes back not to the Cold War, but further, to the presidencies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover in the late 1920s. When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government consolidated power in 1928, America was governed by Coolidge; Hoover, who succeeded him, had spent years in China as a mining company representative. He arrived in office with genuine affection for the country and instinctive sympathy for Chiang's government.
But the Republican relationship with China in that era was built on contradictions that Huidescribes with precision. “On one hand, early Republican figures did enormous charitable work in China — adopting orphans, funding missions. On the other hand, they supported the Chinese Exclusion Act.” The impulse was to Americanize China, not to welcome the Chinese into America. They wanted China to become Christian, democratic, and open to American commerce — a vast market, a moral project, and a geostrategic anchor, all at once.
“They hoped the Chinese would stay in China and build it well,” Huisaid flatly. “But not come to America.” Supporting Chiang, in this framework, was never purely altruistic. It was strategic, ideological, and tinged with a paternalism that old Republicans rarely examined.
That recognition endures. Chiang Kai-shek's (蔣介石) photograph appears today at the entrance of the “Road to Tokyo” hall at the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C. — placed alongside Allied leaders, an acknowledgment of China's role in the Pacific War. When Trump visited the New York Times headquarters in 2016, photographs captured Chiang's portrait on the newsroom wall. Liberal media, conservative hero. The image crosses lines that Taiwan's own politics obscure.
The Break with Truman — and What Really Caused It
The standard account of how Chiang fell out with American liberals centers on the 1948 presidential election, when Chiang backed Republican nominee Thomas Dewey over the incumbent Harry S. Truman (杜魯門). Truman won, felt betrayed, and the relationship curdled. Huithinks this narrative is too simple.
“Chiang's relationship with the Democratic Party wasn't bad to begin with,” he said. “Roosevelt worked closely with him. Chiang knew how to court the Democrats too.” Even after Roosevelt's death, Truman initially supported the Nationalist government. He dispatched U.S. warships to ferry Nationalist troops back to Shanghai, Nanjing, and Beijing to accept Japan's surrender in 1945. He sent Marines to North China. These were not the actions of a hostile president.
The rupture came from a strategic disagreement, not a personal slight. Truman's advisors believed China was an unwinnable “bottomless pit” of American resources. Some in the Democratic Party floated the idea of peeling the Chinese Communist Party away from Soviet influence — making it a nationalist force that would check Moscow rather than serve it. That required pressuring Chiang to negotiate with the Communists.
“Chiang felt Truman wasn't supporting him enough,” Huisaid. “So he backed Dewey. And that soured everything.” The consequences proved lasting. After mainland China fell to Mao Zedong's forces in 1949 and the Korean War broke out the following year, Republicans hammered Truman for “losing China” — a charge that the Democratic Party's alleged softness had handed the world's most populous country to Communism. From that accusation grew the phrase that Rubio reached for seventy years later: “unleash Chiang.”
The concrete expression of that slogan came in July 1953, when Nationalist forces launched an amphibious assault on Dongshan Island, at the Fujian-Guangdong border. The battle failed. But the willingness to try — to strike back at the mainland rather than simply defend Taiwan — cemented Chiang's particular mystique among American conservatives. He became not just a Cold War ally, but a symbol of anti-Communist resolve.
Why Rubio, and Why Now
Marco Rubio has referenced Chiang Kai-shek multiple times throughout his political career. Hui , who has not interviewed Rubio and is careful to frame what follows as informed speculation, believes the key lies not in Washington's China strategy, but in Miami's exile politics.
Rubio comes from Florida's Cuban exile community — people whose families fled after Fidel Castro took power and who have spent generations watching from a distance as their homeland remains under the same government that expelled them. When Castro seized Cuba, the previous leader Fulgencio Batista fled to Portugal, abandoning the anti-Communist resistance. The Cuban exile community was left with their grievances but no institutional home, no continuing government, no flag they could freely display. Castro did not even change the Cuban flag, meaning that the banner Cuban-Americans might rally around is the same one the regime flies in Havana.
“I think Rubio genuinely envies what the Chinese community still has,” Huisaid. “A free, democratic Taiwan. A leader in Chiang Kai-shek. A flag. The entire Republic of China framework successfully transferred from the mainland to Taiwan — a government in exile that became a real country without ever having to formally declare independence. That's something a lot of anti-Communist exile communities can only dream of.”
The sentiment, Huinotes, extends beyond the Cuban community. Vietnamese-Americans who fled after 1975, early Russian émigré communities, and Iranian exiles — all of them, in his telling, look at Taiwan and feel something like longing. A cause that survived. A flag that still flies somewhere.
Taiwan's Uncomfortable Asset
What does any of this mean for Taiwan practically? Huiis clear-eyed about the limits. Republican politicians in opposition sound different from Republican politicians in office. “Even Rubio, now that he's Secretary of State, has to deal with the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. And the possibility that the Trump administration might use Taiwan as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Beijing is not, in Hui 's view, something that can be dismissed.
But the emotional and symbolic capital that Taiwan carries in American conservative circles is real, and Huibelieves Taiwan's political parties — across the blue-green divide — have not fully understood how to use it. His advice is pointed: engage not just with Washington's think tanks and policy elite, but with the broader communities that have kept the Chiang myth alive. Cuban-Americans in Florida. Vietnamese-Americans in California and Texas. The Republican right wing that, in Hui 's assessment, may hold Chiang Kai-shek in higher regard than most Taiwanese themselves do.
“When people hear ‘Taiwan,' they think of Chiang Kai-shek,” he said. “That's a resource. You should use it carefully, not throw it away.”
He is quick to add that using Chiang as a diplomatic asset does not require whitewashing his record. The White Terror, the authoritarian decades, the suppression of political opponents — these are not footnotes. But Huidraws an analogy that is worth sitting with. Roosevelt signed the Yalta Agreement and interned Japanese Americans. Churchill was a committed imperialist. History does not demand that we reduce complex leaders to saints or villains. “At minimum,” Huisaid, framing what he thinks American conservatives ask of Taiwan, “you should acknowledge that he kept Taiwan, and that Taiwan exists today because of that.”
The Last of the Old Guard
Near the end of our conversation, Huimentioned John McCain — the Arizona senator, Vietnam War veteran, and 2008 Republican presidential nominee who died of brain cancer in August 2018. McCain was a consistent friend to Taiwan throughout his career. When he died, his mother Roberta, then in her 100s, reportedly flew the Republic of China flag in the yard of her Arizona home.
“Those old conservatives had deep emotional ties to the Republic of China,” Huisaid. “Thankfully, we still have Rubio. Otherwise, I'm not sure there'd be anyone left.”
It's a melancholy note to end on — the sense that a particular strand of American conservatism, the one that remembers Chiang and means it, is aging out of politics. Whether Rubio represents its continuation or its last gasp may depend, in part, on whether Taiwan can give the next generation of American conservatives something to believe in.
The portrait still hangs somewhere, presumably. The question is whether anyone is still looking at it.
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