American Troops On Taiwan Episodes

It was one of Taiwan’s most secretive Cold War outposts: Shulinkou Air Station (樹林口空軍情報站), a joint-service U.S. intelligence base perched on a misty plateau west of Taipei. Built in 1955, it was a hub for the interception, decryption, and analysis of enemy radio and electronic communications. In Part 1 of this three-part series, we focus on the early 1960s and the everyday world of the young servicemen and officers stationed there. Join them as they resist the character-destroying temptations of Taipei’s back alleys, face vengeful thieves, ride the rails in a stolen locomotive (probably a tall tale but you be the judge), and encounter ghostly road vehicles. This is Part 1. Parts 2 and 3 will take us deeper -- into the looming Vietnam War. For this episode, we relied heavily on the excellent Shulinkou Air Station Taiwan website, which is run by men who served there between 1955 and 1977.

With a new intro and ending, this is a rerelease of one of our more popular episodes: the story of the decision by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter (1924-2024) to follow through with previous administration commitments to recognize the People’s Republic of China. The switch from the ROC to the PRC was a massive change that would slowly lead to the complicated de facto status the Republic of China has today: not technically recognized as a country, not thought to represent “China” anymore, but – at least for a huge number of nations – in reality, now a thriving, democratic, independent island nation known best by the name “Taiwan.”

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter only served one term, but those four years were rough: oil embargos, inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and the decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It was an unpopular move, especially in Taiwan. President Carter asked his deputy secretary of state, Warren Christopher, to go to Taipei and deal with the fallout. Christopher received possibly the most hostile “welcome” to Taiwan ever experienced by an American government official.

“Blatant sex capital of Asia, where vice is legal and the price is right,” was how one book described Taipei in 1969. Listen as Taipei-based journalist David Frazier takes us through the history of Taipei’s first foreign-oriented red light district, an area of girlie bars and nightclubs that was, and still is, known as the “Combat Zone.” Frazier explains how this infamous entertainment zone formed around nearby US military bases, the history of prostitution in modern Taiwan, and how a bar zone became a conduit for Western culture.