Name: Why This Island Could Trigger World War 3
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T09:08:43.000Z
Duration: 29 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Reflexive pronouns

It's the 1940s and China is ripping itself apart.

Adverbs of manner

The ruling government is quickly losing the country to a rising communist revolution.

Participle clauses

It's a well organized military movement supported by the Soviet Union, led by revolutionary Mao Zedong.

And they're now marching across the country, driving out the ruling government all the way down to here, where the government leaders and over a million loyalists and soldiers retreat on boats and planes across this strait to a Chinese island that had been taken over by Japan, but

They can't reach the island without a proper navy or air force, which they did not have yet.

For now, the near defeated Republic of China is safe on this island.

400 years before this, Portuguese explorers arrived here.

It was sought after by empires from Europe to Asia for its fertile land and strategic military and trade location at the heart of Asia's ocean corridors.

China had lost this island for 50 years to Japan.

But the winners of World War II said that China would get it back.

The island was called Taiwan, and now it was home to the Republic of China's government.

Back here on the mainland, Mao declares the People's Republic of China a new communist nation that was to restore the greatness of the Chinese nation after years of domination by outsiders.

Literally, a day later, the Soviet Union recognizes Mao's government as the legitimate government of China.

Both sides still claim to be the rightful government of China, and

the Republic of China government plans to continue to fight from their island refuge to eventually take back the mainland.

They rule the island with a military government that arrests, imprisons, or executes anyone suspected of disloyalty or Communist sympathy or anyone who wants independence from all of this.

Meanwhile, Mao is working on his navy, getting ready to cross this strait.

He's gathering his forces and building his capabilities to be able to complete his takeover of the entire country.

They just defeated Japan in World War II.

They're kind of trying to leave Asia and they're eyeing all of this and deciding to not get involved.

They don't recognize Mao's new country, the prc, and

they do hate that a Communist government now controls the world's most populous country.

But they have other priorities, namely rebuilding Europe after the big war.

They've just created a big military alliance with their European allies to counter Soviet influence.

The Soviet Union was their friend in the war, but is now their rival.

Oh, and they just got nuclear weapons like the US did four years earlier.

President Truman's Secretary of State draws this line on a map show, shows it to people at a press conference saying that anything outside this zone is outside of America's defense commitments.

This includes Korea and Taiwan that remember the US said would be given back to China after the war.

And Vietnam where local communist fighters are kicking out the French, declaring a new communist country that is being recognized by China and the Soviet Union.

This is all concerning to the United States, but this is outside of their perimeter.

Back in Washington, the communist hawks are hating that the US is letting communism spread in Asia, that Taiwan will soon fall.

But Truman says this is a civil conflict in China.

We're going to leave it to them to work out.

That is until everything changes all at once.

It's a morning in the summer of 1950 and a flood of Korean troops from the Soviet aligned side of Korea rush across this line.

They tear through the American aligned south, almost taking the whole country in just 11 weeks.

It's another communist revolution and these soldiers are equipped with Soviet guns, tanks and artillery.

They invaded only after getting the green light from the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who also by the way, said they needed to get the green light from Mao.

Now Mao had been hesitant to support this invasion of Korea, knowing that it might invite the wrath of the United States.

But he had to show that he was willing to support communist revolutions everywhere.

Eventually he would commit some of his troops to go fight in Korea to help his fellow communists liberate the Korean peninsula.

Now the US doesn't have troops in Korea in this moment.

Remember it's outside of their perimeter.

But now they're starting to change their mind.

This is starting to look like a coordinated communist conspiracy all across the region.

It's threatening to turn the whole map red.

The US crosses the line that they drew a few months earlier and goes full force to stop the spread of communism.

Truman tells the nation that he's sending troops to Korea.

And in the same speech he also says that he's ordered a huge naval fleet to Taiwan to prevent any attack.

He's not going to let Mao take the island now.

And to justify this sudden U turn, Truman says something that will influence how the US approaches this situation to this day.

He says that Taiwan isn't actually officially a part of any country yet.

It had been a Japanese colony until 1945.

When Japan surrendered it, when they lost the war.

But they technically haven't worked out their sovereignty in any official treaty yet.

So for now, Taiwan's status is technically undetermined, which makes it okay for us, the United States, to move in and protect it from Mao.

I can imagine he's feeling some regret over the green light he gave the North Koreans to invade the South.

It was looking more like a strategic error which brought the US into his neighborhood, prevented him from taking this island.

And so for the next three years, this brutal Korean War rages on.

It eventually settles into a tense stalemate that still hasn't ended.

So it's 1953, and it's looking like the US is going to be in Asia for a while.

All in the name of containing the spread of communism, which they do by building out a chain of island bases that form this line of defense against their communist enemies.

And you can see that Taiwan is right at the center of it.

Congress gives the President full authorization to defend Taiwan.

The President is allowed to put nukes on the island.

Mao, meanwhile, is reshaping his country in huge ways.

And he needs to drum up support from his people, which he does by initiating an attack, unleashing tens of thousands of rounds of artillery on these close by islands that the Republic of China still controls.

The US wants to show Mao how serious they are about coming to Taiwan's defense.

US military planners draw up plans to drop nukes on the prc.

In one plan, they calculate up to a million potential casualties if they do the attack.

But they do send in a huge armada of military hardware.

Two super aircraft carriers and their destroyer convoys, 56 combat aircraft, a bunch of their most high end missiles capable of deploying nuclear weapons.

Not to mention all the backup in Japan and the Philippines.

The US is there making good on its promise to defend their strategically important island, to keep supply lines open and force Mao to think twice before invading.

Now this is looking like the beginning of another bloody war, which is exactly what the Soviet leader back in Moscow is thinking.

He sends a telegram to the United States, a pretty long telegram, telling them to back down this hasty military buildup with nukes that are all concerning a Chinese island that was never theirs.

And then he reminds the US that China isn't alone.

China and the Soviet Union are friends, brothers in communism.

And he says that an attack on China will be treated as an attack against the Soviet Union, which will lead to World War 3, this time with nukes.

Then he signs it sincerely and Khrushchev.

I mean, this is a tense moment, but ultimately, both sides back down.

The US Keeps tens of thousands of troops here.

And right here across the strait, neither of the two Chinas want the other to have the last shot.

So they keep shooting a few shells at each other every day, eventually settling into this weird rhythm.