"The first Sino-American bilateral talks would be held in Geneva in July 1955. [John Foster] Dulles earnestly explained to the Generalissimo [Chiang Kai-shek] that the purpose of this exchange was to persuade Mao Zedong to agree to a mutual renunciation of force in the Taiwan Strait. This was hardly comforting to Chiang, who feared that such an accord would lead to a neutralization of Taiwan, US rapprochement with China, and Taiwan's loss of its UN Security Council seat. In an unintentionally ironic diplomatic message to Dulles, Ambassador Rankin warned that a declaration by China and the United States avowing their peaceful intentions in the Taiwan area would create 'a grave decline in morale on Taiwan.'
"Until this point Mao was just as averse as Chiang to foreswearing the use of force in the Taiwan Strait. Such an accord would deny the PRC the right to use military means if necesary for the liberation of what most Chinese saw as sovereign Chinese territory--Taiwan. But after much wrangling in the Geneva meetings, Mao, almost certainly encouraged by his foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, surprisingly authorized a compromise. His envoy, Wang Pingnan [Wang Bingnan], proposed a written exclusion-of-force agreement in which the record of the meeting would show that the two sides verbally agreed that such a renunciation of force would include 'matters between the United States and China related to Taiwan.' Since the US commitment to defend Taiwan was the most important matter between China and the United States related to the island, this formulation seemed to provide the United States what it wanted. The Chinese accommodation strongly suggests that at this time (1955 and 1956) Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai quite possibly were serious about working with the United States. [In a footnote, Taylor notes that "In the written agreement, Peking was willing to say that the two sides should settle 'disputes between the two countries in the Taiwan area without resorting to the use of force.'"] Or possibly they saw such an offer as a tactic that might jar the Nationalist leadership into seeking a deal with them. In any event, the US envoy at the Geneva talks, Alexis Johnson, urged the White House to accept the Chinese compromise.
"For Eisenhower and Dulles, however, the offer was the curse of getting what they had wished for. They feared a furious reaction from Chiang Kai-shek and the Republican right wing if they agreed to such a peace accord with 'Red China.' They also assumed, probably correctly, that such an agreement would provoke an avalanche of nations to switch diplomatic recognition to Peking, and while the great majority of native Taiwanese would welcome the accord, they may have feared that it could spark a political crisis within the mainlander regime in Taipei...
"Because of these concerns, Eisenhower and Dulles did not exploit the opportunity presented by Mao's offer--an opportunity that would never return..."
Jay Taylor, *The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China,* pp. 488-9.
https://books.google.com/books?id=7Kz111Lie-0C&pg=PA488
One sticking point that Taylor does not mention was Zhou Enlai's insistence that "If a statement is to be specifically included in the Sino-American announcement that the disputes between the two countries in the Taiwan area will be settled through peaceful negotiations without resorting to force, then it must also be explicitly provided that a Sino- American conference of the Foreign Ministers be held so as to implement this statement."
http://tinyurl.com/z6qcvas
As David D. Perlmutter writes in *Picturing China in the American Press: The Visual Portrayal of Sino-American Relations in Time Magazine, 1949-1973*, "The Chinese precondition, however, was that any final agreement should be negotiated in person by Dulles and Zhou. The former could not bring himself to trust the Communist government and had no interest in a face-to-face meeting with his counterpart, thinking such a meeting would only undermine the American position in Asia. Moreover, as public opinion scholar Melvin Small points out, 'No one could have been elected to a position of power in 1956 who talked openly of sitting down with Mao Zedong' [1]--the latter of whose hands, in the eyes of Americans, were dripping with the blood of innocents."
http://books.google.com/books?id=fVJCwopHjbQC&pg=PA103
I wonder if a renunciation-of-force agreement--or even a meeting between Dulles and Zhou Enlai--would really have been that politically unthinkable in 1956. (If Dulles couldn't bring himself to meet Zhou, the Chinese suggested that Eisenhower send a special envoy.) Yes, Senators McCarthy and Jenner would scream "treason" and other conservative Republicans like Knowland would also disapprove, though in more measured tones. But there was so much public trust of Eisenhower that I don't think the majority of the American people would consider him guilty of a sell-out. Many would welcome a renunciation-of-force agreement as an alternative to endless crises about two tiny offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu. Besides, public opinion was probably almost as hostile to the USSR as to the PRC. If Mao's hands were "dripping with the blood of innocents", Khrushchev's were hardly clean either. Yet less than three years after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the majority of Americans do not seem to have been indignant about Khrushchev visiting the United States at Eisenhower's invitation.
Eisenhower would certainly have had the support of the titular leader of the opposition party. Adlai Stevenson would tell Theodore H. White a few years later (*The Making of the President 1960,* p. 145):
"We live in Asia with this mythology of Chiang K'ai-shek's return to China, and so we keep Quemoy and Matsu as landing stages back to the mainland. The opportunity we missed in 1955 is one of the greatest political crimes of our times, for in 1955 we had a chance to talk to them, to begin to resolve some of the problems there. It's not impossible that we could relinquish those islands in return for their relinquishing the use of force in the Orient and agreeing to a plebiscite in Formosa.
"We lost that opportunity and fortified the islands; and we did it again in 1957--how do you make Americans see these problems?"
Stevenson was wrong about a few matters here. Mao, surprisingly, did not want Chiang to withdraw from Quemoy and Matsu, because (a) Mao liked a situation where, whenever he wanted to apply pressure on the US, he could threaten the islands and whenever he wanted to relax tensions with the US, he could relax the pressure on the islands, and (b) a Nationalist withdrawal would seem to indicate the permanent separation of China from Taiwan. Also, neither Mao nor Chiang would ever have agreed to a plebiscite in Taiwan, because such a plebiscite could lead to the native Taiwanese majority voting for an independent Taiwan--the last thing either Mao or Chiang wanted. Finally, even Chiang did not take his own "counterattack the mainland" rhetoric seriously. Chiang privately explained to Dulles in 1953, on the latter's visit to Taipei, that he actually agreed with Dulles that the primary task of the Nationalist government on Taiwan was not the armed reconquest of the mainland but providing an alternative model for Chinese development. But, Chiang continued, "when it comes to domestic propaganda...it is a different matter as we need to sustain...morale." (Taylor, *The Generalissimo,* p. 478) However, Stevenson may have been right that a renunciation-of-force agreement was possible, and if such an agreement was reached, he would certainly have supported it. Thus, Ike's critics on the Right would have had nowhere to go (except perhaps a quixotic third party effort) in the 1956 election.
As for the effects on Taiwan, Chiang with his military would still have been able to keep control of the island, though undoubtedly the agreement (and the likely rush of nations to recognize Peking) would have been a harder blow than in 1971, when the island had become much stronger economically.
Interestingly, in 1971 Henry Kissinger told Zhou Enlai that the United States was now ready to sign an accord "such as you proposed in 1955." "Zhou replied in a vague manner but indicated that any such agreement would now have to reflect the fact that the question of Taiwan was a Chinese internal matter..." (Taylor, p. 565) So the US could probably have gotten better terms in 1955-56 than sixteen years later...
Any thoughts?
[1] Small wrote: "Similarly, Richard Nixon, the architect of detente with the People's Republic of China in 1972, could not have proposed such a demarche in 1956. According to most indicators of public opinion, American citizens then would not have been willing to consider such a drastic reorientation of national policy. No one could have been elected to a position of power in 1956 who talked openly about sitting down with Mao Zedong, the 'aggressor' in the Korean War. Five years later, President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat from the party that 'lost' China in 1949, believed it impossible to alter U.S. policy in Asia. A majority of Americans would first have to unlearn the propaganda lessons of the early 1950s before such a dramatic program could be safely broached by a national leader."
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Public-Opinion-The-public-as-goal-setter.html
Small may be right that a Democrat like JFK would find it politically impossible to change US China policy but I am not sure that it would have been impossible for Eisenhower--especially with Nixon's support to mollify the GOP Right--to do so in the mid-1950's. Polls might indicate a public opposition to a "deal" with the Chinese Communists, but once the enormously popular Eisenhower had actually made such a deal, some who had previously opposed it might now accept it, especially once they saw that Taiwan was not coming under Communist Chinese control, any more than it did in OTL after 1971.