a notable exception, dissenting from this prevailing view in his "Old Soldiers Never Die" speech. China had to use a Soviet loan, which had been originally intended to rebuild their destroyed economy, to pay for Soviet arms. From official Chinese sources, PVA Korean War casualty figures break down as follows: 114,084 killed in action; 380,000 total wounded in action; 70,000 died of wounds or sickness; and 25,621 missing. Republic of China (Taiwan) Korea played an important role in sustaining the ROC's economic stability. Until the war in Korea, the U.S. had largely abandoned the Nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, whose forces had retreated to Taiwan after their defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong's Communists in the Chinese Civil War. Indeed, the U.S. had little involvement in that conflict, beyond supplying surplus material to the Nationalists. However, the PRC's involvement in the Korean War rendered any U.S. policy that would have allowed Taiwan to fall under PRC control untenable. This saw the abandonment of the American policy to let Taiwan join the communist Chinese state, the policy which existed prior to the war. Truman's decision to send American warships to the Formosa Strait as well as an increase in aid in order to deter the PRC from making any attempt to invade Taiwan, after doing nothing to prevent the Nationalists' mainland defeat in the first place, is evidence of this. Also, the anti-communist atmosphere in the West in response to the Korean War contributed to the unwillingness to diplomatically recognize the People's Republic of China until the 1970s. In that time, the Republic of China (ROC) was recognized by the U.S. as 'the' legitimate Chinese government, and that in turn allowed Taiwan to develop politically, militarily, and economically. The result has been that, today, any effort by the PRC to invade the island, or otherwise coerce the people there into an arrangement of political unity with the Communist controlled mainland, would be difficult at best to accomplish, and may be impossible without a great deal of bloodshed. While economic ties between the PRC and ROC have grown immensely since the 1990s, thus achieving a degree of interdependency that would have been unimaginable even twenty years ago; political diplomacy between the ROC and mainland China remains strained, and successive governments in Taiwan have consistently, if sometimes obliquely, signaled their determination to remain independent for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the defectors