The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  The Soong sisters: Ailing, Chingling, and Mayling. Two of the sisters sided with Chiang Kai-shek; one sided with Mao Zedong. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)

  Charlie provided his offspring with American college educations at Harvard, Wellesley, and Georgia’s Wesleyan College. While living in the United States, the Soong children saw how little Americans knew about China and realized that these people believed China was destined to be Christianized and Americanized. Like their father, they understood that Americans accepted them not for who they were (Chinese) but for what they had become (Americanized Chinese Christians).

  Ailing Soong, Charlie’s oldest child, inherited her father’s drive. Ailing journeyed to the United States alone at the age of fourteen and graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in 1911. She then returned to China to serve as Dr. Sun’s personal assistant.

  The Mandate of Heaven had for years been in play. Sea barbarians on China’s coast had humiliated the Manchu dynasty, which then endured the nineteenth century’s largest civil war—the Taiping Rebellion—and was further humbled by foreign troops who marched on Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion. The corrupt Empress Dowager Cixi finally died in 1908, at the age of seventy-three, after forty-seven years of rule. At the age of two, Puyi—depicted in popular culture as the Last Emperor—became the new Son of Heaven.

  By 1911 the Manchu dynasty was on its last legs, its emperor only five years old. Numerous uprisings—some of which Sun Yat-sen led or participated in—sought to gain the Mandate of Heaven. In the fall of that year, Sun was in the United States raising funds when he learned from press reports that on October 10, 1911, one of his allies had staged a successful military uprising in the city of Wuchang. Sun arrived back in China on December 21, 1911. On December 29, a meeting of representatives from some of China’s provinces elected Sun provisional president of what would be proclaimed on January 1, 1912, as the Republic of China. But Sun had competition within the ranks for the Mandate and was unable to dominate the unruly coalition of revolutionaries. Sun lost out in a clash of arms, and China descended into chaos as warlords quickly divided the country among themselves. Suddenly the lives of Sun and Soong were in jeopardy. In 1913 Sun and Charlie Soong packed up their families, boarded a ship in the dark of night, and fled to Japan.

  Ailing continued as Sun’s personal assistant in Japan, but she soon grew uncomfortable with the unwelcome sexual advances made by her married, older boss. Even as a young woman, Ailing was a shrewd operator, more interested in money than power. In 1914, twenty-six-year-old Ailing extracted herself from the forty-eight-year-old Sun’s grasp with no hurt feelings and married H. H. Kung, a Chinese Christian also in Japan who was reputedly China’s richest banker and a lineal descendant of Confucius.

  At this point, Chingling Soong, Charlie’s second daughter, was twenty-one years old and, like her sister, a graduate of Wesleyan College. Chingling took Ailing’s place as Sun’s secretary.

  Sun made advances to the beautiful young Chingling as well. Unlike her older sister, Chingling fell for Sun and/or his ideas. As she later remembered: “I didn’t fall in love. It was hero-worship from afar. It was a romantic girl’s idea… but a good one. I wanted to help save China and Dr. Sun was the one man who could do it, so I wanted to help him.”4

  When Charlie realized that his married best friend was pursuing his young daughter, he dragged Chingling back to Shanghai and ordered her to forget Sun. Father and daughter quarreled. One night, Chingling escaped through a window, boarded a ship, and returned to Sun’s arms in Japan.

  Forty-nine-year-old Sun abandoned his wife and married twenty-three-year-old Chingling in Tokyo on October 25, 1915. Chingling recalled, “My father came to Japan and bitterly attacked Dr. Sun. He tried to annul the marriage on grounds that I was underage and lacked my parents’ consent. When he failed he broke all relations with Dr. Sun and disowned me!”5

  Charlie Soong died three years later, in 1918, having had no contact with Sun and Chingling since their marriage. Friends remember Soong lamenting, “I was never so hurt in my life. My own daughter and my best friend.”6 Dr. Sun did not attend his funeral.

  Ailing took the reins of the Soong empire upon her father’s death. At this point, many factions were competing to unite a fractured China, one of them the Dr. Sun–founded Nationalist Party, which espoused his Three Principles of the People. Ailing naturally supported the man who was her father’s former best friend and her sister’s husband. Sun’s fortunes—and those of his Nationalist Party—rose, fell, and then rose again, with Sun sometimes close to grasping power, other times fleeing into exile once more. All along, the Wesleyan-educated Ailing, her Yale-educated husband, H. H. Kung, and her Harvard-educated little brother, T. V. Soong, raised funds for the Nationalist Party. Sun and the Soongs would have liked American help, but actions by the United States at this time enraged millions of Chinese, and in the fallout, another white Western country emerged as Sun’s chief supporter.

  Chingling Soong and Sun Yat-sen. She was twenty-three years old; he was forty-nine. “I wanted to help save China and Dr. Sun was the one man who could do it, so I wanted to help him,” Chingling said. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  When World War I erupted in Europe, Britain used its New China colony of Weihaiwei to recruit an eventual 140,000 Chinese to serve in the Chinese Labor Corps (CLC) in Britain, working in place of the British men marching off to war. While in Europe, these CLC forces—and millions of relatives back in China following them in press reports—learned that America had declared this Great War to be a “war to end all wars.” President Woodrow Wilson entered the Paris peace talks preaching “self-determination” as a salve for a ravaged world.

  Wilson accidentally inspired millions of colonized Asians held in the clutches of white Westerners. A young Ho Chi Minh petitioned Wilson and other leaders to help him free Indochina from the grasp of the French, a request that was cast aside. The Chinese warlords who controlled Beijing at that moment sent a delegation representing China’s interests to Paris. Inspired by Wilson, the Chinese imagined that the conference would help China evict the Germans—who had lost the war and who were being taken to the cleaners by the victorious Western powers—from the Middle Kingdom. Instead, Wilson and other leaders at the Paris Peace Conference upheld the right of foreign devils to expand their New Chinas by granting Japan the former German China area of Shandong, on China’s Pacific coast.

  When news of the West’s—and especially Wilson’s—sellout hit, millions of Chinese protesters flooded the streets, among them a youthful Mao Zedong who “attacked Wilson’s failure in his first recorded criticism of the United States.”7 To protest the people’s treatment, the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference was the only one that did not sign the treaty officially ending hostilities between the Allied and Central Powers.

  As Chinese seethed at America, a new revolutionary player, the Soviet Union, cannily renounced many of the deposed czar’s unequal privileges in China (which imperial Russia, along with other Western countries, had gained in the nineteenth century under the unequal treaties but that the new Soviet Union didn’t have the power to exploit). This created a tremendous sense of goodwill between those two nations. Communist Russian agents soon established warm contacts with important Chinese intellectuals and political figures. For over two generations, America had sent thousands of political, cultural, economic, and missionary workers to China. Communist Russia didn’t have a single school, church, or even debating society in China. Yet, within little time, the new Soviet Union had made a greater impression on the Chinese than all the Christian missionary influences combined.

  Eventually, Moscow agreed to bankroll two small factions within the fractured China and dispatched advisers to found a Chinese Communist Party and help organize Sun’s Nationalist Party along Soviet lines. Moscow’s advisers told the Nationalists and the Communists to combine forces in a united front. Both parties would receive Soviet aid.

  In th
e Nationalist camp was a rising star, Chiang Kai-shek, a traditional Confucian thinker on the political right. He’d trained as a soldier in Japan, and Sun had appointed him Generalissimo of the Nationalist army. In Chiang’s idea of revolution, he would seize military control of the country, and the masses would then obey him as a father figure according to his code: inferior yielded to superior, soldier deferred to general, and the general bowed to Heaven. Chiang bought into the father-son model as long as he was the father: “I believe that unless everyone has absolute trust in one man, we cannot reconstruct the nation and we cannot complete the revolution.”8 About his army, the Generalissimo said, “I look upon the soldiers under me as a father regards his children.”9 Chiang valued loyalty above ability and surrounded himself with yes-men. When someone criticized an incompetent general, Chiang replied, “But where do you find a man who is so obedient?”10

  Chiang chanted Sun’s principles of Nationalism, Democracy, and People’s Livelihood, but what interested him most was the tutelage period during which one leader would control China. He ruled out democracy as “absolutely impossible for the entire nation.”11

  While he didn’t say it to foreigners’ faces, Chiang later wrote a too-candid book in which he attributed almost all of China’s ills to the foreign devils and their unequal treaties. Yet Chiang was not on the side of China’s peasant majority; instead, he favored the wealthy bankers and landlords who got fat on peasant labor. Indeed, while claiming to be a revolutionary, Chiang was actually a staunch defender of the status quo—with one exception. When Sun appointed him Generalissimo, Chiang exclaimed to his wife, Jennie: “If I control the army, I will have the power to control the country. It is my road to leadership.”12

  On the left, within Sun’s Russian-supported politically flexible big tent, was a far different character, the Communist Party’s Mao Zedong.13 Mao grew up in relatively comfortable circumstances in the province of Hunan with a financially successful father and his own bedroom, a rare luxury in rural China. As a boy, Mao read voraciously, developing what would become a lifelong habit. “What I enjoyed were the romances of Old China, and especially stories of rebellions,” he later recalled. “I used to read [these outlawed books] in school, covering them up with a [Chinese] Classic when the teacher walked past… I believe that perhaps I was much influenced by such books, read at an impressionable age.”14 Mao also devoured books about the history of Western countries, including the United States. He remembered, “I had first heard of America in an article which told of the American Revolution and contained a sentence like this: ‘After eight years of difficult war, Washington won victory and built up his nation.’ ”15 Rebellion in search of the Mandate of Heaven—a long and hallowed Chinese tradition—excited the young man.

  As a youth, Mao read an 1894 pamphlet written by white Christians entitled “The Dismemberment of China”; it repeated the claim that China could not be reformed from within but would have to be civilized by foreign countries. Years later, he remembered the opening line: “Alas, China will be subjugated.” Mao credited the reading of this pamphlet with the beginning of his political consciousness; as he later recalled, “I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realize that it was the duty of all the people to help save it.”16

  In the early 1920s, the young Mao joined the New Culture movement, which held that traditional Confucian values would not help China advance. Leaders advocated a cultural revolution to regenerate China. Old ways had to be dispensed with, and the consciousness of the people had to be transformed. Until there was a cultural revolution, there was little hope that China would become strong enough to oust the foreign devils.

  Mao and the members of the New Culture movement were young men who faced away from China’s past and toward its future. Inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution, he and a small group of others founded the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in July of 1921. Mao accepted Russian guidance and Marxist language before he fully understood many Western—and especially Marxist—concepts. In Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait, Maurice Meisner writes, “It is a striking feature of the origins of the Chinese Communist Party that its founders became politically committed to Communism well before they became intellectually committed to Marxist theory, indeed, in most cases well before they acquired any significant knowledge of Marxism.”17 Marxism addressed itself to modern industrial countries where the urban workers would supposedly rise in revolution, so Mao began by attempting to organize China’s urban workers into trade unions. But soon he imagined a revolution the exact opposite of that prescribed by conventional Marxism or Communism.

  Most Chinese people lived in small villages; only a small fraction had jobs in the coastal cities. The villages were often little more than a dozen or so mud huts, with no electricity or sewers. Half the people died before the age of thirty. Landlords held sway, owning the vast majority of the land, and the farmers often paid them more than 50 percent of their crops in confiscatory taxes. A British social scientist compared the Chinese farmer to “a man standing permanently up to the neck in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”18 Mao imagined a revolution in which the powerless peasants would rise together to become powerful and take land from the landlords. This was the beginning of Maoism.

  When Mao revealed his new thinking, his fellow Communist Party members were aghast. Communist dogma held that peasants were low-class, simple-minded conservatives who could not be roused to revolution. Mao begged to differ and submitted an article arguing for a revolution in which the countryside would dominate the cities, but Communist leaders refused to publish his heresy.

  Against the majority’s criticism, Mao retained his certainty. As early as 1925, Mao was already talking about organizing the peasant masses. In January of 1926 Mao published an astute analysis of rural society, identifying as China’s real problem the big landlords who controlled too much land. Mao complained that the revolution had focused too much on city people and not enough on the peasant majority. Almost alone, he predicted that those who rode the wave of peasant revolution would inherit the Mandate of Heaven. Duxiu Chen, the secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party, expressed the majority view as he rebuked Mao: “The peasants are scattered and their forces are not easy to concentrate”; their “culture is low, their desires in life are simple, and they easily tend toward conservatism… these environmental factors make it difficult for the peasants to participate in the revolutionary movement.”19

  Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, his principles of Nationalism, Democracy, and People’s Livelihood an intellectual construct that he had never translated into a real revolution. Many had approved of Sun’s rebellious ideas because he called for Chinese nationalism, but Sun was a Western-oriented Christian who had inspired no impassioned nationwide mass movement. His Nationalist Party (along with its Communist adjunct) was a Moscow-funded organization with influence mostly in southeast China. Traditional Chinese society had not changed and the status of the peasantry versus the landlords remained the same.

  Sun’s United Front had been a big tent masking fundamental differences. Sun’s death set off a struggle for succession. Chiang Kai-shek was allied with the urban, Western-oriented moneyed classes and the bankers and landlords who feasted on the status quo. Diametrically opposed was Mao Zedong, who thought that China’s future rested with the rural poor. As the English author Philip Short puts it in his excellent study Mao: A Life, “Among a nation of 400 million, 90 percent of whom were peasants, land redistribution—taking from the rich and giving to the poor—was the primary vehicle carrying the Communist revolution forward, the fundamental point of divergence between [the Communists] and [the Nationalists].”20

  Sun’s passing also meant a realignment within the Soong family: number-two sister Chingling, although only thirty-three years old, was now the revered widow of the sainted Sun Yat-sen. Chingling appreciated Communist Russia’s support for her husband’s revolution and was a liberal wh
o believed, like Mao, that a resolution of the peasants’ plight was the key to China’s future. However, the oldest Soong sister, Ailing, remained the most powerful force within the family. Ailing exuded confidence and strength. An American correspondent observed, “Here was authority, conscious of itself, conscious of power.… I suspected a mind that forgot nothing and forgave little.”21 Another American correspondent with experience in Asia noted that as a “hard-willed creature possessed of demonic energy and great will-to-power, violently able, cunning, and ambitious, she is as powerful a personality as any in China.”22 U.S. State Department cables from China to Washington referred to Ailing as the “most powerful person in China.”23 The FBI later described her as “an evil and clever woman [who] sits in the background and directs the family.”24

  In July of 1926, the Russian-funded Chinese United Front—combining Chiang’s Nationalist forces and Mao’s Communist followers—launched the Northern Expedition, a military effort involving a hundred thousand troops that was designed to break out of southeastern China, beat back various warlords, conquer central China (with the booming metropolis of Shanghai), and gain control of the vital Yangtze River. In United Front spirit, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek led the military assault while Mao Zedong helped spearhead the political effort.

  Mao sent his political operatives in advance of Chiang’s military forces, creating support for the Nationalist cause among the peasants with promises of land reform. When Chiang’s armies arrived, peasant support, as Chiang later recorded, “sprang up with the vigor of storms and cloudbursts.”25 Despite Chiang’s forces being outnumbered by his warlord opponents ten to one, the peasants—newly liberated and promised land by Mao—welcomed his armies.