The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  Ailing Soong was alarmed by Mao’s peasant uprisings and workers’ strikes. Landlords and industrialists were Ailing’s friends and business associates. With a deal in mind, Ailing took a Bank of China steamer upriver to the city of Jiujiang, Chiang Kai-shek’s temporary headquarters on the Yangtze, and invited him aboard for a heart-to-heart talk. Chiang might have been the Generalissimo, but Ailing took control—she made Chiang come to her, and they negotiated for hours. She proposed an alliance between the powerful Soong empire and the ambitious Chiang. The Generalissimo listened attentively as Ailing described an opportunity for him to leave the United Front, reject the Russians, eliminate Mao’s threat, and seize control of a cleansed Nationalist Party.

  Ailing made three demands that would later have a dramatic impact on U.S.-China relations. Each demand concerned her family. To assure herself of political control, Ailing told Chiang to appoint her husband, H. H. Kung, as prime minister. For financial control, Ailing told Chiang that her little brother T. V. Soong would serve as Chiang’s finance minister. The third condition was both political and personal. Ailing possessed something priceless through her father’s support of, and Chingling’s being the widow of, Sun Yat-sen: around the Soong family hovered the aura of the fabled Mandate of Heaven. Ailing offered Chiang an unimaginable prize: marriage into the Soong clan and a stake in the Mandate.

  Ailing had earlier told younger sister Mayling that she would offer Mayling’s hand in marriage to Chiang Kai-shek. Twenty-nine-year-old Mayling was one of Shanghai’s most desired bachelorettes, a beautiful, cultured, rich Chinese Southern Methodist. She had spent a decade of her young life living and studying in New Jersey, Georgia, Tennessee, and Massachusetts, learning to speak perfect American-style English. In 1917, when twenty-year-old Mayling graduated from Wellesley College with a major in English literature and minor in philosophy, she had lived half her life in the United States. Mayling later admitted, “The only thing Chinese about me is my face.”26

  Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Chingling, was appalled by the idea of Chiang marrying into the Soong family; she regarded the militaristic Generalissimo as a traitor to her late husband’s memory. But young Mayling saw no choice but to side with dominant sister Ailing. Little brother T.V. was also less than enamored by the stiff, militaristic Chiang, but he, too, fell in line behind his oldest sister.

  Ailing was proposing a Soong-Chiang syndicate with her relatives in the Generalissimo’s bedroom, office, and pockets. As a final condition, Ailing demanded that Chiang Kai-shek become a proper Southern Methodist like the Soongs. Chingling later observed, “If Elder Sister had been a man, the Generalissimo would have been dead, and she would have been ruling China.”27

  Ailing dismissed Chiang after making her proposals, saying she would await his answer. Chiang hurried home and told Jennie Chen, his wife of seven years:

  I am desperate. Ailing has struck a very hard bargain, but what she says is true. Her offer is the only way for me to achieve my plans to unite China. I now ask you to help me. I beg you not to say no. After all, true love is measured by the sacrifice one is willing to make.28

  Chiang pleaded with Jennie to go to America for five years so he could consolidate power with the Soongs. Jennie was dubious, so Chiang lied to her, saying her time overseas would be short and that she could later return.

  On March 19, 1927, Chiang wrote separate letters to Ailing and Mayling agreeing to Ailing’s bargain. He would exile his wife to the United States, marry Mayling, and appoint Ailing’s husband and her brother to top posts. Chiang and Jennie were never divorced. When Jennie arrived in the U.S., Chiang gave an interview in which he disavowed his wife as a minor concubine. Regarding Ailing’s demand that he be baptized a Southern Methodist, Chiang proposed a shrewd strategy, arguing that religion shouldn’t be taken all at once, like a pill, but rather sipped slowly, like hot, rich soup. Chiang suggested that they put out the story that he was studying the Bible in preparation for a possible conversion. Chingling later observed, “He would have agreed to be a Holy Roller to marry Mayling. He needed her to build a dynasty.”29

  Ailing Soong called the shots with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Note that Ailing is leading and Chiang is holding her arm. (Associated Press)

  In April of 1927 Chiang moved to oust Sun Yat-sen’s Russian advisers, end the United Front, eliminate Mao, and crush the peasant and labor union uprisings. In one of history’s bloodiest betrayals, forces loyal to Chiang massacred between twenty thousand and thirty thousand presumed Communists in Shanghai alone. The majority of Chiang’s killings took place in the countryside. The Mao-oriented peasant revolutionaries were far greater in number than their urban counterparts, and they were more socially radical—a very direct threat, since the majority of Chiang’s army officers were sons of landlords. The Generalissimo’s slaughter in the countryside took hundreds of thousands of lives, yet it was little reported in America, as Chiang turned his Soviet-funded and -trained armies against those who had been his Communist allies. Chiang’s forces still represented a small percentage of the Chinese population but were regionally strong enough to muscle Mao and his comrades away from China’s east coast.

  The Soong-Chiang coup was for China both a turning point and a point of no return. Chiang, apparently triumphant, aligned with New China urbanites like the Soongs to impose his Confucian militarism, while the Communists were seemingly decimated, with only a few survivors like Mao hiding in the countryside. Ailing, her obedient husband, H. H. Kung, little brother T.V., and little sister Mayling hoped that after Chiang’s “extermination” of the Communists, the Soong-Chiang syndicate would go on to control China from an urban base with foreign support. But Chingling understood Mao’s strategy of helping the rural poor majority, and she never forgave her sisters for lending the Soong name to Chiang Kai-shek: “He has set China back years and made the revolution much more costly and terrible than it need have been,” she declared. “In the end he will be defeated just the same.”30

  The Soong and Chiang families were officially joined at a public wedding in Shanghai on December 1, 1927. The Soong-Chiang syndicate staged the event, which was tailor-made for the international press. Over thirteen hundred guests—including the consuls of France, Britain, Japan, and the United States—packed the ballroom of Shanghai’s prestigious Majestic Hotel. Cameras ringed the room. The crowd hushed as forty-year-old Chiang Kai-shek, dressed like an American bridegroom in a natty morning coat, striped pants, and wing collar, entered. Thirty-year-old Mayling, resembling a demure American bride in a silver-and-white beaded gown with a lace veil, followed on her brother’s arm. As cameras clicked and filmed, Chiang and Mayling met in front of the dais and bowed to a huge portrait of the departed Sun Yat-sen, emphasizing the couple’s tie to Sun’s Mandate of Heaven. The bride and groom then bowed to each other and to the guests. Their marriage certificate was read, signed, and sealed. (The couple had earlier exchanged vows in a private ceremony in the Soong home.) The newlyweds exited to the American song “Oh Promise Me”: “Hearing God’s message while the organ rolls / Its mighty music to our very souls.”

  Mayling Soong and Chiang Kai-shek: Suddenly China had Christian rulers. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)

  As with the marriage of Sun Yat-sen and Chingling, charges of bigamy surrounded the Chiang-Mayling marriage. Chiang’s decision to repudiate Jennie, with Mayling and Ailing’s connivance, was seen by many Chinese as reprehensible, and they scorned the couple as hypocrites who used their supposed Christianity as a front. But the Chinese were not the main audience for this spectacle. Soong-Chiang publicists focused the American press on the promise that China’s new leader would welcome the Americanization of his nation. Up until that day, photos of weddings in old China that had appeared in American newspapers were studies in strangeness: the men were exotic-looking pagans in man-dresses with greasy pigtails and long, lacquered fingernails. In contrast, the wedding photograph distributed by the Soong-Chiang press machine was all American-style New Ch
ina, portraying a demure and virginal Southern Methodist bride marrying a hunky aspiring Christian, both dressed for a Park Avenue wedding. The Soong-Chiang money laid out to make this impression was well spent. The New York Times featured the wedding as front-page news. American influence was winning the leaders, and perhaps would win China.

  Madame Chiang would become a favorite of U.S. newsmen looking for a colorful quote. American readers were delighted to learn that Mayling was teaching China’s new leader the English language. His first assignment was the word darling.

  On October 10, 1928, the Soong-Chiang syndicate declared a national government in China led by Ailing’s favorite, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. In certain corners, the applause was loud and prolonged. American missionaries liked Chiang because Ailing, Mayling, and T.V. told New China fables about how the Generalissimo would Christianize and democratize the Middle Kingdom. Ailing, Mayling, and T.V. had spent an accumulated twenty-eight years studying Americans in the United States. Now they used their insights to provide a military dictator with an American-friendly front.

  Chiang’s government controlled the westernized New Chinas where the American merchants and missionaries lived, places like Shanghai and Nanking. These cities had modernized areas with electricity, running water, and Western-style beds. The Four Hundred Million lived beyond these enclaves, by day bent over their rice fields and at night sleeping with their animals. American-style democracy, Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, the Soviet Union, Communism—these were unknowns to most Chinese, who lived by the eternal rhythms of the sun and the moon. To them, Chiang was just another hopeful warlord.

  Parishioners in the United States learned that Chiang studied the Bible an hour each day. One missionary described Chiang as “introspective, patient, tolerant, full of wisdom, ascetic and almost saintly.”31 Another wrote that Chiang’s party was “distinctly Christian and therefore [they had to] prevail for China sooner or later.”32

  Ailing Soong was the unseen financial power behind Chiang, using as front men her fabulously wealthy but simple-minded husband and her brainy little brother. H.H. and T.V. would float government securities; Ailing took her insider’s cut and channeled some to Chiang. Ailing consistently and brazenly profited from inside information. Chingling later remembered:

  She’s very clever, Ailing. She never gambles. She buys and sells only when she gets advance information from confederates in the Ministry of Finance about changes in government fiscal policy. It’s a pity she can’t do it for the people instead of against them.… It is impossible to amass a fortune here except through criminal dishonesty and misuse of political power backed by military force. Every dollar comes right out of the blood of our poor people, who seldom have enough to eat. One day the people will rise and take it back.33

  Mayling served Ailing as the primary Soong-Chiang mouthpiece, giving interviews and translating her husband’s utterances into English, always massaging his words into what English-speaking listeners wanted to hear. She also wrote letters and magazine articles for publication in the United States and broadcast “news” from China via U.S. radio networks. Mayling, in appearance and speech, was the merchant and missionary dream made flesh; to far-off Americans, it was as if a fresh-faced Wellesley girl were guiding China and providing a running commentary. And after decades of opposition from Chinese leaders, American missionaries found themselves seated in Western-style chairs listening to Chiang and Mayling talk about spreading American culture and religion in China. Naturally flattered by their newfound influence at court, the missionaries eagerly portrayed the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang as champions of democracy.

  Since 1919, the U.S. State Department had maintained an arms embargo against China. (In the spirit of the humanitarian Open Door, keeping American arms out of China was meant to help those caught in the country’s constant civil wars.) In 1928, when Chiang had supposedly unified China and declared a government, the State Department lifted many aspects of the embargo, but the sale of U.S. warplanes to China continued to be prohibited.

  The State Department narrowly defined military warplanes as “(a) all types of aircraft actually fitted with armor, guns, machine guns, gun mounts, bomb dropping or other military devices, and (b) aircraft presumed to be destined for military use, whether actually fitted with armament or not.” Britain’s Foreign Office was more flexible and conveniently classified aircraft into two categories, “armed and unarmed.”34 This allowed Chiang to buy unarmed British aircraft and arm them later.

  The U.S. Army Air Corps flew the world’s finest airplanes (made in the U.S.) and thus produced the world’s best pilots. Unsurprisingly, there was a global demand for the services of these highly trained American flyboys. However, the State Department considered American pilots who would fly for a foreign nation the lowest of the low—guns for hire, mercenaries—and informed Chiang that if he hired any such mercenaries, the U.S. would issue warrants for their arrest, deport them, and possibly take their passports away.

  The State Department didn’t want Chiang to use American warplanes, but Chiang quickly found himself being courted by American commercial-aircraft manufacturers. The largest of these was the Curtiss-Wright Corporation of Buffalo, New York. Curtiss-Wright dispatched George Westervelt, a Naval Academy and MIT graduate with a distinguished record as a U.S. Navy captain, to China as their representative, and in April of 1929, after many banquets and probable payoffs, the company received the contract to develop commercial aviation in China. The U.S. State Department readily agreed because the sale involved only civilian aircraft.

  Like most foreign-devil imports into China, civilian aviation failed to catch on. The vast majority of the Four Hundred Million couldn’t afford airline tickets. Curtiss-Wright found few Chinese passengers for its airplanes.

  Yet Chiang’s priority had never been passenger service. In 1930, Chiang dispatched high-ranking Chinese air force officers on scouting missions to United States airplane manufacturers like Boeing in Seattle and Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo. Chiang’s officers went to Washington and had meetings at the Departments of War, Navy, and Commerce, but they avoided the State Department.

  Ailing and Chiang soon noticed that the various parts of the U.S. government did not speak with one voice regarding the Chinese purchase of American warplanes. The Commerce Department in particular encouraged American businessmen to sell aircraft to the Chinese, because its task was to promote the sale of American products to other countries, especially important during the Great Depression. Curtiss-Wright knew that the Generalissimo desired American warplanes and encouraged the Soong-Chiang bunch to set up private companies in the United States to purchase warplanes and then ship them to China, circumventing the State Department’s continuing embargo.

  American newspapers flashed the headline on October 24, 1930: “Chinese President Becomes Christian.”35 The Generalissimo’s baptism was held in the Soong family’s Shanghai home, where Ailing and Mayling watched as the Reverend Z. T. Kuang poured holy water over Chiang’s bald pate to make him a Southern Methodist. The Soong-Chiang press machine later released a suitable one-liner from the newly saved: “I feel the need of a God such as Jesus Christ.”36 Chingling’s observation didn’t make it into the newspapers: “If he is Christian, I am not.”37

  Pulpits across America heralded this remarkable turn of events. China’s leaders—Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, his wife, Prime Minister H. H. Kung, and finance minister T. V. Soong, among others—were Americanized Christians. Just fifty years earlier, North Carolina’s Southern Methodists had Americanized young Charlie Soong. The resulting spiritual chain reaction surely meant that America was winning the leaders, and the New China mirage was coming to fruition. At a time when the Great Depression was shaking Americans’ confidence in themselves, many were heartened to see leaders of the world’s most populous country adopting Christian and American ways.

  Chiang’s converting to Southern Methodism had been one of Ailing’s conditions. He identified with th
e New Testament’s hero and decided he was nothing less than the Jesus Christ of China: “So long as the task of national salvation is not accomplished, I shall be responsible for the distress and sufferings of the people.”38

  In 1931, Henry Luce, the famous founder of Time Inc., was thirty-four years old. The wealthy and powerful publisher had his own private elevator that whisked him up to his New York office every morning and then back down again in the evening. The elevator operator who shared these rides was instructed never to speak to Mr. Luce, who preferred to close his eyes and silently lean against the back wall of the elevator, communicating with his God.

  A cold and gruff man who barked orders to subordinates from behind closed doors as he chain-smoked the cigarettes that would one day kill him, Luce had grown up in a tiny New China as a missionary’s son. Henry learned from his father that his Christianity and Americanism made him superior to the pagan and impoverished Chinese. And in Reverend Luce’s telling, America was a promised land of milk, honey, green lawns, sturdy homes, and the right kind of people.

  Henry Luce. A biographer wrote that “the Christianization of China” was the supreme effort of Luce’s life. (Time Life Pictures / Getty Images)

  Young Luce grew up believing that the Chinese needed above all to be Christianized and Americanized and that they should be grateful for their improvement rather than resentful of his father’s and others’ interference. His father’s mission had been to change China, not to understand it. Later, the reverend’s son would chisel his father’s New China beliefs into the American consciousness.

  What young Henry Luce learned about China was his father’s American mirage. Henry had little direct contact with Chinese people except for the servants he bossed around. (Luce later said, “My favorite Chinese was our cook, who smoked opium.”39) Many evenings Henry saw his father bent over his desk writing hopeful fiction about the New China to come. Having little contact with the reality of China, young Henry accepted his father’s pronouncements as fact. Reverend Luce’s failure to convert the Chinese (a washout in terms of numbers, in line with his fellow missionaries) but success in fund-raising from optimistic Americans was testament to the two coexisting realities, one in China, the other in the American mind.