The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  On the afternoon of Sunday, December 6, 1931, Stimson met with President Hoover. He argued that the risk of war had to be weighed “against the terrible disadvantages which Japan’s action was doing to the cause of peace in the world at large and the danger that Japan was setting off a possible war with China which might spread to the entire world.”67 From Japan went China, from China went Asia, from Asia went the world; in years to come, other advisers in Stimson’s wake would sell a similar domino logic.

  Harvey Bundy, Henry Stimson’s closest associate at that time, later recalled that Stimson “had been brought up in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition and believed in the exercise of power, and not waiting… he believed in taking the bit in his teeth and going forward.” But though Stimson “was on his horse and ready to shoot the Japanese at sunrise,” he did not have Hoover’s support.68 The president quashed Stimson’s dream of an embargo but came up with a compromise, and on January 7, 1932, Stimson announced America’s nonrecognition of Japan’s conquests in China.

  Stimson’s nonrecognition doctrine—like the Open Door policy—was ignored by Japan and the other Western powers, who were busy with their own colonies in Asia. And as Hoover had hoped, American companies continued to supply the Japanese war machine with all the steel and oil it wanted. Generations of missionary letters and the Open Door policy had convinced the American people that the nation’s priority was to help China, so there was now a wide gap between the actual U.S. foreign policy in Asia and Americans’ perception of it. Sympathy for the Noble Peasants ran higher than ever as Americans clutched copies of The Good Earth and read headlines about China’s new Christian leaders. The heavily Protestant churchgoing public felt that America had a responsibility to save the Noble Peasants and not lose China to Japan’s aggression. But the business interests reaping profits from the Japanese felt no such religious or moral compunction. A Chinese newspaper noted, “The Chinese people thank Mr. Stimson for his pronouncements but they are only words, words, words, and they amount to nothing at all if there is no force to back them. At present there is no force, because America [has] made it very plain that they will not support with force the ideals, which they themselves assert are just and desirable.”69

  Hoover opposed an economic embargo against Japan, but he allowed Stimson to write a public letter to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appealing to the world to join in nonrecognition of Japanese aggression and warning Japan that if it expanded its military, the U.S. Navy and Army would also build up its involvement in Asia. Instead of backing down, Japan responded by announcing the creation of a new country—the former Manchuria was now Manchukuo (Land of the Manchu). Soon, a pro-Japanese government headed by the Last Emperor, Puyi, was installed. The League of Nations agreed with Stimson’s nonrecognition policy and condemned Japan for invading Manchuria. Japan thumbed its nose at Stimson, walked out of the League of Nations, and continued to feast on both Korea and Manchuria.

  Japan’s easy seizure of Manchuria was not entirely due to its military prowess. Generalissimo Chiang sat atop a large Nationalist army, but he retreated from the Japanese menace and focused on his top priority of vanquishing Mao, who had regrouped and was again posing a threat. Chiang had trained with the Japanese military and had decided that Japan’s army was too strong to be resisted and that such a conflict would be damaging to his own troops, which he needed for his fight against Mao.

  China had erupted in outrage when Japan invaded its north. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Nanking and Shanghai. Mao called for Chiang to have some spine and fight the Japanese. The China Times published a song: “Kill the enemy! Kill the enemy! Hurry up and kill the enemy!”70 But Chiang decided to “cede land for time,” hoping that his going passive and allowing the Japanese to have a large piece of territory might satisfy them. As Jonathan Fenby wrote in Chiang Kai-shek, “This would be seen as his first great failure to stand up for national interests against the enemy from across the sea, setting a pattern for the following years.”71

  From his early years in the Roosevelt administration and on throughout the 1920s, Henry Stimson was one of the East Coast elite who supported various right-wing dictatorships. By 1930, the U.S. executive branch had “sent gunboats into Latin American ports over 6,000 times, invaded Cuba, Mexico (again), Guatemala, and Honduras; fought protracted guerrilla wars in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, annexed Puerto Rico, and taken a piece of Colombia to create both the Panamanian nation and the Panama Canal.”72 America preached democracy in Asia, but by the end of the First Wise Man’s term as secretary of state, dictators with U.S. military support ruled fifteen of Latin America’s twenty republics. Among these dictators was Nicaragua’s brutal autocrat Anastasio Somoza. Stimson and the strongman went way back: Somoza’s first step up the ladder was serving as Stimson’s interpreter when Stimson refereed Nicaraguan peace talks in the 1920s. Taken with the polite, Philadelphia-schooled Nicaraguan, the First Wise Man had green-lighted the brutal Somoza family dictatorship that would rule into the 1970s. Although Stimson withdrew American Marines from Nicaragua by 1933 (despite the inevitable protests of American businessmen), control remained with a U.S.-supported military dictatorship. In his diary Stimson claimed that intervening south of the border “would put me in absolutely wrong in China, where Japan has done all this monstrous work under the guise of protecting her nationals with a landing force.”73 So said the pot to the kettle.

  On January 28, 1932, the Japanese bombed Shanghai, China’s best known and most visible city in the West. Stimson was ready to go to war with Japan, although Hoover had repeatedly told his secretary of state that he would not risk war by denying U.S. steel and oil to Japan. Still, the First Wise Man continued to insist that there was no danger in cutting off Japan’s supply, because “Japan was afraid of” America’s “great size and military strength.” Hoover, however, understood Japanese thinking better than the First Wise Man and told Stimson his idea was “folly,” that a strict embargo would indeed lead to war with Japan and “that such a war could not be localized or kept in bounds.” A defiant Stimson challenged the president to be a strong-willed executive in foreign affairs like Theodore Roosevelt and to “speak softly and carry a big stick!”74

  Hoover declined to take the advice of his upstart secretary of state. He would fight to defend U.S. territory, but—unlike Theodore Roosevelt—Hoover had no interest in becoming the world’s policeman.

  Chiang’s armies skirmished with Japanese soldiers in the winter and spring of 1932, not in North China where Japan had invaded, but far to the south, in Shanghai. Both sides employed airpower; Japan had a sophisticated carrier-based air wing, while Chiang had a ragtag bunch of battered planes flown by mercenary pilots who were mostly from America but also from Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and Germany. A U.S. Army Air Corps–trained airman named Robert Short became the very first of these pilots to die flying for Chiang Kai-shek in China. Short, a native of Tacoma, Washington, had been sent to China by the Boeing Company to sell airplanes. Once in China, Short crossed the line and became a mercenary. On February 22, 1932, he took off and encountered Japanese planes from the aircraft carrier Kaga; they destroyed his plane in midair.

  Japan eventually beat back Chiang’s ill-trained and badly led troops. Chiang never imagined that his forces alone would be able to defeat Japan in China and expected that he would need foreign support, in line with the ancient Chinese state strategy of yi-yi-zhi-yi, which meant playing one barbarian—in this case, Japan—against the other. On May 24, 1932, the U.S. ambassador to China, Nelson Johnson, met with Chiang, who spoke enthusiastically about a future war between America and Japan “in which the United States will figure as the champion and savior of China.”75

  George Westervelt, the Curtiss-Wright airplane salesman, observed some of the bombing of Shanghai from his hotel-room window. Seizing his opportunity, Westervelt wrote finance minister T. V. Soong and told him that if China had possessed a profes
sional air force, Chiang could have prevented the Japanese from landing at Shanghai by bombing their ships in advance. Westervelt further pointed out that if Chiang now got serious and built a major air force, airplanes flown from China could burn down the paper cities of Japan.

  Soong was excited about the Curtiss-Wright plan, especially Westervelt’s intimation that the U.S. War Department might provide leadership for the Chinese air force and perhaps even foot the bill to stimulate American airplane production. T.V. contacted the U.S. military attaché in Shanghai, Colonel W. S. Drysdale, and asked for his help in securing War Department backing. Drysdale was enthusiastic and wrote a message supporting the plan to the War Department in Washington. In response, General Douglas MacArthur, the Army chief of staff, told Drysdale, “The War Department is not interested in sending an aviation training mission to China.”76

  Most thoughtful military men understood why Chiang would never be able to establish an efficient air force: warplanes required secure airfields, and Chiang’s armies were incapable of defending an airfield against the Japanese. So now both the State Department and the War Department impeded Chiang’s efforts.

  T. V. Soong was not about to give up, however, and he contacted the Commerce Department’s trade commissioner in Shanghai, Edward P. Howard. This was 1932, and Howard knew that airplane sales would be a boon to the sagging U.S. economy. Within a week, Howard gave T.V. a plan to build a U.S.-supplied air force, beginning with twelve aircraft and eight instructors to train fifty pilots within one year.

  When the State Department in Washington learned what the Commerce Department was up to, it wired Howard in Shanghai to explain that Commerce could help with “civilian aviation,” but “in relation to plans for the Chinese Government in connection with ‘military air training,’ it is the Department’s opinion, known to and concurred in by the War Department, [that] it would be inadvisable for this Government or any of its officers to be associated with military training.”77 Commerce’s Howard advised T.V. to ignore State and proceeded to present to him a more elaborate training mission with more airplanes and pilots.

  Ailing’s husband, H. H. Kung, served as both Chiang’s prime minister and Standard Oil of New Jersey’s main representative in China. Retired U.S. Army Air Corps colonel John Jouett managed Standard Oil’s private airplanes. When he learned through Kung that T.V. was looking for someone to head his Chinese air force, Jouett jumped at the chance.

  T.V., working around the State and War Departments and with the help of Curtiss-Wright and the Commerce Department, deposited dollars in American banks in May of 1932 for the purchase of aircraft and spare parts and to pay the salaries and travel expenses of American airmen.

  The State Department realized what was happening when Colonel Jouett and his hopeful mercenaries applied for passports. State called in the chief of Commerce’s Aeronautics Trade Division and explained that as long as the mission to China was civilian in nature, it would have no objections, but that State’s policy was that the United States government was not to become involved with Chinese military aviation. Commerce coyly tried to portray the sales as purely civilian but eventually admitted the truth and explained that “this whole situation had now gone pretty far; that the Department of Commerce had transmitted messages to and from the Chinese government and the interested Americans; that the interested Americans had signed a contract; that the Chinese government had advanced money; and that the interested Americans had made the necessary arrangements to leave for China.”78

  State was now between a rock and a hard place. Chinese purchases of American-made airplanes would mean millions of sorely needed dollars for the United States. Curtiss-Wright and the other airplane manufacturers who would supply T.V. were politically powerful, and they provided high-paying jobs in a high-tech industry. The exchange was already in midstream. State hesitated, then noted its disapproval but did not block the transaction.

  T. V. Soong had hit the jackpot, acquiring not only American airplanes but also access to the inner workings of the U.S. Army Air Corps. Colonel Jouett had served as chief of personnel of the Army Air Corps during the 1920s. He had inside information on American training methods and could get to the personnel files of almost all the American pilots, active and retired. Now on T.V.’s payroll, Jouett looked through confidential records and took away copies of Air Corps training manuals, expertise derived from decades of trial and error and many millions of American tax dollars.

  In early July, Jouett, nine instructors, a flight surgeon, four mechanics, and a secretary—all U.S. Army Air Corps–trained—arrived in Shanghai. Major Howard of Commerce introduced Colonel Jouett to his new boss, T. V. Soong. T.V. selected Hangzhou—a prosperous city on the Yangtze River about a hundred and ten miles from Shanghai—as the training site. Jouett and his men reached there by the end of July and quickly set up the Central Aviation School. Through a corporation called the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company—CAMCO—that she founded with Harvard graduate William Pawley, Ailing became Curtiss-Wright’s Chinese manufacturer. Having successfully done an end run around the State and War Departments, the Soong-Chiang clan was finally getting a barbarian air force with which to destroy another barbarian.

  The Japanese had invaded North China thinking they’d wrap up hostilities in a few months, but soon they were bogged down in China’s vastness. They were further surprised to see the United States opposing Japan by building Chiang an American-style air force. On January 16, 1933, the Japanese Foreign Office complained to the U.S. State Department that the U.S. Army Air Corps had lent American mercenaries to Chiang to “take part in the hostilities against Japan.”79 To those who knew Japan, such language was ominous. But among the American leadership, there was almost no one who knew Japan.

  The phenomenal success of The Good Earth made Pearl Buck an assumed authority on all things Chinese. In a major speech at the University of Virginia, Buck explained why the Noble Peasants were just like Americans:

  The real reason why we do not like Japan as well as China is because the Japanese are emotionally different from ourselves.… I believe of course that these emotional likenesses and differences… are due simply to geography. That is, peoples living, as do the Chinese and ourselves, in broad, rich, abundant land—in continents, really—upon landscapes varying from seacoast and northern cold to high mountains and tropical plains, come to be alike.… The lands of the United States and of China arc extraordinarily alike—the northern plains in China and our western plains, the deserts of north and west, the rich central plains of both countries, the long seacoast, the vast, long rivers the bleakness of the north and the tropics of the south… here are great similarities, inevitably producing, or so I think, similarities in temperament.…

  In brief, then, our emotions are not so much the result of our ideas or our religion as of the food we eat and the land and the climate in which we live, and because China and the United States are so much alike in these respects, we are very much alike in the way we feel.… The same kind of land, feeding the same kinds of foods, under the same sun and winds, the shores washed by the same seas, will produce the same kind of hearts and minds, however the skins may differ. The skin, the color of the hair and eyes—these are, after all, only a kind of dress given us by our chance parents, and not more important than dress ever is. Inside we have the same heart and lungs, the same organs by means of which we live and feel and are.80

  In a speech to the American Academy of Political Science, she claimed that China would change only if forced to by outside forces: “[China] is at last knocking at [American] doors… entering eagerly into the colleges and universities, examining critically all that she sees, seizing ideas which she thinks will be useful to her, and returning again to her own land to use her new knowledge in her own fashion.”81

  But the Noble Chinese Peasants were not knocking on American doors—the Soongs were. And soon Charlie Soong’s offspring would have someone new to approach: Warren Delano’s grandson.
r />   Chapter 5

  THE CHINA LOBBY

  Chiang Kai-shek and the Madame and their families, the Soong family and the Kungs, were all thieves, every last one of them, the Madame and him included.

  —President Harry Truman1

  On November 8, 1932, Warren Delano’s grandson was elected president of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was fifty-one years old, and his new job came with a salary far below his needs. Roosevelt enjoyed a wealthy man’s lifestyle: several homes—one in New York City’s tony East Side, another along the banks of the Hudson River, and a third on the coast of Maine—as well as sailing yachts and other luxuries. Roosevelt had five children at the time he was elected—Anna (twenty-seven), James (twenty-six), Elliott (twenty-three), FDR Jr. (nineteen), and the baby, John Aspinwall Roosevelt (just seventeen)—and with all the private schools and vacations, they had cost a bundle to raise.2

  Yet Roosevelt had never earned much money. For two decades he had held public service jobs with relatively low pay: member of the New York State Senate, assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York. His new title, president of the United States, held immense power and prestige but again had a relatively small salary compared to FDR’s large expenditures. Luckily for Franklin and many of the rich people of his era, one of his ancestors had made a fortune in what was politely euphemized as “the China trade.”