The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  When Warren Delano died, on January 17, 1898, at the age of eighty-nine, he left each of his children a small fortune; to Sara he bequeathed a staggering $1,338,000. (In comparison, FDR’s father had inherited $300,000 from his father.) One million dollars–plus was a substantial amount in 1898, when the average family income was $650 a year.3 Sara’s fortune grew, and during her lifetime she held the purse strings in the family. FDR’s mother paid for FDR’s town houses and yachts; she paid his electric bills and his children’s tuitions. The money that funded the new president’s lifestyle came from Warren Delano’s made-in-China opium fortune.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt. Sara paid FDR’s bills from her father’s China fortune. (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York)

  Franklin Roosevelt’s besting of Hoover in the 1932 presidential election left Henry Stimson a lame-duck secretary of state. The First Wise Man recorded in his diary that he felt his immediate task was to assist the president-elect with the transition and “make sure that whoever comes in as Secretary of State after me shall have a fair chance to understand the policies we have been working out during this time, and, as far as possible, not do something to reverse them unnecessarily.”4 Hoover, a conservative man bitter over his embarrassing defeat, did not trust the liberal Roosevelt. Hoover had invited the president-elect to endorse some of his policies, but Roosevelt responded that he would keep his powder dry. The chill between the two men intensified.

  On December 22, 1932, Stimson answered his phone and heard the voice of Professor Felix Frankfurter. In 1906, when Frankfurter graduated at the top of his Harvard Law School class, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Henry Stimson had hired him as an assistant attorney. When Stimson became secretary of war in 1911, he brought Frankfurter into the War Department as his closest adviser.

  FDR met Frankfurter in 1917 in Washington’s old State, War, and Navy Building, where they both had offices. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt and Chairman Frankfurter of the War Labor Policies Board were the same age (thirty-five) and were both connected to Theodore Roosevelt, FDR by birth and Frankfurter through the trust-busting projects he had done for Teddy under Stimson. Working together on labor issues in the Navy yards, the two men developed a warm first-name-basis relationship. Roosevelt and Frankfurter kept in intimate touch from 1917 until FDR died in 1945, writing each other hundreds of letters and spending innumerable hours on telephone lines.

  After serving Stimson, Frankfurter joined the Harvard Law School faculty, where he remained for twenty-three years. For almost a quarter century, Harvard Law students would hear him praise the First Wise Man, his former boss. The impact on America’s twentieth century would be profound.

  That December, Frankfurter called Stimson from Albany, where he was Governor Roosevelt’s guest. Frankfurter explained to Stimson that Roosevelt “feels very badly that all cooperative efforts had been broken off” and that in the middle of a conversation, FDR had suddenly proposed that Henry Stimson be a bridge between the outgoing and incoming administrations. Frankfurter suggested that Stimson extend an olive branch by phoning FDR, who would then invite Stimson for a talk.

  Hoover, when informed by Stimson about Frankfurter’s overture, was against his secretary of state meeting with FDR. Stimson argued that it made no sense to “deprive the incoming president of the United States of important information about foreign affairs.” Nevertheless, Stimson obeyed Hoover, and for a while, there was little contact between the two camps. Frankfurter personally knocked on Secretary Stimson’s office door in Washington on December 28, 1932. The First Wise Man listened as Frankfurter pleaded the case for FDR, creating an image of him that Stimson described in his diary as “a more attractive picture than we have been getting from the other side.”

  When Hoover returned to Washington after his Christmas vacation, Stimson told him that he wanted to meet with the enemy and that he felt it was his responsibility to give the president-elect the national security information he sought. A wounded Hoover maintained that Roosevelt was “a very dangerous and contrary man and that he would never see him alone.”5 Having made his point about how little he trusted the incoming president, Hoover relented the next day and told Stimson that he could meet with FDR.

  On January 9, 1933, the president-elect welcomed Secretary of State Stimson to Sara Delano Roosevelt’s mansion on the Hudson River. Both men were New Yorkers who had been schooled at Harvard. They spoke for almost six hours and found that they saw eye to eye on most national security matters, such as the need for “stability” in Latin and South America. Stimson was relieved to learn that Roosevelt “fully approved” of his nonrecognition doctrine against the Japanese.6 A week later, FDR publicly backed a Hoover policy for the first time: President-Elect Roosevelt made his initial statement on world affairs when he endorsed Stimson’s nonrecognition doctrine. When later questioned by two surprised advisers as to why a Democrat had given a Republican policy such visibility, FDR replied, “I have always had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese. How could you expect me not to go along with Stimson on Japan?”7

  Unknown to Roosevelt, Stimson had recorded his observations after their meeting, recalling that when he briefed FDR on China, Roosevelt showed a “lively interest”: “Roosevelt told me that one of his ancestors, I think a grandfather, had held a position there and that his grandmother had gone out to the Far East on a sailing vessel.”8

  Henry Luce’s presentation of a united China led by democracy-loving Christians left out informed coverage of Mao Zedong’s revolution, which meant that Time Inc. missed what was certainly—in terms of the number of people affected—one of the twentieth century’s biggest stories.

  After toiling in the cities as a good Communist—following the Marxist line that revolution would originate with urban workers—Mao had returned to his native province of Hunan at the time Chiang had been allying with Ailing Soong. For thirty-two days, in January and February of 1927, Mao interviewed many disgruntled commoners. Mao concluded that he was witnessing the Mandate’s future thrust: “Several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.… They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.”9

  Mao saw these peasant uprisings as organic events, forces of nature that could not be stopped; China’s revolutionaries had to decide whether they would ride the wave.

  Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.10

  Mao understood that the key issue in China was the ownership of land—with land, a peasant ate; without it, he starved. Thus Mao sensed that the verdict of the Mandate was in the peasants’ hands, and he clearly described the violence that would be required to change China:

  A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the power of the feudal landlord class. Without using the greatest force, the peasants cannot possibly overthrow the deep-rooted authority of the landlords, which has lasted for thousands of years.11

  Generalissimo Chiang’s government had complete control in a few provinces and partial control in some others, which left a vast portion of China under the rule of various warlords. Chiang worked through local elites—warlords and landlords—hated by the Four Hundred Million. To most Chinese, Chiang was merely China’s biggest wa
rlord, an aspirant to the Mandate but not China’s absolute ruler. Time may have proclaimed the Generalissimo leader of the nation, but as the journal Foreign Affairs told its few readers, “Chiang is the apex of a loose pyramid of sand, and his peculiar gift is his ability to anticipate the shifting in the immense weight beneath him in time to maintain his own precarious balance.”12

  Unremarked upon by Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, and others was that Chiang admired fascist models of government, with their strong militaries and disciplined societies. German army officers trained Chiang’s elite troops from 1934 to 1937. Chiang also created the Blue Shirts—modeled on Hitler’s Brown Shirts—who swore loyalty to him. With some ten thousand members, the fascist group established branches throughout Chiang-controlled territory. And Chiang’s Special Services was a secret Chinese gestapo headed by the Dai Li, whom some called China’s Himmler.

  The United States was an established nation with a military, while Chiang’s government was but a military masquerading as a nation. Military spending accounted for 70 percent of Chiang’s expenditures.13 John Fairbank pointed out that “[Chiang’s] China in its equipment and modern plant was a small show. In industrial production it was smaller than Belgium, in air and sea power negligible, in the gadgets and equipment of American life not as big as a middle western state.”14 Journalist Edgar Snow described the Chinese economy as a Soong-Chiang plaything: “Nobody knows—except Chiang, Kung, and the Soongs—exactly how much treasure China has shipped to England and America, or how much gold and silver reserve there is for China’s currency. Because of the family’s key financial positions and close relationships with foreign banks and governments… it is doubtful if anyone but a member of the Chiang-Soong-Kung family could draw on China’s bullion reserves abroad.”15

  Chiang didn’t have as much centralized control as Adolf Hitler, but he certainly oversaw a comparable share of media whitewash. He moved quickly to silence critics, sometimes by brutal means. In early 1932, for instance, Chiang had six young writers critical of him arrested and buried alive. When observers pointed out that Chiang’s fascist methods were at odds with the democratic ideals he supposedly harbored, Soong-Chiang propagandists said that conditions in China were difficult and that Chiang was taking his countrymen through Sun Yat-sen’s tutelage period in advance of full democracy.

  After watching the Generalissimo slaughter five-sixths of his comrades, Mao realized that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”16 After Mao’s escape westward, his small area of support was entirely surrounded by Chiang’s hostile troops and had no access to a seaport. Mao could not depend on a foreign country to supply him with instructors and arms. Instead, Mao developed what became known as People’s War, built on winning the political support of the disenfranchised peasant majority and then drawing the attacking enemy deep into China’s interior, where the invaders could be bled dry through a mix of mobile and guerrilla warfare. Mao understood that a tiny band of a few dozen ragtag soldiers (as was typical of his forces) would easily be routed in a head-on confrontation with Chiang’s foreign-supported army, so instead, Mao preached a strategy of fighting only those carefully chosen battles that his warriors could win.

  Mao began his People’s War in a remote area with mountainous and difficult terrain where Chiang’s authority was weak. The Jinggang Mountains are now known as the birthplace of the People’s Liberation Army and the cradle of the Chinese revolution. It was in this remote area of rural poverty that Mao attracted some of China’s later historic giants: Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and Chen Yi.

  Mao had led about a thousand men to these isolated mountains where roving bandit gangs ruled. His first recruits were these same bandits and derelict beggars, the impoverished homeless—essentially, anyone he could find. Mao was confident that he could teach them a new way for China, and he spread his influence through the surrounding mountains, gaining popular support by transferring land from the rich to the poor. (Some peasants who felt abused by their landlords summarily executed them. Mao essentially offered the landlords these options: they could stay but retain only as much of their land as they were able to till on their own; they could flee; or they could refuse to do either, in which case they’d be arrested and, probably, killed.)

  Mao made his People’s Army the core of his revolution. Two thousand years earlier, the Confucian philosopher Hsün-tzu had written, “The people are the water and the ruler is the boat: the water can support the boat but it can also sink it.”17 Mao adapted this to “the soldiers are fish and the people the water in which they swim.” Because Mao welcomed everyone who would fight, orthodox Communists in both Russia and China were aghast and warned that his armed collective would degenerate into roving bandit gangs. But Mao was in firm control from the start, stating what would become a Maoist maxim: “The Party commands the gun. The gun shall never be allowed to command the Party.”18 Eventually, Mao hoped, he and his peasant followers would have the strength to encircle and capture small cities, then larger ones, until finally the entire country would embrace his movement.

  Chinese culture generally looked down on military men. Soldiers were referred to as ping, a derogatory term. In contrast, Mao called his recruits than-shih, “warriors.” In the People’s Army, there was upward mobility. Unlike in any other army in Chinese history, the lowliest peasant could, with hard work, advance to the rank of general. For the peasants, such ascension was a staggering innovation; for generation after generation, their lives had been predicated on near absolute restriction to the bottom of the ladder.

  Mao’s warriors and officers received no regular salaries. Instead, every enlisted man was entitled to a portion of land and some income from it. In the soldier’s absence, his family or a party member tilled the land for him.

  Historically Chinese leaders treated soldiers as little better than beasts of burden. Mao turned tradition on its head by educating his warriors, teaching them that they were fighting for a future in which they and their families possessed land. The soldiers came to understand that if Chiang’s forces beat them, their families’ lands would be confiscated for landlords who would browbeat them once again. Mao instructed his soldiers to be defenders of the peasantry from which they were drawn, issuing these rules:

  All actions are subject to command.

  Do not steal from the people.

  Be neither selfish nor unjust.

  Replace the door when you leave the house.

  Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.

  Be courteous.

  Be honest in your transactions.

  Return what you borrow.

  Replace what you break.

  Do not bathe in the presence of women.

  Do not without authority search the pocketbooks of those you arrest.19

  For tactics, Mao looked to China’s storied past, back to the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who had written,

  All warfare is based upon deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near… we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.… If he is superior in strength, evade him. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak that he may grow arrogant. If he is inactive, give him no rest. Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected.20

  Mao cleverly reworked Sun Tzu’s ideas into four slogans consisting of four Chinese characters each, simple enough for his peasant army to sing during their morning exercises:

  1. The enemy advances, we retreat!

  2. The enemy camps, we harass!

  3. The enemy tires, we attack!

  4. The enemy retreats, we pursue!21

  Mao later remembered,

  These slogans were at first opposed by many experienced military men, who did not agree with the type of tactics advocated. But much experience proved that the tactics were correct. Whenever [we] departed fr
om them, in general, it did not succeed.22

  People’s War focused as much attention on the retreat as it did on the attack, a strategy designed to exhaust the enemy. As Mao explained, “The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we just will not do it. The enemy has internal conflicts. He just wants to defeat us and then to return to his own internal battles… we will let him stew, and then, when his own internal problems become acute, we will smite him a mighty blow.”23

  Mao was still formally under the control of Communist authorities hiding out in Shanghai, where party chief Lisan Li ridiculed his ideas: “All the talk of ‘encircling the city with the country’… is sheer nonsense.”24 Unable to understand the new creed of Maoism, the Chinese Communist Party criticized Mao for his military opportunism.

  Mao put his social ideas into play, becoming a Robin Hood who took land from the rich and gave it to the poor. Mao’s policies against opium use, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage improved peasants’ lives. Mao pushed mass education, and in some areas, the populace attained a higher degree of literacy than rural China had seen in centuries. His movement spread, attracting many converts, and soon he had established bases in neighboring provinces. Chinese peasants supported Mao because he gave them land, which meant that they and their families could live. Mao also lightened taxes and promised resistance against Chiang and his landlord allies. Soon Mao held sway over a constituency of five million people.

  Alarmed by Mao’s growing popularity and power, Chiang had mounted his grandly named Bandit Extermination Campaign in December of 1930, marching more than a hundred thousand troops into Mao’s territory. The majority of Chiang’s officers were sons of landlords. Promotions were based on politics rather than ability. Chiang’s soldiers were ill trained and badly supplied, and they behaved in the Chinese tradition of locust armies, surviving by plundering the peasants’ homes. A British writer visiting Chiang’s front observed, “If anything is calculated to make the Chinese peasant turn spontaneously to Communism… it is having troops permanently billeted on him.”25