The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  Sympathy for the Noble Chinese Peasants grew to a fever pitch when Japan bombed civilians in Shanghai. A photo of Ping Mei, a Chinese baby bombed by the Japanese, caused a sensation and was one of the most reproduced images of the 1930s, creating another sympathetic archetype. Yet Ambassador Johnson wrote that Chiang’s attitude was “let us fight to the last drop of coolie blood” and noted that “in the midst of it all the Soong family carries on its intrigues which sometimes disgust me completely.”23

  On September 4, 1937, George Haas, director of research and statistics in the Treasury Department, wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, “It would appear then that the peace of the world is tied up with China’s ability to win or to prolong its resistance to Japanese aggression. It is our opinion that a Japanese victory increases greatly the chances of a general world war.” Morgenthau wrote to a Chungking official: “We feel we can [help] you and in the long run we will be helping ourselves. We feel it very important to the world peace to help China.”24 Morgenthau wrote to Roosevelt: “What greater force for peace could there be than the emergence of a united China?”25

  Ping Mei amid the Japanese-bombed ruins of Shanghai’s South Railway Station, Saturday, August 28, 1937. One of the most famous photos of the 1930s. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  In a speech that was broadcast to America in September 1937, an American-educated Soong-Chiang propagandist proclaimed, “The present situation in the Far East is very much like a case of one’s neighbor’s house on fire. Unless one helps to extinguish it in time, there is no telling that it will not spread and endanger one’s own house.”26 In a Chicago speech weeks later, President Roosevelt said, “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”27

  Roosevelt’s quarantine speech momentarily raised Chiang’s hopes that the United States might enter the conflict. Emboldened, the Generalissimo ordered his troops to make more suicide stands. But like the Open Door and Stimson’s nonrecognition doctrine, FDR’s words had no force behind them. Isolationist-minded Americans refused to become involved in the outside world’s conflicts.

  Henry Stimson, now a top Wall Street lawyer, was convinced that if Hoover had taken stronger action and embargoed Japan, the Noble Chinese Peasants would not be suffering so. But many Americans feared that embargoing Japan would result in war. The First Wise Man thought otherwise, and in an October 7, 1937, letter to the New York Times, he wrote,

  Today the aggression of Japan is being actively assisted by the efforts of men of our own nation.… It is not only being actively assisted, but our assistance is so effective and predominant that without it even today Japanese aggression would in all probability be promptly checked and cease.… China’s principal need is not that something should be done by outside nations to help her, but that outside nations should cease helping her enemy. Does the safety of the American nation and the safety of the British Empire require that we go on helping Japan to exterminate by the methods she is daily employing, the gallant Chinese soldiers with which she is confronted—not to speak of the civilian Chinese population that she is engaged in terrorizing? Is the condition of our statesmanship so pitifully inadequate that we cannot devise the simple means of international cooperation, which would stop our participation in this slaughter? I for one do not think so. I believe that it can be done, and done effectively, without serious danger to us.

  On December 12, 1937, the USS Panay was at anchor in the Yangtze River twenty-seven miles north of Nanking. Suddenly Japanese warplanes strafed the old gunboat, killing two Americans and wounding fifty. Roosevelt wondered how to pay back Japan and asked Morgenthau if it was legal for a president to confiscate Japanese property in the United States. Morgenthau was ready with Stimson’s argument that the U.S. could do as it pleased with Japan and not suffer retaliation.

  Henry Stimson: the First Wise Man (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  Roosevelt liked what he heard from his treasury secretary, and at a December 17 cabinet meeting, the president said he wanted Morgenthau to take further steps. But at the same time, a repentant Tokyo recalled in disgrace the commanding admiral who’d overseen the Panay bombing, disciplined eleven naval officers, apologized to the U.S., paid indemnities, and promised there would be no recurrence of the event. Secretary Hull’s program of keeping the peace with Japan held, but Roosevelt’s call for retaliation had excited Morgenthau, who knew that a policy option placed on the table never really went off it.

  The Shanghai fighting, often seen in newsreels before screenings of The Good Earth, planted the illusion in American minds that Generalissimo Chiang was a noble leader, but in reality, the Shanghai battle marked the last time Chiang would confront Japan on a massive scale. Chiang’s appalling sacrifice of his best troops in an attempt to attract a foreign barbarian ally had availed him nothing. From then on he would resume ceding land for time, continue his search for a barbarian to pit against the Japanese, and return to his main game of exterminating Mao.

  On December 8, after promising that he would defend Nanking to the end, Chiang took Mayling and fled the capital city by airplane. The Japanese army then closed in on a defenseless population and carried out the atrocity that would later be called the Rape of Nanking—massacres of soldiers and civilians and mass rapes, with victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

  Before she left, Mayling penned a note to Atlantic Monthly magazine requesting that her subscription be forwarded.

  For Time’s 1937 Man of the Year, Henry Luce had been considering various candidates, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, Dale Carnegie—author of the blockbuster How to Win Friends and Influence People—and Clark Gable. In the end, he decided to choose a Man and Wife of the Year, a couple who were derided in China over their New Life movement, who had recently endured a mutiny within their ranks, and who had just lost China’s east coast to the Japanese.

  He is a salt seller’s son, she a Bible salesman’s daughter. No woman in the West holds so great a position as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek holds in China. Her rise and that of her husband, the Generalissimo, in less than a generation to moral and material leadership of the ancient Chinese people cover a great page of history.…

  After losing their largest coastal city—Shanghai—and their capital—Nanking—Chiang Kai-shek and Mayling Soong fled over the mountains from the Japanese. On January 3, 1938, Henry Luce made them Time magazine’s first “Man and Wife of the Year.” (Associated Press)

  Today Generalissimo & Mme. Chiang have not conceded China’s defeat, they long ago announced that their program for as many years as necessary will be to harass, exhaust and eventually ruin Japan by guerrilla warfare. If Generalissimo Chiang can achieve it, he may emerge Asia’s Man of the Century.… He and Mme. Chiang have made themselves Man & Wife of 1937.28

  In Luce’s fantasy world, Mao’s popular appeal was fleeting, his military influence purely negative.

  China… has had the ablest of leadership. Through 1937 the Chinese have been led—not without glory—by one supreme leader and his remarkable wife. Under this Man & Wife the traditionally disunited Chinese people—millions of whom seldom used the word “China” in the past—have slowly been given national consciousness.… The armies or bandit hordes of Chinese Communists who tried to harass Nanking from the hinterland were turned by Generalissimo Chiang into an excuse for not fighting the Japanese. He used them as a football coach uses a scrub team to train the regular army of New China—the first Chinese War Machine, complete with European artillery, German military advisers, U.S. and Italian warplanes.… No fault of Generalissimo Chiang was it that he was forced to use his War Machine at least two years before it was finished. His hand was forced by overzealous Chinese patriots, by canny Japanese who believed that unless they beat China in 1937 they might never do so.29

  Chiang
had just fled over the mountains from his capital of Nanking, but Luce quoted the Generalissimo’s optimistic prediction: “Tell America to have complete confidence in us. The tide of battle is turning and victory eventually will be ours!”30

  Hollington Tong was the Soong-Chiang syndicate’s chief propagandist. As a young man, Tong had taught English to Chiang at Longjing High School, near Chiang’s hometown of Ningbo. Later Tong studied journalism at the University of Missouri and Columbia University. After returning to China, Tong became managing editor of the China Press newspaper, a Soong-Chiang organ. Before long, Tong was in charge of managing the foreign press corps and censoring their dispatches. After the Shanghai and Nanking fighting, Tong was appointed head of the Ministry of Information with a mandate to influence opinion in the United States.

  On February 6, 1938, Chiang ordered Tong to send agents to America “to win sympathy from the American public and prompt the U.S. government to put sanctions in place.”31 Tong moved quickly and submitted a plan to Chiang and Mayling on how to influence American public opinion. Tong recommended three basic steps:

  1. Recruit American missionaries, arm them with evidence of Japanese atrocities, and have them return to the U.S. to give testimony and speeches. (Tong emphasized that the American target audience would not know that the paid missionaries were acting as agents for the Soong-Chiang syndicate. Tong wrote that he would “search for international friends who understand the realities and policies of the Chinese war of resistance and have them speak for us, with Chinese never coming to the fore.”32)

  2. Hire Frank Price (Mayling’s favorite missionary) to lead the missionary campaign.

  3. Recruit American newsmen and authors to write favorable articles and books.

  To Americans, Frank Price was a devoted Presbyterian missionary in China who had translated and expanded Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People in an English-language book. To Mayling, he was a Soong-Chiang employee.

  Frank and his brother Harry Price were, like Pearl Buck and Henry Luce, born in China, the children of missionaries. After receiving college educations in the U.S., the siblings Price had both served as Presbyterian missionaries in China. Now the Price brothers—Frank in China and Harry in New York City—constituted the China Lobby’s main Christian public relations pipeline. Few knew they were Mayling’s agents, paid by the Soong-Chiang syndicate, and because they were brothers, they could communicate confidentially.

  After final instructions from Mayling and Tong, Frank Price left Chungking and set out for New York on a China Lobby mission to convince the American public that the best thing the U.S. could do for peace in Asia was embargo Japan. It would lead, three years later, to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.

  Frank stayed in Harry’s New York apartment, and soon a stream of important people flowed through the premises, including reporters, editors, missionaries, and activists interested in New China. Frank told of shocking Japanese atrocities while Harry made the case that the only way to stop the horror was to choke off U.S. exports to Japan. There was no need to worry that it might lead to more war; little Japan, they explained, would never attack the great big United States.

  After two months of talks, a number of people interested in China gathered in Harry’s apartment to found the committee that would fulfill Chiang’s goal. They included, in addition to Frank and Harry Price, George and Geraldine Fitch; Dr. Edward Hume; Philip Jaffe, editor of Amerasia magazine, a small specialty publication; and Earl Leaf, a Soong-Chiang propagandist and financial bagman. The name of the organization—the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression—was quite a mouthful, but it effectively made clear what the China Lobby wanted Americans to do: stop assisting the killing of the Noble Chinese Peasants by selling the Japanese American oil and steel. The committee set up a professional operation in high-rent office space on Fortieth Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues in the center of Manhattan, the communications hub of the country, and employed a missionary-led staff of about twenty workers whose output over the next two years would convince the American public that the United States could embargo Japan without fear of reprisal.

  At the beginning, Earl Leaf was executive director of the committee, and Mayling funded the effort through the Chinese ambassador in Washington. However, on June 8, 1938, Congress passed a law requiring American organizations that received money from abroad to register as foreign agents. Leaf was too closely identified with the Chinese, so to create the impression that the committee was an American organization, Leaf turned over the executive directorship to Harry Price. Price gave the committee a respectable missionary face but continued to accept Soong-Chiang funding through American friends of China. The public never knew that the Manhattan missionaries diligently working on East Fortieth Street to save the Noble Peasants were paid China Lobby agents engaged in what were possibly illegal and treasonous acts.

  In June of 1938 an article by the well-known economist Eliot Janeway appeared in Harper’s magazine. Janeway, a friend of both Stimson and Luce and a good China Lobby man, made the committee’s case:

  The Japanese government is engaged in a war in which it would be helpless without necessities—oil, steel, munitions, and various commodities—which it imports from the United States.… We are selling Japan the means of mass production for war.… We are helping her to conquer North China by selling her the vital raw materials she needs for armaments.… The Japanese menace is made possible by American exports.…

  Oil is notoriously the weakest link in Japan’s economy.… Seventy-five per cent of the gasoline Japan used last year, gasoline for tanks and bombers and warships, came from the United States.33

  When pollsters asked Americans to name the most frightening international event of the past year, Japan’s invasion of China beat out Germany’s invasion of Austria.34 That same month, Reader’s Digest published letters from missionaries describing the Japanese military’s atrocious behavior in the Rape of Nanking. Digest editors concluded: “The cruelty of the Japanese army in China is one of the blackest pages in history. Barbarian invasions of ancient days furnish no parallel.”35

  In August of 1938, every U.S. senator and representative in Washington received a booklet from the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression. Thousands of influential Americans—governors, pastors, mayors, state representatives, professors, newspaper editors, foreign policy groups, and community clubs like Rotary and Kiwanis—also received the pamphlets. The publication was a masterpiece of simplicity. The back and front covers featured Japanese planes dropping bombs on China, the bombs provocatively labeled Made in the U.S.A. The pamphlet’s title: “America’s Share in Japan’s War Guilt.”

  America’s Share in Japan’s War Guilt: Take American War Profits Out of Japan’s Aggression in China. The Stimson Committee, August 1938. (American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, August 1938)

  The pamphlet repeated the mirage that China was “a great nation whose citizens have traditionally regarded Americans as their best friends” and promised that all the New China dreams would come true if Americans only had the moral rectitude and courage to embargo Japan.

  This is definitely a peace policy, not a war policy. It is a road from war, not to war. We simply withdraw from our part in Japan’s war upon China. We do what we can to hasten the end of hostilities. We act to bring an earlier peace in the Pacific. Whatever other nations may do, our consciences then will be clear.…

  The issue is clear-cut for those who oppose war and seek peace. Japan could not continue her invasion of China another six months or continue as a potential menace to the security of other nations without aeroplanes, munitions, trucks, scrap iron, oil, steel and other materials from the United States.…

  If the American people become fully aware of the part they are taking in the deliberate and frightful bombing of helpless civilians in China, the mad attempt to subjugate a great people, and the ambitious expansion of a mili
taristic power, there is little doubt what they will say or do. Americans will say, “Count us out.”36

  Nowhere in “America’s Share in Japan’s War Guilt” was there any suggestion that an embargo on Japan would lead to anything other than Japanese retreat—and multiple benefits to the American public.

  A more speedy end to the war; an end to Japanese expansion at the expense of the Chinese and of other peoples; a reduction of the tax burden levied upon the American people for naval armaments; a probable change in the Far Eastern balance of power whereby China would emerge independent and free to cooperate with other powers; a discrediting of the military regime in Japan and the rise of a now repressed liberal element to a new degree of influence; a general discrediting of military aggression in this day as a means to nationalistic expansion; an earlier beginning of reconstruction in China and Japan; and an earlier restoration of peaceful trade and international security in the Pacific area.37

  Instead, the pamphlet reassured Americans,

  It is not likely that Japan’s militarist leaders would be so rash as to attempt reprisals against the United States. They recognize that, if they cannot readily win a war against China in their own backyard, they cannot dream of wandering afield, when economically exhausted, in order to engage in conflict the strongest power in the world. War with the United States at this time would mean a certain end to their dream of becoming a great world power.

  There is no historical support for the supposition that an American embargo on war materials to Japan would lead to war. An embargo by Russia and an effective stoppage of war supplies from France to Japan have not done so.