The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  A = America

  B = Britain

  C = China

  D = Democracy7

  In the spring of 1940, the Stimson Committee distributed a pamphlet entitled “Local Labor Unions Protesting Aid to Japan.” It was an eighty-nine-page list of almost two thousand labor unions that supported an embargo against Japan to help the Noble Chinese Peasants. As Donald Friedman noted, “The fact that many millions of men subject to military service were willing to advocate that the United States take measures to stop American economic aid to Japan indicates that they, like many Americans, did not yet link the issue of an embargo with the possibility of America becoming involved in war with Japan. These union members reflected a striking and almost universal American naiveté concerning the effect of an embargo upon Japan.”8

  The spring 1940 German blitzkrieg on Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France changed how Washington viewed U.S. interests in Asia. Suddenly the European colonizers—Britain, France, and the Netherlands—had homeland crises to tend to, and the U.S. was the only Pacific power left to confront Japan. The shocking fall of France altered Roosevelt’s calculations about a country later called Vietnam.

  If Japan expanded into Southeast Asia via French Indochina, American assembly lines might grind to a halt. (If Japan conquered all of China, American industry could continue to hum, for China had no resources—other than tung oil—that the U.S. couldn’t get somewhere else.) Manufacturers from Buffalo to San Diego depended on Southeast Asian products—rubber, tin, tungsten, and much more—that they could not source easily elsewhere. The Dutch East Indies alone supplied more than half of fifteen important commodities used in U.S. industry. As author Jonathan Marshall noted in To Have and Have Not, “Cut off from their Southeast Asian supply lines, whole industries would be unable to begin even the first stage of production and would face agonizing readjustments or total ruin.”9

  French Indochina was also strategically important to Roosevelt because its long coastline and excellent harbors could be used by the Japanese navy to block Western navies’ access to much of Southeast Asia. And if the Japanese took Indochina, they might be able to topple other countries in the area like dominoes.

  Suddenly Roosevelt comprehended a hugely heightened role for China. Before, his aid to Chiang was intended—he’d imagined—to help push Japan out of China. China was now the front line in a continental theater of war, the all-important domino that must continue to stand, as Roosevelt assumed that Japan’s toppling of China would result in the loss of all of Southeast Asia and possibly even more. As he told his son Elliott:

  If China goes under, how many divisions of Japanese troops do you think will be freed—to do what? Take Australia, take India—and it’s as ripe as a plum for the picking. Move straight on to the Middle East… a giant pincer movement by the Japanese and Nazis, meeting somewhere in the Near East, cutting the Russians off completely, slicing off Egypt, slashing all communication lines through the Mediterranean?10

  As President Roosevelt slowed the delivery of resources from the U.S. to Japan, Tokyo turned to its only other source in Southeast Asia.

  As Marshall wrote, FDR now agreed with the “fundamental proposition that the United States could not afford to lose the raw material wealth and the sea lanes of Southeast Asia” even if it meant war.11 But when FDR changed his view, he apparently did not inform his military that the U.S. might be forced to fight for Southeast Asia. Instead, FDR played his cards close to his chest, telling the military to ignore the area and continue planning for action only in Europe. Jonathan Utley observed, “Roosevelt was at his worst when he had to coordinate conflicting views of foreign policy.… Now Roosevelt found himself with a foreign policy that endorsed the vital importance of Southeast Asia and a military strategy that ignored the same region, and he did nothing to bring the two into balance. Issuing conflicting orders, telling different people different things, Roosevelt permitted the nation to move along in two mutually exclusive directions.”12

  Instead of cutting Japan’s oil and starting a war, FDR sent strong signals to Tokyo warning against further expansion into Southeast Asia. One such signal was FDR’s order to move the U.S. Pacific Fleet from California to Pearl Harbor. Admiral James Richardson, commander of the fleet, argued that the shift to Pearl Harbor would enrage Tokyo. FDR coldly told Richardson, “Despite what you believe, I know that the presence of the fleet in the Hawaiian area has had, and is now having, a restraining influence on the actions of Japan.”13

  Roosevelt’s intended message got lost in translation. Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto told a colleague, “The fact that the United States has brought a great fleet to Hawaii to show us that it’s within striking distance of Japan means, conversely, that we’re within striking distance too. In trying to intimidate us, America has put itself in a vulnerable position. If you ask me, they’re just that bit too confident.”14

  Roosevelt froze German and Italian assets in the U.S., but he took no action against Japan. With Washington fixated on Hitler’s rampage, the Stimson Committee cleverly shifted the argument; Japan should be embargoed not in order to help China but so the U.S. could husband its resources at home. Hull agreed to this defensive domestic measure.

  The fruit of the China Lobby’s work through the Stimson Committee was the National Defense Act, signed into law on July 2, 1940. The legislation gave Roosevelt executive control over the export of valuable resources. Though it was passed as a domestic measure, many—including Henry Stimson—saw its potential for use against Japan. Roosevelt had no intention of cutting Japan’s oil, but the First Wise Man had succeeded in placing the power to do so in the hands of the executive branch.

  On June 20, 1940, President Roosevelt surprised many when he named two prominent Republicans to lead the U.S. military. It was a smart election-year move on FDR’s part, made on the eve of the Republican National Convention. Henry Stimson would become secretary of war and Frank Knox would be secretary of the Navy. Both Stimson and Knox were Theodore Roosevelt Republicans. Knox had fought as one of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba, and Teddy had first tapped the now-seventy-three-year-old Stimson for greatness.

  By 1940 Franklin Roosevelt had had more than a decade of experience managing massive bureaucracies. While there would be disagreements within his big tent, he was confident that he had the finesse to work his will through the labyrinth of agencies, committees, and paperwork sultans. Even though he had just appointed two gung-ho Republicans with beliefs and styles at odds with his, FDR was confident that he could maintain control. But suddenly he had a cabinet in which Secretary Morgenthau had three strong allies on the New China front: Stimson, Knox, and secretary of the interior Harold Ickes. The rest of the bureaucracy mirrored the changes in the cabinet: more pro–New China, anti-Japanese Americans streamed into Washington every day. As Washington geared up for the expected war in Europe, new government agencies were sprouting and attracting bright men. These new public servants came from across a nation in which the majority believed the China Lobby line that the U.S. could stop the flow of oil to Japan and suffer no repercussions. Soon there were many hands other than FDR’s and Hull’s near the spigot. One of Frankfurter’s Hotdogs, Dean Acheson, coined a name for these men who supported Stimson’s hard-line stance: Washington Warriors.

  The First Wise Man was a canny bureaucratic player who had studied up close the ways of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and, now, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For those in FDR’s administration who might not have gotten the word, Stimson created study groups in eight different agencies to promulgate the China Lobby fable that the U.S. could choke Japan with no consequences.

  The National Defense Act altered who influenced U.S. foreign policy. President Roosevelt created the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC) to advise him on which war-related supplies the U.S. should husband. To head the NDAC’s seven divisions, FDR appointed some of the best corporat
e, finance, and union leaders in the nation. The new men who staffed the NDAC knew little about Roosevelt’s foreign policy and focused on the country’s domestic needs. Only a few top officials knew that Roosevelt was postponing action in Asia by appeasing Japan in order to first confront Hitler.

  In June of 1940, T. V. Soong did something that almost no other Chinese person at the time was able to do: he, along with his wife, entered the United States without being arrested. While a British, French, or Peruvian couple could freely enter the U.S., the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in full force. A mirage about distant and cuddly Noble Chinese Peasants was all the rage, but Americans still wouldn’t risk a Chinese person living next door.

  T. V. Soong had come to Washington to lobby Roosevelt, Frankfurter’s Hotdogs, and Stimson’s Washington Warriors. Joseph Stalin had been a generous barbarian for the past three years, providing Chiang with hundreds of millions of dollars of credit at low interest rates. With his goal of having Chiang occupy the attention of Japan’s military to protect the Soviet Union, Stalin had also provided a huge amount of military aid, including thousands of planes, pilots, military advisers, tanks, and rifles. Now, with Adolf Hitler threatening Russia’s European flank, Stalin curtailed his generosity.

  Ailing, T.V., Mayling, and Chiang had seen that FDR would not act to defend China, but through their China Lobby contacts, they learned that the Roosevelt administration now valued China as a strategic barrier protecting U.S. access to the riches of Southeast Asia. On the shopping list oldest sister Ailing had given little brother T.V. were requests for U.S. loans with no strings attached and a secret U.S.-funded mercenary air force.

  While Stalin had been forking over large amounts of aid, FDR gave only sporadic morsels. Now Ailing wanted a big chunk from FDR with no conditions. In 1905 Charlie Soong had brought home two million dollars in private funds from American hands. In the next two months, his son T.V. would seek over a hundred million dollars from his Harvard friend in the Oval Office.

  Before T.V. descended on Washington, Soong-Chiang press people arranged for Henry Luce’s Life magazine to interview him in his extraordinary Hong Kong residence. T.V.’s home had both Chinese and Western furnishings—to these American journalists “an expression of… T.V.’s political philosophy, molded, even more than his father, by the influence of two hemispheres.” In one corner of T.V.’s living room, the Life team came upon a triple-tiered shrine. On a table stood “a large, new American radio, complete with short-wave dial.” Hanging on the wall above the American radio was “a photograph of the President of the U.S.” inscribed “ ‘To my friend T. V. Soong, Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ ” Above the Roosevelt photo was an “extremely modernistic terra-cotta head of the Virgin Mary.”15

  In his Life interview, T.V. adroitly framed the argument he would use to pry money and airplanes from Washington: “As the wars in Europe and in Asia drag on, it becomes more evident every day that they are parts of one great struggle—the struggle of democracy against totalitarian aggression. In this struggle China fights on the side of democracies.” Life noted, without evidence, that T.V.’s “American admirers… call him Asia’s greatest statesman.”16

  Secretary Hull—perhaps sensing the disruptive influence of the China Lobby before it had a name—opposed T.V.’s trip to Washington. An internal State Department memo warned, “It is not advisable that T. V. Soong be invited or be permitted to come to this country to discuss the matter with the Secretary of the Treasury or any other high official or officials.”17 State worried that T.V.’s direct dealings with Roosevelt would jeopardize the U.S. government’s “legitimate diplomatic procedures.”18 Nevertheless, Roosevelt met with Soong in the Oval Office many times with neither witnesses nor note takers. One of Roosevelt’s close associates later observed, “At the White House, the making of FDR’s China policy was almost as great a secret as the atom bomb.”19

  John Davies, the State Department China Hand who had been born in China, spoke Chinese fluently, and understood the gap between the reality in China and the mirage in Washington, wrote, “Roosevelt’s approach to China was rooted not so much in what existed as what should be. Like so many Americans before him, he thought less in terms of the actuality than of the potential of five hundred million Chinese. China was to be treated as a great power so that it would become a great power, a grateful friend eventually helping the United States to keep order and peace in the Far East.”20

  Someone like T.V. was a rarity in the Roosevelt White House; very few Asians walked those halls, and suddenly here was a tall, handsome, impeccably tailored graduate of Harvard and Columbia who joked that his Boston-accented English was better than his Chinese. Contrary to the images of bucktoothed Asians with halting English and awkward body language that had already become a staple of American popular media, T.V., Life wrote, was “easy for Washington officials to get along with”; the article noted that he was “unusually tall and stocky for a Chinese… his eyes, behind horn-rimmed glasses, looked clear and confident… he did not bow and scrape, like Chinese politicians… throughout months of long-drawn-out meetings and complicated negotiations in Washington, Soong sometimes even managed to create the illusion that he was really not a foreigner at all.”21

  In his campaign for money and airplanes, T.V. presented the situation and participants in a multiplicity of ways, depending on the moment and on his audience: China as supplicant; Noble Peasants desiring to make an American-like New China; Chiang’s regime’s Christian nature; noble soldiers fighting in Shanghai; helpless victims of the evil Japanese; and a bulwark against a row of collapsing dominoes. John Davies recalled how China Lobby messaging had penetrated American culture:

  Somehow a legend gained currency that the Chinese had fought with persistent valor and that, if only weapons were placed in their hands, they would push the Japanese back into the sea. On top of this was an American sense of shame that, rather than helping the gallant victims of aggression, we had provided the Japanese the wherewithal to mangle the Chinese.22

  T.V. realized that FDR was sensitive to the domestic political fallout of losing China, and he warned Roosevelt that without aid from the outside, Chiang might make terms with Japan, side with Russia, or be defeated by Mao (whom T.V. portrayed as a puppet of Stalin). The dreaded threat of losing China worked. Over a sandwich lunch at FDR’s Oval Office desk, the older Harvard alumnus promised the younger that the U.S. would give Chiang another twenty-five-million-dollar loan.

  After receiving Roosevelt’s assurances, T.V. and his wife moved out of the Shoreham Hotel where they’d been staying since their arrival and into a tony Woodley Road mansion from which T.V. networked into the heart of the Roosevelt administration. The mansion was home to poker games, eight-course Chinese banquets (T.V.’s favorite food was American steak but Henry Morgenthau’s was Peking duck), casual sandwich luncheons, outdoor Sunday barbecues, and numerous parties at which Washington’s power brokers, opinion makers, and munitions salesmen mingled. The finest whiskies accompanied talk of New China; pop music wafted through the rooms. Guests who moved to T.V.’s den, with its fine inlaid wood and impressive library of books in English, would notice a Bible on his desk. Charlie Soong’s son would eventually shake from the U.S. almost three times as much as America would spend on the atomic bomb.

  Felix Frankfurter had recruited the Hotdogs and was a fan of both Henry Stimson and T. V. Soong. Many of the Hotdogs would soon be on the China Lobby’s payroll. One of them, former Harvard professor Lauchlin Currie, was serving as the very first economic adviser to an American president. On and off the Bank of China payroll even as he worked for FDR, Currie was a fortunate catch for T.V.—close to the president and almost totally ignorant about the reality in China.

  Jesse Jones was also enormously important to Soong. Jones was chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, one of the agencies the president would use to funnel money to Chiang. When T.V. played poker with the powerful Texan, he made sure he lost.

  Warr
en Lee Pierson was president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Pierson, like Morgenthau, Stimson, and Knox, enjoyed card games with T. V. Soong, oblivious to the larger hand being played.

  Joe Alsop was a powerful syndicated newspaper columnist and a distant Roosevelt relative; at the time, Washington was essentially a small town, and a blood connection to FDR meant a lot. Alsop was soon cashing T.V.’s checks for filling the role of “adviser,” a remarkable breach of journalistic ethics and a coup for the China Lobby.

  All of these men and many more would work hard to support the Soong-Chiang version of reality and, in so doing, would help bring about disaster in Asia for the United States.

  In July of 1940 Japan pressured Britain to close the Burma Road—China’s backdoor supply route from the port of Rangoon—and withdraw British troops from the International Settlement in Shanghai. An American admiral fretted that Japan’s full control of Shanghai would close “the last open chink in the ‘open’ door in China.”23

  The U.S. Marine Corps commandant in Shanghai announced that his Marines would patrol the British sector of the International Settlement. When the Japanese threatened to confront the Marines, Hull kept them out of the British sector and avoided a hostile encounter. The Washington Warriors shrieked about Hull’s lack of a big-stick policy. But Hull’s policy was to avoid a war in the Pacific.

  On the evening of July 18, 1940, Henry Morgenthau, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox dined with British ambassador Lord Lothian. Stimson needled Lothian about Britain’s buckling under Japanese pressure to close the Burma Road. The British ambassador countered by bringing up FDR’s continuing sales of oil to Japan. As voices rose in argument, Lord Lothian outlined an Anglo-American plan to bring Japan to its knees. First, Roosevelt would stop U.S. exports of oil to Japan. From its Singapore base, the British navy would help the Dutch destroy the Dutch East Indies oil fields, rendering them useless to the Japanese. The British and Americans would then purchase the world’s remaining petroleum. The supply thus claimed, the British would bomb Germany’s synthetic fuel plants. Voilà! Japan, and perhaps Germany, would be brought to heel.24