The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  When Morgenthau phoned FDR and told him that “Chiang Kai-shek’s message was that he wanted to attack Japan,” Roosevelt exclaimed, “That’s what I have been talking about for four years.”16 Morgenthau presented Chiang’s air-war plan in a morning cabinet meeting. Roosevelt, according to Morgenthau’s notes, believed that such an operation might have a positive effect in both Asia and Europe. After the cabinet meeting, Roosevelt summoned Secretaries Hull, Stimson, Knox, and Morgenthau to further discuss T. V. Soong’s colored map.

  “The President was delighted,” Morgenthau told T.V. the next day. “I said, and I hope you will back me up, that if they could get [pilots] who knew how to fly these four-engine bombers, that China would be glad to pay up to $1,000 a month in United States dollars. Was that too high?” T.V. replied, “No, not at all.” Cost was no object to Soong because the bills would be paid with U.S. tax money that came out of Morgenthau’s treasury. Excited, Morgenthau asked, “This Colonel Chennault, where is he?” Soong replied, “He is here now in Washington.”17

  The evening of Saturday, December 21, the treasury secretary hosted some China Lobbyists in his living room. Morgenthau discussed maps of China and lists of American airplanes with T. V. Soong, Claire Chennault, and General Mow, the head of the Chinese air force. It must have been exciting for the balding bureaucrat to be operating as America’s secret air marshal, enthusiastically discussing various types of planes and flying tactics that he knew almost nothing about.18

  The president’s best friend and one of the nation’s most powerful officials was having a conversation with three China Lobbyists about how American planes and pilots would terror-bomb Japanese cities, an act condemned by FDR when the Japanese bombed civilians in China.

  While the operation was to be kept secret from the American public, General George Marshall, FDR’s brilliant and starchy Army chief of staff, learned that administration civilians were planning for a secret air war in Asia. Marshall had little regard for Chennault, who, of course, had been drummed out of the U.S. Army Air Corps three years earlier. Now “Colonel” Chennault had come to Washington trying to sell a harebrained air-war scheme that the Army’s number-one man knew couldn’t work.

  General George Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff. Marshall had served in China and knew of Chiang Kai-shek’s military incompetence, but he was a savvy bureaucratic player who saw the domestic political pressure on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  Marshall had served in China and knew about Chiang’s leadership and his locust armies. It must have been galling for a traditionalist like Marshall to discover that a Chinese financier and his American soldier of fortune had gone around established State and War Department channels to influence the president and the treasury secretary. Marshall invited Soong and Chennault to private meetings.

  Marshall was a good soldier and an adroit bureaucratic survivor who understood that his commander in chief was a politician, that the majority of American voters wanted to help the Noble Chinese Peasants, that the president of the United States and his secretary of the treasury were on Chiang’s side, that the two men had just given one hundred million dollars to the Generalissimo, and that Chiang wanted even more. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 22, Marshall tried to talk some sense into Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau.

  Two types of airplanes were on the table: long-range bombers and short-range fighters. Marshall’s strategy with Morgenthau was to nix talk of bombing Japan while giving Chiang a few outdated fighter planes to satisfy FDR. The general explained to the treasury secretary that every bomber that came off the production line was needed to train thousands of new pilots in support of America’s Europe-first policy. Marshall then adroitly offered Morgenthau half a loaf: he was willing to extend some form of air support to Chiang, but he believed it was in America’s best interests to send only fighter planes. Morgenthau agreed.

  Marshall had averted a potential disaster. Fighter planes had a limited range, so he wouldn’t have to worry about U.S. bombers piloted by American mercenaries getting shot down over Japan while the U.S. was not officially at war with the country.

  Hull hosted a meeting on Monday, December 23, at the State Department for Morgenthau, Knox, Stimson, and Marshall to formulate a policy that would please FDR and mollify Chiang. All agreed that the United States would transfer a hundred outmoded P-40 fighter planes to the Chinese. Roosevelt immediately approved the compromise.

  FDR chose to control this secret air force from outside the War Department and within the White House, creating the historical precedent for the executive branch’s use of air war with no Pentagon or congressional oversight. Roosevelt instructed T. V. Soong to establish a private company to purchase the airplanes, ship them to China, and clandestinely recruit U.S. Armed Services personnel as mercenaries. FDR even suggested the name of Soong’s company: China Defense Supplies. FDR and T.V. agreed that Tommy Corcoran would run CDS under the title of adviser. Tommy hired his brother David Corcoran as president and staffed CDS with men from the administration, some of whom Roosevelt personally recommended. Roosevelt wanted a dignified figure to serve as CDS’s honorary chairman and chose his uncle Franklin Delano. And now that the Stimson Committee was disbanded, Tommy hired former executive director Harry Price—the chief Manhattan missionary—to work in the CDS accounting department.

  In less than six months, T. V. Soong had gotten Roosevelt to authorize what the U.S. State and War Departments had long opposed. And the expenses were paid by the U.S. Treasury, with money and supplies flowing through T. V. Soong and on to Asia, where Ailing and Chiang waited with open arms.

  The first months of 1941 were ones of impressive creativity for Henry Luce. On February 17, he authored a lengthy Life magazine editorial called the “The American Century,” his signature piece that would be cited in his obituary. Luce then defined Asia’s place in his American Century with an April 1941 spread in Fortune entitled “The New China.” To birth his New China, Luce created the biggest propaganda organization for a foreign country in U.S. history: United China Relief.

  “The American Century” was a missionary call for U.S. global domination:

  America as the dynamic center of ever widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of skilled servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive and America as the powerhouse of the ideas of Freedom and Justice.…

  We are, for a fact, in the war.… We are not in a war to defend American territory. We are in a war to defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world.19

  Luce called for the American military to push into Asia, with trade to follow, for which Asians should be thankful. America would be thankful too, as trade with Asia “will be worth to us four, five, ten billion dollars a year.”

  Like his hero Theodore Roosevelt, Luce saw the U.S. as the world’s helpmate and guardian. America would give technical, economic, and military aid to nations felt to be friendly but would take a “very tough attitude toward all hostile governments.”

  Luce’s Fortune article was a description of a place that existed only in the American imagination. Chiang was presented in the sort of hyperbolic terms that one would expect from a dictator’s press office. This, however, was America’s most popular and respected business magazine:

  China may someday be a democracy. Today her government is this man. Probably no chief of state in the world, whether temporary like Churchill or with a pretense of permanence like Hitler, has a hold on his country as does Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.… Among the people he has achieved the status of legend while still alive. The common farmers say and believe that he sits like a mountain, moves like a dragon, and walks with the sure step of a tiger.20

  Luce hired one of the Stimson Committee’s top Manhattan missionaries—Mr. Bettis Garside—to help him birth the organization Luce named United China Relief. Luce
got the ball rolling with a donation of $60,000 from his own fortune, and together, he and Garside consolidated a number of the China aid organizations.

  Luce used the UCR to further convince Americans that China was a land much like the United States and that it was full of people who sought to replace their outmoded past with a future based on the American way. In publications with names like China Fights for Democracy, Luce’s UCR minions wrote, “Despite geographical, racial and linguistic barriers [Chinese and Americans] think alike, react alike and hold much the same ideals.”21

  Pearl Buck’s Noble Chinese Peasants as presented by Henry Luce’s United China Relief (Sawyers, Martha, 1902–1988. China first to fight!: United China Relief participating in National War Fund.U.S.A. UNT Digital Library, http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc367/)

  Despite apparent differences, these two nations [America and China] have many common characteristics. China, with all its changes in governmental forms, has for four thousand years been fundamentally democratic. The Chinese people have long looked to America with admiration and friendship, and have turned to us for leadership and example in every phase of the sweeping changes they have made during the last thirty years. Chinese, trained in American universities or in American-supported colleges and universities in China, occupy a majority of the places of importance throughout China today.22

  United China Relief’s board of directors had star power. Eleanor Roosevelt became honorary chairwoman of UCR’s national advisory committee, Pearl Buck was chairwoman, and UCR board members included luminaries like John D. Rockefeller III, movie producer David O. Selznick, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Wendell Willkie, and Luce himself. T. V. Soong chaired UCR’s National Committee on Chinese Participation.

  In fact, United China Relief was a propaganda machine that sent little money to China. Relief was in the name, but creating images of New China in the American mind was Luce’s game. Luce installed almost thirty Time Inc. professionals to run UCR’s publicity department, and they suggested various public relations ideas: pro-Chiang children’s books; a Times Square Chinese pagoda; a Chinese library; pretty Chinese girls parading down towns’ Main Streets; events like China Nights, China Weeks, and China Luncheons; a national Chinese chess tournament; a radio program to publicize the adoption of Chinese orphans; Chinese-clothing fashion shows. Luce mailed a personal appeal to all Time magazine subscribers soliciting donations for UCR. Donating money to UCR, he said, was “the most effective means of translating American sympathy and admiration for China into concrete measures of assistance.”23 Generous contributors became members of the China Legion, an honor that came with a certificate signed by Madame Chiang.

  UCR employees flooded American airwaves and mailboxes with pro-China press reports, celebrity testimonials, booklets, flyers, and posters; they distributed pieces of imitation Chinese jewelry and thousands of buttons with cute Chinese mottos. The organization had Hollywood stars broadcast New China messages on the radio and established a UCR Children’s Committee—headed by none other than Walt Disney—with branches in cities across the country where children could deposit the pennies, nickels, and dimes they’d collected in UCR coin boxes for the cause. Drivers on America’s roads saw UCR billboards with suffering Noble Peasants and bold headlines:

  3,000,000 CHINESE HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FOR DEMOCRACY

  What have you given?

  Frank Price—Mayling’s favorite missionary—was UCR’s coordinator in Chungking, from where he shoveled China Lobby propaganda. Luce asked Walt Disney and comic-strip writers to introduce Chinese scenes and personalities into their work. UCR mailed China news items to major newspapers and radio stations, from whom Time Inc. also bought advertising. UCR boasted in an internal memo that “a comprehensive program of publicity and promotion was developed, including not only releases and other articles for the press but also departments for radio, motion pictures, speakers, merchandising, and special features.”24

  A billboard for United China Relief. (Courtesy of UCLA, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library)

  The UCR speakers’ bureau got the word out. One of the organization’s most popular speakers was UCR chairwoman Pearl Buck, who told audiences:

  The Chinese people deserve every honor that can be given them, every penny that can be sent to help them, every aid that can be found to preserve their democracy. It is for them that we Americans must work wholeheartedly through all the agencies in which we are working. I am one of a group of Americans who are trying at this moment to raise a million dollars to buy medical supplies to send to China for the millions of people who need them, and there are many other groups working for other Chinese causes.25

  Another of UCR’s popular speakers was William Bullitt, the man who had shuttled messages between FDR and Chiang. Bullitt told audiences, “The Chinese and Americans believe in the same moral code and speak the same moral language.”26 China was proclaimed “our Western front,” and Chiang was fighting what was really “our battle.”27 The Generalissimo now stood “at China’s Valley Forge.”28

  To further focus Americans on New China, Luce decided to orchestrate a national speaking tour for Mayling Soong. Mayling had been broadcasting to the U.S. for years; she regularly contributed to many American magazines and was often voted one of America’s most admired women. Luce wrote Chinese ambassador Hu Shih:

  The central problem of the campaign is to lift the story of China out of the “old old story” category and to present it for what it truly is—the newest story in the world! This will require at least one very dramatic symbol. We therefore very much hope that Madame Chiang will come to this country for a brief visit.29

  For years, a small group of Harvard graduates in Washington had been swaying policy toward China: President Roosevelt, T. V. Soong, Felix Frankfurter, Lauchlin Currie, Henry Stimson, Tommy the Cork, and many Hotdogs spread throughout the administration. Realizing the rewards that could come from such networks, the Soong-Chiang syndicate hired a young Harvard graduate named Theodore White as an adviser to their propaganda arm, the Ministry of Information. White joined an America-friendly government led by the American-educated Ailing and Mayling and the Southern Methodist Generalissimo. The finance minister, H. H. Kung, and the minister of foreign affairs were Yale graduates; the minister of education had a degree from the University of Pittsburgh; Sun Yat-sen’s son, with degrees from Columbia and the University of California, presided over the legislature. Hollington Tong, the minister of information and White’s boss, was a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and Columbia University. T. V. Soong, currently head of the Bank of China and later China’s prime minister, was a Harvard graduate, class of 1915. The list of American-educated Chinese ran from the national health administrator to the foreign trade commissioner. China’s ambassadors were almost all Ivy League; there was a Cornell and Columbia graduate in Washington and a University of Pennsylvania graduate in London; the ambassador to Paris had three degrees from Columbia and a son who was on the Crimson staff at Harvard.

  Teddy White was one of the very first Harvard graduates who spoke Chinese and who had studied Chinese culture. Professor John Fairbank had founded Harvard’s China program only recently, in 1936, and White was one of his original students.

  White’s title was adviser to the Chinese Ministry of Information. Teddy later recalled, “In reality, I was employed to manipulate American public opinion.”30

  Since almost none of the American journalists in China read or spoke Chinese, they were at the mercy of their minders, who kept them in a New China bubble. To house American reporters, the Soong-Chiang clan built new hotels in Chungking where there were beautiful Chinese girls to bond with these lonely travelers. At lavish and convivial banquets, visiting Americans heard about how, with just a little U.S. money and a few airplanes, Chiang would push the Japanese out and transform the Middle Kingdom into a democracy. Most exciting of all for the newsmen was a trip to the “front,” where, from Chine
se army trenches, the Americans could peer through binoculars and see a Japanese soldier in the distance (actually a Chinese soldier dressed in a Japanese uniform).

  The American correspondents were not stupid; many were their generation’s best and brightest. But they came from a country whose exclusion acts had kept Chinese people out for sixty years. The correspondents couldn’t tell the difference between a Chinese, a Japanese, and a Korean.

  On a postelection fishing trip, FDR dreamed up the concept that would later be passed into law and known as the Lend-Lease policy: the attractive fiction that after their wars were over, England, Russia, and China would return the materials the U.S. lent to them. Lend-Lease gave Roosevelt centralized power to decide which countries would get what supplies.

  T. V. Soong heard about Lend-Lease from his employee Ludwik Rajchman—who was probably tipped off by Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter—before Roosevelt announced it to the public. Soong immediately recognized the potential and asked Roosevelt to send Lend-Lease administrator Harry Hopkins to China. Roosevelt wanted Hopkins to deal with Churchill, so to handle China he chose instead Lauchlin Currie.31 Currie had never been to Asia and knew little about China—which was just how T.V. liked it.

  Using American aid as a carrot, FDR thought he could convince Chiang to “call off the civil war.” Once Chiang and Mao were working together, Roosevelt would “give China a budget.” Chiang, with Mao’s support, would then wage a New Deal–style “war for social justice.” The benefits would be huge; Roosevelt foresaw “the industrialization of Asia” with China as “a new frontier for industrial expansion.” Legions of Chinese would be “open to friendly American enterprise.”32