The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  At a joint press conference with Madame Chiang, Roosevelt described what we can now recognize as his New China dream: “The people of China well over a century have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world—the same great ideals. China, in the last—less than half a century has become one of the great democracies of the world.”24

  A reporter asked Mayling about rumors that her husband was less than aggressive in fighting the Japanese. Mayling replied primly, “We are using as much manpower as there are munitions to be used. We can’t fight with bare hands.” All eyes then focused on Roosevelt, who quickly promised that he would send China more munitions “as soon as the Lord will let us.” Mayling flashed FDR a knowing smile and quickly added, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.”25

  Mayling then took her show on the road, wowing audiences from Madison Square Garden to the Hollywood Bowl. After Mayling returned to China, parishioners of St. John’s Church in Massena, New York, installed a large stained-glass window depicting Madame Chiang alongside other Christian saints.

  In 1943, while the mirage burned ever brighter in the United States, to many Americans in China it was clear that Chiang was losing and Mao gaining the Mandate. In his notes, Stilwell compared Chiang’s government to Mao’s:

  [On Chiang] Corruption, neglect, chaos, economy, taxes, words and deeds. Hoarding, black market, trading with enemy.

  [On Mao] Reduce taxes, rents, interest. Raise production, and standard of living. Participate in government. Practice what they preach.26

  Stilwell described Chiang’s military strategy:

  [He] hates the so-called Communists. He intends to crush them by keeping any munitions furnished him and by occupying their territory as the Japs retire. [He] will not make an effort to fight seriously. He wants to finish the war coasting, with a big supply of material, so as to perpetuate his regime.27

  President Roosevelt handed the China Lobby a propaganda triumph when he agreed to sit for photos with Chiang at the Cairo conference in late 1943. Joseph Stalin, who was shouldering most of the burden of fighting Germany at this point, thought so little of Chiang as a war leader that he refused to attend the conference. Winston Churchill turned purple about acknowledging General Cash My Cheque as one of the Big Four but acceded to Roosevelt’s request because he was dependent on the United States.

  Photos showed Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang, and Mayling smiling as if engaged in friendly banter, but the truth was that Chiang and FDR could not understand each other, and an irritated Churchill repeatedly ignored Mayling by speaking to photographers in front of him.

  Stilwell asked Roosevelt to define American policy toward China. According to Stilwell’s diary, FDR responded by reaching back into his family lore:

  Chiang, FDR, Churchill, and Mayling, Cairo, 1943. Roosevelt said Chiang was “the first real Oriental” he had met. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  You know I have a China history. My grandfather went out there, to Swatow and Canton, in 1829, and even went up to Hankow. He did what was every American’s ambition in those days—he made a million dollars, and when he came back he put it into western railroads. And in eight years he lost every dollar. Ha! Ha! Ha! Then in 1856 he went out again and stayed there all through the Civil War, and made another million. This time he put it into coalmines, and they didn’t pay a dividend until two years after he died. Ha! Ha! Ha!28

  Roosevelt later admitted that Chiang was “the first real Oriental” he had ever met.29

  General Hap Arnold, head of the U.S. Army Air Force, visited Chungking and met with Chiang and Chennault, who pitched him the same crazy dream that FDR and Tommy the Cork had bought in 1941. When Arnold brought up the challenges of building, maintaining, and protecting airfields, he found that Chiang and Chennault glossed over the issues with waves of their hands. “They could not or would not be bothered with logistics,” Arnold observed. Chiang complained to Arnold, “Excuses, excuses… there are ways and means of doing things and they must be done.… Tell your President that unless I get [my demands] I cannot fight this war and he cannot count on me to have our Army participate in the campaign.”30

  One of Roosevelt’s shrewdest wartime moves was to arm Communist Russia, allowing Joseph Stalin’s soldiers and civilians to bear the brunt of Germany’s military juggernaut. For example, on June 6, 1944—D-day at Normandy—the Allies suffered about ten thousand casualties. But at Kursk a year earlier, the Russians and the Germans had waged the biggest tank battle in world history, a conflict that produced over a million casualties. The Battle of Stalingrad saw an incredible two million German and Russian dead and wounded. The vast majority of German soldiers who died in World War II were killed by Communists armed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt reached out to the Chinese Communists also with the idea of arming them in their fight against Japan. After all, every Japanese soldier killed in China meant one less for America to confront. Mao had invited U.S. observers to Yan’an in 1942. General Stilwell, John Service, John Davies, General Marshall, and President Roosevelt were all interested in learning more about Mao, his fighting potential, and his usefulness against the Japanese. Roosevelt sent polite memos to Chiang asking his permission to let the U.S. accept Mao’s invitation. Stilwell, Service, and Davies presented FDR’s requests, but an FDR-Mao alliance would be the worst possible development for Chiang, and he and his China Lobby network did all they could to throw up roadblocks.

  At one point, John Davies was surprised to learn that T. V. Soong knew the details of a confidential meeting about China held just the day before in Washington. When Soong noticed Davies’s consternation, he said, “There are no secrets in Washington. Rest assured, Mr. Davies, that no conference takes place regarding which I do not have accurate and complete information.”31

  It wasn’t until the summer of 1943 that a few—very few—American journalists sounded the alarm about the New China dream. Reader’s Digest and the New York Times hit the nail on the head with articles entitled, respectively, “Too Much Wishful Thinking About China” and “Our Distorted View of China.” Readers were told that “the Chinese Army is a comic opera chorus,” that China was ruled by “old war lords, in new clothing, for whom war is a means for personal aggrandizement and enrichment,” and that the American public had been fed a mirage by “missionaries, war relief drives, able ambassadors and the movies.”32 But such snippets of reality could not compete with the century-old merchant-and-missionary mirage.

  A conflicted Pearl Buck wrote an article for Life magazine called “A Warning About China.” Its subtitle was “A Great Friend of the Chinese People Points to Dangers That May Lose Us a Valuable Ally.” Buck reluctantly admitted, “Oppressive elements in the government are being more oppressive. Chungking is a place where free speech is less and less possible and those who want to be free are going to other places.” But she also wrote, “Chiang Kai-shek is still the rallying point and the center of unity for China’s war.” Buck—who had not been back to Asia for years—proceeded to take Americans to task for not giving sufficient support to New China:

  The Chinese are brave and ready fighters and if they are not fighting it is because they have nothing to fight with except plenty of empty-handed men… nothing could please the Japanese better than the way we are now treating the Chinese people.… We are in the process of throwing away a nation of people who could and would save democracy with us but who if we do not help them will be compelled to lose it because they are being lost themselves.33

  In China, Stilwell told his diary a different story:

  The picture of this little rattlesnake being backed up by a great democracy, and showing his backside in everything he says and does, would convulse you if you could get rid of your gall bladder. But to have to sit there and be dignified, instead of bursting into guffaws, is too much to ask for the pay I get. What will the American people say when they finally learn the truth?34

  FDR finally fo
rced Chiang to allow U.S. officials to contact Mao. In July of 1944, one month after D-day in Europe, the U.S. Observer Group, including the OSS (the World War II precursor to the CIA), U.S. military personnel, and China Hands like John Service, flew into Yan’an. At that moment the interests of the Americans and Mao Zedong coincided; each sought an ally against the Japanese, and both sides were eager for China to unify against that common enemy.

  The China Hands immediately noticed differences between Mao’s China and Chiang’s China. On the bumpy ride from the landing strip into Yan’an, one observed, “The people alongside the road were robust, so were the horses, so were the mules, so were the dogs. Our officers exclaimed over the contrast to Chungking.”35 The OSS agents were especially enthusiastic because they had the chance to interrogate Japanese prisoners, something Chiang—whose troops rarely engaged the enemy—could not offer. John Service wrote in his diary, “We have come into a different country and we are meeting different people.… Morale is very high.”36

  Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, John Service, Mao Zedong, unknown (Courtesy Service Family)

  After one month, Mao invited Service to his cave home, where the two men talked for eight hours, with a break for dinner cooked by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Service had more substantial conversations with Mao than any other American government official would have for the next quarter century.

  Mao told Service, “The fact is clear… that China’s political tendency is towards us.… Chiang holds the bayonets and the secret police” over the people and was “determined on Communist elimination… Chiang Kai-Shek was elected President by only ninety members of a single party… even Hitler has a better claim to democratic power.” Mao suggested that Roosevelt face reality regarding Chiang:

  Fundamentally he is a gangster.… The United States has handled Chiang very badly. They have let him get away with blackmail—for instance, talk of being unable to keep up resistance, of having to make peace, his tactics in getting the $500 million loan.… With Chiang you can be friendly only on your own terms. There is no longer any need or any reason to cultivate, baby or placate Chiang. The United States can tell Chiang what he should do.… American help to Chiang can be made conditional on his meeting American desires.37

  Mao told Service that the U.S. could be “decisive” in “preventing civil war” in China. But Mao said that Americans too often uncritically accepted Chiang’s false descriptions of reality, chiding Service, “How many American observers do you now have in the front lines?”

  In the course of conversation, Service mentioned that the U.S. officially recognized Chiang, and any American recognition of Mao would be “interference in the domestic affairs of another country.” Mao retorted,

  America has intervened in every country where her troops and supplies have gone… for America to insist that arms be given to all forces who fight Japan, which will include the Communists, is not interference. For America to give arms only to Chiang will in its effect be interference.38

  Mao described a relationship between the U.S. and China that today in the twenty-first century is a reality:

  The Russians have suffered greatly in the war and will have their hands full with their own job of rebuilding. We do not expect Russian help.

  China must industrialize. This can be done—in China—only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital.… Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar. They fit together, economically and politically. We can and must work together… we will be interested in the most rapid possible development of the country on constructive and productive lines.… America does not need to fear that we will not be cooperative. We must cooperate and we must have American help… we cannot risk crossing you—cannot risk any conflict with you.39

  Mao Zedong had just extended the hand of friendship to Roosevelt through the highest-ranking American official to whom he had access. The vision he described to Service was the one that eventually came true in the 1980s and beyond: the U.S. and China cooperating to industrialize China, with Russia a far distant partner. Mao was so pleased to be talking to Americans that he wrote an article entitled “On Diplomatic Work” about future cultural and political collaboration with the United States.

  Historians argue that Mao was insincere, that he was sweet-talking Moscow at this same time. But Mao was much more a realist in search of power than a political ideologue. Support from the richest country on earth, the most industrialized World War II power with the world’s deepest pools of capital—doesn’t it make sense that practical and ambitious Mao would have deserted Joe Stalin for FDR any day?40

  In the summer of 1944, the predictions of Generals Marshall and Stilwell came true: after Chennault stung them with his airpower, the Japanese wiped out his air bases. Suddenly Chennault and his men were fleeing for their lives. Henry Morgenthau, Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Corcoran, and others had been wrong to believe the Chiang-Chennault dream against the better judgment of the War Department.

  By the summer of 1944, many believed that Chiang had lost the contest for the Mandate of Heaven: Mao was attracting followers while Chiang was losing them. Chiang’s locust soldiers were throwing their weapons down as they ran from the marauding Japanese, and even Chiang’s wife—the Christian Miss Soong—had seemingly abandoned him. Mayling had tired of the Generalissimo after she’d found the high heels of one too many of Chiang’s sexual conquests under his bed, and she’d moved in with Big Sister Ailing. Ailing then cashed in her Soong-Chiang chips, which probably cost Chiang 10 percent of his national treasury. In July, Ailing and Mayling left Chungking and flew to Rio de Janeiro with ten attendants. Ailing did some wheeling and dealing with the dictator of Brazil, President Getúlio Vargas, adding to her already substantial U.S.-funded investments in Brazilian companies and property.

  Although the Soong-Chiang syndicate was collapsing in China, it still had presidential pull in Washington. In August, Mayling cabled little brother T.V. that she was tired of Brazil’s humidity. T.V. made a phone call to his Harvard friend in the Oval Office, and on September 6, 1944, Roosevelt dispatched his private plane—the Sacred Cow—to Rio to pick up the Soong sisters.

  Ailing and Mayling settled in River Oaks, a seventeen-room mansion in the tony Riverdale section of New York City. As the Mandate moved farther from Chiang in China, Ailing tended to her U.S. financial pipeline while Mayling minded the China Lobby propaganda front. As a break from her efforts, Mayling had a Secret Service agent teach her how to drive.

  One of the private citizens Roosevelt used to circumvent the State Department was Patrick Hurley, a vain and pompous Oklahoma lawyer whose original claim to fame was that he had negotiated favorable leases in Mexico for the Sinclair Oil Company. When Hurley’s friends learned that FDR was sending him to the Middle Kingdom as his personal representative, they asked him if China—a country he had never visited—wasn’t a huge challenge. Hurley replied that the Chinese were just like Mexicans and that he could handle Mexicans. (At first, Hurley referred to Chiang Kai-shek as “Mr. Shek,” not understanding that he was Mr. Chiang.)

  Roosevelt’s instructions to Hurley are unclear; as usual with China matters, the president held things close to his chest. Hurley would later write the State Department that his policy “is to prevent the collapse of the National Government” and “to sustain Chiang Kai-Shek as President of the Republic and Generalissimo of the armies.”41

  FDR initially sent Hurley to Chungking to referee the spat between Stilwell and Chiang. Stilwell and the China Hands had become an enormous threat to Chiang. They were talking with Mao, and Chiang was afraid Washington might realize that Mao was the future and Chiang the past. When he arrived in China, Hurley announced what he interpreted as FDR’s dictum: Chiang is China’s future. Stilwell and the China Hands disagreed. Stilwell made it clear to Hurley that he planned to use Mao’s forces to help battle the Japanese.

  In retrospect, Stilwell’s advice could well have resulted in a lasting friendship between China and the Unit
ed States, saved millions of lives, and averted the Chinese civil war, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. But Hurley was just the type of go-between that Chiang wanted: a man ignorant of China, an American already marinated in the myths and eager to toe the China Lobby line. Hurley cabled Washington complaining that his mission was encountering opposition directed toward himself by the “Un-American” elements in the State Department.42

  Roosevelt was annoyed with Stilwell’s views and wrote Marshall,

  Stilwell has exactly the wrong approach in dealing with Generalissimo Chiang who, after all, cannot be expected, as a Chinese, to use the same methods that we do.… All of us must remember that the Generalissimo came up the hard way to become the undisputed leader of four hundred million people—an enormously difficult job to attain any kind of unity from a diverse group of all kinds of leaders—military men, educators, scientists, public health people, engineers, all of them struggling for power and mastery, local or national, and to create in a very short time throughout China what it took us a couple of centuries to attain.… He is the Chief Executive as well as the Commander-in-Chief, and one cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.43

  General Marshall was at the crossroads of the China mirage. From China, his subordinates were calling Chiang a little Hitler, while in Washington his commander in chief considered Chiang to be the undisputed leader of “one of the great democracies of the world.”44 After the war, U.S. Army historians asked Marshall, “What was the President’s policy toward China? Did he ever explain it to you?” All Marshall could say was that Roosevelt wanted “to treat China as a great power.”45