Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Crossing into Shensi, Stilwell at once saw signs of the Christian General’s rule. Soldiers sang hymns as they marched through the streets. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” was sung around the theme of “save your ammunition” and the Doxology as an appeal to save the country from decadence. Admonitions painted in blue characters on whitewashed walls exhorted citizens: “Do not smoke cigarets, do not drink wine,” “Be honest in business,” “Honor thy father and mother,” “Plow land, weave cloth, read books.” Stores displayed signboards quoting all kinds of proverbs of good advice. “But is it such a simple thing,” Stilwell wondered, “to change the habits and mode of life of this to say the least rather stubborn people?”

  Feng’s efforts were not confined to exhortation. His soldiers were required to learn two new characters before each meal in the literacy campaign that was to fit them to become citizens of a modern state. Officers and even their wives and daughters joined the classes to learn to read and write. Courses for civil administrators, magistrates, police and public health officers were part of Feng’s program as well as public works in irrigation and land improvement of the kind Yen Hsi-shan was conducting in Shansi. Stilwell saw little sign of these in his dusty progress toward Sian. But the pings (soldiers), he noted, were “all snappy and their guns are clean.”

  Exasperations were many: rotten roads and lame mules, lazy carters “still snoozing and unwilling to go,” innyards that were open repositories of defecation, pestilential beggars, dust storms for two or three days at a time, then days of rain turning to snow. There were also violets along the road and Ming monuments and a fine view from the top of a pass of the Yellow River with the sun shining on low flats green with young crops on the far side. Ahead to the west were mountains glinting with snow in the clear air.

  Entering bandit country the convoy passed a man’s head hanging on a tree and that night the tu fei (bandits), disguised in uniforms, killed a lieutenant and a soldier. Farther along, outside a town, they passed a dead bandit recently shot and left for all to see. Death was as common as the windblown dust of China, its reminder everywhere in the grave mounds that would wear away over the centuries to be plowed back into the fields, its visible presence in the corpse of a girl baby, victim of infanticide at birth, laid out unburied between the grave mounds for dogs to eat.

  At a hot springs, one day’s journey from the capital, Stilwell learned that the Tuchun had sent orders for him to use his special tub. It was his first bath since leaving Peking.

  On April 3 he entered Sian, ancient capital of the Han and T’ang dynasties. Its walls were the highest and thickest in China but they now enclosed large waste spaces, including the old Manchu quarters where there were only fields of a vegetable oil plant resembling mustard. The main business streets were paved with huge old stone blocks but the few new brick schools and government offices were an architect’s nightmare, “with facades that look like a mixture of Spanish mission, country garage and Hose Company No. 2.” Coal, sold by the pound at a street-corner market, was the city’s fuel supply brought in by wheelbarrow from T’ung Kuan 90 miles away. Hides were drying on outdoor frames and the main streets were crowded and busy, filled with pings carrying umbrellas. Stilwell found it hard to glimpse an idea of the former greatness of the city, but even in decline the people of Sian devised pleasures. They tied bamboo whistles of varying pitch to the tail feathers of pigeons so that when circling in hundreds overhead the birds made the sound of a flying pipe organ.

  Stilwell was taken to meet the Tuchun at his headquarters in the old Imperial City which he had reconstructed into neat clean barracks and drill grounds using soldier labor and bricks from the ruins. Feng Yu-hsiang, a big man of forty-one who abjured the usual warlord’s grandeur, lived in a “neat little brick shack and is a slow spoken bird…a solid sort of guy with no airs who makes friends.” Discussion of the road project was begun but Feng did not seem very interested. The reason, as Stilwell discovered in further conversations, was that “he cares not if I build the road or not; he wants dope on military affairs.” Feng invited Stilwell to return next day to inspect his arsenals and meanwhile showed him through barracks and workshops.

  In the barracks the soldiers’ rooms were each adorned with a map of China showing in vivid red the territories lost in the last 50 years—Indo-China, Korea, Formosa, Port Arthur. Maps of Shensi, of China and of the world were painted on the ends of buildings. The men, much neater and cleaner than the average Chinese soldier, were practicing giant swings on the horizontal bar and their proficiency was something of a shock. “Show me any other organization in the world where man after man can get up on the bar and do a giant swing.” It was another shock to see men at rest studying the bible. In classrooms they were being taught to read and write and in the workshops they learned a craft, as weavers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, tailors and blacksmiths. In the shoemakers’ shop an officer was in charge, working with the men. “This is also a shock. To see a captain pasting uppers doesn’t fit in with ordinary notions of military procedure.” Stilwell found that promising privates or noncoms were appointed lieutenants without examination. After rising to captain they attended a six-month course of instruction, the only theoretical training they received.

  General Feng’s Chief of Staff came next day to ask “a lot of questions about planes, tanks, rifle grenades, etc.,” followed by the Tuchun himself, who talked to Stilwell for an hour about weapons. “They haven’t the slightest idea of the uses of the new inventions and talk of guarding a bridge with a tank.” Stilwell “doped out a Stokes mortar” for Feng and “tried my best to explain what airplanes, tanks and rifle grenades were designed for and could do, and how useless it was for him to waste money on them. With his infantry and machine guns, there is nothing in the province that he could not clean up in short order.” This was not what Feng wanted to hear but Stilwell persevered “in the hope of keeping this really admirable man from wasting his resources on what, to him, would be the frills of war.”

  He took dinner with Feng that evening, which to his surprise turned out to be excellent. Because of his much-publicized Christianity and characteristics of the peasant hero, Feng was a favorite of the foreign press which liked to portray him wearing a simple cotton gown and eating the same fare as his men. But Stilwell found the dinner was “none of this ‘all same soldier’ stuff but soup with meatballs, fresh vegetables, chicken, frizzled mutton, lotus seeds, scrambled eggs and mantou [steamed wheat bread].”

  After four days in Sian, conferring with contractors and Chinese and foreign engineers and assistants, Stilwell collected forty noncoms assigned to him from Feng’s army as construction bosses and moved out to the construction site 20 miles north of the city. He had the foremen build a model of the road which was to lead eastward from the Wei, a branch of the Yellow River, and was actually satisfied with the result. The men seemed unusually intelligent and he had hopes that after a little training they would do well. The ford at the river was a chaos of six to eight flatboats jammed with mules, carts and people, pushed by boatmen from the stern, with mules falling overboard, boatmen yelling and laughing and falling into holes as they walked across. Stilwell was carried ashore on a coolie’s shoulders.

  Work began on the road with 800 laborers armed with “T’ang dynasty picks,” wooden shovels, too few baskets and no tamps. Under the circumstances it proved hard to get the road work under way; the workmen proved poor and the foreman disappointing. After a week they were “no good yet. Won’t make the men work….Still cutting wrong after being told twenty times….Work all bitched up.” But gradually “chaos begins to give way to order” and Stilwell could feel that the work was really progressing. Just at this juncture the renewed war of the northern warlords intervened.

  Rumor spread that Chang Tso-lin was “starting things” and Feng’s division was sent for to help out Wu Pei-fu. Files of Feng’s troops were marching east, Stilwell’s carts were commandeered, his foremen were disappearing and it was plain
the project would have to be abandoned. Feng’s Chief of Staff came to invite him to accompany the army. On April 21 he started east again, brushing aside frantic but incomprehensible pleas for delay by his courier. After two miles an exhausted messenger on a bicycle caught up to Stilwell, bearing on his back a rug as a gift from the Tuchun. The bicyclist presented it and collapsed on the ground. Pushing on, Stilwell passed a group of Feng’s staff, “all down in the mouth and bemoaning China’s fate.” He shared their melancholy. If Feng had been left undisturbed for a period of years, he could have established control, wiped out the bandits and attacked the opium traffic with some prospect of success, Stilwell thought. But now “the only man who has shown any likeliness of standing for law and order and decent government” was pulled back into the endless wars of faction and Shensi was left to revert to the old ways.

  At T’ung Kuan, an old frontier fortress at the elbow of the Yellow River with big gates and stone-paved ramps leading up to them, Stilwell had a farewell dinner with Feng in an old temple. The Tuchun summoned a regiment for review by his guest, whom he introduced to the soldiers as Shih Ying-chang (Major Stilwell) of the Ou Chou (European) clan. To a provincial Chinese a foreigner was a foreigner; particular nationality was rarely differentiated.

  The return trek following the valley of the Fen, a northeast tributary of the Yellow River, to Taiyuan, capital of Shensi, took 18 days. Past barren land and good land of crops, trees and grapevines the group plodded on through the same dust and rains, smells and dirt, as on the way out but with hot weather now added to the discomforts. At one inn Stilwell was bitten by a scorpion and “lay awake in a sweat all night feeling them all over me.” Along the way he was struck by the number of old arched stone bridges, usually with half the arch gone: “Repair? God no, why repair?” His conclusion, that present-day Chinese were a “sad throw-off from the people who built these bridges,” was not the whole explanation. Public services were missing because lower officials received no salaries but lived off what they could tax or squeeze from the people with the result that the repair of roads and bridges or the construction of sanitation systems was left undone.

  Yet Chinese stamina and good humor were admirable. When one particular carter persistently drove into every gully, the others “cheerfully helped him out of each one as he got in.” In order to haul out the carts, “they hitched three mules tandem with a man between the traces” and pulled away, “screaming, yao-ho-ing, laughing and slipping in the mud.” For a makeshift bridge they “take the wheels off a cart, turn it upside down and lay it across the gap. Bridge is now built.” Though in an exasperated moment he listed “carts, mules, carters, in that order of intelligence,” he grew fond of his “pair of jokers, Old Kuo and Old Kuang, both under forty and proud of their profession.” He bought them each a pair of shoes and another time treated six carters to breakfast.

  After days of alternate jolting and trudging, of dirt and heat and overnight discomforts, and on one occasion following a cloudburst, of walking the last two hours through a foot of water in the dark and finding the gate of the town closed on arrival, Stilwell at last reached Taiyuan where he boarded the train for Peking. He had not built a road this time but he had lived and worked with the Chinese soldier and common man and made a friend of an outstanding leader. On the return trip to Peking Stilwell saw Chang Tso-lin’s troop trains heading south from Manchuria toward the confrontation with the forces of Feng and Wu Pei-fu that ended in his defeat. Two years later Feng was to turn against Wu and emerge as the leader of the north, going on to become a crucial figure in the decisive years of the late twenties when Stilwell was again in China. They were to meet again at that time and whenever Stilwell was in China. Long afterwards, a few days after her husband’s death, Mrs. Stilwell was upstairs at her home in Carmel when a visitor was announced with some confusion as “the Christian.” Mystified, she went down to find in the hall the huge figure and cannonball head of Feng Yu-hsiang, who said, “I have come to mourn with you for Shih Ti-wei, my friend.”*3

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  The Far East, during the winter of 1921–22 between Stilwell’s two road-building trips, was the focus of greater international attention than at any time since the Siege of the Legations by the Boxers. The Washington Conference of that winter, halfway in time between the Boxer Rebellion and Pearl Harbor, established the conditions of much that was to follow. Initiated by the United States in consultation with Britain, the Conference was primarily an Anglo-American effort to stabilize a safe balance of naval power in the Pacific without the expenditure of a naval race. Since the American public was distinctly not prepared to pay for a massive naval building program to outmatch the Japanese, the only way to secure and fix a favorable naval ratio and safeguard the Philippines was by agreed limitation. At the same time the Conference was intended to reach a general settlement of interests in the area on the basis of an international treaty. Superseding the Anglo-Japanese Alliance which was up for renewal, this would have the added value of affording Britain a graceful exit from an unwanted attachment—a goal as anxiously sought by the United States and Canada as by Britain.

  The American interest was also to encourage a settlement of Sino-Japanese conflicts, hopefully one strengthening China’s position. A further motive in the minds of the chief promoters—Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and former Secretary Elihu Root—was, by taking the lead in international effort, to exhibit America’s responsibility in world affairs and expiate for rejection of the League.

  Shantung lay on the American conscience. The Republicans had made heavy use of it in the campaign to elect President Harding—to the point that a Democratic official claimed it was “the best vote-getter the Republicans had.” This may have left the Republicans under a sense of obligation to do something about the injustice they had so loudly condemned, but conscience does not often convene international conferences. Secretary Hughes wanted China on the agenda because Japanese expansion threatened to dominate the area, ultimately cutting out American and other foreign interests, and he hoped to limit this expansion by international support of China’s “independence” and reaffirmation of the Open Door.

  Concern with China’s “independence” and “integrity” was chiefly an American policy in which Britain joined, without warm conviction, for the sake of other gains she expected from the Conference. British interests in China, far larger than the American, were governed by the Treaty Port view of China as permanently incapable of self-rule. Many Americans shared this view but American public opinion on the whole responded to the belief of missionaries and educators in the regenerative power of Western teaching and Western methods. These, exercised through their pupils, the Western-educated Chinese like Dr. Sun and his disciples, would establish a stable government if given a chance, and validate the missionary endeavor.

  The real proof of her independence that China wanted—and loudly demanded at the Conference—was cancellation of the unequal treaties. Although American public opinion tended to support the aim, Secretary Hughes and his fellow policy-makers, who would be answerable in the end, were not prepared to go that far. All the more reason, therefore, that China should at least regain Shantung. Hughes insisted on it. “I am an old man,” he was quoted as saying (he was sixty), “and I want to see the Shantung Question settled before I die.”

  Japan had not yet fulfilled her promise to restore the leased area to Chinese sovereignty despite chronic American prodding but she was not fixed in a course of single-minded aggrandizement nor, in 1921, in single-minded hostility to the West. There were two Japans, one militant, the other liberal. Like the thin man inside the fat man crying to get out, Japan’s thin little liberal alter ego emerged in the 1920s for a brief beleaguered heyday before it was regorged. The victory of the democracies in the war had impressed Japan and endowed her parliamentary parties and moderate leaders with new prestige. They had no great appetite for a naval race or for aggressive militarism and they advocated a settlement of goodwill with Chi
na. They were anxious about the alliance with Britain and they wanted to obtain American recognition of Japan’s mandate of the Pacific islands. Japan came to the Washington Conference for these reasons.

  The Conference lasted not quite three months, from November 1921 to February 1922, half as long as the Peace Conference at Paris. Nine powers attended including France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Portugal for various reasons of national pride, naval power or interests in the Far East. Russia, whose interests were both contiguous and persistent but whose Government was not recognized, was not invited despite her angry protest. China’s delegates came bent as ever on treaty revision, tariff autonomy and Shantung. It took Secretary Hughes’ utmost persuasion to induce them to enter negotiations on the rather shady rights, loans and leases involved in Shantung directly with the Japanese rather than publicly at the Conference table. They finally agreed on condition that Hughes and Arthur Balfour, the chief British delegate, would be present as observers. At the first scheduled meeting they failed to appear and on investigation were found besieged in the bathroom of the Chinese Legation by a group of angry Chinese students opposed to direct negotiations with Japan. Thereafter it took 36 meetings before a settlement was reached by which Japan again agreed, for the first time by treaty instead of verbal promise, to restore the leased territory while retaining certain economic reservations.

  Results of the Conference as a whole were embodied in a Four-Power Treaty establishing a naval ratio of 5-5-3 in the Pacific for the United States, Great Britain and Japan; a Five-Power Treaty on nonfortification of possessions in the Pacific; a Nine-Power Treaty on China, plus various separate agreements on Shantung, on withdrawal of Japanese troops from Siberia, on the troublesome island of Yap and a final removal of that old burr under the American conscience, the Lansing-Ishii Agreement. The naval limitation, beginning with Hughes’ spectacular opening proposal to scrap planned battleship construction by the three chief naval powers amounting to 66 capital ships and other vessels, was the most dramatic. But the nonfortification agreement by which Japan undertook not to fortify the mandated islands, the United States not to fortify the Philippines, Guam and the Aleutians, and Britain not to strengthen Hong Kong, was more fateful.