It was during the summer of 1940, White says, that “the spirit of the Chinese reached one of its all-war lows.” The Japanese had captured Ichang, a port on the Yangtze River, which put their bombers only 300 miles from Chungking, and in May they began intensifying their bombing of the wartime capital, making it, according to Chang and Halliday, “the most heavily bombed city in the world” up to that time. “We have had so many raids the past month,” May-ling wrote Emma on June 16, “and all the objectives have been of a non-military nature.… Last week, our house in Chungking was bombed, but with their usual inaccuracy the Japs merely made some bomb-holes in the yard. The house still stands sans panes, and looks like a blind man staring through sightless eyes. Many of my friends lost their homes and possessions during the last few raids. Some of them even in dug-outs had their clothes blown off.… I have distributed a few necessities in various friends’ houses so that when worse comes to worst, I won’t have to walk around the streets of Chungking clothed in fig-leaves!”
With France under the jackboot of Hitler and Britain suffering from the withdrawal at Dunkirk, the Japanese felt free to issue demands—first, that the French close the railroad from Hanoi into China and second, that the British close the Burma Road, running from Lashio, India, in the west to Kunming, China, in the east. The Burma Road, which was, as one American engineer put it, “scratched out of the mountains with fingernails,” had been completed in 1938. It covered a distance of only 360 miles but, according to Fortune magazine, meandered “through 726 miles of the foulest driving country in the world, twisting and contorting through some of the deepest gashes on the wrinkled face of the earth.” The only qualification the British were able to wring from the Japanese was that the closing of the Burma Road—now China’s last link to the world—would last for only three months, a period of time that would give Japan and China an opportunity to reach a peace settlement.
It was during this interval that smuggling, called by White “an unbelievable phenomenon of piracy, bribery, racketeering, [and] corruption,” reached its height. The smugglers were concentrated in three cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tientsin. Hong Kong was the point of departure for what came to be known as the “human railway”—thousands of men carrying small pieces of American trucks dismantled for that purpose, along with medical supplies, textiles, and gasoline. Waiting at the receiving end were agents of the Chinese government, prepared to pay the original cost of the goods, the expenses of the carriers, and reimbursement for goods lost en route due to enemy attacks. Another route, via Macao, served the middle class and was used by officials, journalists, and missionaries. There was also the coastal route, “dangerous but extraordinarily profitable.” For 34,000 Hong Kong dollars* paid to agents of the Japanese navy, a smuggler was given the right to take one tug with as many barges as it could tow up the coastline out of Hong Kong over a period of one month. On board the tug was a Japanese agent to deal with Japanese warships encountered on the way.
But the real center for contraband was Shanghai. According to White, “The great smugglers rings with depots on the islands off the coast, with firm and fixed connections with the Japanese army and navy, with headquarters in Shanghai’s swank and not-so-swank hotels bargained in millions.” According to White, these rings were composed of Japanese merchants, ex–Chinese pirates, Chinese merchants, Korean intermediaries, White Russians, and Japanese Special Service (army and navy) agents.
All these routes eventually met “like the meshed strands of a spider’s web” in Chungking—where prices soared to ten times the value of the item, covering “the loss along the coast, the cost of the bribe, the cost of transport, the risk of confiscation within China and the time during which the capital is invested and is unretrievable” (usually about six months). This was not, as Westerners might have thought, a one-way business; goods were “not all coming in to China; probably an equal amount of the trade was outgoing.” Moreover, it was a terribly risky way to make a living. Smugglers were often killed—shot if they were lucky or, if not, “exposed to fierce German police dogs” trained to “tear them to pieces.” The smuggling trade flourished during 1940, accounting for probably three or four times the amount of goods that reached China through legitimate channels, and it did not subside until the end of that year, when the Japanese cracked down on both the Chinese and their own soldiers.
DURING THE SUMMER of 1940, the generalissimo called a meeting of his councillors to discuss the last set of Japanese terms, offered during the closing of the Burma Road. “When I started 15 years ago,” he said, “I had only 2,000 cadets.… America was against me, and France, and England, and Japan… the Communists were more powerful than they are today. And I had no money. And I marched north.… I united the country. Today I have 3,000,000 men and half of China and the friendship of America and England. Let them come.… In five years I will… conquer all China again.”
Brave words, but Chiang’s most recent biographer, Jonathan Fenby, claims that Chiang sent a member of the Secret Service—a man who looked strikingly like May-ling’s younger brother T. L. Soong—to Hong Kong, where he was introduced as T.L. and pursued secret peace talks with the Japanese. The negotiators, who met at night, got as far as planning a meeting between Chiang, Wang Ching-wei, and the Japanese chief of staff in China, but negotiations collapsed over Manchukuo, which the Japanese insisted that the Chinese recognize. Chiang, who knew he would be called a traitor if he conceded on Manchukuo, also knew that these secret maneuvers could always be used to threaten Washington. Fenby says that this meeting was the basis of at least one U.S. loan to China, secretly arranged by T.V.
Chiang subsequently rejected the Japanese peace terms; there were no more peace talks; and on October 12, 1940, three months after they had closed it, the British reopened the Burma Road. Two weeks earlier, Japan had officially joined the Axis. Convinced more than ever that Japan and the United States would soon be at war, Chiang announced in November that China was allying itself with Britain and the United States. Having received a $25 million loan from the United States in September, China was quickly rewarded with another $50 million. This was in 1940, the year Wendell Willkie ran for president against Roosevelt, who was up for an unheard-of third term. “Both parties,” Emma informed May-ling, “have come out against our participation in the European war.”
Early in 1941, Chiang Kai-shek issued an invitation to White House economist Lauchlin Currie to come to Chungking at China’s expense to survey its problems of inflation and foreign exchange. A Washington gossip columnist reported that the hidden reason for the Currie mission was to check out rumors that U.S. loans, sent to aid China’s war effort, had “stuck to the fingers of some Far East lovers of the democratic way of life,” while Currie’s biographer contends that the Chinese used the visit to show the world that the United States backed the Nationalist government. Others say it was arranged in order to establish a “direct channel of communication between Chiang and Roosevelt,” thus bypassing the State Department, “which neither leader trusted.”
Whatever the reason for his trip, Currie arrived in Chungking with a verbal message from Roosevelt to Chiang, expressing the president’s fervent hope that war between the KMT and the CCP would not interfere with the united Chinese fight against the Japanese. Currie told Chiang that the Chinese Communists were receiving “a very favorable and sympathetic press in the United States” and that the best way to counteract this was for the KMT to follow a “policy of removing grievances rather than attempting to suppress or ignore disaffection.” But the generalissimo, he reported on his return, “has little faith in the ability of the people to govern themselves.”
While he was in Chungking, Currie saw Chou En-lai, who complained that there were “many incompetent and pro-Japanese elements” in the national government and that Kung was “a very bad influence.” He said that Chiang’s position was not as strong as before but that there was no one who could take his place. Currie found the greatest resentment of gover
nment policy among university students, professors, and young government workers. “I got virtually nothing from an interview at which there were two Chinese present,” he reported. “I got very much more when I had one at a time… when they finally ventured on certain criticisms they would draw their chairs close to mine and their voices would fall to a whisper.”
Economically, Currie said, the situation had already “reached a dangerous state,” and he recommended one “absolutely indispensable” step: reformation of the land tax. There were, he reported, some 200 million acres of land yielding about $600 million to local governments, whereas they could be yielding some $2 billion to the central government. Transferring the land tax to the central government and making sure it was collected by an “honest, patriotic and efficient administration” would not only “cut the ground out from under the Communists” but please the peasants, provide the government with revenue it desperately needed, and put the onus squarely on the landlords, who had heretofore managed to avoid taxes because they controlled the tax collectors. “I did not,” Currie reported to Roosevelt, “meet one person whom I considered competent in the whole Ministry of Finance.” In his private notes, Currie jotted down his opinion of Kung, the current minister of finance: “too long on job—older, cynical, weary… not trusted— ugly stories widely believed.” Kung’s sole virtue, Currie noted, was that of being “loyal and accommodating.” In spite of the fact that Kung gave Currie what one columnist called “4 coolie-loads of presents” during his stay in Chungking, Currie told Roosevelt that he was “convinced that the budgetary reforms necessary… will not be carried through by the present Minister of Finance. A change for the better here is absolutely essential.”
At one point in his visit, Currie spent a weekend with the Chiangs in their country home. Having returned to Chungking from Hong Kong a few weeks after Currie’s arrival, May-ling was preoccupied with her health. She was, Currie thought, “quite neurotic—dates her physical ills back to the death of [her] mother.” She “talks of gland deficiencies,” he said.
But along with her usual hypochondria, there was a family problem. May-ling had received a letter from Ai-ling suggesting that T.V. be named ambassador to the United States. What worried the Kungs was the knowledge that when T.V. returned to China, he would be more powerful than his brother-in-law—hence the attempt to keep him on the other side of the ocean. Having failed to influence Chiang thus far, Ai-ling wrote May-ling to say that T.V. was the best candidate for the office of ambassador, as he got along very well with Americans. When May-ling forwarded Ai-ling’s letter to her husband in Chungking, one of T.V.’s trusted associates got hold of it and warned him, causing a deepening of the rift between the two factions of the family.
IN OCTOBER OF 1940, the Chinese had asked the United States for five hundred planes to be flown by Americans in the service of China, along with a large loan to finance them. This request was the brainchild of Colonel Claire Chennault, who had floated the idea that American planes could “carry the war into Japan proper” while at the same time harassing the Japanese navy on the sea-lanes. According to Chiang, who presented the request, the fulfillment of this proposal would also prevent Japan from bombing the recently opened Burma Road. Both Chennault and T. V. Soong had lobbied Washington for this ready-made air force, and T.V. told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that just sending five hundred planes over Japan once “would have a very decided effect on the Japanese population.” When Morgenthau asked him about retaliatory bombings, T.V. was philosophical: “They’re doing it anyway.… This would give us the chance to hit back.”
T.V. was China’s most successful solicitor of loans and equipment. From his impressive oak-paneled office in Washington, D.C., the man known as “the Morgan of China” was able to keep an eye on the beneficiaries of U.S. aid and try to make sure that China got her share. An article in a Canadian newsweekly called T.V. “one of the six most important men” in Washington as well as “a realist who knows that a foreign minister who can supply guns, tanks and planes need not worry about foreign relations.” Barbara Tuchman put it more succinctly. “T.V.,” she said, “was the most unembarrassed and untiring lobbyist of his time.”
But according to Morgenthau, asking for five hundred planes was “like asking for 500 stars.” It was certainly in the interest of the United States for China to keep Japan occupied, thus giving the United States more time to arm, but the Americans were not producing enough war material to go around. “It is of the utmost importance,” said the editors of Fortune magazine, “… that the U.S. strengthen China with everything that can be spared from the Battle of the Atlantic.” The story of how the Chinese got the leftovers was told by Thomas Corcoran, one of Roosevelt’s close assistants:
Early in the winter [of 1941] Lauchlin Currie, Roosevelt’s aide for the Far East, called on me.… The President wanted to help Chiang, he said, to bolster his beleaguered government. If Chungking fell, China fell… if China remained an active adversary, Japan would continue to be distracted from her broader ambitions.… Acting for the President, Currie then suggested that as a private individual I… charter a Delaware corporation to be known as China Defense Supplies. In fact it would be the entire Lend Lease operation for China. This civilian company, supported entirely with government funds, was in one respect a simple conduit behind a facade of utmost respectability. Frederick Delano, the President’s elderly uncle, was a co-chairman of the board. The other was T. V. Soong.… This was an unorthodox operation… what we were doing was dubious according to the letter of the law.… Though legally a private corporation, CDS didn’t operate in a normally competitive market. Its sole customer was the government of China; its only source of income the Treasury Department.… CDS had cash enough for whatever costs it had to cover.… The problem was to locate and acquire the goods we wanted to buy.… The logistics were horrible and the “leakage” exhorbitant, but we delivered some goods.
All that could be scraped together at that time were a hundred P-40 fighter planes that had been destined for Britain. “The British didn’t want these planes now that something faster was about to be available. The P-40’s were big, heavy and out-of-date as last year’s hemline.” The Chinese took them.
One hundred American pilots, attracted by salaries of $750 a month and bonuses of $500 for every Japanese plane shot down, were recruited from the army, navy, and marine air forces and, in April 1941, released by a secret Executive Order to serve as mercenaries in the pay of China. One hundred ten pilots and 150 mechanics and support personnel left San Francisco two months later, traveling on a Dutch merchant ship and carrying passports that identified them as “actors, farmers and other fictions.” The Japanese threatened that their ship would never reach Rangoon, but it did—with no interference on the way. The reason they landed in Rangoon was that the Chinese, after all their lobbying for planes and pilots, had not bothered to prepare an airfield for them.
But it was the passage of the Lend-Lease Act* on March 11, 1941, that had, according to Tuchman, “opened the faucet of real aid to China.” Thereafter, China’s demands increased rapidly. “The business generated by Lend-Lease through China Defense Supplies was even more lucrative than most military procurement operations,” Tuchman claimed. “It made the fortunes of the Americans involved in the group and added to Soong’s, which through his previous tenure as Minister of Finance and chairman of the Bank of China was already considerable.”†
A MONTH AFTER the passage of Lend-Lease, the Soviets signed a five-year neutrality pact with Japan. According to General Vasilii Chuikov, the chief Soviet military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek at the time,* both Chiang and Madame had been “doing everything possible to bring us into open war with Japan.” It was the generalissimo’s wife, according to Chuikov, who “took an active part in troublemaking,” provided “misinformation” to the Soviets, and “frequently made the point that the greatest support the Soviet Union could render China would be to declare war on Japan.” He also bl
amed the Madame for articles that appeared in Chinese newspapers expressing China’s appreciation for weapons received from the Soviet Union while reproaching the West—pieces he claimed had been written “to provoke the Japanese: to show them that the Soviet Union was more dangerous than America or Britain.”
The Soviet-Japanese neutrality agreement was a stunning blow to the Chiangs. Ever since the Japanese invasion of China, Stalin had been sending military supplies to China to use against Japan. Suddenly, in total disregard of the Sino-Soviet Nonagression Pact of 1937, he reversed his position, essentially granting Japan carte blanche to do whatever it wanted in China, since it no longer had anything to fear from its Russian neighbor. The Chiangs reacted to the bad news by urging T.V. to have “a frank heart-to-heart talk with the President.” There was, obviously, nowhere left for China to look for help besides the United States—a fact the G-mo drove home in a flattering speech delivered at a farewell dinner to U.S. Ambassador Nelson T. Johnson in May. Later that month, while outlining Hitler’s plan for world domination, President Roosevelt stated that it “would be near its accomplishment today, were it not for two factors: One is the epic resistance of Britain.… The other is the magnificent defense of China.” Chiang’s rapid response to Roosevelt’s unwarranted praise was prompted by a wire from T.V., whom Chiang had recently named China’s foreign minister. T.V. not only recommended that the generalissimo telegraph the president but also supplied the text. The fact that T.V. told Chiang the contents of the president’s speech a week before Roosevelt delivered it attests to the efficacy of his Washington connections.
During May 1941, Henry and Clare Boothe Luce paid a thirteen-day visit to China. The son of missionaries, born in Tientsin in 1914, Luce was primed to be impressed with the country and the Chiangs. As one of his writers and old friends put it, “The trouble with Harry is that he’s torn between wanting to be a Chinese missionary like his parents and a Chinese warlord like Chiang Kai-shek.” An ardent political reactionary, Luce had already taken on the Chinese Nationalist cause, spearheading a new organization called United China Relief, which would raise $7 million for aid to China. The Luces stayed with the Kungs in Chungking and had tea with the Chiangs, affording Henry Luce an opportunity to declare Chiang Kai-shek “the greatest ruler Asia has seen since Emperor Kang Hsi 250 years ago.” Having heard that Madame’s pantry had been destroyed by a bomb, the guests brought a huge supply of cigarettes, which they presented to the Chiangs along with a portfolio of photographs of their host, his wife, and leaders of the KMT. “An hour later we left,” Luce wrote, “knowing that we had made the acquaintance of two people, a man and a woman, who, out of all the millions now living, will be remembered for centuries and centuries.” In August, May-ling wrote Mrs. Luce to thank her “so much for what you and Mr. Luce have done to help China since your return to America. Since you left,” she added, “I have been having malaria and lately dengue fever.”
The Last Empress Page 47