The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  There was also “a deep-seated resentment” among members of the embassy staff about Madame Chiang’s “lack of consideration for them.” They complained that they were kept on twenty-four-hour-a-day duty, although they often had nothing to do but sit outside her suite just in case she wanted them. In conversations with American friends, they criticized “the lavish entertainment,” the “heavy expenses” incurred at a time when the Chinese at home were starving, as well as “the stupidity and bungling by David Kung.” They believed that Madame’s lengthy visit had “reduced the good will gained upon her arrival and the early days of her visit,” pointing out that most high government officials from other countries stayed in the United States no more than ten days. She had remained for eight months.

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  There is no more entangling alliance than aid to indigent friends.

  —BARBARA TUCHMAN

  FROM NOVEMBER 1942 until July 1943, while Madame Chiang was traveling through the United States garnering sympathy, money, and armaments for China, her husband’s government in Chungking was beginning to show increasing signs of interior rot. “The consensus of most American officials and correspondents working in China,” Tuchman said, “was that the Kuomin-tang was incompetent, corrupt, oppressive, unrepresentative, riddled by internal weakness and unlikely to last.” Pearl Buck,* in an effort to gray down the rosy pictures being painted in America by the generalissimo’s wife, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt that the Chinese people would rebel against their government as soon as they recovered from the war.

  There was certainly a vast disconnect between the China that Americans were hearing about from the Madame and the reality of the situation in the Middle Kingdom. Journalists posted to Chungking were required to obtain credentials from the Chinese War Department and, to do so, had to sign agreements promising to run their stories by the censors before sending them home—a practice that inevitably led to reportorial inhibition and self-censorship. “Probably never before,” Tuchman said, “had the people of one country viewed the government of another under misapprehension so complete.”

  A more specific and personal form of censorship plagued Theodore White, who traveled to the province of Honan, north of the Yangtze River, to report on the famine of 1942–1943, one of the worst in Chinese history. It is estimated that some 2 million to 3 million people died of starvation and disease, and an equal number fled the province. In his original story for Time, White wrote about the “stupidity and inefficiency” of the relief efforts as well as the unconscionable practice by local officials of continuing to collect taxes from starving peasants. The government in Chungking, he said, preserved its “bland equanimity” in the face of this human disaster, since all it cared about was the money. Only too aware of the ongoing tragedy, it failed to act until too late and then sent wads of paper money instead of food to citizens reduced to cannibalism.

  It should come as no surprise, considering that Madame’s picture had appeared on the cover of Time just three weeks earlier, that statements to this effect were cut out of White’s article when it was published in the magazine. But some of the more arresting phrases did survive Luce’s blue pencil, those having to do with “dogs eating human bodies by the road” and “peasants seeking dead human flesh under the cover of darkness.” There was also a description of a banquet given for White and a fellow reporter by the Honan tax collectors—“one of the finest and most sickening banquets” the journalist said he had ever attended. It consisted of “sliced lotus, peppered chicken, beef, and water chestnut… spring rolls, hot wheat buns, rice, bean curd, and fish… two soups and three cakes with sugar frosting.” After she read Time’s coverage of the famine, May-ling asked her friend Henry Luce to fire White. He refused.

  When White returned to Chungking, he asked Ching-ling to help him get an interview with Chiang Kai-shek. To do this, May-ling’s sister told the generalissimo that “the matter involved the lives of many millions.” She then gave some advice to the journalist before the meeting: “May I suggest that you report conditions as frankly and fearlessly as you did to me. If heads must come off, don’t be squeamish about it… otherwise there would be no change in the situation.”

  White met Chiang in his office, where the G-mo stood “erect and slim, taut, holding out a stiff hand of greeting.” He listened to White, as the reporter put it, “with visible distaste because his meddling sister-in-law insisted he had to.” White told him about the people who were dying, about the taxes they were being forced to pay, and about the extortion in the province. Chiang replied that the peasants were not being taxed: “he had ordered that taxes be remitted in distress areas.” White quoted what he had heard from the peasants. Chiang turned to one of his aides. “They see a foreigner and tell him anything,” he said.

  It soon became clear to White that Chiang had no idea what was happening outside Chungking. To bring him down to earth, White tried to tell him about the cannibalism, but he answered that this was impossible. White told him he had seen dogs eating dead people at the side of the road.

  That was also impossible, according to Chiang. White, who had asked a colleague to accompany him, told his friend to bring in photographs of what they had seen. The pictures showed dogs standing by “dug-out corpses.” According to White, “The Generalissimo’s knee began to jiggle slightly… as he asked where this picture had been taken. We told him.… He asked for names of officials; he wanted more names; he wanted us to make a full report to him, leaving out no names… he said that he had told the army to share its grain with the people. Then he thanked us; told me that I was a better investigator than ‘any of the investigators I have sent on my own.’… Heads, I know, did roll… lives were saved—and saved by the power of the American press.” There was, however, only one mention of the famine in the Chinese press. Published in Ta Kung Pao, which White called “the greatest paper in China,” the report included a “powerful” description of the suffering peasants but skirted the corruption and inefficiency of the local officials. Nevertheless, it was shut down by the government for three days after the article appeared.

  The efficiency with which the Chungking government silenced the offending paper was equaled only by its speed in printing a book written by Chiang and published in March 1943. He had started writing it in November, as soon as May-ling left for the United States, and after four months, it appeared. Entitled China’s Destiny, the generalissimo’s book looked back with nostalgia to the days of Confucius and blamed the foreign powers for all of China’s ills: opium, gangsterism, warlords, prostitution, and the chaos following the revolution. China’s Destiny was, among other things, a particularly ungrateful response to treaties, signed just two months before, in which the United States and Britain had voluntarily given up their old territorial privileges in Shanghai and Peiping.

  Starting with a picture of a China that had never existed—a country where battles were fought only “to help the weak and support the fallen” in a country that “benefits other people by extending her blessings and asking nothing in return”—the generalissimo’s opus was hailed in Chungking as the most important book since Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. It was supposed to have sold 500,000 copies before it was pulled from circulation for what was euphemistically termed “revision.” “When an English translation was finally issued, an undertaking that gave those involved “chills and fever,” many of the most offensive parts had been cut. Still, no less an authority than China expert John Fairbank declared himself “appalled” by Chiang’s work. “I never saw a more pernicious use of history for political purposes,” he said. “… The book is a tract unworthy of a statesman.” Another American said that Hollington Tong’s office had pleaded “with the Embassy to use its influence to keep any dissemination of the contents from the American public,” and the edition available in the United States was reduced to a four-page summary. We must assume that if May-ling had been in Chungking at the time, she might have been able to stop Chiang from publishing Ch
ina’s Destiny—or, at a minimum, soften its xenophobia.

  Since Chiang had not been invited to the Casablanca summit and Roosevelt needed his approval for reviving the ground campaign to reconquer Burma, now labeled ANAKIM, the president sent a high-level group of military brass, including General Hap Arnold of the U.S. Air Force, General Brehon B. Somervell, chief of the Army Service Forces, and Sir John Dill, the British representative of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, to see him in January 1943. They started their tour at British headquarters in Delhi, where, in Arnold’s words, Wavell’s “plan” for the Burma campaign consisted of “several pages of well written paragraphs, telling why the mission could not be accomplished.” Their visit to China was at least as disillusioning. Formerly an admirer of Chennault’s Flying Tigers, Arnold was “astonished” that Chennault himself “was not realistic about the logistics of his operations.” After several meetings with Stilwell, Chennault, and the G-mo, Arnold reported that Chiang “would not listen to logic or reason,” that he refused to accept a promise of 5,000 tons of equipment per month to be delivered over the Hump, and that both he and Chennault “glossed over” necessities like fuel and airfield maintenance. Chiang had, in fact, recently come up with new demands: 10,000 tons a month over the Hump, autonomy of command for Chennault, and five hundred combat planes for China within a period of nine months. “Tell your President,” he told Arnold, “that unless I get these three things I cannot fight this war and he cannot count on me to have our Army participate in the campaigns.” After he returned to the States, Arnold wrote Stilwell a letter. “Dear Joe,” it began, “You have one S.O.B. of a job.”

  Arnold left Chungking convinced that Chiang Kai-shek “brushed too many important things aside” and was conspicuously lacking in “a global outlook. His only thought was: ‘Aid to China! Aid to China!’ ” He said that “Dill agreed with him in his estimate of Chiang, but suggested that perhaps the absence of Madame Chiang Kai-shek had had an effect; perhaps her influence on the Generalissimo would have made a difference.” In the end, it was Dill the Britisher who convinced Chiang to join Operation ANAKIM— a commitment the generalissimo repeated in a letter to Roosevelt along with a rundown of his demands.

  While Chiang hesitated, Chennault’s public relations man, columnist Joseph Alsop, tried to undercut Stilwell’s Burma campaign in what Fairbank called the journalist’s “poison pen style.” Alsop, who believed in reporters as advocates, never hesitated to use his family connection to the Roosevelts to bombard the White House with his ideas. Well aware of this, T. V. Soong and Claire Chennault had wooed him assiduously, and Alsop had gone to work for Chennault’s American Volunteer Group in October 1941, doing everything from public relations to procurement of supplies. As one old China hand put it, “Alsop was Chennault’s hatchet man.” Caught by the Japanese in Hong Kong at the time of Pearl Harbor, Alsop had spent seven months in a prison camp followed by a period of recuperation in the United States. During his incarceration, it was T.V. who had kept his family informed about him, and when Alsop returned to Chungking, T.V. introduced him around the city as “a cousin of President Roosevelt.” For his part, Alsop advised T.V.—thirty wires in three months—to get more supplies for Chennault, and he warned the White House of an “apocalypse in Asia” unless the U.S. government arranged for the material to be sent. He contended that Stilwell’s ground campaign was “grandiose” and “dangerous” and that by pursuing it, the United States was passing up a “brilliant and easy opportunity in the air.” At one point Alsop even tried to convince Roosevelt that Stilwell wanted a Communist victory in China. Alsop was not the only Chennault supporter. During the previous summer, Henry Luce had put Chennault on the cover of Life magazine, along with an article by journalist Jack Belden, who called Chennault “the one genius that war on the Asiatic mainland has yet produced.”

  ONE OF THE reasons that May-ling had not left the United States in early May, when her husband asked her to come home, was that she had wanted to be around for the next summit between Roosevelt and Churchill, which took place in Washington from May 11 to May 27, 1943. Code-named TRIDENT, it was the second big meeting of the year (Casablanca being the first) and the largest of the strategy-setting conferences held so far during World War II. Returning to New York just as Churchill arrived in Washington, Madame Chiang contacted him immediately, sending word that she would be delighted to receive him at her suite in the Waldorf. To save Churchill the extra trip and to improve the strained relations between England and China, Roosevelt invited her to lunch at the White House—an invitation that both Chiang and T.V. urged her to accept. “Churchill is really physically unable to come to New York,” T.V. wrote her, “and the President’s idea of giving a luncheon for you both is an excellent way out. I saw the President today and he again inquired if you will attend; after all we must remember that we are all in this country as his guests.” Complimenting his sister on “the part you have played… in moulding Chinese relations with the Western world,” he reminded her that “it is most important that we keep on friendly relations with the British and you could make a real contribution now.”

  But the G-mo’s wife declined to go to Washington and suggested Hyde Park as a compromise, Churchill responded that he was too busy in Washington to come to New York, and everyone blamed the Madame for being temperamental. Her nephew David Kung, who carried diplomatic papers in spite of the fact that he was neither tactful nor schooled in diplomacy, told Ambassador Koo that “as a Lady, Mme Chiang should be called on by Churchill, and as a statesman, she could meet him only half way,” i.e., at Hyde Park. During the negotiations, she herself was quoted by Koo as saying that “Great Britain must realize that China of today is no longer the China of yesterday and she should not accept the same old, paternal patronizing attitude toward her.” Whatever May-ling was trying to prove, the Roosevelts’ invitation was refused “with some hauteur,” leaving the president “somewhat vexed.” However, according to Churchill, “in the regretted absence of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the president and I lunched alone in his room and made the best of things.”

  If May-ling thought it was beneath her dignity to go to Washington to lunch with the British prime minister, she wanted to be in the center of things when the war material was passed out, and, much to Roosevelt’s annoyance, she moved back into the White House for the duration of TRIDENT. T.V. was also in the capital and, as China’s foreign minister, emphasized Chiang’s need for planes and supplies. When asked to explain China’s attitude to the assembled leaders, T.V. said that the generalissimo would not go along with the Burma campaign unless the British agreed to try to recapture Rangoon; he also said that the Chinese would make a separate peace with Japan if the necessary armaments were not forthcoming. Roosevelt reacted as T.V. had hoped, saying that the Allies must not be “responsible for the collapse of China.”

  Meanwhile, back in China, the G-mo was feeling left out. According to an American officer at the embassy, “In conversation with one of the officials who is very close to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, he said he failed to understand the reason why no effort had been made to arrange a meeting between Generalissimo Chiang and President Roosevelt.… He admitted that Chiang could have asked for such a conference but that he refrained from doing so on account of ‘face,’ which is still the predominating force in the Chinese political and social world.” Chiang’s distress had doubtless been exacerbated by a wire from T.V. stating that it was “on record that in the British and American council held last Friday, General Stilwell criticized Generalissimo Chiang openly for being hesitant in making decisions, and having no definite views on military strategy.”

  It was clear from the start of TRIDENT that Roosevelt and Churchill disagreed on China. There was also a split within the American camp itself, with Marshall supporting Stilwell and Harry Hopkins on the side of Chennault. As Marshall tried to explain to the president, Chennault had been “for many years a paid employee of the Chinese Government and hence under the undue influ
ence of the G-mo.” Chiang had asked Roosevelt to call Chennault back to Washington for talks that would not include Stilwell, but Marshall had countered with a request to the president to bring both men home to the States to fight it out: “To call in Chennault and ignore Stilwell, which is the probable purpose of the Generalissimo’s proposal, would… necessitate Stilwell’s relief, and Chennault’s appointment to command of ground and air, which so far as I am concerned would be a grave mistake.” The New York Times, reacting to the anti-Stilwell campaign leaking out of the White House, welcomed the general’s return. “We hope he gets what he wants,” it said in an editorial praising Stilwell for “his unequaled fitness for his post.… He makes no blunders,” the paper claimed. “He commits no offenses against etiquette,” it added hopefully, and then, in a burst of specious improvisation, “from the Generalissimo down, they all like him.”