The English-language magazine China at War, managed by the shrewd head of Nationalist propaganda, Hollington K. Tong, told tales for a neutral American public of brave Chinese fighter pilots seeking to land on Chongqing’s precarious Shanhuba airfield, a sandbar exposed only at high tide. (These magazines anticipated a very similar effort by British propagandists to tell tales of London during the Blitz in an effort to persuade isolationist Americans to enter the war.) The selling of the resistance was evident in the name given to the provinces of western and central China that Chiang ruled
...more