Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

At the end of November 1937 Carlson took off for Yenan in Shensi to find out how real were the legends of the Communists’ guerilla warfare against the Japanese. As evidence he sent the President captured Japanese documents, a diary and a fur-lined uniform. Later when he came inevitably to write a book his point of view appeared in the title he gave to his chapter on Yenan, “China’s Fountainhead of Liberalism.” His views, expressed more floridly in the book than to the President, typified one kind of American approach to China. He had undertaken the journey, he told the Governor of Shensi, “From the heart…in the name of liberty.” In his own country people regarded liberty and equality as “inalienable rights” and he had observed “this same love of liberty and equality” in China, “the same spirit which had animated our own ancestors at Lexington, Trenton and Valley Forge.” This was China filtered through the rhetoric of the American dream, not necessarily the most appropriate framework for policy in Asia.