Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Lacking any stiffening by the British, the “vigorous judgment” of the powers that Stimson h...

on January 7, 1932, came to be known as the Stimson Doctrine of Non-Recognition. It notified Japan and China that the United States “cannot admit the legality nor does it intend to recognize” any arrangement between those countries which impaired the Open Door policy or “the sovereignty, the independence, or the territorial or administrative integrity of the Republic of China”

Chapei, the Chinese district of Shanghai,

The air raid on Chapei of January 29, 1932, was the first terror bombing of a civilian population of an era that was to become familiar with it.

The capabilities and intentions of the host country are the military attaché’s subject.

He serves as an intelligence officer whose function it is to keep his War Department informed of factors and developments of military significance. His sources are official and unofficial: inspection of troops, attendance at field exercises, contact with the right people and cultivation of foreign colleagues, study of the press, reports of private agents, and general circulation with open eyes and ears.

Throughout the 1930s, wrote Secretary Hull, “Japanese diplomats always took care to represent to us that there were two elements in Japan: one liberal, peaceful and civilian; the other military and expansionist….If we did not irritate the military by denying them the right to expand in the Far East, the peaceful element could eventually gain control of the Government and ensure peace. It was therefore up to us to prevent the worst from happening in Japan.”

When the Japanese ultimatum demanding the declaration of an “autonomous” north China by December 10 was made public by desperate Chinese officials, the demand for resistance broke into the open, given voice by a massive student protest on December 7 in Peiping. Watching crowds applauded, then joined the march, defying the police; even rickshaw coolies shouted

the forbidden patriotic slogans. The demonstrations spread to other cities; a second and third were held in Peiping and Tientsin with tens of thousands of participants. Petitions poured in on Nanking. Students commandeered trains on the Shanghai-Nanking run and exhorted people along the way to compel the Government to stand firm against Japan. A National Salvation League was organized and over the next months 30 groups and associations for patriotic defense and a “people’s front” or “united front” against Japan were formed.

Communist agents and propaganda helped the growth of the movement. A “united front” against Fascism was by now official policy of the Comintern, proclaimed at its 7th Congress in July-August 1935. For Russia the revival of a militant Germany on her western front combined with a militant Japan at her back on the mainland of Asi...

It was in Russia’s interest to deflect the Japanese southward where they would be absorbed in the quicksand of endless struggle with the Chinese.

Arousing anti-Japanese sentiment and stimulating China’s will to resist thus became a Communist interest.

The Chinese Communists advocated resistance not simply as tools of the Comintern but in their own interest because if Chiang Kai-shek were forced to take up arms against Japan, he would be required to leave off his relentless campaign against themselves. Besides, they recognized, as an axiom of history if not of Marx, that national war has a wider appea...

Hereafter all anti-Japanese activity was denounced as Communist; Japan became the champion of anti-Communism in Asia and endeavored to press Chiang Kai-shek into an anti-Communist alliance.

This had its attractions for many Chinese no less than coming to terms with Hitler had its charms for the right wing in England and France.

But Chiang Kai-shek could not come to terms with Japan, as he well knew, without risking national leadership. To do so would give the Communists and his many other rivals a rallying cry against him. Already the Li-Pai group in the south was using the deman...

Chiang Kai-shek’s authority, like that of Europe’s medieval kings, rested on the more or less voluntary fealty of provincial barons.

“Unfortunately for China,” as Stilwell had written in a G-2 report the year before, “there is no other influential leader in sight…who can take his place and carry on with anything like the prestige he has gained.” The lack of alternative leadership was a weakness, he noted, “common to all dictatorships.”

China would fall an easy victim; therefore Japan faced a “terrible crisis” which must be decided within the next five years one way or another. The date was then September 1936.

“It looks like another manifestation of the Chinese desire to get somebody else to do something they are afraid to do themselves,” and he added shrewdly, “possibly an intimation that they have no intention of offering resistance unassisted.”

Wu Wei, or “Do nothing,” were given there, leaving the Chinese viewer to add mentally, “and all things will be done.”

“Do nothing” exemplified the Chinese character, Stilwell concluded, “They are constitutionally averse to influencing events.”

By contrast, Europeans and their American descendants had been driven by the impulse to change the unsatisfactory, to act, to move away from oppression, to find the frontier, to cross the sea. They were optimists who believed in the efficacy of action. The people of China, on the other hand, had stayed in one place, enclosed by a series of walls, around house and village or city. Tied to the soil, living under the authority of the family, growing their food among the graves of their ancestors, they were perpetuators of a system in which harmony was more important than struggle.

The international horizon was darkening in 1936, with Fascism emboldened and the democracies infirm. In February extremist Japanese officers attempted a coup d’état by multiple murder of elder statesmen which, though it failed, had a subduing effect on opponents of militarism. In March Hitler occupied the Rhineland unopposed. In May Mussolini annexed Ethiopia; the League’s empty sanctions against Italy were called off and the British fleet, not to be provocative, withdrew from the eastern Mediterranean. Chiang was not the only one who failed to resist. At Geneva a small lonely cloaked figure, the exiled Haile Selassie, in a last appeal to the powers to come to his support, warned, “…and if they do not come, the West will perish.” In July rebellion of the right, supported by the dictators, brought civil war to Spain. Here

though the democracies behind a screen of “nonintervention” tried not to look, sides were being drawn for the coming struggle. This was clear enough to Japan which in November joined Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact.

The Communists nevertheless augmented their propaganda campaign for resistance. In August they issued an open letter to the Kuomintang expressing their willingness to join forces in an All-Chinese Democratic Republic for resistance to the invader.

their ulterior object was to push Chiang Kai-shek into open conflict with Japan.

Familiar with the plight of the Chinese peasant and unfamiliar with Marxism,

Stilwell regarded the Communists as a local phenomenon and a natural outcome of oppression. “Carrying their burdens of famine and drought, heavy rent and interest, squeeze by middlemen, absentee landlordism,” he wrote of the farmers, “naturally they agitated for a readjustment of land ownership and this made them communists—at least that is the label put on them. Their leaders adopted the methods and slogans of communism but what they were really after was land ownership under reasonable conditions.

It is not in the nature of Chinese to b...

November 1936 the China Weekly Review published a

sympathetic series of interviews with Communist leaders and an eyewitness report of their substate at Yenan in Shensi by the first foreign journalist to have visited them, Edgar Snow.

Snow’s account gave the world its first news of the heroic Long March and the first pictures of Communist personalities, way of life, beliefs and intentions.

“For a people being deprived of its freedom, the revolutionary task is not immediate Socialism but the struggle for independence. We cannot even discuss Communism if we are robbed of a country in which to practice it.” He stated frankly that the defeat of Japanese imperialism in China would hasten the victory of world socialism by destroying one of imperialism’s most powerful bases. “If China wins its independence the world revolution will progress very rapidly.”

they appeared in refreshing contrast to the faded promise of the Kuomintang.

“Communism” appeared, as it had to Stilwell, just a label.

In December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek went up to Sian to unloose the sixth anti-Communist offensive, and stepped into the most bizarre experience ...

He was kidnapped by Chang Hsueh-liang, intended commander of the offensive, in an endeavor to persuade him to abandon the civil war and a...

What saved him was that he was necessary. All at once men in Sian, in Yenan, in frightened Nanking, above all in Moscow, saw the same prospect—chaos in China if Chiang were eliminated, with extended civil war and no gainer but Japan.

Before his kidnapping Chiang

was neither popular with the public nor enthusiastically admired by his supporters but he was the repository of the habit of obedience to the head of the family, and the sense of security under that authority which in the ...

Acting in their national interest the Russians preferred Chiang Kai-shek to chaos in China with its resulting advantage to Japan.

The Kuomintang understood well enough that the Communists wanted active battle against Japan as a stage on the way to their own victory and were consequently determined not to be drawn so deeply into resistance as to play their opponent’s game. Chiang Kai-shek’s aim was still to avoid and postpone outright conflict with Japan until the foreign powers should become involved and bring him enough help to defeat Japanese and Communists both, leaving him at last a clear and independent victor.

Stilwell was not overimpressed by the facade of reconciliation after Sian. “The present talk of democracy in China is glib and meaningless,” he wrote in an estimate of the Sino-Japanese situation early in 1937. He expected the Government would “follow a policy of delay, insisting that they are preparing to fight but with no intention of doing so. They hope to have their problems solved by someone else.”

China’s only assets were “numbers, hate and a big country. She has neither leaders, morale, cohesion, munitions nor coordinated training.” Furthermore, in a war Japan could blockade her ports.

But Stilwell knew too Chinese native capacity which made him believe in the Chinese potential. In studies of the Taiping invasions of the north in 1853–55 and of the campaign of the Imperial General Tso Tsung-t’ang to suppress Moslem rebellion in Chinese Turkestan in the 1870s, he found a “lesson for those who believe that the Chinese have degenerated beyond hope.”