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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Pomfret
In the United States, silver was just a commodity, but in China, it was cash. China had been on the silver standard for centuries.
With the State and Treasury departments at loggerheads over how to proceed, China took the initiative. On November 3, 1935, the Nationalist government announced a currency reform program that took China off the silver standard. It was a bold move and another example of how events in America forced change in China. The new program mandated that all silver be handed over to the government’s currency reserve board. For the first time in China’s modern history, the entire country had a single currency,
Japan saw the reforms as a threat. If they succeeded, they would mark a major step toward China’s financial independence. Japanese banks in China refused to relinquish their silver and Tokyo demanded that China immediately halt the reforms.
Morgenthau’s purchases of Chinese silver committed the United States government to the success of one of Nanjing’s most significant reforms and involved Washington more deeply than ever in East Asia. They underscored a shift in the American government’s view of China and Japan. For the first time since World War I, there was a realization that the policy of nonintervention in East Asia was leading to the demise of American influence and was facilitating Japan’s rise. The State Department’s program of avoiding confrontation with Japan was failing because Tokyo showed no limit to its desire to
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In the early 1930s, China’s two leading political parties moved away from American ideals even as Chinese society continued to be inspired by the United States. Neither the Communists nor the Kuomintang believed that American freedom had any role to play in the building of a new China.
Chiang Kai-shek’s decision to challenge the Japanese in Shanghai, along China’s central coast, and not on the North China Plain, reflected the influence of the German military advisers who had trained Chiang’s army since 1934. Northern China was uniquely suited to Japan’s tanks and artillery. Shanghai’s terrain, crisscrossed by creeks and tenements, nullified that advantage. Chiang also picked Shanghai because it was an international city, with settlements run by the British, the Americans, and the French. A great battle in Shanghai would unfold under the noses of Westerners, who would tell
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As Chiang’s armies battled, American newsmen again took China’s side. Carroll Alcott, a radio journalist from South Dakota, visited Chinese soldiers on the frontlines while Japanese artillery shells rained down around them. He found them unfazed, huddled in do-it-yourself caves, cooking rice and vegetables over a charcoal brazier.
Writers and photographers were not shy about goosing the story for effect. On August 28, 1937, H. S. “Newsreel” Wong took a picture of a blackened Chinese baby at the Shanghai South Railway station just after a Japanese air raid. Editors named the picture “Bloody Saturday,” and it became the most celebrated symbol of the conflict. There was China mewling helplessly for a Western savior. Questions were raised about the authenticity of the image when another photograph surfaced showing a man, probably Wong’s assistant, carrying the infant. Wong seems to have staged the shot.
Still, few in America had any stomach for war with Japan. Secretary of State Cordell Hull moved to block the Nationalists from hiring American pilots. American officials in China forced four of Chennault’s American aides to return
Kuomintang officials complained that the United States was obstructing China’s ability to fight. Soong Mayling told Johnson that it was “unneutral” for the United States to deprive China of flight instructors, considering that American planes made up 90 percent of China’s air force. By September 1937, Hull had softened. Americans could advise the Chinese, he determined, but they could not fight. Chennault flouted those rules, shooting down (he claimed) thirty-seven Japanese planes. *
China’s endless woes and Japan’s insatiable drive for territory worried the US president. Franklin Delano Roosevelt hailed from a family of China traders.
Roosevelt had started his political career believing that America needed to extend its empire, but he had grown into a foe of imperialism. In particular, he opposed the foreign penetration of China.
China would loom large in Roosevelt’s plan to establish a new world order after World War II. A strong, democratic China would stabilize the Pacific, counter a resurgent Japan, and tamp down Soviet expansionism in the region, Roosevelt believed. A democratic China would inspire the colonies of Asia to seek independence and embrace free trade. It would be one of the “four policemen” along with the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR, that would guarantee a permanent peace.
Roosevelt told one of his closest foreign policy advisers, Sumner Welles, treating China as a peer was the best means of avoiding “a fundamental cleavage between the West and East in the years to come.”
the early 1930s, Japan continued to be America’s largest Asian market. Airplanes, weapons, and scrap metal to make into shrapnel flowed from the West Coast to the Land of the Rising Sun.
speech in Chicago on October 5, 1937, he urged Americans to stand up to the “epidemic of world lawlessness.” He warned that neutrality would not protect the United States and called for an “international quarantine of the aggressor nations.”
Henry Stimson followed Roosevelt’s speech with a letter to the New York Times urging an embargo on war materiel to Japan. That was front-page news, along with Stimson’s claim that China was fighting for American interests in East Asia. US editorial writers blasted the speech and pooh-poohed Stimson’s rallying cry. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and other isolationist groups gathered twenty-five million signatures against war.
While America fiddled, other nations stepped into the breach. On August 21, 1937, the Soviet Union and China signed a treaty of nonaggression, once again opening the floodgates for Soviet military assistance to the Kuomintang. Given Japan’s alliance with Germany against Communism, Stalin was more than happy for China to tie up the Japanese
Up until Pearl Harbor, financial support from Moscow constituted more than 80 percent of China’s foreign aid.
On December 12, the last remnants of the Kuomintang army fled the city. That same day, Japanese bombers attacked the American naval warship Panay, which was anchored on the Yangtze and loaded with refugees. Three American sailors and scores of Chinese civilians were killed. Although the Japanese claimed that the attack had been unintentional and sent a formal apology to Washington along with an indemnity of $2.2 million, US code breakers had intercepted Japanese communications and learned that the pilots had been under clear orders to sink the ship. Not wanting to tip off Tokyo that America
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Vautrin appealed to the Japanese consulate to rein in the troops. The consulate posted military police officers to the Jinling campus, but the MPs themselves began to rape. On Christmas Eve, with nine thousand women and children packed on campus and a quarter of a million refugees in the safety zone, a Japanese officer arrived at the school and demanded that Chinese prostitutes be rounded up to service his men. The idea, Vautrin wrote in her diary, was to “start a regular licensed place for the soldiers then they will not molest innocent and decent women.” Vautrin found twenty-one prostitutes.
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Vautrin’s Chinese colleagues worshipped and resented her at the same time. Cheng
“To have to stand by,” declared YMCA chief George Fitch, “while a thousand women kneel before you crying hysterically, begging you to save them from the beasts who are preying on them is a hell I had never before envisaged.” Fitch and others began documenting Japanese war crimes.
Steele observed that the Japanese could have taken the city without firing a shot; instead, “they chose the course of systematic extermination.”
Vautrin felt that she had failed China. “At a time when the whole world is in such travail and agony, I am sorry to be on the side lines, helpless and a burden,” she wrote to her colleagues. On May 14, 1941, left alone in the apartment of a friend in Indianapolis, she turned on the gas jet of the kitchen stove and ended her life. She was fifty-five years old.
On January 3, 1938, weeks after Nanjing fell to the Japanese, Time, the most influential news outlet in the United States, declared Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mayling “Man and Wife of the Year.”
The man behind the Time cover would become one of Chiang’s greatest patrons and one of the most influential voices in US-China relations—media titan Henry R. Luce.
After graduation, Luce landed a reporting job in Baltimore. By day, he covered the city; by night, he and his Yale classmate, the magnetically cool Briton Hadden, planned a news magazine. By the end of 1922, capitalizing on Hadden’s connections, the two had raised about $100,000. For names, they toyed with “Facts,” “What’s What,” and “Destiny,” until Luce came up with Time. The first issue came out on March 3, 1923, and a publishing empire was born.
By 1937, despite the Depression, Time’s circulation had surpassed six hundred thousand. By 1941, Time and its sister publications, Life and Fortune, were being read in almost four million households—the broadest reach in American media history.
Time chronicled Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in the early 1930s as a dispute between two tyrannies—Japanese imperialists against Chinese warlords. It referred to Chiang Kai-shek as “Dictator Chiang” and interpreted his kidnapping in Xi’an as proof of China’s disarray. “Chaos and disorder are ‘normalcy’ to China,” read one article. (Even as late as June 26, 1939, Time was still referring to the war in China as inconsequential, “a matter of yellow man killing yellow man.”)
And Chiang Kai-shek struck Luce as the man to do it. The Generalissimo would grace Time’s cover ten times, more than FDR, Stalin, or Churchill, and the same number as Mao Zedong.
China was destined, he believed, to be an Asian America, a pupil of the United States.
As expected, Japanese spies reported the withdrawal but failed to notice that at sundown the fighters returned, skimming in along the treetops. The next morning, the Japanese launched a massive bombing run, but the Russians and Chinese surprised them. When the smoke cleared, thirty-six of thirty-nine Japanese planes had been lost in the biggest pre–World War II battle in aerial history.
Chennault continued to experiment with fighting techniques. Noticing that he could tear the aluminum siding from the Japanese planes with his bare hands, he convinced his men to ram the aircraft in midflight to sheer off their wings—a tactic that the Russians later employed against the Luftwaffe in World War II.
father of American cryptography and had cracked Japanese codes during the Washington Naval Conference in 1922. When the US government shut down its Cipher Bureau in 1929, tossing Yardley out of a job, Yardley wrote his memoirs, The American Black Chamber, which revealed that the United States had broken the codes of nineteen other countries. Herbert Yardley was the Edward Snowden of his day.
Like Frederick Townsend Ward, Yardley was an American adventurer. To Dai Li’s delight, he had no affection for the preachy, patronizing approach of the missionaries and “Old China Hands.” At a banquet in 1939, Yardley gave an eloquent defense of assassination, to which Dai Li responded, “Gan bei!” (Bottoms up!) But Yardley presented the Chinese with other problems. He organized orgies and kept a “comfort” cottage for his mistresses.
The old man struggled to his feet. His whole left side was torn open, revealing a still-beating heart.
Herbert Yardley, Henry Luce, Minnie Vautrin, and Claire Chennault represented America’s mission in China as Japan began nine years of unrelenting aggression against the Middle Kingdom. It was a place for adventurers, entrepreneurs, true believers, and people with something to prove. But China wanted more. Ever since the Opium War, China had sought the full backing of the United States government against its foes. In its life-and-death struggle with Japan, it would be compelled to seek it again.
Appointing an American to command China’s armies would be fraught with risk. Nationalist China had been founded on the idea that China would no longer be subjugated to the West. Now the United States was preparing to place a Westerner on China’s highest military perch.
Stilwell’s image as a hero was of strategic importance to Washington. His fourth star served as proof to Americans and Chinese that the United States was supporting China to the utmost. Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly accepted Roosevelt’s ultimatum. In his hour of need, the Generalissimo could not risk a rift with the United States.
had in my life.” For an alleged China Hand, Stilwell had violated the most basic tenet of civility as laid out by his comrade and sometime competitor Milton “Mary” Miles: he had disgraced a senior Chinese official in front of his subordinates. There was no way Chiang could allow Stilwell to remain in the country. T. V. Soong hypothesized that Stilwell had engineered the event to ensure that he would not become commander because he knew that he was not up to the job.
Roosevelt had decided to distance himself from Chiang Kai-shek. Engaged in a tough reelection campaign, which the Gallup polling agency predicted would be close, FDR could not afford to be held accountable for failure in China, especially now that the war in Europe had hit a snag, and the Japanese were fighting fiercely in the Pacific.
Later that month, Guilin and its US air base fell to the Japanese. But for Tokyo, Ichigo was hardly a crowning victory. The Japanese ran a few trainloads of supplies north from Indochina toward Manchuria, but Chennault’s air force continued to make life difficult, taking out bridges and railroad junctions. Ichigo’s main beneficiary turns out to have been Mao Zedong.
the end of the Japanese offensive, the Communists had extended their territory by hundreds of thousands of square miles. That, in the end, was the legacy of Ichigo and the failed strategy to use China as an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to bomb Japan.
The Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek began to lose the war for American hearts and minds in 1942. When Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department loaned China $500 million in February of that year, China’s finance minister, H. H. Kung, set aside almost half that amount to buy up Chinese currency as a way to control inflation already reaching 100 percent.
Chiang’s ideology also alienated the Americans. In 1943, the Generalissimo published China’s Destiny, his vision for a new China.
In it, Chiang blamed Westerners for famines, stock market panics, the breakup of the Chinese family, selfishness, and drug use. He castigated Christianity—even though he was a Methodist—and lambasted Western education—even though his wife had been schooled in the United States. To accomplish the task of modernizing China, Chiang, in a companion volume called Chinese Economic Theory, advocated a state-run economy.
Many American readers compared Chiang’s manifesto unfavorably with an essay by Communist leader Mao Zedong—“On New Democracy”—that had appeared in 1940. Writing in the folksy style popularized by Hu Shih, Mao vowed to create a new nation and a new culture. This appealed to Americans who sensed in Mao the type of disruptive awakening they believed China needed. Moreover, unlike Chiang, who rejected a market economy, Mao vowed that his China would tolerate capitalists.
In 1944, Chiang’s minions intensified their crackdown on liberal politicians, throwing dozens in jail. In April, reports of a Nationalist operation in America to monitor Chinese students surged through the American press. The New York Times called the campaign “totalitarian.”
So many influential Americans were souring on the Nationalists that Nathaniel Peffer estimated in the New York Times Magazine in May 1944 that “a majority would favor our shifting our support from Chungking to the Communists.” Mao’s chronicler Edgar Snow used his bully pulpit in the Saturday Evening Post to urge a new policy toward China. “Sixty Million Lost Allies” read the headline on Snow’s article in June 1944. He wanted America to embrace the Red Army and dump Chiang Kai-shek. Snow painted a utopian picture of the Red Zone—democracy, free universal education, happy peasants—and a hellish
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