The decisions made in Paris immediately sparked widespread protests in China and radicalized Chinese politics. America’s status, in the eyes of China’s emerging political class, collapsed overnight from national savior to spineless hypocrite. Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who had been one of many young Chinese who had been initially inspired by Wilson’s commitments to China, now described the United States and the other Western powers as a “bunch of robbers” who “cynically championed self-determination.” Had Woodrow Wilson stood up to Japan at Versailles, the twentieth-century history of China may
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