The China Mirage Quotes

“Professor Franklin Giddings of Columbia University warned, “The great question of the twentieth century is whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav is to impress his civilization to the world.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“George Hearst, a mining magnate and later a U.S. senator from California, observed Chinese miners for ten years in four different states, and he worried: “They can do more work than our people and live on less… they could drive our laborers to the wall.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“Thus two mirages: one of an infallible United States, the other of a China that, with some effort and internal allies, might be brought to mirror the flawless United States of America.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The missionary strategy for this New China might today be called trickle-down Christianity:”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“Opium merchants like Delano provided the seed corn for the economic revolution in America.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The entire commercial infrastructure of European trade in Asia was built around opium.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The China Lobby’s premise was that the Japanese military would be forced to withdraw from China if the United States embargoed Japan’s oil.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“FDR thought that if he cut off the California pump, the Japanese military would thrust south toward the Dutch East Indies, and the United States would be drawn into an unwanted Asian war.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The wide gulf of the Pacific Ocean has prevented Americans and Chinese from knowing each other. Generations of accumulated misunderstanding between these two continental giants has so far led to three major Asian wars that have left millions dead and has distorted U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The Soong-Chiang bunch used their Bibles to project their version of the Xian incident. In a Good Friday sermon, the Generalissimo claimed he had remained strong because of the example of “the forty days and nights Christ passed in the wilderness withstanding temptation.”17 Another story stated that when Mayling appeared at her husband’s prison door, Chiang claimed that her arrival had been predicted in a Bible passage he had just read: “Jehovah will now do a new thing, and that is, he will make a woman protect a man.”18 As Chiang explained,”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The Wise Men’s Policy for Asia was a blueprint for American disaster in post–World War II Asia, as it called for the U.S. military to enforce the Japan-centric model, a “for us or against us” policy designed to contain Mao Zedong. Bruce Cumings, one of the leading historians on Korea, wrote about the Policy for Asia, “The United States would now do something utterly unimagined at the end of World War II: it would prepare to intervene militarily against anti-colonial movements in East Asia—first Korea, then Vietnam, with the Chinese revolution as the towering backdrop.”33 In Korea, the two sides skirmished, each repeatedly violating the other’s borders. Acheson testified in secret to the Senate that the U.S. had drawn a line of containment in Korea and asked for funding to turn back Communism there.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“Koreans were even more outraged to learn that U.S. officials would govern South Korea with help from the Koreans’ former Japanese colonial masters. North Koreans watched uneasily as South Koreans who had cooperated with the Japanese occupation now helped the United States gain influence on the Korean Peninsula. Koreans had just suffered forty years of Nazi-like domination by the Japanese. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had begun his military career fighting the Japanese in the spring of 1932, and his government was first of all, and above all else, anti-Japanese.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“Generations of accumulated misunderstanding between these two continental giants has so far led to three major Asian wars that have left millions dead and has distorted U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy.”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“The people of China well over a century have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world—the same great ideals. China, in the last—less than half a century has become one of the great democracies of the world. —President Franklin Delano Roosevelt”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

“There must not and cannot be any conflict, estrangement or misunderstanding between the Chinese people and America. —Mao Zedong”
― James D. Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia