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fiefoeJohn Pomfret wrote a reference book on the interaction between the two countries. Made tons of notes and it was only up to chapter 20.
>> In the early nineteenth century, the promise of the China market sent Americans journeying around the world, killing and harvesting in staggering numbers: six million fur seals; the pelts of a quarter million sea otters; tons of sea cucumber and ginseng; forests of sandalwood; millions of silver dollars, all destined for China. Phelps and hundreds of other Americans spun the first threads of an enormous tapestry that they and their Chinese friends, competitors, customers, lovers, and enemies would weave into a story of wild exploits, extreme misjudgments, and unsung impact.
It wasn’t just free land that lured American settlers westward. It was also the dream of selling to China. The idea of America also inspired the Chinese, pulling them toward modernity and the outside world. American science, educational theory, and technology flowed into China; Chinese art, food, and philosophy flowed out.
The first American Christian missionaries arrived in China in the 1830s. Though they are often held up as an unbecoming example of American cultural imperialism, forcing Jesus on an unwilling people steeped in an older Confucian creed, they were crucial to China’s development.
As a result, many Americans viewed Chiang’s enemies, the Chinese Communist Party, as the true guerrilla David battling a mechanized Japanese Goliath. State Department officials were convinced of the accuracy of this perspective, and steered US policy away from providing aid to Chiang for his showdown with the Communists after the war.
We now know that the reality was more complex. Chiang’s armies fought so stalwartly that it was they, not the Communists, who sustained 90 percent of the casualties battling the Japanese.
Through all the whipsaw cycles of boom and bust, dashed hopes and exalted dreams, rivers of blood and mountains of trade, the relationship between the United States and China is powered by love and hate, contempt and respect, fear and awe, generosity and greed.
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Coastal Indians would barter a pelt for “only a hatchet or a saw,” Ledyard wrote. But the Chinese would pay one hundred Mexican silver dollars for a single fur, a markup that his contemporary Adam Smith could love.
But her prize cargo was thirty tons of American ginseng harvested in the Appalachian forests.
The American appetite for blue-and-white Chinese bowls, plates, and teacups was so prodigious that New England carracks limped into Boston Harbor with crates suspended over their sides. To a people who only recently had measured wealth by the number of chairs a household owned, Chinese porcelain, known as china, represented status and taste.
China in 1800 was a manufacturing powerhouse, responsible for about one-third of all the goods made in the world.
Acting as their own managers, (Siamese twins) Chang and Eng toured the young nation, appearing in formal wear, performing backflips and somersaults, and hoisting portly spectators on their heads. With their earnings, the twins purchased a one-hundred-acre plantation, with slaves, in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. They married sisters, Sarah and Adelaide Yates, and fathered twenty-one children.
After securing a Chinese boatman, ships would stop at Whampoa, twelve miles from Guangzhou,
George Washington wrote that he had once thought that “the Chinese tho’ droll in shape and appearance were yet white.” (The American construction of an Asian racial “type” would happen later in the nineteenth century.) .. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson admired China’s ability to close itself off from the outside world, finding virtue in its isolation.
One reason the Americans felt loved in China was that in the early days, they were generally well behaved. They had no choice.
So, unlike the frontiersmen in the American West who fought Indian tribes with an army behind them, America’s pioneers in China sought harmony and peace.
What pleased the Chinese merchants most about the Americans was that they paid for their tea, porcelains, and cloth with silver.
By 1790, a pound of Yankee ginseng fetched barely twenty-five cents... (The price of wild American ginseng did finally recover—in the 1990s. Today, it’s over a thousand dollars a pound. And most of it still goes to China.)
But in the end, facing a huge trade deficit and hoping to stanch the flow of silver into China, the Americans, like the British, began to run drugs.
One Boston firm alone, Perkins & Company, regularly shipped one-half to three-quarters of Turkey’s entire yearly crop of 150,000 pounds to China.
“I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view,” mused Warren Delano, an American opium trader in Guangzhou and the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
In the early nineteenth century, the world’s richest private businessman was Chinese. Wu Bingjian, a merchant prince from Guangzhou, had amassed a fortune estimated at $26 million in 1834,
Howqua tried to cover his tracks but did not always succeed. In 1821, after opium was discovered aboard his clients’ ship, the Emily, the emperor ordered that a sapphire button, a sign of Howqua’s status as an honorary official, be stripped from Howqua’s hat.
In 1684, however, with southern China finally in the Qing’s hands, the then emperor, Kangxi, opened the south for trade with the outside world. He promoted commerce to jump-start the economy and win the allegiance of the south.
These conflicting goals—of leveraging the West to strengthen the empire and restricting its impact to guarantee security—defined China’s often contradictory responses to the capitalists from across the seas.
Washington’s return to civilian life served as a model of the cardinal virtues that Chinese sages had promoted from time immemorial. Just as Washington had mistaken the Chinese for Caucasians, Xu and his fellow scholars saw Washington’s virtues as Chinese.
Cushing, however, convinced Qiying to extend that protection to include civil cases as well. By allowing the treaty to extend the issue of extraterritoriality far beyond what had been detailed in negotiations with the British, the Manchu court created a mechanism that would humiliate China and threaten her sovereignty for a century to come.
Forbes’s descendants, such as the family of Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry, remember old friends. To this day, a portrait of Howqua hangs at the Forbes estate on Naushon Island just off Cape Cod.
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Just before Roberts was to immerse the man in the murky waters of the Pearl River, the man asked about employment. Roberts had no patience for what his fellow preachers called job-hunting “rice Christians.” He canceled the baptism and, he wrote, “saw him no more.”
Not, that is, until 1860, when that man, Hong Xiuquan, stood at the head of the Taiping Rebellion, one of the biggest and bloodiest rebellions the world had ever seen, an uprising that cost the lives of up to forty million Chinese
The rebellion also taught many leading Chinese not only to despise Christianity but to fear it, a lesson that China’s ruling Communist Party has inherited.
“However much we should regret to see war and bloodshed,” Roberts added, “we are willing to see anything which has a tendency to accomplish these desirable ends”—the opening of China to Christ.
Powered by the twin myths of Chinese need and American appeal, the United States’ great spiritual expansion was under way... From the turn of the twentieth century, Americans dominated the missionary enterprise in China, which absorbed one-third of all American evangelists heading overseas.
Karl Marx, writing in the New-York Daily Tribune, framed the rebellion as part of a global uprising against capitalism that had started in Paris in 1848.
With the concessions wrung from the Manchus following the Arrow War, many in the diplomatic community agreed with the British consul, Frederick Bruce, that a weak Qing dynasty was better than a strong Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.
In March, the Qing government officially named Ward’s contingent the Ever Victorious Army. Ward was allowed to wear a peacock feather in his cap, an exalted honor for a barbarian from the Beautiful Country.
Ward’s exploits came to the attention of a brilliant thirty-year-old Chinese officer, Li Hongzhang, beginning Li’s half-century association with Americans.
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In Shanghai, six men served as consul over a nine-month stretch in 1858. The consulate there occupied a single hotel room and didn’t own an American flag.
Burlingame catapulted to fame in the spring of 1856 when a Southern congressman, Preston Brooks, challenged him to a duel after Brooks had brutally pummeled Senator Charles Sumner, a passionate opponent of slavery and proponent of Chinese immigration, on the floor of the Senate. Once Brooks learned that Burlingame was a crack shot, however, he backed out.
Among them was Xu Jiyu, the author of the early history of the West who had heaped praise on George Washington. Rehabilitated at age seventy, Xu compared himself, restored to government work, to “an old woman who dreams again of sex.”
The idea that two Americans could rewrite an accord between Washington and Beijing did not strike either as bizarre. Americans had already developed a conviction that they knew China’s interests better than the Chinese did.
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At a time of severe labor shortages, Chinese toilers saved the West. By 1870, Chinese made up one-third of the populations of Idaho and Montana, where the key industry was mining.
At about the same time that “The Record,” with its allegations of sexual perversity among the missionary set, was taking China by storm, American medical authorities and politicians took aim against Chinese women as a source of infection, impurity, and disease.
She smuggled at least one shipload of several hundred Chinese prostitutes into San Francisco and was never shy about taking a deadbeat client to court. Ah Toy lived well into her nineties.
The scattered violence of the 1870s turned into a systematic purge. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, twenty-eight Chinese miners were gunned down or burned to death after they refused to join a union.
The Chinese determination to enter the United States and willingness to fight for their rights underscores two points about their lives in America. First, the Chinese were never as isolated from mainstream society as some historians have alleged. Second, despite withering oppression and violence, many Chinese in the United States achieved the American Dream.
Acclaimed in the United States as “The Citrus Wizard,” Lue saved the orange business in America after it was nearly destroyed by several years of hard freezes.
In 1892, Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another decade and added a requirement, called the Geary Act, that all Chinese in America apply for an internal passport—the first in the United States. An organization called the Chinese Equal Rights League convinced tens of thousands of Chinese to defy the Geary Act in one of the nation’s first cases of mass civil disobedience. Urged on by the Six Companies, 105,000 of the 110,000 Chinese in America refused to register with the government.
The Wong Kim Ark case answered the question of whether birth in the United States confers citizenship. It does.
Yung split his time between the educational mission and pushing the Qing court to pay more attention to the fate of overseas Chinese. In 1875, he authored a startling report on the brutal mistreatment of Chinese digging fertilizer in the guano pits of Peru. In part because of his efforts, the trade in Chinese slave labor to Latin America was halted.
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Still, the Qing court was so confident that Japan would not dare attack that even as tensions mounted it sent the Kuang Chia, the pride of the Chinese navy, to southern China to transport lychees for the Empress Dowager. In the spring of 1894,
That summer, on the St. Lawrence River, Foster landed a muskie that came up to his grandson’s shoulder. He sent a photograph of the boy with the fish to Li. The boy’s name was John Foster Dulles. Decades later, as secretary of state, he would have a China story all his own.
The techniques that American ministers employed, including street theater and mass mobilization, and the causes they embraced, such as literacy and rural health care, would inspire China’s Nationalist Party and the Communists as well. Both would borrow liberally from the Protestant tool kit as they vied for power.
For several decades into the early twentieth century, Chinese Protestants made up more than half of China’s college and high school graduates
In his autobiography, Kang Youwei, an influential intellectual known as the Wild Fox, credited the Globe with changing his mind on foot-binding.
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Women from other countries vied for influence in China: anarchists from Russia, revolutionaries from France. But none could match the Americans in their numbers and in defining what it meant to be a “new women"
The Path of Brightness started a handicrafts section, teaching women needlework so that they could support themselves. The industry grew to employ hundreds of thousands of women in southern China and transformed Shantou into an export powerhouse.
Shi and Kang would go on to found hospitals and clinics that treated thousands of women and children a year... Kang Aide was pursued by—and turned down—one of China’s presidents. <> In the United States, Shi Meiyu was known as Mary Stone and Kang Aide as Ida Kahn.
Jennie Hughes was a red-haired American beauty. She and Stone spent the next forty years together. They shared a bed, were apparently lovers, and, as “aunties,” raised five adopted children.
To that end, these women’s legacy is a reminder to both peoples that the quest for modernity cannot succeed without a belief in something more.
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The Independent, a New York magazine, credited the United States with halting the division of China. <> While Americans congratulated themselves on their moral fiber, the Chinese were justifiably perplexed. As in the case of the Burlingame Treaty, the Americans had not consulted the Qing court about the new policy.
Still, it is hard today to appreciate how important keeping China whole was to the Americans. Secretary of War Elihu Root told his wife that the partition of China “would be second to no event in its effect upon mankind since the fall of the Roman Empire.” Preserving China was considered essential to the fortunes of the United States. The idea that a vast Chinese market awaited America’s merchants had penetrated deep into the minds of capitalist America. And the belief that only a unified China would ensure stability in Asia undergirded the thinking of Yankee strategists as well.
The British auctioned off pilfered antiques outside their Beijing embassy every afternoon except Sunday.
Twain’s essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” published in the North American Review, was an acid indictment of all the shenanigans that accompanied Western expansion: land grabs, unequal treaties, concessions, massacres, talk of “the white man’s burden” and “manifest destiny.”
In the end, China was required to pay 335 million gold dollars (about $7 billion today), 30 percent below earlier demands. America claimed the smallest share—7.5 percent. Russia and Germany together demanded almost half.
This gap between America’s tender concern for China and its reluctance to bleed to protect her would bedevil the relationship for decades.
The Boxer Rebellion also pitted those in America who sought to transform China against those who sought stability above all.
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Roosevelt had entered the talks hoping to see Japan and Russia “locked in a clinch, counterweighing each other,” as he put it. But the treaty finished Russia as an expansionist power in Asia for thirty years. Instead, the Land of the Rising Sun was born as a great Asian power, with Teddy Roosevelt as midwife.
Liang Cheng was the Chinese catalyst for the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, the most consequential undertaking to open Chinese minds to Western learning until the US restarted the effort in the 1970s.
Where other Chinese politicians, such as the Communist Zhou Enlai, excelled at manipulating Westerners, Sun came closest to embracing their values.
Dropping out of Stanford University in 1900, Lea surfaced in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Back home, he hatched a scheme with exiled reformer Kang Youwei to train an army of Chinese Americans to overthrow the Qing. Military academies sprang up in twenty-one cities, and hundreds volunteered. Lea called his charges the Chinese Imperial Army and outfitted them in altered US Army kit.
Goodnow fashioned a constitution that handed Yuan the clout he desired. He gave the president responsibility for foreign policy, declaring war, and the national budget. He reduced the legislature to an appointed body. Freedoms of speech and of association were not protected... In November 1912, Harvard’s
From 1916 until 1928, eight presidents, twenty premiers (one man served five different times), and twenty-four cabinets would attempt to govern China as dozens of wars flared.
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Arriving in the United States at the age of eighteen, Hu Shih would mature into the father of China’s renaissance and one of the most important Chinese thinkers of the twentieth century. And Williams, a modern artist from upstate New York, would be his muse. Over the course of their relationship, the pair exchanged more than three hundred letters (unearthed in Beijing only in 1997) and together probed the spiritual and philosophical divide between China and the United States.
A literary revolution may have been part of the American curriculum but a political one was not. Unlike Japan and Europe, the American educational system did not churn out Chinese radicals. (The one notable exception was Sun Yat-sen.) The key was money; American scholarships, both from the Boxer Indemnity and from missionary grants, were generous enough to allow the Chinese students to focus on their studies.
America trained builders and reformers.
World War I proved to be a windfall for the Chinese economy. Consumed by war, the European powers could no longer supply China’s markets with consumer goods, so Chinese industrialists began making things themselves.
The Chinese may have had right on their side, but Japan had might. At Versailles, Tokyo revealed the existence of confidential agreements between Japan and the government of Duan Qirui, a Chinese warlord, who had promised to cede Shandong to Japan in exchange for a loan. Britain and France also acknowledged that they had agreed to back Japan’s postwar occupation of Shandong province in order to get Japan into the war.
Wilson’s decision was based on his desire to save his beloved League of Nations. If Japan had lost Shandong, he feared, it would have walked out of the conference. But Wilson’s move was also part of something larger—an often confusing and inconsistent pattern of American responses to a beleaguered China. American rhetoric perennially championing the underdog led the Chinese to expect real American support, but that support never materialized.
As Reinsch had feared, the crisis also delivered a fatal blow to American efforts to end China’s civil war. Betrayal in Versailles discredited the Beijing government of President Xu Shichang. The Nationalist regime in the south pulled out of talks.
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On September 15, 1921, the Peking Union Medical College opened its doors. Green tiles evoked the grandeur of the nearby Forbidden City; Chinese motifs decorated the buildings. Modeled after the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, it was the Rockefeller Foundation’s first major overseas investment.
PUMC researchers specializing in traditional Chinese medicine isolated ephedrine from the Chinese plant ma huang, the most significant discovery in that field during the twentieth century.
With the exception of Karl Marx, note the historians Susan Chan Egan and Chih-p’ing Chou, no other Western thinker has had such a deep influence on modern China as John Dewey. What he brought to China was a way of thinking immersed in the scientific method. Hu Shih boiled down Dewey’s philosophy into two sentences: “Your hypothesis should have guts! Your proof should be done with a careful heart.”
This was dangerous, he wrote, because it would lead only to disappointment. “China in her despair has created an image of a powerful, democratic, peace-loving America” that was prepared to save her, Dewey said. But that America did not exist.
Smith’s book became a primary source for Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer, as he set out to dissect China’s weakness. Lu Xun read Chinese Characteristics in a Japanese translation while he was a student in Tokyo in the early 1900s.
And, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, China’s Communists flattered (Jimmy) Yen. In their literacy campaigns, Mao and his men embraced Yen’s techniques. However, instead of Yen’s People’s 1000 Character Literacy Primer, they used a different study guide. It attacked bureaucrats and capitalists and replaced Yen’s Christian fellowship with class warfare.
In August 1923, (Sun) sent a trusted lieutenant, Chiang Kai-shek, along with a team of Communists and Nationalists, to Moscow to study the Soviet system.
By the end of 1924, more than a thousand Soviet military and political personnel were in southern China, and the Comintern was funneling tens of thousands of dollars a month to its new friends in Guangzhou. The cognoscenti in the region started calling each other “comrade.”
But, while private American initiatives supported the best China had to offer, the US government seemed stuck in a time warp—backing a series of warlord governments in Beijing. America’s inability to recognize the wave of the future in China opened the door to a country that would grow into its biggest foe: the Soviet Union.
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Sui was an early literary avatar of the belief that, for better or worse, the Chinese and American cultures were locked in a permanent embrace. In her landmark short story, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” published in 1912, (Edith Maude Eaton)
On his journeys, Meyer found a disease-resistant variety of spinach that saved the American spinach-canning industry... The Meyer lemon formed the basis of the lemon juice industry in Florida.
Born in Vienna, the son of a butler to an Austro-Hungarian count, Rock was both a serious scholar—his work on the Naxi people of Yunnan province saved their language from extinction—and a spinner of outrageous tales.
At the same time that Hu Shih was in America mustering the courage to launch his literary revolution in China, these American writers looked to Chinese verse to aid them in a parallel revolt.
Cathay was a founding text of Anglo-American modernism. Appearing during World War I, its themes spoke to the times: long separations, perilous travel, soldiering, and exile.
A Nationalist diplomat was even partially responsible for Wong’s losing what would have been her greatest role, as O-lan in the 1937 movie version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.
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In China, as opium use slowed, the British American Tobacco Company filled the void.
Ever reliant on Chinese know-how, BAT ditched American chemical fertilizers after one growing season, switching to cheaper Chinese nightsoil instead.
BAT fought back. It undercut Nanyang’s brands. BAT agents bought up thousands of Nanyang cigarettes, held them in damp warehouses until they moldered, and then released them onto the market for free.
Tobacco sales, dominated almost entirely by domestic brands, account for more than 10 percent of government revenues.
That year, Starr took over Raven’s flagging insurance operation with two clerks in two rooms at the corner of Nanjing and Sichuan Roads. He called his little business American Asiatic Underwriters. This company, started by a twenty-seven-year-old American to serve the Chinese market, would eventually grow into the global insurance behemoth American International Group, or AIG.
The pair formed the nucleus of what would become the Missouri Mafia, more than fifty graduates of the School of Journalism who dominated China’s American press corps for years.
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Chiang was clearly an autocrat. But he was also an impassioned patriot, a die-hard foe of imperialism and, on the issue of economics, despite his close ties to America’s right wing, a socialist.
When Soong turned China’s Salt Administration tax collection force into an army with modern weapons, Chiang worried that he was plotting a coup. In 1934, Soong was ousted as finance minister and replaced by his more malleable brother-in-law, H. H. Kung.
Despite her husband’s heroism in protecting Nanjing’s foreigners, Standard Oil forced Earle Hobart to resign. The couple returned to the United States, where Alice completed what would be the greatest book of her career: Oil for the Lamps of China, a novel about Stephen Chase, an American oil trader, his frail wife, Hester, and their Chinese associates.
Whereas the Boxer fiasco had precipitated a surge of American passion to change China, the Northern Expedition had the opposite effect. In 1925, there had been 8,300 Protestant missionaries in China, the most ever and most of them American. After the campaign, thousands of them sailed for the United States, never to return.
(Milly) Bennett noted with wry amusement the unthinking wonder of the American journalist crowd, “bowled over” by Soong Qingling, with her idiomatic American English, the scandalously romantic saga of her marriage to Sun Yat-sen, and her brave opposition to the autocratic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Big Eared Tu asked the French for five thousand rifles. From Fessenden, he requested approval to use the International Settlement as a base from which to ambush Communist strongholds.
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Lin disagreed with the notion that the struggle for “national salvation”—to which both the Communists and the Nationalists laid claim—justified sacrificing individual rights or a civil society.
He noted that Confucius’s teaching made for strong families but was disastrous for society at large, as “the family became a walled castle outside which everything is legitimate to loot.”
Hoover had moved to China in 1899 as a twenty-five-year-old engineer, working for a British mining firm. He was appointed manager of the vast Chinese coal complex in Kaiping near Tianjin.
As chief engineer, Bond hired Wong Tsu, a Beijing-born graduate of MIT, who had helped launch an aviation giant when he designed the first commercially viable plane, the Model C seaplane, for Bill Boeing in 1916. Wong’s Model C saved Boeing’s business, another example of the back and forth between China and America.
In the early 1920s and 1930s, J. P. Morgan floated almost $100 million in Japanese bonds freeing Tokyo to engage in military adventures.
The Chinese proclaimed Short a national hero and brought his mother, Elizabeth, and brother, Edmund, over from Tacoma, Washington, for the funeral. More than one million mourners filled Shanghai’s streets. T. V. Soong called Short’s courage and sacrifice “electrifying.”
At a time when Americans were wringing their hands over Japanese landgrabs in Manchuria, a piece of American legislation did almost as much to enfeeble China as the Imperial Japanese Army. On June 19, 1934, President Roosevelt signed into law the American Silver Purchase Act, which directed the US Treasury to buy silver until the price tripled... In exchange for a multibillion-dollar subsidy to America’s mining interests, Roosevelt won their support for his New Deal. Still, the law claimed a casualty: China. <> In China, credit tightened, interest rates tripled, industry and commerce slowed, and bankruptcies spread. Exports of raw silk, China’s biggest cash crop, plummeted. More than half of China’s cotton mills closed. A US policy designed to bolster a tiny interest group back home brought China’s economy to the brink of collapse.
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When Soviet plans to foment an uprising in southern China failed, (Agnes Smedley) moved to Shanghai, where her apartment became a center for the black arts of Soviet spycraft—a courier safehouse, a dark room for microfilmed copies of secret materials, and a radio transmitter linked to Moscow.
* Yes, the Nationalists had executed Communist Party members, but they were actually doing the bidding of another faction of the Communist Party. The Longhua Martyrs had been meeting in a hotel in Shanghai’s International Settlement to discuss an alternative to the Communist Party leadership imposed by Joseph Stalin.
Like others before him, Snow fell under the spell of Soong Qingling.
Though technically atheist and fiercely opposed to missionaries, the Chinese Communist Party used the Christian movement as a model. Like the American missionaries, the Communists employed street theater to get their message out. Moderate reformer and Christian Jimmy Yen inspired their literacy campaigns. From the Rockefeller Foundation, they swiped the idea of the “barefoot doctor.” And Mao Zedong’s emphasis on revolutionary transformation mirrored the Protestant conviction that spiritual renewal was the Middle Kingdom’s only hope.
Published in 1937, Red Star Over China was a monumental work of literary imagination, detailing travels in a magic, forbidden land—a mix of Joseph Rock and “The Incandescent Lily,” with real-world impact. In its Boy’s Life depiction of Soviet China, the historian Charles Hayford has noted, Red Star was as American as Huckleberry Finn, one long prose poem to the previously unknown Chinese Communists.
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Republican-era diplomats had pulled off a stunning feat. China’s mainly American-trained diplomats had taken an empire and convinced the world to recognize it as a nation. Compared with the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, which collapsed around the same time, it was an amazing achievement.
From 1931, when Shepherd wrote “The Unmet Rural Challenge” for the missionary publication the Chinese Recorder, he argued that China’s rural poverty and the inequitable distribution of land would one day bring the Nationalist government to its knees.
New Life Movement would later be scorned for its Fascist overtones and silly campaigns; it was anti–fruit flies, anti–tooth decay, and anti–anything above the knee. But at root, the campaign stemmed from a realization by Chiang and Soong Mayling that China’s Republican revolution was flagging and required an infusion of Western, specifically American, inspiration. Time magazine called it “a big dose of the castor oil of Puritanism.”
an organization known as the Blue Shirts, who modeled themselves after Hitler's brown Shirts, terrorized China’s cities as they enforced the New Life’s rules. Some places banned mah-jongg; others outlawed dancing and drinking.
Xi'An Incident ： On December 13, the Chinese Politburo called for Chiang’s execution. But Stalin countermanded his Chinese comrades. He ordered the Communists to let Chiang live.
The only alternative to Chiang, Shepherd wrote, was “chaos”—a word many Americans have used over the decades to justify their support for various Chinese regimes.
Japan’s invasion of China aborted China’s American-inspired modernization. During the first half of 1937, China’s trade had jumped 40 percent over the first half of 1936. By 1937, China had paid off 80 percent of its debts to Western creditors.
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MacMurray’s memorandum, and it did not resurface until after World War II, when the celebrated American diplomat George Kennan hailed it as “prophetic.” MacMurray’s analysis reflected a decidedly unromantic view of America’s options in Asia. According to MacMurray, the opportunities that China presented were overhyped, America’s ties to China were more emotional than rational, and China’s leaders would never sincerely embrace American values or friendship.
Initially, Chennault fought the Japanese with little help from his own country; American diplomats threatened him with arrest, and American military officers ignored his advice. Later, he would gain worldwide renown as the founder of the American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, a band of hotshot pilots who would amass a spectacular combat record against the Japanese.
The Battle of Shanghai erupted in the second week of August 1937. Westerners in the International Settlement did as they had always done: they gawked.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars and other isolationist groups gathered twenty-five million signatures against war.
Up until Pearl Harbor, financial support from Moscow constituted more than 80 percent of China’s foreign aid.
The committee designated one of the refugee centers for women and children; it was at Jinling Women’s College and was led by an American named Minnie Vautrin
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. Luce was born in 1898 in Shandong province, where his missionary father,
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. <> A pirated translation of Yardley’s book had surfaced in China and caught the eye of spies employed by Dai Li,
With his help, the Nationalists had set up two hundred radio operations that would intercept more than two hundred thousand secret Japanese radio transmissions over the course of the war.
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and out jumped a woman. It was movie star turned aviator Li Xiaqing. At that moment, Hilda Yan decided that she, too, would learn to fly.
After the first live panda cub arrived in America in 1936, courtesy of American explorer Ruth Harkness, Soong Mayling understood the allure of the cuddly beasts and packed off two more—Pan-dee and Pan-dah—to the Bronx Zoo. So began decades of panda diplomacy.
Whereas Hu Shih had once returned $60,000 in Kuomintang lobbying funds to the party, Soong wired the American capital like a Washington insider. He wheedled access to classified cables and put Roosevelt’s relatives and friends on China’s payroll.
For the first time in US history, a private corporation would be used to carry out US policy in a war in which America was not a belligerent. It would be a model for CIA operations, several involving Pawley and Chennault, in the years to come.
Much of the credit for establishing the Flying Tigers, even the legendary name, has to go to T. V. Soong.
It was over this forbidding terrain—called the Hump—that Bond proposed to jury-rig a lifeline to China using CNAC’s planes... The doggedness of yet another private American and the talent of his Chinese and American pilots turned the Hump into China’s salvation.
But for almost two years, from 1943 until late 1945, the Hump provided Nationalist China with 80 percent of its supplies. As was true of many other American endeavors in China, the operation served as a model for future enterprises. The men who managed the Hump later ran the 1948 operation to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin.
The reality proved to be different. The United States provided its allies with more than $50 billion (more than $800 billion in today’s dollars) in Lend-Lease supplies. Of that, Britain received more than 60 percent while China got 3 percent and Russia, which was not even mentioned, collected more than six times China’s share. The gap between what the Chinese believed America had promised and what the United States delivered would be a source of destructive friction between the two countries for years.
For every three tons of cargo that left the port of Rangoon for the road, only one actually made it to Chongqing, the other two-thirds vanishing on the black market.
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FDR dreamed of using the war to forge a strong China, but in the face of fierce competition for resources, the US could only keep the Nationalists on life support. This life support allowed China to trap half a million Japanese troops. But it never did much more.
Over the next six months, in the skies above Rangoon, eastern China, and Vietnam, the Flying Tigers downed what writer Daniel Ford estimates to have been 115 planes and killed four hundred Japanese airmen. Chennault had proved his detractors wrong. In the service of a foreign government thousands of miles from home, he had shown that aggressive pursuit tactics could overwhelm enemy bombing formations.
Defeat in Burma was a huge blow to the Nationalist Chinese government and contributed to its eventual collapse. Chiang lost more than a third of his Western-trained troops, together with their heavy equipment.
>> In the early nineteenth century, the promise of the China market sent Americans journeying around the world, killing and harvesting in staggering numbers: six million fur seals; the pelts of a quarter million sea otters; tons of sea cucumber and ginseng; forests of sandalwood; millions of silver dollars, all destined for China. Phelps and hundreds of other Americans spun the first threads of an enormous tapestry that they and their Chinese friends, competitors, customers, lovers, and enemies would weave into a story of wild exploits, extreme misjudgments, and unsung impact.
It wasn’t just free land that lured American settlers westward. It was also the dream of selling to China. The idea of America also inspired the Chinese, pulling them toward modernity and the outside world. American science, educational theory, and technology flowed into China; Chinese art, food, and philosophy flowed out.
The first American Christian missionaries arrived in China in the 1830s. Though they are often held up as an unbecoming example of American cultural imperialism, forcing Jesus on an unwilling people steeped in an older Confucian creed, they were crucial to China’s development.
As a result, many Americans viewed Chiang’s enemies, the Chinese Communist Party, as the true guerrilla David battling a mechanized Japanese Goliath. State Department officials were convinced of the accuracy of this perspective, and steered US policy away from providing aid to Chiang for his showdown with the Communists after the war.
We now know that the reality was more complex. Chiang’s armies fought so stalwartly that it was they, not the Communists, who sustained 90 percent of the casualties battling the Japanese.
Through all the whipsaw cycles of boom and bust, dashed hopes and exalted dreams, rivers of blood and mountains of trade, the relationship between the United States and China is powered by love and hate, contempt and respect, fear and awe, generosity and greed.
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Coastal Indians would barter a pelt for “only a hatchet or a saw,” Ledyard wrote. But the Chinese would pay one hundred Mexican silver dollars for a single fur, a markup that his contemporary Adam Smith could love.
But her prize cargo was thirty tons of American ginseng harvested in the Appalachian forests.
The American appetite for blue-and-white Chinese bowls, plates, and teacups was so prodigious that New England carracks limped into Boston Harbor with crates suspended over their sides. To a people who only recently had measured wealth by the number of chairs a household owned, Chinese porcelain, known as china, represented status and taste.
China in 1800 was a manufacturing powerhouse, responsible for about one-third of all the goods made in the world.
Acting as their own managers, (Siamese twins) Chang and Eng toured the young nation, appearing in formal wear, performing backflips and somersaults, and hoisting portly spectators on their heads. With their earnings, the twins purchased a one-hundred-acre plantation, with slaves, in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. They married sisters, Sarah and Adelaide Yates, and fathered twenty-one children.
After securing a Chinese boatman, ships would stop at Whampoa, twelve miles from Guangzhou,
George Washington wrote that he had once thought that “the Chinese tho’ droll in shape and appearance were yet white.” (The American construction of an Asian racial “type” would happen later in the nineteenth century.) .. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson admired China’s ability to close itself off from the outside world, finding virtue in its isolation.
One reason the Americans felt loved in China was that in the early days, they were generally well behaved. They had no choice.
So, unlike the frontiersmen in the American West who fought Indian tribes with an army behind them, America’s pioneers in China sought harmony and peace.
What pleased the Chinese merchants most about the Americans was that they paid for their tea, porcelains, and cloth with silver.
By 1790, a pound of Yankee ginseng fetched barely twenty-five cents... (The price of wild American ginseng did finally recover—in the 1990s. Today, it’s over a thousand dollars a pound. And most of it still goes to China.)
But in the end, facing a huge trade deficit and hoping to stanch the flow of silver into China, the Americans, like the British, began to run drugs.
One Boston firm alone, Perkins & Company, regularly shipped one-half to three-quarters of Turkey’s entire yearly crop of 150,000 pounds to China.
“I do not pretend to justify the prosecution of the opium trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view,” mused Warren Delano, an American opium trader in Guangzhou and the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
In the early nineteenth century, the world’s richest private businessman was Chinese. Wu Bingjian, a merchant prince from Guangzhou, had amassed a fortune estimated at $26 million in 1834,
Howqua tried to cover his tracks but did not always succeed. In 1821, after opium was discovered aboard his clients’ ship, the Emily, the emperor ordered that a sapphire button, a sign of Howqua’s status as an honorary official, be stripped from Howqua’s hat.
In 1684, however, with southern China finally in the Qing’s hands, the then emperor, Kangxi, opened the south for trade with the outside world. He promoted commerce to jump-start the economy and win the allegiance of the south.
These conflicting goals—of leveraging the West to strengthen the empire and restricting its impact to guarantee security—defined China’s often contradictory responses to the capitalists from across the seas.
Washington’s return to civilian life served as a model of the cardinal virtues that Chinese sages had promoted from time immemorial. Just as Washington had mistaken the Chinese for Caucasians, Xu and his fellow scholars saw Washington’s virtues as Chinese.
Cushing, however, convinced Qiying to extend that protection to include civil cases as well. By allowing the treaty to extend the issue of extraterritoriality far beyond what had been detailed in negotiations with the British, the Manchu court created a mechanism that would humiliate China and threaten her sovereignty for a century to come.
Forbes’s descendants, such as the family of Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry, remember old friends. To this day, a portrait of Howqua hangs at the Forbes estate on Naushon Island just off Cape Cod.
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Just before Roberts was to immerse the man in the murky waters of the Pearl River, the man asked about employment. Roberts had no patience for what his fellow preachers called job-hunting “rice Christians.” He canceled the baptism and, he wrote, “saw him no more.”
Not, that is, until 1860, when that man, Hong Xiuquan, stood at the head of the Taiping Rebellion, one of the biggest and bloodiest rebellions the world had ever seen, an uprising that cost the lives of up to forty million Chinese
The rebellion also taught many leading Chinese not only to despise Christianity but to fear it, a lesson that China’s ruling Communist Party has inherited.
“However much we should regret to see war and bloodshed,” Roberts added, “we are willing to see anything which has a tendency to accomplish these desirable ends”—the opening of China to Christ.
Powered by the twin myths of Chinese need and American appeal, the United States’ great spiritual expansion was under way... From the turn of the twentieth century, Americans dominated the missionary enterprise in China, which absorbed one-third of all American evangelists heading overseas.
Karl Marx, writing in the New-York Daily Tribune, framed the rebellion as part of a global uprising against capitalism that had started in Paris in 1848.
With the concessions wrung from the Manchus following the Arrow War, many in the diplomatic community agreed with the British consul, Frederick Bruce, that a weak Qing dynasty was better than a strong Kingdom of Heavenly Peace.
In March, the Qing government officially named Ward’s contingent the Ever Victorious Army. Ward was allowed to wear a peacock feather in his cap, an exalted honor for a barbarian from the Beautiful Country.
Ward’s exploits came to the attention of a brilliant thirty-year-old Chinese officer, Li Hongzhang, beginning Li’s half-century association with Americans.
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In Shanghai, six men served as consul over a nine-month stretch in 1858. The consulate there occupied a single hotel room and didn’t own an American flag.
Burlingame catapulted to fame in the spring of 1856 when a Southern congressman, Preston Brooks, challenged him to a duel after Brooks had brutally pummeled Senator Charles Sumner, a passionate opponent of slavery and proponent of Chinese immigration, on the floor of the Senate. Once Brooks learned that Burlingame was a crack shot, however, he backed out.
Among them was Xu Jiyu, the author of the early history of the West who had heaped praise on George Washington. Rehabilitated at age seventy, Xu compared himself, restored to government work, to “an old woman who dreams again of sex.”
The idea that two Americans could rewrite an accord between Washington and Beijing did not strike either as bizarre. Americans had already developed a conviction that they knew China’s interests better than the Chinese did.
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At a time of severe labor shortages, Chinese toilers saved the West. By 1870, Chinese made up one-third of the populations of Idaho and Montana, where the key industry was mining.
At about the same time that “The Record,” with its allegations of sexual perversity among the missionary set, was taking China by storm, American medical authorities and politicians took aim against Chinese women as a source of infection, impurity, and disease.
She smuggled at least one shipload of several hundred Chinese prostitutes into San Francisco and was never shy about taking a deadbeat client to court. Ah Toy lived well into her nineties.
The scattered violence of the 1870s turned into a systematic purge. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, twenty-eight Chinese miners were gunned down or burned to death after they refused to join a union.
The Chinese determination to enter the United States and willingness to fight for their rights underscores two points about their lives in America. First, the Chinese were never as isolated from mainstream society as some historians have alleged. Second, despite withering oppression and violence, many Chinese in the United States achieved the American Dream.
Acclaimed in the United States as “The Citrus Wizard,” Lue saved the orange business in America after it was nearly destroyed by several years of hard freezes.
In 1892, Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another decade and added a requirement, called the Geary Act, that all Chinese in America apply for an internal passport—the first in the United States. An organization called the Chinese Equal Rights League convinced tens of thousands of Chinese to defy the Geary Act in one of the nation’s first cases of mass civil disobedience. Urged on by the Six Companies, 105,000 of the 110,000 Chinese in America refused to register with the government.
The Wong Kim Ark case answered the question of whether birth in the United States confers citizenship. It does.
Yung split his time between the educational mission and pushing the Qing court to pay more attention to the fate of overseas Chinese. In 1875, he authored a startling report on the brutal mistreatment of Chinese digging fertilizer in the guano pits of Peru. In part because of his efforts, the trade in Chinese slave labor to Latin America was halted.
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Still, the Qing court was so confident that Japan would not dare attack that even as tensions mounted it sent the Kuang Chia, the pride of the Chinese navy, to southern China to transport lychees for the Empress Dowager. In the spring of 1894,
That summer, on the St. Lawrence River, Foster landed a muskie that came up to his grandson’s shoulder. He sent a photograph of the boy with the fish to Li. The boy’s name was John Foster Dulles. Decades later, as secretary of state, he would have a China story all his own.
The techniques that American ministers employed, including street theater and mass mobilization, and the causes they embraced, such as literacy and rural health care, would inspire China’s Nationalist Party and the Communists as well. Both would borrow liberally from the Protestant tool kit as they vied for power.
For several decades into the early twentieth century, Chinese Protestants made up more than half of China’s college and high school graduates
In his autobiography, Kang Youwei, an influential intellectual known as the Wild Fox, credited the Globe with changing his mind on foot-binding.
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Women from other countries vied for influence in China: anarchists from Russia, revolutionaries from France. But none could match the Americans in their numbers and in defining what it meant to be a “new women"
The Path of Brightness started a handicrafts section, teaching women needlework so that they could support themselves. The industry grew to employ hundreds of thousands of women in southern China and transformed Shantou into an export powerhouse.
Shi and Kang would go on to found hospitals and clinics that treated thousands of women and children a year... Kang Aide was pursued by—and turned down—one of China’s presidents. <> In the United States, Shi Meiyu was known as Mary Stone and Kang Aide as Ida Kahn.
Jennie Hughes was a red-haired American beauty. She and Stone spent the next forty years together. They shared a bed, were apparently lovers, and, as “aunties,” raised five adopted children.
To that end, these women’s legacy is a reminder to both peoples that the quest for modernity cannot succeed without a belief in something more.
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The Independent, a New York magazine, credited the United States with halting the division of China. <> While Americans congratulated themselves on their moral fiber, the Chinese were justifiably perplexed. As in the case of the Burlingame Treaty, the Americans had not consulted the Qing court about the new policy.
Still, it is hard today to appreciate how important keeping China whole was to the Americans. Secretary of War Elihu Root told his wife that the partition of China “would be second to no event in its effect upon mankind since the fall of the Roman Empire.” Preserving China was considered essential to the fortunes of the United States. The idea that a vast Chinese market awaited America’s merchants had penetrated deep into the minds of capitalist America. And the belief that only a unified China would ensure stability in Asia undergirded the thinking of Yankee strategists as well.
The British auctioned off pilfered antiques outside their Beijing embassy every afternoon except Sunday.
Twain’s essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” published in the North American Review, was an acid indictment of all the shenanigans that accompanied Western expansion: land grabs, unequal treaties, concessions, massacres, talk of “the white man’s burden” and “manifest destiny.”
In the end, China was required to pay 335 million gold dollars (about $7 billion today), 30 percent below earlier demands. America claimed the smallest share—7.5 percent. Russia and Germany together demanded almost half.
This gap between America’s tender concern for China and its reluctance to bleed to protect her would bedevil the relationship for decades.
The Boxer Rebellion also pitted those in America who sought to transform China against those who sought stability above all.
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Roosevelt had entered the talks hoping to see Japan and Russia “locked in a clinch, counterweighing each other,” as he put it. But the treaty finished Russia as an expansionist power in Asia for thirty years. Instead, the Land of the Rising Sun was born as a great Asian power, with Teddy Roosevelt as midwife.
Liang Cheng was the Chinese catalyst for the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, the most consequential undertaking to open Chinese minds to Western learning until the US restarted the effort in the 1970s.
Where other Chinese politicians, such as the Communist Zhou Enlai, excelled at manipulating Westerners, Sun came closest to embracing their values.
Dropping out of Stanford University in 1900, Lea surfaced in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Back home, he hatched a scheme with exiled reformer Kang Youwei to train an army of Chinese Americans to overthrow the Qing. Military academies sprang up in twenty-one cities, and hundreds volunteered. Lea called his charges the Chinese Imperial Army and outfitted them in altered US Army kit.
Goodnow fashioned a constitution that handed Yuan the clout he desired. He gave the president responsibility for foreign policy, declaring war, and the national budget. He reduced the legislature to an appointed body. Freedoms of speech and of association were not protected... In November 1912, Harvard’s
From 1916 until 1928, eight presidents, twenty premiers (one man served five different times), and twenty-four cabinets would attempt to govern China as dozens of wars flared.
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Arriving in the United States at the age of eighteen, Hu Shih would mature into the father of China’s renaissance and one of the most important Chinese thinkers of the twentieth century. And Williams, a modern artist from upstate New York, would be his muse. Over the course of their relationship, the pair exchanged more than three hundred letters (unearthed in Beijing only in 1997) and together probed the spiritual and philosophical divide between China and the United States.
A literary revolution may have been part of the American curriculum but a political one was not. Unlike Japan and Europe, the American educational system did not churn out Chinese radicals. (The one notable exception was Sun Yat-sen.) The key was money; American scholarships, both from the Boxer Indemnity and from missionary grants, were generous enough to allow the Chinese students to focus on their studies.
America trained builders and reformers.
World War I proved to be a windfall for the Chinese economy. Consumed by war, the European powers could no longer supply China’s markets with consumer goods, so Chinese industrialists began making things themselves.
The Chinese may have had right on their side, but Japan had might. At Versailles, Tokyo revealed the existence of confidential agreements between Japan and the government of Duan Qirui, a Chinese warlord, who had promised to cede Shandong to Japan in exchange for a loan. Britain and France also acknowledged that they had agreed to back Japan’s postwar occupation of Shandong province in order to get Japan into the war.
Wilson’s decision was based on his desire to save his beloved League of Nations. If Japan had lost Shandong, he feared, it would have walked out of the conference. But Wilson’s move was also part of something larger—an often confusing and inconsistent pattern of American responses to a beleaguered China. American rhetoric perennially championing the underdog led the Chinese to expect real American support, but that support never materialized.
As Reinsch had feared, the crisis also delivered a fatal blow to American efforts to end China’s civil war. Betrayal in Versailles discredited the Beijing government of President Xu Shichang. The Nationalist regime in the south pulled out of talks.
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On September 15, 1921, the Peking Union Medical College opened its doors. Green tiles evoked the grandeur of the nearby Forbidden City; Chinese motifs decorated the buildings. Modeled after the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, it was the Rockefeller Foundation’s first major overseas investment.
PUMC researchers specializing in traditional Chinese medicine isolated ephedrine from the Chinese plant ma huang, the most significant discovery in that field during the twentieth century.
With the exception of Karl Marx, note the historians Susan Chan Egan and Chih-p’ing Chou, no other Western thinker has had such a deep influence on modern China as John Dewey. What he brought to China was a way of thinking immersed in the scientific method. Hu Shih boiled down Dewey’s philosophy into two sentences: “Your hypothesis should have guts! Your proof should be done with a careful heart.”
This was dangerous, he wrote, because it would lead only to disappointment. “China in her despair has created an image of a powerful, democratic, peace-loving America” that was prepared to save her, Dewey said. But that America did not exist.
Smith’s book became a primary source for Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer, as he set out to dissect China’s weakness. Lu Xun read Chinese Characteristics in a Japanese translation while he was a student in Tokyo in the early 1900s.
And, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, China’s Communists flattered (Jimmy) Yen. In their literacy campaigns, Mao and his men embraced Yen’s techniques. However, instead of Yen’s People’s 1000 Character Literacy Primer, they used a different study guide. It attacked bureaucrats and capitalists and replaced Yen’s Christian fellowship with class warfare.
In August 1923, (Sun) sent a trusted lieutenant, Chiang Kai-shek, along with a team of Communists and Nationalists, to Moscow to study the Soviet system.
By the end of 1924, more than a thousand Soviet military and political personnel were in southern China, and the Comintern was funneling tens of thousands of dollars a month to its new friends in Guangzhou. The cognoscenti in the region started calling each other “comrade.”
But, while private American initiatives supported the best China had to offer, the US government seemed stuck in a time warp—backing a series of warlord governments in Beijing. America’s inability to recognize the wave of the future in China opened the door to a country that would grow into its biggest foe: the Soviet Union.
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Sui was an early literary avatar of the belief that, for better or worse, the Chinese and American cultures were locked in a permanent embrace. In her landmark short story, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” published in 1912, (Edith Maude Eaton)
On his journeys, Meyer found a disease-resistant variety of spinach that saved the American spinach-canning industry... The Meyer lemon formed the basis of the lemon juice industry in Florida.
Born in Vienna, the son of a butler to an Austro-Hungarian count, Rock was both a serious scholar—his work on the Naxi people of Yunnan province saved their language from extinction—and a spinner of outrageous tales.
At the same time that Hu Shih was in America mustering the courage to launch his literary revolution in China, these American writers looked to Chinese verse to aid them in a parallel revolt.
Cathay was a founding text of Anglo-American modernism. Appearing during World War I, its themes spoke to the times: long separations, perilous travel, soldiering, and exile.
A Nationalist diplomat was even partially responsible for Wong’s losing what would have been her greatest role, as O-lan in the 1937 movie version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.
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In China, as opium use slowed, the British American Tobacco Company filled the void.
Ever reliant on Chinese know-how, BAT ditched American chemical fertilizers after one growing season, switching to cheaper Chinese nightsoil instead.
BAT fought back. It undercut Nanyang’s brands. BAT agents bought up thousands of Nanyang cigarettes, held them in damp warehouses until they moldered, and then released them onto the market for free.
Tobacco sales, dominated almost entirely by domestic brands, account for more than 10 percent of government revenues.
That year, Starr took over Raven’s flagging insurance operation with two clerks in two rooms at the corner of Nanjing and Sichuan Roads. He called his little business American Asiatic Underwriters. This company, started by a twenty-seven-year-old American to serve the Chinese market, would eventually grow into the global insurance behemoth American International Group, or AIG.
The pair formed the nucleus of what would become the Missouri Mafia, more than fifty graduates of the School of Journalism who dominated China’s American press corps for years.
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Chiang was clearly an autocrat. But he was also an impassioned patriot, a die-hard foe of imperialism and, on the issue of economics, despite his close ties to America’s right wing, a socialist.
When Soong turned China’s Salt Administration tax collection force into an army with modern weapons, Chiang worried that he was plotting a coup. In 1934, Soong was ousted as finance minister and replaced by his more malleable brother-in-law, H. H. Kung.
Despite her husband’s heroism in protecting Nanjing’s foreigners, Standard Oil forced Earle Hobart to resign. The couple returned to the United States, where Alice completed what would be the greatest book of her career: Oil for the Lamps of China, a novel about Stephen Chase, an American oil trader, his frail wife, Hester, and their Chinese associates.
Whereas the Boxer fiasco had precipitated a surge of American passion to change China, the Northern Expedition had the opposite effect. In 1925, there had been 8,300 Protestant missionaries in China, the most ever and most of them American. After the campaign, thousands of them sailed for the United States, never to return.
(Milly) Bennett noted with wry amusement the unthinking wonder of the American journalist crowd, “bowled over” by Soong Qingling, with her idiomatic American English, the scandalously romantic saga of her marriage to Sun Yat-sen, and her brave opposition to the autocratic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Big Eared Tu asked the French for five thousand rifles. From Fessenden, he requested approval to use the International Settlement as a base from which to ambush Communist strongholds.
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Lin disagreed with the notion that the struggle for “national salvation”—to which both the Communists and the Nationalists laid claim—justified sacrificing individual rights or a civil society.
He noted that Confucius’s teaching made for strong families but was disastrous for society at large, as “the family became a walled castle outside which everything is legitimate to loot.”
Hoover had moved to China in 1899 as a twenty-five-year-old engineer, working for a British mining firm. He was appointed manager of the vast Chinese coal complex in Kaiping near Tianjin.
As chief engineer, Bond hired Wong Tsu, a Beijing-born graduate of MIT, who had helped launch an aviation giant when he designed the first commercially viable plane, the Model C seaplane, for Bill Boeing in 1916. Wong’s Model C saved Boeing’s business, another example of the back and forth between China and America.
In the early 1920s and 1930s, J. P. Morgan floated almost $100 million in Japanese bonds freeing Tokyo to engage in military adventures.
The Chinese proclaimed Short a national hero and brought his mother, Elizabeth, and brother, Edmund, over from Tacoma, Washington, for the funeral. More than one million mourners filled Shanghai’s streets. T. V. Soong called Short’s courage and sacrifice “electrifying.”
At a time when Americans were wringing their hands over Japanese landgrabs in Manchuria, a piece of American legislation did almost as much to enfeeble China as the Imperial Japanese Army. On June 19, 1934, President Roosevelt signed into law the American Silver Purchase Act, which directed the US Treasury to buy silver until the price tripled... In exchange for a multibillion-dollar subsidy to America’s mining interests, Roosevelt won their support for his New Deal. Still, the law claimed a casualty: China. <> In China, credit tightened, interest rates tripled, industry and commerce slowed, and bankruptcies spread. Exports of raw silk, China’s biggest cash crop, plummeted. More than half of China’s cotton mills closed. A US policy designed to bolster a tiny interest group back home brought China’s economy to the brink of collapse.
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When Soviet plans to foment an uprising in southern China failed, (Agnes Smedley) moved to Shanghai, where her apartment became a center for the black arts of Soviet spycraft—a courier safehouse, a dark room for microfilmed copies of secret materials, and a radio transmitter linked to Moscow.
* Yes, the Nationalists had executed Communist Party members, but they were actually doing the bidding of another faction of the Communist Party. The Longhua Martyrs had been meeting in a hotel in Shanghai’s International Settlement to discuss an alternative to the Communist Party leadership imposed by Joseph Stalin.
Like others before him, Snow fell under the spell of Soong Qingling.
Though technically atheist and fiercely opposed to missionaries, the Chinese Communist Party used the Christian movement as a model. Like the American missionaries, the Communists employed street theater to get their message out. Moderate reformer and Christian Jimmy Yen inspired their literacy campaigns. From the Rockefeller Foundation, they swiped the idea of the “barefoot doctor.” And Mao Zedong’s emphasis on revolutionary transformation mirrored the Protestant conviction that spiritual renewal was the Middle Kingdom’s only hope.
Published in 1937, Red Star Over China was a monumental work of literary imagination, detailing travels in a magic, forbidden land—a mix of Joseph Rock and “The Incandescent Lily,” with real-world impact. In its Boy’s Life depiction of Soviet China, the historian Charles Hayford has noted, Red Star was as American as Huckleberry Finn, one long prose poem to the previously unknown Chinese Communists.
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Republican-era diplomats had pulled off a stunning feat. China’s mainly American-trained diplomats had taken an empire and convinced the world to recognize it as a nation. Compared with the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, which collapsed around the same time, it was an amazing achievement.
From 1931, when Shepherd wrote “The Unmet Rural Challenge” for the missionary publication the Chinese Recorder, he argued that China’s rural poverty and the inequitable distribution of land would one day bring the Nationalist government to its knees.
New Life Movement would later be scorned for its Fascist overtones and silly campaigns; it was anti–fruit flies, anti–tooth decay, and anti–anything above the knee. But at root, the campaign stemmed from a realization by Chiang and Soong Mayling that China’s Republican revolution was flagging and required an infusion of Western, specifically American, inspiration. Time magazine called it “a big dose of the castor oil of Puritanism.”
an organization known as the Blue Shirts, who modeled themselves after Hitler's brown Shirts, terrorized China’s cities as they enforced the New Life’s rules. Some places banned mah-jongg; others outlawed dancing and drinking.
Xi'An Incident ： On December 13, the Chinese Politburo called for Chiang’s execution. But Stalin countermanded his Chinese comrades. He ordered the Communists to let Chiang live.
The only alternative to Chiang, Shepherd wrote, was “chaos”—a word many Americans have used over the decades to justify their support for various Chinese regimes.
Japan’s invasion of China aborted China’s American-inspired modernization. During the first half of 1937, China’s trade had jumped 40 percent over the first half of 1936. By 1937, China had paid off 80 percent of its debts to Western creditors.
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MacMurray’s memorandum, and it did not resurface until after World War II, when the celebrated American diplomat George Kennan hailed it as “prophetic.” MacMurray’s analysis reflected a decidedly unromantic view of America’s options in Asia. According to MacMurray, the opportunities that China presented were overhyped, America’s ties to China were more emotional than rational, and China’s leaders would never sincerely embrace American values or friendship.
Initially, Chennault fought the Japanese with little help from his own country; American diplomats threatened him with arrest, and American military officers ignored his advice. Later, he would gain worldwide renown as the founder of the American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, a band of hotshot pilots who would amass a spectacular combat record against the Japanese.
The Battle of Shanghai erupted in the second week of August 1937. Westerners in the International Settlement did as they had always done: they gawked.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars and other isolationist groups gathered twenty-five million signatures against war.
Up until Pearl Harbor, financial support from Moscow constituted more than 80 percent of China’s foreign aid.
The committee designated one of the refugee centers for women and children; it was at Jinling Women’s College and was led by an American named Minnie Vautrin
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. Luce was born in 1898 in Shandong province, where his missionary father,
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. <> A pirated translation of Yardley’s book had surfaced in China and caught the eye of spies employed by Dai Li,
With his help, the Nationalists had set up two hundred radio operations that would intercept more than two hundred thousand secret Japanese radio transmissions over the course of the war.
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and out jumped a woman. It was movie star turned aviator Li Xiaqing. At that moment, Hilda Yan decided that she, too, would learn to fly.
After the first live panda cub arrived in America in 1936, courtesy of American explorer Ruth Harkness, Soong Mayling understood the allure of the cuddly beasts and packed off two more—Pan-dee and Pan-dah—to the Bronx Zoo. So began decades of panda diplomacy.
Whereas Hu Shih had once returned $60,000 in Kuomintang lobbying funds to the party, Soong wired the American capital like a Washington insider. He wheedled access to classified cables and put Roosevelt’s relatives and friends on China’s payroll.
For the first time in US history, a private corporation would be used to carry out US policy in a war in which America was not a belligerent. It would be a model for CIA operations, several involving Pawley and Chennault, in the years to come.
Much of the credit for establishing the Flying Tigers, even the legendary name, has to go to T. V. Soong.
It was over this forbidding terrain—called the Hump—that Bond proposed to jury-rig a lifeline to China using CNAC’s planes... The doggedness of yet another private American and the talent of his Chinese and American pilots turned the Hump into China’s salvation.
But for almost two years, from 1943 until late 1945, the Hump provided Nationalist China with 80 percent of its supplies. As was true of many other American endeavors in China, the operation served as a model for future enterprises. The men who managed the Hump later ran the 1948 operation to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin.
The reality proved to be different. The United States provided its allies with more than $50 billion (more than $800 billion in today’s dollars) in Lend-Lease supplies. Of that, Britain received more than 60 percent while China got 3 percent and Russia, which was not even mentioned, collected more than six times China’s share. The gap between what the Chinese believed America had promised and what the United States delivered would be a source of destructive friction between the two countries for years.
For every three tons of cargo that left the port of Rangoon for the road, only one actually made it to Chongqing, the other two-thirds vanishing on the black market.
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FDR dreamed of using the war to forge a strong China, but in the face of fierce competition for resources, the US could only keep the Nationalists on life support. This life support allowed China to trap half a million Japanese troops. But it never did much more.
Over the next six months, in the skies above Rangoon, eastern China, and Vietnam, the Flying Tigers downed what writer Daniel Ford estimates to have been 115 planes and killed four hundred Japanese airmen. Chennault had proved his detractors wrong. In the service of a foreign government thousands of miles from home, he had shown that aggressive pursuit tactics could overwhelm enemy bombing formations.
Defeat in Burma was a huge blow to the Nationalist Chinese government and contributed to its eventual collapse. Chiang lost more than a third of his Western-trained troops, together with their heavy equipment.
