CHIANG'S SEDUCTION OF AMERICA
Neumann, William L.
Chiang's Seduction of America by WILLIAM L. NEUMANN When Congress in 1955 gave the President authority to use American armed forces in defense of Formosa it relinquished a vital constitutional...
...The religious press of the United States was jubilant...
...Against the weight of this sympathetic background few Americans have spoken as frankly and critically of the Chiangs and their entourage as has been the American practice in dealing with the leadership of other allied nations...
...Four films dealing with Sax Rohmer's diabolical "Fu Manchu," 1929-32, were effectively countered by 48 films devoted to Earl Biggers' charming detective, Charlie Chan, who represented the ancient wisdom of the Orient at its best...
...When he became the head of the gigantic Time-Life-Fortune empire with access to millions of American homes, the Chiangs were astute enough to cultivate his sympathies...
...one American was able, in their view, to give a decisive turn to the course of history in the world's biggest and most ancient nation...
...The Generalissimo and the Madame have a store of personal charm to give them added advantage...
...government which accompanied the victory of the Chinese Reds and the flight to Formosa...
...By 1940 Owen Lattimore could write, "The key to the future of China lies neither in Japan nor in Russia, nor even in China itself...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt frequently entertained with stories of how his grandfather Delano made millions in the Canton trade...
...History probably offers no more unique piece of megalomania than that offered by many of Chiang's American supporters...
...Almost ten years after the military debacle of the Kuomintang forces this influence persists...
...President Wilson, himself a missionary supporter, gave the appeal his personal support and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan proclaimed it "an extraordinary tribute to Christianity...
...We must have a market or we shall have a revolution," said Senator Frye of Maine...
...Far from being immune to the economic and religious biases, with their romanticized versions of the past and the future, the Far Eastern experts have expanded upon the prevailing myths...
...Reluctance to criticize the Kuomintang is also a product of the ugly controversy over Communists in the U.S...
...As an illogical result every criticism of the Kuomintang was traced to Communist sympathies while even the most obvious white-washings of the delinquencies of Chiang's government went unchallenged...
...Other missionary children have also had an impact on American thought...
...The New York Times proclaimed more than a hundred years ago, "The rapid growth of our Chinese commercial relations excites universal wonder . . . The bulk of Chinese trade is within our reach...
...and the farther away those peoples are from us, both in physical distance and in historical tradition, the more we like to picture ourselves as associated with them in some sort of rosy nirvana of intimacy and comradeship...
...An affluent citizenry now turns its back on controversial and complex foreign policy issues, complacently assuming it is meeting its civic responsibilities by debating the future of the American automobile or the political purity of Sherman Adams...
...These dreams of the China market were never realized...
...The Chiangs reciprocated and in 1938 Madame Chiang personally announced to the missionary movement the raising of the old ban on the teaching of Christianity in Chinese schools...
...Instead of conforming to the stereotypes and expressing their gratitude for American destruction of Japanese powers, the Chinese flocked to the cause of the Communist leaders who exploited the undercurrents of anti-foreignism long ignored or underrated by Americans...
...From the radioactive ruins will rise the China of dreams—democratic, Christian, and pro-American...
...The Luce press editorial and news policies have engaged in a steady program of near-deification of Chiang and the vilification of his detractors...
...Any answer must consider the nature of the historic American image of China...
...The business acumen he gained in the United States led him into more lucrative fields and he acquired a personal fortune from his many ventures...
...A purely "reform movement" description was consistently applied to the Chinese Communist Party even when in 1945 the truce with the Kuomintang was broken and Chiang openly attacked...
...In the thirties and forties, when Americans still flocked in great numbers to the Mauldin in The St...
...After acquiring a theological degree at Vanderbilt University Soong returned to China to do missionary work...
...But for Congress to exercise no restraint on the President's cavalier use of the war-making power is a gross abdication of democratic responsibility...
...foreign policy...
...The victory of communism in China ended the dream, although a rapidly industrializing China could in theory offer a far greater market for American production than could the earlier China which consumed Standard Oil's kerosene in its lamps and wore the cheap cotton goods from Southern mills...
...Journalists and scholars specializing in Far Eastern affairs have also contributed to the mythology of American-Chinese relations...
...One inch added to the Chinese shirt-tail was to keep the cotton mills of America humming endlessly...
...Some Chinese had a brilliant inspiration: an official appeal was sent to the Christian world to set aside a "Pray for China" day in the churches...
...The Chinese Republic was the first to realize how effectively the good churchmen of America might be used for political ends...
...only a rare dissenting voice in Congress and in the press disputed the unwarranted Munich analogy...
...George Kennan suggested a few years ago that Americans have "a tendency to hazy and exalted dreams of intimacy with other peoples...
...American dreams of China began with economic aspirations...
...The ultimate irrationality, a thermonuclear war of liberation, is the means to salvage more than a century of minor irrationalities...
...Such a decision may be justified, perhaps, in an age when a few hours' initiative may mean military success or failure...
...Henry Luce's "The American Century" editorial of 1941 still offered a vision of the billions of dollars the China trade would bring after a victorious war...
...The conviction that the United States would not only control the markets and win the souls of the Chinese but would also guide her political evolution had won increasing favor after the establishment of the Republic in 1912...
...The only explanation which did not shatter the old myths was to believe that China had been the victim of a plot, hatched in Moscow and abetted by Washington...
...Hollywood responded readily to pressures from the Chinese government and its supporters...
...More than five years ago President Eisenhower "unleashed" the armies of Formosa to invade the mainland...
...A profitable to* bacco trade based on the consumption of one cigarette per Chinese yearly was to produce vast profits by raising the rate to one a day...
...Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door notes of 1899 and 1900, yellowed and unheeded in the archives of foreign chancelleries, are conventionally pictured as saving China from the evils of European imperalism...
...Millions of Americans learned about China through the missionaries who distributed mimeographed letters to their supporting congregations and made periodic tours of the United States to raise new funds...
...A recent issue of Time describes the "helplessness" of American forces, bidden by Washington to stand by and watch the bombardment of Quemoy...
...It was the third daughter, Mei-ling, who became the wife of Chiang Kai-shek in 1927...
...The greatest single contribution to Chiang's American influence has come from Henry Luce...
...But why is it that a defeated, deposed, and discredited Chiang can maintain such a powerful hold over American policy...
...The Good Earth was published in an important year for China, 1931, and was an American best-seller...
...The oldest daughter, Ai-ling, married an Oberlin graduate, H. H. Kung, who came from a family of pawnshop operators and bankers...
...When Henry Morgenthau, Sr., sounded out the President on a diplomatic appointment to Peking, Wilson said that he wanted the new envoy to be "an evangelical Christian...
...Louis Post-Dispatch "And the Best Part Is That He's Paying Us for the Ride" movies, The March of Time added its influence to the same ends...
...Perhaps this potential was in the mind of the present head of the Ford Motor Company when he recently urged recognition of Communist China...
...Pearl Buck went to China as an infant with her Presbyterian missionary parents and remained until the age of seventeen...
...the Truman-Eisenhower Formosa policy is largely a byproduct of irrationality...
...H. H. Kung and T. V. Soong, after serving terms as ministers of finance and directors of the Bank of China, saw fit to desert the Formosa regime and settle in New York with fortunes reported in the tens of millions...
...In its subtle and persistent way the Luce press has probably surpassed even the missionary movement in giving literate Americans a distorted view of the quality of the Kuomintang and its leaders...
...China is a good illustration...
...Chiang Kai-shek is still immobile but the American public refuses to see "Free China" and its aging army as a lost cause...
...The Luce publications have given support to those who believe that the old China is still there and can be restored by American bombers...
...before Pearl Harbor, it was Japan's consumption of American products that boomed, rising to three and four times that of China...
...The fiction that note-writing changes the nature of power politics is found again in many accounts of Wilson's 1915 protest against Japan's Twenty-One Demands when American action is credited with forcing Japan to modify her goals...
...Divine aid was to be sought for the election of "strong and virtuous men" to the new Chinese Assembly and that "the government may be recognized by the powers...
...A 1903 Chinese-American treaty defined Christianity for the pagan as "teaching men to do good" and American missionaries poured into the land of Confucius and Buddha...
...The aura which surrounds the Chiangs has extended to their aides...
...Lattimore's critics a decade later were to agree with this interpretation and go further: the key to the future of six hundred million Chinese had not been in the hands of the American government but held by Lattimore himself who apparently turned the key to the Left rather than the Right...
...This anomalous situation may signify a decline in that democratic management of foreign policy in the United States...
...China's peasant millions, in this view, suffer under the domination of a tiny minority of Moscow-trained leaders...
...Missionaries were expelled, American schools and colleges were closed or turned into Communist institutions, and the old ties severed...
...The significant history of American relations with China is not the story of diplomatic exchanges and treaties but one of the evolution of dreams and the creation of myths about that relationship...
...The most imporant conversion took place in the United States itself when Charlie Jones Soong joined the Methodist Episcopal Church of Wilmington, North Carolina, in the late 1870's...
...China's millions were slow to convert, but a few spectacular successes heartened the whole movement...
...And at least one China trader, Alfred Kohlberg of China Lobby fame, has rested his hopes on the future of Kuomintang China while not being adverse to handling Communist Chinese goods which found their way to Hong Kong...
...When war began with Japan in 1931 church leaders took the lead in creating a broad propaganda front in behalf of American aid to the Ruomintang and eventually to military commitment to Chinese victory...
...Hardly had this country won its independence when New Englanders were told that the unsatisfied demands of China's millions only awaited the coming of the Yankee trader with his ship loaded with goods...
...He was formerly staff consultant on foreign affairs for the U. S. Senate, formerly director of the Institute of Foreign Affairs, and a lecturer on overseas problems at the Pentagon...
...Eisenhower's explanation of the American stand on Quemoy equated the significance of Chiang's future with that of Czechoslovakia in 1938...
...There will be no Western Pacific Munich" says Life...
...His return at the head of a liberating army is awaited by the masses who will rise to join the avenging destruction and throw off their Communist chains...
...In the spring of 1913 the new regime still awaited recognition from the Western world along with loans to meet its financial difficulties...
...The concept of America as the big brother of China, found often in missionary writings, became the theme of the history of American diplomacy in which the United States by a series of unselfish acts protected a weak China from the depredations of the aggressors...
...When it comes to China and the Chinese, Americans have seldom been coldly rational...
...Chiang's Seduction of America by WILLIAM L. NEUMANN When Congress in 1955 gave the President authority to use American armed forces in defense of Formosa it relinquished a vital constitutional power...
...Pearl Buck's popular novel, The Good Earth, glorifying the Chinese peasant, was purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and issued in 1937 after being filmed under the supervision of the Chinese government and earning the imprimatur of the Kuomintang...
...the "real China" is represented by Chiang...
...Three years later her husband announced his own conversion and membership in the Methodist Church...
...The constituency of the missionary movement had already had a major effect on American thinking about China when the conversion of Chiang brought this powerful group of opinion-makers to the support of the Kuomintang itself...
...one of the most successful was a publishing company which specialized in Chinese Bibles...
...Few dare question involvement over Quemoy without at the same time proclaiming their undying hatred of and opposition to Chinese communism...
...The image of four hundred million customers awaiting American goods was paralleled in the American mind by that of an equal number of pagan souls awaiting conversion to Christianity...
...Here too there were aspirations for a Yankee monopoly...
...By 1919 a Senatorial orator, pleading for an American stand against Japan, could appeal to history and speak of the time when Europe stood ready to carve up China: "We simply reached out our hand across the ocean and warned them to stand back, and all the hungry hordes stood back...
...President Eisenhower has succumbed as Presidents Truman and Roosevelt did before him...
...By 1941 there were some fifty missionary societies in the United States supporting some 2,500 men and women in their labors and with half a billion dollars invested in buildings in China...
...With his money Soong sent his three Christian daughters to the United States for college education while his eldest son earned a degree at Harvard...
...Prayers were sent up for China on Sunday, April 27, 1913, and on May 8, the United States responded by recognizing China, the first Western nation to do so...
...Too many of Chiang's American detractors had also accompanied their attacks with naive praise or deliberate misrepresentation of the character of the Chinese Communists...
...Miss Buck is no sycophant of Chiang, a notable exception to the rule along with John Hersey and a few other of the China-born writers, but her able novels helped win much interest in pre-Communist China's future...
...General Stilwell found himself rebuked for his criticism of Chiang during World War II by Roosevelt's reminder of China's early commercial importance...
...The old "Yellow Peril" menace was now centered on Japan and the stereotyped "heathen Chinee" with pigtails trailing was replaced by a friendlier caricature...
...Born of Presbyterian missionary parents in China, Luce was 14 before he visited the United States...
...It is the seduction of this gruesome fantasy which gives Chiang his hold over America...
...a faithful and devoted ally...
...In the 1930's the American Communist Party hued to the line of making Japan the major enemy in Asia and from 1936 onward even gave grudging support to Chiang...
...For some Americans the mention of China has always revived romantic memories of this era...
...The lengthy hearings of the McCarran Committee into the bias of the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Lattimore investigation, and other probings showed that this Communist line had been echoed in government circles...
...It may be ours entirely...
...Madame Chiang on a recent "Meet the Press" interview assured her questioners that mainland Chinese have pleaded for the use of thermonuclear weapons in bringing their freedom...
...And in the early Nineteenth Century a few New England families did make fortunes in this commerce...
...The second daughter married a non-Christian, Sun Yat Sen, and lived to hold a high post in Communist China...
...The support of the Kuomintang by the churches was accompanied by a major shift in the American image of China...
...The seduction of American public opinion by Chiang Kai-shek now threatens to blight the world...
...In keeping with this version of the past Secretary of State Stimson's Non-Recognition notes of 1932 are praised as a measure to save Manchuria for Chinese rule and the same commendation is given to Secretary Hull's homilies delivered to the Japanese in the thirties...
...A bombing plane is pictured, sitting idle on the deck of an American carrier, awaiting "a nuclear bomb capable of reducing all Peking and its masters to radioactive dust...
...Christianity in China is creating a community of idealism between that nation and the United States upon which the most lasting friendship may be built," wrote Stanley High in the 1920's...
...China would soon become a Christian republic...
...Chiang has repeatedly defied his American advisers and disregarded the suicidal international implications of his policy, but Washington remains WILLIAM L. NEUMANN, professor of history at Goucher College, has long been a student of American-Asian relations and is the author of a number of monographs on U.S...
...Americans who had long believed in their cherished image of China were embittered and confused by the course of recent Asian history...
...In the beginning of the Twentieth Century American capitalism was a victim of the myth that China was an essential market of the future if our rich economy was to be buried by its surplus goods...
...Scandals in the use of American funds which would have brought a Congressional investigation of the fiscal policies of any other nation have received only the barest mention in the American press...
...There is no parallel in history for this onesided relationship in which the policy of a powerful nation is dominated by a weak government-in-exile, notorious for its blunders and corruption...
...It lies right here in America...
...And for the President to give the head of a foreign government, a government-in-exile, freedom to involve the United States in war is a subversion of national sovereignty...
...The realities of Communist success in 1945 to 1949 projected a harsh light into this background of dream and myth...
...Once the menace of Japan was destroyed, American evangelism had hopes for new and rapid gains...
Vol. 22 • November 1958 • No. 11
