Struggling for Survival
American Images of China and the Consequences of the “Loss” of
China in 1949
President Truman and Madame Chiang Kai-shek meet at the White House, August 29, 1945.
Student: Quirijn Karten Student no.: 10656359 Master Thesis
Faculty of Humanities: American Studies University of Amsterdam
Thesis supervisor: prof. dr. R.V.A. Janssens Second reader: dr. G. H. Blaustein
Abstract
From the beginning of the twentieth century until 1949, many Americans believed that they enjoyed a special relationship with China. They thought that the Chinese, in their hearts and minds, wanted to become just like them. As a result, China was increasingly depicted as a US-friendly, democratic, and increasingly Christian state, in many ways akin to the United States. The American images of China were mostly the product of domestic forces. Many prominent Americans, from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to publisher Henry Luce, believed that the Chinese and Americans shared certain fundamental values and ideals. To Luce and many other Americans, China was slowly emerging into the modern world. Because of America’s obsession with China in the 1940s, Mao Zedong’s proclamation of independence on October 1, 1949 was an unexpected disaster that stunned the American public and heavily influenced American foreign policy in the following decades of the Cold War. The US-centered debate about the “loss” of China in the early 1950s focused primarily on the failure of Truman’s foreign policy to prevent the Communist revolution in China. While the “loss” of China was the result of persistent American delusions and misconceptions about China, it aroused such anger in American society that it helped fuel the infamous witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy in its immediate aftermath, which directly contributed to a harsher policy of containment in the Cold War and to the American conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.
List of main characters
Buck, Pearl S.: Born in China to missionary parents. Author and a respected China expert.
Her acclaimed novel The Good Earth, the first part of a trilogy about Chinese life, was published in 1931 and awarded with a Pulitzer prize a year later.
Johnson, Lyndon B.: Having vivid recollections of how the debate surrounding the “loss” of
China weakened Truman’s administration, Johnson feared that history would repeat itself if he would not learn from Truman’s mistakes. If he “lost” Vietnam, a new round of McCarthyism would quickly weaken support for his domestic policies and effectively end his presidency.
Kai-shek, Chiang: Leader of the Kuomintang, China’s Nationalist one-party government.
Chiang was the successor of Sun Yat-sen, who founded the Chinese Republic in 1911. In war-torn China, Chiang’s regime repeatedly proved corrupt, ineffective and undemocratic, and it continued to lose ground and public support to the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong. Chiang, who was nicknamed “The Generalissimo,” fought the Communist forces of Mao Zedong until he fled to the island of Formosa in the wake of the Communist revolution in 1949.
Luce, Henry R.: The influential publisher of Time, Life and Fortune. Born in China to
missionary parents and an unequivocal supporter of the Chiang’s and the Nationalist regime. Luce wanted to mold American public opinion. Born in China to Christian missionaries, he tried to fulfill his personal destiny by convincing Americans of his understanding of the United States and its destiny. Since he believed that the United States had a sacred mission to the world, Luce was determined to help achieve the fulfillment of that national purpose.
Marshall, General George C.: Chief of Staff of the United States army during the Second
World War. In 1945, President Truman asked Marshall to mediate in the Chinese civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Achieving only a tentative cease-fire, Marshall concluded that political differences and deep animosity between the two factions made unification in China impossible.
May-Ling, Soong: The Chinese “First Lady.” Known in the United States as Madame
Chiang Kai-shek, the charming and American-educated wife of the Generalissimo. Her visit to the United States in 1943 was a media-sensation and heavily influenced American public opinion toward China and its Nationalist regime.
McCarthy, Joseph: Claimed that traitors and saboteurs inhabited the American State
Department. His accusations had a deep impact on the lives of many politicians and China experts, and on American society in general. The “loss” of China in 1949 was his stepping stone to national prominence, as it become the central theme in his accusations. All persons in the U.S. army or in the State Department that were targeted by McCarthy, from George C. Marshall to John S. Service, had close connections to the recent deception in China.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: President of the United States from 1933-1945. In Roosevelts
vision, China was to be one of the “Four Policemen” that would take on global responsibility after the Second World War. In a letter to Mao Zedong, Roosevelt wrote that it was his sincere hope that Mao and President Chiang would “work together harmoniously to achieve internal unity.”
Service, John S.: American foreign policy official in China during the Second World War.
Mastered the Chinese language and had close contacts with the Chinese Communists. Along with other so-called “China Hands,” Service argued that not supporting the Kuomintang, and keeping good ties with Mao, would have been a better long-term decision for the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, however. preferred Chiang. After the loss of China in 1949, Service became a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy due to his former contacts with the Chinese Communists and his arrest during the Amerasia affair in 1945.
Stillwell, General Joseph W.: Served in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War
II. Disliked Chiang Kai-shek because of his corruption, ineptitude and his unwillingness to listen to reason. Stillwell generally referred to Chiang as “The Peanut.”
Truman, Harry S.: President Truman continued to support Chiang Kai-shek after the Second
World War, which angered the Communists and motivated Chiang to continue his military campaign. The publication of the White Paper in August 1949 aimed to inform the American public why China was “lost” and tried to shift the blame on Chiang’s corruption and
ineptitude, but instead provoked a relentless response from Senator Joseph McCarthy and Chiang’s supporters in the United States.
Yat-sen, Sun: Leader of the Kuomintang and the founding father of the Republic of China in
1912 after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty during the Xinhai Revolution. Yat-sen’s political philosophy was called the Three Principles of the People, which consisted of nationalism, democracy and the will of the people. This philosophy would ensure China’s freedom, independence and strength after decades of humiliation by foreign powers.
Zedong, Mao: The Leader of China’s Communist Party from 1943 until his death in 1976.
He established the Peoples Republic of China on October 1, 1949, forcing Chiang Kai-shek to flee to Formosa. Like Chiang, Mao had a strong desire to restore China to its former glory. He proclaimed that China would no longer “be a nation subject to insult and humiliation” by foreign powers.
Contents
Abstract 2
List of main characters 3
Introduction 7
1.
China Emergent
131.1: The Awakening of China 15
1.2: America’s Purpose 20
1.3: A Damsel in Distress 22
1.4: American Narcissism 27
2.
The Truman administration and China, 1945-1949
302.1: The Generalissimo 31
2.2: The White Paper 43
3.
The Loss of China
483.1: Pearl Buck 49
3.2: The Misery of China 52
3.3: An American Tragedy 56
3.4: Changing Images 61
Conclusion 64
Introduction
The people of China well over a century have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world – the same great ideals.1
-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1943.
On the eighteenth day of February in 1943, Soong May-Ling, better known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, delivered a passionate address before U.S. Congress. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the “First Lady” of China further accentuated the “striking similarities” between the two countries. She told her enthusiastic audience that China was eager to follow America’s democratic example to form a lasting international alliance against greed and aggression.2 She was seen by many Americans as the charming and intelligent wife
of China’s Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, while war-torn China was struggling with Japanese occupation during World War II and a looming civil war with Communist forces in its mainland.3
Historian Barbara Tuchman has noted that Madame Chiang’s visit to the United States in 1943 aroused the “greatest outpouring of admiration and welcome received by anyone since Lindberg flew the Atlantic.”4 By expressing her familiarity and China’s common
purpose with the United States, her visit increased the American obsession with China in the 1940s.5 Her address before Congress resonated with many politicians, especially
conservatives. During the early 1940s, many Americans became enthralled by the image of a China that would reflect American democracy and its ideals. Proponents of this idea, among them the famous publisher Henry Luce, believed that other peoples could not truly solve and improve their own lives without following the American ideal.6 China beckoned to Americans
for guidance. Like many other newspapers and magazines, Luce’s Life magazine 1 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943. In: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Public Papers and addresses of
Franklin D. Roosevelt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 1943), 101.
2 Madame Chiang Kai-shek, speech before U.S. House of Representatives, Washington D.C., 18 February 1943. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, “China Emergent,” The Atlantic, May 1942,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1942/05/china-emergent/306450/.
3 Ibid, 422. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 391. Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress. Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of
Modern China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 422.
4 Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (New York: Random House, 2017), 420.
enthusiastically told their readers that Madame Chiang captivated and amazed the members of U.S. Congress. She spoke gallantly “without a single bobble or ill-timed pause, in a rich, concise voice that clipped off the words better than most Americans can pronounce them.”7
At the end of Madame Chiang’s tour through the United States, she had become a celebrity, received by large and enthusiastic crowds in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and in Hollywood. Due to her eloquent speech and elegant appearance, her visit to the United States was a clear signal that a modern, Americanized China was now becoming reality.8
Because of America’s obsession with China in the 1940s, the victory of the Communist forces in August 1949 was an unexpected disaster that stunned American politicians and the American public. The blame-game that ensued focused primarily on the failures of Truman’s foreign policy and the American foreign policy officials in China, the China hands.9 Among Truman’s staunchest critics was Henry Luce, who argued that the
“loss” of China was a result of American irresolution, not Chiang Kai-shek’s corruption or ineptitude.10 However, the person who profited the most from the China debacle was Senator
Joseph McCarthy, as it opened a window for him to exploit existing fears and insecurities about America’s declining role in the world. He was by no means the first to exploit fears of Communist encroachment, as it had been a favorite tactic by pro-Chiang supporters for many years before McCarthy reached national prominence.11
Most likely due to China’s current prominence on the world stage, the peculiar relationship between China and the United States during the 1940s has received considerable attention in the past few years from historians and journalists.12 However, recent literature
tends to focus more on the failure of American foreign policy than on the impact of the Chinese Communist Revolution on domestic events in the United States. A particularly helpful work for this thesis is American Images of China by historian Christopher Jespersen, as he has focused on the impact of Madame Chiang’s visit to the United States in 1943 and the extraordinary influence of Henry Luce on American foreign policy and public opinion in 6 T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 1931-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), xvi-xvii. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American economic and cultural expansion,
1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 111.
7 Frank McNaughton, “Life’s Reports. Mme Chiang in the U.S. Capitol,” Life, March 8, 1943.
8 Grace C. Chuang, “Madame Chiang’s visit to America,” in: Joseph W. Esherick and Matthew T. Combs ed.,
1943. China at the Crossroads (New York: Ithaca University, 2015), 41-74.
9 John Paton Davies Jr., China Hand: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 10 Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion. America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 25. 11 Ibid, 111-114.
12 See, for example: Richard Bernstein, China 1945. Mao’s Revolution and America’s Fateful Choice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Kevin Peraino, A Force so Swift: Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China,
1949 (New York: Crown Publishing, 2017); Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018).
the 1930s and 1940s. Due to his importance, Henry Luce and his magazines have a prominent role in this thesis. Most accounts of the Sino-American relationship only mention Luce briefly.13 Historian Patricia Neils has argued that Luce’s evaluation of China was not
completely wrong and that he was one of the few who understood the Chinese people.14
However, Neil’s conclusion is only further evidence of the blindness in the United States to how domestic forces have influenced the images of China in the past.15 Many historians have
argued since 1949 that the compelling myth of a China that is on its way to become an Asian version of the United States blinded American policymakers and politicians for what was truly going on in China during the 1940s.16 After years of positive articles and favorable
images in American media outlets, the Communist Revolution in 1949 came as a sudden shock. The loss of China aroused such anger in American society that it helped fuel the infamous witch-hunts of Joseph McCarthy in its immediate aftermath, which contributed directly to a harsher policy of containment and would lead to the wars in Korea and Vietnam.17
According to historian James Bradley, the “loss” of China certainly had such impact due to the obsessive and unrealistic American attachment to China and the fabricated Christian image of the “Noble Chinese Peasant.”18 Apart from some well-informed diplomats
in China, U.S. perceptions of China consisted mostly of fabricated rosy images in magazines, most importantly the ones owned by Henry Luce.19 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was
largely influenced by his grandfather who made a large fortune by smuggling opium to China in the mid-nineteenth century. Like so many other Westerners who had limited access to and knowledge of China, he saw China as a backwards country that could only be “uplifted” by Western intervention. This oversimplified and paternalistic image of China persisted in the United States. Roosevelt and many other Americans grew up with the idea that China could not be reformed internally, and that “the pitiful, drug-addicted, backward pagan mess of a
13 Jespersen, American Images of China, 194.
14 Patricia Neils, China Images in the Life and Times of Henry Luce (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1990), 292.
15 Jespersen, American Images of China, 194.
16 Richard P. Madsen, review of American Images of China, 1931-1949, by Christopher Jespersen, The Journal
of American History, March 1997.
17 Mann, The Grand Delusion, 24-26.
18 James Bradley, The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (New York: Back Bay Books, 2016), 85-90.
19 Stephen J. Whitfield, American Cold War Culture (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 159-162. Jespersen, American images of China, 176.
place was lucky to have Americans in its coast to civilize it via American values and beliefs.”20
Historian Emily Rosenberg has noted that from the 1890s Americans began to believe that “other nations could and should replicate America’s own developmental experience.”21
The United States would serve as a universal model for the rest of the world. The idea of the United States acting as the Good Samaritan became one of the major guiding principles of America’s foreign policy. It was, according to the revisionist historian William Appleman Williams, “the idea that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States.”22
An important topic of discussion among historians is the way how President Truman and his advisers dealt with the civil war in China. In recent years, historians and journalists like Kevin Peraino have argued that Truman’s critics who charged that the United States basically gave China away to the Communists were not completely wrong.23 Contrary to what
these historians assert, the answer to why the United States “lost” China should be sought in the persistent American delusions and misconceptions of China and not in their inability to guide a corrupt, inept and unpopular foreign government to a predesignated objective.
This thesis will research where the powerful and romantic images of a transformed, Americanized China originated from and how these images contributed to the sentiments of hysteria and American decline in the aftermath of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949.
The American images of China have most of all been the product of naïve American assumptions. China was a focus of American narcissism. While most Americans forgot about China after the early 1950s, the memory of the “loss” of China and its aftermath influenced policymakers during the following decades of the Cold War. The hysteria surrounding China in 1949 was a valuable lesson for several American policymakers who clearly remembered its disastrous results.
While the romantic images of China are older, starting with the missionaries in the eighteenth century who travelled to China to “uplift” and educate the people, this thesis will 20 Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 28-58. Bradley, The China Mirage, 28.
21 Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 7.
22 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 11. Jespersen, American Images of China, xvii.
23 Kevin Peraino, A Force so Swift: Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China, 1949 (New York: Crown Publishing, 2017). Orville Schell, “1949: The Year That Set the Course of Chinese-American Relations,” review of A Force so Swift: Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China, 1949, by Kevin Peraino, The New York
specifically focus on the late 1930s and 1940s. Americans began to see the Chinese as idealized and distorted versions of themselves. In commentaries, newspapers and magazines, they were depicted as a pro-American, democratic and Christian people. This comforting and inaccurate notion, fostered by media-outlets, opinion-makers and politicians, originated from wishful expectations of American values and global aspirations.24 From the first decades of
the twentieth century and onwards, the United States had a peculiar interest in China’s wellbeing, primarily driven by religious, imperialistic and business motives. The height of America’s fascination with China was in the early 1940s when Madame Chiang captured the American imagination during her visit to the United States.25 The first chapter of this thesis
will thus concentrate on the origins of the American obsession with China in the 1940s and how the American fantasies of a modern, Christian China changed from the beginning of the twentieth century until 1949.
The second chapter will concentrate on President Truman’s China policy, Chiang Kai-shek and the publication of the White Paper in August 1949. In recent accounts of the “loss” of China, few historians give much attention to China’s political culture and Chiang’s political beliefs. The “loss” of China shows above all the culture differences between China and the United States, despite the constant insistence on possessing shared values. Both Roosevelt and Truman believed that Chiang represented China and viewed him as the only leader who was capable uniting the country. Despite their expectations, China has never known a tradition of sharing power. While Chiang viewed his relationship with the Americans as a marriage of convenience during two subsequent wars, American policymakers misunderstood -or ignored- his totalitarian tendencies and his paternalistic outlook towards his population which he outlined in his work China’s Destiny.26 There was, besides Chiang’s
recent conversion to Christianity, no evidence of Chinese willingness to adopt the American model. While several American diplomats voiced their concerns over Chiang’s willingness to reform the political structure, Truman continued to support him after World War II, alienating the Communists in the process and making unification in China impossible.
While the publication of the White Paper by the Truman administration aimed to absolve their responsibility for the events in China and silence domestic critics, it only provided them with more ammunition. The document, officially titled United States Relations
with China with Specific Reference to the Period 1944-1949, was released two months before
24 Arthur Power Dudden, review of American Images of China, 1931-1949, by T. Christopher Jespersen, The
American Historical Review, June 1997.
25 John Paton Davies, “America and East Asia,” Foreign Affairs 55 (January 1, 1977): 368-394. 26 Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Destiny (New York: Macmillan Press, 1947).
Mao Zedong established the Peoples Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Its initial purpose was to straighten out the facts and to prevent domestic accusations against the American government that China was “lost” to the Communists, which once more illustrates the possessive attitude of the United States towards China.27 Dean Acheson called the White
Paper a “giant firecracker,” while George Kennan even went so far to proclaim that it was the
greatest document ever produced by the American government.28 The White Paper asserted
that the result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the American government.
The New York Times proclaimed on its front page that the United States solely blamed
Chiang’s corrupt regime.29 The outrage that followed focused primarily on Truman’s policies
and his administration.
The final question is how the “loss” of China and the disastrous release of the White
Paper contributed to the hysteria and sentiments of American decline in its immediate
aftermath. In 1948, Time stated dramatically that the United States was struggling for survival.30 The “loss” of China was a call to arms for conservative Republicans. Since the
events in China were seen as a major step in America’s postwar decline, an abrupt end to the American Century, bitter allegations for who was responsible for this “avoidable catastrophe” characterized its immediate aftermath.31 Many of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s charges against
the American government directly involved the events in China.32 After 1949, every American
president, from Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson, vividly remembered the hysteria that surrounded China. From the early 1950s, the “loss” of China influenced American foreign policy toward the Third World and guided President Johnson to the war in Vietnam. Johnson feared that if he “lost” Vietnam, a new round of McCarthyism would quickly weaken support for his domestic policies and effectively end his presidency.
27 Bernstein, China 1945, 390-394. William A. Rintz, “The Failure of the China White Paper” Constructing the
Past 11 (2009): 76-84, https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol11/iss1/8/. Jespersen, American Images
of China, 176-178. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 742-744.
28 Nancy B. Tucker, ed., China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945-1996 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 62. Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of
American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 230-232.
29 “U.S. Puts Sole Blame on Chiang Regime for Collapse, Hold More Aid Futile; Acheson Bids Reds Avoid Aggression,” The New York Times, August 6, 1949, 1.
30 “Struggle for Survival,” Time
31 He went even further by accusing the Democratic Party of “twenty years of treason.” Quoted in: Whitfield,
The Culture of the Cold War, 38.
1. China Emergent
With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.33
- Senator Kenneth Wherry, 1940.
In 1876, over the course of six months, millions of Americans visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to marvel over the exhibits of thirty-seven countries and to celebrate technological progress. Along with fearsome machines and architectural wonders, the foreign exhibits provided another great attraction for Americans. The main exhibition provided a source of endless fascination, as visitors could observe people from all over the world who dressed in their native costumes and spoke in languages never heard before by most Americans.34 The traditional displays of China and Japan drew the most attention, as
they were stacked with antique chinaware, highly decorated and handcrafted furniture, mythical figures and colorful silks. It was the largest exhibit of Chinese wares ever seen in the United States, larger than any previous display.35 Henry Walters, the son of a renowned
collector of Asian art, wrote that all Americans would certainly “recall the remarkable display made by both China and Japan at our great Centennial.”36
While the idealized image of China in the United States slowly started to dissolve by the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans still looked at China with fascination, expecting 33 Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry during his visit to China, 1940. Wherry’s statement illustrates the growing optimism about China’s future and the role for the United States. Quoted in: Jespersen, American Images of
China, 164.
34 Bayard Taylor, who visited the world-fair for the New York Tribune, remarked that some of the foreign exhibits drew more attention than others. The reason for this disparity was that “the exhibits which are accompanied by exhibitors of another race, at once recognizable in features or dress, have a double attraction to the crowd.” See John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: excursions to China in U.S. culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chapter 9. Haddad writes that the exhibition was like a “modern-day Tower of Babel.”
35 China: Catalogue of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Collection at the United States International
Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1876).
36 Jennifer Pitman, “China’s presence at the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876,” Studies in the
Decorative Arts 10, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 2002-2003), 35, 51, 56. George Titus Ferris, Gems of the Centennial exhibition, consisting of Illustrated Descriptions of Objects of an Artistic Character at the Philadelphia International Exhibition of 1876 (New York: Appleton & Company, 1877), 84-86.
a pastoral paradise that matched the romantic portrayals on their porcelain from Canton. The Centennial marked the first noteworthy exhibition of Chinese culture in the United States since some smaller Chinese expositions from the 1830s to the 1850s.37 Chinese merchants or
their representatives attended the exhibition and were described with great detail in the American press. The Daily Commercial observed that their presence, “all in their native costume which they would disdain to replace by the toggery of the outside barbarians, adds another point of interest to their exhibit, and they are almost as much gazed at as the wonderful and beautiful things over which they preside.”38
When former president Ulysses S. Grant visited China in 1879, an American representative described his surroundings as “a scene from the Arabian Nights.”39 However,
by 1912, this old romantic portrayal of China in the United States had slowly disintegrated.40
Around the turn of the century, the perspective in the United States of China gradually changed to that of a “friendly, democratic, and increasingly Christian state, in many ways akin to the United States.”41 This new and hopeful perspective of China was supported by many
prominent Americans, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, novelist Pearl S. Buck, and of course, the influential publisher of Time and Life magazines, Henry R. Luce. As one historian wrote about America’s peculiar relationship with China: “no country has engendered the American sense of Manifest Destiny more potently than China; and no country has more captivated, needled and frustrated Americans than China.”42
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the origins and significance of widely accepted images of China in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s and illustrate how these images -often inaccurate and deceptive- continued to affect American foreign policy during the first half of the twentieth century. Since the Chinese were seen as “aspiring Americans,” China and its leaders became pervasive symbols of American hopes and fears in 37 Pitman, “China’s presence,” 67. Two noteworthy examples of these “Museums of Chinese Curiosities” are Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Museum in Philadelphia (1838) and the Chinese Museum in Boston (1845-1847). 38 Quoted in: Haddad, The Romance of China, chapter 9.
39 In 1879, Ulysses S. Grant was requested by the Qing Empire to mediate between China and Japan in a dispute over the Ryukyu kingdom. One of Grant’s most significant meetings was in Tianjin with Li Hongzhang, viceroy of the Northern province Zhili. Both Li and Grant once commanded an army during civil war. Their familiar accomplishments inspired Li to proclaim: “You and I, General Grant, are the greatest men in the world, having subdued the two greatest rebellions known in history.” Quoted in: William S. McFeely, Grant (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
40 Sinologist Berthold Laufer claimed in 1912 that “the romance of China has died away with the end of the Chivalrous Manchu dynasty.” See: Berthold Laufer, “Modern Chinese Collections in Historical Light: With Especial Reference to the American Museum’s Collection Representative of Chinese Culture a Decade Ago,” American Museum Journal 12 (April 1912), 137.
41 Jespersen, American Images of China, 2.
42 Lachlan Strahan, review of American Images of China by T. Christopher Jespersen, The China Quarterly, December 1997.
the 1930s and 1940s. The United States, so it was believed, would benevolently give China the “opportunity to remake itself in America’s spiritual, political and cultural image.”43
1.1: The Awakening of China
During the Centennial Exposition, American newspapers commented that, in comparison with the stubborn Chinese, the Japanese were more willing to clothe themselves “appropriately.” According to the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, the Chinese could learn a thing or two, “if they were only willing to open their eyes.”44 Charles Denby Jr., an American diplomat stationed in
Peking, proclaimed in 1895; “the educated Chinaman, who speaks English, becomes a new man; he commences to think.”45 The following cartoon appeared in the Daily Graphic during
the Centennial Exposition in 1876. The father of a young Japanese boy urges him to study civilization in the United States. After a brief taste of America, he has converted to the American way of life:
Figure 1. After traveling to the United States, a Japanese immigrant has successfully transformed into an American, even gaining the affection of an elegant American lady.46
While Americans recognized that immigration was the confirmation of their own success, they also grew increasingly worried over the threat that these “unassimilable strangers” posed to American values. Over 26 million immigrants came to the United States from 1870 to 1920 and racial and ethnic stereotypes determined their “placing” in American society and their 43 Jespersen, American Images of China, 2.
44 Ibid. 45 Ibid, 1-2.
“worthiness” to become part of it.47 During this new wave of immigration, many Americans
believed that the Chinese were incompatible with the American way of life.48 The Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first of a series of laws which attempted to keep out “racially inferior” peoples. While only 110.000 Chinese immigrants lived in the United States by 1882, the exclusion of Chinese was important, proponents claimed, because unrestricted immigration would prevent the United States from living up to its global promise.49
Anti-Chinese sentiments and discrimination was not restricted to organizations like the Immigration Restrictive League, but extended even to the highest ranks of the American government.50 In 1888, President Grover Cleveland proclaimed the Chinese “an element
ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare.”51
Despite the anti-Chinese sentiments and immigration restrictions, various missionaries and politicians warned the American public in the first decade of the twentieth century for China’s inevitable awakening, a “grand spectacle” that would have a tremendous impact on the world.52 In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his readers in The Outlook that
the imminent awakening of China was “one of the great events of the age.”53 Roosevelt’s
point of view is illustrative for the growing optimism about China’s future at the turn of the century. Just a few years later, in 1911, President Woodrow Wilson stated that he had this “most amazing and inspiring vision – this vision of that great and sleeping nation suddenly awakened by the voice of Christ.”54 The United States, as the new leading power in the
47 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13-14. For the treatment of Chinese Americans in the nineteenth century, see Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War
Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007), and Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
48 Westad, The Global Cold War, 13-14.
49 Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and
Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 83.
50 Jonathan H. X. Lee, History of Asian Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2015), 19-20.
51 Ibid, 20.
52 See, for example: W.A.P. Martin, The Awakening of China (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1907). To American missionaries like Martin, the “grand spectacle” that was occurring in China represented the conversion and renovation of a former heathen nation, to which no one in America could look on with indifference. Martin wrote: “May we not look forward with confidence to a time when China shall be found in the brotherhood of Christian nations?”
53 Roosevelt stated that “Our Christian missions have for their object not only the savings of souls, but the imparting of a life that makes possible the kingdom of God on the earth. It seems to me that there is no place where there is better opportunity today to do this work than in China.” Theodore Roosevelt, “The Awakening of China,” The Outlook, November 28, 1908, 665-666.
54 Eugene P. Trani, “Woodrow Wilson, China, and the Missionaries,” 1913-1921, Journal of Presbyterian
History 49, no. 4 (Winter 1971): 328-329. Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 109-112.
Pacific, would be responsible for the implantation of the basic principles of Christianity and democracy in Chinese soil.55
In 1901, Roosevelt wrote that “owing to the rapid growth of our power and our interests on the Pacific, whatever happens in China must be of the keenest national concern to us.”56 Many prominent Americans dreamed of turning China into a replica of the United
States. China, despite its allure seen as backwards and corrupt, would be renovated by American missionaries, Christian educators and businessmen.57 The United States was
portrayed as the redeemer nation, since, according to President Wilson, “America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world.”58 Since America was China’s
only hope against the European exploiter, to refuse the responsibility that was being “offered” by China, was to reject the very meaning of America’s exceptional mission to the world.59
Around the turn of the century, the romantic notion that China and the United States shared similar objectives and ideals became deeply embedded in the American mind.60 Historian
Stanley Karnow has argued that while business interests were an important aspect, a more prevalent strain in American expansionism around the year 1900 was evangelical: it was as if “the United States, fulfilling some sacred responsibility, had been singled out by the divinity for the salvation of the planet.”61
By the final decades of the nineteenth century, some Americans asserted that the United States had a duty to guide other nations to freedom and independence.62 Many authors
and politicians of the era believed that the United States was “destined” to be in the Far East and the Pacific, the very reason being America’s own exceptionalism. Part of this destiny was an obligation of the superior race to the inferior peoples- a burden to protect and educate the Filipinos and the Chinese.63 America was the harbinger of civilization and its phrase
“Manifest Destiny” signified the belief that Americans had the obligation to export their way of life to other “less privileged” nations. While the phrase was originally intended to justify 55 A.W. Greely, “GEN. GREELY ANALYZES THE GREAT AWAKENING OF CHINA; He Dispels Some Popular Illusions About the Empire and Shows How the Modernizing of Its Army and Navy Is Merely a Part of Its Rapid Westernization,” The New York Times, October 1, 1911, 9.
56 Oliver Turner, American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy (London: Routledge, 2015), 63.
57 Jonathan Goldstein, America Views China: American Images of China Then and Now (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1991), 123. Schulte Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson, 109-110.
58 Speech by Woodrow Wilson, quoted in: Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's
Millennial Role, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 212.
59 Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinese. A Study of American Attitudes toward China, 1890-1905 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 217.
60 Akira Iriye, “Japan as a Competitor, 1895-1917” in: Akira Iriye ed., Mutual Images: Essays in
American-Japanese Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 86-89.
61 Karnow, Vietnam, 12-13.
62 Westad, The Global Cold War, 14-15.
America’s westward expansion to new territories in Texas, the poet Walt Whitman and American presidents like Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson amplified the notion in the twentieth century.64
Part of America’s belief in its own exceptionalism was fueled by the concept of heliotropism, the belief that America represented the final stage of civilization. As the harbinger of civilization, the United States would complete the circle and bring civilization back to Asia.65 Most of the illusions of a Christian China were not based on economic reality
or deeper knowledge of Chinese culture, but on their concept of heliotropism; the belief that civilization had once started in the East and would end in the West.66 The French-American
writer Crèvecoeur stated in 1782 that Americans were “the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigor, and industry which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle.”67
The American sentiments of responsibility towards China were intimately connected to the earlier events in the Philippines. The acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 turned American eyes to East Asia, as a new frontier. While American missionaries started campaigns in China for Christianization and social betterment in the nineteenth century, it was in the late 1890s that the American federal government began to take political responsibility for foreign people under American control. The occupation of the Philippines was a victory for the future of American global reform, which would bring a “new day of freedom” to Asia.68 After the Spanish-American War, one of America’s leading experts on
Asia, William Elliot Griffis, wrote that “for the people of the United States, the oceanic event of May 1, 1898, changed their view of the world.”69 President William McKinley’s
administration defined the American presence in the Philippines not as imperialism, but as an
64 Karnow, Vietnam, 12-13. See, for example, the poem by Walt Whitman, “Facing West from California’s Shores,” from his poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
65 For example, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one of America’s most ardent expansionists in the nineteenth century, expressed in 1846: “The sun of civilization must shine across the sea; socially and commercially the van of the Caucasians, and the rear of the Mongolians, must intermix. They must talk together, and trade together, and marry together. Moral and intellectual superiority will do the rest; the White race will take the ascendant, elevating what is susceptible of improvement-wearing out what is not. And thus the youngest people, and the newest land, will become the reviver and the regenerator of the oldest.” Quoted in: Chris J. Magoc and David Bernstein ed., Imperialism and Expansionism in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural
Encyclopedia and Document Collection (Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2015), 577.
66 Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, De Mythe van het Westen. Amerika als het Laatste Wereldrijk (Amsterdam: Meulenhof, 1992), 237-238.
67 Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America (New York Penguin Books, 1986), 76.
68 Westad, The Global Cold War, 15.
69 Gordon H. Chang, Fateful Ties. A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 13.
act of humanity. He ensured on December 21, 1898 that the American mission towards the Philippines was one of “benevolent assimilation.”70 He confessed that;
The truth is, I didn’t want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods I did not know what to do with them. There was nothing left for us to do but take them all and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.71
Griffis proclaimed that the American victory in the Spanish-American war “made the Far East a Near West.”72 Many Americans saw the acquisition of the Philippines as a gateway to
China. If the United States had no interest in China, remarked one advocate of the annexation, “the possession of the Philippines would be meaningless.”73
An American missionary reported in 1934 that a “vast change” was coming over China.74 After the warlord era, marked by recurrent fighting and constant division, it was up to
the Nationalists to modernize post-imperial China. While American evangelicals looked to China as a new opportunity to convert people to Christianity, business leaders and the American government saw the country above all as a market for the expanding industrial production of the United States.75 In 1908, an editorial in the Journal of the American
Association of China stated that “the people of the nation acting as teachers to China will win
a popularity which will help to advance all relations between the two peoples-diplomatic, commercial, industrial, and social.”76 The United States increasingly saw China as a factor in
global affairs. According to historian Akira Iriye, Americans began to see Japan, instead of Russia, as their main competitor in China after its victorious war with Russia in 1904-1905. It was as if both the United States and Japan were competing for China’s friendship.77 While the
United States represented modernity, democracy, and was seen as the “epitome of progress,” Japan was seen as America’s antithesis, representing despotism and imperialism, a nation 70 William McKinley, Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, December 21, 1998,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=69309.
71 General James F. Rusling, "Interview with President McKinley" Christian Advocate, January 22, 1903, http://www.ksassessments.org/sites/default/files/HGSS_Preview_Texts/Grade_11/Interview%20with
%20President%20William%20McKinley.pdf. 72 Chang, Fateful Ties, 13.
73 Jeffrey A. Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 49-50.
74 Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2005), chapter 14, 4.
75 Jespersen, American Images of China, 43. 76 Quoted in: Akiria Iriye, Mutual Images, 90.
77 See also, for example, Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).
with an aversion to technology.78 Throughout the twentieth century, these recurring images of
the Chinese and the Japanese in the United States changed constantly, replacing one another as either good or evil, depending on their relationship with the United States.
1.2: America’s Purpose
One of the most vocal and influential supporters of an Americanized China during the 1930s and 1940s was the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune, Henry R. Luce, himself born to Presbyterian missionaries in the Chinese city Qingdao.79 To Luce and many other Westerners
in China, the outcome of the Chinese Revolution of 1911-1912 signified the nation’s “emergence into the modern world.”80 Luce passionately believed in America’s material
culture and its national purpose, and tried to persuade Americans of his personal belief that the United States and China shared a common future.81 To Luce, China beckoned in the same
way as it did decades earlier to the Christian missionaries, including his father. China was called “the lodestar, the goal.”82 Like many other prominent Americans of that era, Luce
vigorously believed that America had to assist China into modernity and introduce it to the American Way. Throughout his life, and with the help of his media outlets, he continued to stress the enormous importance to the world, especially to the United States, “of a free and democratic China.”83 The failure of his ambitions in 1949 with the defeat of Chiang
Kai-shek’s corrupt but pro-Christian regime left Luce bitterly disappointed.84
Luce’s magazines all reflected a certain collection of American values and assumptions that, at least according to Luce, were universal.85 His publications both reflected
and reinforced assumptions about China that already circulated in American society. The creation of Henry Luce’s media empire was part of the conception of American mass culture in the 1950s, the heyday of national magazines. Like his missionary parents, Luce had an evangelical sense of mission. Luce believed that Americans were the ones chosen by God, out of all peoples on earth, for a special mission since they were a “deeply religious and virtuous 78 Historian Akira Iriye has argued that, in the eyes of Americans, Japan experienced “The evils of pagan cults, a despotic government, and a primitive state of technology.” Its “people enjoyed none of the comforts of life accruing from free foreign trade.” Quoted in: Akira Iriye, “Minds Across the Pacific: Japan in American Writing (1853-1883),” Papers on Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 3.
79 Jespersen, American Images of China, 11-13.
80 Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 22. 81 In a letter to a friend who visited China after the Xinhai Revolution, Luce wrote that he would encounter “a great land, peopled by a great nation, endowed with a great past, overshadowed by a greater future.”
82 Jespersen, American Images of China, 24. 83 Ibid. Brinkley, The Publisher, 22-24.
84 Luce, bitter and dismayed after the Truman administration “lost China” in 1949, called president Truman a “vulgar little Babbit.” Quoted in: Brinkley, The Publisher, 22.
people who were supremely positioned to carry out God’s work on earth.”86 Luce strongly
believed that it was his duty as a publisher to “further those ends that naturally resulted from America’s unique moral and religious qualifications.”87 Luce gave his magazines a distinctive
and consistent voice. He wanted to mold American public opinion. Luce tried to fulfill his personal destiny by convincing Americans of his understanding of the United States and its destiny. Since he believed that the United States had a sacred mission to the world, Luce was determined to help achieve the fulfillment of that national purpose.88
Through his media outlets, Luce became one of the most vocal propagators of an Americanized China. He never abandoned his belief that China would eventually follow America’s example. However, Luce also knew exactly what Americans wanted to read, considering their uncritical attitude and willingness to accept his romantic and paternalistic view of China. According to historian Christopher Jespersen, Luce could “tap into longstanding cultural and historical symbols, apply them to China, and project them to millions of Americans.”89 Due to their trustworthy reputation and Luce’s shrewd manipulation
of his audience, the Time and Life magazines contributed heavily to the domestic hysteria following the loss of China in 1949. By connecting China with American ideals and events, Luce tried to promote his own misperceptions about a fictional harmony that many Americans in the next decade would fiercely demand to preserve. Like many Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, Luce firmly believed that Chiang and his wife embodied China’s future. It was a popular misconception among Americans at the time that Chiang, a converted Christian, represented China itself.90 While the China hands advised to pursue
closer relations with the Chinese Communists, both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Truman naively assumed that Chiang was the only leader who could unite and lead China.91
Clare Boothe Luce was just as vocal in her support for the Chiang’s as her husband. She asserted that under Chiang’s leadership, China was becoming a “modern, healthy nation.”92 She pleaded that the Chinese people, whom she absurdly called “our spiritual allies
86 Jespersen, American Images of China, 11-12. 87 Ibid, 11.
88 Ibid, 11-12. 89 Ibid, 12, 21-23.
90 John Paton Davies Jr., Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China
and One Another (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972). 338-339.
91 Ibid.
92 Speech by Clare Boothe Luce at United China Relief dinner, June 18, 1941. Quoted in: Jespersen, American
Images of China, 53-55. As Jespersen stated, United China Relief was an organization that tried to “sell” China
to the American people. Therefore, it had to reflect certain American values and ideals that corresponded with its audience. Jespersen argued that “by invoking episodes and images from America’s past and relating them to present conditions within China, UCR hoped to convince Americans that they had a significant stake in the
and our fellow Christians,” desperately needed more support and guidance in their heroic struggle against the Japanese. Since “over fifty percent of China’s leaders” were Christian, Luce claimed that China possessed the same religious spirit as the United States. Luce concluded by saying that Madame Chiang spoke “flawless, tumbling, forthright American.”93
1.3: A Damsel in Distress
The image of Chinese-American harmony began in the nineteenth century, when missionaries travelled to China with the intention to educate and Christianize its people. However, while the shared objective of defeating Japan already fostered the Chinese-American relationship during the early years of the Second World War, the visit of the American-educated Madame Chiang in 1943 further planted the illusion of Chinese-American harmony in the 1940s in American minds.94 With her public appearances in the United States during the 1940s,
drawing large and enthusiastic crowds, she became the leading symbol of a modern, Americanized China. As part of the modern and Christian leadership in China, her visit stirred sentimental and romanticized notions in the United States.95 Historian A. T Steele argued in
his work The American People and China that the popular saying at the time that Madame Chiang was worth ten divisions to the Generalissimo was no exaggeration in terms of her influence on American public opinion.96
Madame Chiang, whom Life magazine called “an even more exciting personality than all the glamorous descriptions of her,” visited the United States regularly in the mid-1940s.97
She was aware of the warm sentiments towards China in the United States and knew exactly how to spin American opinion towards the Nationalist cause. In May 1942, she wrote a lengthy article for Atlantic Monthly entitled “China Emergent,” which set the tone for her visit a year later.98 Its purpose was foremost to appeal to Americans by insisting that they shared
common ideals with the Chinese. Without subtlety, she even went as far to call China the “Columbus of democracy,” since she claimed that in ancient times Chinese emperors succeeded each other by their subjects’ wish instead of hereditary right. She argued that China, long before the West, embraced democratic ideals.99 If the United States would help
outcome of events there. 93 Ibid.
94 Peraino, A Force so Swift, chapter 24, 6. Jespersen, American Images of China, 82. Davies, Dragon by the
Tail, 186-187.
95 Jespersen, American Images of China, 82-83.
96 Archibald Trojan Steele, The American People and China (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). 97 Henry R. Luce, “China: To the Mountains,” Life, June 30, 1941.
98 Madame Chiang Kai-shek, “China Emergent,” The Atlantic, May 1942,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1942/05/china-emergent/306450/. 99 Ibid. Pakula, The Last empress, 34.
China in its fight against the Japanese, as equals, they could strive together to create a “world vitalized by new hopes and worshiping a more Christlike ideal.”100
There was a vast disparity between the picture of China that Madame Chiang presented to Americans and the true conditions in that country. Despite the authoritarian nature of her husband’s regime, Madame Chiang declared that she was opposed to any political system which would permanently give “absolute power to a single party.”101 While
Madame Chiang travelled through the United States in 1943 to garner sympathy and support, her husband’s government was increasingly showing signs of decay. According to historian Barbara Tuchman, the consensus of most American diplomats and correspondents was that “the Kuomintang was incompetent, corrupt, oppressive, unrepresentative, riddled by internal weakness and unlikely to last.”102
General Joseph Stillwell, who served in China during World War II, described Madame Chiang as follows in his diary:
A clever brainy woman. Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history. No concession to the Western viewpoint in all China’s foreign relations. The Chinese were always right; the foreigners were always wrong. Writes entertainingly but superficially, with plenty of sarcasm for Western failings but without mention of any of China’s little faults. Can turn on charm at will. And knows it.103
Madame Chiang arrived in New York on November 27, 1942. Feeling gravely ill and exhausted, she gave a short speech upon her arrival before checking in at the Waldorf-Astoria towers, taking the whole forty-second floor for herself. Due to her medical condition, doctors ordered her to rest for two to four months and to limit herself to no more than five speeches during her stay. Her months spent hidden from the public view only incited more curiosity over the purpose of her visit and the reports on her symptoms added more sympathy to her cause. On the eighteenth of February her tour began, as May-Ling would address both houses of Congress. Historian Laura Tyson Li has written that, prior to her speech, the “national exercise in hero worship reached a fever pitch; there was a tremendous and inexplicable thirst to simply ogle her.”104 Madame Chiang’s visit provided her and sympathetic Americans with
100 Madame Chiang, “China Emergent.” Jespersen, American Images of China, 90. 101 Ibid.
102 Barbara Tuchman quoted in Pakula, The Last Empress, 38. 103 General Joseph Stillwell, quoted in Pakula, The Last Empress, 33.
104 Madame Chiang was aware that she was up against many prejudices. Not only the many unfavorable American stereotypes of the Chinese, but also against their negative views of women. She knew she would be judged as much on her appearance as on what she would say. Tyson Li, Madame Chiang, chapter 13.
an opportunity to advance their convictions and put China in the minds of the American people. One month before she would embark on her tour, Frank W. Price, an American missionary in China, wrote to her that “China’s cause and China’s needs and the importance of the China front” had to be “dramatized.”105
The effect of Madame Chiang’s speech was spectacular, as its message struck a chord with American politicians. Even before she began to speak, she was given a four-minute standing ovation. As a fluent English speaker, she skillfully appealed to a deep American desire: they wanted to be admired, imitated and needed by weaker, “less civilized” peoples. In her speech, she thus portrayed the Chinese as a downtrodden but heroic people. One columnist wrote that sympathy for China swept the United States “like a tidal wave.”106 When
Roosevelt discussed the Sino-American relationship in one of his fireside chats, he said that the two countries were “closer together than ever before in deep friendship and in unity of purpose.”107
Madame Chiang captivated her mostly male audience with her exotic looks and mysterious background. According to Tyson Li, America’s sympathy for China’s ancient but weak civilization was strengthened by Madame Chiang’s femininity. She was too helpless to be dangerous, but exotic enough to be intriguing. She represented, as Tyson Li has argued, an excellent target for America’s “rescue complex:”
Madame Chiang projected the image of a tiny woman, frail yet valiant, being rescued by tall, strong, chivalrous male senators. China was the damsel in distress and America the knight in shining armor. It was a calculated strategy. She was aware of the power of her looks and her message. She knew her audience; she knew her part. And she played them both to perfection.108
Madame Chiang was the compelling image of the Americanized foreigner. Historian Jespersen has argued that she confirmed the American assumption that other nations could become like Americans, with great results. Newspapers commented that, as China’s first lady, her Christian religion and her relationship with the United States played a major role in the success of the Kuomintang. Various commenters came to the conclusion that much of 105 Ibid.
106 Tyson Li, Madame Chiang, 25. Before Madame Chiang’s visit, many Americans looked down upon the Chinese and saw their culture seen as inferior and incompatible with American ideals. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that now was “the time for the West to implant its ideals in the Orient, in such fashion as to minimize the chance of a dreadful future clash between two radically different and hostile civilizations.” 107 President Franklin Roosevelt, “Christmas Eve Fireside Chat on Teheran and Cairo Conferences,” December 24, 1943, in: Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses, 556.
Chiang’s “success in welding the warring factions of the nation together could be attributed to his religion and the influence of his wife.”109
Madame Chiang herself desperately wanted China to become “Americanized.” She argued that, despite some small differences, the values and culture of Americans and the Chinese were identical:
If the Chinese people could speak to you in their own tongue, or if you could understand our tongue, they would tell you that … fundamentally we are fighting for the same cause, that we have identity of ideals … I assure you that our people are willing and eager to cooperate with you in the realization of these ideals … for ourselves, for our children, for our children’s children, and for all of mankind.110
While Madame Chiang admired the American culture and its ideals in her articles and speeches, she also took the moment to subtly criticize American foreign policy. A report on public opinion in April 1942 observed that many Americans believed that their country should first and foremost be focused on defeating Japan.111 Not surprisingly, Madame Chiang seized
on this sentiment by saying that “it takes little effort to watch the other fellow carry the load.”112 The sympathy for China stemmed in a large part from the common fight against
Japan. Her plea that the United States should focus its attention on Imperial Japan instead of Nazi-Germany was met with cheering and applause.
In March 1943, Chiang gave another speech in Madison Square Garden, at the invitation of Henry Luce, before a crowd of almost 20.000 people.113 After being introduced
by Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for President, as the “avenging angel” and “the most fascinating” wartime leader, the crowd cheered as the Madame spoke of the teachings of Christ and China’s “titanic fight for a free and just world.”114 The level of
infatuation and excessive admiration in the United States towards Madame Chiang was enormous. One commentator called her “the most effective ambassador ever to represent a foreign power in the U.S.”115 The American press typically described her as “dazzling,” one of
the world’s “greatest personalities,” and as “one of the most powerful women in the world.”116
109 Jespersen, American Images of China, 89.
110 Address by Madame Chiang Kai-shek before US Congress, quoted in: Tyson Li, Madame Chiang, chapter 16, page 6.
111 Jespersen, American Images of China, 90. 112 Ibid.
113 Ibid, 99.
114 Tyson Li, Madame Chiang, 13. Fenby, Chiang Kai-shek, 22.
115 Economist Eliot Janeway stated in Fortune magazine that Madame Chiang “appeared before the country with no ulterior motives, either ideological or political.” Quoted in Pakula, The Last Empress, 36.
116 The excessive characterizations of Madame Chiang in the American press even continued after her death and helped shaped her legacy. See, for example, her obituary in The New York Times: Seth Faison, “Madame
According to the Boston Post, it was clear that “no other woman, and few men, made so profound an impression on the hearts and minds of the American people of this generation than has the gallant little First Lady of China.”117
Madame Chiang’s visit ensured that China was no longer a stranger to the United States. The New York Times wrote, in an article aptly named “Our Neighbor China,” that China “had risen to a new and splendid destiny. Freedom is being born beside her great rivers and in her mountains. In freedom and the hope of freedom she is not divided from us by the widest of seas.”118 The New York Herald-Tribune featured three editorials on Madame
Chiang’s visit in three days. Her ideas were “nothing exclusively or esoterically Oriental,” according to the newspaper. She expressed ideals that Americans considered “their particular, if not exclusive property.”119 The newspaper concluded that her visit showed many
Americans, on closer acquaintance, that they had a “spiritual kinship” with the Chinese.120
The South Atlantic Quarterly argued that Madame Chiang spoke on behalf of a China that possessed an “identical belief in democracy, an identical mainspring of thought and action.”121
It continued by saying that: “Anyone who has known Chinese people well knows them as one of the most naturally democratic peoples in the world, much more nearly kin to ourselves in this respect than many a European nation of ‘our own race.’”122
Madame Chiang’s visit to the United States was an immense success, deepening the affection for China in Washington and the rest of the country. James Reston, journalist for
The New York Times, remarked that Madame Chiang’s stay in the United States helped to
create in the minds of the American people a “most dangerous illusion.”123 Not only were
China and the United States seen as allies in their fight against the Japanese, but Americans also thought that the Chinese “believed in the same things, were fighting loyally together towards roughly the same objectives, and were represented by men of unquestioned honor and probity.”124
1.4: American Narcissism
Chiang, 105, Chinese Leader's Widow, Dies,” The New York Times, October 24, 2003. 117 Tyson Li, Madame Chiang, chapter 13, page 17.
118 “Our Neighbor China,” The New York Times, March 3, 1943, 22. 119 Quoted in Jespersen, American Images of China, 100.
120 Ibid. 121 Ibid, 101. 122 Ibid, 101-102.
123 Quoted in: Peraino, A Force So Swif, 260. 124 Ibid.
