The China Mirage

The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia

James Bradley 2015, Garden Home 327.510 BRA

• Author of Flyboys and Flags of Our Fathers

Bradley isn't fond of either President Roosevelt, and makes a case that their gullibility to Japanese and Chinese schemers led to the 1940s Pacific War, the Vietnam war, and a 50 year delay of normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China. I have friends in PRC, and also ROC (Republic of China), so what follows is Bradley's view, not mine.

Yankee traders from New England got fabulously rich smuggling opium into China, founding dynasties (like the Warren Delano's) in New England. First Opium war 1839-1842, Britain against China. Treaty of Nanking forced the establishments of dozens of treaty ports where foreigners could trade opium for silver. Americans Delano, Russell, Cushing, Perkins, Forbes, Low, and Green built New England's monuments and factories with opium profits.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's mother Sara spent two years of her father's Rose Hill mansion in Hong Kong, and she supported Franklin financially throughout his life.

5th cousin Theodore became president in 1901 when President McKinley was assassinated. T.R. was friends with fellow Harvard graduate Baron Kaneko, and disliked Russians. In 1882, the US and Korea signed a treaty of perpetual peace and friendship; in 1900 T.R. wrote "I should like to see Japan have Korea. She will be a check on Russia."

On February 8, 1904, Japan attacked Russian ships in Korean ports. T.R. approved, and welcomed Kaneko to Washington on March 26. The Japanese won battles at very high cost. In public, T.R. brokered an end to the war with the Portsmouth Peace Treaty in September 1905; in private, he furthered Japanese interests, and gave Japan control of Korea in that treaty. He told fables to his friends and was given the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize for that.

Churches in the United States sent many missionaries and lots of money to China, hoping to westernize the heathens. The missionaries mostly failed, but they didn't tell the churches. One of their few "successes" was Charlie Soong, an immigrant laborer in the US who skirted the 1882 Alien Exclusion Act by moving to North Carolina, becoming a Southern Methodist, and studying theology at Trinity College (renamed Duke University in 1924), then Vanderbilt in Tennessee, graduating and returning to China in 1886, where he became wealthy printing bibles. In 1894, Soong met Sun Yat-sen, who he lauded on fund-raising missions to the US as the "Chinese George Washington". Soong's 23 year old daughter Chingling married Sun in 1915. Soong died in 1918, daughter Ailing took charge of the family fortune, and daughter Mei-ling married Chiang Kai-shek in 1920.

Bradley writes of decades of U.S. financial aid to Chiang Kai-shek, which Chiang used to bribe warlords to stay in power, and to fight Mao. Bradley's book describes Mao fighting the Japanese, while Chiang fought Mao. Mao was an atypical Marxist; he focused on peasants ousting landlords and warlords in the countryside, while Marx wrote about urban workers ousting capitalists in industrialized countries.

China missionary's son Henry Luce founded Time, Life, and Fortune, and supported Chiang and the myth of the Noble Chinese Peasant hungry for Protestant Christianity. Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth" reinforced this mythos. When Japan invaded and colonized Taiwan and later Manchuria, US opinion was aroused against the Japanese, not because they continued the expansion that began with the Russo-Japanese War, but because they threatened a supposedly christianizing China.

• Note: The Pew foundation estimates more than 67 million Christians in the PRC today (4.7%, other estimates are 31 million), about half affiliated with the government registered Three-Self Church and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. ROC/Taiwan is 3.9% Christian (1.6% Han - perhaps 400,000, 2.3% aboriginal), thus the ROC Han majority may be "less Christian" than PRC. The 1940 population of Taiwans was about 6 million; about 1.2 to 2 million soldiers and civilians arrived from the mainland in 1948-1949.

Chennault's "Flying Tigers" were mercenaries with antique P40s; when they attacked Japan, they were routed and destroyed by the Japanese.

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