America in China

The great popular historian Barbara Tuchman, in her book Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945, examines in detail America’s efforts to use and shape  China after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in the early 20^th Century. She concentrates on military relationships but shows that US involvement throughout China during this time was broad and deep. 

Spiritually, China was viewed as nothing less than the possible savior of Christianity. Article by Catholics and Protestants compared the enthusiasm of Chinese converts to the listlessness and formal obeisances of Christians back home. There was talk of a glorious rebirth of the Spirit as was experienced in the 12th Century, or early 16^th Century, or 18^th Century, depending on your brand of Christianity. The various denominations owned hundreds of square miles of Chinese land. They built elaborate Gothic spires and simple red brick boxes, and constructed schools and hospitals financed largely by the small contributions of American believers; these were dangled as carrots to the Chinese faithful at a time of widespread social chaos.

Materially, China was assessed by hundreds of technicians as being enormously wealthy in natural resources. There was also an immense pool of the world’s cheapest labor, and large cities that were potentially lucrative markets for finished products. Businessmen of every type salivated at the possibilities.

Politically, Roosevelt and his advisors expected that after World War II a friendly China would exert control over all Southeast Asia. They wrongly assumed that Nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek had a firm grip on the country. The maps of China studied by schoolchildren then showed a China at its greatest historical size, including Outer Mongolia and much of what is now Laos and Vietnam. America would thus be able to pose as anti-colonialists, not allowing France or Britian to reenter Southeast Asia, while exerting effective control over their former colonies.

Intellectually, the most prestigious universities and technical training institutes in China were run by Harvard, Yale, and  the churches. Luminaries such as Hu Shih and Lin Yu Tang who dominated the magazines and publishing companies believed in liberal economics, democratic government and constitutional law. They regretted some of Chiang Kai Shek’s excesses but recognized that China’s illiterate masses would need guidance for an appreciable length of time.

America was more than willing to guide. There were tens of thousands of Americans in China during the 1920s and 1930s – economic advisors, Red Cross workers, preachers, doctors, teachers, geologists, Sinologists, merchants, sailors and soldiers. 

General Joseph Stilwell embodied the best qualities of our guiders. Intelligent and bluntly honest, he felt an often exasperated but deep love of the Chinese, who he knew over 32 years. He was fluent in several dialects of Mandarin and well acquainted with Chinese culture. As a military leader, there were none better in the entire US. Army. He had excellent rapport with both Chinese and American enlisted men and was a superb tactician, developing theories of attack and defense at Fort Benning in the early 30s under the leadership of George Marshall that were used with great success in World War II.

Stilwell’s task during his last six years in China was to coordinate the training of an effective army under Chiang Kai Shek that would fight the Japanese, who had an army of over a million men spread around the country. He left at Chiang’s insistence just after World War II and distilled his frustrations into a one-sentence diary entry on August 19, 1945: “We ought to get out – now.”

Tuchman recounts Stilwell’s experiences that led to this judgment. She concludes her book with:  “Stilwell’s mission was America’s supreme try in China. He made the maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less; he never slackened, and he never gave up. The mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell had built in 1921 had disappeared twelve years later. China is a problem for which there was no American solution. In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”

Her last sentence is not quite true. America’s efforts to sculpt China into its own design are now an integral part of the “Century of Humiliation” stretching from the Opium Wars of 1839 -1860 to the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, a time widely seen in China as a nightmarish deviation from its normal historical rhythms, imposed by Europeans for whom America became the tip of the spear.

This concept has legs. Narratives taken from it regularly trigger heated internet discussions and draw crowds to theaters. It justifies the hegemony of China’s current rulers and has a discernible part in galvanizing millions of people to work sufficiently hard and well that China is never, ever again treated by anyone as moldable clay. 

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