The China Mirage by James Bradley

The China Mirage History of American Disaster in Asia by James D. Bradley

Goodreads Review

INTRODUCTION and PREAMBLE and CAUTIONARY NOTE

 

 I really liked “The China Mirage” by James Bradley. I learned things and felt it was worthwhile reading. I say that now, because I need to point out much that is wrong with the book, (see below) or rather what some people, (such as serious historians) might say is wrong with it. I think this history is important though, (and it is forthrightly a history). 

 He covers the many examples of corruption, betrayals and cruelty alleged against the Kuomintang, but, again, says nothing of similar well documented instances against Mao. We (...us serious readers who are searching for some kind of truth…) have to be armored against all kinds of propaganda, and this technique of only reporting one side of a struggle is what the modern mainland Chinese party (CCP) uses (even today in the Covid era) to sell China to the Americans. The technique is to point out the easily provable failings of the West while refusing to acknowledge China’s own obvious failings in a serious way. This is why Bradley’s book has to be held to a different standard than for a more serious study. 

 

The argument for reading Bradley’s “The China Mirage” is that so-called serious studies have consistently missed the ‘Big Picture”. Bradley is trying to spotlight the “Big Picture”, to correct the propaganda imprint that the “China Lobby” has left on the American psyche. If you agree with Bradley’s premise, (Which I do) then you will like the book.

 

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Bradley puts you inside deliberations that are tragic-comic illustrations of extreme American hubris combined with profound ignorance. The book is about how America twisted and convoluted itself into a long standing “Asia Policy” that was based on delusional fantasy. 

“The China Mirage” is written as popular history, in the hope that a wider audience will understand how the US was duped, and how we seem to continue to be duped by the “China Lobby” and its (still) active descendants. There are many sub-themes in the book, but the overriding one is that in the mid-19th century, American Protestant missionaries sent back glowing letters about the “simple Chinese villagers” who were industrious, family-oriented, moral people who only needed to to hear the word of Christ to rise up and join the enlightened nations. At the same time, Yankee sea captains and second tier British aristocrats were making fortunes selling opium to those same simple villagers. So those two social forces - missionary zeal and massive fortunes made from drug dealing in the largest market on earth combined to drive conflicting fantasies about an Americanized China. 

 

 In the mid-19th century, America’s stumbling intrusion into Asia began with Commodore Perry’s “Gunboat diplomacy” in Tokyo Bay. Japan quickly saw how the technological and industrial might of the West gave it such a military advantage over Asian countries. Small and insular, the Japanese used both their social unity, and unique laissez faire (low taxes) attitude toward commerce to quickly begin to “catch up”. By “social unity” I mean the many layered, strict hierarchical social discipline that had been imposed by the Tokugawa Shogunate 200 years previously, and that was still maintaining sway when Perry arrived. Japan went from international seclusion and feudalism to a unique form of an expansive paternalistic military-Industrial oligarchy within two generations. Underneath the new system however, the old feudal system persisted, disguised with Western bureaucratic forms, but still underlying society. And in the end these sub-rosa feudal attitudes and inhibitions trapped Japan in an aggressive, “Samurai” posture when facing the world. Japan followed the example of the West by using colonialism to expand and capture natural resources. 

By the turn of the 20th Century, Japan had already defeated China in a war and taken Korea as a colony. Then Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, (on a Sunday morning), and defeated the Tsar’s empire pushing Russia out of East Asia. But Japan did not want a long drawn out war, so they asked Teddy Roosevelt to mediate a peace treaty. He brokered the deal in Japan’s favor. Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. Baron Kaneko, who reported directly to Prince Ito (who was the power and brains behind the Meiji Revolution, which signalled Japan’s move to westernise.). Kaneko, like Roosevelt a Harvard man, worked a brilliant con on Teddy and his fellow alumnus. He understood Teddy and the US, while no one in the US government knew anything about Japan. Teddy envisioned Japan as the leader of Asia, and himself as Japan’s big brother. TR wanted full access to China’s market, and he didn’t want to share it with Europe. Japan could play the heavy, protecting Asia from European poachers, while letting the US in the back door. The Japanese of course were not fooled. Diplomatically they made every signal that they agreed with Teddy’s vision, while they expanded and consolidated their colonies into China. 

 The story then switches to the rise of the Soong family. We learn how Charlie Soong arrived in the US as a laborer, became a Christian, and to avoid anti-Chinese violence on the West Coast, moved to North Carolina. A group of prominent Methodists, none of whom had ever met an Asian person before, took Charlie in. With their support, he studied English and ended up graduating from (what became) Duke University. With his wealthy American Christians contacts in hand, he returned to China and started a publishing company. His main product was Bibles (translated into Chinese) and with his American friend’s support, he sold millions of Bibles to US Missionaries, (who were generously funded from Protestant churches in the US). Needless to say, Charlie got rich. Charlie had six children. The most prominent were his three daughters, and a son, all of whom would graduate from prestigious US Universities. His children would form the backbone of a “dynasty” that would become enormously wealthy, be celebrated in the western press, and for a while, be the rulers of China. The eldest was Ailing, the often invisible power behind the Kuomintang Party, Chiang Kai Shek, and all of his generals. She was by all accounts the leader, and the effective ruler of China. Ailing married H.H. Kung, a descendant of Confucius, an early supporter of Sun Yatsen, and a minister in his government. Kung was the richest man in the world in the 1930s. Ailing had previously been Sun Yatsen’s secretary, but she didn’t submit to his sexual advances, so she promoted her sister Qingling to be Sun’s principal assistant. Qingling did not rebuff Sun.

 Qingling was the second daughter and she became Sun Yatsen’s very young wife and eventually heir to his legacy. After the Kuomintang’s bloody purge in 1927, (where many of Sun Yatsen’s closest followers were killed) Qingling rejected her family, and left Shanghai for Yan’an, Mao’s headquarters in Northern Shaanxi province. Qingling supported Mao and was on the podium in front of Tiananmen in 1949 when Mao proclaimed the founding of the PRC. She held a number of high, ceremonial posts in the CCP, suffered severe criticism and harassment during the Cultural Revolution and lived in Beijing until her death in 1981.

 The youngest sister, and the most attractive was Mayling, (Madame Chiang Kai Shek). She was bartered off to Jiang by her elder sister Ailing in order to cement Jiang’s “legitimacy”. According to Bradley, (the official account differs) Jiang was married already, but his old wife silently accepted the arrangement. The Soong family also included Harvard educated little brother T.V. Soong, who was the Finance Minister. That in a nutshell was the Kuomintang leadership in 1930, after the massive purging of leftist “allies” in 1927, of whom an estimated 300,000 were killed. Ailing was the brains of the gang and beautiful Mayling was the “front”. Mayling, as Madame Chiang Kai Shek, spoke with a beautiful southern-American accent and charmed the American power brokers who were “The China Lobby”. Bradley’s analysis of who “founded” the China lobby and how they became almost all powerful inside the American foriegn policy establishment is the central theme of the book. Those foriegn service officers, like John Service, who had lived in China during the war, spoke the language, and who had had contacts with Mao and his ministers before 1949 were drummed out of the State department by Joseph MacCarthy. The China Lobby used MacCarthy, but did not embrace him, because the China Lobby passed itself off as a high brow, Harvard kind of group, and while willing to use people like MacCarthy, otherwise wanted nothing to do with him.

 The China Lobby had many members of the Press “on the payroll”, as Bradley put it, notables such as Theodore White, Joseph Alsop to say nothing of Henry Luce himself. Many supporters were in Academia, as well as some of the most important politicians who came after World War II, including JFK, Nixon, along with many influential members of Congress and the Senate. The China Lobby created the “China Mirage”, which was the totally fabricated notion that China was on the verge of becoming a “Christian” nation that wanted to be like America. Neither side had a clear picture of what the “other side” was like or what they wanted. The China Lobby said that if the US helped the charming Mayling and her heroic husband, then the US could “change” China into a liberal Christian democracy, anti-Communist, and a reliable pro-American ally. In reality, according to Bradley, Jiang and the Soongs were a gang of grifters who personally skimmed much of the billions of dollars the US would give them to fight the Japanese. Even after the Japanese were defeated in 1945, when the battle raged against Mao, corruption in the Guomindang ran rampant. Mao was winning every battle, but the China Lobby Press, (ie. TIME magazine and the other Luce publications) refused to cover the military debacle that the US was bankrolling. Bradley says that the US fell into an unrealistic romance with an “oriental” version of Asia that never existed. He shows how the China Lobby continued to dominate the US’s Asian Foriegn policy long after Mao took power in 1949. Vietnam ended up playing out the same way that China did, where we propped up a Western educated Christian Vietnamese, (Ngo Dinh Diem) and his camarilla (Madam Nu) against a popular liberation front led by a charismatic leader(Ho Chi Minh). And even our most recent adventure in Afghanistan has many of the hallmarks of the “China Lobby”. We followed the same pattern of pumping billions in modern American weaponry (benefiting our own Military industrial complex while being paid for by taxpayers), while hoping that the supporters of our propped-up authoritarian grifter can fight off a popular, nationalistic insurrection. 

 Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather made his fortune selling opium in China as did many other founders of 19th century American fortunes, such as the Forbes family, the Perkins Family, the Cushings, and the Russell family - all of whom played a powerful part in portraying a peculiar portrait of China to the rest of the US. One of the primary China Lobby heavyweights who came from the missionary side of the Americans in China in the 19th century was Henry Luce. His parents were missionaries and he was born in China himself. He founded and edited TIME as well as LIFE magazine(s). China has always fired the imagination of the west. Popes, and emperors even neighbors like the Mongols who conquered China never seemed to get what it is about China that has this effect. Its vastness, its antiquity, the way it solved so many of the problems of civilization in such different ways from the manner that the west used, all have a way of getting into our heads and making us think that "if only..." they did this, or accepted that, then China could be - ???

 In "The Quiet American" the American Alden Pyle fantasizes about a "Third Force" not Communist, not Kleptocracy but a true blue movement of patriotic, democratic honest brokers who could somehow come to power in a nation like Vietnam. If trying to understand how we got conned by the China Lobby, I would recommend reading Graham Greene's novel. Its as good an explanation as any. Bradley believes, contrary to most historians, that if Roosevelt had trusted Mao, or at least had seriously engaged diplomatically with him, that the history of the CCP’s early rule after 1949 would have been different. Maybe no Korean War, no Vietnam war, and for China, more openness, less paranoia, no horrible internal decisions such as the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. While no one knows how the “what if” gambit would turn out, most historians think Mao would have turned China inward in any event. I am inclined to agree that Mao showed his radical agrarian, anti-democratic side early on in his history. And like most dictators, he couldn't admit he was wrong in large and important matters. But, the result might have been different on the margins, how much who knows. 

 But those kinds of predictions are not helpful, because they can not really be tested. Bradley’s prose is bitter at times, even cynical. Occasionally he is very funny. He has no domestic “partisan” agenda, as he makes clear that both Rs and Dems were equally in on the China Lobby. Most of his attacks are on the Roosevelts or their representatives. He has a lot of gossipy info and he “chains” events quite well, taking known events and putting in the transitions to help the reader understand “motivations”. As I said, sometimes it seems like a stretch. In spite of all my reservations about the “process” Bradley uses, I give it five stars, because I essentially agree with him on every point, having come to similar conclusions from study and experience.