Read China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice for Free Online Page A

appearances on the cover of Time, this one in August 1945. © 1945 Time Inc. All rights reserved (illustration credit 2)
    The savior-of-China, man-of-destiny image was reflected in the photographs of Chiang that appeared everywhere—schoolrooms, government offices, public squares, even, for a brief few years after the end of the war, over the massive entry gate to the Forbidden City in Beijing, long since replaced by a photograph of his great enemy, Mao. One of the standard pictures shows him in the military uniform favored by Chinese commanders in those days, with oversized epaulets, golden braids, sash and belt, and a constellation of saucer-sized medallions. His left hand is on the hilt of a sword, his shaved head and trim mustache somehow just a bit too small for all that paraphernalia. One of the covers of Time, this one published in 1933, has him on a white horse, in sunglasses, saluting. Other photographs show him in an elegant silk scholar’s robe, and in still others he smiles in avuncular, mustachioed fashion, the understanding, kindly, indulgent teacher of the Chinese nation.
    The images were all designed to convey a sense of the dignity, wisdom, and command due the leader of China, a spiritual force, as Han Suyin put it, and, if the image is to be believed, a tranquil, confident one. Henry Luce continued to convey this image to the American public until long afterChiang’s cause was lost. Other Americans with a more balanced, less rhapsodic vision of Chiang admired him despite his faults, and when a heavy cloud of disillusionment with Chiang took hold of many, perhaps most, in official American circles, these diehard supporters argued that his faults were being exaggerated and his virtues underplayed.
    ForAlbert C. Wedemeyer, who arrived in China late in 1944 as the commanding American military officer in the China theater, the astonishing thing was not how badly Chiang had done in the war but how well. Compared to Britain and the Soviet Union, he wrote, China had gotten only “a trickle of aid,” yet “she had managed to survive as a national entity in spite of Western indifference and neglect.” Wedemeyer made no secret of his disagreement with his predecessor, Stilwell, about Chiang. “Far from being reluctant to fight as pictured by Stilwell and some of his friends among the American correspondents,” Wedemeyer later wrote, China “had shown amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan.”
    Americans, in Wedemeyer’s view, failed to understand the sacrifices that China had made and the degree to which it had fought. The battle for Shanghai in 1937, he noted, was “the bloodiest battle that the world had seen since Verdun.” This was true. The battle for Shanghai belied the view that came to prevail later that China essentially had failed from the beginning of the anti-Japanese war to the end to resist the Japanese invasion. As a matter of historical fact, China’s resistance had been so fierce as to take the Japanese completely by surprise. At the outset of the war, the Tokyo militarists who pressed for the conquest of China had predicted that the fighting would be over in a few months. They did not predict that nearly eight years later, nearly one million Japanese troops would remain tied down in China. The British colonies of Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma fell to Japan almostwithout a fight. So did the sprawling Dutch-run archipelago of Indonesia, and ditto the Philippines, which was then an American colony. But China was still resisting, unconquered.
    And there was a comparison with Europe as well, in which Chiang emerged in a favorable light. Wedemeyer noted that China could have “followed France’s example and let herself be occupied, waiting to be rescued eventually by the United States.” But after the Japanese invasion of 1937, Chiang called on the Chinese people to go to the “limits of endurance” and to “sacrifice and fight to the bitter end,” a statement that