11
Revolutions in Nicaragua were a normal, almost routine, occurrence. Not so in China, among the oldest and most unchanging of nations, a land shaped by reverence for ancestors and respect for tradition. At the dawn of the twentieth century, absolute power was still exercised by mandarins clad in satin robes and skullcaps; women of good breeding still bound their feet, a ritualized torture that caused excruciating lifelong pain but was necessary in order to become a well-to-do wife or concubine; men from high-status families still studied the Confucian classics and calligraphy in order to take the series of examinations that would open the door to lucrative bureaucratic appointments; and countless peasants in blue cotton garb still eked out a meager living from the jade green earth, much as their ancestors had millennia ago, always one flood or drought away from starvation. Here and there, signs of a more modern (if perhaps less civilized) world could be glimpsed—steamboats on the Yangtze, a few railroads sprouting in the northern provinces, telegraph wires snaking between some major towns—but, for the most part, the Middle Kingdom clung to its old ways. China was like an exquisite porcelain doll, lovingly crafted by skilled artisans and carefully preserved over the centuries in a beautiful old lacquer cabinet that was growing musty with age and could not remain locked much longer.
The nineteenth century had brought momentous change. A growing Western and Japanese presence coincided with—and probably contributed to—major domestic upheavals, the biggest being the Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864. The Ching dynasty was unable to respond effectively. An initial burst of governmental reform in 1898 had ended after just 100 days, setting the stage for the xenophobic Boxer Uprising in 1900. In the decade after the foreigners’ suppression of the Boxers, the ruling Manchus tried halfheartedly to reform their government, to make it more “modern” and constitutional, but as in Russia, the monarchy’s reform efforts only spurred revolutionary upheaval. Anti-Manchu nationalism was on the rise among a younger generation of students trained in Western and Japanese learning. Most prominent among the intellectuals calling for a republic was Sun Yat-sen, a physician educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong who preached the virtues of the “Three People’s Principles,” nationalism, democracy, and socialism.
On October 10, 1911, a military mutiny against the Manchu authorities broke out in the industrial town of Hankow and quickly spread across the country. Just 83 days later, the abdication of the boy emperor Pu-yi ended two and a half centuries of Ching rule. Men across the land cut off their queues, worn as a symbol of subjugation to the Manchus. After more than two millennia of dynastic rule, the Chinese people had embarked on a brave, if short-lived, experiment in self-government.
The inspiration for the newly proclaimed republic came from Sun Yat-sen but its president became Yüan Shih-kai, an ambitious military commander who had previously served the Manchus. Yüan created a dictatorship and even tried to proclaim himself emperor, but his attempt to claim the Altar of Heaven failed. After his death in 1916, no strongman emerged to take his place. Sun Yat-sen briefly tried to establish his own regime in Canton but he was run out of the city by warlords. He died in 1925 a disappointed man, having seen his dream of a republican China dissolve into endless squabbling and warfare among competing regional warlords.
As we have seen, the U.S. had been drawn into the two other great revolutions that occurred during the second decade of the twentieth century—the Mexican revolution of 1911 and the Russian revolution of 1917. So too would America be drawn in by the ripples emanating from the overthrow of China’s imperial system in 1912. But like most things in the Middle Kingdom, the full implications of these events would take time to make themselves apparent.
Treaty Ports
For the most part, at least in the beginning, the clashes between warlords and the virtual dissolution of central government had little impact on foreigners, who lived in a world isolated from that of most Chinese. With the exception of some missionaries in the interior, most foreigners resided in “treaty ports” and “concessions” created by the treaties imposed by the West in the nineteenth century. The most important of these outposts was Shanghai, little more than a small, sleepy port surrounded by malarial wasteland when the Manchus had first turned over the area as a residence for foreigners in 1842. By the 1920s, it had become one of the great cities of the world, rich and cosmopolitan, with its stately Bund running along the waterfront, grand hotels and apartment houses, vast department stores and varied food shops, foreign and domestic banks, trading houses and factories, elegant clubs and seedy watering holes, opium dens and bordellos. Living here by 1930 were perhaps 3 million Chinese and 50,000 to 70,000 foreigners, 3,000 Americans among them, making this China’s largest city.
Like the other treaty ports and concessions, Shanghai was not technically a colony, but foreign residents could be forgiven for thinking it was. As a result of the unequal treaties, certain foreigners, Britons and Americans among them, enjoyed immunity from Chinese laws; they could be tried only by their own countrymen. (Germans and Russians were stripped of this privilege after the First World War.) They also had their own government, or rather two governments—one in the International Settlement (formed in 1863 by joining the American and British settlements), another next door in the French Concession, both run by municipal councils elected by a handful of foreign property owners. The Chinese remained in control of the parts of the city bordering the foreign settlements. Thus Greater Shanghai was split between three different governments, each with its own police force.
Chinese residents of Shanghai’s foreign settlements paid taxes but, until the late 1920s, had no representation on the city councils. Except for amahs (nannies) with their foreign charges, Chinese were not even permitted into the Public Gardens across from the British consulate (though, contrary to legend, there was no sign that proclaimed, No dogs or Chinese allowed). This naturally caused no end of resentment among Chinese nationalists, but they and their countrymen also benefited from Shanghai’s extraordinary economic success. It served much the same function as Hong Kong did until its handover to Beijing in 1997, providing a haven where the rule of law prevailed, taxes were low, government services worked, entrepreneurial energies could be unleashed, and a vigorous political and intellectual debate could take place. More daily newspapers were published in the International Settlement in the 1920s than in the rest of the country combined. Notwithstanding the usual urban problems—crime, poverty, pollution, racial tensions—millions of Chinese flocked to this bustling metropolis. So did countless refugees from across the world, ranging from White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks in the 1920s to German Jews fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.
The other treaty ports were smaller, tamer versions of Shanghai: the Chinese city a crowded maze of bustling alleys and lanes, full of noise and smells, shanties and food stalls, dirt and beggars, lepers and wild dogs; and nearby, separated by high walls and iron gates, the foreign concession: broad, tree-lined avenues, clean and quiet, solid brick buildings, spacious houses with large verandahs, and pleasant parks, with only the omnipresent “coolies” pulling rickshaws or carrying food baskets, to remind a foreigner that this was not Birmingham or Baltimore.
“By Bluff Alone”
Connecting the treaty ports in central China was the Yangtze River, 3,500 miles long, originating in Tibet and flowing a winding course to empty in the muddy waters of the Yellow Sea near Shanghai. The Yangtze watershed contained almost half of China’s population. And patrolling it were foreign warships, including the U.S. Navy’s Yangtze River Patrol. Though the YangPat, as it was known in navy jargon, was not officially organized until 1919, U.S. warships had been regularly navigating the Middle Kingdom’s largest and most important waterway since the pioneering voyage of the USS Susquehanna in 1854.
Until 1925 the YangPat relied on six ramshackle gunboats captured from the Spanish by Admiral Dewey in 1898. Because the Yangtze became shallower the farther one went inland, only two of the vessels, the Palos and Monocacy, were able to navigate the entire length of the river in winter when the water was at its lowest. All were underpowered and lightly armed. In 1925 Congress authorized the construction of six new gunboats specifically designed for the Yangtze: the Guam, Tutuila, Oahu, Panay, Luzon, and Mindanao, all named for American colonial possessions in the Pacific. There were also some destroyers and a few other sundry vessels assigned to regular duty in China.
They were part of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, which in 1925 consisted of one heavy cruiser, 20 destroyers, 12 submarines, 11 gunboats, and various tenders and transports. The fleet spent the fall and winter at Cavite in the Philippines, the summer cruising along the coast of China. The Asiatic Fleet’s primary mission was to prepare for war against Japan. Under War Plan Orange, first begun in 1904 and revised constantly during the 1920s, it was supposed to shield the Philippines and America’s other Pacific possessions long enough for the main U.S. battle fleet to steam across the Pacific and defeat the Japanese navy.
The Yangtze River Patrol, a bunch of tin buckets with pop guns, obviously could do little against the Imperial Japanese fleet. Its task was simply to police the river, protecting the lives and property of American traders, civilian sailors, and missionaries—and keeping the Open Door from slamming shut. Unlike other nations, the U.S. did not seek to carve out its own quasi-colonial sphere of influence; the U.S. policy, first articulated in two famous diplomatic notes in 1899 and 1900, was to preserve the “Chinese territorial and administrative entity” and safeguard “for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.” Commerce with China amounted to less than 4 percent of U.S. foreign trade during the 1920s, but Washington felt responsible for securing American treaty rights. “It is our wish,” said Rear Admiral William Phelps, YangPat commander in 1923, “to make every American feel perfectly safe in coming to the Yangtze Valley to live or to transact business.”
This was no easy job given the weak central government in China and the corresponding rise in lawlessness. The gunboats would often land parties of armed sailors to protect foreign settlements from bandits and warlord troops, categories that were frequently indistinguishable. The handful of U.S. merchant ships on the Yangtze were also in constant danger. The Yangtze Rapids Steamship Company, the C. R. Cox Company, and the Dollar Steamship Company ran passenger and cargo service along the river, while the Standard Oil Company of New York (forerunner of Mobil) operated a number of refineries and tankers to supply kerosene and oil for Chinese lamps. Some warlords would try to requisition these U.S.-flagged vessels at gunpoint to transport their troops. Others would try to exact “taxes” on the stretch of the river they controlled.
In response, bluejackets sometimes served as guards aboard merchant vessels; at other times a gunboat would escort merchantmen. A typical incident: On July 20, 1920, the SS Alice Dollar, a U.S.-owned steamer, is heading for the treaty port of Chungking, 1,400 miles from Shanghai, when she is fired on from shore by warlord troops seeking to collect a toll. The following day the USS Monocacy takes her under escort; the gunboat in turn receives a steady round of fire from the riverbanks, which she returns with her six-pound cannon and .30 caliber machine gun. Two Monocacy men are lightly wounded in this half-day operation. Often in this type of escort operation, the YangPat cooperated closely with the Royal Navy, which had 15 gunboats of its own on the river. These missions usually involved no combat; it was simply a matter of showing the flag and deterring any violence against Americans. The only fighting the U.S. bluejackets regularly engaged in were brawls with other nations’ sailors in waterfront dives.
For a sense of what it was like to be a “river rat”—as the Yangtze patrollers called themselves—there is no better source than the novel The Sand Pebbles, written by Richard McKenna, a navy enlisted man who served on the river in the late 1930s. (It was made into a 1966 movie starring Steve McQueen.) The action is set in 1925 aboard the USS San Pablo, nicknamed the Sand Pebbles, a decrepit old gunboat captured from the Spanish in 1898—just like its real-life counterpart, the USS Villalobos. “She looked stubby and blocky and topheavy . . . more like a house than a ship,” and did not have much by way of armor, ordnance or speed. But the old Sand Pebbles had other compensations, as petty officer Jake Holman, the novel’s protagonist, discovers. The bunks are softer and wider than normal in the navy and are spaced farther apart. Quite a contrast to a typical fleet vessel where “Somebody’s rump sagged in your face and someone else’s feet were next to your pillow.”
Better still: “Just about everything a sailor had to do for himself on other ships was done for him on this one.” Chinese laborers ran the engine room, swabbed the decks, shaved the men, cleaned their clothes, cooked their meals. Jake is amazed to discover how fresh and plentiful and delicious the food is. There are even fresh eggs—as many as a man can eat. “Any chow on here’s better than a holiday dinner in the Fleet,” he crows. And all these delicacies cost the sailors relatively little; they merely turn over 10 percent of their monthly paychecks to Lop Eye Shing, the ship’s “number one boy,” actually an old, partially paralyzed man, who pays all the laborers and takes enough “squeeze” off the top to make himself wealthy in the bargain.
While Chinese laborers take care of the normal tasks of running a ship, the bluejackets concentrate on strictly military functions: training to repel boarders, fire the ship’s guns, and serve as landing parties. It is not unusual for the San Pablo’s 50 men to confront a mob of thousands of Chinese threatening some foreign concession—and to carry the day without firing a shot. “As a fighting machine, San Pablo was a joke,” acknowledges its skipper, Lieutenant William Collins. “In a genuine battle he could not whip even General Pan’s ragtain army, let alone 40 million Hunanese. He was a man with a kitchen chair in a cage full of tigers.” So what made the San Pablo, and its real-life counterparts, effective tools of policing? “Faith made San Pablo invincible in Hunan. Faith kept the tigers believing that they were house cats.” Faith in the power represented by the Stars and Stripes flying prominently on the San Pablo’s mast. Some Chinese mothers were so convinced that the U.S. had the Mandate of Heaven that, legend has it, they embroidered crude American flags on their babies’ shoes to ward off devils. Thus the Yangtze Patrol’s mission was to maintain “face” by making a display of military prowess while doing everything possible to avoid being put to the test of battle. Not unlike a big-city police force, which flourishes firearms but tries to use them only as a last resort.
The U.S. garrisons in Tientsin and Peking played a similar role. They had been established under the Boxer Protocol, signed in 1901, which gave the Western powers and Japan the right to permanently station troops in those two cities. Even after the bulk of the military forces sent to rescue the foreign legations went home, the U.S. kept a marine guard in Peking that, by the mid-1920s, numbered 400 to 500 men. Starting in 1912, another 700 to 1,000 men from the army’s 15th Infantry Regiment were stationed in Tientsin, putting them in position to rush to Peking and rescue the legations in case of another outbreak of antiforeign violence.
In 1924–1925, as fighting between warlord troops raged across north China, leaderless soldiers streamed toward Tientsin. The 15th Infantry sent out small detachments to make sure that none entered the foreign concession. One such detail, 28 men under the command of Sergeant Karl Grahlberg, was armed to the teeth with Springfield rifles, Browning Automatic Rifles, Colt .45 automatic pistols—but no ammunition, save for five rounds for the sergeant’s own sidearm. Instead they were given baskets of rice, tea, and cabbages to hand out to the warlord soldiers in exchange for their firearms. “The high command didn’t want Karl to initiate a war of his own there in the hinterland,” wrote a 15th Infantry veteran. “If he was to carry out his mission, he would have to carry it out by bluff alone.” In this instance, as on so many others, the 15th Infantry lived up to its pidgin English motto: Can Do. The warlord soldiers accepted their rations and gave Tientsin a wide berth.
This policing mission—today it would be called peacekeeping—had little in common with the type of service experienced by millions of draftees in the First or Second World Wars, but it was perfectly amenable to the volunteer soldiers and sailors serving on the China station. Many were long-term enlistees from the margins of society. Jake Holman himself was there only because a judge gave him the choice of the navy or reform school—a not uncommon situation. In the navy, Jake and his real-life counterparts found a home. While the duty was largely a boring routine, as it so often is in peacetime, there were plenty of opportunities for R&R in the bars and whorehouses of treaty ports. (“The most of it goes for likker and wimmen,” one sailor wrote of his pay. “The rest I spend foolishly.”) Some River Rats even settled in China after retirement, opening a bar and shacking up with a “pig,” as the sailors affectionately referred to Chinese girls. Life in China with the navy was in many ways more pleasant than their existence back home.
Northern Expedition
This free and easy life was interrupted in 1925 by the outbreak of the Nationalist revolution; from 1927 to 1928, when the revolution was at its height, the Yangtze Patrol would be involved in no fewer than 37 skirmishes. Nationalist sentiment had been building among China’s students and intellectuals for some time, nationalism being a nineteenth-century European import that had finally taken root. The students were doubly disgusted by native warlordism and foreign imperialism. These impulses were channeled by two powerful new forces: the National People’s Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), organized by Sun Yat-sen, and the Chinese Communist Party, organized under Moscow’s guidance. In 1923–24 the KMT and the Communists joined together in a common front. Their immediate goal was to solidify their rule in the area around Canton, but in the meantime, agitators stirred up outbreaks against foreign domination further north.
A series of worker strikes and demonstrations in Shanghai led on May 30, 1925, to a march by some 2,000 demonstrators shouting, “Down with imperialism!” A British officer feared that his police station would be stormed, and just a few seconds after shouting a warning to disperse, he ordered his Chinese and Sikh constables to open fire. Eleven protesters were killed, 20 wounded—few enough deaths given the violence racking China at this time, but these were deaths caused by foreigners, and that made all the difference. The May 30th Incident, as it became known, sparked strikes, protests, and boycotts across the country. A month later, on June 23, another serious incident occurred in Canton. Thousands of protesters, including armed military cadets, tried to storm a bridge leading from the city proper to the foreign settlement on Shamian Island. In the ensuing melee, British troops killed 52 demonstrators and wounded 100. This poured more fuel on the fires of Chinese nationalism, enough to singe foreigners standing too close to the flames; Hong Kong was practically paralyzed by strikes for 16 months.
Unlike in the past, most of the anger this time was directed at Britons and Japanese, viewed as the most oppressive imperialists in China, but Americans living in the same concessions could hardly remain aloof. After a general strike was declared in Shanghai the State Department agreed to land American sailors and marines “to afford adequate protection to American lives and property,” though ostensibly not to defend the International Settlement itself, which was seen in Washington as an unfortunate relic of imperialism. By early June 1925, the U.S. had more than 400 servicemen ashore and 13 warships at anchor in Shanghai, the second largest military force in the area after the British.
Amid all this turmoil, the Nationalist army surged out of its Canton base. Its leader was Chiang Kai-shek, a protégé of the late Sun Yat-sen who had visited the Soviet Union to study Red Army methods and then opened the Whampoa Military Academy to train a new generation of Chinese officers. In July 1926, at the head of 6,000 Whampoa cadets and 85,000 troops, assisted by Soviet advisers and supplies, Chiang embarked on his long-planned Northern Expedition to defeat the warlords and unify all of China.
Because of the KMT’s alliance with the Communists, many Westerners, especially businessmen and soldiers, viewed the Northern Expedition as Bolshevism on the march and Chiang as a tool of the Comintern. Others, mainly missionaries, idealized it as the last, best hope for good government in China. Neither view would be vindicated by events.
Nanking Incident
By the fall of 1926, having met little resistance from the poorly organized warlords in their path, Chiang’s surging armies had reached the Yangtze. Fighting now swirled around cities with sizable foreign populations. Early in January 1927, the British abandoned the Hankow and Kiukiang concessions to Chinese mobs, being careful to avoid another May 30th Incident but suffering in the process a great loss of “face.” Or so crusty old China hands told one another over tumblers of whisky in their Shanghai clubs.
On the night of March 23, 1927, the Nationalist army entered Nanking, which had no foreign concession but was the center of American missionary activity in the Yangtze River valley. Several days earlier small parties of U.S. sailors had landed to evacuate the American community, but a number of longtime residents had refused to leave. Among those still trapped inside the city were Pearl Buck and her family. Not yet a famous novelist, Buck was the daughter of Protestant missionaries and had lived most of her life in China. She spoke fluent Mandarin and had always gotten along well with the Chinese but now, for the first time, she feared for her life. And with good reason. The American vice president of Nanking University, a Christian college where she taught, was killed; an American woman, a missionary, was seriously wounded. In all, six foreigners would be killed in Nanking. The future author of The Good Earth narrowly avoided their fate.
Buck’s gray brick house was broken into and looted by a mob while she and her family scuttled into a kindly Chinese neighbor’s mud hut. Here they hid, trying desperately to keep their small children from making a sound, while Nationalist soldiers marched through the neighborhood. At any moment, she feared they would be dragged out and murdered. “In the midst of this desperate waiting suddenly we heard a frightful noise, a thunder, rumbling over the roof,” Buck wrote. “What was it? It came again and again. It could only be cannon. But what cannon? The Chinese had no such cannon as this, deafening us, roaring above the human shouts and cries.” It took her a moment to realize: “Foreign cannon—the warships in the river!”
And so it was.
The U.S. destroyers Preston and Noa had arrived off Nanking several days before to evacuate the American community. British and Japanese warships came on a similar mission. This did not deter KMT troops from attacking both the Japanese and British consulates; several Britons and the Japanese consul were wounded. Despite the protection afforded by a small party of U.S. sailors, U.S. Consul John K. Davis decided that the consulate building was no longer safe. On March 24, 1927, he and his wife set out, accompanied by a small party of sailors and some missionaries, to seek refuge two-and-a-half miles away in the hilltop house occupied by the local representative of the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony). They were attacked along the way, with a navy enlisted man and a Chinese servant being wounded and the sailors shooting two of the attackers in return. Finally they reached Socony Hill and joined other Americans and some British consular officials trapped inside—52 foreigners in all.
Throughout the day Chinese soldiers bent on loot and perhaps worse approached the house. The foreigners handed over all their money and valuables but soon there was no more left to give, and still the soldiers kept coming. At 2:53 P.M., three navy signalmen atop Socony Hill braved sniper fire to send a message by semaphore to the foreign warships anchored in the river: “We are being attacked. Open fire. SOS SOS SOS.”
The skipper of the USS Noa, Lieutenant Commander Roy C. Smith, saw the signal. Like most captains in the Yangtze Patrol, isolated a long way from headquarters, he did not have the time or means to get orders before acting. He knew that Washington did not want its representatives starting a war in China, but he also knew he could not simply leave the Americans in Nanking to their fate. He told his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Staud, “Well, I’ll either get a court martial or a medal out of this. Let her go, Bennie!” With that, the Noa’s 4-inch guns unleashed a salvo into the hills of Nanking, soon to be joined by the Preston and the British cruiser Emerald. It was this gunfire that Pearl Buck, hiding in the city, heard as distant thunder. Three Japanese destroyers moored nearby did not open fire, but at each blast from the Anglo-American vessels their crews yelled a loud “Banzai!”
“The gunfire was most effective and undoubtedly saved all our lives,” wrote Ensign Woodward Phelps, one of the Americans trapped on Socony Hill. “Missionaries in the interior who were being looted stated that all looting ceased when the bombardment commenced. At Socony Hill the soldiers ran like scared rabbits, but not until we had killed three or four of them ourselves.” As soon as the soldiers disappeared, the Socony Hill refugees made ropes out of sheets and lowered themselves down the 60-foot wall at the foot of the hill. Then the ragtag party—48 men, two women, two children—walked a mile to the river, commandeered three sampans, and finally reached the safety of the American warships.
That still left some 90 American men, 40 women, and 20 children trapped inside Nanking. The senior British and American naval officers on the spot issued an ultimatum to the Chinese authorities: either produce the refugees or Nanking would be shelled. All the Americans, including Pearl Buck and family, were delivered safely by the evening of March 25, 1927. It was a bittersweet salvation for the missionaries, many of whom had long resented the quasi-colonial foreign military presence in China and had sympathized with the aspirations of Chinese nationalists. “All my life I had seen those gunboats in the river, and I had wished that they were not there. I had felt they should not be there, foreign warships in Chinese interior waters,” Pearl Buck wrote. “Now such a ship was saving me and mine and taking us to a refuge.”
For unleashing the Noa’s guns, Lieutenant Commander Smith received neither a court-martial nor a medal, but his “cool-headed judgment” was applauded by his boss, Rear Admiral H. H. Hough, commander of the Yangtze Patrol.
General Duckboard
Admiral Clarence Williams, commander of the Asiatic Fleet, wanted to exact revenge for the Nanking “outrage” by pounding various KMT military installations in cooperation with the British, French, and Japanese. A few decades before, Theodore Roosevelt would no doubt have jumped at the opportunity. But America’s chief executive was now a reserved, taciturn New Englander whose cautious personality was far removed from Roosevelt’s high spirits and love of warfare for its own sake. The world situation, too, was different from Roosevelt’s day. Imperialism was on the wane, and the Middle Kingdom, teeming with Chinese soldiers armed with modern weapons, was no longer the pushover for Western militaries that it once had been. Calvin Coolidge had no desire to be drawn deeper into a war in China; he refused Admiral Williams’s request to teach the KMT a lesson. Instead the Yangtze Patrol was ordered to evacuate American civilians and diplomats from all treaty ports below Hankow, and to bring the refugees to Shanghai.
President Coolidge did, however, reluctantly agree to dispatch the 4th Marine Regiment from San Diego to help defend Shanghai’s International Settlement from the advancing Nationalist armies. By mid-1927, the U.S. had more than 5,600 soldiers in China. To command the marines, the president summoned Old Gimlet Eye, Brigadier General Smedley Butler, ballyhooed by Time magazine as the “Premier ‘Fighting Devil’ Among ‘Devil Dogs.’”
It is worth taking a moment to catch up on Butler’s doings since we last encountered him commanding the Gendarmerie d’Haiti (after having already fought in the Spanish-American War, Philippine War, Boxer Uprising, Nicaragua, and Veracruz). As soon as America entered World War I, Butler became desperate to fight on the Western Front. For almost a year his urgent entreaties were ignored by marine headquarters, which, much to his chagrin, deemed him irreplaceable in Haiti. He was not sent to France until September 1918, just a couple of months before the armistice, and even then he was not ordered to the front but assigned to run Camp Pontanezen, a supply base on the French coast for the American Expeditionary Force.
Though disappointed, Butler tackled this job with his customary verve. When numerous requests through “channels” failed to produce the wooden duckboard needed to cover the camp’s sea of mud, he simply marched his men to an army warehouse and liberated what he needed. Thus he gained a new nickname: General Duckboard. By the time he left France in July 1919, Butler had earned plaudits and a promotion to brigadier general for his skill in reorganizing the AEF’s main transit and supply depot.
Back in the States, Butler took over command of the marine base at Quantico. Peacetime duty could not satisfy this warrior, however. When the mayor of Philadelphia asked him to take over the police department of his crime-ridden hometown, Butler jumped at the chance. President Coolidge granted him leave from the corps and in 1924 he was installed as Philadelphia’s Director of Public Safety. The teetotaling Quaker general proved to be an indefatigable and incorruptible enforcer of Prohibition. Too indefatigable and incorruptible. He caused a backlash among prominent citizens who did not want their vices interfered with and wound up being fired by the same mayor who had hired him.
In 1926 Smedley returned to the corps as commander of the San Diego barracks only to find himself in the middle of another high-octane controversy. After his second-in-command, Colonel Alexander S. Williams, showed up visibly drunk at a hotel, Butler ordered him court-martialed—to hoots of derision from “wets” across the country. Smedley’s public reputation did not improve when Williams was convicted, demoted, and transferred to San Francisco, where he drove his car off a pier and drowned in a possible suicide. But Butler bulled on, taking command of 2,500 marines called out to guard mail trains in the western United States after a series of violent robberies. He had just successfully completed this assignment when early in 1927 he received orders to sail to China.
“Shanghai Has Become Red”
Brigadier General Butler arrived in Shanghai on March 25, 1927, the day after the siege of Socony Hill had been lifted in Nanking, 160 miles away. Panic was running high among the foreign residents of Shanghai. Communist workers had already staged a general strike and armed insurrection in the Chinese part of the city. The local warlord troops, poorly trained peasant conscripts, fell apart; in panic some of them tried to force their way into the International Settlement, only to be mowed down by British rifle and machine gun fire. By the time Nationalist troops marched into the Chinese sections of Shanghai on March 22, the city was already in the hands of the Communist labor union. Posters screamed, Exterminate the feudal forces!, workers paraded with red armbands, and any Chinese who cooperated with foreigners was denounced as an “imperialist running dog.” “Shanghai has become red,” exclaimed a French nun.
The Shanghai Municipal Council, which governed the International Settlement, responded by declaring a state of emergency, calling out the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (1,500 militiamen under British command), and requesting additional assistance from the dozens of foreign warships anchored offshore. Some 20,000 foreign troops were landed, the largest contingent being 13,500 British soldiers. They crouched behind barbed wire and sandbags, ready to repel any attack on the International Settlement.
Admiral Williams agreed to land 1,500 marines but would not permit them to man the perimeter, in keeping with the Coolidge administration’s policy of protecting American lives and property in China but not “the integrity of the [International] Settlement.” In practice this was a distinction without a difference, but it was an attempt, however clumsy, to suggest that the U.S. was not an imperial power like the others. The U.S. also offered to renegotiate the unequal treaties, though little was done to match words to deeds. In keeping with administration policy, Smedley Butler limited his marines to patrolling the interior of the International Settlement, “prepared to frustrate any attempts on the part of our own servants to murder us in bed.”
The attempt never came. Instead it was the Communists who were murdered. Chiang Kai-shek had been willing to make common cause with the Communists, but now that all of southern and central China was in his grasp he decided to double-cross his putative allies before they could double-cross him. Starting on April 12, 1927, Nationalist soldiers and their underworld allies attacked the Reds, beginning in Shanghai and moving on to other towns, killing thousands and arresting more. They dealt the Communists a series of swift, hard blows that left them reeling.
To replace his Communist backing, Chiang sought and found support among wealthy bankers, industrialists, and organized crime figures in Shanghai. He also shed his movement’s xenophobic rhetoric and appealed for help from Western and Japanese governments. In the eyes of the American public, Chiang’s transformation into a sympathetic figure was completed in December 1927 when he married Soong Mei-ling, the Wellesley-educated daughter of a prominent Chinese financier, in a Christian ceremony in Shanghai.
With the consolidation of Chiang’s power along the Yangtze and his purge of the Communists, the foreigners in Shanghai could finally afford to exhale. Life returned to its normal round of cocktail hours and dances, race meets and tennis matches. The marines’ major concern shifted from the Communist threat to the British threat, the threat being that the “limies,” as Smedley Butler called them, might outshine U.S. troops in spit and polish displays. The leathernecks rose to the challenge by nickel plating their weapons, burnishing entrenching tools, polishing helmets, and “secretly” training a band. At a review of all the foreign troops in the city they won top honors.
Mission accomplished!
Northern China
More serious work awaited the marines in China. Anticipating that Chiang Kai-shek would march north with the ultimate objective of seizing Peking, in June 1927 Butler and his men shifted their operations from Shanghai to the Peking-Tientsin corridor. Both cities had sizable foreign populations and, as a result of the Boxer Protocol, garrisons of foreign troops to protect them. In Peking there were 500 “horse marines”; in Tientsin, 900 men from the army’s 15th Infantry Regiment. Butler brought more than 3,000 marine reinforcements to Tientsin, accompanied by artillery, machine guns, light tanks, and 20 airplanes. This gave the U.S. a formidable force in the area but greatly annoyed the 15th Regiment’s officers, who were to be placed under Butler’s command in the event of hostilities.
Chiang’s much-anticipated march north was delayed; he was still distracted mopping up Communists and warlords in the south. This left the marines, camped out under the pitiless summer sun on Woodrow Wilson Boulevard in the Tientsin Foreign Concession, with little to do. Butler drilled his men to a high state of readiness so that they would be able to reach Peking and evacuate U.S. diplomats if another Boxer-like incident occurred. As part of this task, the marines worked on improving the roads between Tientsin and Peking—a job that Butler, drawing on his road-building experience in Haiti, tackled with gusto. One Chinese village was grateful enough for the marines’ help to present Butler with a Ten Thousand Blessings Umbrella, a scarlet silk canopy on 12-foot poles that was traditionally given to great public benefactors.
When, on Christmas Eve 1927, the Standard Oil installation outside Tientsin caught fire, the marines pitched in to help put out the flames, with Butler playing fire chief. This firefighting was not entirely altruistic, since the ability of marine trucks and airplanes to operate depended on having access to Socony’s gasoline.
But for the most part the marines’ mission was aptly characterized by Smedley Butler as “grueling monotony.” It was quite a contrast from the last time Butler had visited Tientsin, during the Boxer Uprising. Then the emphasis had been on daring offensive action. Now the marines had an even more difficult task: to restrain their eagerness for battle. “I continually lectured the men that our purpose now was peaceful and that we weren’t carrying any chips on our shoulders that might lead to fighting,” Butler wrote. “I was tolerating no clashes with the Chinese people. I warned them that if a Marine so much as laid a hand on a rickshaw coolie he would be court-martialed.” Despite some incidents of rowdyism, the marines generally obeyed Butler’s edict and carried out their mission peacefully.
Things got more exciting early in 1928, when Chiang Kai-shek’s armies finally resumed the last phase of the Northern Expedition. On May 3–5 the advancing KMT armies clashed with Japanese troops around Tsinan, capital of Shantung province. Ostensibly the Japanese troops were merely protecting their fellow countrymen living in Tsinan; in reality, the Japanese were becoming alarmed about the prospect of a strong China united under the Kuomintang and were trying to stymie Chiang Kai-shek. Though the Japanese held onto Tsinan and the rest of the province, the Nationalist armies simply took a detour and reached Tientsin a week later.
With the arrival of the KMT army, most of the warlord soldiers withdrew north, leaving considerable chaos in their wake. Smedley Butler estimated that for about a week 150,000 Chinese troops of various factions were within 10 miles of the Tientsin concession. But all gave it a “wide berth” because of the presence of 15,000 foreign troops. The general in charge of the Japanese garrison at Tientsin, apparently itching for a replay of Tsinan, urged joint international action that would be likely to precipitate a confrontation with the Chinese. The U.S. vetoed this plan. Instead Butler maintained cordial relations with the various Chinese generals and made sure they respected American lives and property. “Had we not been in such strength we would have had trouble,” Butler wrote.
Thanks in part to the American role in blocking Japanese interference, Chiang Kai-shek took Tientsin and Peking peacefully. China was now at least nominally united under KMT rule. Although Chiang’s hold was very tenuous, northern China did quiet down for the time being. By early 1929 the marines were withdrawn from Tientsin, leaving behind the army’s 15th Infantry Regiment.
Smedley Butler basked in the success of his marines in preserving the peace but privately griped to the corps commandant, his friend John Lejeune, that “the American government is wasting its biggest ammunition”—the marines—“on sparrows.” Although “we can do this traffic duty better than anyone else,” he suggested that it should be turned over to “inferior forces,” meaning the army, and that the devil dogs should be reserved “for real ‘rough and tumble’ service such as we are now having in Nicaragua.” Butler’s complaint again underlined the fact that even soldiers with vast experience in peacekeeping operations preferred, if possible, warfighting.
“I Was a Racketeer for Capitalism”
Butler returned home in 1929 and was promoted to major general, becoming at 48 the youngest major general in the U.S. armed forces. But he never became marine commandant, a failure that Butler, who had not attended college, blamed on a clique of Naval Academy graduates. The job went instead to a bland organization man who was an Annapolis graduate. Butler was consigned once again to running the Quantico base, which left him plenty of time to make extra money on the lecture circuit. During one of his speeches in 1931 Smedley told a disparaging story about the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, igniting an international incident. The Italian government complained, Secretary of State Henry Stimson apologized, and President Hoover had Butler arrested, making him face the prospect of a court-martial. This unleashed a storm of pro-Butler publicity, forcing the administration to settle for giving him a letter of reprimand. The 50-year-old major general thereupon retired from the corps, if not from public life.
In 1932 citizen Butler ran unsuccessfully in the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Pennsylvania. The following year, he went public with an accusation that a shadowy cabal of Wall Street financiers had tried to recruit him for a plot to overthrow President Roosevelt and establish a fascist dictatorship. An investigation by the House Un-American Affairs Committee confirmed that Butler had indeed been approached, but all indications were that the alleged conspiracy was never very serious. In any case Butler’s denunciations established his reputation as an anti-Wall Street firebrand. In 1935, just before his assassination, presidential candidate Huey Long named Butler secretary of war in his shadow cabinet. Smedley, who had voted for Roosevelt in 1932, moved further and further left. He voted for socialist candidate Norman Thomas in 1936 and did not hesitate to share speaking platforms with leaders of the American Communist Party.
By the mid-1930s America’s leading imperial soldier had become a pacifist and anti-imperialist. In a 1935 magazine article he wrote that he had spent most of his time as a marine “being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. . . . I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . In short I was a racketeer for capitalism.” The same year he published a book, War Is a Racket, a very short, very crude exposition of an economic determinist viewpoint which held that all wars, whether the occupation of Haiti or World War I, were launched by capitalist cabals for their own benefit. Most of this was already a cliché by the 1930s, but it had more credibility coming from a retired major general than from the average street-corner orator.
Butler’s views have been cited over the years by critics intent on “proving” that the Banana Wars were undertaken at the behest of big business. The reality is that Butler was not involved in the decisions to use force; he carried out his orders, and carried them out well, but he often did not know precisely why they were issued. The credibility of his wilder charges should also be viewed in light of the other intemperate views he expressed at the time.
In his last years, Old Gimlet Eye became a leading critic of any military buildup. He thought the U.S. armed forces should be restricted by constitutional amendment to homeland defense only, excluding even Alaska and Hawaii. “Not a single drop of American blood should ever again be spilled on foreign soil,” he thundered on August 31, 1939. Hitler’s invasion of Poland the next day did not change his mind. Right up to his death, from cancer in June 1940, this self-proclaimed “military isolationist” was warning Americans not to get involved in trying to stop the Axis powers.
Smedley Darlington Butler was sui generis, no doubt, but his end-of-life outbursts do indicate something of the American military’s ambivalent attitude toward imperialism. Butler was hardly the only soldier who felt disdain for money-grubbing businessmen and thought that the warrior ethos should not be corrupted by commercial considerations. Nor was he the only soldier to feel that small wars overseas were a waste of time. He took these views to a more radical extreme, however, than just about any officer of such high rank before or since. One cannot help but suspect that Butler’s Quaker pacifist beliefs, so long suppressed during his military career, came back with a vengeance upon his retirement.
Shanghai in the 1930s
Back in China, the nature of the threat faced by American troops changed after Butler’s departure in 1929. From the start of the Chinese revolution in 1911 until the completion of the KMT’s Northern Expedition at the end of 1928, the primary challenge had been to protect American lives and property from warlord troops and various anti-foreign uprisings. In the 1930s the U.S. military’s focus changed to protecting Americans, and to a lesser extent Chinese, from the depredations of Japanese troops embarked on a savage campaign of conquest.
The threat had been presaged by the 1928 clash between KMT and Japanese troops at Tsinan. Three years later the Japanese army annexed Manchuria and set up a puppet regime under the last Manchu emperor, P’u-yi, a government not recognized by Washington. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, more worried about the Communist threat, did not attempt a military response, but the anger of the Chinese people could not be contained. On January 18, 1932, a Chinese mob attacked five Japanese Buddhist monks in Shanghai, providing a pretext for the Japanese armed forces, eleven days later, to attack the slums of Chapei outside Shanghai’s International Settlement. The Chinese Nineteenth Route Army put up a surprisingly stout resistance, and warfare soon raged around the foreign community.
The defense of the International Settlement had previously been divided into sectors, with U.S. troops guarding its western third, which turned out to be next door to the fighting. The U.S. garrison—1,624 men of the 4th Marines and 1,100 men from the army’s 31st Infantry Regiment—were under strict orders not to fight the Japanese. But at the same time, they had to stop the Japanese from sending troops through the Anglo-American sectors of the city in an attempt to outflank Chinese defensive lines. This delicate task required as much diplomatic as military savvy. Unlike in the past, this time U.S. soldiers manned the perimeter defense of barbed wire, machine gun nests, and sandbagged emplacements strung out along the bank of Soochow Creek. It was a hazardous assignment, with stray shells often landing in the U.S. zone, but not nearly as hazardous as life in neighboring Chapei, which was leveled by Japanese airplanes and artillery, causing mass civilian casualties. By March 8, 1932, the Japanese had conquered Chapei, and the generalissimo had withdrawn the Nineteenth Route Army from the area. An armistice was arranged in May, easing the strain on the American defenders for the time being.
The Japanese militarists were encouraged by the feeble international response to this aggression. Five years later, on July 7, 1937, Japanese troops provoked a clash with Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge just outside Peking, signaling the start of the Sino-Japanese War, which would not end until Japan’s surrender to Allied forces in 1945.
It did not take the Japanese long to conquer both Peking and Tientsin, which had U.S. garrisons of 528 marines and 814 soldiers, respectively. The fighting reached Shanghai in August 1937, and once again the approximately 2,500 marines were nervous bystanders. During the ensuing battle, four Chinese bombers, aiming for a Japanese battleship in the harbor, instead dropped their bombs in the middle of the International Concession, killing approximately a thousand civilians, mostly Chinese. Later that afternoon, more Chinese bombs narrowly missed the USS Augusta, flagship of the Asiatic Fleet, also moored in Shanghai harbor. A week later a shell burst on the Augusta’s well deck, killing one sailor and wounding 17 others.
The Nationalist army put up a brave fight but, after suffering staggering casualties, was driven out of Shanghai by a Japanese amphibious assault that threatened an envelopment of their positions. On November 11, 1937, Chinese troops began retreating in the direction of Nanking, the Nationalist capital located 160 miles west of Shanghai, with Japanese forces not far behind. Chiang Kai-shek’s hold on the entire lower Yangtze Valley, China’s industrial heartland, was in peril.
“Get Under Cover”
After Japanese airplanes had begun bombing Nanking in September 1937, one of the Yangtze Patrol gunboats, the Panay, had been dispatched to protect and assist the Americans who still remained in the city. On Saturday, December 11, just two days before the brutal Rape of Nanking began, the Panay left the city carrying, in addition to its normal crew of five officers and 54 men, 15 evacuees—American newsmen, businessmen, and diplomats, as well as a couple of Italian correspondents. The gunboat steamed slowly up the Yangtze; at dusk it anchored 12 miles from the city. Three Standard Oil tankers—the Mei Ping, Mei An, and Mei Hsia—clustered around the gunboat for protection.
The next day, December 12, 1937, a Japanese army boat briefly came alongside and demanded to inspect the Panay, but when its captain, Lieutenant Commander Joseph Hughes, refused, the soldiers left. The Panay and the three tankers steamed a few more miles and anchored in the broad, muddy river 27 miles away from Nanking. An American diplomat aboard the Panay radioed their location to various U.S. consulates and asked them to inform the Japanese command of their position.
It was a clear, calm, lazy day, and the men aboard the Panay went about their normal Sunday routine. At 1:35 P.M., a sailor on the deck spotted some airplanes flying high overhead. Without warning, six planes suddenly dived toward the gunboat, their Rising Sun emblems clearly visible. Three minutes later, the chief quartermaster shouted: “They’re letting go bombs! Get under cover.” Then the ominous whistling sound, followed by an explosion. Some of the Japanese planes got within a hundred feet of the ship, close enough for the Americans to see the pilots’ faces. How could the pilots miss the giant U.S. flags prominently displayed in three places around the ship?
Yet the bombs kept falling, dropped by a squadron of 24 Japanese naval airplanes, a combination of medium bombers, dive bombers, and fighters. All the ship’s officers, except the surgeon, were wounded right away. The captain had his leg fractured and his face badly cut. His executive officer, Lieutenant Arthur “Tex” Anders, was wounded in the throat and, unable to speak, took to scribbling orders on the bulkhead and various scraps of paper, blood speckling his words. Some of the crew members, including one petty officer who did not have time to put his pants on, ran over to fire the ship’s .30 caliber machine guns at the marauding airplanes, but to little effect.
Unable to defend itself, the Panay also could not flee; one of the first blasts had punctured the fuel line, leaving the ship sitting in the water like a dummy target at a shooting range. About 20 minutes after the start of the attack, 20 bombs had been dropped on or near the Panay, and water was a foot-and-a-half deep below deck; the pumps could not keep up. At 2:05 P.M., the order was given to abandon ship. The men lowered two motor sampans and ferried themselves to shore as Japanese warplanes strafed them, creating more casualties.
The crew, many of them wounded, hid in some reeds along the river bank and took stock of their situation. They saw a couple of Japanese patrol boats approach the Panay and spray the sinking ship with machine gun fire. They saw the four Socony oil tankers ablaze after also having been attacked by the Japanese aircraft. They saw, a little before 4 P.M., their ship slide beneath the water, the first U.S. Navy vessel ever lost to enemy aircraft and the first Yangtze Patrol boat lost to enemy action of any sort. The men feared that the Japanese might set out to exterminate the survivors, if only to hide the evidence of the attack.
The Panay’s crew straggled along the shore. They reached a village and then the nearby town of Hohsien, where they managed to telephone word of their predicament to the outside world. On December 14, 1937, two British gunboats and an American gunboat, accompanied by Japanese warships, arrived to rescue them. By the time their 60-hour ordeal was over, two navy enlisted men, an Italian journalist, and a civilian American oil-tanker captain were dead; 74 men on the Panay and the three oil tankers were injured.
In the days to come, the Japanese government apologized profusely for this “very regrettable incident” and paid $2.2 million in reparations. The official line from Tokyo was that the Japanese warplanes mistook the gunboat and oil tankers for Chinese ships ferrying troops out of Nanking. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, not yet ready to declare war on Japan, accepted this explanation. He even asked an American newsreel cameraman who had been aboard the Panay to suppress part of his film which showed Japanese planes attacking the ship from virtually deck level—a distance from which the pilots could not have failed to spot its giant American flags.
If the attack was no accident, what had caused it? The most probable explanation, though one that in all likelihood can never be proved, is that an ultranationalist Japanese army officer, Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, who was in the area, tricked the Japanese navy into bombing the Panay in the hope of either provoking a confrontation or humiliating America. Like the attack on the USS Stark by Iraqi warplanes in 1987, another ostensible accident, the Panay incident did not provoke an immediate war but did foreshadow hostilities in the near future.
Surrounded
The American press reacted with predictable fury to the Panay attack, but many newspapers also suggested that, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it, “American military forces must be withdrawn from the Japanese-Chinese battle zone.” The War Department seconded this view. No withdrawal occurred, however, because the State Department feared that the removal of U.S. military forces would give Japan a green light for further aggression.
But the small number of American servicemen left in China could do little to resist the Japanese advance. Tokyo now controlled all of the important cities of northern and eastern China and much of the land in between. Chiang Kai-shek’s government was forced to seek refuge first in Hankow and then in Chungking, deep in the interior vastness of China, 1,400 miles from Shanghai. There was no longer any need for the Yangtze Patrol since by mid-1938 the river had become a war zone and commercial traffic had ground to a halt. The U.S. garrisons in Tientsin and Shanghai were tiny islands stranded in a sea of hostile Japanese troops.
The Japanese were greatly irritated to see how these Western outposts aided Chiang. Since the Western powers did not recognize the puppet governments set up by the Japanese to rule occupied territories, they continued to let Nationalist officials operate in the Shanghai International Settlement, collecting customs duty and operating a post office, radio and telegraph offices, and a central bank. The revenue generated here helped keep the government of Free China afloat.
Protecting this enclave was the puniest of forces. The U.S. maintained only about 1,000 men from the 4th Marines in Shanghai. The British had another 2,500 men in their garrison, but they were withdrawn in August 1940, after the collapse of France, rendering its 4,000-man garrison useless. The 750 Italian troops were of no value in defending the settlement’s neutrality following Mussolini’s alliance with Japan, formally announced in June 1941 when Italy entered World War II on Germany’s side.
It was not these tiny forces that maintained the neutrality of Shanghai’s International Settlement; it was simply that Tokyo was not yet ready to make war on Britain and America. But there was always a danger that extremist nationalists in the Japanese army would invade the settlement regardless of the consequences. There were constant incursions by Japanese patrols into the American-controlled sector, all turned back peacefully by the marines. On one occasion, 80 Japanese soldiers entered the U.S. zone after dark and began rounding up 200 Chinese for “trial.” When Chesty Puller, the Haiti and Nicaragua veteran who was now executive officer of the 2nd Marine Battalion, heard about the incident, he wasted no time in leading 22 marines out to confront the Japanese. Puller drew his pistol and told a Japanese officer, “I’ll give you five minutes to free those men and get your troops back across Soochow Creek where you belong.” This time, the Japanese complied, but it was clear that war was looming, and that the little garrisons in Shanghai and Tientsin could only come to grief.
The 15th Infantry, the “Can Do” Regiment, was withdrawn from Tientsin in 1938. All Asiatic Fleet dependents, some 2,000 women and children, were sent home late in 1940. The 4th Marines did not leave Shanghai until November 28, 1941, going from the frying pan into the fire: They wound up in the Philippines where their fate would be either death or capture on Corregidor and Bataan. On December 5, 1941, the Yangtze Patrol was officially dissolved. When Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor two days later, only one of the U.S. gunboats, the Wake, was left in Shanghai. Manned by a skeleton crew, it was taken without a shot by the Japanese. Three other Yangtze gunboats managed to brave the choppy open seas to escape to the Philippines, but within six months all three had been sunk. It was an inglorious end to the longest continuous military operation in American history.
The Legacy of Imperialism
The U.S. presence in China was resented over the years by many Chinese, and repented of by many guilt-ridden Americans, because it carried the taint of imperialism. Many Chinese felt as affronted by the U.S. Navy being on the Yangtze as Americans would have felt had the Chinese navy tried to patrol the Mississippi River; as offended by the garrisons in Shanghai, Peking, and Tientsin as Americans would have been by Chinese garrisons in Washington, New York, and Baltimore. Perhaps even more galling to many Chinese were the petty slights and indignities—the stray look, the odd word, the sudden outburst of violence—by which the white man made plain that he did not regard the “yellow” race as his intellectual or social equal. All this is undeniable and understandable, yet much can be said in defense of the U.S. role.
To start with, the U.S. did not carve out its own quasi-colonial sphere of influence, as Japan and the European powers did. Instead America helped prevent the Europeans from dividing China into formal colonies. The Open Door policy was codified in international law through the Nine Power Treaty of 1922. The U.S. also pushed for a reduction in the number of treaty ports; the total shrank from a high of almost 80 to 13 by 1937. The unequal treaties were not finally nullified until 1943, but by then this was a mere formality. The Europeans and Americans had long ceased to be a threat to Nationalist China; they were now Chiang Kai-shek’s allies in his fight against the Japanese and the Communists.
The primary mission of American forces in China was not aggressive, though it may have seemed that way to many Chinese; “their primary function,” as the State Department stated in 1937, “is protecting American nationals, secondarily, American property.” This would not have been necessary if China had had an effective national government capable of enforcing law and order, but it did not. One could argue that repeated foreign interventions helped undermine the legitimacy of China’s governments, and there is some truth to this. But for the most part foreigners merely revealed the rot in the Celestial Empire’s institutions; they did not cause it. Japan, though considerably smaller in land area and population than China, had stronger political and social structures that allowed it to withstand European and American bullying.
The Western missionaries and businessmen who rushed into China under the protection of Western navies unsettled its traditional society but also provided real benefits to the Chinese people. By the 1920s the old missionary impulse to win “China for Christ” had been largely channeled into running medical, educational, and social-welfare programs, much as the Peace Corps would later do. Americans helped set up numerous schools and colleges, such as Nanking University and Yenching University, that provided a Western education to thousands of Chinese scholars, women included. The Rockefeller Foundation created Peking Union Medical College, China’s premier research and training hospital. YMCAs and YWCAs sprouted across the land, offering, among other programs, public health seminars and anti-opium campaigns. Ironically, many of these educational institutions fostered nationalist and xenophobic feelings by exposing Chinese students to Western ideology. The most fervent supporters of both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were some of the most Westernized Chinese.
Like the missionaries, the businessmen who flocked into the Middle Kingdom were resented by many Chinese, and understandably so. Even after they stopped importing vast quantities of opium (London outlawed the export of opium from India to China in 1913), the foreigners remained for the most part immune from Chinese taxes and laws. But the treaty ports where the businessmen flocked were more boon than bane.
Part of the benefits were political: The treaty ports provided neutral areas where Chinese out of favor with the current regime—whether deposed warlords or radical students—could live, write, and speak in safety. Many of the denunciations of the unequal treaties were written in the very treaty ports they made possible. After being driven out of Canton in 1918, Sun Yat-sen settled in Shanghai’s French Concession; three years later, the Chinese Communist Party held its first congress there. All this was most unusual since China had no history of tolerating anti-government publications or organizations. In the 1930s these treaty ports became a vital haven that helped keep Free China afloat.
But most of the cities’ benefits were economic. These settlements, especially Shanghai, gave China the genesis of a modern banking and industrial system. The historian Immanuel C. Y. Hsu writes:
Foreign investors introduced modern technology and the entrepreneurial spirit, and financed many modern industries. . . . Their success created an environment in which profit from industrial undertakings was demonstrably possible, thereby prompting the Chinese to follow their example. Additionally, the employment and training of Chinese in foreign factories and business establishments produced a native pool of technical knowledge of production and managerial skills which later were to be profitably tapped by and for the Chinese. . . . Nor should one lose sight of the fact that foreign-leased areas and treaty ports provided a certain degree of peace and order necessary for industrial growth; and that foreign establishments had already borne most of the cost of ‘social overhead,’ such as public utilities, roads, and communications facilities, which eased the development of Chinese industry.
Many of these achievements would be forgotten during the horrors that engulfed China in the decades that followed—civil war, famine, the Cultural Revolution—but in the 1980s capitalism would experience a resurgence, building on the almost-forgotten foundations of the distant past. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, then, Western imperialism could be seen as neither a blind alley nor a crippling burden but as a promise delayed, an opportunity deferred.
It goes without saying that Western businessmen did not provide these benefits in a spirit of altruism; that is not how capitalism works. But while Americans did reap some profits in China, it was never as much as either boosters of China trade or its critics would suppose. From 1890 to 1920, China represented just 3.5 percent of U.S. exports and 1.4 percent of U.S. foreign investment. For Britain, businessmen were the driving force behind its China policy; but in the case of America, it was the missionaries who were more important. This hardly supports the theories of a Smedley Butler that all military policy is driven by pursuit of material gain.
What is most striking is how long the American military stayed in China—and how successfully. The sinking of the Panay was the only military disaster suffered by the United States during almost a century of peacekeeping duty in the Celestial Kingdom, from the 1840s to 1941. That the mission went so smoothly is, in retrospect, remarkable. There were seldom more than a handful of U.S. sailors, soldiers, and marines on the China station, far from home, and surrounded by all manner of potential enemies: various Chinese armed forces, the militaries of other foreign powers, and of course the Chinese people themselves, 400 million strong in the early twentieth century, who, if aroused, easily could have expelled the small number of intruders from their midst.
The U.S. armed forces in China were never adequate to deal with a determined foe. They could perform only a policing role, and that mainly through bluff and swagger. There is no shortage of examples in American history of similar missions that came to a sad end; one thinks of the marines being blown up in their Beirut barracks in 1983. In China, by contrast, the Americans’ bluff worked almost until the very end.