Niall: The China Lobby. I think it’s an important part in understanding how the myth…
James: Oh, the China Lobby.
Niall: Go ahead.
James: The China Lobby is a word suppressed. Just like Google and Facebook now are suppressing, editing, they call it trying to help us but it’s censorship. So the China Lobby is such a hot term. The China Lobby was formed in the 1930s with Franklin Roosevelt and it rose from a little power defending Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan in the 50s. Huge political power. But in 1960 a guy writes a book called The China Lobby and he has a contact. He writes the book. The editors edit it. They print it and somebody visits his editor, McMillan, and all of a sudden the book’s not published, not only not published, all the copies are burned.
And it takes another 14 years for it to come out in paperback. So the word China Lobby has been excised. Everybody Will say “What’s the China Lobby?” But it was this huge force. So in Washington, D.C. the Washington newspapers wrote about the China Lobby as having enormous influence from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. Amazing!
So I don’t know if your listeners know the story about how Richard Nixon committed treason by asking the president of South Vietnam not to agree to LBJ’s Paris peace talks conditions until after the election. Well that message was transmitted by Mrs. Chennault, the key member of the China Lobby. That was 1968, LBJ election with Humphreys. 1968! China Lobby was begun back under Franklin Roosevelt. It has enormous power.
I’m not talking conspiracy. We’ve got to get it simple. Right now the world’s complicated, the internet and people can fly in an airplane to China. Back in the 1930s nobody went to China. Come on! It’s a three-month trip. So yeah, maybe you were in a lecture with someone who went to China but you didn’t know people who went to China and you didn’t know any Chinese. It was illegal for Chinese to be in America. We had the Chinese Exclusion Act. So you were white, you were protestant and you didn’t know any Chinese.
So there’s this extremely wealthy Rockefeller-style family in Shanghai that knows how to talk to Harvard people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They know how to dress. They know how to talk about Jesus. They know quotes from the bible. They know Shakespeare. They went to Harvard, Wellesley, they spent decades in the United States and they learned what America wanted. And what America wanted was the China Mirage. America looks at China and thinks “Someday they’ll be like us.”
So you know the famous quote from the Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket, when the sergeant comes up…
Niall: Yes.
James: …and says “What’s inside every gook…
Niall: gook.
James: …is an American waiting to come out.” So today Americans are waiting. “When will China democratize? When are they going to get rid of that horrible communist leadership and experience freedom?” This has been going on for 300 years in the American mind.
Niall: Yeah.
James: So they’re imagining that America has the better way and that China can get towards it. Well China’s building this idea in the world, the silk road and we better get going. They have a few centuries of experience doing things well. But the China Lobby’s purpose was to get money from Franklin Roosevelt for Chiang Kai-shek. So Chiang Kai-shek married into this family called the Soong family and there was a banker Soong. I can get into the details, Madam Chiang Kai-shek. There’s books written about it. There’s books written about every one of these characters. And then Chiang Kai-shek opposed Mao.
So one of the Soong sisters went towards Mao. The other two went to Chiang Kai-shek. The Chiang Kai-shek sisters propagandized into the United States just like you do today with millions of dollars paid to journalists who are not journalists. We supported Chiang Kai-shek. So we gave Chiang Kai-shek, the loser, more money than we paid for the atom bomb. And then after he lost we said “Oh, we’d like to make an announcement. China has ceased to exist. China is now this island in the Pacific, Taiwan.” Well why? There are 600 million people in China and there’s hardly anybody from Taiwan. Why is Taiwan officially China now? Well because Chiang Kai-shek is there. Oh. So all my life I was told that I couldn’t go to China because Mao wouldn’t let me in. He hated Americans so much he wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t realize it until later, it was my State department that kept me out. Mao would have welcomed me but the United States said “Mao and you 600 million, you’re not real Chinese.”
So this might sound ridiculous to the audience but I’m 63. For the majority of my life my country, my leaders said this island in the Pacific, this is the country of China.
Niall: And Mao’s China was the false or communist China. Among the countless light bulbs that went off in my head reading your books was an understanding now I think of the beginning of the red scare after the second world war. I found this episode fascinating. Can you explain about John Service and the China Hands and how that led into McCarthy’s witch hunt and this fascinating paranoia about who lost China?
James: Okay I will but after I said that Taiwan was China you said yes and Mao’s China was communist China. No! The state department said it didn’t exist. There was non-recognition.
Niall: Right.
James: We didn’t say there was a communist China and a Taiwan China and you can go to either one. We said it’s too evil to even exist. We won’t even talk about it. So one journalist, Walter Cronkite, name all the famous journalists you know from the 1950s. None of them went to China. Too intimidated. They just reported State Department handouts like they do today. So one reporter from Baltimore goes to China in the 1950s. It’s such an event Time Magazine reports on it. An American reporter went to the biggest country in the world! Are your listeners realizing? America says the number one country in the world with the most people, now I think that would be an important country to know something about. It’s illegal to go there and we don’t want you to go there and we don’t want any information about it.
So a reporter goes there. When he gets back Dwight Eisenhower takes his passport away. So we don’t know about China. Look at the campaign. What we know is China rapes the country. China’s unfair. Front page of the Times “China just shot 10 CIA guys.”
Niall: Yeah.
James: China’s indescribably bad and they need a change. And the change is they should become more like America.
Niall: This has been the belief since the beginning. Today it’s China has to be democratized. Then it was a fervent belief, reinforced by the Chinese Lobby, namely very powerful Harvard-trained Americanized Chinese, that “Yes, any day now China’s going to embrace America, it’s going to become Christian even.”