A drunken idiot given to Choctaw war cries

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 102.

The Americans restrained Chiang from definitively strangling Mao’s Communists in their Yan’an fastness, and then suggested he incorporate them into a coalition government. Quite possibly Chiang could not have achieved a military solution, but the constraints put on his freedom of action by the Americans ruled it out altogether. One would not think it from British historiography, but China, untainted by either Communism or imperialism, was Roosevelt’s favourite ally in the Second World War. ‘The people of China’, he said in 1943, ‘have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world – the same great ideals. China in the last – less than half a century has become one of the great democracies of the world.’ The will to see a world full of potential Americans, struggling to cast off the shackles of imperialism, tribalism and other unAmerican cultural accretions, has deep roots. Many influential Americans looked at China and saw evolving a more populous version of their own country.

Real China, as distinct from this fantasy, fascinated and frustrated Americans in equal measure. It was vast, with desert, mountains and then coastal plains crisscrossed by irrigation canals. The currency fluctuated with bewildering rapidity, while palms had to be greased for every encounter with officialdom. Gangsters, such as Shanghai’s Green Gang, had fluid relations with government agencies including the KMT secret police, which reminded Americans of the Gestapo. Although the US sought a unified, democratic China, its chosen instrument for achieving this goal, Chiang’s Nationalists, denied elementary Western freedoms even as they experimented with constitutions and assemblies.

An alarming percentage of US aid went to the territorial warlords who dominated the Nationalist military. The US sought a moral basis for supporting the Nationalists, but grew frustrated when it could not find one in a regime whose corruption was epic. Misreading Mao’s Communists as honest agrarian socialists, Washington thought they could be persuaded to become a loyal opposition within a democratic framework. To that end financial pressure was brought to bear on the Nationalists, who after a twenty-year struggle knew their Communist opponents far better than the Americans did. As Chiang once remarked: ‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart.’

US policy was not well served by its Ambassador to China from late 1944 onwards, a former Republican secretary of war called Patrick Hurley, a drunken idiot given to Choctaw war cries. Oblivious of China’s delicate protocols, he referred to Chiang as ‘Mr Shek’ and Mao Zedong as ‘Moose Dung’ in the course of shuttle trips designed to bring the two together to convert China into a springboard for the final showdown with the Japanese. Mao’s cronies called Hurley ‘the Clown’; his US diplomatic colleagues dubbed him ‘the Albatross’.