Not Zero-Sum: Perspective of an Ordinary Chinese American
In the era of Trump/Putin/Xi, an ordinary Chinese American's hope for solidarity (Chapter Two)
(Source: Fulton County Jail; YouTube “Chinese Backstreet Boys — That Way” screenshot; Wikimedia Commons)
← Chapter One: First Impression—The Opium Wars
Chapter Two: Almost Friends - WWII
A color TV joined my grandparents’ household in the early 1980s, replacing its black & white predecessor just a few years before I was born. It had been imported from Hong Kong with the insider help of my grandmother’s youngest sister, whose family migrated to the then British colony in the late 1970s, as China began reaching outward. Sitting in the corner of our living room, the black cube with its distinctive v-shaped antennas was my family’s most prized possession; its existence placed us squarely ahead of most Chinese households in terms of living standards.
By the time third grade rolled around, I had earned 30 minutes of TV time on weekdays, which grew to 45 minutes over the next couple years, provided my school works were complete, a prerequisite that usually meant I could start watching during primetime. Occasionally, the golden slots spun the tale of a past emperor, one that had maintained a good reputation, but more often it was a channel into China’s fixation on WWII, as if compensating for the West’s omission of the parts of the war that took place in Asia.
Like most Chinese people, I had been familiar with the actors—the Japanese, shouting and firing their machine guns at every opportunity; the Chinese Nationalists, indifferent in their fine uniforms; and the Chinese Communists, mending clothes, footwear, devastation as they advanced side-by-side with the people. These three parties formed the stakeholders in countless conflicts across the TV screens in China, each rendition reaffirming the Communists’ moral superiority.
Beyond television, books were another excellent source of WWII stories. In between the print margins, a new character—America—emerged; its high-tech planes and ships had prevented its video entrance in the early 1990s. Instead, the fighter jet maneuvers and the aircraft carrier battles over the vast Pacific Ocean came to life through the written words, captivating the imagination of millions of Chinese people. After I moved to the US a few years later, I had marveled at how the Midway Battle seemed more popular in China.
America’s inclusion also brought a new dimension of complexity. During WWII, the US was known to the Chinese people as a distant but technologically advanced ally. Yet shortly thereafter, it became the enemy in the Korean War (although the conflict with America never felt quite as personal as with Japan). As a kid, I had been content to absorb each story in isolation; the need to connect the dots didn’t occur to me. However, my curiosity expanded as I grew older—how did the US transition from China’s ally to its adversary despite achieving victory together in WWII? When I dug deeper into US-China collaborations and subsequent breakup, I found stories that had been left out of history because they didn’t fit its narrative.
The Doolittle Raid
Japan invaded China in 1937, marking the beginning of WWII in Asia. While the US remained diplomatically neutral, it supported China by restricting trade with Japan and sending the “Flying Tigers,” volunteer and mercenary pilots who sustained the Chinese Nationalist army with critical airdrops of American supplies. Later, as Germany set Europe ablaze, the Chinese army played the important role of keeping the vast Japanese army preoccupied, preventing its entrance into the European theater. When Japan surprise attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, WWII became personal for the US, and the partnership with China was cemented. However, despite the rapport of the two giant nations, the situation was rather dire.
As the Allied Forces reeled from a string of defeats against the seemingly invincible Imperial Japanese Navy, President Roosevelt asked for a bold strike to turn the tide of war, and Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle volunteered to do just that. The daredevil mission involved sixteen B-25 bombers with five crew members per bomber lifting off from the deck of an aircraft carrier 600 miles east of Japan, their target—Tokyo and the heartland of Japan, and their landing destination—somewhere in China. The operation was unprecedented in several aspects: aircraft carriers penetrating deep into hostile water, bombers taking off from aircraft carriers and flying unprotected across enemy heartland, and pilots pushing fuel optimization to physics’ limit. The fate of the crew members would depend on flawless executions, luck, and courage—their own, and as it turned out, the courage of the Chinese civilians.
The audacious plan became even riskier when, during the naval advance toward Japan, an enemy reconnaissance boat spotted the American fleet. To avoid endangering the entire carrier group, the bombers decided to take off immediately, some 200 miles from the original spot. This change in distance meant the planes would have to crash land on China’s east coast in lieu of predetermined runway options—if they could even reach China. Crash landing also meant that there would be no “welcoming party,” and the crews would have to find their own way to safety in a foreign land infested with enemy troops.
After a tense six-hour flight of radio-silence, the B-25s broke the calm of the Japanese sky around noon on April 18, 1942, to the bewilderment of onlookers; many waved to the planes, mistaking them for simulations by their own air force.
Five months after Japan’s betrayal, the American bombers carried an intentional message of retribution—bombs tagged with “friendship medals” previously awarded by the Japanese government to US servicemen, now returning to their new homes in Japanese industrial and military compounds. As flames engulfed the sites of explosions, Tokyo scrambled fighter planes, but they hesitated to engage. Paired with the intense but wildly inaccurate anti-air fire, they formed an ineffective defense that betrayed the complacency that Japan had operated under domestically, and all 16 bombers safely departed Japanese airspace.
While the actual physical damage from the raid was relatively small, its psychological effects were huge. Whereas Japan had been almost delirious from victories, it now experienced its first horror of war, shaking the image of an indestructible army and untouchable homeland. Meanwhile, the raid buoyed spirits in the United States, a much needed lift after the gloom of Pearl Harbor.
As the mood of the people shifted, the state of the war also shifted. In the wake of the Doolittle Raid, Japan held back more naval forces to defend its homeland, reducing its offensive firepower in the Pacific. The threat of future American attacks also prompted the Japanese to attack the Midway Islands, where a decisive battle that sank most of the Japanese’s aircraft carriers irreversibly gave the Americans the upper-hand.
The complete success of the bombing segment was a testament to the ingenious idea, the meticulous planning, and the hardcore training. However, for the American crews, the hardest part of the mission was just beginning.
Of the 16 fuel-exhausted bombers, 15 crash-landed in China, and 1 landed in Russia. Of the 80 crew members, 3 were killed on impact, an additional 8 captured by Japanese troops (3 regrettably the result of misjudgment by a Chinese guerrilla), and 5 were interned by the Russians. The remaining 64 crews found themselves depleted and vulnerable in foreign terrain, and they had to place their lives in the hands of the local people—strangers who did not share a common language or expect their appearances.
The Chinese civilians reacted quickly to the friends from the sky, caring for the Americans’ wounds, offering up the best available food despite their own grim living conditions, and even staging performances with the children. While the raiders found the region primitive, composing mostly of villages, mountainsides, and rice paddies, like “land[ing] in the China of a thousand years ago,” the warmth from the hero-like welcome buoyed their spirits, sustaining them in struggles against fatigues, injuries, and illnesses.
Traveling often in junks and rickshaws, the Chinese transported the raiders in fragmented trips toward scattered waypoints, evading the Japanese troops with skills and courage. The grueling journeys left many exhausted. At one point, when Doolittle simply could not go on, the locals managed to procure him a donkey. Despite enormous risks—the penalty of being caught is almost certainly death in a horrifying way—the Chinese people successfully helped all 64 Americans reach safety in the city of Chongqing, where they could board a plane to return home.
When the Japanese army eventually figured out what had happened, it launched a vicious campaign across China to destroy potential airfields and punish the civilians for helping the American pilots. More than 250,000 Chinese civilians were subsequently killed by Japanese troops, who committed heinous war crimes even by the most egregious standards, including contests of how many heads a single bullet could pass through, intentional mixing of biological diseases into villages’ wells, and massacres of entire communities.
Despite the atrocities, the Chinese people continued to act courageously, saving more than 300 Allies pilots over the course of WWII. During the same period of time, the Japanese army killed an estimate of six million Chinese civilians.
In the past 80 years, the heroics of the Doolittle raiders have been relatively well told. However, the heroics and sacrifices of the Chinese civilians have mostly been overlooked due to politics. In China, until recently, internal politics had limited the attention on the raid since it was mainly the Nationalist Party, not the Communist Party, that collaborated with the Americans, although the Communists did assist in other pilot-on-ground scenarios. In the US, because of its at best lukewarm relationship with China since WWII, it has rarely been politically convenient or commercially favorable to go beyond the pilots’ crash landing in any storytelling.
The raiders themselves never forgot the courage of the Chinese people, expressing gratitude whenever they could. Since the 1990s, they have made pilgrimages back to Quzhou, China, the town where many of them first found refuge. But as their lives reach their resting places, how do we reconcile their memories—bonds of a lifetime—with the rift that now strains relations between the Chinese and American governments?
During research, I had encountered the following passage in two Chinese publications, attributed to a letter written by a 95-year old James Doolittle in 1991 to the Chinese people. While I could not verify the validity of the source, I cannot agree more with the sentiment of its content:
“I sincerely hope that our younger generation will never forget the great sacrifices made by the people of the United States and China in World War II, and work together to prevent the tragedy of the war from repeating itself.”
Just how did the US and China go from the Doolittle Raid to where we are today? The answer lies in a choice the US made toward the end of WWII.
As the Americans battled the Japanese navy at sea, the Chinese engaged the Japanese army on land. The Chinese army was split into two main factions: the Nationalist army and the Communist Red Army. When the tide of war turned in favor of the Allies, the US faced the choice of which Chinese faction to endorse post-WWII. The intelligence gathered during the Dixie Mission should have supported a more informed decision.
The Dixie Mission
Like any complex relationship, the relationship of China and the United States is filled with what-ifs. Prior to war with the Japanese, the Chinese Nationalist Party and Communist Party were fighting each other internally, and the Nationalists had established a firm upper hand, forcing the Communists on a 10,000 km (~6,000 mile) Long March for survival to the remote areas of Northeast China. When the Japanese invaded, it brought temporary relief to the Communists, as the Nationalists half-heartedly agreed to focus on external threats first.
Though the American troops interacted almost entirely with the Nationalist army, they viewed the Chinese Communists as a potential ally, since they were also fighting the Japanese (in fact, the Chinese Communists were one of the few armies having any success against the Japanese on the ground). This perspective, however, was not shared by the Chinese Nationalists, who saw the Communists as an inevitable threat.
In July 1944, with grudging approval from Chiang Kai-shek, leader and generalissimo of the Nationalists, a group of Americans embarked on the Dixie Mission to Yanan, the Communists’ mountainous base, to gain understanding of how Chinese Communists and Americans could collaborate. The rapport formed during this mission would provide the foundation for the question—what if the Americans had sided with the Chinese Communists after WWII?
One of the key goals of the Dixie Mission was assessing the Chinese Communists’ capabilities. The Dixie members, chosen because of their familiarity with China, were impressed by what they saw at Yanan—the characters of the Communist leaders, the discipline of its soldiers, and most importantly, the support of the people. (What they couldn’t have known was the ideological purges that helped engineer this cohesion, a pattern that would later resurface at greater scale in post-war governance.)
The Communist leaders, led by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, greeted the American group warmly and with surprisingly transparency, frankly admitting their complete lack of knowledge on aviation and advanced artillery, and freely sharing their plans, movements, and comprehensive knowledge of the Japanese army.
While the size of the Red Army was smaller compared to the Nationalists’, its soldiers had strong beliefs in the cause—the people’s war—they were fighting for, “so ideologically indoctrinated that it could retain popular support and operate decentralized but under discipline.” The Red Army was also supported in adjunct by the People’s Militia—civilians armed with picks, shovels, and flintlocks, “so closely integrated that it was hard to tell where the People’s Militia stopped and where the Red Army began.”
What the Red Army lacked in advanced weaponry, it compensated through absolute intelligence. Communist operatives could be within a couple miles of a Japanese stronghold and yet stay relaxed, secure in the knowledge that the people monitored the Japanese’s every move, relaying constant intel that formed the backbone of the Red Army’s guerrilla warfare.
Major Casberg, the Dixie doctor and intelligence collector, who spent four months behind Japanese line with the Chinese Communists, noted the similarities between the people’s war and the American Revolutionary War, especially the role played by the People’s Militia vs. the American minutemen—civilians who unconditionally supported the army because they believed in its cause. At the conclusion of the Dixie Mission, Casberg sagaciously predicted that there would be a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the Communists would win.
In November 1944, The Dixie Mission was making progress on all fronts. The Americans were gathering intelligence on the Japanese, developing rescue system for downed-airmen, and exchanging insights with the Communists to mutually improve operations, until the arrival of Patrick J. Hurley, Special Emissary of the President of United States, screwed everything up—“a classic instance of the derailment of history by accident.” Whereas the Dixie members were all old hands, well-versed in the ways of the Chinese “to ensure they would not be at the mercy of their hosts,” Hurley was “atrociously uninformed about Chinese affairs” and out of his league from the start. And whereas the Dixie members dealt in facts and details, Hurley was overly dependent on relationships—what he called “personal diplomacy.” Hurley also didn’t bother to read the Embassy reports that provided the latest intelligence, and his motivations seemed to be rooted more in seeking personal glory than advancing public interest.
Confident that his charm would work its magic on the leaders of the Nationalists and the Communists, Hurley instead became a pawn for both—more for the former, because he spent more time with the Nationalists, and his gravitation toward pomp and circumstances made him a natural fit with the more affluent Nationalist Party, which had become plagued by corruptions. A top of the lungs Indian war whoop that left his communists hosts nonplussed during Hurley’s first visit to Yanan also seemed to foreshadow his incompatibility with the latter.
Although Hurley started out as a believer in a united front of Nationalists and Communists, his support for the Nationalists grew through his personal diplomacy—one drink at a time. While other Americans in China increasingly saw the necessity to maintain flexibility between the Nationalists, who had equipment / material advantages, and the Communists, who had people / spiritual advantages, Hurley became a staunch supporter of the Nationalists by 1945.
Capitalizing on Hurley’s weaknesses, the Nationalists supplied all the attention and ostentation that he craved, and then they fed him conspiracies that other Americans in China were working to overthrow the Nationalists and replace them with the Communists. Hurley foolishly ate it all up; other Americans questioning his judgment only brought him closer to the Nationalists.
Despite his professional incompetence, Hurley had a trump card—direct access to the American president. He used it “to press what amounted to a purge of the professional China experts in the field, the men who had been in the country for years, who spoke the language, who knew the place and its dramatis personae.”
Chiang, the Nationalists Generalissimo, later congratulated Hurley on having “purged the United States headquarters of the conspirators.” Meanwhile, the New York Times journalist Brooks Atkinson lamented America’s accommodation of “an unenlightened cold-hearted autocratic political regime.”
Toward the end of their mission, the Dixie members had become convinced the Chinese Communists would win the civil war regardless of how much support the US might provide to the Nationalists. Furthermore, China, under the Communist leadership of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and others, would not be a subordinate to the Soviet Union Communists, but an independent nation.
These insights, however, found no audience back home. With Hurley’s assistance—among other lobbying efforts—the Nationalists had effectively eliminated the Communists as a possible post-WWII option for the United States. Nevertheless, despite their talent in securing American support, the Nationalists could not win the support of the Chinese people back home.
As the controlling party of China, the Nationalists were blamed for failing to stop Japan’s invasion. Its army engaged in mostly large-scale, conventional battles against the brunt of Japanese forces, incurring heavy casualties and numerous defeats. Meanwhile, the Communists fought tactical but effective guerrilla skirmishes, which cultivated the perception among civilians that the Communists had displayed greater capability fighting the Japanese.
After a century of oppression from foreign powers, the ability to stand up to outsiders had become the key to unlocking the confidence of the Chinese people. Moreover, to the common peasants, the Communists’ promises of collective land ownership and removal of social class sounded far more attractive than the Nationalists’ offer of status quo.
When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 ending WWII, China predictably fell into an all-out civil war with the US backing the Nationalists and the Soviet Union backing the Communists. By December 1949, the Chinese Communists had taken control of all of mainland China, and the Nationalists were forced to retreat to the island of Taiwan, setting the backdrop for the cross-strait dilemma today.
Given the wary American public sentiment toward communism in the 1940s, supporting the Chinese Communists was always going to be a tough sell. However, it was a pitch that should have been made based on the intelligence gathered by the Dixie Mission for both practical and ideological reasons. Practical, because the Chinese Communists were going to win the civil war. Ideological, because the Chinese Communists had the support of the people. When the US sided with the Nationalists following the Japanese surrender, it betrayed, perhaps unknowingly, its core democratic belief in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. When the Nationalists were defeated as the Dixie members anticipated, the opportunity to build long-term rapport with China was lost.
Aftermath
In the twin aftershocks of a Communist China and the Soviet Union detonating its first atomic bomb in 1949, Red Scare dominated US policies both domestically and internationally. At home, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused thousands of Americans of subversion and treason for alleged Communist connections, destroying their livelihoods despite scant evidence. Abroad, American soldiers engaged in a number of wars and proxy wars with the sole purpose of containing the spread of communism. Japan became an ally, and the US shielded some of the most diabolic Japanese war criminals from prosecution—a prioritization of expediency over justice that continues to undermine American human rights efforts today. Meanwhile China, aiming to prevent the presence of American allies and troops on its borders, fought the US in the Korean War and provided supplies to the Vietnamese Communists in the Vietnam War.
In both wars and nations, the will of the people was more of an afterthought. Although the US displayed foresight with allies through the Marshall Plan aids, it did not exhibit the same discipline with potential adversaries, often prioritizing dictatorial regimes that favored the US over the will of the people. Many of the US’s headaches around the world today are direct products from that post-WWII era characterized by inflamed rhetoric, fear-driven policies, and divisive politicians exploiting public sentiments for personal gain—not all that different from the Trump presidency.
In the most recent conflict with China that seems to have spawned spontaneously, it begs the question: how much of the conflict is driven by hard intelligence like that gathered by the Dixie Mission, and how much is driven by demagogues seeking to manipulate public opinion?
With the US backing the South Korean army and China backing the North Korean Communists, the Korean War ended in a draw in 1953—an outcome touted by the Chinese government to this day, though the real victory was America’s recognition of the bigger picture. It’s truly a credit to the US that nuclear weapons were not deployed to win the war outright, even if it had been wary of Soviet retaliation. The restraint of power and a rare but critical instance of choosing the long view made possible the remarkable prosperity that mankind has enjoyed over the past 70 years.
In 1964, China detonated its own atomic bomb, certifying its status as a rising military power. However, despite the external power it projected, internally, chaos reigned.
Chapter Three: We Are All Minorities - The Cultural Revolution →
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Chapter Two End Notes + 2025 Commentaries:
For the Doolittle Raid, I relied primarily on the book Target Tokyo by James M. Scott. It provided not only a gripping narration of the raid itself, but also a detailed account of the sacrifices made by the Chinese civilians—one of the few works to do so, for which I’m grateful.
For the Dixie Mission, I relied primarily on the article “Intelligence Lost in Politics: The Dixie Mission 1944” by Bob Bergin from the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, which offered a fascinating study of both ground-level interactions between the US and the two factions of China and higher level politics during WWII. The book The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret was also helpful for certain details, although Pomfret drew his view based on insights of the four state stakeholders (Chinese Communists, Chinese Nationalists, Soviet Union, United States), whereas I focused more on the perspective of the Chinese people. While I agree with Pomfret’s argument that the Chinese Communists would have chosen the Soviet Union regardless of America’s choice, I don’t believe the relationship between the US and China would’ve been nearly as strained if the US had hedged their bets more. It’s hard to imagine that the Chinese Communists would insist on being enemy vs. America, the only nation that possessed nuclear weapons (until Soviet Union joined the club in 1949). It’s also unlikely then that the US and China would have fought in the Korean War.
The paragraph on the raiders’ relationship with the Chinese people since WWII is based on insights from the website built by the children of the Doolittle Raiders (www.childrenofthedoolittleraiders.com).
The content of the letter written by a 95-year old Doolittle came from two Chinese websites (1. https://www.sohu.com/a/342885329_120241726, 2. https://www.yizhai.net/article/135991.html). I translated their text from Chinese (included below) to English, although the original text would’ve been in English. As noted, I could not verify the validity of the sources.
“在我和轰炸机队的飞行员弃机降落在中国大陆后，中国民众以极大的勇气营救了我们，想方设法保护我们。我衷心期望我们年轻的一代永远不要忘记美中两国人民在第二次大战中作出的巨大牺牲，共同努力，不让战争悲剧重演。”
Further reading: Target Tokyo by James M. Scott, “Intelligence Lost in Politics: The Dixie Mission 1944” by Bob Bergin (https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/The-Dixie-Mission-1944.pdf), The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom by John Pomfret
2025 Commentaries:
As mentioned before, the events of the book had cut off before the 2024 American election. The outcome of that same election presents, at the very least, another example of American inconsistency, though I fear it will be much worse.
Before Trump threw away the international order that America had spent decades cultivating, there were shades of his transactional approach from his first presidency that I originally named this book “Personal Diplomacy,” specifically to highlight its two different variations—the former featuring the personal inclinations of diplomats and political leaders such as Hurley and Trump, and the latter anchoring in the bonds of ordinary people.