The Battle of Yichang
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1943)
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China – Twentieth Century
Censors of the Japanese War Machine
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
The Japanese censorship boards have drafted regulations for the press in territory under their control, and unsuccessful attempts were made to control news dispatches in Shanghai’s foreign-owned newspapers. In Peiping, Tientsin, Tsingtao and other cities where the Japanese are in complete control, foreign editors are having their troubles, as evidenced by the ‘secret’ instructions to the press issued by the Special Military Missions to China, with Headquarters in Peiping… Under the heading ‘Important Standards for Press Censorship’ come the following regulations…
-what follows is an enormous laundry list of DONT’S issued to the officers of the foreign press stationed in Japanese-occupied China.
The New Normal
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)
In December of 1949 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek’s anti-communist forces retreated to the island of Formosa (Taiwan).
Truman’s China Policy for 1951
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)
This is a single column that clearly lays out the Truman Administration’s diplomatic policies concerning Mao’s China – the summary is reduced to five bullet points.
‘Where Moscow Is Teaching China to see Red”
(Literary Digest, 1927)
Attached is a 1927 American magazine article that reported on the Soviet influence taking place in China. Attention is paid to the activities of a young Soviet named Karl Berngardovich Radek (born Karol Sobelsohn: 1885 – 1939):
Russia has been the only country to assist the Nationalist China movement to which they all hope to devote their lives. Men who believe in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ have furnished much of the brain-power that has organized, directed and articulated the Chinese popular uprising in it’s successful Northern drive…As far as foreign culture is concerned, China is still much more deeply steeped in American and British idealism than in those of modern Russia
A Pox on Both Your Houses…
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)
Washington’s growing impatience and distrust with both Chiang Kai-shek’s island nation and the communist thugs on the mainland was reaching the high-water mark during the earliest days of 1950 when President Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893 – 1971) presented that administration’s China policy:
No official military aid for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist government, either on the island of Formosa [Taiwan] or anywhere else. No hasty recognition of the Communist Chinese government of Mao Zedong. No attempt to stop further Russian advances in Asia except through ‘friendly encouragement’ to India, French Indo-China, Siam, Burma and the new United States of Indonesia…
The Truce of Tangku
(The Literary Digest, 1933)
This 1933 news piece concerned the cessation of hostilities that was agreed upon by both the Imperial Empire of Japan and China in the campaign that began two years earlier with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
When the withdrawal of Chinese troops is completed, the Japanese agree that their own troops will retire to the Great Wall, which the Japanese claim is the boundary of the state of Manchukuo.
China’s Industrial Cooperatives
(The Commonweal, 1941)
A 1941 magazine article by Delbert Johnson that reported on the unprecedented success of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives during the earliest period of the Japanese occupation:
Industrial cooperation in China, which was no more than a paper plan three years ago, today is a nation-wide movement that has cast a blight upon Japan’s economic aspirations in Asia and is providing the people of China a new means of salvation against aggression.
The plan for the Indusco movement came into being during the dark days of the spring and summer of of 1938…Seemingly, China was doomed to economic strangulation if not to military defeat. But a handful of Chinese and foreign visionaries’ thought otherwise. They knew that time, area and population all would work to China’s advantage in any prolonged struggle.
Eyes on Chiang Kai-Shek
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
Before the war was hours old, Chiang’s most secret plans were known to the Japs. Again and again Jap actions showed foreknowledge of Chiang’s movements and stratagems, as discussed and decided with his most trusted leaders. This explains many mysterious incidents, and makes China’s apparent ‘spy complex’ fully understandable.
Japan’s Puppet
(Literary Digest, 1936)
A brief notice reporting on Prince Teh Wang (Prince Demchugdongrub 1902 – 1966), ruler of Inner Mongolia, who, in an attempt to create an independent Mongolia, simply ruled as an appeaser of Imperial Japan:
While Prince Teh’s position, as a Japanese puppet, can scarcely be less comfortable than it was before , Japan has a grip on the bottle-neck controlling a vast, ill-defined hinterland of North China; and has as well a buffer State between her own influence and that of the Soviets.
Reversals for Chiang Kai-shek
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)
The years 1927 through 1947 has largely been remembered as a victorious era for the Chinese Nationalists in their struggle against the Communist rebels under Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976). However, following Mao’s 1947 retreat to Manchuria and the subsequent training and reforms that took place within his army, the Nationalist Chinese troops began to feel the humiliation of defeat until they made good their strategic withdrawal to Formosa (ie. Taiwan), where they have remained ever since.
This single page article goes into greater detain outlining the chronology of events.
Mao and the Death of Stalin
(Quick Magazine, 1953)
Upon hearing that Stalin had died, the official Red Chinese radion spent hours talking of Stalin’s death, paid little heed to Malenkov’s elevation to Russia’s premiership.
Mao has considered himself second only to Stalin in communism.
General Dai Li: ”The Himmler of The East
(Collier’s, 1946)
Kind words are written herein by Lt. Commander Charles G. Dobbin regarding the Himmler of the East, General Dai Li(1897 – 1946), founder of China’s secret police under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887 – 1975). Written in 1946, this reminiscence concerns the tight cooperation that existed between General Li’s guerrilla units and the American military (Sino-American Co-Operative Organization: S.A.C.O.) during the later years of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Dobbins emphasized how deeply General Dai Li’s intelligence operatives were able to circulate during the period in which U.S. Rear Admiral Milton Mary Miles commanded the S.A.C.O. troops.
‘China: The Pity of It”
(Saturday Review of Literature, 1933)
The review of J.O.P. Bland’s China: The Pity of It which was written by Henry Kittredge Norton:
Mr. Bland (1863 – 1945) has known his China for a third of a century and he is convinced that if that unhappy country has moved at all in the last three decades, it has moved backwards…Without relieving the Chinese of their share of the responsibility in the premises, the half-baked liberalism of the west – by which is meant Great Britain and the United States for the most part -is found to be the chief cause of expanding disaster in China…
Available at Amazon: China – The Pity Of It
The Battle at the Great Wall
(Literary Digest, 1933)
…Peiping Associated Press dispatches tell of a major battle between Japanese and Chinese armies for possession of Chiumenkow Pass in the Great Wall of China. The Pass is one of the most important gateways leading into the rich province of Jehol which, it is reported, Japan purposes to cut off from China and add to Manchukuo…This collision forms the second chapter in the Shanhaikwan dispute, and it comes quickly.
Japan Sinks an American Warship
(Literary Digest, 1937)
Bombs rained like hailstones and churned the waters all around the ship like geysers.’ said Earl Leaf, United Press correspondent in China and eyewitness of the sinking of the United States gunbpat PANAY
His Majesty’s Ambassador to Tokyo has made the strongest protest to the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs.’
Click here if you would like to read more about the sinking of the U.S.S. Panay.
The Roots of Communist China
(The Nation, 1927)
A dispatch from the old China watcher Lewis S. Gannett was printed in the left-leaning American magazine, THE NATION:
All China has been won to half the Nationalist program – that which is directed to the reestablishment of national independence. The fundamental conflict between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ is, I think, between short-sighted men who think that the Nationalist passion can subside without causing fundamental changes in China’s social fabric, and those who recognize the inevitability of industrialization in China and are determined that their country shall not pass through all the miserable phases of capitalistic industrialism which created a disinherited proletariat in the West.
The Japanese Drive on Beijing
(The Literary Digest, 1933)
The aggressive ambitions of Japan know no bounds. The occupation of Peiping [Beijing] will lead to further aggression in Shantung and Shansi and other northern provinces, and will result either in the establishment of a new puppet regime in North China.
The Shanghai SHUN PAO, an independent newspaper, bewails the futility of the uncoordinated resistance which has prevailed among China’s forces since the capture of Jehol, and it adds:
The only possibilities now are peace by compromise or a continuance of war. Despite the dangers of the latter course it is the only possible solution, but resistance must be coordinated under an able leader, China must fight or become a second Korea.