Hong Kong Thoughts: FDR, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Mont Tremblant Conference

I can assume you've heard of Hong Kong, and most of you know FDR stands for United States President-for-Life Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You should know that Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), the Generalissimo, was the generally acknowledged leader of the Chinese government (such as it was) during the era of Roosevelt and Hitler. Chiang even went on to a ghostly existence as the leader of the rebel island province of Taiwan once he lost mainland China to the Chinese Communist government.

I'm pretty sure you don't know about the Mont Tremblant Conference, because I only learned of it a few days ago while reading A History of Hong Kong
by Frank Welsh. Nothing like reading a Brit book to learn some things about American history that are ... not in American books.

Before we get into Mont Tremblant, let me mention that on page 424 I learned a new fact about the D. in FDR. During World War II, President Roosevelt's "visitors were reminded that his maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, had been a partner in Russel's [Hong Kong establishment] and that his mother had spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong. The fact that Russel's had been active in the opium trade ... did not seem to cross the President's mind." But I'm sure all you FDR fans already knew that. I just missed it somehow.

Today the Mont Tremblant conference is a mystery, it does not even have its own Wikipedia page [another item for my To Do list]. According to Welsh, scattered about pages 423-427, the conference took place between December 4 and 14th, 1942 at Mont Tremblant near Quebec, Canada. I learned elsewhere it was sponsored by a non-governmental organization, the IPR (Institute of Pacific Relations). The Chinese nationalists were doing little in the way of fighting the Japanese at that time, but Roosevelt was giving them a lot of money and arms that the British thought could be better used to fight for British dominance of Europe and North Africa.

Some American leaders were playing the anti-colonialism card, notably Vice-President Wallace. But Roosevelt stated he was willing to give the French colony of Indochina as well as Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek. The Brits present had no problem trading rhetoric. When FDR referred to the Brits grabbing Hong Kong, Oliver (Lord) Stanley retorted "Mr. President, that was about the time of the Mexican War, wasn't it?" The British, less blinded to certain realities than the anti-communists in Roosevelt's regime, in 1942 already suspected that Chiang Kai-shek would not be able to hold onto power if the Japanese left China. Recall that the number 2 man in the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) had been set up as the head of China by the Japanese, a pretty cozy relationship that no one any longer seems to want to talk about.

David MacDougall, formerly a member of the Hong Kong government, attended Mont Tremblant and reported that there was a division in the British delegation between those who were willing to pacify the U.S. by giving up Hong Kong, and those who believed that after the war a general settlement on colonialism in the Pacific would be necessary. In such a conference the British might give up Hong Kong if the Dutch and French gave up their colonies. And it the U.S. gave up the Philippines and Hawaii. Welsh does not mention it, but the U.S. had grabbed quite a few smaller Pacific islands during its colonial expansion. [FDR repeatedly turned down the requests of the Philippines for independence during his regime. The Japanese granted the Philippines formal independence.]

Now, as part of my research into the U.S. War Against Asia, I feel I need to read in more detail about this Mont Tremblant conference. No treaties were signed, but that should not relegate the conference to the dustbin of history. Are there minutes of the meetings somewhere? All this sort of stuff should be on the Internet now, where scholars and the merely curious can access it easily.

Hong Kong History and Wild Swans of China

As my relaxing reading lately I have been dividing my attention between two books, A History of Hong Kong by Frank Welsh and Wild Swans by Jung Chang. Both books have pro-British Empire glosses that are undermined by the actual historical facts recounted.

As the title would indicate, A History of Hong Kong is written in a competent, standard historical manner. It is unappologetically pro-British. Frank Welsh seems to think the package of British civilization and British racism and attrocities is a package any wise country would buy at any point in history. Yet he does not hold back the facts, including the gory details of the Opium Wars, including exactly which British mercantile families and politicians benefitted. For me, the most useful part of the book so far has been the color it has cast on The U.S. War Against Asia. It is obvious that Commander Perry's military expedition against Japan was merely a shadow copy of the British operations against China in the decades that preceded it. That makes sense, but Perry's chronicler only mention's his studies of Japanese history, not his apparently careful study of how the Brits grabbed Hong Kong.

Wild Swans is the more complex and interesting book. If you don't know the history of modern China, it certainly paints a picture by telling of the struggles of the ancestors of the author to make good under the old Empire, under the Kuomintang, and then as communist bureaucrats. In the introduction Chang gushes with a love of modern England and a hatred of Mao, but so far in the book the stories sound authentic enough. No one comes out looking good. Bad as the communists may be painted, the Kuomintang were worse; bad as the Kuomintang might have been, they were better than the Manchus. Some of Jung Chang's ancestors are Manchus, but they are mostly Han. Because the book concentrates on the stories of her mother and grandmother, we see the meaning of modern reforms is particularly compelling for women. On the other hand Chang takes many opportunities to trash the folly of peasants and the incorporation of peasant knowledge into modern communist Chinese practice.

Closer to home, people in this coastal California community are talking about the Gulf oil spill. Good thing we don't allow drilling off our shores. Of course we drive our cars just as much as people in the gulf states. Soon I need to get up from this computer and drive to a meeting in Boonville to try to get an environmentalist elected to office. I tried to get the other organizers to hold these meetings by teleconference, but no, they are old fashinioned, they like in-person meetings. As a result I have missed almost all of the meetings. I am driving today because suddenly our campaign seems to be in trouble; I'm hoping my personal presence will have an impact, but in fact it will probably be one last waste of time and gasoline.

Wild Swans's stories of hunger and physical hardship in 20th century China reminds me of how corrupted by material wealth our American society is. Point Arena like anywhere else. Voters here are mostly apathetic about the primary coming up in June. Those who liked to complain about Bush have been replaced by a far smaller number of people who like to complain about Obama, but mostly politics and economics are just too complicated for Californians to bother their heads with. On the other hand, the turnout for Fishtank was good Saturday at the Arena Theatre. Nothing against Fishtank, they were great. As to democracy, forget about it. The captains of the U.S.S. Ship of State can sink it just fine, without any help from citizens at all.

More about the books at Amazon:

Chiang Kai-Shek and Andrew Jackson

I have not added to this blog this week until now. I have been busy, my mind is racing, and I have a lot to write about that is going to take up considerable blog space in the future. I know most of my small but loyal band of fans like my ability to connect dots, and are wondering how I am going to connect Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of Nationalist China in the 20th century, with Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party and President of the United States in the early 19th century. But first a bit about my life.

This was a week of meetings for me, most of them business meetings in which corporations told their investors how they did in the third quarter of 2007. Most of them did fine; the economy is okay as long as you aren't poor and did not make the mistake in loaning mortgage money to people who can't repay it.

I attended three public interest meetings. The first was a forum of local school board candidates in the Point Arena, California school district. I'm not running after being on the school board for eight years, so mainly I was happy to see that some people even wanted this unpaid job. But the answers to the questions were mostly evasive happy talk. A guy named Jim DeWilder gave some good answers. He has actually been paying attention to the way the schools are governed.

The actual school board meeting this week was pretty exciting for me. Even though we have shown pretty phenomenal improvements in the schools these last six years, there is a group of people who have spent the last year in attack mode against us. It is a long story so I will narrow it to last night's appearance of a lynch mob. This happens from time to time, usually when someone has to be not-rehired. In this case we were pretty far off in our budget for 2006-2007, and Thursday was when we would go over that situation. The thing is, we really did not do anything wrong except we were not conservative enough about our revenues and expenses. Then we had 3 teachers who were very ill and out a lot, pushing up our budget for substitute teachers way beyond the typical unanticipated expenses. In fact we are in no danger of bankruptcy, we just have to tighten our belts a bit more this year and when we prepare next years budget. We managed to explain all this to the public. By the end of it everyone was calm and several people expressed happiness at how we handled the situation.

But Chiang and Jackson. General Chiang and General Jackson. I just happen to be reading two different books for different reasons at more or less the same time. Because I am getting ready to write the China chapter of my U.S. War Against Asia, one book I am reading is Hollington K. Tong's Chiang Kai-Shek. Mr. Tong is a big fan of the Generalisimo. Similarly Marquis James is a big fan of the Hero of New Orleans, as shown in his The Life of Andrew Jackson. When I am likely to be critical of a historic person I like to read someone who has a positive take on their subject; I can provide my own criticism. I am reading up on the Hero to get a better understanding of why so many American voters support such an evil party, which I believe all goes back to Jackson.

Andrew Jackson distinguished himself in the fine arts of genocide and stealing native American Indian lands. He was a gambler who owned and fought dogs and chickens, but as he got wealthier mainly gambled on horses. Eventually he was elected President of the United States and founded the Democratic Party. He was not only a slave owner, but he actively traded slaves for profit. He combined the old-style English predatory trading and lawyering mindset with the Wild West land lust and contempt for weaker humans.

Andrew Jackson was beloved by most (white anyway) Americans of his time and is held in high regard today by most Americans, descendants of former black slaves included.

Chiang Kai-Shek, when you don't know the facts, starts at the opposite end of American opinion. When I was a child in the 1960's he was the ruler of Taiwan and pretended to be the ruler of China. Americans hated the communists who ruled China and of course their leader Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung when I was growing up). Yet we did not like Chiang Kai-Shek because he had lost China to the Communists. When I was exposed to Marxist-Leninist propaganda I learned that Chiang was an American puppet. We don't like it when our puppets lose.

While Chiang was not the founder of the Nationalist Party of China, more properly the Kuomintang, he was its leader for far longer than Andrew Jackson led the Democrats. He was a national hero, like Andrew Jackson, because of his ability to win battles. In fact, all evidence is that he was a far better general than Jackson was.

In reading Chiang's biography I keep making mental notes, "puppet," or "not a puppet." No doubt the Chinese nationalists wanted to modernize their nation. They wanted to emulate the powerful nations of Russia, Germany, France, Japan, Great Britain and the United States. But they started from a difficult position, a position of weakness. The powerful nations were the predators and China was the prey.

Some puppets are willing extensions of the will of their masters. I don't see the Generalisimo that way. But he must have looked that way to many Chinese. His wife was educated in the United States and Chiang converted to Christianity under her influence. But Chiang Kai-Shek's driving passion was to unite China under a single, centralized government. Which was Mao's passion too; they just differed as to who would run that government and how it would be run. In World War II and afterwards Chiang became dependent on the U.S. This was a mistake, because the U.S. was just looking after its own interests and was far more interested in occupying Japan and restoring the economy of Europe than in aiding the Chinese once the Japanese were defeated.

Early in Chiang's career his main problem was subduing various war lords. The communists were a problem, but not his main problem. Then came the invasion by the Japanese. Maoist propaganda holds that Chiang refused to fight the Japanese. Nationalist propaganda is that the Reds only fought the Japanese when they could seize supplies. It looks to me like both sides fought the Japanese, with ebbs and flows in enthusiasm. However, the big battles had to be fought by the nationalists. They lost millions of men and so did the Japanese. Which brings up an important aside.

One you get past the "US defeated the Nazi's in World War II" theory, and realize that the Russians defeated the Nazis and the U.S. only stormed in at the last minute to grab France and most of Germany for the capitalist cause, you feel enlightened and relax. But the same thing happened with the Japanese, if to some lesser degree. The Chinese nationalists lost far more men fighting the Japanese in World War II than the U.S. did. This was part of Roosevelt's strategy to let foreigners die to weaken the enemies, then be strong enough to grab the spoils. If the A-bomb had not worked Roosevelt's plan was to have the Russians invade Manchuria, where the best equipped and trained Japanese armies were stationed. This back fired: Russia invaded Manchuria mostly after the Japanese surrendered. Russia grabbed a lot of industrial equipment and gave the Japanese arms to the Chinese communists, which enabled them to graduate from guerrilla warfare to conventional warfare in their civil war.

So the moment the Japanese surrendered the Chinese Nationalists found themselves in a civil war with the Communists. The great Chiang Kai-Shek lost the civil war and retired in disgrace to Taiwan (taking the gold bullion with him. For the good of the nation).

Andrew Jackson did not live long enough to see the Civil War. If he had, the North might have lost. But here is the difference between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Party. When the Democratic Party lost the Civil War, the Republican Party did not make it illegal. Wise men knew that two parties were needed in the U.S., to trade places in times of public discontent. At first the Democratic Party had trouble winning elections after the Civil War, but fixed that by denying the former slaves the right to vote. Eventually even on a national level Democrats started winning, with Grove Cleveland becoming the first post-civil-war Democratic President.

While neither man scores very high by my standard of ethics or political leadership, I think Chiang was a better (in the ethical sense) man than Andrew Jackson. Of course Chiang Kai-Shek was born over a century after Andrew Jackson, and times had changed. Probably Chiang's worst mistake was setting up an authoritarian regime in Taiwan after he lost the civil war in China. If he had immediately allowed free elections with multiple political parties, he would have looked like what he had claimed to be in China: a genuine democrat. But he was a general first-and-foremost. He preferred to command and be obeyed. So did Andrew Jackson.