Who lost China?

Who lost China?

When I was young in Hong Kong, my after-school entertainment was playing guitar and listening to pop music on the radio. I was bombarded with British and American hit songs. Cliff Richard, a very popular UK singer similar to Elvis, and a female singer, Helen Shapiro, were my music idols. Alongside Elvis, Paul Anka, Bobby Vinton and Connie Francis were among my most favorite American singers. I became better acquainted with British and American culture and I learned to write English better
through their wonderful lyrics. Then, of course, the Beatles craze swept through England and the United States. Today, my website deals with the relationship between America, Britain, and China as embodied through the figure of Homer Lea. There always lingers a difficult question in my mind: Why did the Americans and the British not help Homer Lea to support Dr. Sun Yat Sen's new democratic, republic government? After all, it was a new Lincoln's China! Sun Yat Sen's Three Principles of the People is based on Lincoln's ideology, of the people, by the people, and for the people. Perhaps I have found the answer from an expert! Whether you agree with him or not, you have the right to make your own judgement. This is the first time I have invited a writer to my blog. It would be fair to balance various opinions from different angles as more writers will be invited to my blog. I hope you enjoy reading this article. Also, I have included a brief introduction of the writer at the end.

Why did the United States fail to support the Republic of China?

by Mark Calney

In 1904, Sun Yat-sen issued his pamphlet, A True Solution of the Chinese Question, which was a direct appeal to the American people to support his revolutionary efforts to overthrow the Manchu government. It stated:

“To work out the salvation of China is exclusively a duty of our own, but as the problem has recently involved a world-wide interest, we, in order to make sure of our success...must appeal to the people of the United States in particular for your sympathy and support, either moral or material, because you are the pioneers of Western Civilization in Japan; because you are a Christian nation; because we intend to model our new government after yours; above all because you are the champion of liberty and democracy. We hope we may find many Lafayettes among you.”

On January 1, 1912, Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of China at Nanking. There were no official representatives of any Western government present. However, there was one American “Lafayette” there who had worked tirelessly to witness the events of that day – Homer Lea. But where was the support of that nation upon which President Sun had modeled his political and economic ideas? What had happened to the nation of Abraham Lincoln?

During the 1950s, one the most contentious political debates in the U.S. centered on the question of “Who lost China?” To find the answer to that question we must search further back into history than the ascendancy of Mao Zedong and China’s Communist Party in 1949. That answer is properly located in the historic battle over the Idea of Man located in the ongoing life-and-death struggle between the principles of the American System versus the British System. One looks to the universal nature of all people, embodied in the creative potential of the human mind, where the republic protects the General Welfare and enables its citizens to engage in the scientific and cultural advancement of their nation. The other, the British System, represents the static, parasitical system of empire ruled by self-appointed elites that act as if the vast bulk of humanity is merely cattle taking up space on their global plantation.

The issue of “Who lost China?” starts with the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. With the end of the U.S. Civil War, the nation had not only recovered quickly but by the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia it had provably become the greatest industrial and agricultural power in the world. This was accomplished by the continued adherence to President Lincoln’s policies of the American System of economics (characterized by upholding the Constitutional credit power of the nation to foster infrastructure and industry, and protectionism), epitomized at the time by his advisor and the world’s foremost economist, Henry C. Carey. Unlike today, when the alpha and omega of what passes for “economic theory” is the British-created concept of “Free Trade” (known now as Globalization), the American System stood against the Imperial promotion of opium, wars, and slavery in all its forms. Consequently, it also gave hope to all peoples around the globe that they too could throw off the shackles of their colonial masters, who viewed them as animals, and become modern nations. Emulating the success of the Transcontinental Railroad, Americans began exporting locomotives and railway equipment to Russia, China, and South American. In Europe, Germany, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, had adopted the America System of economics. By the end of the 1890s, three companies of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers had surveyed all of Central and South America in order to build with those nations what President Ulysses S. Grant called an “iron belt” of railroads that would “encircle the whole American continent.” There was a global revolution occurring that promised to modernize the world and relegate the system of Empire to its much deserved place in the dustbin of history.

On September 5, 1901, President McKinley attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The main theme of Exposition was the display of frontier technologies, such as the generation of electricity for public use, to be utilized in the peaceful and mutual development of the nations of the Americas. He reaffirmed, in a sublime fashion, the founding, universal principles of the United States, in his public address which began, “At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not a mile of steam railroad on the globe. Now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and all seas. God and man linked the nations together. …” Within hours of that speech, President McKinley was assassinated by those who had the most to gain (“cui bono”) and facilitated the action – the British oligarchy.

But that crime was no simple act of murder. It was, in affect, a coup d’etat. The man who then became President, Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt, represented a counterrevolution against the American System of George Washington and Lincoln. Philosophically and spiritually, Teddy Roosevelt was a Confederate. He had been tutored in England on the geopolitics of British Empire naval strategy by his beloved “Uncle Jimmy” – James D. Bullock. Bullock had been the head of the Confederate Secret Service in Europe during the Civil War and was responsible for coordinating the construction and supply of Confederate warships in England, where he remained in exile after the war.

Teddy Roosevelt replaced McKinley’s vision of an America that was facilitating the development of the world with that of the crass, imperialist bully whose only foreign allegiance was to the British Empire. It was TR who, as temporary acting Secretary of the Navy, on February 25, 1898 issued orders, without President McKinley’s knowledge, to Admiral Dewey to have his fleet steam to the Philippines to capture Manila and thus forcing the Spanish-American War (McKinley had been involved in peace negotiations with Spain to establish the independence of Cuba). It was TR who ordered the illegal invasion of Colombia in order to occupy the Isthmus of Panama. Contrary to the popularized myths of TR “the trust buster,” it was during his Administration that the London-allied banking houses of Wall Street, led by J.P. Morgan, consolidated their control over one-fourth of all American businesses.

During Teddy Roosevelt’s re-election campaign in 1904, Jacob Gould Schurman, whom McKinley had appointed chairman of the First U.S. Philippine Commission in 1899, proposed that Roosevelt make Philippine independence one of the planks in his program. TR angrily rejected the idea, to which Schurman denounced him as “Caesarism in government.” Schurman later served as the U.S. Envoy to China (1921-1925) during the Harding Administration.

Teddy Roosevelt’s intentions and his actions to turn the U.S. into the junior partner of the British Empire were openly stated at an address he gave at Oxford University after his retirement: “No hard and fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races. . . . In the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. That is what our peoples have in the main done, and must continue . . . to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines.”

The election of President Howard Taft in 1908 offered some relief from the Anglophile policies of TR. Taft’s ‘Dollar Diplomacy” was a welcome alternative to the ‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ of his predecessor. Having served as McKinley’s Commissioner and Governor-General of the Philippines, Taft had a personal knowledge and desire for the modernization of Asia. Shortly after entering the White House, Taft issued a direct communication to Prince Chun, Regent of the Chinese Empire, stating that he had “an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassments affecting the growth of her independent political power and the preservation of her territory.” The State Department had requested that certain American bankers issue loans for participation in the construction of the proposed Hankow-Szechuen Railway. The Regent accepted the American offer, and in deference to other imperial powers Taft stated that “this railroad loan represented a practical and real application of the Open Door policy.”

During the Taft Presidency, Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary movement had received informal support from many Americans without intervention by the U.S. government. With the success of the Chinese Revolution on October 10, 1911 and the election of Sun Yat-sen as the first President, British interests were frenetic in their attempts to sabotage the new Republic of China and ensure that there would be no U.S. recognition and collaboration. Taft unfortunately took the advice of those who said that he should remain neutral regarding China until after his reelection. Guaranteeing that that would never occur, TR ran as a third party candidate (Bull Moose Party) in order to take votes away from Taft and thereby electing another arch-Anglophile, Woodrow Wilson, as President.

Having grownup in a household of radical, Confederate theologians during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson abused the Presidential office through his treasonous activities. Wilson hated the American System of economics and supported the unconstitutional establishment of the Federal Reserve by its London/Wall Street backers. He participated in, and supported, the Confederate re-writing of American history, as well as the reestablishment of the Ku Klux Klan by premiering the D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK film, the Birth of a Nation (originally The Clansman) in the White House and endorsing its contents: “It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

In his 1885 book, Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics, (written in the presence of a portrait of the then-current British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, which hung above his desk) Wilson advocated replacing the American system of government with the British parliamentary system. So, it was no surprise that the British had a staunch ally in their drive to halt the international influence of the American System through the launching of a series of political destabilizations leading into a World War. Despite his lying re-election campaign slogan that he would never allow the U.S. to be involved in a European war, President Wilson eagerly backed the British Empire in its imperial enterprise, beginning with his illegal U.S. naval blockade of Germany (resulting in the needless starvation of over 750,000 Germans).

In such an international climate, dominated by the British Empire’s unbridled push for World War and with the U.S. President having turned the nation into a “dumb giant on a British leash,” pressure was exerted upon China to join the Allied Powers. But, Sun Yat-sen responded for China, stating, “We must maintain strict neutrality in an unbending spirit of independence.” Sun had no illusions about the aims and methods of the British oligarchy concerning their World War and published them in his famous 1917 pamphlet The Vital Problem of China:

“When England befriends another country, the purpose is not to maintain a cordial friendship for the sake of friendship but to utilize that country as a tool to fight a third country. When an enemy has been shorn of his power, he is turned into a friend, and, the friend who has become strong, into an enemy. England always remains in a commanding position; she makes other countries fight her wars and she herself reaps the fruits of victory. She has been doing so for hundreds of years. . . . In other words, Britain seeks friendship only with those which can render her services, and when her friends are too weak to be of any use to her, they must be sacrificed in her interests. Britain’s tender regard for her friends is like the delicate care usually shown by farmers in the rearing of silkworms; after all the silk has been drawn from the cocoons, they are destroyed by fire or used as food for fish. The present friends of Britain are no more than silkworms, and they are receiving the tender care of Britain simply because there is still some silk left in them.”

Sun Yat-sen’s warnings were proven correct when, after the war, the Versailles Treaty allowed the Britain Empire to preserve and extend its colonial powers in China. The British Empire had become the primus inter pares, controlling one-quarter of the surface of the Earth and ruling over one-fourth of the world’s population.

It was not until the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt that the American System of economics and its foreign policy corollary was fully reinstated. It was then, when the world was at war to defend human freedom that the United States supported, as best it could, China and the National Party of Sun Yat-sen. FDR personally brought Chiang Kai-shek into the leadership of the Allied Powers.

During World War II, Roosevelt informed the British Prime Minster, Winston Churchill, at the Casablanca summit in Morocco that in the post-war period the U.S. would no longer tolerate any empire (British, Dutch, or otherwise) and that all former colonies would be independent and free to modernize their nations with “twentieth century methods.” Unfortunately, history once again repeated itself when, with the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman became President. Truman followed the British and failed to implement FDR’s post-war vision.

Today, in the present historic financial crisis, the United States and China have the opportunity to jointly establish, with their Russian and Indian allies, that universal American System policy for which those like Sun Yat-sen, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Homer Lea gave their full measure of devotion.

Photo: commemorate China 1937-1942, struggle for a democratic nation (courtesy of United States Post Office 1942 stamp).

Reference: Theodore Roosevelt
The Romaines Lecture: Biological Analogies in History, Oxford, England, 1910.
Diplomacy That Will Live in Infamy by James Bradley, author of Flag of Our Fathers and Imperial Cruise, about how Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=james%20bradley&st=cse

Links to Sun Yat-sen’s The Vital Problem of China in Chinese and English:
Chinese: (longer download time)
http://larouchejapan.com/chinese/drupal-6.14/sites/default/files/text/traditional_vital_problem_of_china.pdf
English:
http://larouchejapan.com/japanese/drupal-6.14/sites/default/files/text/jp-sun-yat-sen-the-vital-problem-of-china-en.pdf

About the author:

Mark Calney has written articles published in America and Germany on Richard Wagner and the Racist Roots of Nazi Ideology and D.W. Griffith: Hollywood and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1989, he published a series of articles on Sun Yat-sen and the American Roots of China’s Republican Movement. In addition, to extensive research and writings on California history, U.S.- Mexican industrial relations, and the U.S. 1876 Centennial Exposition, he has recently concluded an in-depth research project on the unique roll of America in the development of the modern nation of Japan. He has also contributed articles to Executive Intelligence Review magazine on Scottish affairs.
Mr. Calney and his family live in Altadena, California. He has been an organizer in the political movement of American statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche for more than thirty years. In 1994, he was a Democratic Party candidate for Governor of the State of California, and has done several speaking tours of Scotland on the subject of his book. You can contact the author at: Calney@aol.com

Lincoln's China

Friday, October 23, 2009