Stilwell and the American Experience in China

Vinegar Joe and the China Tangle

General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was, by most measures, the most frustrated American commander of the Second World War. As the commanding general of American forces in the China-Burma-India theater, he was responsible for training and equipping Nationalist Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-shek — a task that proved impossible not because of Japanese resistance but because Chiang and his government had no intention of fighting the Japanese when they could preserve their forces for the coming civil war with the Communists.

Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography uses Stilwell’s career as the organizing principle for a history of American engagement with China from the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 through the end of the Second World War. Stilwell knew China — he had served there as a military attaché for years, spoke Chinese, and understood the country with a depth unusual among American officers. This knowledge made his wartime frustrations more acute: he could see exactly what was wrong, and he was ignored.

The American Illusion of China

The deeper subject of Tuchman’s book is the American illusion about China — the romantic attachment to the idea of China as a naturally democratic, naturally pro-American country whose natural destiny was alignment with the United States. This fiction, cultivated by missionary associations, by pro-Nationalist lobby groups in Washington, and by Chiang Kai-shek’s shrewd management of American public opinion, shaped American policy for decades and made honest assessment of the Nationalist government’s failures essentially impossible.

Tuchman traces how this illusion persisted in the face of Stilwell’s reports, the assessments of the State Department’s China hands, and the visible evidence of the Nationalist government’s corruption and military passivity. The refusal to update belief in the face of contrary evidence is a theme Tuchman would later develop systematically in The March of Folly; Stilwell is one of its richest illustrations.

A Policy History as Biography

The biographical and policy-historical strands work together effectively. Stilwell becomes both a subject and an instrument — a man through whom American assumptions about China are tested and found wanting. His famous outburst referring to Chiang as “the Peanut” captures both his frustration and his clarity about what American policy was actually dealing with. Tuchman’s portrait of both men — Stilwell’s integrity and rigidity, Chiang’s political cunning and military paralysis — is one of the book’s great achievements.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A Pulitzer Prize winner that uses one general’s career to illuminate fifty years of American self-deception about China — essential history for understanding the roots of American-Chinese relations.