280 book reviews James Bradley The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015). 417 pp. $35 (cloth). James Bradley, author of the famous popular history (and major motion pic- ture) Flags of Our Fathers, has continued to plumb the legacy of his family’s war record, this time taking on the wisdom and necessity of the u.s. war against Japan. He does not mince words: Washington’s decision to cut off Japan’s access to oil in the autumn of 1941 was a foolish decision and forced an otherwise reti- cent Japan into attacking u.s. naval forces at Pearl Harbor. This decision, he writes, “thrust America into an unwanted Asian war,” for which his “father and millions of others” need not have risked or sacrificed their lives (p. 8). According to Bradley, the root of the problem was the obsessive and wholly unrealistic American attachment to China and (in his words) the “Noble Chinese Peasant.” Ultimately most concerned with the impulses that drove the Roosevelt administration’s Pacific strategy in the 1930s and 1940s, he begins with a chapter on Warren Delano, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandfa- ther, who made a fortune in the opium business in China in the mid-19th Century. Like so many other Westerners who had little access to or knowledge of China beyond the high walls of the treaty ports, Delano viewed China as both backwards and eminently salvageable. Crucially, then, Warren Delano not only imparted to his family an immense personal fortune, but also an image of China that was wildly oversimplified and paternalistic. His grandson, Franklin Delano, inherited both, and maintained throughout his life the notion “that China could not be internally reformed, and the pitiful, drug-addicted, backward pagan mess of a place was lucky to have Americans … to civilize it via American values and beliefs” (p. 28). Much of the book’s next four chapters elaborate on how Delano’s views— the basis of the “China Mirage”—reflected the prevailing image of China in the United States. Bradley is generally attentive to the standard history of Chinese-American relations in the early 20th Century, though he leaves out some of the major events that took place between 1910 and 1930. Perhaps this is because President William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, or President Woodrow Wilson’s performance at the Versailles Peace Conference, or the hol- lowness of the 1922 Nine-Power Treaty, or the Gunboat Diplomacy of the late 1920s would complicate Bradley’s tidy narrative that the United States let its emotional and mythologized view of China invariably get in the way of more clear-eyed foreign policies. In any case, the first half of the book culminates with the emergence of the China Lobby—a group of politicians, policymak- ers, and businessmen who had been swept up in the idea that China needed © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/18765610-02203009 <UN> book reviews 281 and deserved a benevolent United States to save it politically, militarily, economically, and spiritually. Crucially helping the China Lobby’s efforts to promote its vision and to fun- nel as many resources and supportive policies in China’s direction was another advocacy group of sorts—the Soong Dynasty. Bradley traces the rise of the Soong family—including the father (Charlie), his two daughters (Ailing and Meiling), and the son (Tse-ven or T.V.)—both in China, where they attached themselves to powerful political factions (most importantly, Chiang Kai-shek), and in the United States. The Soong family helped the China Lobby perpetuate the myth of the “Noble Chinese Peasant” to the general, uninformed American public. For their effort, Bradley writes, the Soongs “would eventually shake from the u.s. almost three times as much as America would spend on the atomic bomb” (p. 206). Meanwhile in China, Mao Zedong, without the benefit of American dollars or sympathies, was working tirelessly to unify the country and oppose the Japanese occupiers. The Soong-China Lobby connection is in many ways the centerpiece of Bradley’s story. Each side of the coalition had different motivations, but both played on the “China Mirage” to get what they wanted from u.s. foreign policy. Their combined efforts produced a host of policy initiatives designed to prop up Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and ineffective regime. Even when American dollars and personnel made their way to supporting China’s war against Japan—perhaps most famously through Claire Chenault’s Flying Tiger’s air force—the results never matched the expectations of the optimists in the United States. But for Bradley, the most grievous of any machination was the China Lobby’s efforts to go behind the back of President Roosevelt and force a full-scale oil embargo on Japan in the fall of 1941. Bradley writes that Roosevelt “wanted the Japanese to have all the California oil they desired” and understood what might follow if the United States froze its oil exports to Japan (p. 261). But the China Lobby, determined to protect Chiang and the “Noble Chinese Peasant,” maneuvered behind the scenes to “cut off Japan’s economic lifeblood,” thereby “leaving Japan an industrialized beached whale” (pp. 281, 276). Because Japan could not suffer the humiliation of reducing or withdrawing from its operations in China, Bradley confirms to his readers that “Japan was provoked into a war of self-defense” (p. 286). The book’s last two chapters detail the sustained influence of the China Lobby after World War ii, which Bradley sees as partially responsible for the United States fight- ing wars in Korea and Vietnam. Despite its dependence on parsimony and sometimes sensationalized con- clusions, historians should welcome The China Mirage as a reasonably well- informed popular history of 20th Century Chinese-American relations. After journal of american-east asian relations 22 (2015) 273-282 <UN>.