It is one of history’s most important questions why the United States failed the Chinese nationalists during the civil war against the communists. The shock to the American and international public ran deep. A quarter of the world’s population fell under communist control. Of course, various narratives had to be distributed for different target groups in the period that followed. For most citizens and historians, there was a collection of stupid excuses. For the right-wing spectrum, those who are interested in conspiracies and especially for the military and secret service agents, however, the picture of a far-reaching conspiracy was painted:
Communist agents in the US government, or agents of the Jewish world banker conspiracy, were supposedly behind it. People were urged to support Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s sponsors came from the secretive Skull & Bones group, which had a lot to do with what was going on in China and turned China into a world power. At some point it was officially declared under Nixon and Kissinger that China had to be helped as a counterweight to the Soviets. Somehow it would all make sense, they said, and the Chinese would buy American goods as a bonus. The John Birch Society believed Nixon and Kissinger were agents of the Rockefellers, who in turn were agents of the Rothschilds. While it was true that Nixon’s career was built by the Rockefellers and that the Rockefellers were closely associated with Kissinger, US foreign policy was certainly not under orders from the Rothschilds or the elusive mythical Elders of Zion. This JBS narrative persisted and influenced millions of people around the world. Today, as the conflict between the United States and China comes to a head, this old narrative can still be used to make people chase ghosts. Right-wing pro-Trump influencers like Alex Jones (from the JBS corner) claimed in 2020 that Joe Biden was an agent of China and that the communists (or international bankers) had stolen the presidency from Trump. The same conspirators who made China communist back then were behind Joe Biden and his election victory. So one draws a line from Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati and the French Revolution, to the alleged takeover of power by the Jewish bankers over Britain and the USA, to the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, to the current era with Joe Biden’s election victory and the tensions between the US and China.
On Infowars, the platform of the JBS-born Alex Jones, it is assumed that Biden deliberately provides the Chinese with an excuse for a war and then Biden plans to lose this war or end it under disadvantageous conditions. The right-wing influencers have no real evidence that Biden is an agent of China or that his connections to the US establishment are in any noteworthy different from those of Trump.
What happens if there is a military confrontation with China under Joe Biden or any other Democrat president? How will the right-wing influencers and their audience react? Would they refuse the military draft because they fear being deliberately sacrificed on the battle field by Biden and his backers (the Elders of Zion)? Would the federal government then prosecute and punish these conscientious objectors? Would the objectors violently oppose the prosecution? Would the objectors rally in the more conservative states and proclaim secession from the United States? Would they try to attack the federal government in a full-blown civil war? Would influential right-wing circles promise to help? And would these influential circles then let the patriots down? Is the East-West conflict suposed to lead people to chaos and to destroy right-wing, militant patriots?
“Who lost China?”
The “loss of China” was described by critics of the Truman administration as an “avoidable catastrophe”. It led to a “heated and divisive debate” and the issue was taken advantage of by Republicans in the 1952 election. It also played a huge role in the rise of Joseph McCarthy, who with his allies sought scapegoats for this “loss”. In his speech on February 7, 1950, McCarthy held Dean Acheson responsible for the “loss of China” and made the sensational claim:
“Although I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here a list of 205 names in the hands of people known to the Foreign Minister and who were still allowed to continue working and shape the policy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “.
The speech, which McCarthy repeated shortly afterwards in Salt Lake City, made him a figure well known nationwide. “Communists and gays” in the State Department, whom President Harry S. Truman allegedly tolerated, were supposedly responsible for the “loss” of China. McCarthy wasn’t entirely wrong, but he was unqualified for getting to the bottom of the facts. He had the traits of a narcissistic impostor and turned his embarrassing performance in World War II into a heroic story: At home, he stylized himself as an experienced rear gunner “Tail-Gunner Joe” through skillful publicity and manipulation, including alleged injuries in battle and a commendation; in fact, he had a party accident. In serious combat missions he was hardly involved with personal risk due to his service position; he was only a “gunner” at the Marine Corps on Bougainville in the hinterland that was already militarily secured, where he caused civil damage. With this mischaracterization he succeeded in becoming a politician and entered the Senate. His beliefs and ideas coincided with Senate leader Robert Taft, a member of the extremely powerful family clan who co-founded the Skull & Bones secret society at the elite Yale University. Bones was instrumental in participating in the communist revolutions in Russia and China as well as the subsequent building of the Eastern Bloc through technology sales. At the same time, Bones became the center of the American military-industrial complex, including espionage; created the secret service OSS in World War II and shortly afterwards the CIA.
It is unlikely that the career politician and anti-communist McCarthy was privy to this secret. He attacked the US Communist Party and looked mainly for Russian spies on the left. Anti-communism was a gimmick for McCarthy, a subject that made him stand out in the public eye. He declared in 1950 that he had a list of 205 people whom the Democratic Secretary of State Dean Acheson knew to be “members of the Communist Party”. Acheson was a member of another secret society at Yale called Scroll & Key. As foreign minister, he encouraged communist North Korea to attack the south with his public statements. The US would not intervene militarily, so the impression was given. When the Korean War was in full swing and the famous officer MacArthur saw how he was being sabotaged from above, he was unceremoniously sacked. President Truman met with Dean Acheson (Scroll & Key) and “Advisor” W. Averell Harriman (Skull and Bones) and agreed to get rid of MacArthur. For McCarthy these connections were too high and he looked at Acheson’s State Department for communist spies. The list McCarthy had spoken of didn’t even exist. One of his most important collaborators was a certain Roy Cohn. This lawyer had, of all things, a left-wing judge from New York as his father, who had influence in the Democratic Party. Roy was allowed to work on highly sensitive, genuine cases of Soviet espionage, such as the theft of nuclear weapons secrets by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. His interrogation of Ethel’s brother David Greenglass was instrumental in the fact that Julius Rosenberg was sentenced to death. As a lawyer he also represented Donald Trump, mafia bosses Anthony Salerno, Carmine Galante and John Gotti, the owners of Studio 54 Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager and the Archdiocese of New York. Cohn was also an important advisor and mentor to Trump. Trump’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Steven Mnuchin, was a member of Skull & Bones and other hugely important people in Trump’s environment studied at Yale University, the home of Skull & Bones. Whether the president understands the bigger east-west game is highly questionable. But one can assume that Trump was embedded in the plans of the secret societies.
One of the more popular books on the “loss of China” was General Charles A. Willoughby’s 1952 book The Shanghai Conspiracy, which claimed that the Soviet spy ring was under the leadership of Richard Sorge (arrested in 1941 and executed in 1944) and was still in existence. Willoughby went on to claim that the concern spy ring caused the “loss of China” in 1949 and was steadily taking over the US government. The American Japanese scholar Michael Schaller wrote that Willoughby was indeed right on some points, as Sorge was a spy for the Soviet Union, and the same was probably true of some left-wing American journalists who had worked together with concern in Shanghai in the early 1930s , but much of Willoughby’s book reflected the paranoid spirit of one of the most incompetent military intelligence officers to appear in American history.
Bush, Kissinger, Nixon
For the John Birch Society and other influencers in the conspiracy media, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon are all suspected of working for the great “international banker” conspiracy. The three of them had a lot to do with strengthening US relations with China. Bush, according to his own statements, could have become the US envoy to the Court of St. James in London or the Palais de l’Elysee in Paris, but he absolutely wanted to go to China. Bush explained it with pragmatism:
“The United States had no formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic at this point, so my appointment would not require Senate confirmation.”
Bush kept silent about his membership in the secret society Skull & Bones, which played an instrumental role in relations with China and goes back to the British Empire, which once waged opium wars against China. In 1974 there was the “US Liaison Office” (USLO) in China, which did not have the official status of an embassy. The chief of this office was the personal representative of the US president in China. Bush’s predecessor in Beijing was David K.E. Bruce, who served during the Second World War as head of the London office of the US secret service “Office of Strategic Services”, the forerunner of the CIA, which arose from circles of Skull & Bones. This meant that he must have been the head of all European OSS operations. He married Ailsa Mellon, the daughter of the banker and diplomat Andrew W. Mellon. After the divorce he married Evangeline Bell, a granddaughter of the noble Sir Herbert Conyers Surtees, who was decorated with the highest British orders: Order of the Bath, Order of St Michael and St George and Royal Victorian Order. As a Freemason, he was appointed Provincial Grand Master for Durham in October 1932 and Provisional Prior of the Knights Templar in November 1932. He was knighted by King George V in 1932.
Kissinger made it clear that he himself would lead the way, or one of his confidants like Richard Solomon from the NSC, the Deputy Secretary of State Philip Habib or Winston Lord, director of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department and offspring of an old Skull and Bones family. Kissinger is himself a bearer of the British Order of St Michael and St George. In 1938 he fled with his family from Nazi Germany to the USA, where he ended up with military intelligence and took on dangerous missions in World War II. He was promoted to special agent of the “Counterintelligence Corps” secret service with the rank of Sargeant. He was employed in the Welfen strongholds of Hanover and Hesse, later studied at Harvard and became a fixture in the national security apparatus, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefellers and various think tanks. One of Bush’s closest contacts between the Chinese authorities was Deputy Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, who studied at the German University of Tübingen. China’s leadership was riddled with agents from the United States, Britain, France and Russia. The US Liason Office was located in a walled area in a suburb of Beijing. A People’s Liberation Army guard was on duty at all times. As a result, the US leadership and China both wreaked havoc in Vietnam and Cambodia. When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he had turned to Brown Brothers, Harriman partner Robert Lovett, to provide him with a list of possible candidates for his cabinet. From this list were drawn Rusk and McNamara, the leading hawks in the cabinet. McGeorge and William Bundy, descendants of the Boston Lowells but closely related to the Stim-son-Acheson circles, were the mainstays of the escalation. After his death, Kennedy was hyped up as an opponent of war by leftists and conspiracy theorists, which is a gross distortion.
W. Averell Harriman, who began as Assistant Secretary for Southeast Asian Affairs, had been highly geared with a program to expand the war by the Kennedy-Johnson State Department.
Harriman had insisted on assassinating President Diem, the leader of the country the US was supposedly defending. Kennedy had planned that Diệm would be safely exiled, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. recalled that Kennedy was “gloomy and shaken”. Kennedy later wrote a memo, complaining that the assassination attempt was “particularly heinous” and accusing himself of approving Cable 243, which authorized Lodge to examine coup options. The pro-US government of Cambodia was headed by Marshal Lon Nol. In the spring of 1975, when the North Vietnamese were advancing on Saigon, the Lon Nol government fought for their lives against the armed uprising of the communist guerrillas of the “Khmer Rouge”, which were supported by mainland China. The main argument of the US leadership remained to ally itself with China against the USSR, which actually didn’t make much sense. US corporations had persistently sold the Soviets important technology that had military uses for decades. Nobody would have argued out loud that they wanted to strengthen the Soviets in order to weaken the Chinese. Kissinger’s policy was to overthrow the Lon Nol government and replace it with the communist Khmer Rouge.
George Bush, as Kissinger’s liaison in Beijing, implemented this policy. The new Pol Pot regime committed genocide on its own people. In 1969 Nixon and Kissinger ordered a secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese troop concentrations on Cambodian territory under the code name “Menu”. Nixon and Kissinger went to great lengths to keep the missions secret. The number of people who had a complete understanding of the operation was kept to a minimum. Neither the Air Force Secretary nor the Air Force Chief of Staff were aware of the bombing of Cambodia. After the air raids, those responsible collected the mission papers, computer tapes, etc. and destroyed them in an incinerator. Then they called a special phone number in Saigon and reported that “the ball game is over”. The pilots falsified routine reports on hours flown, fuel burned and ordnance dropped. After Operation Menu, the Operation Freedom Deal continued bombing Cambodia for another three years and extended the bombing to at least half of the country. In late April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger launched a large-scale US military invasion of Cambodia, referring to the use of Cambodian territory by the North Vietnamese armed forces. The decisive support for Pol Pot and the later genocidal policy of the Khmer Rouge came from Beijing and Washington. Kissinger and Nixon initiated the Arclight campaign. Under the pretext of stopping an attack by the Khmer Rouge on Phnom Penh, US forces deployed B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets in Cambodia and dropped 539,129 tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell on the most densely populated parts of Cambodia, including the Phnom Penh countryside. The number of deaths caused by this campaign has been estimated at 30,000 to 500,000. In 1974 the Khmer Rouge consolidated its influence on parts of Cambodia. As early as November 1972, Kissinger informed Bush’s main contact, Qiao Guanhua, that the USA would have no real objections to a Khmer Rouge government. In 1973 Kissinger informed the Chinese delegate Huang Hua in New York that the interests of the USA and the Red Chinese in Cambodia were compatible. In 1977 Bush returned to China as a private citizen and took his former Zapata business partner J. Hugh Liedtke with him. In January 1978, Liedtke was present when the Chinese Oil Minister was Bush’s guest for dinner at his Houston home. In May 1978, Liedtke and Pennzoil were at the top of the list of US government oil companies competing for drilling contracts in China. In the late summer of 1978 J. Hugh Liedtke von Pennzoil made another trip to China, during which he was allowed to inspect geological studies that had previously been kept by Beijing as state secrets. Pennzoil was at the head of a contract to start offshore drilling in the South China Sea. The People’s Republic of China provided resources and training to North Vietnam, and in the summer of 1962 Mao agreed to give Hanoi 90,000 rifles and weapons free of charge. After the start of the American Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965, China sent anti-aircraft units and engineering battalions to North Vietnam to repair the damage caused by American bombing, to rebuild roads and railways, and to carry out other technical work.
In the US the argument was made that moving the PRC closer to the US would weaken the Soviets. The nearly one billion consumer market in mainland China has appealed to American business. Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held a series of hearings on the matter. Richard Nixon mentioned in his inaugural address that, after an era of confrontation, the two countries are entering an era of negotiations. Although Nixon loudly supported Chiang Kai-Shek during his 1960 presidential campaign, during the second half of the decade he began to speak increasingly of the fact that in the United States there is “no reason to enrag and isolate China”. Nixon had the reputation of an anti-communist and consequently his China policy was considered pragmatic.
President Gerald Ford visited the PRC in 1975 and reiterated the American interest in normalizing relations with Beijing. Shortly after taking office in 1977, President Jimmy Carter reaffirmed the aims of the Shanghai Communiqué. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and National Security Council chief Michel Oksenberg encouraged Carter to pursue full diplomatic and trade relations with China. The United States and the People’s Republic of China announced on December 15, 1978 that the two governments would establish diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. The threat of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia have been major factors that have brought Washington and Beijing closer than ever. Military cooperation between the US and China began in 1979; American arms sales to China began, and in 1981 it became known that a joint US-China wiretapping had been operated in Xinjiang, near the Soviet border. Chinese demands for advanced technology from the US have not always been met, in part due to opposition from Congressmen who either on principle mistrusted technology transfer to a communist nation or feared that there was no guarantee that the technology would not got into the hands of unfriendly third parties. In 1983, the US State Department changed its rating of China to “a friendly, developing nation” increasing the amount of technology and armaments that could be sold.
President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang visited each other in 1984. Vice President Bush visited the PRC in October 1985 and opened the US Consulate General in Chengdu, the US’s fourth consular post in the PRC. Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 and sharply criticized his predecessor George H. W. Bush for prioritizing profitable trade over human rights issues in China. However, as President from 1993 to 2001, Clinton resigned from his position. He formulated a desired set of goals for China. These included free emigration, no export of goods made by prison workers, the release of peaceful demonstrators, the treatment of prisoners according to international standards, the recognition of the distinct regional culture of Tibet, the permission for international television and radio reporting and the Compliance with established human rights through resolutions of the United Nations.