It’s ironic that during World War II, the United States fought alongside the Chinese, both the Nationalists and the Communists, against the Japanese until 1945. In fact, it was Mao’s Chinese Communist guerrilla troops who rescued some of Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 crews when they crash landed in China after bombing Tokyo on April 18, 1942. The Chinese who helped save those American troops paid a horrible price. Click the link to discover how horrible.
Then a few years later Communist China and the United States became enemies fighting in North Korea until 1953, and China sent advisers to Vietnam to help fight the United States there (1955 to 1975).
To punish Communist China, the U.S. placed an embargo on China from 1949 to 1969. The Korean War ended in 1953 but the embargo didn’t end until 1969. The goal had been to disrupt, destabilize, and weaken China’s communist government by causing the people of China to suffer, and this “complete embargo” was one of the tools to achieve that goal. The embargo also helped set the stage for millions of Chinese to die of starvation during what’s known as Mao’s Great Famine.
When Nixon arrived in China in 1972, China and the U.S. became friends again.
Now President Donald Trump, the popular-vote loser by almost 3 million votes, is working overtime to turn China into an enemy of the U.S. again.
But in 1996, when the U.S. and China were trading partners and still friendly, Chinese farmers discovered a World War II American bomber’s wreckage and the remains of the ten-man crew on Little Cat Mountain (Mao’er Shan), Southern China’s highest peak.
The name of the B-24 bomber was Tough Titi.
These Americans were considered heroes to the Chinese, and the remains of the crew were returned to the United States for burial.
There’s a memorial stone near the crash site and Chinese tourists pay honor to these Americans by leaving flowers and other gifts.
To honor these American heroes further, the Chinese recovered some of the bomber’s parts and used them as a centerpiece for a museum in Xing’an, about a four-hour drive from the crash site.
Why is President Donald Trump going out of his way to make China an enemy of the United States while doing the opposite in Russia with the brutal Vladimir Putin?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.
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