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The Go-Between. The Japanese conquest of the Yangtze valley drove T.V. from his Shanghai headquarters. He set up shop in Hongkong. Until that outpost of the British Empire fell to the enemy, he operated an extraordinary outpost for Fighting China. He was the link between his country's strangling economy and the U.S. and Britain, which were not yet awake to the fact that Japan's invasion of China was also a threat to them. High above Repulse Bay, in an immense house guarded against Japanese gunmen by British police and his own bodyguard, T.V. and an indefatigable staff of cable decoders carried on. His living room was a symbol of his outlook: amid exotic Oriental brocades and dragon rugs were an occidental short-wave radio, an autographed photograph of Franklin Roosevelt and a modernistic terra cotta head of the Virgin Mary.
In 1940 T.V. flew to Washington again, this time to negotiate an urgently needed loan. Americans called him the "symbol of Chinese cooperation with the West . . . most businesslike Oriental between Aden and Korea." He talked with Franklin Roosevelt, played poker with the RFC's Jesse Jones, the Treasury's Henry Morgenthau. Someone told T.V., "A little lobbying in Congress won't hurt." T.V. snorted. He had come with a business proposition—take it or leave it. For $100,000,000 worth of supplies China would continue to pin down 1,125,000 Japanese troops. By saving China from collapse, the U.S, could buy time to prepare for war with Japan. T.V. drove his bargain. Pearl Harbor proved his point.
On Dec. 7, T.V. was still in Washington. A fortnight later the Generalissimo cabled his appointment as Foreign Minister. Like all China, T.V. had soaring hopes of quick, substantial aid from the U.S. He became a peripatetic global emissary shuttling between Chungking, Washington, London, Quebec, New Delhi. He signed the Declaration of the United Nations, treaties to abolish extraterritoriality in China. He attended important Allied conferences. He arranged his biggest loan yet ($500.000,000) from the U.S. Treasury. He set up China Defense Supply Corp. (CDS) to expedite Lend-Lease. But, like all China, he soon found that the priorities of Allied global strategy made Allied aid to China a dribble and a distant thing.
Last October T.V. went home, leaving beautiful Madame Soong to manage the big house on Washington's Woodland Avenue. Over a Chungking tea table, frustrated Chiang Kai-shek upbraided his brother-in-law for the meager trickle of foreign aid. Hot words passed between them. According to one story, the Generalissimo ended the angry conversation by smashing every teacup on the floor.
For a year T.V. lay low. He lost his Bank of China post. When the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang went to Cairo, T.V., though still the Foreign Minister, stayed in Chungking. But many an old China hand knew that T.V. would come back in China's next crisis.