‘Save China and Save America’: The Road Not Taken

I n early April, U.S. President Donald Trump will visit Chinese strongman Xi Jinping in Beijing, Politico reports.

The summit announcement occurs amid a backdrop that includes a Chinese court sentencing pro-freedom media tycoon Jimmy Lai, a British citizen, to 20 years in prison; the Chinese government urging its banks to curb its holdings of U.S. debt; and a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration by Chinese electric-vehicle giant BYD to recoup losses from tariffs.

On the American side, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods remain elevated, and the second Trump administration’s heightened military activity, particularly Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, seems aimed in part at curtailing China’s access to cheap oil.

Both the Chinese and the Americans are pursuing a policy of weakening the other relative to themselves. As strange as it sounds in 2026, one of China’s greatest patriots and a pioneer of the American conservative movement forged a friendship about a century ago based in large part on each one’s desire for both countries to thrive.

The proof of this comes in a remarkable folder of correspondence at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. It contains interbellum letters between George Sokolsky, later an ABC News commentator, syndicated columnist, and infrequent contributor to National Review, and Hu Shih, later China’s ambassador to the U.S. and president of Peking University.

Both men left America after pursuing degrees at Columbia University — Sokolsky to Russia, where the Bolsheviks deported him, and Shih back to China.

“During my travels,” Sokolsky wrote to Lola Kinen in February 1920, “I came to Shanghai where I found in progress what is to my mind the most significant mass movement of the century: the development of the middle class in China and the awakening of a national consciousness here. I say that this movement is of such intrinsic value because I came to realize that the center of the world was moving from the North Atlantic to the Pacific and that what would happen on the Pacific would characterize the history of the rest of the century.”

“By all means,” encouraged Kinen, an old girlfriend of Sokolsky’s who later encouraged movie actor Ronald Reagan to speak out politically, “save China and save America.” Sokolsky, at various points, sought to do one, the other, or both.

In the correspondence between him and his co-conspirator in this effort, Hu Shih, one finds, here and there, a prophetic quality. Sokolsky wrote Shih in July 1923 that “while economic conditions in China are constantly improving and the economic tone of the people is improving, the country is in chaos almost entirely because there is a lack of leadership.”

Both Shih and Sokolsky worried that a lack of strong Chinese leadership created a dangerous power vacuum that the increasingly militaristic Japanese or the always opportunistic communists might soon fill.

Neighborhood monsters lurked. Shih saw the ascendancy of militarists in Japan as “the greatest tragedy in the world politics of the century” in its reorientation of Japan away from democracy, likely humiliation of China, and trouble for world peace.

In September 1931, Shih wrote his friend “Sok”:

The situation is still gloomy, and I am far from being optimistic. The anti-Communist campaign in Kiangsi has failed the third time with rather heavy losses. The floods in the southern provinces are brewing banditry and furthering communism. The government is incapable of controlling the petty party workers who, I am afraid, may blindly lead the country into very grave troubles with Japan. Strong anti-China feelings are gaining ascendancy in Japan. If another civil war should materialize in the next few months, China might find herself in a worse position in international relations than she has ever been since 1900.

Weeks later, Japan, after manufacturing a false-flag incident, invaded Manchuria.

Understandably, Chinese tempers flared. Wisely, Shih counseled his countrymen not to indulge this passion. Citing a seventh-century Chinese wiseman’s thoughts on weakness, Shih shared his advice to his own people with his American friend. “To be weak is far more difficult than to be strong, because it requires far greater moral courage for a weak nation to acknowledge its own weakness,” he wrote Sokolsky in November 1931. “The difficulty is more than doubled when the false pride of the nation has been puffed up by silly propaganda stuff.”

Such sagacity caused “Sok” to write Sir John Keswick, a Scottish businessman with interests in China, in December that “Hu Shih grows increasingly larger in stature outside of China year by year. To many people he appears to be the only Chinese who has both courage and character.”

In May of the next year, Sokolsky, back home in America after more than a decade in China, struck a pessimistic tone. “If only the thing had finally collapsed one might start building anew, but this constant propping up of a decaying institution places too great a burden on the props and seems to serve no good purpose,” Sokolsky wrote. “I fear even greater calamity to China in the collapse of Japan as a great power. The Chinese do not seem to realize that once Japan collapses, no Asiatic nation stands to challenge the predominance of the white race.”

Indeed, the Chinese Hessians of the most destructive force of 20th-century European colonialism — Marxism — eventually exploited both the collapse of Japan and the decaying government. The consequences of ignoring Shih and Sokolsky’s wisdom and warnings seem apparent in daily headlines emanating from the East.

Donald Trump confronts those consequences up close in April.