Mike leads our discussion of the American experience in China during World War II. Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Roosevelt, and General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell are the central figures in this episode, which explores many aspects of the war's often-overlooked China-Burma-India Theater and introduces us to the Flying Tigers, the Burma Road, Merrill’s Marauders, and the “Over the Hump” cargo flights from India to China. Roosevelt’s postwar goals for China, differing advice FDR gets as to how to handle Chiang, and Stilwell’s fraught relationship with Chiang drive our narrative as issues of military strategy, operations, logistics, and reform lead to disagreement between “Vinegar Joe” and the Generalissimo and, ultimately, to their disdain for one another.

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Marshall, Blake, and Mike discuss America’s view of China from the 1920s through the early 1940s and the strong influence Americans raised by missionaries in China, notably Henry Luce and Pearl Buck, had on that view. Chiang Kai-shek emerges as the leader of the Republic of China, and Americans contribute money to Chiang and his in-laws, the Soongs – who have become China's new "dynasty" – in the belief that they will use it to modernize China. But Chinese corruption, Chiang’s inability to gain control of the entire country from warlords and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists, and war with both the Communists and Japan obstruct that modernization and make it unlikely that China will emerge from World War II as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” of the postwar world.

Mike walks us through the events of the Boxer Rebellion, a conflict in which Chinese rebels attempted to slaughter all foreigners and Chinese Christians in China. Marshall then explains how this drove missionaries into isolated compounds, from which they could look out on the Chinese — and judge them — without gaining any real knowledge of the Chinese people or their culture. Marshall also introduces us to Henry Luce, a child of American missionaries who used his innovative approaches to journalism in the 1920s to give America a narrative of China reflective more of his own views than of Chinese reality.