Flying tigers a symbol of friendship, then and now

Many of China's stories of camaraderie and shared sacrifice with the US have long been overlooked. Seven decades on, however, there are those who still remember.

For Chinese Vice-Premier Liu Yandong, who is in Washington for the seventh US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, her connection to the US-China wartime collaboration is deeply personal. During a diplomatic exchange in 2011, she presented Hillary Clinton, then the US secretary of state, with a photograph of her father, Liu Ruilong, with a Flying Tiger pilot that he helped save.

As a young man fighting against the Japanese, Liu's father joined in a mission to rescue five US flyboys after their plane was shot down. Several soldiers died in the operation. "I still keep an old photo telling the story of my father, an anti-Japanese military leader, risking his life to rescue American pilots and sacrificing three of his own soldiers," Liu was quoted as saying.

Clinton, now a presidential hopeful, reportedly said she would hang the picture on the wall of her office as a reminder of the historical ties that bind the US and China.

Those ties began in earnest in early 1941, when retired US army air corps officer Claire Lee Chennault brought 100 outdated Warhawks to China, along with 99 US pilots and ground crew who had all resigned commissions in the US military to join the fight.

Technically a mercenary outfit, but widely believed to be unofficially sanctioned by the US government before war was declared on Japan in December 1941, in the early days the American Volunteer Group presented China's only real air resistance to the Imperial Japan Army.