An Online Exploration of Diplomatic History and Foreign Affairs

“The pro-Communist group in the State Department… promoted at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.”

Senator Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), quoted in Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation

 

“We have gathered to honor a group of Foreign Service officers – represented in the person of Jack Service – whom history has recognized as having been right…. For having been right many of them were persecuted, dismissed or slowed or blocked in their careers, with whatever damage done to them personally outweighed by damage done to the Foreign Service of the United States.”

Historian Barbara Tuchman, at American Foreign Service Association “China Hands”
luncheon, January 30, 1973 – Foreign Service Journal, March 1973

Overview

During the Second World War, as the United States sought maximum Chinese assistance in the struggle against Japan, a remarkable cadre of China specialists within the Foreign Service reported on conditions in that country.  The cables of these Foreign Service Officer (FSO) “China hands,” as they were called, came from both the Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist headquarters in Chung King (Chong Qing) and after 1944, from Mao Tse-tung’s Communist base in Yenan.  Their astute reports reflected deep knowledge of Chinese language, culture, history and politics, and provided Washington with an invaluable portrait of wartime conditions in China.  Though no evidence of deliberate bias, incompetence or disloyalty was ever proven against any of these men, they were soon to be subjected to vilification and to having their careers and reputations destroyed for reporting unwelcome truths about the people and circumstances at their post of assignment.  Agents of their persecution, abetted by media pundits, were in the Executive Branch as well as in the Congress.  Those in the White House and the State Department who might have defended them – and the professional standards they exemplified – conspicuously failed to do so.  This egregious use of a post-hoc ideological litmus test to judge the reports and integrity of Foreign Service Officers cast a pall over the profession for many years.  The chilling effect was felt not only during the worst days of McCarthyism, but also before and after Senator Joseph McCarthy’s emergence as the most insidious and irresponsible of the anti-Communist witch hunters of the early 1950s.

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The China Hands

According to E.J. Kahn, Jr., whose The China Hands is an excellent source of detailed information on this episode, there were in all perhaps three dozen FSOs of the period who could be called “China hands” (or “old China hands”).  Kahn gives special attention to 10 FSO China specialists, plus John Emmerson, a “Japan hand” who reported exclusively on the Japanese in Yenan but nonetheless became tarred with the same brush as the China specialists.

Several of the China hands (including John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service) were born in China, while others became proficient through language study early in their careers.  Many had served at one of the numerous consulates (China had more than any other single country) scattered all around China in the 1930s to advance U.S. trading and missionary interests.

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China Hands under attack

The reports of these officers often contained information and analyses critical of the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Chiang and, particularly after FSOs were assigned directly to Yenan, detailed accounts of the growing power of and popular support for Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  Cables suggesting that American support to Chiang was doomed to failure were particularly unwelcome to many elements of official Washington, including the Congressional supporters of Chiang and his popular U.S.-educated wife, Soong Mei-Ling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek).  The latter had been a guest at the White House and had addressed a rapturous joint session of Congress on February 18, 1943.

Heavy criticism of the China hands began in earnest following President Harry Truman’s firing of Ambassador Patrick Hurley in late 1945.  Hurley lambasted his embassy staff for alleged pro-Communist views, charging in November 1945 that “the weakness of the American foreign policy [sic] together with the Communist conspiracy within the Department are reasons for the evils that are abroad in the world today.”  The first major attack on an FSO’s personal integrity was the suspension of John Service in 1945 for inadvertently passing information to a suspect publication, Amerasia.  As it heated up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the pillorying was led by members of the so-called “China lobby” headed by Congressman Walter Judd and by conservative Senators such as William Knowland, Styles Bridges, Patrick McCarran and Joseph McCarthy.

Many conservative Americans castigated the China hands’ reporting for reflecting naïve thinking if not outright pro-Communist attitudes.  Although the China specialists were frequently accused of calling the Communists mere “agrarian reformers,” there is no evidence that any of them ever used that term.  Ultimately charges of leftist leanings were amplified to blame these FSOs for contributing directly to “the loss of China” to the Communists in 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established and Chiang and his followers were forced to retreat to Taiwan.

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What happened to them

As a result of their reporting, most of the China hands faced retribution in the form of intrusive and repeated security investigations (often before “Security Loyalty Boards” if not also hostile Congressional committees), expulsion from the Foreign Service (John Stewart Service in 1951 and John Paton Davies in 1954), forced retirement (Oliver Edmund Clubb in 1952 and John Carter Vincent in 1953), exile to posts far from East Asia, missed promotions, denial of senior appointments that would have required approval of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and other indignities smearing their judgment and loyalty.  Only two of the FSO China hands highlighted by Kahn emerged relatively unscathed from the witch hunt: Everett Drumright, who became Consul General in Hong Kong in 1954 and was ambassador to the Republic of China on Taiwan from 1958 to 1962, and Edward Rice, who became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1962 and Consul General in Hong Kong from 1964 to 1967.  Also, though banished from duty in East Asia, Fulton (Tony) Freeman eventually prospered, becoming ambassador to Colombia and Mexico.

O. Edmund Clubb, beginning in 1929, served in Hankow (Hangzhou), Tientsin (Tianjin), Nanking (Nanjing), Shanghai, Chungking (Chong Qing), Urumchi (Urumqi), Mukden (Shenyang) and Changchun, as well as Peking (Beijing), where he was the last Consul General before its takeover by the Communists in 1949. In 1951 he was vilified before the House Un-American Activities Committee for alleged pro-Communist sympathies and relationships with known Communists, and was forced into retirement in February 1952. He later became a noted scholar and prolific author of works on China while at Columbia University’s East Asia Institute.

John Paton Davies, was cleared by eight previous investigations but fired by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954 after a ninth inquisition, this one by a special Security Hearing Board, for “lack of judgment, discretion and reliability.” Davies, who had gotten to know well Mao Tse-dung and Chou En-lai, was an exceptionally able writer, a noted foe of communism (in part from his service in Moscow at the end of the war) and a man of great prescience.  His accurate prediction that nationalist forces in China and Eastern Europe would lead to deep fissures in the Communist bloc was ridiculed by those who denied the force of nationalism.  In late 1953 Senator McCarthy said that the State Department clearly had not properly cleaned itself up 11 months into the Eisenhower administration, because its payroll still included Davies, who was part of the “group which did so much toward delivering our Chinese friends into the Communist hands.”  The firing of Davies led to a firestorm of critical comment by editorialists and prominent correspondents such as Arthur Krock and Eric Sevareid.

John Stewart “Jack” Service was the first and longest-serving officer assigned to Yenan.  In the course of his duties, he developed many close relations with the Communist Chinese leaders, including Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.  For having had these relationships and for his candid reporting from the scene, Service was investigated over and over again, abused mercilessly and suspended from duty in late 1945 on the grounds that he had illegally shared information with a correspondent of Amerasia, a magazine characterized as having pro-Communist leanings.  Fired by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1951, he was reinstated into the Foreign Service in 1957 but sent to languish in Liverpool as Vice Consul until he retired in 1962.  Service’s oral history, excerpted in detail in Nancy Tucker’s China Confidential and available in full on the Library of Congress' American Memories website, makes gripping, albeit depressing, reading.  Service, representing all of the China hands, was the featured speaker at a special luncheon hosted in their honor by the American Foreign Service Association on January 30, 1973.

John Carter Vincent, forced to retire in 1952 by Secretary Acheson, was serving as “diplomatic agent” in Tangier at the time that he was excoriated during hearings by Senator McCarran’s Subcommittee on Internal Security.  Having served as a senior member of the staff in Chungking, he was well known as a sharp critic of the government of Chiang Kai-shek, with views very close to those of General Joseph Stilwell, whose rocky and controversial relationship with the Generalissimo has been documented by historian Barbara Tuchman in her Stilwell and the American Experience in China. The December 12, 1952, statement of censure by Civil Service Loyalty Board Chairman Hiram Bingham (father of Hiram Bingham, IV, one of the “Examples of Excellence” on this website) presents an unfortunate example of the character assassination all too common during that period.

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Reactions of Secretaries Acheson and Dulles

During this period the leadership of the State Department (and the administrations of Harry S Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, more generally) was notably weak, rendering it largely unable to defend its dedicated FSOs against the right-wing onslaught.  Under broad attack by anti-Communist elements in Congress in the nervous early days of the Cold War, the Department established its own Loyalty Security Board to carry out internal investigations, and in the end proved willing to sacrifice a few of its own in order to fend off or lessen suspicions and outright attacks against the institution as a whole.

Although Secretary of State Acheson directed the August 1949 publication of a China White Paper, which concluded that the wartime reporting of the China hands had been balanced, incisive and prescient – and had had no impact on the outcome of the Chinese civil war – the furious reaction to that report and the deepening anti-Communist hysteria that accompanied the outbreak of the Korean War led him to avoid further actions in defense of his own officers.  He subsequently acquiesced to the Loyalty Security Board recommendations that John Stewart Service and O. Edmund Clubb be removed from the Department. 

Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who insisted on ideological orthodoxy and “positive loyalty” from his FSO subordinates, was even more unwilling to overrule the findings of the Loyalty Security Boards.  He forced John Carter Vincent to retire in 1953 and fired John Paton Davies outright in 1954. The latter action, which disgraced a man widely known as a strong anti-Communist, came just as the reckless witch hunts conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy had reached their apex and his own star was headed for precipitous decline.  However, even into the latter part of the 1950s and throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years, when the State Department was led by Secretary Dean Rusk, an avid foe of Chinese communism, there was little rehabilitation of these China hands.  Unfortunately, their expertise remained unavailable to policy makers dealing with momentous issues such as the Sino-Soviet split and the deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which was widely but mistakenly viewed as a Chinese “client state.”

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The role of the American Foreign Service Association

The Foreign Service Association (later called the American Foreign Service Association, or AFSA), in those days essentially a professional club dominated by senior FSOs, largely stayed out of the fray, though individual members were clearly appalled by what was happening.  To its credit, the Foreign Service Journal of that period contained occasional editorials and other pieces supportive of Service, Clubb, Vincent and Davies – and some of those included explicit endorsements by the Association’s Board of Governors.

In 1973, a much more activist AFSA, under the leadership of “Young Turks” like William Harrop, Tom Boyatt and Tex Harris, decided to give belated recognition to those fellow FSOs whose perceptive reporting 30 years earlier had led to the destruction of so many careers and reputations.  The luncheon event, broadcast to a nationwide audience and given widespread print coverage, was held on January 30, 1973, before a full house in the State Department.  Those in attendance agreed that it was high time to set the record straight and give proper credit to a cadre of extraordinary officers whose wartime reports from China reflected the highest professional standards expected of America’s Foreign Service Officers.

The 10 China hands given prominent attention by Kahn were:

• Oliver Edmund Clubb
• John Paton Davies, Jr.
• Everett F. Drumright
• Fulton Freeman
• Raymond P. Ludden
• James K. Penfield
• Edward E. Rice
• Arthur R. Ringwalt
• John Stewart Service
• Philip P. Sprouse
• John Carter Vincent

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Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Frontline Diplomacy—Country Readers: China. Arlington, VA: ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Program, 2000 (CD-ROM) (contains oral histories of Everett Drumright and John Service, as well as many China Hands of subsequent years)

Kahn, E.J., Jr. The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. New York: Viking Press, 1975.

May, Gary. China Scapegoat: The Diplomatic Ordeal of John Carter Vincent. Washington, New Republic Books, 1979. (Introduction by John King Fairbank)

Tucker, Nancy. China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945-1996. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

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