China Hands

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The term "China Hand" originally referred to 19th Century merchants in the treaty ports of China, but evolved to reflect anyone with expert knowledge of the language, culture, and people of China. The China Hands were a group of American diplomats and soldiers who were known for their experience with and knowledge of China before, during, and after World War II.

[edit] The Men who "lost" China

The China Hands during World War II were Foreign Service Officers of the United States Department of State, most of whom had experience in China, some of them going back to the 1920s. Due to the need for military assistance against the Japanese, the Dixie Mission was sent to Yan'an and reported favorably on the strength and capabilities of the Chinese Communist Party compared with the Chinese Nationalists. This view was motivated not by sympathy with communism as a political or economic system, but with the view that Chinese communists were far more popular and militarily effective than the Nationalists. John Service, along with other China Hands, felt that the Nationalists were wracked with corruption and incompetence. Communist leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were more impressive personalities than the average Nationalist official. Many China Hands felt that America should establish relations with the communists as a practical matter, so that the U.S. could work with them if, as many China experts correctly expected, they gained power. But this view was opposed by the new U.S. Ambassador to China at the time, Patrick Hurley, who had the diplomats who advocated this position recalled from China.

In the postwar period, their analysis was considered "pro-communist" and came under fire from anti-communist sentiment in the United States. When the Chinese Communists declared victory in 1949, an immediate outcry occurred in the U.S. over "Who lost China?" Anti-communists like John T. Flynn, Louis F. Budenz, Freda Utley and General Albert Wedemeyer^[1] and later Senator Joe McCarthy singled out China Hands as having consciously "lost" China to the Communists. Several of them, notably John Paton Davies, Jr. and John S. Service, were forced out of the Foreign Service even though they had been recalled from China four years previously.

Not until the warming of relations between China and the United States in the 1970s did public opinion change to a more benevolent opinion towards the China Hands. Notable was the invitation to the surviving China Hands to testify to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971. The Chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, remarked to John Paton Davies on how the China Hands who had "reported honestly about conditions were so persecuted because [they] were honest. This is a strange thing to occur in what is called a civilized country."^[2] John Service, reflecting on the low level of understanding of China in the American public at the time, joked that the loss of China had been blamed on "three Johns": John Service, John Fairbank, and "John" Kai-shek." ^[3]

[edit] Recognized China Hands

• John Paton Davies, Jr.
• John S. Service
• John Carter Vincent
• O. Edmund Clubb
• Owen Lattimore
• John K. Fairbank

[edit] References and further reading

1. ^ Gary North, The Red/Blue Map vs. Conspiracy Theories, LewRockwell.Com, November 8, 2004.
2. ^ Artes Liberales, University of Wisconsin article on Davies
3. ^ http://www.usdiplomacy.org/history/service/chinahands.php

• Kahn, E. J. (1975). The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. Viking. ISBN 0140043012. 
• Lilley, James R. and Lilley, Jeffrey (2004). China Hands: Nine Decades Of Adventure, Espionage, And Diplomacy In Asia. PublicAffairs. ISBN 1586481363. 
• Utley, Freda (1951). The China Story. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 0895262819.