"The China Hands: Profiles in Courage and Lessons for the Future"

Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy
Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research

AMBASSADOR ROY: Good Morning, I would like to begin by thanking the Open Forum for sponsoring this program honoring the China Hands, and specifically the memory of John Davies who died in December of last year. This is not so much because James Mann, Ambassador Hummel, and I in a sense are China Hands. Rather, it is because the core issue involved in what happened to the China Hands relates to the central purpose of the Foreign Service, which is to represent our country abroad effectively and to provide policymakers with the best and most honest judgments of which we are capable. The attention that has been and continues to be devoted to these men recognizes their significance in history and the history of the Foreign Service.

They did not serve in ordinary times, and I think that is the first thing to remember. They worked as Foreign Service officers in a China and in an Asia that was in tumult, both before, during and after World War II. They covered events of immense significance that affected not only hundreds of millions of lives but also shaped the post-World War period. They wrestled with the problem of interpreting these events and relating them to U.S. interests under the pressure of fast breaking events. Even in retrospect the issue of whether they were right or wrong is not the issue. None of them claimed to be infallible at the time or later. They saw clearly and accurately the corruption and decay in the Kuomintang government and military leadership. And they pulled no punches in reporting it even when this brought them into conflict with their superiors. They were right in doing so, because this was the factor more than any other that explained the inability of the Kuomintang government after World War II to use its superior man power and resources in the civil war against the communists.

The China Hands were also impressed by the contrast between Kuomintang corruption and what seemed to be a less corrupt and more militarily capable Chinese communist administration in Yenan, and they showed this in their reporting. They were perhaps less perceptive and incisive in identifying the repressive essence of the Chinese Communists that emerged so clearly once Mao Tse-tung seized power. But that said, they produced the best information on developments in China that was available from any source--information that could have made U.S. policy wiser. Now whether a wiser U.S. policy could have affected the course of events is a subject for another discussion.

Overall, they did the best they could under extraordinarily trying circumstances at a watershed moment in history to provide their government with an understanding of events and how we should be responding. History has vindicated the judgment that, in doing so, they were motivated solely by the best interests of their country, and were at all times professional and loyal Foreign Service officers. Aside from these broader considerations, I have some personal reasons for appreciating this attention to the memory of John Davies, which I shall get into later.

First, let's look at the meaning of China Hands. The term has a number of meanings. The old missionaries, educators and diplomats with long experience in China didn't consider themselves to be China Hands. Before, this term was largely reserved for the bankers and foreign businessmen who served in the treaty port cities in China. They knew a good deal about doing business in China, but were not considered experts, neither in the language nor the history of the country where they served. The term accurately or not invoked images of jaded, somewhat inebriated expatriates sipping their whiskeys and sodas at posh clubs, while Chinese waiters lurked in the background. That definition faded with the end of the treaty port system, and particularly with the expulsion of the foreign business community from China following the communist triumph.

In the minds of most Americans nowadays, and especially in the Foreign Service, the term China Hands is particularly associated with a group of career China specialists in the Foreign Service who became our most knowledgeable resource on developments in that country. This group was small--numbering somewhere between thirty and forty Foreign Service officers on active duty at any given moment. At the beginning of World War II, remember, there were some seven hundred officers in the Foreign Service. So the China Hands represented at best, less than five percent of the active Foreign Service. What distinguished them was that, in contrast to our practice in many other posts, in China, career diplomats were expected to know the local language before they were assigned to consulates. This is one of the reasons why their expertise on China was so profound.

While each was unique, their cases shared certain common characteristics. They served in China during the late 1930s and during World War II. They were accused after World War II of being instrumental in the loss of China. They were subjected to a series of loyalty hearings over a period of years in a highly charged anti-communist atmosphere. A number were fired or forced out of the Service, including some who number among the best and the brightest. Most, but not all, who were able to salvage their careers, spent it in posts outside of East Asia. All without exception were eventually exonerated of any disloyalty to the United States and were considered to be fine professionals. Three of these China Hands have come to symbolize the fate of the entire group of U.S. Foreign Service officer China specialists who served their country loyally and well during a watershed moment in Asian history. They were John Carter Vincent, John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies.

The coincidence that all three of these officers, these best known cases of the China Hands, have the first name of John has not gone unnoted. Some chose to read sinister connotation into this. After all, another China Hand was called John Emmerson. One of our leading Sinologists at that time, John Fairbank, was accused of communist sympathies and of contributing to the loss of China as well. Our last Ambassador in China, at a time when I was in high school there, was John Leighton Stuart. The coincidence was so significant that another China hand, Ray Ludden, was frequently referred to as Jack Ludden by people who didn't know him that well and some of his superiors, simply by virtue of the fact that he was one of the four Foreign Service officers that had served in Yenan during World War II. So John became associated with the best known China Hands; because of this, Jack Service sometimes liked to joke that the loss of China was attributed to the four Johns--himself, John Davies, John Fairbank and John Kai-shek.

Curiously, all three are known to the public by their full names. Even though both Service and Davies normally did not use their middle names and were not referred to by them. John Carter Vincent was the exception; he came from the South and, in accordance with southern tradition, he was formally called John Carter. But John Service was called Jack Service or Jake by his friends, and John Davies always went by John Davies. However, the use of their full names, in the minds of some, gave them a sinister connotation which has carried over into common usage. An additional factor is that the use of these full names somehow associated them in the public mind with an East Coast Ivy League elite background. This is ironic, because it is true that after World War II about twenty-five percent of incoming Foreign Service officers for a period of five or six years came from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and ten percent alone came from Harvard. And yet not a single one of the China Hands came from Harvard. And in fact the three best-known ones came from Middle America and attended Middle American schools. They were not a group of elite East Coast persons.

You have been given a handout from the excellent book called The China Hands, which recounts the careers of many of the China Hands who are the subject today. Let me simply say that I, in many ways, grew up in the shadows of these men. In the case of John Paton Davies in particular, there are an interesting number of parallels between our backgrounds and careers. Like him, I am the son of China missionary parents and was born in China. Like him, I grew up in Chengdu where I spent seven years during World War II. Like him, at least in one occasion, I returned to Chengdu via the railroad from Hanoi up to Kunming, which was the only way into China at that time. Like him, I was sent away to study at the Shanghai American School. Like him, I joined the Foreign Service at an early age. Like him, I was sent to a Chinese language school in order to brush up my Chinese and get rid of my Szechuan accent. Like him, I served at a variety of posts in China, and, like him, I served as well in Moscow, covering the same issues he did and paying the same interest he did to the state of relations between China and Russia. So while our careers were in many ways very different, I have always been conscious of elements of parallelism in our respective backgrounds.

Now some of these elements were shared as well with Jack Service, who was also the son of missionary parents, grew up in Chengdu and joined the Foreign Service soon after graduating from Oberlin. In his case, Jack Service's case, there is one other common element. His missionary father, influenced by his impression that diplomats were a hard drinking, worldly group of people, would have preferred for his son to follow in a more godly career. And I remember receiving similar advice from my father when he discovered that I was interested in joining the Foreign Service. Perhaps in Jack Service's case as in mine, this simply reinforced his determination to pursue a diplomatic career.

Aside from the issue of parental approval, however, I would note that having a China missionary background is not necessarily an advantage in the Foreign Service. A book was published in the mid 1950s for example, that was generally critical of China specialists in the Foreign Service in the State Department. And I quote, "their fatal flaw seems to have been an extreme missionary humanitarianism, a virtue dangerously excessive for the framers of the nation's foreign policy." I wonder if our top policymakers today are aware of this flaw. Apparently, this flaw only applied to Foreign Service officers because John Foster Dulles, who also came from missionary forebears, has rarely been accused of an excess of humanitarianism.

I think briefly we should review the fate of the three best known China Hands. All three of them had their careers ended for similar reasons; they gave their best judgments of the significance of the events taking place in China during World War II and the post-World War period. Their judgments were different from those of their superiors, and in the partisan atmosphere that surrounded the traumatic defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces by the Chinese communists, they were accused of sympathy for the communist cause and disloyalty to the United States. In Service's case, he was arrested in 1945 in the Amerasia case; his case was dismissed by a jury, by a twenty to zero vote. After an endless series of hearings and investigations, he was dismissed from the State Department in 1951. He was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1957, but he was never able again to get a significant assignment. He was sent as Consul to Liverpool in 1959 and chose to retire in 1962. As a footnote, I should add that his son entered the Foreign Service but never went near East Asia. And he capped a distinguished diplomatic career as Ambassador at a Latin American post. Service himself was belatedly honored by a luncheon in the State Department in the early ‘70s after President Nixon had gone to China. It was a bittersweet affair that again evoked some of the memories of the past and did not make up for the years of official harassment, silence, and public humiliation that he had endured.

In the case of John Carter Vincent, he became a target of the China Lobby forces in the period after World War II. He was defended by Secretary Acheson, but he was eventually forced out of Far Eastern affairs and was sent as Minister to Switzerland. His loyalty was repeatedly questioned by the Hiram Bingham Loyalty Review Board, which first voted to exonerate him and then was packed with the addition of other members who voted to question his loyalty. They recommended his dismissal. When the matter was referred to the incoming Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Dulles exonerated Vincent of disloyalty or of being a security risk. But he essentially offered him a choice of being fired or resigning. Vincent chose to resign.

John Paton Davies, in many ways, was the most extraordinary of the exceptionally talented group of people. I have already referred to his background. He was widely considered among the China Hands the most scholarly and the most intellectual. Like many of them, however, he was also a man of action. During World War II he was forced to parachute into the jungles of Burma. Essentially, he became the leader of the group of ten to fifteen people that had to spend a month making their way out of the Burmese jungles, which were filled with Japanese patrols. Eric Sevareid, a well known journalist, who happened to be a war correspondent at the time, was on the airplane. He accompanied John Davies during this ordeal. He later wrote of Davies, "if ever again I were in deep trouble, the man I would want to be with would be this particular man. I have known a great number of men around the world under all manner of circumstances. I have known none who seemed more the whole man; none more finished a civilized product, in all that a man should be - in modesty and thoughtfulness, in resourcefulness and steady strength of character." He wrote this in reaction to Secretary Dulles' firing of Davies for alleged weakness of character.

Davies had a wry sense of humor. Those of you who have read his books will have enjoyed this. This occasionally got him into trouble--things haven't changed in the Foreign Service. Left in charge of Consulate General Mukden, for example, among his other reports, he sent in a parody of a normal political report in which he announced that the government of Manchukuo had declared the recognition of 1,423 virtuous widows. In his analysis, he pointed out that this number was 33 less than the number of virtuous widows recognized the year before. He appended the comment, "whether the standards of the Manchukuo government had tightened, or those of the widows have slackened, is not known." This was sufficient to get him officially reprimanded by the officer in charge of Far Eastern affairs in the State Department, who was singularly lacking a sense of humor. His books, Foreign and Other Affairs and Dragon by the Tail, are delights to read, if you can find them. Some of them may be out of print by now. I have read them both; they show why he was such an outstanding reporting officer. He had an engaging style, and they are filled with keen insights.

George Kennan who was the DCM in Moscow when John Davies served there as First Secretary, wrote in his memoirs: "He was a man of broad, sophisticated, and skeptical political understanding without an ounce of pro-communist sympathies, and second to no one in his devotion to the interests of our government." He reflected on the harassment and the humiliation that Davies later suffered because of charges inspired by General Patrick Hurley that Davies was naive or pro-communist in his sympathies. Kennan wrote of " the nightmarish quality of that world of fancy to which official Washington, and much of our public opinion, can be carried in those times, when fear, anger, and emotionalism take over from reason in the conduct of our public life."

During the heart of the war years, 1942-1944, Davies did not serve in the American embassy in Chungking but rather as a political advisor to Commanding General Stilwell, who was the Commander of the China-Burma-India Theater. While in that capacity, he got on the wrong side of the Foreign Minister of the Nationalist government, T.V. Soong, who schemed constantly over a period of months and years to get Davies transferred out of China.

Davies also subsequently lost the confidence of General Hurley who had been dispatched by President Roosevelt to be the U.S. Ambassador to Chungking. History has not been kind to either President Roosevelt or General Hurley for this assignment, which was disastrous from every respect. It resulted in impractical policy recommendations to the American government from General Hurley, who had no knowledge of China and no understanding of communism. General Hurley later became one of the principal accusers of the China Hands in the Foreign Service whose reporting was different from his own judgment. In large measure because of this, John Davies was subjected to at least eight, maybe nine, loyalty hearings for a period of eight years, all of which found him unquestionably loyal. He was fired by Secretary Dulles in 1954 after a further loyalty security board in a travesty of sound procedure, found that he had, and I quote, "demonstrated a lack of judgment, discretion and reliability." Although Davies unlike Service showed no interest in rejoining the Foreign Service, his security clearance was restored in 1968 in a belated, technical act of atonement by the Department.

The purge of the China Hands shook the State Department as never before or after in our history. This was not only because the prolonged offensive against them extended over a period of fifteen to twenty years, from the moment when the charges first began to be leveled until some of the corrective actions began to be taken. It was because the nature of the charges and the emotional atmosphere within which they were evaluated, touched on the central issue of a professional Foreign Service, which is to report honestly on situations in foreign countries. That is why the State Department was so affected by their fate.

In the case of the China Hands, the central issue was whether in the struggle against Japan, we should confine our support solely to the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek or should extend assistance as well to the Chinese communists in the effort to defeat Japan. The China Hands became convinced, from their observations of Nationalist government rule and the Kuomintang government's conduct of military operations against the Japanese, that it was not an effective force and that they stood a good chance of losing in the post-war competition with the Chinese communists. They reported this.

They favored keeping lines open to the Chinese communists, principally because they saw this as the most effective way to pursue the war against Japan. These views were conveyed in a cable sent to Washington that recommended, and I quote, "that the President inform the Generalissimo in definite terms that military necessity requires that we supply and cooperate with the Communists and other suitable groups who can assist in the war against Japan and that we are taking direct steps to accomplish this end." In many ways, this was designed to be an ultimatum to try to get a more effective work performance out of the Nationalist government. But the cable was sent while Ambassador Hurley was back in Washington, even though it was slugged to his attention and to that of General Wedemeyer who would replace General Stilwell. General Hurley deeply resented the transmission of views that countered his own, and he always considered this to be an act of disloyalty.

A secondary issue entered into the thinking of Foreign Service officers like John Davies; they were concerned over how the United States should position itself for the post-war period. And they looked at the question of how to avoid forcing the Chinese communists into the hands of Moscow. These issues have been explored at length in a series of books, so there is no need for us to dwell on them here. The question that affects us all, currently serving Foreign Service officers is, could it happen again? The answer is it could. But it probably won't for a variety of reasons.

First, we should not underestimate the scale of the trauma that our country went through during the time extending from the Great Depression through World War II into the consolidation of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the loss of China to the Chinese Communists in the early post-war years. The threat we perceived then was dangerous and expanding in a way we had not seen before. We were psychologically insecure in a way that we are not likely, hopefully to be again. Moreover, we have developed protections against the suppression of dissenting views both in our traditions and in such mechanisms as the dissent channel.

Another important factor is the existence of the China lobby at the time--a powerful group that included members of Congress, influential forces in the media, and a host of right wing persons who were convinced that China had been sold out to the Chinese communists. As a result, the China Hands were not judged in a vacuum; they were judged in a highly politicized atmosphere that gradually wore down and intimidated some of those who had been willing to speak up courageously in their defense in the early period.

Finally, the conditions that gave rise to the purge of the China Hands were essentially the same forces that gave rise to McCarthyism, although by the time McCarthyism was in full swing, the China specialists largely had been purged from East Asia or from the Foreign Service. So the charges that the State Department was a hotbed of communists was largely aimed at dealing with the Soviet threat rather than the Chinese communist threat.

Why do I say it could happen again? Because the factors that contributed to the tragedy continue to exist in human nature: the desire to suppress contrary views; the tendency to equate disagreement with disloyalty; the instinct to attack the bearer of unpleasant tidings; the willingness to put expediency ahead of principle; the propensity to reduce complex issues to black and white oversimplifications; and the use of political correctness as the yardstick of performance. In my own experience, and perhaps in the experience of some of you here, certain issues to this day have become so politicized that they either need to be avoided, fudged, or handled with kid gloves in order to guard against becoming the object of political attack. There are no grounds for complacency.

Let me end my remarks and pay tribute to the China Hands by recalling the words of George Kennan given in testimony on behalf of John Davies. "If there ever creeps into our system an atmosphere in which men do not feel at liberty to state the facts as they see them, knowing that the greatest crime they could commit would be to state them as they did not see them; then in my opinion, the successful operation of the democratic foreign policy would be out of the question." Again to continue with Kennan's words, they could be my own as well, "I feel very deeply about that and I think that the first requirement we have of officers who are asked to report to the Government is that they report honestly what they believe." Today a half-century after the events that determined the fate of the China Hands, the need for dedicated, honest, and fearless Foreign Service officers remains as strong as ever. Only such officers can serve their country as well as the China Hands did. Thank you.

This speech tell about those Americans working with both KMT and CCP during WWII. The three "John's" are highly respected in China and Mr. Serivce was Mao's close friend. Had the US completely abandoned the KMT and recognize the new Chinese government after Chiang escaped to Taiwan in 1949, there wouldn't have been Korean War and China wouldn't have allied with the USSR against the US. The Mao's regime wouldn't have been that radical. Mao hated Russians much more than he hated Americans.

>>china still allied with the U.S against the soviets, but after a few decades of isolation though.

I think what made China and the US become enemies was the Korean War, in which both China and the US were losers. The USSR and the Kim's regime in North Korea were the winners. China didn't want to fight the US and was asked by Stalin to enter the war. The US ambassador to China sayed in Nanking for three months, trying to contact with the new government, after the PLA took the capital. Had the US recognized the new Chinese government, the history would have been completely different.

>>that claimed that the real reason Chang was unable to defeat the Commies, was that the US withdrew all support, and military supplies.

That's KMT's execuse for its defeat. The fact is the US did give the KMT all types of political, military and economic support. The CCP troops were simply peasants equipped with out of date weapons that were no match to KMT's American arms.

>>You can not fight if you do not have ammo.

Do you know how many KMT troops defected in the civil war? 1.7 millions. Yes, they didn't have enough ammo because the ammo shipped from the US was passed to the PLA by the KMT generals who didn't want to fight for Chiang.

Lake, were you a poster by a another name around here about 6 months ago?

Most likely it was 'Pol Pot'. This is straight Red propaganda, out of the Red state department of X-42. All of the individuals discussed in this story lost their security clearances because of their connections with Mao, and with Stalin. Mao Tse-Tung was a devoted Marxist-Leninist since the early 1920's. I did a lengthy research paper on the growth of the Chinese Communist Party during the pre-WW2 era, and this stuff is unadulterated bull crap.

>>the three "John's" were anti-Communists

Nixon was anti-communist, too. Khrushov was NOT anti-commnuist, but Mao hated him most.

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