Spring 2020 marks a seventieth anniversary that’s unlikely to inspire much celebration: the last American diplomats’ humiliating departure from China. Despite U.S. attempts to engage with the CCP in 1949-50, an understanding proved impossible, and foreign service officers returned home only to face McCarthy-era persecution for having “lost” China. Fortunately for us, they recounted their experiences in detailed oral histories that are now archived at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST). Given the current state of heightened U.S.-China tensions, this earlier transitional period provides a cautionary tale of how misunderstandings, misplaced hopes, and missed opportunities can poison relations between great powers.
The CCP Victory
Although China and America were allies in the fight against Japan, American diplomats and military officers grumbled about KMT corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism – concerns which carried over into the Chinese Civil War period (1945-49). At a time when Washington policymakers hoped China could be a regional stabilizing force, a defining conflict emerged: the so-called “China lobby” of influential American businessmen, missionaries, and anticommunists strongly supported the KMT, while most diplomats in China saw the KMT as an inadequate partner.
“I think all of the members of the [U.S.] embassy staff who were old China hands . . . were all disillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek,” recalled diplomat John Wesley Jones, “and [were], in fact, constantly critical and rather bitter about him and his government.” To John A. Lacey of the U.S. Naval Group China, “The worst thing . . . was that Chiang’s generals were most interested in lining their own pockets. . . . [Chiang’s brother-in-law] T.V. Soong was well known to have milked China dry.” A February 1948 cable to Washington from the consul general in Shanghai neatly summarized the dilemma: “Our great issue in the battle with Communism for the minds of men, as I see it, is our upholding of freedom and democracy…. How then can we back the Nanjing [KMT] regime, which obviously upholds neither?”
Communist victories in 1949 forced the issue. “This was, of course, the big question,” recalled Shanghai-based Jerome Holloway of the communists’ “liberation” of major cities. “Do you stay and try to do business with these people, or do you declare them beyond the pale and get out?” The State Department, according to Ralph Clough, worked from the theory “that the best way to make the adjustment to the new government . . . was to keep our ambassadors there so we would have some representation. We could begin a dialogue.”