China Hands

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 the World War II. The terminology "China Hand" originally referenced 19th Century merchants in the treaty ports of China, but evolved to reflect men with expert knowledge of the language, culture, and people of China.

[edit] The Men who "lost" China

In the modern history of the United States, the China Hands were Foreign Service Officers of the United States Department of State who had reflective experience in China. During and after World War II, many of these men adopted the outlook that the United States should support the Chinese Communist Party over the Chinese Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. 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.^{[citation needed]} The China Hands felt that the Nationalists were wracked with corruption and incompetence. By contrast, the communists seemed to be much more competent. Communist leaders like Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai were more impressive personalities than the average Nationalist official. Many China Hands felt that America should support 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.

These "pro-communist" views views clashed with postwar 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?" Under the direction of the Anti-Communist proponents and later McCarthyism, many of the China Hands were singled out as having "lost" China to the Communists. The backlash resulted in several men, notably John Paton Davies, Jr. and John S. Service, having their careers destroyed.

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."^[1]