John S. Service

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John Stewart Service (3 August 1909 - 3 February 1999) was an American diplomat who served in the Foreign Service in China prior to and during the World War II. Considered one of the State Department's "China Hands", he was an important member of the Dixie Mission to Yan'an. In the immediate postwar years, Service fell victim to American Pro-Chinese Nationalist factions in the government (the China lobby) and to McCarthyism. This included being indicted in the Amerasia Affair, of which later he was fully exonerated.

John Service in Yan'an, China, 1944
John Service in Yan'an, China, 1944

Contents

[edit] Early life

John Service was born in the city of Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China, on August 3rd, 1909. The son of missionaries working for the Y.M.C.A., Service spent his childhood in the Chinese province. By the age of eleven, Service had mastered the local Chinese dialect and then attended the Shanghai American School for high school. The Service family briefly moved to California, where upon John graduated at the age of fifteen from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California.

In the fall of 1927, Service entered Oberlin College. He majored in both art history and economics and still found time to be captain of the school's cross-country and track and field teams. After graduation, Service took and passed the Foreign Service Exam in 1933.

[edit] Career in China

Service was first assigned to a clerkship position in the American consulate in the capital of the Yunnan province, Kunming. Two years later, Service was promoted to Foreign Service Officer and sent to Beijing for language study. In 1938, he was assigned to the Shanghai Consulate General under Clarence E. Gauss. When Gauss was promoted to ambassador, he made Service Third Secretary of the American Embassy at Chungking. As time progressed, Service was eventually promoted to Second Secretary.

During the war years, Service wrote increasingly critical reports on the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek. This caught the attention of John P. Davies, a Foreign Service Officer working as a diplomatic attaché to General Joseph Stilwell. In the summer of 1943, Davies managed to have Service, among two others, assigned to him to assist him in his duties. When the U.S. Army Observation Group, also known as the Dixie Mission, was formed to travel to the Communist territory, Davies selected John Service to be the first State Department official to visit the region.

[edit] The Dixie Mission and Yan'an

Last Page from Service's First Report from Yan'an. Page One, Two and Three here.
Last Page from Service's First Report from Yan'an. Page One, Two and Three here.

John Service arrived in Yan'an, the capital of the Communist Party of China, on July 22, 1944. This had a direct impact on the rest of Service's life. In Yan'an, Service met and interviewed many of the top leaders of the CPC, such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. He sent back many reports over the next four months that were highly positive of the Chinese Communists. At the same time, he continued to write critically of the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, whom he considered hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. Service and the other American political officers eventually advocated a policy of support for the Communists as well as the nationalists. They believed a civil war was practically inevitable and that the Communists would triumph in such a struggle. If the U.S. supported the Communists, then the U.S. would be able to work constructively with them when they came to power.

In the event, the new U.S. Ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, rejected the recommendations of Service and the other Foreign Service officers. A policy of exclusive support for the nationalists was continued with a mistaken belief that the Communists could not be brought into a unified government. All the political officers, Service included, were recalled from China at Hurley's request. Hurley later blamed them for his diplomatic failures in China.[1]

[edit] Post China Career

John Service returned to Washington in 1945 and was soon arrested as a suspect in the Amerasia Case. Accused of passing top secret documents to Communist sympathizers at the East Asian affairs magazine, Amerasia, Service was found innocent by a grand jury on a vote of 20 - 0. Five years later, on March 14, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Service of being a Communist sympathizer in the State Department. Service was cleared of the charges by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, also known as the Tydings Committee. Regardless of the Senate findings, the State Department soon after fired Service. In the "red scare" turmoil of the early 1950s, a number of diplomats became scapegoats for the fall of China to the Communists. John P. Davies was also forced out of the State Department.

From 1952 on, Service appealed his dismissal from the State Department and in the meantime worked for a steamtrap company in New York. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously voted in his favor.[2] Service returned to active duty in the State Department in 1957 but was not given very important assignments. He was first assigned to the transportation division at the State and then posted overseas to the U.S. consultate in Liverpool, England. Sensing that he would not be allowed to advance again as a Foreign Service officer, he retired in 1962. He then pursued a Masters of Arts degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation, Service worked as library curator for the school's Center for Chinese Studies into the 1970's and then served as editor for the center's publications.

In 1971, preceding President Nixon's visit to China, Service was one of a handful of Americans invited back to the country, as relations with the U.S. were normalized. He met again with Chou En-lai during his visit, and he and his wife Caroline appeared on the cover of Parade Magazine.

On February 3, 1999, John Stewart Service died in Oakland, California.

[edit] The Service Legacy 60 Years On

Much of what Service and the other officers wrote in the 1940's has been vindicated by the passage of time. Service's appraisal of the nationalists has been supported even by people who criticize Mao. Few people disagree that the Communists under Mao were more efficient and successful as a political and military organization than the nationalists were, and Service was correct in predicting that they would triumph in a civil war. But Service apparently missed the ruthlessness and brutality of Mao and the Communists in Yan'an. The positive reports he wrote from the Communist headquarters did not, in retrospect, capture the entire story. The cruelty that went with Communist efficiency became known to all during the years Mao was in power. Service hoped that the Communists would adopt free market and democratic reforms if they were pushed in the right direction, with U.S. support. Later in life, Service wrote that he believed an American relationship with the Communists might have even prevented or drastically altered the course of history surrounding the Korean War and Vietnam War. It is difficult to say whether the United States would have been able to foster reform or restraint had the U.S. engaged the Communists in 1944-45, as was recommended by Service. But as Service's recommendations were completely rejected, it is entirely unfair to say that he and the other China Hands "lost China". Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists were ultimately responsible for losing the civil war to the Communists through their own political and military incompetence.

[edit] References

  • Joseph W. Esherick, ed, Lost Chance in China: The World War II Despatches of John S. Service, New York: Random House, 1974.
  • John S. Service, The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of US-China Relations, Berkeley, CA: Center for Chinese Studies, U of California, 1971.
  • Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Mao: The Unknown Story, New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005.
  • E. J. Kahn, The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (New York: Viking Press, 1972, 1975).

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Carolle J. Carter, Mission to Yenan: American Liaison with the Chinese Communists, 1944 - 1947(Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky Press, 1997), 131.
  2. ^ Carter, Mission to Yenan, 215.

[edit] External links

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