Prophet Without Honor.

AuthorWhite, James W.
Position'China Hand: An Autobiography' - Book review

China Hand: An Autobiography by John Paton Davies, Jr., Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 978-0-8122-4401-4, 2012, 351 pp., $34.95

When I was just getting started in the field of East Asian politics, in the 1960s, one of the names most commonly heard--usually in a tone somewhere between respect and awe--was that of John Paton Davies, Jr. One of the career Foreign Service officers hounded out of government service during the McCarthy era, he had the reputation of having been almost unfailingly prescient regarding US China policy. And for this reason he was fired. But was he as good as people said, or just the beneficiary of a positive retrospect? Actually, he was better: now we have his story in his own words, and it is even more extraordinary than I then had reason to believe.

The son of missionaries in China, Davies was educated at Wisconsin, Yenching, and Columbia, and entered the Foreign Service in 1931. His career thereafter combined a veritable Who's Who of the mid-20th century, as the Forward puts it--not only every significant China expert in academia and government, but also FDR, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tsetung (I'm using Davies' transliterations here), Joseph Stilwell, Cordell Hull, John Foster Dulles, Stalin and Molotov, all the way to Eero Saarinen, Teilhard de Chardin, Diego Rivera, and Reinhold Niebuhr--with an only barely imaginable ability to show up anywhere worldshaping events were going on: Peking, Mukden, India, Burma, Washington, DC, Cairo, Yenan, Singapore, Moscow, and on and on.

The major focus of Davies' career was of course China. He served in several consulates there, and also in Burma and India, given their crucial importance to American efforts to support the Nationalist (KMT) government against the Japanese. But most importantly, he was from 1942 to 1944 the special assistant to General Stilwell, America's liaison with the KMT, and in this role became a central figure in our "China tangle." Basically, the conflict was between Stilwell's desire for a China-based offensive against the Japanese and the KMT's passivity, corruption, and ineptitude combined with Chiang's (and General Chennault's, and later Patrick Hurley's) constant demands for more military aid, which he planned to hoard while the US defeated Japan, after which he would use it against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), his Number One enemy all along. Unfortunately, the KMT's PR machine, combined with the myth of a heroic China...

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