Oftentimes the greatest foreign policy struggles are not with the host government but rather with the government bureaucracy back home. Such was the case with China in the 1940â?²s in a fight that would define geopolitics for a generation and would ultimately ruin the careers of those diplomats who were on the losing side.
After the death of Chinaâ??s last post-emperor autocratic ruler in 1916, China was left without any recognized central authority and fragmented into a nation of competing warlords. Sun Yat-sen united the early Kuomintang (KMT) parties in 1919. The KMT gradually increased its influence from its base in Guangzhou, but was unable to control all of China. With Sun Yat-senâ??s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek became the leader of the KMT. The fledgling Communist Party of China joined the KMT in the United Front, which allowed the KMT to seize power throughout most of China by 1927. Chiang then purged the Communists from government. A civil war between the two sides lasted until the Second United Front was formed in 1936 to fight the Japanese. Initially, the Communist-Kuomintang split was overshadowed by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, but it soon became too big to ignore. Although the U.S. backed the Kuomintang from the very beginning, it was the Communists who eventually won. This in turn led to criticism of the State Departmentâ??s â??China handsâ? for â??losing China.â? And as with any big loss, somebody would ultimately have to pay the price.
John S. Service was an American Foreign Service Officer who was born in China of missionary parents and who served in China before and during World War II. As one of the State Departmentâ??s â??China Hands,â? he correctly predicted that the Communists would defeat the Nationalists in a civil war, but he and others were blamed for the â??lossâ? of China following the 1949 Communist triumph. In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an attack against Service; Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired Service, but in 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered his reinstatement in a unanimous decision.
In these excerpts from his lengthy oral history, John Service explains the bureaucratic resistance he encountered when he tried to explain to Washington what was really happening in China and the strong opposition to his belief that the Communists would eventually win. He was interviewed by Rosemary Levenson in 1977. Read Part II.
Read Full Article »