The Old China Hands

Monday, Aug. 02, 1971
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Into the hearing room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week strode two men who had passed more than a quarter-century in the flickering light and shade of nonrecognition. John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies Jr., both 65, once middle-echelon Foreign Service officers of the State Department, as long ago as 1944 correctly diagnosed the power and potential of Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communist Party and urged that the U.S. make an early accommodation with it. Had this been done, they contend—and many observers agree—the U.S. might have been spared two wars—in Korea and Indochina. Drummed out of the service at that time for their views, they now see the wheel of U.S. policy come ironically full circle under Nixon.

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Both men were born in China to U.S. missionaries shortly before the 1911 revolution toppled the Manchu dynasty. Both were educated partly in China and spoke the language fluently. By 1944 they were young old China hands stationed in Chiang Kai-shek's wartime refugee capital, Chungking, as political officers on the staff of Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, who was commander of U.S. forces in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II. The pair chafed at the frustrating restraints imposed on "Vinegar Joe" by the generalissimo and his Nationalist regime, which they believed was fatally weak, unpopular and corrupt.

Fuzzing the Issues. That was a difficult view for the U.S. to accept, for Chiang was a genuine hero, the man who had rallied his country against the Japanese invasion. Increasingly, however, his war effort bogged down, partly because of the challenge to his rule from Mao Tse-tung and the Communists. Chiang felt that he was inadequately supported by the U.S. A group of U.S. military and diplomatic observers arrived at Communist headquarters in Yenan in July 1944. As the senior diplomat present, Service talked most with Mao and his top aides.

Service saw no point in fuzzing the issue by using euphemisms like "agrarian reformers" for Communists. Mao declared that his was genuine Communism. But he made a distinction that was to be lost on the West for more than two decades: his was a Chinese, "nationalist" Communism and no carbon copy of Moscow's. Mao hoped for U.S. military aid in the war against Japan. He insisted that after Japan's defeat, the U.S. and the China that he expected to influence or control must be close friends. Mao's Communists, Service decided, must be reckoned with. Davies later replaced Service in Yenan and reached the same conclusion: "The Communists are in China to stay. And China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs."

The two diplomats' views, relayed to Washington, clashed with America's deep pro-Chiang sympathies, and especially with the sentiments of Major General Patrick J. Hurley, U.S. ambassador to Chungking. Hurley accused the old China hands of undermining his authority, and had Service recalled. Davies was allowed to stay on longer. After V-J Day, Hurley resigned and, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Service and Davies among others of disloyalty to the U.S., though he never went so far as to accuse them of being Communists.