A Loyal China Hand

Forty years ago China’s long civil war effectively ended with a military triumph by Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces. Newly installed in Beijing, Mao demanded international recognition of his regime as China’s legitimate government. The United States was among the countries that refused. The last American official to leave China was a foreign-service officer named O. Edmund Clubb, who returned to Washington to serve as head of the State Department’s China desk. Within a year, however, Clubb found himself suspended and accused of being a security risk. Two years later, cleared of all allegations but nonetheless shunted aside to a meaningless job, he resigned.

Clubb was one of a number of talented specialists on China who were forced out of government in the eruption of inquisitorial hysteria, suspicion and fabricated charges that followed the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and, less than a year later, the invasion of South Korea by the Communist north. They included John Paton Davies Jr., John S. Service and John Carter Vincent, all of whom had extensive service in China. The chief sin attributed to these old China hands was that for many years, in Clubb’s case from the early 1930s on, they had accurately reported that the Communists were steadily gaining popular support as Chiang’s regime proved to be increasingly corrupt, brutal and inefficient. Diplomats who should have been hailed for their prescience were instead accused in the catchword of the day of “losing China,” as if China had in any way ever been America’s to dispose of.

Victims of a gross injustice, the purged China experts saw careers ruined and incomes lost. But even worse was the harm done the nation, first by the denial of their services and subsequently by the timid conformity their fate imposed on others who stayed in government. At a minimum, their retained expertise could have helped significantly to deepen U.S. policy-makers’ understanding of China in the turbulent 1950s and ‘60s. It’s even possible that some major mistakes might have been avoided, among them perhaps the development of the strategic rationale that had the United States fighting in Vietnam in an effort to block Chinese expansionism to the south. Had they remained in government the China experts could have reminded their masters that rather than being natural allies China and Vietnam were in fact historic and bitter national enemies.

O. Edmund Clubb died this week at the age of 88. He served his nation honorably as a diplomat and later as a scholar and teacher. With others, in a painful time when ignorance and vengefulness were allowed to ride high, he was scorned and punished. Like others, he has long since been vindicated.