‘Learn to Write Well’: The China Hands and the Communist-Ification of Diplomatic Reporting

The China Hands — the US Foreign Service officers who served in China during the second world war — have been portrayed as both villains and tragic heroes of US diplomatic and Cold War history. As villains, they deliberately ‘lost’ China to the communists in 1949. As tragic heroes, they proposed wise alternatives to US policy in Asia: alternatives that might have pre-empted the war in Vietnam. Rather than render judgment on the recommendation to cooperate with the Chinese communists, this article considers instead the medium through which this recommendation was made, namely diplomatic reporting. A focus on the two most vilified and heroized of the China Hands, Jack Service and John Davies, demonstrates the importance of the evolving tradition of Foreign Service reporting to the rise of the China Hands during the war. It also reveals how, after 1949, the anti-communist attack on the China Hands focused not only on the immediate recommendations of the China Hands, but also on the tradition and practice of diplomatic reporting, thereby suggesting that the medium was itself associated with communism. The effects of this conflation outlasted the internal policy debate to which the China Hands' reports properly belonged.