JOHN PATON DAVIES: Yeah.

JPD: Generally speaking, I think people who are interested in the subject attribute it to the missionary influence. There were thousands of... and I am a product of a missionary family... thousands of missionaries from the United States who went to China to do the work of conversion, and they adopted the Chinese, as it were, and felt a very proprietary interest in them, and they would then transfer that to political patronage of the Chinese.

JPD: Not necessarily. Some of the most upset were politicians, who saw the issue of the future of China as a policy on which to attack the existing administration in Washington. But it is true that many missionaries were strongly anti-Communist; they'd had a bad time at the hands of the communists. On the other hand, there were certain liberal missionaries who championed the communist cause, and who had... when the communists changed their pattern of behavior towards foreigners during World War II, there was sort of a feeling of friendship among the Chinese communists and the missionaries.

JPD: They were close. Many of them, many of the Chinese officials who dealt with foreigners were American-educated, and therefore there was a sort of a ready p-partnership, as it were. There was exasperation in the American representation in China with many of the problems of dealing with the Chinese, but by and large the Chinese officials and the American officials got along very well.

JPD: Well, there was really no contact until the... United Front was formed in China between the communists and Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang to fight the Japanese invasion. And then the communists had representation at the capital in a small delegation which had formal contact with American officials. But there was no across-the-board collaboration.

JPD: After the defeat of Japan, the relationship soured greatly, because the Chinese communists felt that the United States had intervened in what was essentially a civil war, and therefore they resented it. There was an American contingent of Marines that helped Peking for the nationalists and held the Japanese, because the nationalists were not there in sufficient strength to take over, and so we were doing Chiang Kai-shek's work and denying the communists, who were also there, the chance of taking the Japanese surrender.

JPD: Well, Chiang was a product of a Japanese military academy. He worked with the Russians later, when there was an attempt by the Guomindang to take over China and to unify China. He had Russian advisers whom he used as he would, not necessarily as they t-told him to do. And then he began to show his real character when he came to power in the Central China, and he was a... well, he was... let's not say a dictator, because he did not really control the country, but he was certainly an authoritarian type. He was a poor general, by all accounts and he was dependent upon manipulating a series of corrupt generals and politicians to maintain his supreme position - nominally supreme.

JPD: Well, that's a highly relative question, because this depends on whether the communists would take power, and how competent they would be.

JPD: Ah, when it became clear that they were going to take power, I think the American officials in China were of different minds: there were some who felt that Chiang should be supported to the last ditch, and there were others who felt that Chiang had served his purpose, he could not rule effectively, the communists would win anyway, and that therefore there had to be established a working relationship with the communists. This would not have been an unusual situation in China, because prior to the communists taking power in China, there were warlords in various parts of China with whom the US Government maintained relations. That is to say, the Consul in Manchuria, for example, dealt with the Manchurian warlords and yet nominally recognized that Manchuria was part of China and that Chiang Kai-shek was therefore the president or ruler of Manchuria. But in fact, it was an acceptance of a de facto situation which enabled the American Government to deal very flexibly with local situations. And the communists would have been one of those situations.

JPD: Oh, because the communists were identified as being part of the Soviet bloc, and that was impossible, because the Russians were regarded as the aggressors in Asia.

JPD: I don't think anyone took the position that the Soviet Union had benign intentions in Asia, as well as in Europe. This question of the Chinese relationship with Moscow... the orthodox position which was formulated by the Russian specialists in the Department of State was that any communist party was subject to the rule from Moscow, the Comintern and from the Kremlin - the Comintern being an agent of the Kremlin - and that there was no such thing as national independent communist parties. This view with regard to China was in error, because the Chinese communists had not been penetrated, as had the European and many other Asian communist parties... been penetrated by Kremlin agents. The Chinese communists held territory, they had their own army, they had their own secret police around in the person of Mao, and Moscow couldn't exert leverage directly into the Chinese apparatus. Moscow had to work externally, through external pressures on the Chinese communists.

JPD: I knew that at the time.

JPD: I differed from what had been the orthodox view. Kennedy, as the outstanding Russian specialist ... he came around to the view pretty much, I believe, that the Chinese background was unique.

JPD: It was not at all popular until events finally proved it; and even then... Events proved it when the Chinese communists and the Russians went into border battles in the, what?, Sixties, and even after that, I remember Dean Rusk, whom I greatly respect, saying to me ... this must have been in the Sixties... that, did I really believe that the Chinese communists were independent of Moscow? So that that point of view continued.

JPD: Oh, I think that was certainly the case. This was particularly the case with most of the military advisers that he . It was certainly MacArthur's view; it was the view of General Shenault, the Air Force general. It a widely held view, and it was held by some in the State Department.

JPD: This was affected by the Korean War, the outbreak of the Korean War, and then the intervention of the Chinese in the Korean War, on the side of North Korea. That alarmed the United States greatly, and Taiwan then became... the attitude towards Taiwan changed greatly, and we became very defensive about Taiwan.

JPD: It was rather... as I remember, it was rather in limbo. Taiwan had been given at the Cairo Conference, in 1944, I guess, to China. It had been Japanese, and it was returned to China. And so we regarded it as part of China.