Davies memoir a ‘very important contribution’ to history of U.S.-China wartime policy

What was called by some “the loss of China”—the unexpected victory in 1949 of the Chinese Communists over the American-backed Nationalists—also destroyed the career of the diplomat John Paton Davies Jr., the late father of BRAF President and CEO John Davies. That’s because in the 1950s, the elder Davies and other like-minded “China hands” were wrongly accused of having been responsible for the defeat. The events leading up to the events of 1949 and their fallout are detailed in China Hand, the recently released autobiography of John Paton Davies Jr., who was born in China to missionary parents and served in consular posts from 1933 to 1940. In 1942 he was assigned by the State Department to serve with General Joseph Stilwell in Chungking (now Chongqing), the Chinese wartime capital. Davies died in 1999, and his memoirs remained unpublished for more than a decade before being released last fall. A review of Davies’ autobiography in the new issue of the Weekly Standard calls his account “a very important contribution to the underresearched history of American China policy in wartime. … China Hand must be digested by anyone interested in China, then or now. We still live, after all, in an age of myth about China.” You can check out the complete review here.