Overview
With a population of 1.3 billion, China contains one-fifth of the world’s population. For every person who lives in the United States there are four in China. Luo Gan, a member of the nation’s ruling Politburo, suggested this solution to China’s overpopulation problem: “We have too many people. We should encourage our people to leave and settle abroad. There are a lot of nice places to live in the world.” Almost all Chinese are members of the Han ethnic group. The 55 recognized non-Han minorities make up only 8% of the population, but China is so big that that 8% translates to more than 100 million people, a number larger than all but ten countries in the world. Although China shares borders with fifteen different nations, the vast majority of Chinese live far away from any of them.
Since 1949, China has been ruled by a single party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party members hold all important positions in the government and the military. The highest authority is the 24-member Politburo of the CCP and its nine-member standing committee. Because of its size and its enormous economic potential, many of the world’s governments have tended to ignore or pay lip service to the fact that China is a repressive authoritarian state.
In September 2008, China passed Japan as the U.S. government’s largest foreign creditor. In 2007 the United States imported five times as much from China as it exported. China is using the profits from this trade imbalance to co-finance the current bailout of the American financial system
Basic Information
Lay of the Land: In eastern Asia, China stretches from the Pacific Ocean west to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Larger than the U.S., China's terrain is as varied. Four great east-west mountain ranges divide western China and provide the main watershed for China's rivers. The Himalayas form the southwestern border with Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bhutan. The Kunlun mountain system separates the 12,000 foot plateau of Tibet from the 3,000 foot Tarim Basin in Sinkiang Uighur. The Tien Shan range divides the Tarim from the lower (1000 foot) plain of Dzungaria, and the Altai Mountains form the northern border with Soviet central Asia. Within the Tarim Basin lies the smaller Turfan basin, which dips to 940 feet below sea level. The northern basins are arid, supporting only nomadic pastoral cultures and oasis agriculture. The Himalayas and smaller but rugged mountains to the east are th sources of the major rivers of Southeast Asia–the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Slaween, Mekong, and Red- which flow into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The rich agricultural valleys of eastern China have historically been the home of the bulk of the population. The major two rivers are the Huang Ho (Yellow River), in northern China, and the Yangtze, in central China. The Pearl River (Zhu Jiang), part of which empties into the Pearl River estuary near Hong Kong, flows through Southern China, and Amur, which forms the border with eastern Siberia, collects water from the far northeastern region of Manchuria.
Population: 1.3 billion
Religions: Non-religious 41.5%, Chinese Universalist 27.5%, Buddhist (Mahayana, Tibetan, Theravada) 8.5%, Christian 8.4%, Atheist 8.2%, Ethnoreligious 4.3%, Muslim 1.5%, Falun Gong (not known exactly, but less than 0.1%).
Ethnic Groups: Ten most populous: Han, Zhuang, Manchu, Hui, Miao, Uyghurs, Yi, Tujia, Mongol, Tibetan. The government recognizes 56 different ethnic minority groups.
Languages: Mandarin Chinese 66.7%, Wu Chinese 5.9%, Yue Chinese 4.0%, Jinyu Chinese 3.5%, Xiang Chinese 2.8% Hakka Chinese 2.0%, Min Nan Chinese 2.0%, Gan Chinese 1.6%, Zhuang (Northern and Southern) 1.1%, Uyghur 0.6%, Mongolian 0.3%, Tibetan 0.3%, Bouyei 0.2%.
History
Roots
China’s recorded history is so long and so rich that it is difficult for most Westerners to grasp. For example, the first comprehensive history of China, the Shiji, was written by Sima Qian between 105 and 84 BC. Although the Communists did not take charge of China until after World War II, the roots of the Chinese brand of non-royal authoritarianism run deep. As far back as the Shang Dynasty, which began in about 1766 BC, the king considered himself to be the earthly instrument of Heaven’s design. This same mandate of Heaven was claimed by the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC). In 651 BC, the rulers of the central states held a conference to deal with what would be a recurring problem in Chinese history: foreign invaders, in this case non-Chinese tribes from the north. This period saw the inauguration of standing armies with professional career soldiers, as the military gained an increasingly important role in society. Wars, which previously had been viewed as something of a sport by the aristocracy, became more serious and were now fought to gain territory and resources. Military conscription became common and some of the larger states raised million-strong armies.
The Zhou period saw the development of several important philosophical schools that addressed the subject of governance. The most famous philosopher, Confucius (551-479 BC), promoted the concept that rulers should be junzi, which is usually translated as “gentlemen,” and that their behavior should be guided by principles of moral virtue. Confucius believed in centralized authority and he agreed with earlier thinkers that an emperor or king had a mandate from Heaven. The ruler’s subjects were expected to be unconditionally loyal and obedient and to accept the ruler’s right to speak on behalf of his people. Mo-tzu (480-390 BC), the first great critic of Confucius, argued that the concept of junzi was an excuse for maintaining social inequalities. Mencius (372-289 BC) agreed that the founders of the Zhou Dynasty, by their virtue, had been granted the approval of Heaven and, with it, the right to rule, but he also taught that the people had the right to rebel if the ruler neglected or oppressed the people because such treatment was not the will of Heaven. The Legalists, of whom the most famous was Han Fei (280?-234 BC), were a group of thinkers who believed that the state should be ruled by laws and institutions and that rulers should be judged not by their virtues or morals, but by the effectiveness of the results they produced. The Legalist view is still important in present-day China.
In 359 BC, Shang Yang, a minister in the western frontier state of Qin, began a series of reforms that included the creation of administrative districts known as hsien. Eventually this system led to civil servants who were representatives of the central power taking over the control of administrative functions that had previously been run by the local nobility. Shang Yang also burned books, massacred scholars, instituted a system of government surveillance and pursued the strategy that if you made the law severe enough no one would violate it. When his patron, Duke Zhao died in 340 BC, Shang Yang’s opponents had him drawn and quartered.
In 230 BC, the Qin prince Cheng began a series of military campaigns that, within nine years, unified China proper under a centralized, non-hereditary bureaucratic system for the first time. The Qin Dynasty was overthrown after only fourteen years, but the Han Dynasty that followed lasted from 206 BC until 220 AD. The Han emperor Wu Ti, who reigned for 54 years (141-87 BC), expanded the Chinese empire to its greatest size yet, stretching from Central Asia in the west to Korea in the east and from Inner Mongolia in the north to Vietnam in the south. Wu Ti introduced civil service examinations for government posts, opening the civil service to those who were talented instead of only to those who were well-connected.
One early ruler who would later be cited by the Communists as a forerunner of their own philosophy was Wang Mang, who served as regent from 1-6 AD and then seized power in 9 AD. Wang Mang abolished private ownership of land and “nationalized” all estates and the slaves who worked on them. His measures managed to alienate both the gentry and the peasantry and he was overthrown after a series of peasant uprisings.
By the end of the fourth century, much of the North China Plain was controlled by non-Chinese dynasties of the Toba tribal federation. The Toba instituted a land equalization program that was similar to that of Wang Mang. Under the Toba, all land belonged to the state. Every free citizen was allowed to farm a certain amount of land, but after he or she died, the land was returned to the state to be redistributed. In 581, Yang Jian (known posthumously as the Wendi) changed the land distribution system by charging a land tax and requiring each adult male to give twenty days of labor to the state. He also ordered government bureaucrats to work in regions other than those of their birth, a system which, for the most part, is used today for important government positions.
In the seventh century, the Chinese empire stretched to its greatest size ever, from the border with Iran in the west to Pyongyang, the capital of present-day North Korea, in the east. In 751 Chinese forces were defeated by an Arab army in the Battle of Talas in Kyrgyzstan, initiating a steady, centuries-long decline in China’s power. The Mongol armies, first led by Genghis Khan and later by Kublai Khan, gradually conquered China in the thirteenth century, establishing the Yuan Dynasty in 1271. Mongol rule of all of China would last less than a century.
The founder of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, rose from being a beggar to the emperor of a unified China in less than twenty years. Upon formally ascending the throne in 1368, he took the name of Hongwu. Distrustful of his advisors to the point of paranoia, Hongwu tried and executed 1500 people in 1380, including one of his oldest companions. Six centuries later, observers would compare the founder of the Chinese Communist regime, Mao Zedong, to Hongwu, in that he rose from humble origins, unified China and purged anyone who could be remotely considered a possible opponent.
The Manchu people, a non-Han ethnic group, moved out from the northern province of Manchuria in the north to overthrow the Ming and establish the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, in 1659. It was the Manchus who were the first rulers of China to have to deal seriously with the European powers.
The White Mongols Arrive
Catholic missionaries, primarily Jesuits, began arriving in China in the thirteenth century. The Portuguese were the first of the European colonial powers to arrive, followed by the Spanish, the British and the French. During the eighteenth century, Europeans and Americans acquired a taste for certain Chinese products, in particular tea, silk and porcelain. However, the Chinese had little interest in anything that the West had to offer. The British tried to remedy this imbalance by taking raw cotton and opium from India and sending it to China. The Qing government did not mind the cotton, but was alarmed by the spread of the debilitating effects of opium. In 1839 they passed laws prohibiting the opium trade, seized the opium owned by Chinese traders and destroyed 20,000 chests of British opium. The British government sent a punitive expedition that ended with the defeat of the Chinese forces in 1842. What came to be known as the First Opium War concluded with the Treaty of Nanjing, which gave the island of Hong Kong to the British and granted British citizens resident in China exemption from Chinese laws. The Treaty of Nanjing, along with two more treaties with the French, were known popularly in China as the “unequal treaties.”
Jesus Christ’s Younger Brother
In 1847, a poor village teacher from Kwangtung Province named Hung Hsiu-chuan founded the Association of the Worshippers of God, a group that was influenced by Protestant ideology. Within three years, he had recruited about 30,000 members who were soon known as the Tai Ping. Merging with other anti-Manchu groups and inspired by tales of Wang Mang and other ancient leaders, they confiscated large estates and redistributed the land to local farmers, without allowing them to actually own the land. Hung Hsiu-chuan announced that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother and that he was driven by divine inspiration. In 1851 he founded the Kingdom of the Heaven of the Great Peace and he proclaimed himself the King of Heaven. He banned slavery, opium smoking, arranged marriages and foot binding. Unnerved by the growing popularity of the Tai Ping, the Western powers threw their support behind the Qing, and the Tai Ping Rebellion was crushed in 1865.
Meanwhile, the European powers were on the move. Russian tsarist troops invaded Manchuria and Chinese Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang), the French established colonies in Cochin China in present-day Vietnam and in Cambodia, and the British took over Burma and acquired a 99-year lease of Kowloon, across from Hong Kong. When Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, China was forced to give up Taiwan and the Penghu Islands and to recognize Japanese control of Korea. The United States, which had not taken over any Chinese territory, proposed in 1899 that there should be an “open door” policy in which all foreign powers would be granted equal access to all Chinese ports. With the exception of Russia, they all agreed. In 1900, an anti-foreign movement of secret societies, known in China as the Tihetuan and in the West as the Boxers, began burning down facilities built by missionaries and killing Chinese Christians. In June they attacked foreign-held areas in Beijing and Tianjin. The Qing declared war on the foreign powers, which invaded China, crushed the Chinese forces and occupied northern China. To many Western historians, the Western occupation was a major turning point in Chinese history, but to the Chinese, with their longer view of their own history, the Westerners were just another set of foreign invaders and their occupation lasted barely as long as that of the Mongols.
Sun Yat-sen
Acknowledged as the founder of modern China, Sun Yat-sen was born November 12, 1866, in Guangdong Province. At the age of thirteen he moved in with his older brother in Honolulu and attended missionary school. Four years later he moved to Hong Kong to study medicine, returning to Honolulu when he was 28. When China lost the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, he returned to Guangdong. In 1905 he founded a revolutionary movement that was based on his Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood. By nationalism he meant that the only way to overthrow foreign imperialism was to think and act as a nation rather than as a region or a clan. Sun believed in republican Western democracy, including the right to referendums and recall elections, but as time went on, he leaned more towards traditional Chinese village democracy. In promoting “people’s livelihood,” he emphasized raising the population’s standard of living and allowing farmers and workers to own the land and the means of production.
The republican revolution broke out in Wuchang, the capital of Hubei Province on October 10, 1911. Because the existing dynasty, the Manchus, was non-Han, the revolution was not just republican, but nationalist. Within seven weeks, fifteen of the twenty-four Chinese provinces had overthrown Qing authority. In December, Sun Yat-sen returned to China from a fundraising trip in the United States, and on January 1, 1912, he was inaugurated as the provisional president of the Chinese republic. However, by this time, the commander-in-chief of the imperial army, Yuan Shikai, had already seized power in Beijing and Sun was forced to allow Yuan to take his place as president on March 10. Throughout most of the country, warlords were running the provinces and were content to let the government in Beijing deal with China’s foreign affairs.
In August 1912, one of Sun Yat-sen’s associates, Song Jiaoren, formed a new political party, the Kuomintang (National People’s Party), which was often referred to as the Nationalist Party. National elections for a new bicameral parliament were held in February 1913 and were won by the Kuomintang. Undeterred by this detail, the increasingly dictatorial Yuan Shikai had Song Jiaoren assassinated. That summer seven provinces revolted against Yuan, who successfully put down the rebellions and intimidated the parliament into electing him president of the Republic of China. Yuan banned the Kuomintang and ordered its members to leave parliament. Finally, he simply dissolved parliament and, through a new constitution, declared himself president for life. In late 1915, Yuan went even farther, announcing that he would reinstate the monarchy with himself as emperor. Rebellions broke out all over the country and several warlords declared independence. In the end, Yuan died of kidney failure in June 1916, leaving the country in chaos.
Fighting on the Allied side in World War I, Japan occupied the German-held Chinese territory of Shandong Province. In 1917, the Beijing government declared war on Germany, but the following year they signed a secret agreement with Japan acknowledging the Japanese claim to Shandong. During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, this deal was made public, which led to widespread student demonstrations against the government and against Japan. These demonstrations developed into a national reawakening known as the May Fourth Movement. In 1917, Sun Yat-sen joined with southern warlords to create an alternative government and he revived the Kuomintang in 1919. Sun appealed to Western democracies for aid, but they were not interested, so in 1921 he turned to the newly-forming Soviet Union. Soviet advisors arrived in China in 1923 and set about reorganizing the Kuomintang along the lines of the Communist Party of the USSR. In 1922 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had only 300 members, while the Kuomintang had 150,000. Nonetheless, the CCP was admitted into the Kuomintang in 1924.
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was born to wealthy parents in Zhejiang Province on October 31, 1887. After spending one year at a Chinese military academy, he went to Japan, where he continued his military education and served in the Japanese Army from 1909 until 1911. When he heard about the uprisings against the Manchus, he returned home. He joined the Kuomintang in 1918 and in 1923 he was sent to the USSR for several months of military and political training. When Chiang returned to China, he established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou with himself as the head. Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in March 1925. Chiang dismissed his Soviet military advisors and in the summer, as the commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, set out on the Northern Expedition. Over the next nine months, he defeated one warlord after another and conquered half of China. After Sun’s death the Kuomintang was ruled by a collective leadership, but in March 1926, Chiang emerged from a power struggle as the party’s only leader.
Mao Zedong
One of the most important figures of the twentieth century, Mao Zedong was born December 26, 1893, in Hunan Province in the village of Shaoshan, where 75% of the residents were surnamed Mao. The oldest of four children, he began attending school at the age of eight. But when he was thirteen, his father, who had raised himself to moderate wealth through hard work, pulled him out of school and made him work in the fields by day and manage the account books by night. When he was fifteen years old, Mao ran away from home and went to live in the neighboring county with his maternal uncle, who enrolled him in the local primary school even though he was six years older than the other students. When he was seventeen, Mao took a steamer to the city of Changsha and enrolled in middle school. He was a voracious reader and would later say that he gained his real education from reading newspapers. When he heard about the anti-Manchu Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911, he joined the army and served six months as a common soldier. After being discharged, he spent six months reading in a library and then became a teacher, a profession he pursued for five years. He published his first article, “A Study of Physical Culture,” in 1917. In it he fused nationalism with bodybuilding, explaining, “If our bodies are not strong, we will be afraid as soon as we see enemy soldiers.”
Mao worked in a library in Beijing and then returned to Changsha after the beginning of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. A prominent local spokesman for anti-imperialist, anti-warlord forces, he was forced to flee Changsha after the failure of a student strike. However he returned in the summer of 1920, won the position of principal of a primary school and married Yang Kaihui. He organized a Marxist study group and, in January 1921, he told his friends that he was a communist. In July 1921, he led the Hunan delegation to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. Upon his return, he assigned Communist representatives to organize mine workers, railroad workers and even barbers. The local warlords put an end to this activity in early 1923. That same year, Mao was elected to the Central Committee of the CCP and he worked diligently to align his party with the Kuomintang. Attacked by both the left and the right, he became ill. Still, he pressed on and, in October 1925, he was appointed acting head of the Kuomintang’s propaganda department. He was already expressing the strategy that would put him at odds with both the Kuomintang and with the orthodox communists: that the strength of China was the peasantry and that peasants should own their own land and not work the land of others.
The CCP-Kuomintang alliance collapsed in June 1927 and Chiang Kai-shek launched a vicious anti-communist repression. Mao led an armed rural insurrection in Hunan, the Autumn Harvest Uprising, but it was defeated after only ten days. Captured, he managed to bribe his way out. Fleeing with 1000 men, he joined with bandit leaders and organized peasant uprisings while also fighting against warlords and the leadership of the Communist Party. He was finally expelled from the CCP Politburo because of his insistence on organizing peasants. Mao and another revolutionary military commander who shared his viewpoint, Zhu De, created the slogan that would become famous and would inspire guerrilla groups around the world: “If the enemy advances, we retreat; if the enemy halts and encamps, we harass; if the enemy tires, we attack; if the enemy retreats, we pursue.” Somewhat less well-known were Mao and Zhu De’s Three Rules of Discipline: “Obey orders, don’t take anything from the workers or the peasants, turn in anything taken from the landlords or the gentry.” They also created Eight Additional Rules that included: put back the doors you use for bed boards, replace the straw borrowed for bedding, speak politely, pay fairly for what you buy, return everything you borrow, pay for anything you damage, don’t bathe in the sight of women and don’t search the pockets of captives.
Civil War: Part One
In April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek’s troops massacred 5000 Communist supporters in Shanghai and Changsha. Mao Zedong also faced problems with warlords in Hunan, who executed Mao’s sister and his ex-wife, and with the Communist Party itself, which, in February 1929, ordered Mao and Zhu to attack the cities despite the fact that two-thirds of the Communist Red Army troops were peasants. Chiang, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly dictatorial. In an attempt to eliminate not just the Communists, but all non-Kuomintang political parties, he enacted the Speedy Punishment of Crimes Endangering the Republic law, which was modeled after a similar law being used by the Fascists in Italy. In 1932, Chiang created the Blue Shirts, a party within the party that he never publicly acknowledged. With a membership of more than 10,000 that was dominated by army officers, Chiang used the Blue Shirts to maintain control of the military.
In September 1931, the Japanese took advantage of the chaos in China to invade Manchuria in the north, installing the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as the head of a puppet government in 1932. After consolidating their control of Manchuria, the Japanese pushed south. Despite this foreign invasion, Chiang remained obsessed with fighting the Communists. He designated Communist-controlled areas “Bandit Suppression Zones” and ordered his Kuomintang troops to engage in “Extermination Campaigns” against the Communists. Both sides experienced tumultuous infighting. For example, in the December 1930 Furien Incident, Mao ordered the execution of 2000 people he claimed were collaborating with the Kuomintang. On the other side, in January 1932, the 20,000-man Twenty-Sixth Nationalist Army deserted en masse to the Communists. Using guerrilla warfare, the Communists fought off four attempted encirclements by the Kuomintang. For the fifth campaign, which was launched in October 1933, Chiang, aided by German General Hans von Seeckt, committed one million troops, a huge arsenal and 400 airplanes. Many of the Kuomintang soldiers were upset that they were fighting their fellow Chinese instead of repelling the Japanese invaders and Chiang had to take a pause in the fighting to control his own troops. It is estimated that one million civilian peasants died as a result of fighting between the two sides. After a year, the Kuomintang finally broke the Red Army’s resistance and on October 16, 1934, Mao and about 90,000 Communist troops set out on what would be immortalized as The Long March.
The Long March
Unlike most historical events that have been glorified by dictatorial regimes, The Long March really was an extraordinary achievement. Actually, Mao himself started the “march” on horseback because of a bout with malaria. In the course of the following year, the Red Army executed a series of spectacular and heroic escapes, as they faced a wide range of obstacles ranging from Kuomintang bombing campaigns to mosquito-infested marshes. During one period, unable to make fires, they survived on raw grains and vegetables. At another point, they defeated an army of Tibetan fighters and stole their clothes (despite the high-minded resolutions of the Eight Additional Rules) in order to survive the cold. After criss-crossing about 6000 miles (some say it was “only” 3700), less than 10,000 survivors arrived safely in the town of Wuchichen in the northern Shensi soviet area. Another branch of the Red Army, led by Chu Teh, lost 15,000 soldiers in August 1936 while crossing the Yellow River, including a woman’s regiment of 2000.
Civil War: The Intermission
In 1936, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Manchurian warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, popularly known as The Young Marshall, to deploy his 15,000-man army against the Communists. Like most Chinese soldiers, The Young Marshall preferred to fight the Japanese. So he arrested Chiang on December 11 and forced him to negotiate with a representative of Mao Zedong named Chou Enlai. So nine years of civil war ended not with a victory by one side, but with a mutiny. The number of battle deaths was variously estimated to total between 400,000 and 1,275,000. Once the Kuomintang and the CCP called a truce, the Chinese gradually turned the tide against the Japanese. However, beginning in 1940, clashes between the two reluctant allies became more frequent. Even before World War II ended, the CCP-Kuomintang conflict was annexed by the nascent Cold War. The United States began aiding Chiang Kai-shek in late 1941. U.S. troops arrived in China in mid-1943, reaching a peak strength of 113,000 in late 1946. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies agreed to allow Soviet troops to enter Manchuria to fight against the Japanese. When the Japanese were forced out of the country, the Soviets invited the CCP to move in and seize the weapons left behind by the 594,000 Japanese and 75,000 Manchurian troops. In August and September of 1945 Chiang Kai-shek’s American chief of staff, General Albert Wedemeyer, arranged for 500,000 Kuomintang troops to be transported by air and sea to central and north China. In August, the U.S. ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, accompanied Mao Zedong to Chungking to meet with Chiang Kai-shek. The talks ended unsuccessfully after two months, but the Americans continued to try to prevent a resumption of the civil war. On January 14, 1946, U.S. special ambassador General George A. Marshall managed to arrange a truce, but it did not include Manchuria and even then it broke down after six months. The United States withdrew its troops in early 1947, but continued to give Chiang Kai-shek massive amounts of aid.
Civil War:Part Two
Full-scale civil war resumed in July 1946. Over the next three years it would claim more lives than both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The Kuomintang began with three million troops and the Communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with about 1.3 million. However, the PLA, with its strategy of appealing to the masses, grew quickly, tripling in size by the spring of 1948. The PLA finally captured all of Manchuria after winning the Battle of Mukden on November 2, 1948. Four days later, the climatic battle of the civil war, the Battle of Hwai Hai (aka the Battle of Suchow) pitted 600,000 PLA troops against 500,000 Kuomintang. The fighting went on for two months, during which 100,000 soldiers lost their lives and the Communists took 300,000 prisoners. The PLA moved on to take Beijing on January 23, 1949. On December 7, Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan with 5000 soldiers (and $300 million). Another Kuomintang general, Hu Tsung-nan, led a retreat into the wilds of Sinkiang Province in the west and then into Burma. By the time all fighting ended in June 1950, 4,500,000 Kuomintang soldiers had been taken prisoner and 1,775,000 had defected to the Communists. During the four years of the second half of the Chinese Civil War, 1,200,000 Chinese lost their lives in battle.
The Dawn of the Communist Dynasty
The People’s Republic of China was established on October 1, 1949 with its capital in Beijing. Mao Zedong defined the new government as a “people’s democratic dictatorship,” to be led by the Chinese Communist Party, the “vanguard of the working class.” The CCP had 4.5 million members, 90% of whom were peasants. Mao was the chairman of the Party and Zhou Enlai took the position as premier and head of state. Zhou tried to negotiate with the United States, but the administration of President Harry Truman was not interested. In December 1949, Mao traveled to Moscow and spent nine weeks negotiating with the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. In February, the two communist governments signed a thirty-year treaty of friendship. The Chinese Communists soon found themselves embroiled in the civil war in neighboring Korea, but this did not distract Mao from transforming China into his version of a communist paradise. In June 1950, the Communists began confiscating land from landlords and redistributing it to the poor. This change was undertaken with such haste and lack of long-term planning that an estimated two million people died in the process. The Communists cracked down on “enemies of the state” and engaged in an ideological cleansing of scientists, university professors, artists, writers and others that included public trials and public confessions. Unrealistically confident that this cleansing had succeeded, Mao announced, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend.” Much to his chagrin, almost all of the “hundred schools of thought” criticized the Communist Party. CCP leaders accused their critics of being “bourgeois rightists” and punished them in an Anti-Rightest Campaign.
Economic Bungling
Following the USSR model of stressing heavy industry, in 1953 Mao and the CCP initiated the First Five-Year Plan. They centralized all government administration, abolished private enterprise and nationalized banking, industry and trade. By 1956 90% of China’s farmlands had been collectivized. Mao followed this further disruption of the Chinese economy with his 1958 Great Leap Forward. A direct attack on the institution of the family, the Great Leap Forward created 23,500 people’s communes of about 22,000 people each. Each commune was supposed to be self-supporting with communal kitchens and mess halls. The program was an utter disaster and led to an estimated 27 million deaths due to starvation and disease. Mao was forced to resign his government leadership position, although he remained the chairman of the CCP. Deng Xiaoping, the General Secretary of the CCP, led an economic recovery movement. Threatened by Deng’s success, Mao began purifying the Party in 1962. He forced intellectuals to do manual labor, forced professionals to put the goals of the Party ahead of the needs of their fields of expertise and generally purged the Party of his opponents.
Government-Approved Chaos
Having already subjected the Chinese people to the failures of the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong embarked on an even worse program in 1966: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Convinced that the CCP was filled with “capitalist and bourgeois obstructionists,” Mao and his third wife, Jiang Qing, promoted Mao’s ideas, in the form of the Quotations from Chairman Mao, as a holy text and they sent out high school and university students, known as Red Guards, to punish anyone they decided was not ideologically pure. Before long, the Party had collapsed, the economy was in chaos, Red Guard factions were fighting one another, and the average Chinese citizen was afraid to express even the mildest opinion. In mid-1968, Mao was finally forced to admit that things had gone too far. The only institution that had remained unscathed by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution was the People’s Liberation Army. Mao allowed the PLA, led by Lin Biao, to crack down on the Red Guards. By the time the situation was under control, between 400,000 and a million Chinese had been killed. In September 1971, Lin Biao attempted to overthrow Mao, but his coup failed. He fled in an airplane, but his plane crashed in Mongolia and he died. As for Mao, his health was declining and he made his last public appearance in 1973. However, he still retained enough power as late as 1976 to remove Deng Xiaoping from all of his public posts and to appoint his chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, acting premier and first vice-chairman of the CCP.
The Year of Transition
For China, 1976 was the year of transition. Three of the nation’s most powerful leaders died, beginning with Zhou Enlai in January and then Zhu De in July. On July 26, the city of Tangshan in Hebei Province was hit by a massive earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, the Tangshan earthquake is regarded as the deadliest earthquake in modern history. According to Chinese tradition, such a disaster was viewed as a withdrawal of the mandate of Heaven and it presaged a great change. Thus it did not come as a surprise when Mao Zedong himself died six weeks later, on September 9. With Mao gone, Jiang Qing and three others were denounced as the Gang of Four and Jiang Qing eventually died in prison. Athough Hua Guofeng assumed all important positions, in July 1977 Deng Xiaoping was reinstated and an intraparty struggle gradually led to the rehabilitation of most of the Party leaders who had been denounced during the Cultural Revolution. In March 1979 Mao was officially deemed no longer infallible and in 1981 the Party announced that in his later years Mao had made mistakes by deviating from his own sacred Thought.
Money Talks
In December 1978, the CCP Central Committee adopted Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of emphasizing economic development over Maoist class struggle. To promote his goals, Deng managed to reduce Hua Guofeng to a figurehead by putting two of his own protégés in positions previously held by Hua. Hu Yaobang, a liberal by Chinese Communist standards, was made General Secretary of the CCP and Zhao Ziyang took over as premier. The number of small businesses in China grew from 100,000 in 1978 to six million in 1983. Special Economic Zones were created to attract foreign investment. By 1982, 90% of farming had been decollectivized. Each household was required to pay their commune in cash or kind for the right to lease farmland and then to turn over a percentage of their harvest. However, whatever was left over, the farmers could sell and keep the profits. Grain production rose 5% a year in the early 1980s, but later the prices paid by the government did not keep pace with the inflation rate and production stagnated. In 1985, Deng Xiaoping published Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, which formally presented his approval of private enterprise while at the same time maintaining strict control of the economy through central planning.
The 1982 Twelfth Party Congress signaled a significant development in the leadership of the Communist Party: the rise of the technocrats, men who had been trained in a technical science, pursued a professional occupation and held a Party leadership post. As the old guard of Mao’s generation faded away, they were replaced by these technocrats. In 1982, none of China’s provincial governors were technocrats; by 1997, 77% were technocrats. In 1978 only 23% of Politburo members were college-educated. By 1988 the figure was 67% and by 1998 92%.
The Tiananmin Massacre
By 1988, the official inflation rate was 18% and economic anxiety was widespread. When Hu Yaobang, the liberal, died in April 1989, the government refused to honor his memory. This sparked demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that mushroomed into protests against inflation, corruption and nepotism and then into calls for the resignation of Deng Xiaoping and the institution of freedom of speech and democracy. Soon the crowds grew to more than 100,000 people. Some workers, inspired by the Solidarity movement in Poland, started independent trade unions. When the government cracked down, these workers were punished more severely than the students who had initiated and led the protests. On May 15, there were pro-democracy demonstrations in 132 Chinese cities. Four days later, the government put Beijing under martial law. Considering local army troops too sympathetic to the protestors, they brought in troops from outside the city. On June 3 and 4, the troops assaulted the demonstrators, killing about 500 of them. Chinese embassies abroad were ordered to collect videotapes of the foreign television coverage of the demonstrators. The tapes were sent back to Beijing and used to identify and then arrest the demonstrators.
After Tiananmen, the CCP increased its control over the People’s Liberation Army and the PLA was encouraged to build up its business interests. By the early 1990s, the PLA operated more than 10,000 businesses, including joint ventures with foreign partners, international hotels and foreign trade. PLA representation on the CCP Central Committee also rose to 25%. The collapse of the USSR in August 1991 rattled the Communist leadership. At the 1992 Fourteenth Party Congress, the CCP added Deng Xiaoping to the pantheon of Communist Gods, alongside Marx, Lenin and Mao. “Deng Thought,” especially his promotion of a socialist market economy, was canonized as the official guide to government policy. Respect for Confucianism was revived and Western democracy was criticized as being contrary to Confucianism and to Chinese traditions. Deng’s strategy of liberalizing the economy while maintaining strict control of all political institutions and refusing to allow freedom of expression would come to be known as the “Chinese model” and would be emulated by dictators around the world.
Hu Jintao
Hu Jintao’s ancestors were tea merchants from Anhui Province in central China, who then moved to the city of Taizhou in Jiangsu Province northwest of Shanghai. Hu’s father sold tea in Shanghai and that was where Hu was born on December 21, 1942. His mother died when he was a child and he and his two younger sisters grew up with his grandparents in Taizhou. His father became an accountant and Hu himself worked briefly as an accountant for a company that sold household equipment. When he was sixteen years old, Hu passed the entrance examination for Qinghua University in Beijing, China’s elite science and technology school. Qinghua had been founded by Americans in 1911. Beginning a trend that would continue throughout his life, Hu was the youngest student in his class. He was a member of the student dance team and was known to dance solo at parties, although this detail of his life was deleted from his official biography in the 1980s. Known for his photographic memory, Hu was identified as a potential leader in his sophomore year. After earning a degree in riverine hydropower generation in the hydraulic engineering department in 1964, Hu stayed on at Qinghua to do postgraduate research and to serve as a “political trainer,” in charge of ideological indoctrination. The president of Qinghua University, Jiang Nanxiang, accepted Hu as a probationary member of the Communist Party in 1964, and the following year he was made a full party member. At Qinghua, Hu met and married fellow student Liu Yongqing. The couple has a son and a daughter. Their daughter is rumored to be living in the United States under an assumed name. In the autumn of 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, Hu was sent to do manual labor, building housing, in the remote northwestern desert province of Gansu. After the political climate in China calmed down, Hu was allowed to work as a technician during the construction of the Liujia Gorge Dam, which was completed in 1974. During this time he also managed Communist Party affairs for the local Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power. In 1974, Hu was transferred to the provincial capital of Lanzhou, where he served as the deputy chief of the Project Design Division of the Gansu Provincial Construction Commission. Two years later he led the Gansu construction team’s efforts in its relief work following the Tangshan earthquake.
In the late 1970s, Hu Jintao made the contact that would lead to his comparatively rapid rise in the Communist Party power structure. Hu met, and became a protégé of, Song Ping, a fellow Qinghua University graduate. Song, the chairman of the Gansu Provincial Revolutionary Commission and the first secretary of the Gansu branch of the CCP, was well-connected with the Zhou Enlai faction of the CCP and with Deng Xaioping. In 1980, Deng sent out a call to promote younger party cadres ahead of more senior officials. Song responded by sending Hu Jintao to Beijing to attend the Central Party School’s inaugural training class for middle and young cadre. The executive Vice-President of the school happened to be Jiang Nanxiang, the former president of Qinghua University whom Hu had defended against the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Jiang introduced Hu to the Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang. In 1981, Song Ping was promoted and sent to Beijing to serve as vice-chairman (and later chairman) of the Party’s Central Planning Committee. In 1982, Hu was selected as an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. At 39, he was its youngest member. Having already, thanks to Song Ping, moved up the ranks in the hierarchy of the provincial branch of the Communist Youth League (CYL), Hu was transferred to Beijing to become president of the All-China Youth Federation. In November 1984, he gained the highest position in the CYL. As part of his responsibilities, he was in charge of the CYL newspaper and he ordered the paper to criticize a hardliners’ campaign against Western ideas. In so doing, he alienated two members of the “Princeling Party,” sons of Party leaders, who complained about him to Hu Yaobang. Because Hu Yaobang liked Hu Jintao, he eased him out of this confrontation by sending Hu Jintao to serve as Party Secretary in the impoverished southwestern province of Guizhou. At the age of 43, Hu became the youngest provincial Party Secretary in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Three months later, Hu was made a full member of the CCP Central Committee. Arriving in Guizhou in July 1985, Hu soon made himself popular. Although he never moved his family to Guizhou, he lived in a modest fashion, and he visited every one of the province’s 86 county-level administrative units and familiarized himself with the people’s problems. He ordered tuition waivers for poor students to help them attend university and he worked to improve economic conditions. By the end of 1987, Guizhou’s economic output had more than doubled and per capita income had almost tripled in comparison to pre-1985 levels. Far from the political turmoil in Beijing, such as the downfall of Hu Yaobang in 1987, Hu Jintao maintained a clean record, free from enemies.
Hu Jintao’s Tibetan Adventure
Because of its exotic culture and its spiritual component, Tibet has long held a special fascination for Westerners. China invaded Tibet on October 7, 1950. The Tibetan army was small and ineffective, but the Chinese did face resistance from various mountain tribes, in particular the Khampa of eastern Tibet. China annexed Tibet in May 1951 after losing 2000 soldiers in battle. Another 2000 Chinese froze to death, 3000 died of disease and 3000 were declared missing. About 5700 Tibetans were killed and 2000 were imprisoned. Tibetan guerrillas continued to fight against the Chinese. In May 1956, they ambushed and massacred 2000 Chinese soldiers. The Chinese responded by bombing a monastery in Batang in eastern Tibet, killing 2000 monks and pilgrims. For the next seventeen years, the CIA supported the Khampas in their struggle against the Chinese. On March 10, 1959, 20,000 rebels, armed only with swords and old muskets, revolted in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. During a week of heavy fighting, Chinese forces killed 65,000 Tibetans. The leader of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama, fled Lhasa with eighty supporters, arriving in India two weeks later. The Indian government offered sanctuary to the Tibetans in Dharamsala, which has been home to the Dalai Lama ever since.
While Hu Yaobang was General Secretary of the CCP, he visited Tibet and issued an apology to the Tibetan people. However, when he lost power in 1987, Chinese policy towards Tibet turned more repressive once again. As the 30th anniversary of the Chinese occupation neared, the Chinese government knew that they would face major protests in Lhasa. In June 1988, the new head of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, following a suggestion from Song Ping, suggested that Hu Jintao be chosen to replace the current Party Secretary in Tibet, who was considered too soft on repression. From October 30 until November 20, Hu accompanied Yan Mingfu, the Communist Party’s head of propaganda for minority areas, on an inspection tour of Tibet. On December 9, Hu was officially appointed Party Secretary for Tibet. The next day, International Human Rights Day, police fired into a crowd of protestors in Lhasa.
For Hu Jintao, this new appointment was a test of his willingness to follow the policies of whichever faction was in power in China. Vaguely associated until now with reformist elements, Hu was expected instead to take a hard line. Once again leaving his family behind in Beijing, Hu arrived in Lhasa January 12, 1989. He met with Party leaders and told them, “With the powerful PLA and armed police as our backing,” he and the leaders would “do our work well.” The sympathy with the locals that Hu had shown during his assignments in Gansu and Guizhou did not reappear in Tibet. It is not clear whether this was a result of racist attitudes that he harbored towards the Tibetans or whether he simply wanted to do whatever it took to toe the party line. On January 23, Hu traveled to Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city, for the reopening of a rebuilt Buddhist stupa that had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. At the ceremony, he shared the podium with the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking member of the Tibetan hierarchy, who had spent most of the previous twenty years under house arrest in Beijing. Speaking to the assembled crowd, the Panchen Lama criticized the Chinese presence in Tibet and described the damage it had done to the Tibetan people and their culture. Five days later, the Panchen Lama was declared dead, reportedly as the result of a heart attack. Rumors spread that he had been poisoned and, although it was never substantiated, this version of his death was widely believed. On February 7, large crowds paraded through the streets of Lhasa displaying the banned Tibetan exile flag. After speaking directly with General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, and with the occupation anniversary coming closer, on February 20, Hu ordered Chinese armed troops to march through the city. On March 5, a demonstration in Lhasa turned into a riot. Police shot to death ten Tibetans and one policeman was killed. Forty more Tibetans would die over the next few days. Martial law was declared on March 7 and all foreigners were given two days to leave Lhasa. Tibetans without residence permits for the city were ordered to leave within two weeks. Tibetans suspected of having separatist thoughts were investigated, as were those “who are suspicious for the need for investigation.” In September 1989, Hu succumbed to “fatigue” and began making increasingly frequent medical visits to Beijing, finally moving there permanently in the summer of 1990. He did, however, retain his title as Secretary of the Party Committee for the Tibetan Autonomous Region for two more years.
Hu Jintao: Climbing to the Top
Back in Beijing, Hu Jintao, having proved himself in Tibet, continued his steady rise in the Communist Party. In the spring of 1992, Deng Xiaoping made him his point man in the organizing of the Fourteenth Communist Party Congress. Deng announced that he wanted to put men under the age of fifty on the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest authority. Song Ping nominated Hu as one of four candidates. Of the four, two were disqualified when it was discovered that they would turn fifty before the Congress opened in October. Hu got the job and, aged 49 years 9 months, he became, as usual, the youngest member of the Standing Committee. With Song Ping’s approval, he replaced Song as the man in charge of party personnel. Hu, probably recalling his run-in with the Princelings, banned nepotism and established performance standards for promotion. In March 1993, he was appointed president of the Central Party School, which gave him contact with every rising party leader in every province. Under Hu’s control, the school began teaching courses in comparative politics and Western economics and management. Hu was now affiliated with the three main sources of Party leaders—Qinghua University, the Chinese Communist Youth League and the Central Party School—and was now viewed as the heir apparent to China’s number one position. When Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997, his ashes were scattered into the Bohai Sea. Hu was the only Politburo member to accompany Deng’s family and bodyguards at the ceremony. The leader of China, Jiang Zemin, appointed Hu State Vice-President in March 1998. Although this was a largely ceremonial post, it was Hu’s first major position outside of the Party. Once again, he was the youngest vice-president in the history of the People’s Republic of China. He was put in charge of an important program: overseeing the closure of businesses owned by the Army and transferring the assets to local authorities. Meanwhile, Hu began making trips abroad, including representing China at the ASEAN Summit in Hanoi in December 1998. In November 2001, he toured Europe for the first time, visiting Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain, and then, accepting an invitation from Vice-President Dick Cheney, he visited the United States in 2002.
In 1999, Jiang Zemin awarded Hu the post of vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and in May of 1999 he gave Hu his first public role: addressing the nation on television after the United States bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists. In a carefully-worded speech, Hu exploited the patriotic feelings of the Chinese people, lambasting the Americans for their “brazen” attack. But he also reminded his viewers that they must “guard against overreactions.”
Over the next couple years, Hu accumulated more and more important state and Party positions, and in 2004 succeeded Jiang Zemin as chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission and head of the army. When he finally achieved full power, it marked the first time that an heir apparent in Communist China had survived the usual internecine struggles and actually taken charge of the country…and he did not so without having any serious enemies.
From 1978 to 2000, China’s GDP quadrupled and in 1999 China became the second largest economy in the world after the United States. Although China’s GDP per capita has increased greatly over the past thirty years ($181 in 1979 to $2,485 in 2007), indicating signs of drastic development, social inequality has also increased.
History of U.S. Relations with China
U.S.- China relations began in the 1700s when trade routes were first established between the two countries. In the mid-1800s, relations between the two countries grew stronger due to two separate phenomena. In China, extreme famine struck the southeastern province, while, in the U.S., gold had been discovered on the west coast. As a result, thousands of Chinese fled to California in search of riches. Between 1871 and 1880, 123,201 Chinese were recorded as immigrants to the United States. Unfortunately, few managed to strike it rich and most ended up working on the emerging railroad system for little pay. Initially, these jobs were shunned by most Americans. However, in the 1880s, economic strife struck the U.S. and many Americans began to compete with the Chinese for low-paying jobs. As a result, anti-Chinese sentiments grew and many violent acts were carried out against the Chinese immigrants. Congress responded by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned immigration from China to the U.S. Although many deemed the act obvious discrimination, it wasn’t until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that Chinese were once again allowed to immigrate to the U.S. in large numbers.
Opposed to the ideals of communism, the United States further distanced itself from China after Mao Zedong established communist rule in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s the two countries treated one another with a sense of fear, hostility and suspicion. It wasn’t until the extremely influential meeting between Mao and President Richard Nixon in February of 1972 that this hostility began to fade. The meeting created the foundation for the growth in trade growth that characterizes current U.S.-Chinese relations.
Current U.S. Relations with China
Noted Chinese-Americans
Public Service
Bill Lann Lee: As Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, he held the nation’s highest civil rights post during the Clinton Administration.
Elaine Lan Chao: Appointed the 24th U.S. Secretary of Labor, she was the first Chinese-American and first Asian American to be appointed to a President’s cabinet in American history. She was also the first Asian American to serve as Deputy Secretary of Transportation and the Director of the Peace Corps.
Gary Locke: He became the United States Secretary of Commerce of the Obama Administration in 2009. Locke served two terms as the 21st governor of Washington from 1997-2005. He was the first, and still remains the only, Chinese American to become governor of a state in United States history.
John L. Fugh: First Chinese American to reach the rank of U.S. Army, Major General, he managed the Army’s worldwide legal organization as the top uniformed lawyer in the Army. He is currently Chairman for the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese Americans dedicated to improving U.S.-China relations as well as encouraging more Chinese American participation in society. He published the “War Crimes Report,” the first US document to record enemy war crimes since World War II.
Maya Ying Lin: An artist and architect known for her sculptures and landscape art, she is best known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial has become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of American military casualties in the Vietnam War.
Ming W. Chin: In 1996, He became the first Chinese American to join the California Supreme Court. As an associate justice, he authored various landmark decisions in cases on DNA, insurance coverage, surrogate parenthood, and hate crimes.
Yau Leong Fong (a.k.a. Hiram Fong): In 1959, he became the first Chinese American and Asian American to become a U.S. Senator and the first and only Republican Asian American to have ever held a seat in Hawaii’s Senate. He was one of the foremost leaders in Hawaii’s fight to achieve statehood.
Art/Entertainment/Media
Amy Tan: Best-selling author Amy Tan is most widely known for her fiction novel The Joyluck Club (1989), which has been translated into 17 languages. Other notable works include The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995).
Anna May Wong: As a third generation Chinese American, she became the first prominent Chinese American Hollywood film star during a deeply racist time in American history, helping to “humanize” Asian Americans to white audiences.
Ben Fong-Torres: An author, broadcaster, and rock journalist, he has interviewed some of the biggest names including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, the Jackson 5, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Grateful Dead, Ike & Tina Turner, Diane Keaton, and Steve Martin. He is best known for his contributions to Rolling Stone magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Bruce Lee: Considered one of the greatest martial arts actors, he sparked the first major Western interest in Chinese martial arts. He created two of his own style of martial arts, Jun Fan and Jeet Kune Do, which are still taught today. Lee also trained several World Karate Champions, most notably Chuck Norris, Joe Lewis, and Mike Stone. During their training with Lee, they won every Karate Championship in the U.S. Lee, also known for his fitness, is allegedly documented to have achieved a number of remarkable physical feats, including the following:
Lee's combat movements were at times too fast to be captured on film at 24 frames per second, so many scenes were shot in 32 frame per second to put Lee in slow motion.
In a speed demonstration, Lee could snatch a dime off a person's open palm before they could close it, and leave a penny behind.
Lee could throw grains of rice up into the air and then catch them in mid-flight using chopsticks.
Lee performed one-hand push-ups using only the thumb and index finger
Lee could cause a 300-lb (136 kg) bag to fly towards and thump the ceiling with a sidekick.
Connie Chung: She became correspondent and anchor for major television networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. In 1993, she became co-anchor of CBS Evening News, first Asian American and second woman to become a news anchor at a major network. Chung is the only person in history (male or female) to have served as a substitute anchor for all three network nightly newscasts (NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News and ABC World News Tonight) as well as all three network morning newscasts (Today, CBS This Morning and Good Morning America). Connie Chung is credited with setting off a boom in female Asian American network newscasters.
Ellery J. Chun:Not only did he invent the modern day Hawaiian shirts, a distinctively Hawaiian fashion, he also coined the term “Aloha shirt.”. The popular shirts, sporting palm trees, hula dancers, pineapples and other colorful patterns, were seen in nearly every movie based in Hawaii in the 1950s through 1970s, and are still popular today.
I.M. Pei (Ieoh Ming Pei): A noted modernist architect, he designed the Louvre Pyramid in 1983, a glass and metal pyramid that has since become a landmark of Paris, France.
Jimmy Choo: He is a fashion designer known worldwide for high fashion women’s shoes and handbags. Initially he handcrafted both himself. His products are adorned by many celebrities including Nicole Richie, Katie Holmes, and the late Princess Diana.
Lucy Liu: Hollywood actress Lucy Liu has starred in multiple movies and TV series, most notably Ally McBeal, Dirty Sexy Money, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Chicago (20002), and Charlie’s Angels (2000).
Meg Tilly: An Academy Award-nominated actress, ballerina, and author, she is best known for her role in the movies Psycho II (1984) and Agnes of God (1986) and her novels, Singing Songs and Gemma.
Nancy Kwan: In the 1960s, she became the first Asian American actress to gain fame and acceptance in Hollywood, paving the way for actors of Asian descent in major roles. She won the 1961 Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Female Newcomer.
Yo-Yo Ma: He is a world-renowned cellist who has received countless awards and won 15 Grammy Awards. He was a child prodigy, attending Juilliard School at the age of 7, performing in a concert conducted by Leondard Bernstein at the age of 8, and first performing at Carnegie Hall at the age of 9. In 2002, he was appointed Culture Connect Ambassador by the U.S. Department of State and has trained students worldwide. In 2006 and 2007, he was appointed U.N. Messenger of Peace
Athletes
Michael Te Pei Chang: A professional tennis player, he began breaking records at the young age of 15 years. In 1987, at 17, he became the first American male and the youngest male ever to win the French Open since 1955. He is the first and only Asian player to be ranked in the World Top 10 ATP world rankings during the 1990s. He ranked World No. 2 in 1996.
Michelle Kwan: A figure skating legend, she won 42 championships, including 5 World Championships, 8 consecutive U.S. Championship titles, and 2 Olympic medals. In addition to setting numerous U.S. records, she set multiple world records as well. She is the only woman in figure skating history to claim the World title three times and the only singles skater to receive as many as 57 perfect 6.0 marks.
Science/Academia
Chien-Shiung Wu: A physicist, she joined the Manhattan Project in WWII and helped develop the uranium enrichment process necessary to build the first atomic bomb. She is the first living scientist to have an asteroid named after her.
Henry C. Lee: Lee, a forensic scientist, investigated over 4,000 homicides and served as expert witness in a number of high-profile cases, including O.J. Simpson’s. He is the Chief Emeritus of the Connecticut State Police Laboratory and a professor at the University of New Haven.
David Ho: He pioneered the use of protease inhibitors, a class of anti-retroviral drug, to treat or prevent HIV-infections. During his 26 years as an AIDS researcher he also published over 350 papers and explicated the mechanisms of HIV replication. Along with his research team, he is currently working on developing a vaccine for AIDS.
Flossie Wong-Staal: She was the first scientist to define the structure of several human cancer chromosomes and, in 1983, co-discovered the genetic structure of HIV. In 1985, Wong-Stall was responsible for the first cloning of HIV.
Min Chueh Chang: In his 45 years as a reproductive biologist, Min Chueh Chang is recognized primarily for in-vitro fertilization, reproduction outside of a living organization, and co-invention of the first birth control pill in the 1950s. Chang also discovered what is known as the process of capacitation, the change a sperm must go through in the female genital tract in order for it to penetrate and fertilize the egg.
Ray J. Wu: In 1970, he developed the first method for sequencing DNA and some basic tools for DNA cloning at Cornell University. Dr. Wu’s research has formed the basis for the entire world of modern biotechnology and DNA research and engineering. In 1976, Dr. Wu and other scientists spliced artificial genetic material into bacteria, a living cell.
Steven Chu: He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1997) for his research on the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light. He is the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy, unanimously confirmed in 2009, in the Barack Obama administration. He is also the 2nd Chinese American member of the Cabinet.
Taylor Gun-Jin Wang: Aboard the STS-51B Challenger space shuttle, in 1985, he was the first ethnic Chinese astronaut to go to space. In the first operational Spacelab mission, Wang traveled over 2.9 million miles in 110 Earth orbits, and logged over 168 hours in space. Wang also invented the acoustic levitation and manipulation chamber for the NASA Drop Dynamics experiments.
Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods: One of the greatest golfers of all time, he has won 14 professional major golf championships, 66 PGA Tour events, and set countless world records. He is currently the World #1 golfer (2009) and has held that title for a record number of consecutive weeks (264) and record total number of weeks (548). Woods is the youngest player to complete the Grand Slam, the youngest Masters champion ever, and the only person to ever win all 4 World Golf Championship events. He is also the first major championship winner of African or Asian heritage.
Tsung-Dao Lee: A U.S. citizen since 1962, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics and the equally prestigious Albert Einstein Award in 1957. He is the youngest American to have ever won a Nobel Prize, the second youngest Nobel laureate in the world, and the first Chinese Laureates (along with his partner C.N. Yang).
Business
An Wang: He invented several important computer technologies, such as the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949, which was critical for the magnetic core memory technology. In 1955, he sold their core memory patent to IBM. He founded Wang Laboratories, which employed 30,000 people. In addition to desktop digital calculators and word processors, they began producing minicomputers in the 1970s. Wang held 44 patents.
Andrew Cherng: In 1972, he started with a single restaurant in Pasadena. Panda Express has now grown to become the largest Chinese fast food chain in the U.S. with 600 locations. This Americanized Chinese cuisine is served in the Pentagon.
George Koo: He is an international business consultant who has become a key link in the multibillion dollar trade that has grown between China and the United States. Since 1978 he has advised American high tech companies on how to establish a presence in Asia and linked Asian companies with partners in the United States. Prior to founding Bear Stearns China Trade Advisors, he was Vice President and co-director of Chase Pacific Trade Advisors of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Jerry Yang: Yang co-created Yahoo navigation directory and co-founded Yahoo! Inc., an internet directory, while at Stanford University in 1995. Yahoo has since expanded to provide a variety of online services worldwide and, in 2007, was the 2nd most visited site in the world. While Yang was CEO, Yahoo provided the IP addresses and other information of an anonymous Yahoo! Mail user to the Chinese authoritarian government, which subsequently led to the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese dissidents. Chinese dissidents sued Yahoo in U.S. courts under human rights laws. In 2007, Yahoo settled out of court and paid an undisclosed amount of compensation.
Steven Chen: He is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of YouTube, a video-sharing website that significantly impacted internet culture. In 2006, the founders sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion.
Vera Wang: She is a prominent fashion designer, particularly known for her wedding gown collection. She has made wedding gowns for celebrities, such as Maria Carey, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, Victoria Beckham, Uma Thurman, Avril Lavigne, Jennifer Garner, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Campbell Brown, and more. After just 6 months in stores, her collection made it to the 3 of the top 10 best-selling patterns in the U.S.
Vera Wang: She is a prominent fashion designer, particularly known for her wedding gown collection. She has made wedding gowns for celebrities, such as Maria Carey, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, Victoria Beckham, Uma Thurman, Avril Lavigne, Jennifer Garner, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Campbell Brown, and more. After just 6 months in stores, her collection made it to the 3 of the top 10 best-selling patterns in the U.S.
Miscellaneous
Eng and Chang Bunker: The term “Siamese twins” originated from Eng and Chang Bunker, the most famous conjoined twins.
Feng Shan Ho: He saved thousands of Austrian Jews during the Holocaust. In 1938, at a time when 32 countries refused to accept immigrant Jews, Ho defied orders of his superiors and issued over two thousand visas to Jews to enter Shanghai, China.
Wong Kim Ark: The ruling on an 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, set a momentous legal precedent regarding what determines U.S. citizenship. The U.S. Supreme court determined that, under the 14th amendment, an American-born person of foreign descent is a citizen of the United States at birth, contingent on certain parental conditions.
Vincent Chin: He was beaten to death in 1982 in a racially charged attack by two American workers. It is believed to be a hate crime triggered by massive layoffs in the auto industry due to competition from Japan, despite his Chinese ethnicity. The lenient sentencing on the two assailants outraged the Asian American community and initiated a pan-ethnic Asian American movement.
About 2.8 million people of Chinese origin live in the U.S., making them the largest group of Asian Americans. They have settled primarily on the west coast, and in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Early Chinese immigrants performed intensive labor in hellish conditions, and faced racially discriminatory immigration laws from 1882-1965. By the turn of the 20th century, nearly 80% of the Chinese population lived in Chinatowns across the country as a means to escape pervasive racism.
1,555,450 Americans visited China in 2005, an increase of 18.9% from 2004. The number of visitors has been fluctuating year by year, but generally trends upwards since 2002 when 1,121,197 Americans visited China.
320,450 Chinese visited the U.S. in 2006, an increase of 18.6% from 2005. Visits are up from 2002 when 225,655 Chinese traveled to the U.S.
Where Does the Money Flow
In September 2008, China passed Japan as the U.S. government’s largest foreign creditor. In 2007 the United States imported five times as much from China as it exported. China is using the profits from this trade imbalance to co-finance the current bailout of the American financial system
U.S. imports from China have grown dramatically in recent years, from $152 billion in 2003 to $322 billion 2007. The primary imports accounting for this growth are computers and computer accessories, rising from approximately $22 billion in 2003 to $51 billion in 2007, toys and sporting goods, rising from $16.5 billion in 2003 to $27.5 billion in 2007, and clothing apparel and material, rising from $26 billion in 2003 to $51 billion in 2007.
U.S. exports to China have also more than doubled over the past four years, rising from 28 billion in 2003 to $65 billion in 2007. The main exports accounting for this growth are civilian aircraft parts, rising from approximately $3 billion in 2003 to $7 billion in 2007, semiconductors, rising from $2.4 billion dollars in 2003 to $6.4 billion in 2007, and soy beans, rising from $2.8 billion in 2003 to $4.1 billion in 2007.
The largest single program to receive a piece of the $8.9 million in U.S. aid to China in 2006 is Clean Productive Environment ($2.6 million), which is an economic development initiative. This same program will be cut in the 2008 budget request, as China addresses more of its own shortcomings in sanitation. Since China is a target for the President's Plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR), the HIV/AIDS program will jump into existence in 2008 with a budget of $7.0 million out of a proposed total aid budget of $9.3 million.
China Tops Japan in U.S. Debt Holdings: Beijing Gains Sway Over U.S. Economy (by Anthony Faiola and Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post)
Human Rights
The Chinese Communist system is based on repressing free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and democracy in general. Because of his mixed record during his long climb to the top of the Communist hierarchy, many observers hoped that Hu might introduce reforms relating to civil liberties and political expression. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. To begin with, Hu has made it clear that the Chinese army should be loyal not to the state, but to the Communist Party. In 2004 he reportedly advised Party leaders to study North Korea and Cuba as models for maintaining order.
Tibet—Tibetans have been arrested for speaking with foreigners, possessing the autobiography of the Dalai Lama or video and audio cassettes of his speeches, preparing a list of casualties of Chinese crackdowns and advising friends to wear traditional Tibetan costumes on the Chinese national day. In 2005, two monks were sentenced to 11 years in prison for hoisting the banned Tibetan flag. Incommunicado detention is routine. Torture is the expected form of interrogation. There is no right to trial in an open court; defense is permitted for mitigation of punishment not for pleading innocent. Tibetans call judges “sentencing officers.” The Chinese government vets all applicants for the monkhood and prohibits the performance of traditional rites. In July 2005, the Chinese chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region announced that China would choose the next Dalai Lama. The boy the Dalai Lama identified in 1995 as the next Panchen Lama (#2 in the Tibetan hierarchy) has been under virtual house arrest, probably in Beijing. The Chinese government chose a different boy and in June 2005 in Sichuan ordered monks to publicly greet him.
Criminal Justice—According to statistics complied in 2003, 1-5% of trials in China have witnesses. The conviction rate in criminal trials is 99.7%. The criminal code includes 68 crimes that are punishable by death, including embezzlement, counterfeiting, bribery, pimping, stealing gasoline and selling harmful foodstuffs. Exact annual figures for the number of executions in China is not known, although it appears to be in the thousands. Amnesty International’s cautious estimate for 2004 was 3400. The majority of the world’s executions take place in China. In March 2004, the government introduced traveling “execution vans.”
Forced Labor Camps—According to Chinese government statistics, there are 260,000 people being held in 300 “reeducation through labor” camps throughout the country. The reform through labor system, known in Chinese as Laogai,was borrowed from the Soviet Union and begun in China in the 1950s. Originally created to “reeducate” class enemies of Communism, the Chinese have broadened its usage to include petty criminals, drug users, political dissidents, Falun Gong members and personal enemies of local officials. The Chinese justification for the labor camps is that criminals exploit society and that through work they will absorb the Communist ideology and become proper members of the proletariat. Under the system, local police and others can send anyone to the camps for three years without a trial. The inmate population of these camps has tripled in the last twenty years. Since the days of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government has tried to make the reeducation camps operate at a profit. According to official documents, at least 200 Laogai-made products are exported to other countries, including a quarter of China’s tea, a majority of its rubber-vulcanizing chemicals, steel-pipe, hand tools and cotton. According to the Washington D.C.-based Laogai Research Foundation, prisoners in the labor camps mine asbestos without protective gear, work with battery acid with no protection for their hands. often work 15 hours a day and are subject to torture.
Torture—According to a United Nations investigation, among the methods of torture used by Chinese police and in prisons to extract “confessions” and to maintain discipline are immersion in sewage, ripping out fingernails, sleep deprivation, burning with cigarettes and beatings with electric prods. China outlawed torture in 1996, its definition of illegal acts - those leaving physical marks—is so narrow that interrogators can employ a wide range of methods contravening UN standards. Suspects can also be manacled in contorted positions, some of which are given names like gymnastics moves, such as “reversing an airplane,” where a victim must remain standing, bent double, with arms splayed upwards and backwards. China outlawed torture in 1996, but its definition of torture only covers acts that leave physical marks.
Religion—China has tried to deflect criticism of its suppression of religion by legalizing controlled worship. For example, the government sponsors its own version of the Catholic Church that does not recognize the authority of the Pope. Evangelical Christians have been arrested for “praying for world peace.” In June 2004, Jiang Zongxiu was beaten to death by police after she was arrested while distributing Bibles in a marketplace in Guizhong Province. In March 2005 the government passed the Regulations on Religious Affairs. This directive requires all congregations, mosques, temples, churches and monasteries to register to be legal. According to the law, all religious bodies must “safeguard the unification of the country, the unity of the nationalities and the stability of society.” This wording has proved sufficiently vague enough to give the government control of all religious teaching. The Chinese authorities have used this carte blanche to particular effect in Buddhist Tibet and in Xinjiang Province against the Muslim Uighur people. In Xinjiang it is illegal to teach religion to children under the age of eighteen and schoolchildren may not even sing traditional songs. It is also forbidden to publish anything about Islam that does not “uphold the Marxist point of view of religion,” and the government has destroyed thousands of books about Uighur history and culture. In Xinjiang, almost half of the prisoners in the area’s labor camps are there for religious reasons.
Falun Gong—Falun Gong is a peaceful, meditation and exercise-based spiritual group, whose belief-system, although strange, is peaceful and seemingly harmless…except, that is, to the Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong was outlawed in China on July 22, 1999, its publications banned and thousands of its followers arrested and even executed. The harsh government action followed an unexpected incident three months earlier when 10,000 Falun Gong adherents staged a day-long silent protest outside the Zhonggnanhai compound where the nation’s leaders live in Beijing. Even though it seems bizarre that powerful government officials like Hu Jintao and the Politburo of the CCP should feel threatened by such an innocuous group, from the Chinese Communist point of view, the Falun Gong are suspiciously similar to the Tai Ping of the 19th century and other sects that have served as rallying points for mass discontent.
The Great Firewall of China—TheChinese government spent $800 million to create the Jin Dun (Golden Shield) Project, a broadband network that incorporates a system for automatically policing Internet gateways, blocking foreign Web sites, filtering content and key words, invading computers, sending out viruses and connecting with the monitoring systems of the Public Security Bureau. The system is run by a 50,000-person Internet control department. China is the only country in the world whose laws include the concept of a “Web political criminal.” Publishing articles on the Internet can be deemed “committing an offense.” According to Reporters Without Borders, China is the “the biggest jailer in the world for cyberdissidents.” Of course, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, China is also “the world’s leading jailer of journalists,” and in China there are no privately-owned television or radio stations. In creating its Internet control system, China has benefited from lots of help from foreign friends, including Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Cisco, which has annual revenues in China of $500 million, sells the Chinese routers with censorship capability built in. It also sells surveillance technology to the Chinese Public Security Bureau and other law-enforcement agencies. It has also been accused of selling network equipment to the Chinese government for its so-called Policenet, which allegedly gives the police direct access to a citizen's internet history and e-mails. In July 2002, Yahoo signed a voluntary self-censorship pledge written by the Chinese government. Yahoo agreed to filter its search results so that a search for “Free Tibet” in Chinese yields no Web pages. In 2005, Yahoo admitted to providing the Chinese government with information leading to the arrest of journalist Shi Tao, who was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for e-mailing a copy of a government warning about the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre to foreign Web sites.
Family Affairs—In six of China’s 31 provinces, government permission is needed for a married couple to have a first child. Some provinces practice forced abortion and sterilization. In rural areas, where two-thirds of the population lives, a couple is usually given permission to have a second child if their first child is disabled or a girl. In most of the country it is illegal for a single woman to have a child. Zhou Jiangxiong, a 30-year-old farmer in Hunan Province. was detained in May 1998, by officials at a local birth-control office who wanted him to reveal the whereabouts of his wife, who was suspected of being pregnant without permission. They hung him upside down, beat him, burned him with cigarette butts and castrated him. He later died.
It’s Your Home Unless We Want It—According to the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, the Chinese government has evicted more than 40 million since 1985. It has also forced people in cities to leave their homes, including 2.5 million in Shanghai alone and, according to government figures, at least 400,000 in Beijing in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. In March 2005, Chinese authorities announced that, in advance of the 2010 World Expo, another 500,000 families would be moved from their homes in Shanghai to the outskirts of Beijing. They said this was being done “to protect the environment.” The Ministry of Public Security reported that in 2005, there were 87,000 cases of “disturbances of public order.” Most of these protests and demonstrations were in response to land seizures and evictions, although some were inspired by cases of local corruption and environmental pollution. On December 6, 2005, security forces shot to death at least twenty demonstrators in Dongzhou village in Guangdong Province who were protesting inadequate compensation for land expropriated for construction of a power plant. This was the first known killing of protestors since Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.
Coal Mining Deaths—Workers in China are not allowed to form autonomous unions. According to official figures, 16 million enterprises are considered “toxic.” In 2005, 5986 workers died in coal mining accidents. This may seem shocking in comparison to the much lower number of mining deaths in other countries, but, in fact, this was the first time in four years that the figure dropped below 6000 deaths.
Friendly Dictators—Unlike the Soviet Union in the days of the Cold War, China pursues its foreign policy without any regard whatsoever for ideology. All that matters is business and the Chinese will do business with any country, Communist or capitalist, democratic or authoritarian. In its quest for resources and markets, the Chinese government has embraced dictators who are the worst of the worst. Kim Jong-il has no better ally than Hu Jintao’s China. Less than two weeks after Uzbek troops massacred hundreds of civilians in in May 2005, Uzbekistan’s dictator, Islam Karimov, was welcomed in Beijing with a red carpet and a 21-gun salute. China is now the leading trading partner of Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan. In October 2004, China signed a $70 billion oil deal with dictators of Iran. China is so friendly with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe that the Chinese government paid for the roof of Mugabe’s presidential palace and for t-shirts used in his election campaign. They also magnamimously trained Zimbabwean censors in the best methods to control the Internet.
According to the State Department human rights report for 2007, “The People's Republic of China (PRC) is an authoritarian state in which, as specified in its constitution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the paramount source of power. Party members hold almost all top government, police, and military positions. Ultimate authority rests with the 25-member political bureau (Politburo) of the CCP and its nine-member standing committee. Hu Jintao holds the three most powerful positions as CCP general secretary, president, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. The party's authority rested primarily on the government's ability to maintain social stability; appeals to nationalism and patriotism; party control of personnel, media, and the security apparatus; and continued improvement in the living standards of most of the country's 1.3 billion citizens. Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces.
“The government's human rights record remained poor, and controls were tightened in some areas, such as religious freedom in Tibetan areas and in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR); freedom of speech and the media, including the Internet; and the treatment of petitioners in Beijing. As in previous years, citizens did not have the right to change their government. The government tightened restrictions on freedom of speech and the press, particularly in anticipation of and during sensitive events, including increased efforts to control and censor the Internet. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), both local and international, continued to face intense scrutiny and restrictions. The government continued its severe cultural and religious repression of minorities, with some tightening of control in the XUAR, and an increased level of religious repression in Tibetan areas. The government stepped up efforts to rid Beijing of petitioners seeking redress for various grievances. Other serious human rights abuses included extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners, and the use of forced labor, including prison labor. The government continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison journalists, writers, activists, and defense lawyers and their families, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under law. The party and state exercised strict political control of courts and judges, conducted closed trials and carried out administrative detention. Executions often took place on the day of conviction or immediately after the denial of an appeal. A lack of due process and restrictions on lawyers further limited progress toward rule of law. Individuals and groups, especially those deemed politically sensitive by the government, continued to face tight restrictions on their freedom to assemble, their freedom to practice religion, and their freedom to travel. The government continued its coercive birth limitation policy, in some cases resulting in forced abortion and sterilization.
“The government failed to protect refugees adequately, and the forced repatriation of North Koreans continued to be a grave problem. Serious social conditions that affected human rights included endemic corruption, trafficking in persons, and discrimination against women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. In the XUAR, trials of Uighurs charged with separatism continued.
“The government pursued some important criminal and judicial reforms. In January the country's highest court, the Supreme People's Court (SPC), reassumed the death penalty review power from provincial courts in cases handed down for immediate execution, a power that had devolved to provincial high courts in 1980. Also in January the government implemented temporary rules for foreign journalists, which eliminated the requirement for journalists to seek approval from authorities before conducting interviews. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) reported that although the regulations improved overall reporting conditions for foreign journalists, problems with enforcement of the regulations remained a challenge, and there were over 180 reports of interference, some of which included plainclothes thugs intimidating or physically assaulting foreign journalists.”
Past Ambassadors
Edward Everett
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Mar 3, 1843
Note: Commissioned to China. Declined appointment.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Mar 3, 1843
Note: Commissioned to China. Declined appointment.
Caleb Cushing
Appointment: May 8, 1843
Presentation of Credentials: [about Jun 12, 1844]
Termination of Mission: Left Macao Aug 27, 1844
Note: Commissioned to China. Was issued two separate commissions during a recess of the Senate, one as Commissioner and one as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary; after confirmation on Jun 17, 1844, recommissioned as Commissioner only. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter of credence.
Appointment: May 8, 1843
Presentation of Credentials: [about Jun 12, 1844]
Termination of Mission: Left Macao Aug 27, 1844
Note: Commissioned to China. Was issued two separate commissions during a recess of the Senate, one as Commissioner and one as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary; after confirmation on Jun 17, 1844, recommissioned as Commissioner only. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter of credence.
Alexander H. Everett
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Mar 13, 1845
Presentation of Credentials: [Oct 26, 1846]
Termination of Mission: Died at post Jun 28, 1847
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter of credence. Nominated Feb 26, 1845, to be Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary; the Senate did not confirm this nomination.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Mar 13, 1845
Presentation of Credentials: [Oct 26, 1846]
Termination of Mission: Died at post Jun 28, 1847
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter of credence. Nominated Feb 26, 1845, to be Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary; the Senate did not confirm this nomination.
John W. Davis
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Jan 3, 1848
Presentation of Credentials: [Oct 6, 1848]
Termination of Mission: Left post May 25, 1850
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Jan 3, 1848
Presentation of Credentials: [Oct 6, 1848]
Termination of Mission: Left post May 25, 1850
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Note: Peter Parker served as Chargé d'Affaires ad interim, May 1850-Jul 1853.
Name: Joseph Blunt
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Oct 15, 1851
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate. Commissioned to China. Declined appointment.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Oct 15, 1851
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate. Commissioned to China. Declined appointment.
Humphrey Marshall
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Aug 4, 1852
Presentation of Credentials: [Jul 4, 1853]
Termination of Mission: Left post Jan 27, 1854
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Aug 4, 1852
Presentation of Credentials: [Jul 4, 1853]
Termination of Mission: Left post Jan 27, 1854
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Robert J. Walker
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Jun 21, 1853
Note: Commissioned during recess of the Senate. Commissioned to China. Declined appointment.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Jun 21, 1853
Note: Commissioned during recess of the Senate. Commissioned to China. Declined appointment.
Robert M. McLane
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Oct 18, 1853
Presentation of Credentials: [Nov 3, 1854]
Termination of Mission: Left post Dec 12, 1854
Note: Commissioned during recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Dec 6, 1853. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Oct 18, 1853
Presentation of Credentials: [Nov 3, 1854]
Termination of Mission: Left post Dec 12, 1854
Note: Commissioned during recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Dec 6, 1853. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Peter Parker
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Aug 16, 1855
Presentation of Credentials: [Jul 15, 1856]
Termination of Mission: Left China Aug 25, 1857
Note: Commissioned during a recess of Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on May 26, 1856. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Title: Commissioner
Appointment: Aug 16, 1855
Presentation of Credentials: [Jul 15, 1856]
Termination of Mission: Left China Aug 25, 1857
Note: Commissioned during a recess of Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on May 26, 1856. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
William B. Reed
Appointment: Apr 18, 1857
Presentation of Credentials: [May 3, 1858]
Termination of Mission: Left China Nov 11, 1858
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Jan 14, 1858. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Apr 18, 1857
Presentation of Credentials: [May 3, 1858]
Termination of Mission: Left China Nov 11, 1858
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Jan 14, 1858. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
John E. Ward
Appointment: Dec 15, 1858
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 10, 1859]
Termination of Mission: Left Hong Kong Dec 15, 1860
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Dec 15, 1858
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 10, 1859]
Termination of Mission: Left Hong Kong Dec 15, 1860
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Anson Burlingame
Appointment: Jun 14, 1861
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 20, 1862]
Termination of Mission: Appointment terminated Nov 21, 1867
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Jul 15, 1861. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Jun 14, 1861
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 20, 1862]
Termination of Mission: Appointment terminated Nov 21, 1867
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Jul 15, 1861. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
J. Ross Browne
Appointment: Mar 11, 1868
Presentation of Credentials: [Sep 29-Oct 28, 1868]
Termination of Mission: Left post, Jul 5, 1869
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Mar 11, 1868
Presentation of Credentials: [Sep 29-Oct 28, 1868]
Termination of Mission: Left post, Jul 5, 1869
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
William A. Howard
Note: Commissioned to China. Took oath of office, but did not proceed to post.
Note: Commissioned to China. Took oath of office, but did not proceed to post.
Frederick F. Low
Appointment: Sep 28, 1869
Presentation of Credentials: [Apr 27, 1870]
Termination of Mission: Left post Jul 24, 1873
Note: Commissioned during recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation Dec 21, 1869. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Sep 28, 1869
Presentation of Credentials: [Apr 27, 1870]
Termination of Mission: Left post Jul 24, 1873
Note: Commissioned during recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation Dec 21, 1869. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Benjamin P. Avery
Appointment: Apr 10, 1874
Presentation of Credentials: [Nov 29, 1874]
Termination of Mission: Died at post Nov 8, 1875
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Apr 10, 1874
Presentation of Credentials: [Nov 29, 1874]
Termination of Mission: Died at post Nov 8, 1875
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
George F. Seward
Appointment: Jan 7, 1876
Presentation of Credentials: [Apr 24, 1876]
Termination of Mission: Superseded, Aug 16, 1880
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Jan 7, 1876
Presentation of Credentials: [Apr 24, 1876]
Termination of Mission: Superseded, Aug 16, 1880
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
James B. Angell
Appointment: Apr 9, 1880
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 16, 1880]
Termination of Mission: Left post, Oct 4, 1881
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Apr 9, 1880
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 16, 1880]
Termination of Mission: Left post, Oct 4, 1881
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
John Russell Young
Appointment: Mar 15, 1882
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 17, 1882]
Termination of Mission: Relinquished charge, Apr 7, 1885
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: Mar 15, 1882
Presentation of Credentials: [Aug 17, 1882]
Termination of Mission: Relinquished charge, Apr 7, 1885
Note: Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Charles Denby
Appointment: May 29, 1885
Presentation of Credentials: [Oct 1, 1885]
Termination of Mission: Presented recall Jul 8, 1898
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Jan 13, 1886. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Appointment: May 29, 1885
Presentation of Credentials: [Oct 1, 1885]
Termination of Mission: Presented recall Jul 8, 1898
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Jan 13, 1886. Commissioned to China. Presentation of credentials to the Chief of State upon arrival did not become the normal procedure for U.S. diplomatic representatives in China until 1898. The date in brackets represents establishment of an official relationship with appropriate Chinese authorities, not necessarily including communication to them of a letter or credence.
Henry W. Blair
Appointment: Feb 27, 1891
Note: Commissioned to China. Took oath of office under recess appointment, but did not proceed to post; the Government of China having objected to his appointment.
Appointment: Feb 27, 1891
Note: Commissioned to China. Took oath of office under recess appointment, but did not proceed to post; the Government of China having objected to his appointment.
Charles Page Bryan
Appointment: Nov 10, 1897
Note: Took oath of office under recess appointment, but did not proceed to post; nomination of Jan 5, 1898 was withdrawn before the Senate acted upon it.
Appointment: Nov 10, 1897
Note: Took oath of office under recess appointment, but did not proceed to post; nomination of Jan 5, 1898 was withdrawn before the Senate acted upon it.
Edwin H. Conger
Appointment: Jan 19, 1898
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 8, 1898
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 4, 1905
Appointment: Jan 19, 1898
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 8, 1898
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 4, 1905
William Woodville Rockhill
Appointment: Mar 8, 1905
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 17, 1905
Termination of Mission: Relinquished charge Jun 1, 1909
Appointment: Mar 8, 1905
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 17, 1905
Termination of Mission: Relinquished charge Jun 1, 1909
Charles R. Crane
Appointment: Jul 23, 1909
Note: Took oath of office, but did not proceed to post.
Appointment: Jul 23, 1909
Note: Took oath of office, but did not proceed to post.
William James Calhoun
Appointment: Dec 21, 1909
Presentation of Credentials: Apr 21, 1910
Termination of Mission: Normal relations interrupted Feb 12, 1912; new Government of China still unrecognized by the United States when Calhoun left post, Feb 16, 1913
Appointment: Dec 21, 1909
Presentation of Credentials: Apr 21, 1910
Termination of Mission: Normal relations interrupted Feb 12, 1912; new Government of China still unrecognized by the United States when Calhoun left post, Feb 16, 1913
Paul S. Reinsch
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Aug 15, 1913
Presentation of Credentials: Nov 15, 1913
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 15, 1919
Charles R. Crane
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Mar 22, 1920
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 12, 1920
Termination of Mission: Left China Jul 2, 1921
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Mar 22, 1920
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 12, 1920
Termination of Mission: Left China Jul 2, 1921
Jacob Gould Schurman
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Jun 2, 1921
Presentation of Credentials: Sep 12, 1921
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 15, 1925
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Jun 2, 1921
Presentation of Credentials: Sep 12, 1921
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 15, 1925
John Van A. MacMurray
Appointment: Apr 9, 1925
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 15, 1925
Termination of Mission: Left post Nov 22, 1929
Note: Commissioned during a recess of the Senate; recommissioned after confirmation on Dec 17, 1925.
Nelson T. Johnson
Appointment: Dec 16, 1929
Presentation of Credentials: Feb 1, 1930
Termination of Mission: Promoted to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Appointment: Dec 16, 1929
Presentation of Credentials: Feb 1, 1930
Termination of Mission: Promoted to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Nelson T. Johnson
Appointment: Jun 18, 1935
Presentation of Credentials: Sep 17, 1935
Termination of Mission: Left post May 14, 1941
Appointment: Jun 18, 1935
Presentation of Credentials: Sep 17, 1935
Termination of Mission: Left post May 14, 1941
Clarence E. Gauss
Appointment: Feb 11, 1941
Presentation of Credentials: May 26, 1941
Termination of Mission: Left post Nov 14, 1944
Appointment: Feb 11, 1941
Presentation of Credentials: May 26, 1941
Termination of Mission: Left post Nov 14, 1944
Patrick J. Hurley
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Nov 30, 1944
Presentation of Credentials: Jan 8, 1945
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 22, 1945
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Nov 30, 1944
Presentation of Credentials: Jan 8, 1945
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 22, 1945
.
J. Leighton Stuart
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Jul 12, 1946
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 19, 1946
Termination of Mission: Left post Aug 2, 1949
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Jul 12, 1946
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 19, 1946
Termination of Mission: Left post Aug 2, 1949
Note: Karl L. Rankin served as Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, Aug. 1950-Apr. 1953.
Karl L. Rankin
Appointment: Feb 27, 1953
Presentation of Credentials: Apr 2, 1953
Termination of Mission: Appointment terminated, Dec 30, 1957
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Appointment: Feb 27, 1953
Presentation of Credentials: Apr 2, 1953
Termination of Mission: Appointment terminated, Dec 30, 1957
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Everett F. Drumright
Appointment: Feb 17, 1958
Presentation of Credentials: Mar 8, 1958
Termination of Mission: Left post Mar 8, 1962
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Appointment: Feb 17, 1958
Presentation of Credentials: Mar 8, 1958
Termination of Mission: Left post Mar 8, 1962
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Alan G. Kirk
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Jun 7, 1962
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 5, 1962
Termination of Mission: Left post Jan 18, 1963
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Jun 7, 1962
Presentation of Credentials: Jul 5, 1962
Termination of Mission: Left post Jan 18, 1963
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Jerauld Wright
Non-career appointee
Appointment: May 3, 1963
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 29, 1963
Termination of Mission: Left post Jul 25, 1965
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Non-career appointee
Appointment: May 3, 1963
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 29, 1963
Termination of Mission: Left post Jul 25, 1965
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Walter P. McConaughy
Appointment: Jun 16, 1966
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 28, 1966
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 4, 1974
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Appointment: Jun 16, 1966
Presentation of Credentials: Jun 28, 1966
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 4, 1974
Note: Commissioned to China; resident at Taipei.
Leonard Unger
Appointment: Mar 14, 1974
Presentation of Credentials: May 25, 1974
Termination of Mission: Left post, Jan 19, 1979
Note: commissioned to the Republic of China; resident at Taipei. The United States established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and terminated them with the Republic of China, on Jan 1, 1979. Embassy Taipei closed Feb 28, 1979.
Appointment: Mar 14, 1974
Presentation of Credentials: May 25, 1974
Termination of Mission: Left post, Jan 19, 1979
Note: commissioned to the Republic of China; resident at Taipei. The United States established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and terminated them with the Republic of China, on Jan 1, 1979. Embassy Taipei closed Feb 28, 1979.
U.S. Liaison Office in Peking, (now Beijing)
Note: The following persons headed the U.S. Liaison Office in Peking (now Beijing) between May 1973 and March 1979.
David K.E. Bruce
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Mar 15, 1973
Entered on Duty: [May 14, 1973]
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 25, 1974
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Mar 15, 1973
Entered on Duty: [May 14, 1973]
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 25, 1974
George H.W. Bush
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Sep 26, 1974
Entered on Duty: [Oct 21, 1974]
Termination of Mission: Left post Dec 7, 1975
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Sep 26, 1974
Entered on Duty: [Oct 21, 1974]
Termination of Mission: Left post Dec 7, 1975
Thomas S. Gates, Jr.
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Apr 14, 1976
Entered on Duty: [May 6, 1976]
Termination of Mission: Left post May 8, 1977.
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Apr 14, 1976
Entered on Duty: [May 6, 1976]
Termination of Mission: Left post May 8, 1977.
Leonard F. Woodcock
Non-career appointee
Appointment: July 11, 1977
Entered on Duty: July 26, 1977
Termination of Mission: Promoted to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary; U.S. Liaison Office became Embassy Beijing Mar. 1, 1979.
Non-career appointee
Appointment: July 11, 1977
Entered on Duty: July 26, 1977
Termination of Mission: Promoted to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary; U.S. Liaison Office became Embassy Beijing Mar. 1, 1979.
People’s Republic of China
Leonard F. Woodcock
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Feb. 27, 1979
Presentation of Credentials: Mar. 7, 1979
Termination of Mission: Left post Feb 13, 1981.
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Feb. 27, 1979
Presentation of Credentials: Mar. 7, 1979
Termination of Mission: Left post Feb 13, 1981.
Arthur W. Hummel, Jr.
Appointment: Jul 30, 1981
Presentation of Credentials: Sep 24, 1981
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 24, 1985
Appointment: Jul 30, 1981
Presentation of Credentials: Sep 24, 1981
Termination of Mission: Left post Sep 24, 1985
Winston Lord
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Nov 6, 1985
Presentation of Credentials: Nov 19, 1985
Termination of Mission: Left post Apr 23, 1989
James Roderick Lilley
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Apr 20, 1989
Presentation of Credentials: May 8, 1989
Termination of Mission: Left post May 10, 1991
Name: J. Stapleton Roy
Appointment: Jul 2, 1991
Presentation of Credentials: Aug 20, 1991
Termination of Mission: Left post Jun 17, 1995
Jim Sasser
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Dec 19, 1995
Presentation of Credentials: Feb 14, 1996
Termination of Mission: Left post Jul 1, 1999
Joseph W. Prueher
Non-career appointee
Appointment: Nov 16, 1999
Presentation of Credentials: Dec 15, 1999
Termination of Mission: Left post May 1, 2001.
China's Ambassador to the U.S.
Cui, Tiankai
Cui Tiankai presented his credentials as ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the United States to President Barack Obama on April 15, 2013.
Cui was born in October 1952 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, near Shanghai. In the early 1970s, he spent five years as a farmhand during the Cultural Revolution, the period in which many urban Chinese were forced back to the land in a kind of spiritual cleansing effort by the Chinese Communist Party. Cui later became one of the first Chinese officials to speak of his experience during the Cultural Revolution.
He attended East China Normal University, studying foreign languages. After his 1979 graduation, Cui spent two more years at a special school for interpreters. This led in 1981 to his being assigned to the United Nations as an interpreter.
In 1984, Cui returned to China to serve as the third secretary in the International Organizations and Conferences department of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Cui returned to the United States in 1986 for postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins University. He earned his Master’s in Public Administration at Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in 1987. He then returned to the International Organizations and Conference department and was named head of that department in 1988, a post he held for eight years.
Cui’s profile was raised in 1996 when he was named a deputy director and spokesman for China’s Foreign Affairs ministry. As such, he was a frequent source in Western media reports on China. In 1997, Cui was sent back to New York, this time as counselor in the Chinese mission to the UN.
In 1999, Cui returned to China to a position in the Policy Research Office, first as deputy director, then in 2001 as director. Cui moved to Foreign Affairs’ Asian Affairs Department in 2003 as director.
Cui was named assistant foreign affairs minister in 2006. One of his more prominent taks in that position was to participate in talks with Russia and Iran about Iran’s nuclear program.
In 2007, Cui took over as China’s ambassador to Japan. While in that job, he was outspoken on Japan’s role in World War II and some of its leaders’ attempts to downplay their country’s role as an aggressor in that conflict.
In 2010, Cui was named vice minister for Foreign Affairs. While there, at times he showed his ability to hew to the party line but in other instances he showed his skill in defusing tricky situations. When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was named winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, Cui was outspoken in trying to intimidate other nations into boycotting the Nobel ceremony, an attempt that was mostly unsuccessful. However in 2012, when civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and eventually requested safe passage to the United States, Cui helped resolve the situation by allowing Chen’s departure from China.
Since taking his post in Washington, Cui has seemingly become immersed in American culture. He took his wife, Ni Peijun, to the Super Bowl last February and was photographed on the sidelines. In March 2014, he told a panel in Beijing “I have seen both seasons of ‘House of Cards,’ which I think embodies some of the characteristics and corruption that is present in American politics.”
Cui has a reputation as a troubleshooter. “Cui is very good to have at the center of U.S.-China relations,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “That's not because he's pro-U.S. but because he’s a subtle and wide-ranging thinker. He represents China's interests and then understands what might be accomplished.”
Cui and his wife have a daughter.
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
Behind Scenes, China’s Envoy Aims to Allay Tensions With U.S. (by Jane Perlez, New York Times)
- Table of Contents
- News
- Overview
- Basic Information
- History
- Newspapers
- History of U.S. Relations with China
- Current U.S. Relations with China
- Where Does the Money Flow
- Controversies
- Human Rights
- Debate
- Past Ambassadors
- Ambassador to the U.S.
- Embassy Web Site in the U.S.
- Comments
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U.S. Ambassador to China
Branstad, Terry
After Donald Trump repeatedly bashed China during his presidential campaign, it made sense that he choose someone as ambassador who might be able to smooth things over. Trump may have found his man in Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (R), whom Trump nominated for the post on December 7, 2016, and whom the U.S. Senate confirmed in an 82-13 vote on May 22, 2017.
Branstad was born in Leland, Iowa, on November 17, 1946, to Edward and Rita Branstad, who were farmers. Branstad grew up on the farm, graduated from Forest City High School in 1965 and went off to the University of Iowa, where he earned a B.A. in political science and sociology in 1969.
Branstad then took a detour into the Army, where he served as a military policeman at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Years later, Branstad would gain credibility with conservatives for a story that he arrested actress Jane Fonda as she protested at the base. The truth of the story, according to Branstad, was that he had recommended that she not be allowed on base to protest. Fonda came on the base anyway and was arrested by others in Branstad’s unit.
Branstad got out of the Army in 1971 and went to Drake Law School, earning his J.D. in 1974. Even before then, however, Branstad entered politics, taking a seat in the Iowa Assembly in 1973. He served three terms in the Assembly before becoming lieutenant governor in 1979. Four years later, at age 37, he became the youngest governor in Iowa’s history.
It was during Branstad’s first stint as governor, in 1985, that he met Xi Jinping, who is now president of China. Xi traveled to Iowa with a delegation from his home province and stayed in the small town of Muscatine. Xi returned to the town on a visit in 2012 when he was China’s vice-president. Branstad served as governor until 1999.
After he left office, Branstad practiced law with the firm of Kaufman, Patee, Branstad & Miller; was a financial adviser for Robert W. Baird and Company; and had his own business, Branstad and Associates. In 2003, Branstad was named president of the Des Moines University School of Medicine. He remained there until deciding to run for re-election as Iowa governor. He easily won, and resumed his spot in the statehouse in 2011. Branstad was successful in selling Iowa agricultural products, particularly pork and soybeans, to China.
Branstad was an early supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign. He was mentioned shortly after the election as a likely candidate for the Beijing post, even drawing supportive comments from the Chinese. “First of all, I would like to say that Mr. Branstad is an old friend of the Chinese people and we welcome him to play a greater role in promoting Sino-U.S. relations,” Chinese government spokesman Lu Kang said, according to The Washington Post.
Branstad will leave Des Moines as the longest-serving governor in U.S. history at 22 years, not including the gap in service. He’ll also leave office having never lost an election.
Branstad and his wife, Christine, have three adult children: Eric, who ran Trump’s Iowa campaign; Allison; and Marcus.
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
Terry Branstad, Iowa Governor, Is Trump’s Pick as China Ambassador (by Binyamin Appelbaum, New York Times)
10 Things to Know About Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, Trump’s Pick for Ambassador to China (by Amber Phillips, Washington Post)
An “Old Friend” of Xi Jinping Will Be America’s Next Ambassador to China (The Economist)
morePrevious U.S. Ambassador to China
Baucus, Max
Max Baucus was sworn in as ambassador to the People’s Republic of China on February 21, 2014, after being nominated by President Barack Obama on January 7, 2014. Baucus replaced former Washington Governor Gary Locke in the position.
Baucus was born Max Sieben Enke on December 11, 1941, in Helena, Montana. His mother Jean came from a well-to-do ranching family in Helena and was attending Stanford, while his biological father, Stephen Enke, taught economics at that university. Enke later was controversial for some of his theories on population control (such as paying Indian men to be sterilized). Max lived for two years in California before his parents divorced and his mother brought him and a younger sister back to Helena. Baucus had little to do with Enke from that point.
In 1946, Max’s mother married John J. Baucus, who later adopted Max and his sister. Baucus attended Helena High School, playing football there, and graduating in 1959. He went to Carlton College for one year, and then transferred to Stanford, from where he graduated with a degree in economics in 1964. While a student, Baucus took time to hitchhike his way around the world. He remained in Palo Alto for law school, earning his J.D. in 1967.
Baucus’ first job out of law school was as a staff attorney for the federal Civil Aeronautics Board, which at that time controlled fares and routes of commercial airlines. He later took a similar position with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In 1971, Baucus returned to Montana. He took a position with the 1972 state constitutional convention, which was rewriting that state’s governing document. Baucus eventually was made executive director of the convention. What was eventually adopted was called by some one of the most progressive constitutions in the nation.
By 1973, Baucus was working for a law firm in Missoula and was a member of the state legislature. He made the leap to Congress the next year, representing the western half of the state (Montana then had two representatives in the House). As part of his first campaign, he walked across the large district to gain name recognition. Baucus served two terms in the House before running for the Senate in 1978. He won easily, as he did most of his subsequent races through the final one in 2008.
As a senator, Baucus was a moderate, often working with Republicans on their programs to the consternation of his fellow Democrats. One example of this was on tax policy. Baucus voted for the George W. Bush tax cuts, opposed repeal of the cuts and has championed elimination of the estate tax. Another was on gun safety issues; he voted against the Manchin-Toomey background checks proposal.
As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Baucus was a key player in President Obama’s fight to enact health-care legislation. One of Baucus’ first moves was to declare that single-payer healthcare, that is, a system like Medicare where the federal government manages payments to doctors, was not a possibility. Some tied this stance to the large contributions Baucus received over the years from the healthcare industry.
Baucus originally supported the war in Iraq. However, a nephew, Marine Cpl. Phillip E. Baucus, was killed in Iraq in 2006. The following January, Baucus spoke in opposition to the war, saying “If I knew then what I know now I never would have voted for the war.”
On April 23, 2013, Baucus announced that he would not run for re-election when his sixth term expired in 2014. In December 2013, Obama announced his intention to nominate Baucus for the post in Beijing. Baucus’ nomination was approved 96-0 by the Senate, with the nominee himself voting “present.”
Baucus has a son, Zeno, with his first wife Ann Geracimos, a journalist. Zeno is now an assistant U.S. Attorney in Montana. Baucus married his second wife, Wanda, in 1984. They were divorced in 2009. In 2011, Baucus married Melodee Hanes, who had worked in his state office. Prior to their marriage, Baucus nominated Hanes to be U.S. Attorney in Montana, but Hanes withdrew from consideration for the post.
-Steve Straehley
To Learn More:
Ranch Roots To D.C. Career: Democrat Baucus Running For 6th Term In U.S. Senate (by Jennifer McKee, Missoulian)
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