There has been no shortage of think pieces comparing the current trajectory of U.S.-China relations to the Cold War conflict between Washington and Moscow. The historical analogy has become so omnipresent that some have begun to denounce it either as tired or else as dangerous. Yet, the validity of that analogy aside, as a new congressional committee vows to investigate China and root out a pervasive Communist Party conspiracy, another parallel comes to mind: the hearings on Capitol Hill that followed then-leader Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war. During those hearings, academics and foreign-policy experts who had come into contact with the Chinese Communist Party in the decades before 1949 became scapegoats for a historical event far outside their control. Were this scapegoating to happen to China specialists this time around, the consequences for U.S. foreign policy would be serious.
Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the U.S. Senate held a series of hearings to determine “who lost China.” These hearings attempted to sort out how the United States had failed to prevent a communist takeover in China and who exactly was responsible for the failure. Marking the start of high McCarthyism in American politics, the congressional investigation quickly devolved into a witch hunt for corrupt officials in the United States who had supposedly enabled Mao’s victory by subverting American support for Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party, the losing side of the civil war.
The stories of these persecuted individuals, particularly scholar Owen Lattimore and U.S. State Department official John Service, are well documented and reasonably well known within the annals of Cold War history. Yet the severity of the U.S. government’s campaign against some of its own leading experts on China has gained less public traction.
In 1953, the U.S. Embassy in Taiwan contacted its Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask whether the Nationalist Chinese government’s secret police had collected any information on Lattimore, Service, and a host of other researchers who had spent time in China before the civil war, most notably Harvard University professor John King Fairbank. (This is according to documents in the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives at Academia Sinica.)
The U.S. State Department was interested in any information on these individuals’ interactions with members of the Chinese Communist Party, particularly if it would demonstrate that they had perjured themselves before Congress. In the name of investigating China, the Senate enlisted the support of a foreign government’s secret police to discredit some of the leading American experts on China and prove that they were untrustworthy because they had firsthand knowledge of the individuals who now ran the Chinese government.
The newly established Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party has only held one hearing, and it may still correct course, but its early activities suggest that there is reason to fear that it will fall into these traps from the past, prioritizing political theater over substantive inquiry and inviting testimony from individuals who confirm the members’ hawkish assumptions about China rather than offering nuanced assessments.
Many pundits and researchers who support a strategy of engagement with China have expressed concern that policy initiatives like the China select committee, given its explicitly hawkish agenda, may accelerate the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, antagonize Beijing, and push Washington toward increasingly confrontational stances. Others have warned that the committee’s activities may contribute to the wave of anti-Asian hate that has endangered Asian American communities across the country. And inaugural comments from committee leaders suggest that, as in the 1950s, Congress may focus more on U.S. citizens with professional or personal ties to China than on the Communist Party itself.
On Feb. 28, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher opened the first hearing of the committee, which he was appointed chair of, with a warning: “The CCP has found friends on Wall Street, in Fortune 500 C-suites, and on K Street who are ready and willing to oppose efforts to push back. This strategy has worked well in the past and the CCP is confident it will work again. Our task is to ensure that it does not.”
Gallagher’s remarks, delivered in the same Capitol hearing room where a select committee of the previous Congress had investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riots not two months prior, kicked off a three-hour session on the manifold dangers to the United States posed by the Chinese government, complete with a video montage of human rights abuses and testimony from a series of Trump administration appointees (now fellows at the Hoover Institution).
His rhetoric toward Wall Street and K Street suggests that Gallagher wants to use the committee to investigate so-called friends of the Chinese Communist Party in and from the United States.
Already, the committee has launched an inquiry into the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, scrutinizing the chamber’s chair, Geoffrey Siebengartner, for appearing in a promotional video produced by the Hong Kong government. Siebengartner’s participation in the video may have been ill-advised, but the committee’s letter of inquiry, demanding that he make a statement on the erosion of democratic institutions and civil liberties in the city, will accomplish little. It will only serve to warn other U.S. citizens that they run the risk of censure from their own government when they engage with Chinese counterparts—even when such engagement is their explicit purview.
Indeed, the committee’s letter seems designed to elicit a response from Siebengartner that will estrange him from Hong Kong authorities. Either he can denounce the Hong Kong national security law and incur the wrath of local officials or he can refuse to comply with the China select committee’s inquiry and confirm their suspicions that he is in the pocket of a foreign, hostile government. Siebengartner is being punished for doing his job, albeit clumsily, and the result may well be that his job becomes untenable. One wonders if such an outcome—all sparked by a video that highlights Hong Kong’s legal system alongside its fine dining institutions as reasons for foreign businesses to base operations in the city—is really an American victory in the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.”
This historical comparison with the 1950s is not meant as yet another warning against the increasingly hawkish tone of U.S. policy toward China. Whatever one’s personal opinions may be on the shift, the era of engagement is clearly over. Instead, the China select committee must understand that a wide range of nuanced, well-informed views on the Chinese Communist Party will inform better policy, whether it be hawkish or engagement-oriented. The committee may well make progress in investigating the security risks of U.S.-China trade and bilateral investment. Chinese state actors have infiltrated U.S. institutions in the past, and preventing them from doing so in the future will indeed boost American security. But only seeking a narrow range of perspectives and shunning those who have affiliations with China will make those objectives more difficult.
The problem with the “who lost China” debate of the 1950s was not that the Senate got the answer wrong, though its misguided attempts at attribution did cause great suffering, but rather that it was a bad question to begin with. China was never the United States’ to lose. It seems possible that today’s congressional China select committee is also asking a misguided question—namely: “Who helped China rise?” But if the committee’s hearings are spent looking for domestic culprits, they will necessarily ignore the fact that those culprits took their cues from several decades of Washington policy that supported China’s growth.
The primary concern here is not that academics will be tried for perjury, as Lattimore was in 1952, but rather that the political climate in Washington will alienate the people whose expertise and connections might help Congress understand the Chinese government and its posture toward the United States. As was the case in the 1950s, it seems likely that in the process of investigating China, Congress could come to know less about the country.