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American “China Hands” in the 1950S

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Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s

Abstract

Americans have long played a part in the making of modern Hong Kong, beginning in 1842. Early that year, an American Protestant missionary, Jehu Lewis Shuck, came from Macau and founded the island’s first Christian church on Queen’s Road (named the Queen’s Road Chapel).1 In 1843, United States officials arrived to open the first foreign consulate in the colony. American merchants were likewise attracted to the free port, establishing one of the largest trading firms there, Russell & Company. 2 Nevertheless, until the second half of the twentieth century the American community in Hong Kong remained small, and their interests and influence were limited. Indeed, it was mainland China, rather than Hong Kong itself, that caught the imagination of most American sojourners. Hong Kong was seen primarily as a springboard to China, a country in which there were more Chinese to convert, more economic opportunities to exploit, and more political interests to protect.3

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Notes

  1. Wang Gungwu, ed., Xianggangshi xinbian (Hong Kong History: New Perspectives), vol. II (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., 1997), p. 743.

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  2. Liu Shuyong, ed., Jianming Xianggangshi (A Concise History of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., 1998), pp. 34 and 37.

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  3. For an interesting account of American activities in China and Hong Kong, see Andrew Coe, Eagles & Dragons: A History of Americans in China & the Origins of the American Club Hong Kong (Hong Kong: American Club, 1997).

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  4. An American missionary institution which moved its operations from the mainland to Hong Kong after 1949 was Yale-in-China. See Nancy E. Chapman, The Yale-China Association: A Centennial History (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), pp. 77–93.

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  5. The term American “China Hands” in Hong Kong is used here as a shorthand for all consuls general, consuls, vice-consuls, political and economic officers, and information officers within the U.S. consulate general in Hong Kong, notwithstanding their differences of background and outlook. They all shared striking similarities in their attitude toward China and U.S. operations in Hong Kong, as discussed later. The term, however, does not include covert specialists of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Hong Kong station, which was attached to, but nonetheless acted independently of the American consulate. Although some American missionaries and scholars in Hong Kong could be classified as “China Hands” in this sense, they are not the focus of this chapter.

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  6. See e.g., Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994); Richard Deacon, The Chinese Secret Service, rev. and updated edn. (London: Grafton Books, 1989).

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  8. Hong Kong to Colonial Office, 5 June 1950, FO 371/83557, FC1908/8/G; Hall to Trench, 27 September 1951, FO 371/92385, FC1905/9, The National Archives, formerly known as Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), Kew, U.K.; Dagongbao, January 12, 1958.

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  10. For a study of the American “Old China Hands,” see Paul Gordon Lauren, ed., The China Hands’ Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987).

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  11. This chapter draws heavily on the oral history interviews conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies, Foreign Affairs Oral History Program (hereafter FAOHP), which are housed in the Lauinger Library of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Extracts of the most important interviews can be found in Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, comp., China Confidential: American Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945–1996 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

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  12. For example, Consul General Karl Rankin found Hong Kong a “most pleasant and interesting post.” Jerome K. Holloway, an economic officer in the consulate, recollected that Hong Kong was “my best post . . . [E]veryone seemed to me to have a real interest in China and what was going on in China. And it was a very professional group.” Rankin to Butrick, 2 November 1949, Karl L. Rankin Papers 1916–1973, Correspondence (April 1948–May 1950), Box 4, Folder 5, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereafter PUL), Princeton, New Jersey; Jerome K. Holloway Oral History Interview, June 16, 1989, FAOHP, p. 32.

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  15. For example, Lindsey Grant later served as Assistant to Marshall Green (Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State) in a China policy review in mid-1963. Both were key participants in the drafting of a speech by Roger Hilsman (Assistant Secretary of State for Asia) delivered in December 1963 (the famous Hilsman’s China speech), which called for a relaxation of U.S. policy toward China, one of the first of many long steps that culminated in the U.S. opening to China in 1972. Indeed, Green himself had also been U.S. consul general in Hong Kong in the early 1960s. See James C. Thomson, Jr., “On the Making of U.S. China Policy, 1961–9: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics,” China Quarterly, no. 50 (April/June 1972), pp. 220–43.

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  16. Declassified material on the British Secret Service in Hong Kong is very thin. For some brief accounts, see Luo, Ya (Lo Ah), Zhengzhibu huiyilu (Memories of the Special Branch) (Hong Kong: Xianggang zhongwen daxue yatai yanjiusuo haiwai huaren yanjiushe, 1996), pp. 51–52; Stephen Dorril, M16: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 711.

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  18. A long-time CIA covert specialist revealed that his responsibilities included supporting “a refugee interrogation unit in Hong Kong operated jointly with the British” in the 1950s. Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983), p. 21. Also see Richard J. Aldrich, “ ‘The Value of Residual Empire’: Anglo-American Intelligence Co-operation in Asia after 1945,” in Richard J. Aldrich and Michael F. Hopkins, eds., Intelligence, Defence and Diplomacy: British Policy in the Post-War World (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 226–58.

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  19. The Hong Kong branch of the Regional Information Office was created in 1949 to produce propaganda materials, both antiCommunist and positive, for Asian consumption. It furthered the aims both of its headquarters in Singapore and of the Information Research Department in London, each of which was responsible for secret psychological operations at home and abroad. W. Scott Lucas and C. J. Morris, “A Very British Crusade: The Information Research Department and the Beginning of the Cold War” in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 21.

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  20. Zwolanek to Pope, January 14, 1954, RG 59, DAD 1947–1955, Box 8; Harris to Cook, August 26, 1952, RG 59, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs (hereafter CA) 1945–1955, Reel 29, NA.

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  23. Quoted in Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong, rev. edn. (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 447.

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  28. In his memoirs, Peer de Silva, the CIA chief in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, talked about how, during his first day in the station, the U.S. consul general and principal British officials cautioned him about “the rules of the game in intelligence work in Hong Kong.” Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Time Books, 1978), pp. 192–93.

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  29. Paul Kreisberg Oral History Interview, April 8, 1989, FAOHP, p. 22. In the course of the 1950s, there was no evidence that U.S. secret agents used Hong Kong for covert operations against China. Even the most dramatic attempt on Premier Zhou Enlai’s life—the Kashmir Princess incident of April 11, 1955—was attributed to the work of Guomindang secret agents, not the “hidden-hands” of the Americans. For a detailed account, see Steve Tsang, “Target Zhou Enlai: The ‘Kashmir Princess’ Incident of 1955,” China Quarterly, no. 139 (September 1994), pp. 766–82.

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  30. Some economic historians have argued that the impact of the Korean War embargo on Hong Kong’s economy should not be exaggerated: it merely reduced the level of trade to that which prevailed in the late 1940s before the Korean War boom. See Catherine R. Schenk, Hong Kong as an International Financial Centre: Emergence and Development 1945–65 (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 39–42.

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  31. State Department to Hong Kong, December 3, 1950, RG 84, Hong Kong Consulate General Security-Segregated General Records (hereafter HKCGR) 1943–1955, Box 14, NA.

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  33. Hong Kong to State Department, December 4, 1950, RG 84, HKCGR 1943–1955, Box 14, NA.

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  34. Hong Kong to State Department, December 19, 1950, RG 84, HKCGR 1943–1955, Box 14; Hong Kong to State Department, December 21, 1950, ibid., NA.

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  36. For the report, see Hong Kong to State Department, March 29, 1951, RG 84, Hong Kong Consulate General, Records Re Hong Kong Trade with Communist Controlled Areas, 1950–1954, Box 1, NA. As a matter of fact, the report quoted by MacArthur at the hearings was an enclosure to a confidential dispatch from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong to the State Department (entitled Strategic Materials Bulletin). The enclosure contained information furnished at fortnightly intervals by the colonial authorities to the consulate for the purpose of scrutinizing the flow of goods to China. It listed a wide range of “strategic materials” which were believed to be of interest to the United States, but might not necessarily be of strategic importance in the strictest sense.

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  50. See Michael H. Hunt, “Conclusions: the Decolonization Puzzle in US Policy—Promise versus Performance,” in David Ryan and Victor Pungong, eds., The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 207–29.

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Authors
  1. Chi-kwan Mark
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

    Cindy Yik-yi Chu (Associate Professor of History) (Associate Professor of History)

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© 2005 Cindy Yik-yi Chu

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Mark, Ck. (2005). American “China Hands” in the 1950S. In: Chu, C.Yy. (eds) Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980557_9

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