Call for Manuscripts

Here's a book that probably needs to be written (again?): a history of "the China lobby," the cabal of hustlers and intriguers who provided so much of our political wallpaper in the period of, say, 1945 to 1960 (perhaps even up to 1972, when Nixon finally went to China)--the crowd who gave us "Who lost China;" the gang who did so much to preserve (if not exactly to create) Chiang-Kai Shek, the throng who cost us and the Chinese people nearly a quarter century of modern life by isolating Mao behind a wall of indifference and paranoia where he was able to inflict his private visions on his own beleaguered people.

The thought occurred to me while making my way through David M. Oshinsky's fine biography of Joe McCarthy. You can't tell the McCarthy story without lots of cross refs to the China and Oshinsky does an admirable job of keeping China in the story. There is other good stuff on the topic: you can't go far in this literature without discovering Michael Ybarra's Washington Gone Crazy, on the career of Pat McCarran; Robert P. Newman weighs in with Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China. You get wonderful pre-1945 background from Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China.

Amazon does turn up one title, The China Lobby in American Politics, by one Ross B. Koen (unknown to me), published in 1974 and available in hardback for $194.06 (there are new and used from $4). I haven't seen it but it doesn't seem to have established itself in the literture so I would have to regard it as unpromising.

Best I can tell, the phrase enters the language via Max Ascoli's Reporter magazine, the great bugaboo of the 1950 Republican noise machine; see See Max Ascoli, Philip Horton and Charles Wertenbaker, "The China Lobby," Reporter 6 (April 15, 1952) 2-24; (April 29, 1952): 5-24. Robert Griffiths (from whom I just cribbed the Reporter reference) comments:

In a strict sense the "China lobby" was a myth. Like the "McCarthy lobby," it was not a cohesive, well-orgnized group, but a coalition including representatives of the Nationalist government seeking arms and aid, true believers in the cause of Chiang Kai-shek as against the Conmmunists, and a bevy of Republican politicians.

(The idea of Republican politicians arriving by the "bevy," is something to savor itself.) Griffiths' point is just, but it doesn't gainsay the political reality and power of the non-lobby on the politics of its time.

Historians, to your word processors! Operators are standing by!

[The Griffiths quote is from The Politics of Fear, fn. 32 p. 64, available at Google Books. Griffiths played for McCarthy something of the role that Lou Cannon plays for Ronald Reagan--a hometown journalist who knew his subject long and well and writes with an admirable pairing of sympathy and detachment].