Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University and author of Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Many readers will be familiar with the politics of reproduction in contemporary China, via media stories about the One Child Policy in effect from the late 1970s until 2015, and the Party-state’s efforts to increase birth numbers in the years since the policy’s rollback. In Reproductive Realities, Rodriguez moves beyond politics and widens the timeframe to consider the lived experiences of Chinese citizens—particularly women—as they managed reproduction and birth control from the early 20th century to the present.

Building on a rich archival base of legal cases, mass media, and government family planning records, Rodriguez adds depth to her study with details gathered through oral histories conducted with 80 men and women in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Luoyang. While state documents often depict a strictly enforced, top-down approach to regulating reproduction and birth control, Rodriguez found in her research that “Approaching sexuality and contraception from a grassroots perspective highlights the role that ordinary people played in shaping their own reproductive futures and the diversity of their experiences with reproduction.” More often than we might expect, and in many different geographic and temporal contexts, the story of Reproductive Realities is one of resistance.

The following interview with Sarah Mellors Rodriguez about Reproductive Realities was conducted via email.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham: Let’s start with the origin story of Reproductive Realities. How did you develop a dissertation project on reproduction and contraception in modern China, and then what sort of revisions or additions did you make to the project in its transition to book form?

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez: I became interested in reproduction and contraception in China nearly 15 years ago. In 2009, I started teaching English at a suburban middle school in Guangdong province. I had heard about the One Child Policy’s harsh enforcement and that transgressors were sometimes forced to undergo abortion and sterilization surgeries. To my surprise, I had a number of students in my classes with as many as eight siblings. My pupils often teased each other, joking that one student had cost his parents an additional 1,000 yuan in fees or that another had managed to evade the policy altogether.

In 2011, I was teaching English and history at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Jiangsu province when I was asked to teach a compulsory class for university faculty and administrators. As I grew closer to my adult students, they invited me to their homes and confided in me about their personal lives. Like their parents decades earlier, some students admitted that they had known very little about sex or birth control when they were married in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of my students, then in their 40s and 50s, had undergone multiple abortions in accordance with the One Child Policy, the violation of which could lead to heavy fines or even expulsion from the university. This led me to research human rights violations associated with the One Child Policy for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bi-partisan U.S. government agency that monitors rule of law issues in China.

It was this series of events, revealing the vast degree of variation in policy enforcement and the enduring gaps in sex education and birth control use, that piqued my interest in studying the history of contraception. I wondered how these contemporary stories fit into the longer narrative of birth control use in China.

As for revisions I made to my dissertation, although my books covers the period from the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to the present, my dissertation actually began in the 1920s and stopped with the conclusion of the One Child Policy in 2015. I quickly realized that I was ascribing insufficient importance to American birth control activist Margaret Sanger’s 1922 trip to China and that I needed to spend more time discussing how her visit sparked broader conversations about modernity, women’s rights, and public health. Situating Sanger’s visit within the context of the Republican period also required me to rethink the periodization of my book and thus I decided to start with the establishment of the Republic of China. Reworking the dissertation into the book also meant that I had to return to China, which I did in the summer of 2019, to conduct additional interviews that specifically addressed experiences under the One Child Policy. Those interviews allowed me to reflect more deeply on issues related to the One Child Policy that had been given less scholarly attention: namely, sex education and eugenics.

MEC: While there’s a large body of literature on women in 20th century China, most of that scholarship sticks to one side or the other of the 1949 divide between Republican China and the People’s Republic of China. Why did you decide to work in a broader timeframe, and what were some of the benefits and challenges to doing so?

SMR: I decided to frame my work in terms of the longue durée because I realized that crossing the 1949 divide yielded new insights that would not have been apparent if I had focused on a narrower timeframe or confined my analysis to just the Republican or Mao era. For instance, the emergence of overtly eugenic ideas and language in the 1980s is noteworthy in itself, but it is even more telling that Chinese eugenicists first promoted many of these same concepts during the May Fourth/New Culture Movement of the 1910s and ’20s. Although I feel that the benefits of using a broader timeframe outweighed the disadvantages of this approach, I was not able to provide as granular of a history as I might otherwise have. It was also a challenge to foreground contraception and abortion while not losing sight of the numerous significant political, economic, and social changes that occurred between 1911 and 2021.

MEC: I was struck by the many examples in Reproductive Realities of the disconnect between official discourse and on-the-ground reality: national conversations about birth control and abortion focused on socioeconomic and political factors, but individual behavior was driven by pragmatism and resources. If you could get Reproductive Realities into the hands of China’s family-planning officials today, what lessons would you hope they’d draw from history?

SMR: I hope that family-planning officials would realize that, as in the past, people make reproductive decisions for practical reasons linked to their personal circumstances. If the government wants people to act in a particular way with regard to childbearing, state policies need to make the desired reproductive behavior beneficial to individuals in the target demographic. To provide a concrete example, in light of the low birth rate, since 2015 the central government has repeatedly relaxed the national population policy and is now urging married couples to have more children to augment the workforce and care for the elderly. Rather than restricting access to abortion (something that was proposed in 2021), the government should address the structural factors that make having children difficult. Providing generous leave allotments for parents regardless of gender, industry, or migration status would do a lot to encourage childbearing. Guaranteeing access to low-cost childcare and education would also help ameliorate the financial burden of raising children. Ultimately if state policies are at odds with individual needs and wants, people won’t abide by them.

MEC: You emphasize the intensely gendered nature of state surveillance over reproduction, with women subject to far more scrutiny than men. What made this a “women’s issue” in the eyes of the Chinese state?

SMR: Reproduction, and by extension contraception, is viewed as a “women’s issue” for two reasons. First, childbearing is linked to women’s social and biological roles as mothers. The natal connection between mothers and babies makes childbearing of greater consequence to women and therefore renders their bodies particularly vulnerable to policing. Second, historically women in China have been viewed as responsible for duties related to the family, and reproduction often falls under this rubric. In this way, both women’s biological connections to babies and their social roles as wives and mothers make them the primary targets of state reproductive surveillance.

MEC: Though I have shelves and shelves of books waiting to be read, I’m always looking for more. So, if someone liked Reproductive Realities and wants to read further about gender history in modern China or reproduction and birth control elsewhere, what are a few of your top recommendations? What are the books that inspire you?

SMR: One of my all-time favorite books about gender history in China and a significant inspiration for my book is Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. This book, which has now become something of a classic, charts the experiences of “doubly marginalized” rural women from the founding of the People’s Republic through the Reform era. As a graduate student, reading The Gender of Memory demonstrated to me more clearly than any other work how centering gender can destabilize and reframe conventional historical narratives. The way in which Hershatter (and her co-author, Gao Xiaoxian) seamlessly integrated life stories into the book’s analysis also left a lasting impression on me. Some of my other favorite readings on the history of reproduction in China are “Jihua shengyu de kaiduan – 1950–1960 niandai de Shanghai” 计划生育的开端—1950–1960年代的上海 (The Beginnings of Birth Planning in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s) by Masako Kohama (in Chinese) and “Under the Shadow of the Collective Good: An Ethnographic Analysis of Fertility Control in Xiaoshan, Zhejiang Province, China” by Hua Han. Although Kohama is a historian and Han is an anthropologist, both authors use ethnographic methods—including “thick description” (à la Clifford Geertz)—to expose Chinese women’s reproductive agency and local contraceptive practices.

MEC: Finally, what else has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, historian, professor, or person living in the world?

SMR: I find myself thinking a lot lately about the fact that many countries in Asia and Europe are facing significant demographic shifts as their populations age. Even in the best of circumstances, negotiating eldercare can be challenging for everyone involved, and this is an increasingly dire issue in Mainland China. According to official estimates, by 2050, half a billion people—more than one-third of China’s population—will be 60 or older. Yet state efforts to meet the needs of the swelling senior population have not kept pace with the demand for eldercare services. My next book-length project, “Growing Old in China: A History of Aging in the People’s Republic,” uses archival research and interviews to investigate how the rollback of the (albeit limited) collective-era social safety net, uneven economic development, and limited access to healthcare have shaped experiences with aging in China since 1949. My goal is to shed light on the experiences of individuals who represent a substantial portion of the Chinese population in absolute terms but whose stories have largely been overlooked. If you are reading this and would like to get involved with this project or know of potential source material, I would be delighted to hear from you!

As the Qing dynasty wrested control over the Chinese empire from Ming rulers in the mid-1600s, officials in Beijing needed information. Administering a state both geographically large and bureaucratically deep, the central government relied on reports from below to ascertain events outside the capital city and assess the performance of officials who operated beyond its immediate reach. Quickly, however, the Qing state began to recognize the problems of relying on these reports from below: the empire only worked as well as the information it received. In response, the imperial court began developing more rules, deadlines, and reporting requirements; this, in turn, created more need to monitor and punish those who did not comply. The result? Paperwork. So, so, so much paperwork—a good portion of which is now held in archives in mainland China and Taiwan.

Historian Maura Dykstra has delved into that paperwork in writing her new book, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022). Dykstra, who will take up a position at Yale University later this year after teaching at Caltech since 2015, examines the first century of Qing rule to understand how the dynasty’s archive developed. Officials at the top pored over reports from the provinces and fretted that they weren’t getting a complete picture of the situation, which led them to worry about the health of the empire. As Dykstra argues, “The more the Qing state learned about itself, the more uncertain it became.” It responded to that uncertainty by demanding ever-greater amounts of information from below.

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine reveals how many small procedural changes amounted to a greater administrative shift in Qing China, resulting in concerns about the solidity of the state itself. Those piles of paperwork that might appear to be the standard product of any bureaucracy are, more significantly, a tangible manifestation of the anxiety Qing rulers felt about the security of their rule.

Over email, I interviewed Maura Dykstra about her work.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham: You write at the outset of the book that Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine was originally intended to be an article, but then grew into a book project that you pursued rather than revising your dissertation. Can you talk about how that happened, and the factors you weighed in making the decision to put your previous work aside and focus on something entirely new?

Maura Dykstra: I remember feeling despondent upon the occasion of my first book workshop, when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center. I had sent out the [dissertation-based] manuscript to several friends and admired colleagues, and although I felt that each one of them captured something really important about the dissertation, the big picture—what I wanted to say about the workings of the late imperial state—seemed to get lost for the trees. We concluded, as a group, that the dissertation was actually three separate books. So before I tackled the task of revising my dissertation into the first of these three separate monographs, I wanted to take just a few insights about the operation of the late imperial state that I felt were truly important prefatory points to my larger project and write them up in an article, since people seemed very confused by my assumptions and claims about the evolving character of late imperial administration. The deeper I got into that article, the more I was drawn into the subject. By the time I came up for air, the article had ballooned to over 90 pages. It had developed a momentum of its own.

By the end my first term at Caltech, I realized there was no way I could put it down. So I announced that my first book would be something completely different and the revision of the dissertation would have to wait. When my advisers and mentors told me that I couldn’t possibly do such a ridiculous thing, the deal was sealed. I didn’t choose this career to be bored with what I was reading and writing, so I went down the rabbit hole.

Friends and mentors still ask me, sometimes teasingly and sometimes with dismay, whether and when I’ll revise the dissertation. But this project, the next project, and the one following are all in conversation with the theory of the late imperial state that emerged from reading commercial disputes in the Ba County archives. I am still realizing, researching, and hammering out the implications of what I began exploring as a graduate student.

MEC: Your book looks at not only the contents of the archives Qing historians consult, but also at how those contents came to be. One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is how central government requests for information spiraled into ever-greater demands for documentation from below—leading to those stacks of paper in the archives. You term this “an administrative revolution,” but note that it was a gradual and subtle one. How did you see that revolution take shape in the archives? Or in other words, what prompted you to take a meta approach in thinking about the Qing archive?

MD: At first, as a legal historian working in a local archive, I went to Beijing merely trying to figure out what the central state knew about litigation at the county level, as I discuss in this blog post for the Journal of the History of Knowledge. But, after spending a very short period working in the First Historical Archives (FHA), I suddenly became able to place a document in time simply by looking at it, without even starting to read. Any scholar with time in the FHA can probably do this. And the patterns go below the surface level, to the structural and the formulaic as well. There is simply something different about a Qianlong-era document and its Guangxu-era counterpart.

Those moments—when I realize that, at some point, somewhere, a switch has been flipped and I don’t know where or why—those are the moments I live for, as a historian. I become fascinated with figuring out the story behind an obvious but unexplained change. I became curious about the documentary formalism that one sees emerging by the nineteenth century and why it mattered. What’s in a document? What lies below the phenomena discussed in our texts, or before them? How is the content, format, or subject of a document shaped by its purpose? How do we think we know what we claim to know, and what does that have to do with what the Qing was trying to learn, in an effort to grapple with the problems it understood? There were too many interesting questions. I couldn’t stop thinking about them in relation to one another.

MEC: As I read Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine, I kept mentally pairing it with The Magistrate’s Tael by Madeline Zelin for the ways that you both show how the 1722-1735 reign of the Yongzheng emperor served as a pivot point in the arc of the Qing dynasty. What was it about Yongzheng’s time on the throne—less than a decade and a half, in an era before phones and email!—that resulted in so many reforms? How did his reign then set the course for emperors who followed?

MD: One of the things I’m most excited about in the years to come is how people interact my work with Zelin’s work on the Yongzheng era. What her monograph beautifully established was the Yongzheng emperor’s role as a centralizing administrator. Where I think my project furthers the discussion is in focusing on what administrative centralization means in the case where central authorities rely on textual information to govern large and diverse spaces. I hope that, after my book, some of the earlier scholarship on autocracy in the Qing may be reconsidered in light of the distinction between centralizing processes and actually gaining power or control. This may help historians start to re-imagine the space between the two wildly-diverging narratives we have of the Qing: was it a dynasty of extreme control, or lack thereof? What if it was both? How would that help us refine the ways in which we ask questions about authority in the late imperial context?

MEC: Thinking more broadly in terms of time and/or place, how does this history of bureaucracy in Qing China add to our understanding of the administrative state and its growth? For someone interested in exploring this topic, what are some of the other works you recommend they read?

MD: I’m very curious to see how readers engage this question, as my work is in conversation with earlier monographs on comparative history such as Alexander Woodside’s Lost Modernities, R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed, Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence, Wong and Rosenthal’s Before and Beyond Divergence, as well as works on progress, development, and modernity from beyond East Asia and history, like Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Politics of the World-Economy and Robert A. Nisbet’s Social Change and History. What do theories of modernization—whether we confront them head-on or as they operate in the background of historical narratives—presume about what activities must be measured, or what institutions must develop, to establish whether and when a society or an institution becomes modern?

Working on my manuscript in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election, I developed a compelling—almost obsessive—curiosity about the relationship between information, control, and crisis. This paired interestingly with some conversations I had in the summer of 2019 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where I participated in a working group on the history of bureaucracy. We talked a lot about the relationship between the rationalization of bureaucratic processes and the interplay between complex realities and the “facts” processed by these organizations. In researching the Qing, I felt like James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which presumes that this tension fuels a push towards high modernity, could not quite describe the “information trap” that I was seeing in the case of the Qing. I guess, if I were to put it more simply, I’d say: the Qing teaches us that, although more information is almost always desired by rulers and administrators, it’s not as straightforward a commodity as historians and rulers tend to assume. Centralization does not necessarily entail control. Information does not necessarily result in better or more useful knowledge.

MEC: It seems like the Qing central government’s attempts to get more information from lower levels created a textbook example of formalism (xingshizhuyi), with local officials producing endless routine documents that failed to satisfy the recipients in Beijing. As you write toward the end of the book, “Emperors became skeptics; supervisors became scrutinizers; bureaucracy became the enemy of the empire.” Can you carry the story forward a bit and briefly share how the conflict between bureaucracy and empire played out over the remainder of the Qing, prior to its fall in 1911?

MD: I can’t! It’s the subject of the next book! But I can tell you: the story gets even wilder. In the upcoming monograph, I’ll be tracing how the connection between central imperial offices and the archives of the territorial yamen, after the administrative revolution, completely transforms case-making practices at the local level. The resulting story is one of intensive local state-building, culminating in the late nineteenth-century era of local self-governance. I hope to completely re-write the history leading up to the moment of institutional efflorescence in the late nineteenth century by re-centering it in earlier Qing practices (rather than the standard response-to-the-West model). Stay tuned!

MEC: Finally, what else has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, historian, professor, or person living in the world?

MD: One of my current fascinations is the moon jar form. I’ve been working in a ceramics studio for about three years now, and I’m finally starting to throw larger vessels. My house is slowly filling up with these ceramic orbs. Between studio sessions, I’m plugging away on a book that will continue the story from this first monograph into the nineteenth century and down to the local level, as well as polishing up a few articles in legal and economic history. And I’ve just started a working group based out of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, which will take five years to discuss the evolution of a Chinese Legal Tradition. I also just hit a new personal record at a 100-lb bench press. There’s always something to keep me moving.

MEC: Congratulations on both the bench press and seeing Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine in print, and good luck as you move to Yale!

When historian and lifetime AAS member Terry Lautz arrived in mainland China for the first time in December 1978, he visited a country that had been slowly mending ties with the United States after a rift of more than two decades. By the time he departed the mainland three weeks later, Sino-American relations had undergone a momentous shift: Lautz’s trip had coincided with President Carter’s announcement that the United States would establish “normalized” relations with the People’s Republic on January 1, 1979. This pivot ushered in a new—though still often fraught—era of contact and exchange between the countries.

Lautz’s 1978 trip straddled the move from unofficial to official American recognition of the PRC, but as he makes clear in his recent book, Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic (Oxford University Press, 2022), there was never a time when contact entirely ceased. Even in the depths of the Cold War, Sino-American ties were maintained by individuals, and it is that people-to-people engagement that Lautz highlights in this volume with profiles of thirteen Americans whose life and work have intersected with various aspects of the U.S.-China relationship. Those personal connections ensured that links between the countries could always be restored, even when high politics caused a breakdown in formal diplomatic relations. Across the ups and downs of more than seventy years, Lautz’s book tells personal stories to illustrate how “America’s bond with China is volatile, unpredictable, and complex”—and also unable to be broken, even when it frays.

After reading Americans in China, I interviewed Terry Lautz by email to learn more about his work.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham: Your previous book was a focused look at the life of John Birch, an American missionary who fought in China during World War II prior to his death in 1945. How did you move from writing one extended biography to a book that contains thirteen short profiles?

Terry Lautz: It was actually the other way around! During a fellowship at the Wilson Center, I was planning to write short biographies of Americans who had lived and worked in China when I stumbled on the unlikely story of John Birch. How did a missionary-turned-soldier in China become the namesake for the right-wing, anti-communist John Birch Society? Researching and writing his story was a fascinating five-year detour before I returned to the profiles featured in Americans in China.

MEC: As you explain in the introduction to Americans in China, the topic and format parallel those of To Change China, by Jonathan Spence, while you also note some of the shortcomings of that book. In what ways did you regard To Change China as a model for your work, and in what ways did you develop your own approach and style?

TL: Jonathan Spence was a brilliant scholar and a masterful writer who brought Chinese history to life through stories centered around people. I had always admired To Change China: Western Advisers to China for this reason and because it shed light on Sino-Western interactions from multiple perspectives. Americans in China picks up pretty much where Spence left off with the advent of the PRC. My approach was different because Westerners were suddenly confronted by a united Chinese nation that was no longer beholden to outsiders—although the Soviet Union had tremendous influence during the 1950s. So the key question for me was not how Westerners sought to “change China” but how they were changed by an anti-imperialist Communist China. My approach was also different because I wanted to include women and Chinese Americans; Spence wrote only about white men.

MEC: As I read Americans in China, I kept thinking that it would be an excellent book to use or excerpt in an undergraduate course. The life stories you tell are compelling and illustrative of major moments in U.S.-China relations over the past seven decades, and I can imagine students really connecting with them. If you had to recommend only one or two chapters to use in course materials, which ones would you suggest, and why?

TL: If I could only choose two chapters, I’d contrast Joan Hinton and Sid Engst with Elizabeth Perry. Hinton, a nuclear physicist, and Engst, a dairy farmer, were both in China when the Communists came to power in 1949. They married, became devout Maoists, and stayed in the PRC for the rest of their lives. I wanted to know how they became true believers and why they stayed that way even after the horrors of the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution.

Elizabeth Perry was born in China, where her parents were missionaries, and grew up in Japan. She teaches Chinese politics at Harvard and is a former AAS president. In her youth, she idealized the Chinese revolution but was disenchanted when she finally was able to see China with her own eyes as a visiting scholar at Nanjing University in 1979. Her story led me to ask why she and others romanticized the Chinese Communists only later to be disillusioned. These two chapters reflect the bipolar thinking that has characterized American responses to the PRC.   

MEC: I expect that one of the most difficult aspects of writing a book like this one is selecting the figures to include and deciding who will be left out. Which profile was the most difficult to develop? Were there any people you wanted to profile but couldn’t get enough material on? Is there a person or group not represented in the book that you would have liked to include?

TL: After consulting with a number of friends and colleagues, I selected people whose stories represented some of the key themes in Sino-American relations: politics, diplomacy, science, law, business, culture, journalism, scholarship, human rights. All of them had spent significant time in China, which ruled out some influential figures like Michel Oksenberg. Among many others, I considered the architect I.M. Pei and the missile scientist Qian Xuesen, but their stories were already quite well known.

Perhaps the most difficult but interesting chapter was writing about two of the twenty-one American Korean War POWs who voluntarily went to “Red” China when the war ended. Their largely unknown stories highlighted the ideological confrontation between China and the United States—which is still very much with us today. One of the men I wrote about, Clarence Adams, was an African American who wanted to escape U.S. racism and accepted the idea that the Communist system was superior. He went to Wuhan University, married a Chinese woman, had two children, and worked at the Foreign Languages Press. So he had more opportunities in China than would have been possible in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.

I would have liked to include profiles from a younger generation of Americans who have experienced a more prosperous, cosmopolitan, and confident PRC. I did write, in my introduction, about the long-forgotten story of a American youth group that visited China in 1957, defying the opposition of the U.S. government. Their meeting with Zhou Enlai, singing “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” is featured on the cover of Americans in China.

MEC: In an email to me, you mentioned that you’re now working on a follow-up volume to Americans in China. What can you tell #AsiaNow readers about that book?

TL: Deborah Davis, emerita professor of sociology at Yale, and I are co-editing a sequel to Americans in China that will present profiles of individual Chinese who have lived and worked in the United States and then have returned to the PRC. We’ve enlisted authors to write about diplomacy, education, civil society, business, science, sports, music, culture, and American studies. Chinese Encounters with America, our working title, asks why Chinese citizens came to the United States, what they discovered, and in what ways their experiences changed the trajectories of their lives.

MEC: In addition to your next book project, what else is occupying your time and attention these days?

TL: I’m enjoying my affiliations as a Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), an advisor to the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations—where you and I first met—and the advisory council of ASIANetwork consortium of liberal arts colleges.

MEC: Terry, congratulations on the publication of Americans in China, and thank you so much for sharing it with #AsiaNow!

TL: Thank you for this opportunity, Maura.

On March 12, 1973, John T. “Jack” Downey walked across the Lo Wu Bridge from mainland China into Hong Kong—a crossing more than two decades in the making. In November 1952, Downey had been a young CIA agent tasked with a covert mission near the border between China and Korea. Chinese forces, however, had prior knowledge of the planned infiltration, and shot down the plane carrying Downey and his CIA colleague Dick Fecteau. Downey and Fecteau were taken into custody by the Chinese government, their imprisonment soon becoming a long-running point of negotiation in U.S.-China relations. Not until the thaw occasioned by Richard Nixon’s visit to the PRC would the two men receive their freedom.

Jack Downey returned to the United States, attended Harvard Law School, and settled down in Connecticut with his wife and family. When Downey died in 2014, a long obituary appeared in the New York Times—which is how historian John Delury (Yonsei University) first learned of his story. Delury quickly realized that Downey’s secret mission, capture, and years in Chinese custody shed light on a much more expansive history, involving domestic politics in both the United States and China as well as diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Delury intertwines these narratives in his new Cornell University Press book, Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China. In Agents of Subversion, Delury blends the intellectual history of the early Cold War years, stories of intelligence operations, and the arc of U.S.-China foreign policy from the 1940s to 1970s. Throughout it all, Jack Downey sat in a Beijing jail cell—one man whose fate was subject to forces far beyond his reach.

After reading an advance copy of Agents of Subversion, I interviewed John Delury via email about his work.

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham (MEC): I’d like to start with the evolution of your scholarly work. You trained as a historian of the early Qing and wrote your dissertation on the political thinker Gu Yanwu, who died in 1682. The action in Agents of Subversion, however, covers the 1940s through early 1970s. How and why did you make the leap from the 17th century to the 20th?

John Delury (JD): First of all, thank you so much, Maura, for doing this. I’m a huge #AsiaNow fan! And thank you for bringing up my old pal Gu Yanwu. In fact, by the time I entered graduate school right at the end of the 20th century, I already thought of 17th century China and China today as existing on a continuum. No doubt this was the influence of my undergraduate teacher and doctoral advisor Jonathan Spence, whose class on modern China, 1600 to the present, framed my basic conception of Chinese historical time, and whose writings ranging across that period inspired me to one day do the same. In other words, I’ve always thought of it more as a hop, skip, and a jump, as opposed to a leap, from early Qing to early PRC.

Also, in between the dissertation and this book, I co-authored an intellectual and political history of 19th and 20th century China (Wealth and Power, with Orville Schell), and in the course of that project I found myself drawn to certain decades—including the 1860s (a future book one day, I hope!) and the 1950s, which is the anchor point of Agents of Subversion. I wouldn’t push the comparison too far, but perhaps there is a similarity in being a time felt by those in it as one of shifting world order. For thinkers during the transition from Ming to Qing dynasties like Gu Yanwu, it felt like one epoch giving way to another. Similarly the post-WWII years had that feeling of a hingepoint in history. As someone interested in the history of political thought, I’m naturally drawn to those sorts of moments, which tend to nurture a rich debate over the fundamentals of how the polity is ordered.

MEC: The political thinkers of the 1940s and ‘50s, of course, grappled with the lessons of World War II and struggled to understand the Cold War world that was emerging around them. You profile two groups, the realists and the China Hands. What were some of the arguments that these thinkers put forth, and how did they gain traction within the foreign-policy establishment of the early Cold War?

JD: You know that feeling when you hit send on your manuscript submission to your editor thinking, “No way they will let me keep that part in”? That was my trepidation sending in the chapter on “the realists,” and I was ready to do battle to defend keeping them in the book. To my delight, my editor seemed to love it as much as I did.

So yes, there’s a healthy dose of the history of early Cold War American political thought in this book, which might surprise readers. I drill down on a quartet of exceptional thinkers: Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and George Kennan. They published seminal works in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, trying to instill some humility in their readers, to get Americans to recognize the perils of their newfound “superpower” status. They also, quite presciently, alerted readers to the danger of being afraid of the wrong thing—specifically, they saw the fear of Communist subversion [think Joe McCarthy] as a more dangerous threat than the actual force of Communism (although none of them were pollyannish about Stalin, to say the least). I didn’t choose them for this reason per se, but I couldn’t help thinking that the realists’ message had something to say to our own moment, as well.

Interwoven with the realists, my book takes a close look at the China Hands, including prominent figures like the post-war “founder” of modern Chinese studies in the U.S., Harvard’s John King Fairbank, and the first high-profile target of Senator McCarthy’s witchhunt, Owen Lattimore at Johns Hopkins. Drawing on deep knowledge of and experience in China and bordering lands, Fairbank and Lattimore staked out positions on U.S. “Far Eastern” policy that echo and reinforce the more general arguments being made by the realists. My cast of China Hands includes lesser-known figures as well, some of whom are on the opposite side of the ideological and policy debate, who are equally fascinating—experts like the Yale political scientist David Nelson Rowe, for example.

I don’t want to include any spoilers here, Maura, but let’s just say that a treat for the reader who reads to the end is how these realists and China Hands, many of whom were ostracized from mainstream foreign policy discourse, make a dramatic return in the context of the national debate over the Vietnam War, setting the stage for the breakthrough in U.S.-China relations in 1971. I’ll leave it at that. 

MEC: One of the key terms in Agents of Subversion is “Third Force,” which seems to have been an idea even more than it was any sort of coherent or unified entity. What was the Third Force, in the context of the early PRC and the China-U.S.-Taiwan triangle?

JD: A simple definition of the Third Force might be anyone who hated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party as much as they did Mao Zedong and the Communists. And you are right, it never quite came together as an organized entity, although there was a compelling idea at its core.

When I first heard the term in a CIA context it sounded like a delusional fantasy, a projection worthy of The Quiet American (which Graham Greene wrote after hearing about Third Force on a reporting trip to Vietnam). But the Third Force was a powerful idea on a global scale in the post-war years, and its roots in Chinese thought can be traced back to the public intellectual Liang Qichao, who tried to carve out a moderate, centrist path through the divisive early years of the Republic of China. Liang’s protégé Carsun Chang carried the torch for the liberal cause into the even more tumultuous and violent years of the Chinese Civil War, which ended in 1949 with Chiang Kai-shek and his followers on Taiwan. Many Third Force intellectuals—as well as anti-Chiang Nationalist soldiers and generals—ended up in Hong Kong, where they tried to persuade American contacts that the Third Force represented a more viable alternative to Mao than did Chiang. Between the disillusionment with Chiang in Washington, DC and the impetus of the Korean War to support anyone who opposed Mao, the Third Force possibility gained traction. Their weakness had always been, especially as compared with both the Nationalist and Communist Party, that the Third Force was unarmed, and the CIA looked for ways to fix that problem for them.

MEC: Many of the American intelligence operations you discuss led to terrible outcomes—the capture and deaths of countless Third Force operatives, the decades-long imprisonment of Jack Downey and Dick Fecteau—and it doesn’t appear that Chinese intelligence agents fared much better. It seems like both governments took aggressive action based on the belief that the opposition was on the brink of carrying out massive and successful intelligence operations, when the reality was that everyone was floundering around. Was the CIA ever actually effective? Or did it just have good PR, capitalizing on the popular image of spies as slick James Bond characters?

JD: Well, the answer depends on how you define “effective.” For the first few years, the CIA struggled to find its place in the emerging Cold War “national security” apparatus of which it was a part. When the Korea War erupted, U.S. intelligence as a whole did not perform well—failing to anticipate Kim Il Sung’s invasion in June 1950 and Mao’s willingness to send massive reinforcements that fall. But you can’t blame it all on the CIA; military intelligence made egregious mistakes and the political analysis in State Department circles suffered from a lack of understanding of the countries and leaders involved. McCarthyism magnified the problem by sidelining experts who were deemed insufficiently loyal. Overall, I think the track record of intelligence on China was not good throughout the period covered by the book—there is probably a cautionary moral there as the U.S. and China drift back into a relationship with thinner ties and increased hostility. The moral might be something like: “Do not underestimate the ability to misread one another!” As far as the Korean War-era covert operations are concerned, it’s hard to argue those achieved any larger goals, and the human, individual cost was great.

All that said, I think you can make the case for CIA success as far as intelligence analysis and even clandestine operations, just maybe not vis-à-vis China. I came out of the research impressed by Sherman Kent, for example, who left his job teaching 19th century French political history at Yale to run the analytical directorate at the CIA for over a decade. And during the Eisenhower-Dulles years, the CIA scored some remarkable achievements in subverting governments deemed a threat to U.S. interests or values or propping up “friendly” ones. But again, a lot depends on how you define “effective.” The Agency was proud of its role in tipping elections in Italy and France and toppling governments in Iran and Guatemala, but were those not Pyrrhic victories?

MEC: You write that this book explores “the perilous linkage between subversion abroad and repression at home.” What’s the relationship between the two that you found in the past, and how do you see it playing out in the present? What lessons can current-day foreign policy actors or domestic policymakers find in Agents of Subversion?

JD: One of the unnerving similarities between the United States and China in the early 1950s is how strong the forces of reaction and repression grow in both places. Mao launches his first nationwide mass campaigns to root out and “suppress counter-revolutionaries” at the same time that McCarthy abuses his senatorial powers and manipulates public fears into an American equivalent. While McCarthy fanned flames of a Red scare, the U.S. government was taking active measures to subvert the People’s Republic of China, which do nothing to weaken Mao’s grip but did help justify his calls for a stronger “public security” state. You could even say the covert subversion against China was hidden only from the American public. Meanwhile the United States was being targeted by Soviet (not so much Chinese) espionage, but the repressive measures taken in response made the U.S. a less open society, not necessarily a more secure one. Subversion and repression generate a feedback loop—and the fact that Owen Lattimore was the first name leaked/made up by Joe McCarthy as the leading Soviet agent in America dramatizes the tragic absurdity of how China experts were sucked up into the engine of the national security state and its demands for loyalty. I should add that racism against Asians played into the equation as well, channeling fears of subversive forces into suspicion of Chinese-Americans based on their ethnic background.

I certainly hope folks concerned about subversion-repression dynamics will read the book. The fear of subversion has been rising toward China as its power and influence have grown, and some of these fears seem, like in the 1950s, more dangerous than their objects. At the same time, the apparatus of repression grows stronger and net of control tighter year by year in Xi Jinping’s China, a tragic and ominous trend. I’m sure policymakers don’t want to be told what to do by a historian. So I think more in terms of what we can all do as citizens and civic activists to be constructive (not subversive) while standing firmly on the side of openness (against repression). The more that individuals and groups in the U.S. and PRC can act together in solidarity on those principles, the better for us and the world. But I too struggle to identify the concrete ways to achieve that solidarity, and at the policy level, the challenge is really daunting going forward.

MEC: Finally, where have you focused your attention lately—as a reader, writer, historian, professor, or person living in the world?

JD: The number one focus of my attention in life is our three kids, who are extremely talented at finding ways to attract attention. So there is a lot of focus going into being a Dad, which is a blessing. My “pandemic hobby” was learning to surf, and I’ve found few places in this world that cultivate paying attention better than being out on the water, waiting for a wave—let alone those blissful moments of actually riding a wave. As far as reading, writing, teaching, and being a historian, my attention is definitely moving back in time—to my roots, as you put it in this interview. Am I too old to convert my dissertation into a book? I hope not, because I find Ming-Qing China calling out to me. It is a lot of fun going back to texts I studied twenty years ago, and seeing them in a new light. So that’s where my scholarly attention is focused for the time being.

MEC: Thank you, John, and congratulations on seeing Agents of Subversion in print!