Johns Hopkins University not only has a history with China but at least one notable communist sympathizer in its hall of famed scholars—Owen Lattimore, who whitewashed many of Mao Tse Tung’s earliest massacres in his official reports. “The key to the situation in China is not that the communists have won but that the National Government has collapsed of its own corruption and its own inefficiency,” Lattimore said in a 1949 broadcast when Mao came to power.
“The former director of Hopkins’ Walter Hines Page School of International Relations, Lattimore became the subject of unwarranted controversy in the 1950s, when Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused him of being the Soviet Union’s top espionage agent in the United States,” Maria Blackburn writes in Johns Hopkins magazine. “Lattimore had been appointed advisor to China’s Chiang Kai-shek in 1946.”
“Once again the United States had hopes for democracy in China, and Presidents [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and [Harry S] Truman hoped Chiang Kai-shek was the vehicle by which China would become democratic,” David M. Lampton of JHU’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) told Blackburn. “Instead, Chiang’s regime became progressively more corrupt and alienated from the Chinese population as a whole.”
“Mao Zedong won the revolution in 1949, much to the surprise of most Americans.” Incidentally, Lattimore’s FBI file, which covers the years 1941-1950, runs to 5,161 pages and is available online at foia.fbi.gov.
“Investigation in this case was commenced following the receipt of referenced letter from the Bureau which sets out that for a number of years information has been received concerning the activities and contacts of OWEN LATTIMORE,” the file reads. “It was pointed out that information had been received from Confidential Informant T-1, an informant of known reliability, to the effect that General I. Berlin, of Red Army Intelligence, at one time identified LATTIMORE as a Russian Agent.”
“It is also the opinion of this informant, predicated upon a review of LATTIMORE’s writing, that LATTIMORE is a Russian Agent.” By the way, being a Russian agent in the 1930s and 1940s meant serving the interests of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Professor R. J. Rummell of the University of Hawaii calculates that the Man of Steel took 20 million lives in his three-decade reign.
By way of contrast, that record would be topped by the man whose rise to power Stalin aided—Mao Zedong. Even now, three decades after Mao’s death, China with liberalized policies does not boast as humane a human rights record as Taiwan—the island nation founded by Chiang Kai-shek, according to every available reference ranging from the U. S. State Department Country Reports to the Amnesty International yearbook.
“Although the constitution asserts that ‘the state respects and preserves human rights,’ the government’s human rights record remained poor, and in certain areas deteriorated,” the State Department reported of China last year. “There were an increased number of high-profile cases involving the monitoring, harassment, detention, arrest, and imprisonment of journalists, writers, activists, and defense lawyers, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under law.”
In Taiwan “The authorities generally respected the human rights of citizens; however, there continued to be problems reported in the following areas: corruption by officials, violence and discrimination against women, trafficking in persons, and abuses of foreign workers,” according to the State Department.
The more right-of center Freedom House human rights monitoring group rates Taiwan as free. Correspondingly, the institution rates China as not free.
“The government crackdown on lawyers and housing rights activists intensified,” the more-left-of-center Amnesty International (AI) reports of China. “Many human rights defenders were subjected to lengthy periods of arbitrary detention without charge, as well as harassment by the police or by local gangs apparently condoned by the police.”
“Many lived under near constant surveillance or house arrest and members of their families were increasingly targeted.” Although not enamored of Taiwan, AI nonetheless gave the Republic a cleaner bill of health than it did the Mainland.
“Hundreds of thousands of people participated in political demonstrations for and against President Chen Shui-bian in the wake of corruption allegations against him and his family,” AI reported this year. “Media organizations raised concerns for the safety of journalists covering such protests.”
“Mandatory death sentences were abolished, but the death penalty remained as a discretionary punishment for murder and several other crimes.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
