GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
22 JUNE 2026. CHINA POST #626
CHINA – DR JI CHAODING – JACK PERRY
The CHINA POST #624 on Dr Ji and Jack Perry triggered a number of enquiries and prompted me to elaborate on the importance of the role of researchers in China to dig deeper into the life and times of Dr Ji.
Dr Ji was the driving force – he was the initiator of the relationship between Dr Ji and Jack and just as the new China initiated the new relationship with the UK so Ji reached out to Jack and not vice versa. I am familiar with the Jack side of the story and can and will document the narrative with events and meetings and personalities. The imbalance is in the knowledge of how events unfolded on the China side and it is for students of China History in China to access contemporary documents from 1950 onwards. It will happen. Eventually. The When? and The Who? and The Where? and The How? – the answers to these questions will arise as the history of the PRC and the UK merits growing attention from Chinese historians.
As a starting point, I list the following for consideration;-
- Dr Ji’s father – Ji Gongquan (1882–1967) studied law in Japan. But what is his background as he grew up? What were his politics and to what extent did he pass them on to his eldest son, Dr Ji? What part did Lu Xun, China’s most famous writer, play in the development of the thinking of Ji Senior and his eldest son, Dr Ji
- There is also a need for details of the ongoing relationship between Father Ji and Son Dr Ji. Ji Senior died in 1967 – four years after the death of Dr Ji. Just as I recall with clarity the many discussions I had with my father, Jack Perry, from the early 1950’s onwards, so it is relevant to know more about the politics of Ji Senior and the ongoing exchanges between Father and Son in China that conditioned the political thinking of Dr Ji.
He came from a well-to-do family and the question arises why did Ji Senior encourage Dr Ji to side with the Left and the Communist Party of China and not the Right and the KMT of Chiang Kaishek?
- This is the period which covers;-
the failure of the Republic in 1911;
the brief dominance of Sun Yatsen;
the Civil Wars between the CPC and the KMT;
the Patriotic War against Japan and World War II;
the Third Civil War 1945-49 and the establishment of the PRC on 1 October 1949.
- On the personal side, what ongoing contact was there between Father and Son and what evidence is there of family mourning following Dr Ji’s sudden death in 1963?
- How did Dr Ji come to join the CPC? What was the trigger for his decision? History shows us that revolutionaries settle into a life time’s role with a political party after they have completed a journey of discovery that includes links with associated parties and organisations that lead them ultimately – in Dr Ji’s case – to the CPC. What was Dr Ji’s journey?
- Clearly Premier Zhou Enlai featured prominently in Dr Ji’s life. How? When? Where? Contact would have been spasmodic because Zhou was on the move with the Party between 1921 and 1949 – as was Dr Ji. Can researchers examine the history of the CPC and in particular the history of Premier Zhou and track his meetings and contact with Dr Ji?
- It would also be helpful to know more about Dr Ji’s work in the U.S. How did he manage to become a Professor of Economics at Chicago University and later at Columbia U? It seems at first sight quite remarkable that an immigrant from China could reach the academic pinnacle of Professor of Economics at two prestigious U.S. universities What is known about Dr Ji’s university career – as an undergraduate, a graduate and ultimately as a member of the academic staff?
- At this juncture it is important to recall that there are three limbs to Dr Ji’s activities in the U.S. in the 1930’s and 1940’s. First, In 1936 he authored an important book – Key Economic Areas in Chinese History. This came to the attention of the internationally renowned academic China expert, the British born Professor Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China. Needham called Dr Ji a “learned and brilliant writer”. Needham went further and described Dr Ji’s Key Economic Areas” as “perhaps the most outstanding book on the development of Chinese history among Western books on China”. Surely the 1930’s equivalent of the C.I.A. would have tracked Dr Ji as he rose through the ranks of the academic world in the U.S. and authored a book that received such wide academic praise?
It is the case that the U.S. in the 1930s was not in the grip of the anti-communism of the Red Scare Days of Senator Joe McCarthy’s in the 1950s but the U.S. was not soft on Communism. So how did Dr Ji slip through the net and flourish as a Left leaning academic at Chicago and Columbia Universities. Perhaps Professor Jeffrey Sachs, presently of Columbia University, can tell us more?
- Second, through links with his Left leaning brother-in law, Peter Jaffe, Dr Ji wrote regular articles, perhaps under a pseudonym, in The Ameriasia a publication of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). He served on its editorial board with Chen Hansheng, another underground communist. He wrote a regular column, “Far Eastern Economic Notes,” which used materials supplied from Party sources in China.
In 1937 the IPR appointed Dr Ji to its research staff, and in 1938 he travelled to China financed by a $90,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to gather material for a study of China’s wartime economic situation. Dr Ji’s name would have come to the attention of the security forces in the U.S. What do their files reveal? Are they accessible? This is an important part of Dr Ji’s history.
- There was a third important limb to Dr Ji’s activities in the U.S. On instructions from Zhou Enlai, Dr Ji engaged in important work with the KMT’s government’s financial mission in the U.S. He had been recruited in New York for this role in 1939 by the Shanghai banker K.P. Chen who headed the Universal Trading Corporation, a quasi-government mechanism for loans from the U.S. Treasury Department to the Chongqing KMT government. Dr Ji and fellow Communist Chen Han-sheng travelled back to China through Burma, before Ji returned to New York following his appointment in December 1940 as Secretary-General of the Sino-American British Currency Stabilization Board, which took over from the Universal Trading Corporation. Again, his boss was K.P. Chen.
- Dr Ji ensured that he made himself indispensable to the top leadership of Chiang Kaishek’s KMT. Famously, the KMT Finance Minister, – the high profile H.H. Kung – trusted Dr Ji because they were from the same province and Kung had always held Dr Ji’s father, Ji Gongquan, in high respect. But the U.S. had the closest relationships with the highest echelons of the KMT and it is most unlikely that they would have overlooked the credentials of the KMT’s fast rising economic adviser – Dr Ji. In time there will be further revelations about the unique role of Dr Ji – the man who befriended the U.S. academic world, who wrote regularly about China and who sat alongside the KMT’s economic ministers in their meetings with the U.S. Treasury Department and who was all along an undisclosed member of the Communist Party of China. The secret files of Dr Ji – in China and the U.S. – are bulging with information.
- The narrative and the intrigue goes further. The next KMT Finance Minister was T.V. Soong, so American trained that he could not speak Chinese well. Soong and Dr Ji became close friends and brought Dr Ji within the political radius of the three very influential Soong sisters – the most prominent women in modern Chinese history;-
- Soong Ai-ling, the eldest who married H.H. Kung,
- Soong Ching-ling, the middle who married Sun Yat-sen and
- Soong Mei-ling, the youngest who married Chiang Kai-shek,
Remember, Dr Ji, a committed Marxist and unyielding opponent of the KMT notwithstanding, won the confidence of such leading members of the KMT as H.H. Kung and T.V. Soong and their powerful wives – who remained blissfully unaware that Ji, their closest financial adviser, was all along a secret member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and reporting directly to Zhou Enlai.
- And do not overlook that Dr Ji features prominently at the 1944 International Bretton Woods Conference. Here he developed close links with the economists (Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn) at Cambridge University in the UK who had worked closely with John Maynard Keynes in the writing of his famous treatise – The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The U.S. and the UK intelligence services would not have overlooked the prominent role played by Dr Ji as a leading member of the KMT Nationalist Delegation to the Conference. Just five years before the creation of the People’s Republic of China, the KMT Delegation was mixing closely with the U.S. and UK delegations at Bretton Woods with the Communist Dr Ji attending every meeting between U.S. and KMT representatives. This will be recorded in the documents of the C.I.A. and MI6 as well as the KMT.
Where is the graduate student in the U.S. who takes on responsibility for building his/her own career in the academic world by writing up the unique role of Dr Ji in the U.S?
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The next instalment of “Dr Ji and Jack Perry” focuses on Jack. How did he travel from Hackney to Beijing? How did a young man aged 14 in 1929 and sweeping the floors of a London dress manufacturer for 10/- a week (50 pence) as an assistant warehouse manager go on to become China’s Man of Choice in the early 1950’s to head up future trade relations between China and the U.K? How did Jack’s later career as a businessman develop? How did he become Managing Director of an East End based Dress Making company? And what politicised him? And what was his direction of travel that led him to be so highly regarded by the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain? And what led Jack to become the Secretary of the British Delegation to the 1952 Moscow Economic Conference? And how did he respond when Dr Ji made his move in April 1952 and said “Jack, we want you to form your own independent company in London to do business with China”
It is a fascinating story on many counts;-
- the emergence of China and the roving role of Dr Ji on a mission to find a UK business counterpart that he could trust;
- the evolution of Jack from modest East End dress manufacturer to high-flying international businessman
- the role of Jack as an initial Go-Between the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of China
- the growing relationship between Dr Ji and Jack Perry
A narrative is unfolding, A story that has remained secret for many years is being told, The time is right to reveal all about China and Jack Perry.
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TWO ITEMS OF HARD NEWS ABOUT CHINA
#1 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
“China’s exports surged last month on demand for AI-related goods as the world’s second-largest economy shook off the impact of energy shortages from the Middle East. Exports expanded 19.4 per cent in May on a year earlier in dollar terms, exceeding the expectations of analysts in a Reuters poll for 15 per cent and the previous month’s growth of 14.1 per cent, official data from China’s General Administration of Customs showed on Tuesday. Imports also grew faster at 27.4 per cent compared with analysts’ expectations of 25 per cent and April’s 25.3 per cent, led higher by semiconductor imports.
“We are seeing a strong boost from the usual tech-related sectors,” said Lynn Song, chief China economist at ING. He pointed to a 110 per cent increase in China’s semiconductor exports, a 44 per cent rise in mobile phone shipments and a 66 per cent jump in automatic data processing machines, a category that includes processing units for computers and servers, data storage units, computers and other items.
The figures were also buoyed by China’s trade truce agreed with Washington in October…But the data, which came just weeks after a high-stakes summit in Beijing between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, showed that the US president’s tariffs have failed to slow China’s export machine. China’s trade surplus rose to $105.4bn in May from $84.8bn in April, the customs administration said, the highest figure since a combined figure for January and February this year.
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
There is always Good News and Bad News but in standard Western reporting on China the Bad News always dominates. And it gives a false picture and leads the reader to incorrect conclusions. So let the scales fall from your eyes; see the whole picture and not the selective information that a media that is basically anti-China wants you to read.
The Bad News is there; the property sector imposes costs on the Chinese economy; there is 15%+ unemployment among young people and domestic consumption remains stubbornly low. My advice – look out for these negatives as – gradually – they will diminish, No magic wand. No quick fixes. China learns from its mistakes. And its biggest lessons are from its biggest mistakes – the Cultural Revolution 1966-1976 and the Tiananmin Deaths of 1989.
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#2 CHINESE UNIVERSITIES CATCHING UP
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“Chinese universities are catching up with UK and US institutions whose competitive edge is being eroded by crackdowns on international students, according to a leading global ranking.
While Britain and the US retained their grip on the global top 10, with MIT first and Imperial College London second, rivals in Asia are gaining on their mid-ranked institutions, the QS World University Rankings found.
65% of US institutions slipped down the rankings of global institutions and Britain saw a 40 per cent fall, while China experienced a 61 per cent rise up the rankings.
Jessica Turner, QS chief executive, said “While Chinese universities struggled to break into the top 10 given they remain less international than western counterparts, QS argued that they are improving rapidly and becoming an increasing threat. Mainland China has three universities in the top 30, compared to four in Britain and 11 in the US. Broader metrics around patents, publications in prestigious academic journals and citations also point to the rise in influence of Chinese universities, which have received substantial funding from the government in recent years, notably in science, engineering and health.”
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
See the bigger picture, Get a feel for what is happening in China, It is not just the surge in railway tracks or the increasing use of electric cars or solar energy. The country is on the move – not to effect a takeover or to impose its will. Its trillion dollar package of overseas investment is not asset grab or military bases. China will inevitably become the largest economic power in the world – already they produce annually the largest number of STEM (Science Technology Engineering, and Mathematics} PhDs. DeepSeak is not an accident but a Statement of Intent. As China’s main problems – the Property Sector, Youth Unemployment, Population imbalance – are gradually resolved progress will continue. China will achieve its goal of moving from a “moderately prosperous economy” to “a prosperous economy”, Dropping the word “moderately” will be a moment of real achievement.
GRAHAM P
IN THE NEXT CHINA POST – #627 – THE FOCUS IS ON WEALTH CREATION IN CHINA AND THE ISSUE OF INHERITANCE. CAN THE BILLIONAIRES PASS ON – UNFETTERED – THEIR ACCUMULATED WEALTH TO THEIR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN OR DOES THE CHINA GOVERNMENT INTERVENE AND REGULATE THE FREEDOM TO “KEEP THE MONEY IN THE FAMILY”.
IS CHINA BUILDING A CLASSLESS SOCIETY OR A PROSPEROUS SOCIETY? AND, ARE THE TWO GOALS COMPATIBLE?
GRAHAM PERRY
