GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
14 AUGUST 2026. CHINA POST #634
CHINA AND THE FOREIGN MEDIA
ABOUT CHINA POST #634
THIS POST – #634 – IS A BLEND OF COMMENTS ON CHINA TODAY AND CHINA YESTERDAY.
THERE IS LITTLE OF NOTE IN THE UK MEDIA ON THE IMPACT OF CHINA’S PAST ON CHINA’S PRESENT AND YET ANY CONTEMPORARY STUDENT OF CHINA TODAY KNOWS THAT HE/SHE HAS TO VIEW CHINA IN 2026 AS A CONTINUOUS EVOLUTION OF MAO’S CHINA OF 1949.
CHINA IS WHERE IT IS TODAY DUE TO THE “THREE BECAUSES”;-
FIRST, BECAUSE OF THE CENTURY OF HUMILIATION IN WHICH THE UK PLAYED A BIG AND NEGATIVE ROLE;
SECOND, BECAUSE, OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE TIANANMIN DEATHS WHICH BROUGHT THE INSTABILITY THAT CHINA’S LEADERS TODAY ARE DETERMINED TO AVOID,
THIRD, BECAUSE, OF MAO’S REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP FROM 1935 ONWARDS AND DENG HSIAOPING’S FAMOUS CORRECTIVE ABOUT CATS AND MICE.
CHINA AND THE TIANAMIN DEATHS – JUNE 1989
CHINA’S LEADERS MAY NOT BE AS FORTHCOMING AS THEY SHOULD BE ABOUT THEIR RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE TIANANMIN DEATHS BUT THEY KNOW THAT THEIR LEADERSHIP FROZE. THEY LOST CONTROL DUE TO TURMOIL AT THE TOP. PROTESTS GATHERED PACE IN THE CENTRE OF BEIJING AND IN OTHER CITY CENTRES.
SOME LEADERS WANTED TO TALK TO THE PROTESTORS.
OTHERS, ESPECIALLY DENG HSIAOPING, REALISED THAT ORDER HAD TO BE RESTORED AND THE STUDENTS SENT HOME.
PARALYSIS AT THE TOP PRODUCED CHAOS. THE LONGER THE DELAY IN DEALING WITH THE GROWING NUMBERS IN TIANANMIN SQUARE, THE MORE LIKELY IT WAS THAT THE RESTORATION OF ORDER WOULD BE VIOLENT.
AND IT WAS VIOLENT.
PEOPLE DIED, ANTI-CHINA PEOPLE TALK IN THOUSANDS. PRO-CHINA PEOPLE TALK IN HUNDREDS. THAT IT HAPPENED AT ALL IS THE CRUCIAL FACT. AGAIN – THE LEADERSHIP FAILED. THEY KNOW IT. THEIR STYLE IS NOT YET TO GO PUBLIC AND ADMIT OPENLY – THAT TIME WILL COME – BUT THEY KNOW THEY MADE A BIG MESS OF THINGS.
THERE IS A REASON FOR THE SILENCE – TODAY’S LEADERS BELIEVE IT IS BEST TO CLEAR THE MEMORY BY SHOWING THAT THEY HAVE LEARNED THE LESSONS AND MADE THE CHANGES. AND CHINA TODAY IN 2026 IS A QUITE DIFFERENT PLACE FROM CHINA IN 1989 – POLITICALLY, ECONOMICALLY, SOCIALLY AND MATERIALY.
LEADERSHIP CAN BE GOOD AND LEADERSHIP CAN BE BAD. AND FOR CHINA TODAY THE LEADERSHIP OF XI JINPING MUST ENSURE IT IS ALERT, AWARE, IN TOUCH, INFORMED, KNOWLEDGEABLE, WITH EYES WIDE OPEN.
THIS IS THE REALITY BEHIND THE PHRASE “SERVING THE PEOPLE”
THERE IS ANOTHER REQUIREMENT. THE LEADERSHIP MUST BE RIGHT AND NOT WRONG. IT MUST ASSESS, RE-ASSESS, EVALUATE AND RE-EVALUATE. ITS LEADERSHIP MUST BE THE BEST AND THE MEMBERS OF THE PARTY MUST PROVE THEMSELVES EVERY DAY BY THEIR ACTIONS THAT THEY ARE THE RIGHT PEOPLE FOR THE TASK IN HAND – AND THAT IS JUST TWO WORDS – PROSPERITY AND STABILITY.
AND SINCE 1989 THE PARTY LEADERSHIP HAS MADE BIG STRIDES – 200 MILLION CHINESE WILL TAKE OVERSEAS HOLIDAYS IN 2030 AS ONE EXAMPLE. THERE ARE MANY OTHERS – RAILWAYS, TRAVEL, CONSUMERISM, ROADS, CENTRAL HEATING +++.
ALWAYS – THERE ARE NEGATIVES. THINGS THAT HAVE GONE WRONG. THE PROPERTY SECTOR, YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT, EVIDENCE OF A LACK OF INDIVIDUAL PURPOSE. THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT IS NOT COMPLACENT. ITS IN-TRAY IS BULGING.
BACK TO THE TIANANMIN DEATHS. THEY WERE LESS TO DO WITH DEMOCRACY AND A SURGE OF PUBLIC INTEREST IN THE RIGHTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND MORE TO DO WITH CORRUPTION AT THE TOP. DENG HAD RELEASED THE GRIP. HE MADE IT EASIER FOR PEOPLE – ESPCIALLY FOR PEOPLE AT THE TOP – TO MAKE MONEY; TO BE SUCCESSFUL AND TO ENJOY THE FRUITS OF SUCCESS.
A ”THEM AND US” CULTURE WAS DEVELOPING. LEADERS WERE BECOMING CORRUPT – DRIVING AROUND IN BIG CARS FOR EXAMPLE. THEY WERE PUTTING THEMSELVES FIRST AND THE PEOPLE SECOND.
THERE WERE ALSO INTERNAL DIFFERENCES AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. WITHIN THE POLITBURO BETWEEN THOSE WHO WANTED TO CHANGE COURSE AND ADOPT WESTERN DEMOCRATIC NORMS AND THOSE THAT WANTED THE LEADERSHIP OF THE PARTY TO REMAIN COMMITTED TO THE LENINIST DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.
THE TWO ISSUES – CORRUPTION AND INNER POLITICAL CONFLICT AT THE TOP OF THE PARTY – BECAME COMBUSTIBLE AS THE PARTY LEADERSHIP FROZE.
IN THE WEST, THERE HAS BEEN A FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND “THE HOW AND THE WHY” OF THE TIANANMIN DEATHS. THAT IS BECAUSE THERE IS NEVER AN ATTEMPT TO PUT THE EVENT IN ITS CORRECT HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE. THE TIANANMIN DEATHS – LIKE THE HUNGARIAN UPRISING OF 1956; THE BERLIN WALL OF 1961 AND THE PRAGUE ‘SPRING’ OF 1969 – ARE A BATON WITH WHICH TO BEAT THE COMMUNIST LEFT OVER THE HEAD. THAT IS TO BE EXPECTED. BUT THERE IS A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE IF YOU REMAIN POSITIVE ABOUT CHINA – AS GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON REMAINS.
HAS THE POLICY ERROR AND THE HISTORICAL SETTING BEEN REALISED IN CHINA? THE ANSWER IS “YES”. AND THE HOPE HAS TO BE THAT THE GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO LEAD AND TO LISTEN AS IT IMPLEMENTS POLICIES THAT SERVE THE TWIN AIMS OF IMPROVING THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE AND MAINTAINING THE CORE ROOTS OF MAO’S MARXIST-LENINIST PHILOSOPHY WITH, OF COURSE, CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS.
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ABOUT THE PAST IN THIS ISSUE – HOW DID DR JI CHAODING OPERATE BOTH AS A PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT TWO TOP U.S. UNIVERSITIES AND AS AN UNDERGROUND MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA?
DR JI – CHINA – AND THE U.S.
Dr Ji Chaoding succeeds in the U.S. as a Professor of Economics at two Universities – Chicago and Columbia. He also succeeds as an undisclosed member of the Communist Party of China.
This is the introduction to Dr Ji that appears in Wikipedia with detailed sources.
“Ji was educated at Tsinghua University in China, then in the United States at University of Chicago and Columbia University. He became a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As an underground party member, he was on the staff of the Institute of Pacific Relations in the 1930s before returning to China in 1939. From the West, he worked as a spy, providing intelligence directly to Zhou Enlai.
He became a trusted adviser to the Ministry of Finance in the wartime Nationalist government but remained in China as a well-placed official in the new government of the People’s Republic of China after 1949. Only after his death was his long-time Party membership, and 20-year career as a spy for the communist faction acknowledged by the Chinese Government”
Dr Ji was born in China and studied at Tsinghua University before moving to the United States. He wrote the influential 1936 book Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, which analysed public works, flood control, and economic development. This book influenced the conceptualization of Chinese history in Europe by emphasizing geographic and economic factors as the basis of dynastic power.
Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, called Ji a “learned and brilliant writer” and his book – Key Economic Areas in Chinese History as “perhaps the most outstanding book on the development of Chinese history among Western books in those days.“
Quite incredibly, Dr Ji manoeuvred himself to be appointed as Secretary to the Chinese Delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and worked closely with H.H. Kung, who featured prominently in the Kuomintang Party. Kung’s wife was a sister of the wife of Chiang Kaishek, the leader of the Kuomintang. Dr Ji was operating at the highest level of the KMT and incredibly Chiang Kaishek and his closest advisers did not realise that – all along – Dr Ji was reporting into Zhou Enlai. This was the Dr Ji that identified Jack Perry early in 1952 as China’s first foreign trade partner. Dr Ji was a man of many parts and the enormity of his significance in the early history of the new People’s Republic of China has yet to be fully appreciated. His story will emerge.
After the end of World War II and the defeat of Chiang’s KMT Dr Ji was the most effective member of the China Delegation to the Moscow International Economic Conference in April 1952. He died, aged 60, in August 1963. Premier Zhou Enlai spoke at his funeral
DR JI AND THE FUTURE
There is a story waiting to be written by an aspiring Chinese historian who will research Dr J’s life in detail – in the U.S. the UK as well as in China. This will include his academic career at the two U.S. Universities; his marriage to his American Jewish wife, Harriette Jaffe which produced two sons – Emil and Karl; his close relationship with Harriette’s Left-Wing brother, Peter Jaffe and his work on the influential American think tank, the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, cementing his status as an authority on Asian economies. It will also focus on his long-term friendship with Jack Perry.
DR JI CHAODING – EARLY DAYS IN CHINA
Here now follows an extended narrative on the Life and Times of Dr Ji He was born in 1903 and entered Tsinghua University, a school supported by funds from the Boxer Indemnity and whose classes were taught largely in English. In the aftermath of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, an awakening of patriotic spirit, Dr Ji led radical nationalist activities along with classmates Luo Longji and Wang Zaoshi. After graduating in 1924 he went to the United States to study on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. He enrolled at the University of Chicago.
DR JI IN THE U.S.
While at Chicago University he became President of the Chicago Chinese Student Association and worked with the American Anti-Imperialist League. In 1926 Ji joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The Party had a keen interest in global communism, and established a Chinese Bureau to supervise students from China. At that time, the newly formed Communist Party of China (CPC) was in a United Front alliance with the Nationalist Party of Sun Yatsen, who was popular among Chinese Americans, and Ji developed a national reputation as a public speaker able to rouse support for China with his anti-imperialist speeches to local overseas Chinese groups in Chinese or to leftist comrades in English.
In 1926, Ji and several of his Tsinghua friends denounced American supporters of the Nationalists and secretly joined the CPC. Their membership was kept secret in order to avoid surveillance or deportation, and to allow them to work in Chinese American communities where the Nationalists were strong.
In the winter of 1926, on the orders of the Chinese Bureau, Ji sailed to Europe to attend the League Against Imperialism, organized in Brussels for colonialized peoples by the Communist International (Comintern) agent Willi Munzenberg. In 1927, Ji married Harriet Levine in Paris, whom he had met on the boat to Europe. The Chinese Bureau of the CPUSA ordered Ji and a group of students back to China to take part in the revolution, but White Terror led by Chiang Kai-shek ended the First United Front, and the group went to Moscow instead.
China Today
There Ji studied at Sun Yatsen University, which had been founded to train Chinese students in revolution, and acted as interpreter for the Chinese communists who had fled China. He attended the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, and was one of the secretaries to Deng Zhongxia, China’s delegate. William Z. Foster, an American delegate to the Congress, suggested that Ji not return to China but rather should return to the United States to publish a newspaper, a suggestion which Ji accepted.
DR JI AND PROFESSOR KARL WITTFOGEL
In 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, Ji met the economic historian Karl Wittfogel, then a member of the German Communist Party. Ji was deeply influenced by Wittfogel’s Marxist analysis, which used geography and economics to analyze the development of China’s political system. Wittfogel argued that imperial despotism arose from control of waterways, which gave the ruling dynasty the ability to extract grain and gather tax revenue.
When Ji returned to New York for graduate study in economics at Columbia University, he joined the central committee of the CPUSA Chinese Bureau, and wrote a series of articles for the Daily Worker under the name Richard Doonping. Ji’s wife, Harriet, was a cousin of Philip Jaffe, a New York communist who urged Ji to join the International Labor Defense, a radical labor group. Ji and Jaffe formed the American Friends of the Chinese People. They both wrote under pseudonyms for China Today, a magazine sponsored by CPUSA. Ji also appeared on Broadway in the Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov‘s play Roar, China! He was a man of many parts.
DR JI’S WARTIME ACTIVITIES
In 1937, Ji, Jaffe and their group decided that China Today lacked the academic stature to be convincing to influential Americans. Instead, Jaffe, with the financial support of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, an open member of the CPUSA and secretary of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, founded a new journal, Amerasia. Ji served on the editorial board along with many scholars of less radical politics, as well as Chen Hansheng, another underground communist. Ji wrote a regular column, “Far Eastern Economic Notes,” which used materials supplied from Party sources in China. In 1937 the IPR appointed 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.
When Japanese troops were about to take Fengyang, Ji’s father, Ji Gongquan, had assumed that the occupation authorities knew of his Japanese education. To avoid being coerced into joining the government, Ji Gongquan and his family fled to Hankow, which became the temporary national capital after the fall of Nanjing. Ji Gongquan became frustrated with Chiang Kai-shek, so Chaoding, who was then in China doing research, arranged the difficult passage through South China and Hanoi as the family made their way to New York. Chaoding had planned to go to the wartime communist capital in Yan’an, but Zhou Enlai asked him to instead accompany his family to the United States, where he could present sympathetic information while not revealing his political allegiance. Ji continued his work with the IPR and the magazine Amerasia.[5]
Ji Chaoding returned to China in March 1940. He was a member of the government’s financial mission to 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 (環球進出口公司), a quasi-government mechanism for loans from the U.S. Treasury Department to the Chongqing government.
Ji and Chen returned to China through Burma, and Ji returned to New York in December, 1940. He became 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. Ji travelled for the Board to Shanghai and Chongqing in July 1941.[15]
Ji accepted a position in the wartime government in Chongqing, where he lived in the same rooming-house as a British Leftist Solomon Adler who became well known when he settled in China in 1960 and held a senior position overseeing the English translations of the Collected Works of Mao Tsetung.
One senior Nationalist Party official, Chen Lifu, later complained that the intelligence agencies knew of Ji’s communist connections but that Finance Minister H.H. Kung trusted Ji because they were from the same province and Kung respected Ji’s father. The next Finance Minister, T. V. Soong, Chen continued, was American trained and could not speak Chinese well. Soong and Ji got along because they both had a better command of English than Chinese. Chen remained suspicious and argued that that Ji was recommending damaging policies to both Kung and Soong. However Chiang Kai-shek trusted and defended Kung and Soong because they were married to his wife’s sisters. Ji Chaozhu, Ji’s brother, and many years later to become China’s Ambassador to the UK recalled that Kung had once demanded” “Chaoding, tell the truth. Are you a Communist?” Knowing that a Communist might be tortured or executed, Chaoding replied, “Uncle, I have followed you these many years… Do I look like a Communist to you?”
Ji was one of the most effective members of the Chinese delegation at the Bretton Woods conference. He served there as Kung’s secretary and in 1944 the standing of the KMT Government was high with the Western powers. All along Dr Ji was reporting to the soon-to-be Premier Zhou
When the war ended, Ji’s wife and two children came to China for the first time. The couple divorced, however. Ji planned to stay in China but Harriet preferred the U.S.
Ji travelled to Australia in 1948 as an advisor to the Nationalist delegation at the United Nations Economic Council, and on his return to China was made economic advisor to Nationalist General Fu Zuoyi, a fellow Shanxi native. Ji and his father were among the intellectuals who persuaded General Fu to peacefully surrender the city to the Communist People’s Liberation Army. Ji met with Fu at their Beijing home as part of the ultimately successful effort.
FRIENDS,
CHINA POST #635 IS A BREAK FROM THE DR JI-JACK PERRY STORY.
IT IS ALREADY IN DRAFT FORM AND WILL FOLLOW AFTER THE WEEKEND.
IT CONCENTRATES ON FOUR ISSUES.
- “THE WORSENING HEALTH OF DEMOCRACY”
GLOBAL FREEDOM DECLINES
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
THIS IS A CRTICIAL COMMENT ABOUT DIMINISHING DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S.
- CHINA’S OVERSEAS TRAVEL NUMBERS
THE FT CONFIRMS SURGE IN TRAVELEX
PREDICTIONS
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
THIS IS THE 200 MILLION OVERSEAS CHINESE TOURISTS IN 2030.
- LAST QUARTER SEES 25% JUMP IN CHINA’S EXPORTS
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
PROBLEMS IN PROPERTY SECTOR, YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT BUT PROGRESS IN CHINA’S EXPORTS
- CHINA’S ECONOMIC FALL-OUT FADES
BLOOMBERG
BLOOMBERG NOTES THAT PREDICTIONS OF A CHINA ECONOMIC CRASH ARE DIMINISHING
