Being a “Friend of Free China”: W. G. Goddard in Nationalist Taiwan

Abstract

The relationship between various Chinese governments and Western individuals who supported them throughout the 20th The tone of such research begins to change markedly, however, once one turns to scholarship on figures who continued this tradition of “friendship” with China in the years following 1949. The names of figures of “the Right” such as Claire Chennault and Alfred Kohlberg are as well known to us as those of Rewi Alley or Edgar Snow. Yet the context of the Cold War in which these individuals operated has made the academic research about them far more fraught. The divisive debates which once raged over the “China Lobby” and its influence on Area Studies in the United States still cast shadows over the study of those individuals who found themselves at the heart of such events. century, either in China or abroad, forms the foundation of an already substantial academic literature. The historiography of Republican China, in particular, is populated with often colorful figures such as George Ernest Morrison, Morris Cohen, and William Donald.