The British geopolitical theorist Sir Halford Mackinder wrote that great statesmen have had one quality in common: to see the world through the eyes and minds of other nations. For the United States in the twenty-first century, that means most importantly seeing the world through the eyes and minds of the leaders of China. Robert D. Kaplan, America’s most prolific, provocative, and insightful geopolitical thinker, attempts to do that by searching for insights among what he calls “an elite group of Americans” who “demonstrated an exceptional, almost intuitive ability to empathize with” China’s culture in his forthcoming new book China Whisperers. Some of those elite Americans, Kaplan writes, were “dupes” while others were “brilliant,” but all of them understood the Chinese people in “their Shakespearean complexity.”  

Kaplan believes we need to heed the voices of the China whisperers in order to avoid the “ultimate geopolitical disaster—a war with China.” Those voices communicate to us how the Chinese people—including China’s leaders—see and think about the world. Kaplan’s China whisperers include J. Stapelton Roy, the son of missionaries who was born in China in the 1930s when Japan began its series of Asian conquests. He returned to China in the late 1940s when the Chinese Communists overran much of the country. Later, he joined the Foreign Service, where he received language training in Taiwan; was posted to Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; lived for a time in the Soviet Union; and later worked on Far Eastern affairs at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Fluent in Mandarin, Roy was stationed in Beijing after President Richard Nixon’s opening to China, then served as ambassador to Singapore during the Reagan administration and as Secretary of State James Baker’s executive secretary during the George H. W. Bush presidency. In 1991, Bush appointed him as ambassador to China. Kaplan calls Roy the “last of the so-called China hands.” 

Roy’s career exemplified the quality Mackinder admired most in statesmen: His personal and professional experience over the course of nearly seven decades enabled him to view the world through the eyes and minds of China’s people and leaders. He observed the subtle shift in China’s leaders after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 but did not view this shift as a fundamental abandonment of communism—as Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama did when they welcomed China into the “rules-based international order.” Roy told Kaplan that Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama thought that “China would naturally rid itself of Communism the way that Russia and Eastern Europe did.” Those three U.S. presidents, Roy said, “had no idea what they were dealing with.” China was not going to remake itself in America’s image. Roy laments that the United States has approached China with, in Kaplan’s words, a “cultural blindness . . . which opens the door to tragic miscalculations.”  

Kaplan contrasts Roy and other Asianists with Europeanists, who, he writes, “dominate our intellectual class.” Europe and Asia are two distinct civilizations with two distinct cultures, and different histories and worldviews. “Foreign policy,” Kaplan writes, “is not a political science experiment. It is about people, individuals, with differing impulses: ideological, cultural, and . . . personal.” To improve its relationship with China—meaning to stabilize that relationship—the United States needs to listen to China whisperers such as Roy, who have been “our eyes and ears in China for over a century.” 

Roy is not the only “China whisperer” Kaplan describes in the book. Pearl S. Buck, with her 1931 book The Good Earth, introduced Americans to rural China, the sufferings of China’s peasants, and “almost every facet of Chinese life in the early decades of the twentieth century.” Kaplan writes that Buck’s work “prepared the background for what would become the tragic American experience in China.” Buck’s writings provided evidence that Chinese civilization was, in Kaplan’s words, “too immense, too overwhelming, and too intractable to be changed by outsiders.” Americans then and since—including America’s political leaders—haven’t learned that lesson yet.  

The Good Earth drew George Kates to China between 1933 and 1940, and that experience led Kates to write The Years That Were Fat (1952). Kates, according to Kaplan, viewed China’s civilization and its Confucianism as superior to the West. That is how Chinese leaders view it, too. One of Kates’s key insights from his years living in China was that the Chinese people measure history differently than we do—a discovery, Kaplan notes, that was shared by Henry Kissinger and that aided Kissinger in opening relations with China in the Nixon administration. 

Another China whisperer Kaplan admires is Owen Lattimore, who combined travels throughout China and Central Asia with a geopolitical mindset. It is a combination Kaplan knows well, having devoted much of his professional life to travel and geopolitical thinking based, in part, on his own travels. Like Kaplan, Lattimore traveled and wrote books on geopolitics. Geopolitics views the world through broad historical and geographical lenses, whereas travel enables interpersonal relationships and interactions with the peoples of other countries and regions. Kaplan’s book follows Lattimore’s footsteps in China, Mongolia, and elsewhere in Central Asia. Lattimore foresaw that Manchuria would become a region of conflict after World War I. His prediction came true when Japan invaded the region in the early 1930s—which some historians believe is the real beginning of the Second World War.  

Kaplan compares Lattimore’s book Inner Asian Frontiers of China to Mackinder’s 1904 essay “The Geographical Pivot of History” and 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality, and he credits Lattimore for taking a Mackinderesque geohistorical approach to Asian and Chinese geopolitics. Lattimore surveyed Chinese history and culture in its geographical setting. His reputation later suffered, however, from his association with the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and its journal Pacific Affairs, which published sympathetic portrayals of Chinese communists in the 1940s—so much so that the great anticommunist writer James Burnham connected the IPR to a “web of subversion” that infiltrated the United States after World War II. Lattimore also became associated with a group of Far East experts in Washington that formed a kind of anti–Chiang Kai-shek lobby that recommended that the Nationalists form a coalition government with the Communists and that emphasized Nationalist corruption instead of the communist threat.  

Kaplan downplays Lattimore’s approach to China’s civil war—indeed, he downplays the disastrous foreign policy decisions of the Truman administration, which Lattimore supported—with respect to Asia. As Frank Dikötter has documented in Red Dawn Over China, Truman’s China policy amounted to an attempt to position the United States as a neutral arbiter between Chiang’s regime (which was the United States’ wartime ally) and Mao Zedong’s Communists. This wasn’t the foreign policy realism so prized by Kaplan; instead, it foreshadowed Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” approach to foreign policy and subsequent neoconservative crusades for democracy. Kaplan derides the political question raised by conservatives in the later 1940s and early 1950s, “Who lost China?,” as nothing more than a right-wing, McCarthyite smear and a “political and media witch hunt.” Dikötter, however, places some of the blame for losing China where it belongs—the Truman administration’s foreign policy.  

Kaplan also mostly gives a pass to Edgar Snow, Theodore H. White, John King Fairbank, John Paton Davies Jr., General Joseph Stilwell, John Stewart Service, and Barbara Tuchman—more of his China whisperers—for their insistence on attempting to force Chiang Kai-shek’s regime to reform during the war against Japan and later during the civil war in China, and their sympathetic portrayal of, and their “delusions” about, the Chinese Communists. He writes that such delusions and sympathies could “be credibly entertained about” the Communists before they came to power. Mao’s was the most murderous regime in history, and Kaplan writes that this made Fairbank, White, Snow, and the others “appear hopelessly naïve in their obsession with the mistakes of Chiang Kai-shek’s highly imperfect Kuomintang regime.” Kaplan excuses their naïveté by writing that they should only be judged by what they knew and experienced “at the moment.” Kaplan even excuses Snow’s failure to report on Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which took the lives of as many as thirty million Chinese people. Snow, he writes, “was reminiscent of the parable of the blind man with the elephant, who touched this and that part of the beast without sufficient awareness of what it actually was or looked like.”  

As the Venona intercepts later revealed, and as M. Stanton Evans and others have shown, there were pro-Communists and agents of influence within the United States government and media who supported Mao’s Communists over Chiang’s Nationalists, as Senator McCarthy charged. Frank Dikötter in Red Dawn Over China is scathing in his criticism of President Harry S. Truman and George C. Marshall—not for being Communists but for abandoning realism while exhibiting naivete toward Mao’s Communists. Dikötter is equally scathing in his criticism of the “reporting” of White and Snow, who romanticized the Communists as rural democrats. And as the Amerasia case demonstrated, there were also American Far East experts who covertly aided the Chinese Communists. Even the Washington Post’s Nicholas von Hoffman had to admit that for all of his errors, McCarthy was closer to the truth about domestic communists than his legion of critics.  

Why then should we listen to these China whisperers today when they were so wrong about the Chinese Communists and displayed no sense of realism when reporting on Chiang’s regime and Mao’s intentions? Kaplan makes excuses for his China whisperers, but he refuses to give a pass to McCarthy or others on the right who also made some misjudgments about China and about some of the Americans who made China policy in the 1940s and 1950s. Those on the far right whom Kaplan criticizes throughout the book suffered from no delusions about Communism or Mao. They were right about the Chinese Communists and the need to support Chiang. Kaplan has the integrity to acknowledge that in China’s civil war “Chiang was by far the lesser evil,” but he contends that there was nothing the United States could do to save Chiang’s regime. Lattimore, Fairbank, White, Snow, Davies, Service, Stilwell, and Tuchman—for all their firsthand knowledge of China—were wrong. In the larger scheme of global history, whose errors were worse, the China whisperers’ or McCarthy’s?  

Kaplan incudes in his book a chapter devoted to Nixon’s opening to China, featuring Kissinger as the China whisperer. Nixon and Kissinger were indeed foreign policy realists who made a deal with the devil (Mao) to set the stage for the end of the Cold War. Unlike Kaplan’s other China whisperers, Kissinger spoke no Mandarin, never resided in China, and never reported from China as a journalist. Yet, arguably, Kissinger was the most successful and important of the China whisperers. Kissinger’s expertise was geopolitics, not Chinese culture and history. And it was geopolitics, rather than cultural knowledge, that won the Cold War.  

Kaplan’s most recent China whisperers are Evan S. Medeiros, who served in the Obama administration; Matt Pottinger, who worked in the State Department in Trump’s first term; Mary E. Gallagher of Notre Dame University; and Sulmaan Wasif Khan of Tufts University. All have observed China and some have dealt with China in the Xi Jinping era, where China has become a peer competitor to the United States. All are foreign policy realists who counsel varying degrees of coexistence with China because the alternative would be so much worse.  

Robert Kaplan, too, is a China whisperer. He heaps too much praise on the China whisperers of the 1930s through 1950s who knew more about Chinese culture than they did about geopolitics. Yet it must be kept in mind that his focus is geopolitics informed by his studies of Chinese culture and his reading of and conversations with the China whisperers. His geopolitical goal is not to change China’s regime but to deter its regional and global ambitions without resorting to war. That goal is probably the best we can hope for.