Davies,John Paton,Jr.,China Hand: An Autobiography

John Paton Davies's story is familiar to students of China-U.S.relations.Born to missionary parents in Sichuan,Davies joined the Foreign Service in 1931 after his itinerant undergraduate years.Through language training in Beijing and postings in Kunming,Shenyang,and Hankou,Davies built a reputation as one of the State Department's most capable China hands.When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,he was working at State's Far Eastern Affairs desk.Eager to return to China—or just get out of Washington—Davies urged Major General Joseph Stilwell,who was rumoured to be leading an American military mission to Chongqing,to take him along.Davies got his wish a few months later and spent most of the wartime in China as Stilwell's civilian aid.After the war,Davies,who had predicted that Mao Zedong's Communists would triumph over Jiang Jieshi's Nationalists once the Japanese surrendered,became a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist accusations.Secretary of State John Foster Dulles fired him in 1954 after his ninth appearance before the State Department's Loyalty Security Board.Disgusted with the politics in America,Davies and his family left the country and lived many years in Peru.Though he returned to America in the 1960s and wrote on foreign affairs,Davies never again served in government.     

Building an Alliance and Building a Bomb

Books reviewed in this article:
Abraham Ben-Zvi, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance
Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb     

Symbolic recognition,multicultural citizens,and acknowledgement: Negotiating the Christmas Wars

In recent times, December has come to mark a new tradition—an annual public debate over the degree to which Christmas should be publicly recognised and celebrated in a multicultural society. Curiously, political theorists of multiculturalism have had little to say on this controversy. In this article, I argue that there is a genuine issue at stake in the so-called ‘December dilemma’, but that the public debate—which construes the matter in terms of offending non-Christians—fails to identify and address it. Differentiating three distinct areas of contention (public holiday, public square, and state schools), I suggest that the core issue is one of ‘acknowledging a “generalised other”’, and sketch what this might mean for each of these public aspects of Christmas celebration.