Ji Chaoding

Richard Louis Edmonds wrote in 2002 that Ji offered this theory as an "overlay" to the largely political, historical-oriented dynastic-cycle theory developed by traditional Chinese historians. Ji saw the lower Yellow River as the key economic area of the first period of unity and peace in the Qin and Han dynasties, but in the second such period, the Sui dynasty and the Tang dynasty, the key area shifted to the lower Yangzi basin, though linked to the Yellow River basin by the Grand Canal. During the third period, that is, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties or roughly the 13th–19th centuries, the lower Yangzi remained the key economic area, but the governments put much effort into developing the Hai River basin as a new area southeast of modern Beijing.

In wartime Chongqing, Ji lived in the same boarding-house as John S. Service, an American Foreign Service Officer who was to leak State Department documents to Jaffe in the Amerasia documents case, and Solomon Adler, a friend of Ji's and official of the Treasury Department who was later accused of being a Soviet spy. The historian M. Stanton Evans wrote that this "trio" worked to undermine the government of Chiang Kai-shek. Chen Lifu told historian Stephen MacKinnon in 1992 that "it was Chen Hansheng and Ji Chaoding who were responsible [for the loss of the mainland]." MacKinnon concluded on the basis of his own research that Chen's charges were "at least partially justified." Ji worked in Washington during the war to undermine the reputation of the Nationalist government, though "how much Ji contributed to the failure of the Bank of China to control inflation during the civil war years is an open question."

Ji Chaoding died suddenly in 1963 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Joseph Needham organized a memorial service in Cambridge, England, and asked Owen Lattimore and other prominent leaders to speak. Lattimore wrote that Ji was "humane to the marrow of his bones." In Beijing, Ji was given a state service attended by Fu Zuoyi and high officials at which Zhou Enlai gave an encomium. Only after his death was Ji's long-time membership in the Chinese Communist Party officially acknowledged.

Ji's innovative analysis of early Chinese civilization as arising from the interaction of settled agriculture and Inner Asian pastoral economies work influenced Owen Lattimore. One historian commented that it was "an irony" that neither Lattimore or his critics in the 1950s knew of Chi's Comintern connections. Karl Wittfogel, however, testified that when they had been in China together he had told Lattimore that Ji was a communist. Lattimore denied any knowledge to that effect.

On the eve of the communist revolution in 1949, Ji became director of the research department of the People's Bank, then went with the revolutionary armies to Shanghai, where he became assistant general manager of the Bank of China. When the new government was declared in October, although his relation with the Communist Party was not known, he was put in charge of foreign capital enterprises under the Government Administration Council. In the 1950s, he represented China on trade and commercial missions. Domestically, he was a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a body made up of third party groups.

When the war ended, Ji's wife and two children came to China for the first time. The couple divorced, however, since Ji planned to stay in China, where Harriet did not want to remain. Ji traveled 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 Fu to peacefully surrender the city to the communist armies. Ji met with Fu at their Beijing home as part of the ultimately successful effort. After 1949, Ji Gongquan continued his national and provincial educational and legal activities under the new government.

Ji Chaoding returned to China in March 1940. He was a member of the government's financial mission to the U.S. Ji 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. The American representative on the Board was Solomon Adler, who was later accused of being a Soviet agent. Ji traveled for the Board to Shanghai and Chongqing in July 1941.

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 traveled to China financed by a $90,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to gather material for a study of China's wartime economic situation.

Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, Ji Chaoding's doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, was published in London by the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1936 (it was not published in the United States until many years later). This was Ji's only book and it contained only 136 pages, but it had wide influence. A review of the 1964 reprint noted that "three decades after its completion and initial publication, this study still offers data and insights on the economic history of China not readily available elsewhere." The book identified key areas of grain production which, when controlled by a strong political power, permitted that power to dominate the rest of the country and enforce periods of stability.

Karl Wittfogel, who was thanked by Ji in the preface, reviewed the book in the pages of Pacific Affairs in 1936, saying it was "an extremely important contribution to a real understanding of China's past and present." When Ji used geographical distribution of water control to explain the territorial form of China's political and economic development, Wittfogel continued, "the motives behind the economic political activities of China's dynasties thus appear much less humanitarian, but infinitely more realistic." Wittfogel did note that Ji's term "semi-feudalism" might better be called "Oriental Society" or "Oriental Absolutism."

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 Communist Party of China. 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. 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 acknowledged.

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.

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 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.

He became friends with Lu Xun, with whom he shared many progressive views. Ji Gongquan told his son Ji Chaozhu that he then calculated that "if I were to join the 'Preserve the Empire Party' I might lose face. If I were to join the Revolutionary Party I might lose my head. I decided I was wisest to keep both." He became education commissioner in the 1920s for the new Shanxi provincial government of Yan Xishan, but when he was ordered to open fire on student demonstrators, he resigned and moved his family from the capital back to Fenyang. Ji Chaoding had two younger brothers, Ji Chaoli (冀朝理, better known as Chao-Li Chi) and Ji Chaozhu (born 1929), who became a highly placed translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after 1949, and a younger sister, Ji Qing (冀青).

The new government debated economic policy, especially foreign trade. Ji favored trade with Western Europe and foreign investment, one of the first in the government to do so, because he believed that China needed Western technology in order to develop. But he also insisted that this foreign trade should be balanced, adding that Beijing would have to conduct marketing efforts to promote Chinese goods abroad. Some criticized him for this openness to the West and for his American education and contacts, saying that he "drank too much American water." His brother, Chaoli, later commented that it was just as well that Chaoding was divorced from his wife, Harriet, for their marriage would have prevented him from playing a major role in the Party. He then married Luo Jingyi, another Chinese student activist who had joined the Communist Party in the United States in the 1920s.

Only after his death were accusations of his membership in the Chinese Communist Party confirmed, but there had long been accusations of radical activity and association with communists. Investigations by the FBI summarized Ji's above-ground activities: From his days at the University of Chicago in the 1920s Ji had worked with and supported communists, and when he returned from China in the 1930s, he was introduced to the Institute of Pacific Relations. He worked on several projects with Philip Jaffe, most prominently on the publications China Today and Amerasia, both of which presented views of China which were sympathetic to the communists. In a 2009 article from the Chinese magazine 瞭望东方周刊 (Oriental Outlook), security official Luo Qingchang commented that Ji's proposal for issuing Chinese gold yuan led to a economic crisis that accelerated the fall of Kuomintang regime. Zhou Enlai also praised Ji, saying he "cannot be stained in mud, especially during the time of secret work".

In 1916 Ji Chaoding 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, Ji Chaoding 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 graduated from the University of Chicago in 1926 with a bachelor's degree in history. While there he was 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 was in a United Front alliance with the Nationalist Party of Sun Yat-sen, who was popular among American Chinese, and Ji developed a national reputation as a public speaker able to rouse support for China with his anti-imperialist speeches to local 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 Communist Party of China. Their membership was kept secret in order to avoid surveillance or deportation, to allow them to work in American Chinese communities where the Nationalists were strong, and to keep their options open when they returned to China.

Ji Chaoding (Chinese: 冀朝鼎; Wade–Giles: Chi Ch'ao-ting; 1903–1963) was a Chinese economist and political activist. His book Key Economic Areas in Chinese History (1936) influenced the conceptualization of Chinese history in the West by emphasizing geographic and economic factors as the basis of dynastic power.

The Ji family was prominent in Shanxi education and politics. Chaoding's grandfather was a landlord who had a reputation for treating tenants honestly and supplying grain to the poor in times of shortage. His father, Ji Gongquan (冀貢泉; 1882–1967) studied law in Japan, but when the Republican Revolution of 1911 broke out and his government scholarship was suspended, he returned to China rather than accept Japanese government support.