Allen S. Whiting
Allen Suess Whiting (October 27, 1926 – January 11, 2018) was an American political scientist and former government official specializing in the foreign relations of China.
Whiting also interviewed Nationalist government officials who had dealt with Sheng, Stalin, and Xinjiang, as well as exploring archives in Taiwan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo.
[6] China Crosses the Yalu: the Decision to Enter the Korean War is a monograph based on research for the United States Air Force by the RAND Corporation.
William Stueck's 2002 review of scholarship on the Korean War concluded that in its "broad outlines, Whiting's account remains plausible if hardly incontestable.
They noted that "Whiting's comprehensive study of China's decision to enter the war, and some of his inferences and conclusions, were closer to the truth than those of most other western analysts"; considering the limited materials he had then from the Chinese side, "probably no one could have done better than he did."
He assumed that "patron-client relations existed between Stalin and Mao, which "limited the possibilities he could explore," rather than seeing that China's primary concern was for security in the face of a hostile power on their border.
When President Kennedy then sent Averell Harriman to India to keep relations calm, Whiting and his group, including a specialist in Tibetan affairs, were dispatched with them.
[11] Whiting, said Hughes, warned Pentagon officials in August 1964 that North Vietnam would retaliate against American air bases after the bombings of Hanoi.
[11] Hughes also describes Whiting as "a major influence on both Dean Rusk and George Ball in the 1960s as well as on Henry Kissinger and his opening to China in the 1970s.
"[13] Whiting's State Department group was often at odds with the CIA and military, whose assessments of the intentions of China and the North Vietnamese often contended that the application of force, such as escalated bombing, would induce Hanoi to make concessions or come to the bargaining table.
[14] However, Whiting remained heavily involved in State Department affairs, even traveling to the summer home of Richard Nixon in San Clemente to personally brief him about the threat of the Sino-Soviet border conflict becoming a war.
Instead, Whiting testified that the Soviets had known the phones were tapped and intentionally discussed matters they wanted the British and American governments to intercept.
Whiting portrays China as a "cautious and conservative power that uses force as a last resort only after repeated signaling has failed to deter its adversary."
[18] John W. Garver writing in 2005 noted that Whiting and the British journalist Neville Maxwell reached the same broad conclusion: "China's resort to war in 1962 was largely a function of perceived Indian aggression."
Donald Klein, reviewing the book in Journal of Asian Studies says that Whiting "describes these events in masterful fashion" and "never pushes his evidence to prove some preconceived notion."
Whiting granted anonymity to his subjects in order to understand how much the Chinese were publicly displaying indignation as a bargaining tactic and how much this sense of historic wrong affected policy.
What emerges from Whiting's analysis, Klein continues, is the "indelible point" of the "depth and fervor of China's historic memory of Japan's past predatory policies" and the "special intensity" concerning the Nanjing Massacre of 1937.
Although some Chinese officials admired Japan's economic success, Whiting's off-the-record interviews made clear that the feelings of enmity were serious and sincere.
The editors note in their concluding remarks that Whiting has "long argued that China’s government pursues its international goals with basic rationality," even those "ideologically fundamentalist actors, like Mao himself."
