He returned briefly to China to travel with a friend, Winthrop Knowlton, in the summer of 1948, when Mao Zedong's revolution was gathering force.
[3] As a member of the Democratic Party, Thomson was an assistant to Senator Chester Bowles of Connecticut during the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign of 1956.
in the April 1968 Atlantic Magazine examined and condemned American involvement in Vietnam in terms of State Department bureaucratic politics, the purging of expertise in the McCarthy era, and Democratic administration remembrance of the "loss of China" charges.
The book describes the efforts of American oriented reformers to provide China with effective political and social change, especially the Rural Reconstruction Movement.
One reviewer noted that "Using a clear and often pretty prose style, Thomson skillfully blends his own deep and personal interest in the fate of these projects with a willingness to examine the political contradictions the work entailed.
[7] After his return to Cambridge, he supported the efforts of John Fairbank and others to form the Committee on American-East Asian Relations under the aegis of the American Historical Association.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), a series of essays from a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, which assessed the state of the field of American relations with Asia.