Chaoding's grandfather was a landlord who had a reputation for treating tenants honestly and supplying grain to the poor in times of shortage.

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.

[4] 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.

Their membership was kept secret in order to avoid surveillance or deportation, to allow them to work in Chinese American communities where the Nationalists were strong, and to keep their options open when they returned to China.

[10] 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 Communist International (Comintern) agent Willi Munzenberg.

[9] 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.

[12] When Ji returned to New York for graduate study in economics at Columbia University, he joined the central committee of the CPUSA Chinese Bureau, and wrote a series of articles for the Daily Worker under the name Richard Doonping.

[11] 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 wrote a regular column, "Far Eastern Economic Notes," which used materials supplied from Party sources in China.

To avoid being coerced into joining the government, Ji Gongquan and his family fled to Hankow, which became the temporary national capital after the fall of Nanjing.

Chaoding had planned to go to the wartime communist capital in Yan'an, but Zhou Enlai asked him to instead accompany his family to the United States, where he could present sympathetic information while not revealing his political allegiance.

One senior Nationalist Party official, Chen Lifu, later complained that the intelligence agencies knew of Ji's communist connections but that Finance Minister H.H.

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.

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.

[1] Joseph Needham organized a memorial service in Cambridge, England, and asked Owen Lattimore and other prominent leaders to speak.

"[22] In Beijing, Ji was given a state service attended by Fu Zuoyi and high officials at which Zhou Enlai gave an encomium.

[24] 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.

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.

[28] 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."

"[30] 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.