He taught at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s but was let go after he came under criticism for his support of the CCP and because of accusations that he had been a wartime spy for the Soviet Union.
In the 1930s and the 1940s, Bisson wrote prolifically on China, Japan, India, Mongolia, international relations, politics, and economics for the American public in a series of books and pamphlets for the Foreign Policy Association.
He studied the Chinese language and developed a sympathy for the anti-imperialist program of the Kuomintang, but was disheartened when Chiang Kai-shek gained control and crushed the left wing, including communists.
He left Columbia before he could finish the doctoral program, however, to work for the Foreign Policy Association, which had been founded in 1918 to inform the American public about world affairs.
The Board, chaired by Vice President Henry Wallace, competed for influence with other executive offices and was criticized as a refuge for left-wingers.
[citation needed] Bisson worked on plans to disrupt the flow of war supplies to Japan, which called on the knowledge of East Asian economics that he had built up in his research at the Foreign Policy Association.
The historian Howard Schonberger wrote that Bisson "recognized that the war had shattered the hold of the old order, fanned revolutionary fires, and left the United States alone as the dominant outside power in the region.
[11] Bisson drew on the arguments of his friend E.H. Norman, who had written that on the contrary, Japanese authoritarian rule and imperialist expansion had started with the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
[10] Instead, he argued in Pacific Affairs that the new leadership must include men and women who had led unions and farm organizations that had opposed the government; most of them had been imprisoned in 1941.
[12] After two years with IPR, Bisson moved back into government service and served from October 1945 to April 1947 in the occupation of Japan, which was led by General Douglas MacArthur.
The Venona Transcripts were a set of intercepts of Soviet communications made by American government intelligence services during World War II.
The scholar M. Stanton Evans, in his book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America's Enemies, cites Venona documents reading that a "Soviet espionage agent has established friendly relations with T.A.