Thomas Arthur Bisson

Bisson graduated from Rutgers University in 1923, then went as a Presbyterian missionary to teach English and Classics in Anhui province, China, and then taught at Yenching University in Beijing. He studied the Chinese language and developed a sympathy for the anti-imperalist program of the Chinese Nationalist Party, but was disheartened when Chiang Kai-shek gained control and crushed the left-wing and the Communists. Bisson left China in 1928 to enroll at Columbia University. He left Columbia before he finished 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. He later explained that at that time he had a wife and two children: "I went into politics to make a living."

Between 1934 and 1937 Bisson, under the pseudonym "Frederick Spencer", wrote dozens of articles supporting the communist cause in China in China Today, a magazine edited by Philip Jaffe, a left-wing businessman and frequent collaborator with the American Communist Party. Financed by the FPA and the Rockefeller Foundation he travelled in China, including a 1937 automobile trip he and several friends, including Owen Lattimore and Philip Jaffe, made from Beijing to Yan’an to interview Mao Zedong and other Communist Party leaders. His book Japan in China (1938) was a detailed account of the recent Japanese invasion based on his own extensive travels in China. Although Japan in China drew on his trip, Bisson did not publish his detailed account of the Yan’an visit until 1973, immediately after President Richard Nixon went to China. This book, Yenan in June 1937: Talks with the Communist Leaders is his journal of a harrowing journey, complete with photographs of the Communist leaders and of the travelers’ canvas-topped touring car being towed out of mud by oxen and by local villagers.

Bisson was recruited into government service in 1942, within a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. His assignment was the Board of Economic Warfare, charged with advising the government on how the mobilization and redirecting of economic resources could affect the war effort throughout the globe. The Board, chaired by Vice President Henry Wallace, competed for influence with other executive offices and was criticized as a refuge for left-wingers. He worked on plans to disrupt the flow of war supplies to Japan, a topic which called on the knowledge of East Asian economics he had built up in his research at the Foreign Policy Association.

In April 1943 Bisson was one of the officials called to testify before Representative Martin Dies’s congressional committee. Bisson’s positive assessments of the Chinese Communists came under fire. Bisson defended himself, saying that American army leaders now also saw the need for Soviet support against fascism, and that he had come to Washington at a financial sacrifice because he was a "loyal American citizen". The Board of Economic Welfare became controversial even within the Democratic Party, and Bisson left Washington to become Research Associate of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) in New York, and Associate Editor of their journal, Pacific Affairs.

During his two years at IPR, Bisson published articles, book reviews, editorials, and books that criticized American policies and argued that they held back the hopes of Asian peoples for self-determination; their claims were legitimate and had been thwarted by domestic militarists and western imperialists. His 1943 article in Far Eastern Survey attacked the Guomindang in China as "feudal" and asserted that the Chinese Communists were more effective. The Communists were practicing something like “bourgeois democracy” in an agrarian setting and “by no stretch of the imagination” could they be regarded as genuine communists.He revised American’s Far Eastern Policy, a survey that he published at IPR in 1940.

At the end of the war, policy circles debated what course the United States should pursue in the Occupation of Japan. 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." Bisson strongly opposed the group in the State Department known as the "Japan Crowd," led by former ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. This group urged that the Occupation purge right-wing elements who were responsible for the war but allow the Emperor to remain on the throne to lead democratic forces, which would allow the American Occupation to be short. Grew's view assumed that militarists and extremists had derailed a viable Japanese democracy, which could therefore be put back on track after the war. 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 of 1868. Bisson opposed keeping the Emperor on the throne, which Grew favored in order to maintain stability. Bisson and his friends proposed to eradicate the zaibatsu, the conglomerates that had dominated the economy and supported military rule. 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 whom had been imprisoned in 1941.

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. Bisson was first a member of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and then an economic analyst for General Headquarters's Government Section. He was part of teams working on the dissolution of the Zaibatsu, passing the new Japanese Constitution, and enforcing the economic stabilization plan. He came to believe that the leaders of the post-war Japanese governments were reactionaries who oppposed both the democratic features of the constitution and the dissolution of the zaibatsu. These beliefs brought him in conflict with MacArthur and Major General Charles A. Willoughby, head of MacArthur's security investigation, who charged that Bisson had been part of the "leftist infiltration" into the Occupation.

With backing from his associates at IPR, he received an appointment in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1948. But because Bisson had never completed his doctorate, his faculty appointment was temporary, subject to periodic review. He soon came under attack from Republican politicians within and beyond California for his sympathy for the Chinese Communists. Bisson was called to testify in 1952 before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee chaired by Senator Patrick McCarran that had investigated the Foreign Service officers known as the China Hands.

Bisson used his experience in Japan for another book published by IPR, Prospects for Democracy in Japan.and for the major work of his Berkeley years, Zaibatsu Dissolution in Japan.The review in American Political Science Review praised Bisson's ability to tell a technical story clearly and said the book was a "thorough piece of research based on English language sources." But the review continued that Bisson "enters a controversial field" when he argues that the zaibatsu should be nationalized. The review noted that the Bisson gave both the pros and cons of nationalization, but objected to Bisson's argument that nationalization would be successful because it was based on Japanese collectivistic social patterns, as shown in the success of the railroad and communications systems, which had been nationalized for many years.

Bisson remained at Berkeley through 1953-54, but his appointment was not renewed, perhaps because the administration was defending only tenured faculty from political attack. He finally found employment at Western College for Women, a religious college in Oxford, Ohio, and “never again,” in historian Howard Schonberger’s words, “had the time or the facilities for further major research.” Bisson did speak out politically from time to time, and was an adamant opponent of the Vietnam War.He then moved to Renison University College, the affiliated college of University of Waterloo that emphasies social and global engagement, where he taught from 1970 to 1973.

Bisson died in 1979.

The Venona Transcripts were a set of intercepts of Soviet communications made by American government intelligence services during World War II. These translated transcripts include a report to Soviet intelligence that Bisson shared four documents with Asia specialists at IPR, including Joseph Bernstein, who was an agent of the Soviet Union.The documents came from the Board of Economic Warfare. 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. Bisson," and concluded that Bisson "not only touted the cause of the Red Chinese" but "passed confidential official data to a Soviet intelligence agent." The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr go farther. They conclude from the fact that Soviet intelligence mentioned Bisson by name and gave him the code name “Arthur” that he was a “spy.”

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•  CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link)
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