Robert A. Kapp
March - April 2001 Issue:
Cover by Benjamin Hurd
We lose something important when figures like Leonard Woodcock and Arthur Hummel depart
The work of ambassadors Woodcock and Hummel provides food for thought to a new generation of businesspeople, legislators, and American leaders today.
We have lost two extraordinary Americans, significant contributors to the making of modern US-China relations, in a matter of weeks. The China Business Review notes in this issue the passing of ambassadors Leonard F. Woodcock and Arthur W. Hummel Jr. Two eminent China specialists contribute their thoughts on these departed friends in our magazine (see In Memoriam.).
The work ambassadors Woodcock and Hummel performed for the United States in the early years of diplomatic relations with China provides food for thought to a new generation of businesspeople, legislators, and American leaders today.
Leonard Woodcock became our first ambassador to the People's Republic of China when the United States and China normalized diplomatic relations at the beginning of 1979.
Woodcock, a commanding presence in American organized labor for much of his career, was born in 1911, the year that China's imperial system of government collapsed after more than 2,000 years. Between the time of his birth and the time he presented his credentials as American ambassador in Beijing, China had been engulfed by warlordism, civil war, 14 years of Japanese invasion followed by 4 more years of all-out civil war, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the exhilaration of political unification, war with the United States in Korea, alliance and disillusionment with the Soviet Union, the excesses and social tragedies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the near-divine dominance of Mao Zedong, and the sudden lurch into the post-Mao reform era.
Arthur Hummel was our second ambassador to the PRC, serving from 1981 to 1985. Hummel's life took a different trajectory. Born in North China, his parents were Congregationalist missionary educators. After childhood in China and more rearing in the States, Hummel was back in China when the Pacific War broke out. That earned him internment in the famous Japanese holding camp for foreigners at Weixian in Shandong Province, from which he escaped to join Nationalist guerrillas for the last two years of the war. By 1950 he was in the State Department, where his career led gradually through ambassadorships in Burma, Ethiopia, and Pakistan, and the department's top Asia-Pacific job, before taking him to our embassy in Beijing.
Hummel was born in the warlord era: China lacked any functional central government, foreign forces operated at will within its boundaries, and extraterritoriality ensured foreigners' immunity from Chinese law. His childhood return to the United States coincided with the Nationalist Party's partial military reunification of the country under a regime based in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. He came of age during China's vicious civil war, and entered the State Department as the "Who Lost China?" debacle leapt from Congress to the media to the executive branch, as these things sometimes do. As a young public servant, he saw at close range how the American system could nearly devour itself over the politics of China policy. He stayed the course, and rose to the heights of American diplomatic service.
Leonard Woodcock and Arthur Hummel, from my limited acquaintance with one and longer acquaintance with the other, shared a number of characteristics that Americans of a later generation dealing with China would do well to embrace, in any forms of public service:
They were dignified, quiet, and economical of expression. We will, I'll wager, never meet anyone who saw Leonard or Arthur shoot from the lip.
They were intensely interested in China because of its intrinsic significance, as well as its implications for US policy. They "engaged" personally, deeply, and energetically with China and with Chinese people.
They were immune to ma
nipulation. Listening to Arthur's clear-eyed analyses, which penetrated the fog of both American and Chinese political posturing, was one of the great pleasures of life. And Leonard Woodcock did not ascend to leadership in organized labor and in American diplomacy by being credulous in the face of designing overseas negotiating adversaries or domestic polemicists.
They deeply believed that the development of productive, stable, and expanded cooperation between the United States and China was in the most basic interest of the American people and the Chinese people. This sounds like a stock cliche, but in fact it is true. Perhaps Leonard Woodcock came to this from the depth of his understanding of the needs and the dignity of laboring Americans. Arthur, I surmise from knowing him and knowing something of his China background, had as well a sense of the dignity and the hardships of the ordinary people of China that undergirded his judgment and his instincts in representing the American nation to China.
I suppose one might conclude that Leonard Woodcock had outlived his era, and that his perception of the seminal importance of stronger cooperation between the United States and China was somehow passe; that he was "out of touch," as the saying goes. Woodcock was dismissed, incorrectly, by his successors in the labor community as being an anach ronism, thanks to his writing from his sickbed in 2000:
Democracy, including rights for workers, is an evolutionary process. Isolation and containment will not promote improved rights for a people. Rather, working together and from within a society will, over time, promote improved conditions. The US-China WTO agreement will speed up the evolutionary process in China....
It is possible as well to reflect on Arthur Hummel's lifelong involvement with China and come to either of two familiar, equally mistaken conclusions about China and our relations with the PRC.
The first is that "That was then"; that history doesn't matter; that the China we deal with today is something new on the earth, full of unprecedented and inscrutable novelty, a sui generis phenomenon in world affairs and for that reason a potentially hostile and mortal challenge to America, both militarily and ideologically, that requires emergency preparations from this day forth.
The second conclusion is that, looking at China's travails today, "China has not changed," as we hear over and over again. Same old tyranny; same old corruption; same old lack of stable legal institutions; same old social and political inequities; same old overtaxation of the peasants; same old folk superstitions; same old bureaucratic opacity; same old combination of pride and hypersensitivity; same old dreams of glory; same old "rule of man" ins tead of rule of law. (Exactly which "China" has not changed depends on the critic: Second century BC Han Dynasty China to one, late imperial China to another, Korean War China to yet others, Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution China to still more.)
But neither of those conclusions by itself is right, and neither is the basis for a confident steering of the American ship of state in relation to China.
Time moves on. Elders depart. Fresh faces appear. In the year 2000, 65 percent of the members of the US House of Representatives had served only since 1992 or later; in the new House, 48 percent have been in office for six years or less. Barely half of all US Senators have been in office longer than five years. Put another way, more than a third of the members of the present Congress have been in their posts for four years or less. With new arrivals come energy, enthusiasm, and a particular kind of fire that helps the American political system to retain its vitality, on domestic and foreign policy issues alike. But a sense of how today's decisions rest in a larger temporal framework is harder to come by.
We lose something important when figures like Leonard Woodcock and Arthur Hummel depart. We need their calmness, their skepticism of flaming rhetoric, their demonstrated ability to "count to 10 first," their manifest self-knowledge, and their broader perspectives on what makes people, societies, and governments--American and Chinese--tick. As we welcome our new legislators and government leaders to Washington, it is worth spending a few minutes reflecting on the character of these departed friends, and hoping that our newest leaders and representatives will embody their wisdom.
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