Allen Suess Whiting (October 27, 1926 – January 11, 2018) was an American political scientist and former government official specializing in the foreign relations of China."Remembering Allen S. Whiting " Political Science, University of Michigan, March 21, 2019.
Whiting was University of Arizona Regents' Professor of Political Science from 1993 to his retirement, having joined the university in 1982. He graduated from Cornell University in 1948, earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1950 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1952. After first joining the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University, he became a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served in several capacities in the U.S. Department of State, including head of the Far Eastern Division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and deputy consul general in Hong Kong. He then taught at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1968–1982. Whiting has been a member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, the Association for Asian Studies, and the International Institute of Strategic Studies.Allen S. Whiting University of Arizona 11/18/2002
Early life and education
Allen Suess Whiting was born to Leo Robert and Viola Allen (née Suess) Whiting in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He graduated from Cornell University in 1948, where he studied with Knight Biggerstaff, and received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1950. In 1952, he received a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Career and major works Whiting was instructor of political science at Northwestern University from 1951 to 1953, but his contract was not renewed when senior colleagues felt that his interest in the Soviet Union and China were politically suspicious. He was unemployed for a time, but received a Ford Foundation grant to study language in Taiwan. While there he contracted polio, whose effects afflicted him for the rest of his life. Between 1955 and 1957 he was assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing. From 1957 to 1961 he was a social scientist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Between 1962 and 1966 he worked for the United States Department of State as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the Far East. From 1966 to 1968 he served as Deputy Consul General in Hong Kong. Whiting continued his academic career as professor of political science at University Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he worked from 1968 to 1982. He was then a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson between 1982 and 1993, and from then a regents professor. He was a director of the Center for East Asian Studies from 1982 to 1993. Whiting also served as a consultant for the Department of State between 1968 and 1988 and as director of the National Committee on the United States-China Relation in New York City from 1977 to 1994. He was an associate of the China Council from 1978 to 1988. From 1983 to 1995 he was president of the Southern Arizona China Council in Tucson and a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington from 1995 to 1996.
Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot? (1958)
His 1958 Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot? includes Whiting's "Soviet Strategy in Sinkiang: 1933-49" (pp. 3–148), which analyzes the background and the international rivalry between Moscow and the Chinese central government in this period, and "Red Failure in Sinkiang," the memoirs of Sheng Shicai, the military ruler of Xinjiang (Sinkiang, as it was spelled at the time), from 1933 to 1949. The book also includes archival material, for instance, Sheng's interrogation and 1943 execution of Mao Zemin, the brother of Mao Zedong.
While studying in Taiwan in 1954, having heard that Sheng had come there with the Nationalist government after the communist victory on the mainland, Whiting inquired as to Sheng's whereabouts and was told that they were "unknown." Whiting then met and interviewed Sheng extensively and edited his memoirs for this book. Whiting also interviewed Nationalist government officials who had dealt with Sheng, Stalin, and Xinjiang, as well as exploring archives in Taiwan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. He received helpful accounts of wartime diplomacy from O. Edmund Clubb, who opened the first American consulate in Urumchi in 1943. Although he thanks Owen Lattimore in the Foreword for adding "another dimension of understanding," Whiting explains that by titling the book "pawn or pivot," he wished to place a different emphasis from Lattimore's 1950 book Pivot of Asia and from those who saw the region as simply a pawn of the neighboring great powers. Taking the advice of a friend, he observed that in chess a "pawn" could also be a "pivot."
Since Xinjiang was an important communication link between Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in Yan'an, Sheng's memoirs illuminate the sometimes angry relations between Stalin and Mao Zedong as well as Sheng's swing away from Moscow to ally with China.
China Crosses the Yalu (1960)
China Crosses the Yalu: the Decision to Enter the Korean War is a monograph based on research for the United States Air Force by the RAND Corporation. Whiting argues that China entered the Korean War reluctantly and to protect its border against a perceived American threat. This view became widely accepted at a time when many other observers saw the People's Republic as irrational and expansionist. William Stueck's 2002 review of scholarship on the Korean War concluded that in its "broad outlines, Whiting's account remains plausible if hardly incontestable."
In 1990 two political scientists at Taiwan's National Chengchi University revisited the question of China's decision. They noted that "Whiting's comprehensive study of China's decision to enter the war, and some of his inferences and conclusions, were closer to the truth than those of most other western analysts"; considering the limited materials he had then from the Chinese side, "probably no one could have done better than he did." But they also saw evidence that Whiting was "deeply biased ideologically, and overlooked many important factors." He assumed that "patron-client relations existed between Stalin and Mao, which "limited the possibilities he could explore," rather than seeing that China's primary concern was for security in the face of a hostile power on their border.
Department of State in the 1960s
Whiting was recruited from his position in the RAND Corporation in late 1961 and became head of the Far Eastern Division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.John Prados (National Security Archive Fellow), "Introduction: The Mouse That Roared: State Department Intelligence in the Vietnam War," National Security Archives
In 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis was breaking out, Whiting and his group correctly predicted that border clashes between India and China would escalate into the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and that China would initiate and then inflict a humiliating military defeat on America's ally, India. When President Kennedy then sent Averell Harriman to India to keep relations calm, Whiting and his group, including a specialist in Tibetan affairs, were dispatched with them. In the words of a National Security Archive history, Whiting's group "embarrassed the U.S. military, and helped Harriman's mission, because their excellent maps ... were much better than anything the military had and formed the basis for policy discussions."
Whiting had responsibility for gathering and analyzing intelligence on the People's Republic of China at a time when there were no diplomatic relations and direct access was not possible but calculating China's intentions was important in making military decisions in the Vietnam War. In his memoirs, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara complained that he was hampered in decision-making because there were no diplomats who were as familiar with China as those who were familiar with Russia. Reviewers took exception to this claim. Roger Hilsman, who had been assistant Secretary of State in the Kennedy administration, pointed to Whiting as just such a Chinese-speaking expert. The problem, he said, was not that the department did not have such experts but that McNamara would not listen to them.
Hilsman's successor, Thomas L. Hughes, wrote in his own review of McNamara's book that Whiting regularly briefed McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Whiting, said Hughes, warned Pentagon officials in August 1964 that North Vietnam would retaliate against American air bases after the bombings of Hanoi.For Whiting's retrospective view of this work see, INR Estimates and the Vietnam War Whiting to Hughes. February 10, 1969 Whiting recommended that aircraft be moved to Thailand or provided with extra security. Neither action was taken and the planes suffered heavy damage when the bases were attacked. Hughes also describes Whiting as "a major influence on both Dean Rusk and George Ball in the 1960s as well as on Henry Kissinger and his opening to China in the 1970s."
Whiting's State Department group was often at odds with the CIA and military, whose assessments of the intentions of China and the North Vietnamese often contended that the application of force, such as escalated bombing, would induce Hanoi to make concessions or come to the bargaining table. Whiting's group considered those views unrealistic and predicted that the Chinese would be willing to take military action if pushed. Whiting later conceded that in the end, the fear of Chinese intervention may have gone too far, although Chinese intervention may have been prevented by the split in the leadership and China's turn inward at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1965. His State Department intelligence group then correctly predicted that China would limit itself to low-risk support of North Vietnam, such as allowing the use of air bases in southwest China. Whiting found on a trip to Vietnam, however, that high-level U.S. Navy intelligence estimates of Chinese capabilities did not include the existence of these airbases, which Whiting knew to exist. He was warned that some disgruntled fighter pilots identified him as a source of resistance to the air war and that he might be in danger of bodily harm.
As the American involvement in Vietnam became deeper and more contentious, Whiting became a frequent adviser to George W. Ball, then deputy undersecretary of state, whom President Lyndon Johnson consulted as a counterweight to more hawkish advisers, and also to Averell Harriman. But in 1966, when McGeorge Bundy, Whiting's direct contact in the White House, was replaced by the more hawkish Walt Rostow, Whiting accepted the position of deputy consul in the US consulate in Hong Kong.
In 1968, he became professor of political science at the University of Michigan, where he taught until 1982.Allen S. Whiting University of Michigan, Faculty History Project. However, Whiting remained heavily involved in State Department affairs, even traveling to the summer home of Richard Nixon in San Clemente to personally brief him about the threat of the Sino-Soviet border conflict becoming a war.