John Carter Vincent - Wartime Activities

Wartime Activities

Vincent was among the China Hands who wanted to gather intelligence from and provide materiel to the Communist Armies, then at least theoretically under Chiang's command, as part of the Allied coalition for a future invasion of Japan. When he accompanied Vice-President Henry Wallace on a state visit to the Soviet Union and Chongqing in June, 1944, he helped to persuade the Generalissimo to finally grant permission for the Dixie Mission, which opened contact with the Communist base areas. Vincent and the China Hands also argued that the Chinese Communists had their own genuine domestic roots that might trump any ideological loyalty to the USSR, as was occurring at the time with Tito's Yugoslavia. The defenders of the China Hands argued that it was exactly this perspective in China policy that Nixon and Kissinger began to implement in 1972.