A. Doak Barnett

Arthur Doak Barnett (8 October 1921, Shanghai – 17 March 1999 Washington, D.C.), known as A. Doak Barnett, was an American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, he organized public outreach programs and lobbied the United States government to put those relations on a new basis.

Barnett taught at Columbia University 1961-1969, then went to the Brookings Institution in 1969. In 1982 he was named the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of Chinese Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

Barnett was the son of Eugene and Bertha Barnett. His father worked in Shanghai for the Chinese National YMCA and the family did not return to the United States until 1936. The young Barnett graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1942, with a degree in international relations. He spent World War II in the United States Marine Corps, advancing from private to lieutenant while serving in the United States and in the Pacific.

After the war, he earned an M.A. degree in international relations at Yale and a certificate from the Yale Institute of Far Eastern Languages in 1947. That year he returned to Asia as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, and as a correspondent for Chicago Daily News. He traveled throughout China, starting from Xi'an, in the Northwest, where he interviewed the warlord Yan Xishan; then lived for a time in a poor village in Sichuan; and rode on horseback to the regions of western Sichuan inhabited by Tibetans, sometimes finding that hard-boiled eggs were the only sanitary food. He chronicled the devastating conflicts of the Chinese Civil War. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists were pitted against Mao's People's Liberation Army, which he saw enter Peiping in 1949. In 1950-51, Barnett served as a public affairs officer in the American Consulate in Hong Kong, helping to analyze China's internal politics and to draft recommendations for propaganda campaigns. Beginning in 1952, he spent four years as an associate of the American Universities Field Staff writing accounts of current developments in China from a base in Hong Kong.

...
Wikipedia