T.A. Bisson

Thomas Arthur Bisson, who wrote as T. A. Bisson (b. New York City 1900-1979) was an American political writer, journalist, and government official who specialized in East Asian politics and economics. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked for the Foreign Policy Association, the Institute for Pacific Relations and wrote sympathetically about the Communist movement in China. He served in the American government during World War II, then was an officer in the Occupation of Japan. He taught at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s, but was let go after he came under criticism for his left-wing views and accusations that he had been a wartime spy for the Soviet Union.

In the 1930s and 1940s Bisson wrote prolifically on China, Japan, India, Mongolia, international relations, politics, and economics for the American public in a series of books and pamphlets for the Foreign Policy Association. His most prominent book is Zaibatsu Dissolution in Japan (University of California Press, 1954).

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.

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