China Lobby Intensifies Campaign After Nationalist Retreat to Taiwan - Alfred Kohlberg Funds Propaganda

The Chinese Nationalist government relocates its capital to Taiwan on December 8, 1949, after Communist forces complete their victory in the Chinese Civil War, intensifying the “China Lobby’s” campaign to shape U.S. foreign policy in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. The China Lobby refers to a coalition of American politicians, journalists, missionaries, and business interests who actively seek to influence U.S. policy on behalf of the Nationalist Republic of China (ROC) and in opposition to Communist China, funded by the Kuomintang through T.V. Soong, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals and Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law.

Key American figures include publisher Henry R. Luce (whose Time-Life empire consistently promotes the Nationalist cause), Alfred Kohlberg (a wealthy New York importer who becomes the lobby’s most aggressive propagandist), Frederick C. McKee (Pittsburgh manufacturer and philanthropist), and Republican Representative Walter H. Judd. Kohlberg chairs the American China Policy Association and personally subsidizes pro-Chiang magazines The China Monthly and Plain Talk as outlets to denounce U.S. China policy. Articles from The China Monthly frequently enter the congressional record and are cited as sources of China Lobby propaganda in congressional hearings.

The lobby’s “loss of China” narrative blames disloyal Americans for preventing Chiang from receiving aid to defeat Communists, claiming American boys die in Korea because liberals betrayed China. This conspiracy theory becomes a central McCarthy-era theme. From 1951 to 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy - advised by Kohlberg, columnist George Sokolsky, and Roy Cohn - uses China Lobby accusations to drive able China specialists from the State Department and Foreign Service. The lobby’s attack on scholar Owen Lattimore begins after Kohlberg’s unsuccessful attempt to control the Institute for Pacific Relations, with the smear campaign continuing for nearly five years.

In response to accusations of abandoning Chiang, the State Department releases the “China White Paper” in 1949, a massive volume of documents justifying its disengagement policy by emphasizing U.S. non-responsibility for the Nationalist regime’s fall. The effort fails, and the Republican Party exploits the “loss of China” as a political weapon. The China Lobby demonstrates how foreign governments can manipulate U.S. policy through funding American propagandists, cultivating sympathetic media coverage, and weaponizing anti-Communist hysteria. The lobby establishes templates for foreign influence operations that persist through subsequent decades, including funding think tanks, subsidizing friendly publications, and coordinating with domestic political allies to advance foreign government interests under national security pretexts.