Heidelberg University
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Open Door Paternalism in Early Cold War U.S. Intelligence on China

  • Date in the past
  • Wednesday, 11 December 2024, 16:00 - 18:00
  • Online
    • Sara Castro (Associate Professor, United States Air Force Academy)

Sara Castro (Associate Professor, United States Air Force Academy) will share her thoughts on early Cold War U.S. intelligence on China:

The first sustained official contact between U.S. officials and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders, the so-called Dixie Mission, was a US Army-led group of U.S. intelligence officials deployed to the CCP base at Yan’an, China in 1944 to investigate opportunities for defeating the Japanese in North China. U.S. officials formed cordial relationships with top CCP leaders. However, interagency rivalries, duplication of efforts, and communication failures limited productive engagement between the United States and the CCP. This paper discusses how early US-CCP engagement suffered from an American tendency toward paternalistic policy approaches and the underdevelopment of norms for U.S. intelligence practices.

Open Door Paternalism in Early Cold War Intelligence on China

For more information about the Research Training Group "Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East”, please go to our website:

RTG 2840

This project has received funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). 

All Dates of the Event 'Enemy Encounters Webinar Series'

Enemy Encounters in East Asia will have a similar geographic scope to the Aftermath webinar series, covering East Asia, but with a broader temporal reach beyond the Imjin War and its aftermath. It will feature speakers from across different academic disciplines working on East Asia, who deal with antagonisms and processes of enemization in their research. Contributing speakers will discuss enmities in East Asia and associated ambivalences as they have historically manifested in the concrete conflicts they are studying. Case studies will include both states and non-state actors like religious and terrorist movements, as well as antagonisms within societies, such as those revolving around gender differences and class conflicts. We will look at how enmity and processes of enemization took shape, evolved over time and influenced identities, perceptions of self and others, as well as state policies. Please find attached the program for the upcoming term at Heidelberg University, covering October 2024 until February 2025. Information about the first session follows below:

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