Institute of Pacific Relations
Trans-Pacific policy institute (1925–1960), the Pacific-rim sister of the RIIA and CFR
Also known as: IPR, Institute of Pacific Relations
Founded in 1925 in Honolulu, the Institute of Pacific Relations was the third corner of the Anglo-American foreign-policy triangle whose other two corners were the RIIA and the CFR. It was, in Quigley's account, the principal institutional clearing-house through which American thinking on East Asia was formed from the late 1920s until McCarthy-era Senate investigations between 1951 and 1953 effectively destroyed it. Quigley's documentation in Tragedy and Hope (esp. pp. 944–949) is one of the most balanced surviving accounts of the IPR — defending its scholarship against the more lurid charges while acknowledging the small-group sociology that gave the China Lobby's contentions "considerable truth" (T&H 948).
Founding and Programme
The IPR was founded in Honolulu in 1925 at the initiative of YMCA and Christian-missionary networks active in the Pacific, expanded almost immediately to include British, Australian, New Zealand, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Canadian national councils, and was funded principally by the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a roster of corporate donors with Pacific interests. Like Chatham House and the CFR, it operated through a journal (Pacific Affairs, edited from 1934 by Owen Lattimore), study groups, regular international conferences, and a sponsored monograph series. From the mid-1930s the IPR's published research provided the principal English-language analytic literature on Manchurian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Korean affairs, with Lattimore's work on Mongolia and inner Asia the most prominent.
The Quigley Framing: A Small-Group Sociology
Quigley's analysis is sociological. "Because of language barriers, the number of people who could be 'experts' on the Far East was limited. Most of these… were children or relatives of people who originally became concerned with China as missionaries. This gave them a double character: they learned the language and they had a feeling of spiritual mission about China" (T&H 949). Add to this the small numbers, the disproportionate share of research and travel funding, and the result was "a small group who knew each other personally, met fairly regularly, had a fairly established consensus (based on conversations and reading each other's books) on Far East questions, and generally had certain characteristics of a clique" (T&H 949). The IPR was the institutional vehicle of this clique. Quigley is therefore neither a defender of the China Lobby's charges nor a dismisser of them — he treats the IPR as a legitimate scholarly institution whose social structure produced a more uniform interpretation of the Chinese Communist movement than the evidence warranted.
McCarthy, the McCarran Subcommittee, and the IPR's Destruction
Tragedy and Hope documents the McCarthy-era assault on the IPR in detail (T&H 944–949). Senator McCarthy's accusations against Lattimore on the Senate floor on 20 February 1950 — that he was "the chief architect of our Far Eastern policy" and that he had "plunged headlong forward" without evidence — were, in Quigley's flat verdict, "a fraud and a hoax" (T&H 946). The 1951–1952 hearings of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee under Pat McCarran were more substantial documentary exercises; they accumulated a vast record of personal correspondence between IPR researchers and identified Communists. The Subcommittee's report concluded the IPR had been "a vehicle used by the Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policies toward Communist objectives." Quigley accepts that "there is considerable truth in the China Lobby's contention that the American experts on China were organized into a single interlocking group which had a general consensus of a Leftish character" (T&H 948) — but rejects the inference that this consensus was caused by Communist penetration rather than by the structural features he identifies.
The Triangle: RIIA, CFR, IPR
Within Quigley's institutional architecture, the IPR completes a triangle whose other vertices are Chatham House and the CFR. The three shared trustees, donors (the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan-aligned foundations), and intellectual orientation. Their joint product was an integrated Anglophone analytic apparatus covering Europe, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. The IPR's collapse in the 1950s — its loss of tax-exempt status in 1955, the secession of national councils, its formal dissolution as an international body in 1960 — represented, in Quigley's reading, not a defeat of "the Establishment" in any conspiratorial sense but the destruction of a real institutional capacity for serious East Asian analysis at the very moment when American engagement in Korea, Indochina, and Taiwan made such analysis most essential. Many of its functions migrated to the CFR's expanded Asia programme, to area-studies centers at universities (Harvard's Fairbank Center, Columbia's East Asian Institute), and to the new private foundations of the 1960s.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 944 Quigley
There is considerable truth in the China Lobby's contention that the American experts on China were organized into a single interlocking group.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 946 Quigley
The Tydings subcommittee report, issued in July, condemned McCarthy for 'a fraud and a hoax' on the Senate.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 948 Quigley
the American experts on China were organized into a single interlocking group which had a general consensus of a Leftish character.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 949 Quigley
a small group who knew each other personally, met fairly regularly, had a fairly established consensus… and generally had certain characteristics of a clique.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 949 Quigley
Lattimore, for example, because he knew Mongolian and the other [experts] did not, tended to become everybody's expert on Mongolia.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1335 Quigley
Field, F. V., 944, 946 (link between Communists and Institute of Pacific Relations), 947.