Taylor, George Edward, 1905-2000

George Edward Taylor (1905-2000) was a scholar of Chinese studies and director of the Far Eastern and Russian Institute at the University of Washington from 1946 to 1969. Considered one of the founders of modern Chinese studies in the United States, Taylor recruited internationally known scholars of the Soviet Union, China, Japan, and other countries to the institute in the 1940s and 1950s, and helped attract extensive federal and foundation support for international studies at the university. As deputy director of the U.S. Office of War Information for the Pacific Region during World War II, he established the Foreign Morale Analysis Division, which tapped the expertise of leading social scientists to study Japanese value systems in order to formulate psychological warfare and military policy against the Japanese, as well as policy toward the Japanese surrender. After the war, Taylor spoke out against the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, arguing that it was not based on evidence of Japanese intentions. Taylor was an outspoken opponent of U.S. recognition of the communist government of China in the 1950s and 1960s, and a supporter of U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

American historian and political scientist; director, Far Eastern and Russian Institute, University of Washington, 1946-1969.

Biographical/Historical Note

American historian and political scientist; director, Far Eastern and Russian Institute, University of Washington, 1946-1969.

George Edward Taylor (1905-2000) was a scholar of Chinese studies and director of the Far Eastern and Russian Institute at the University of Washington from 1946 to 1969. Considered one of the founders of modern Chinese studies in the United States, Taylor recruited internationally known scholars of the Soviet Union, China, Japan, and other countries to the institute in the 1940s and 1950s, and helped attract extensive federal and foundation support for international studies at the university. As deputy director of the U.S. Office of War Information for the Pacific Region during World War II, he established the Foreign Morale Analysis Division, which tapped the expertise of leading social scientists to study Japanese value systems in order to formulate psychological warfare and military policy against the Japanese, as well as policy toward the Japanese surrender. After the war, Taylor spoke out against the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, arguing that it was not based on evidence of Japanese intentions. Taylor was an outspoken opponent of U.S. recognition of the communist government of China in the 1950s and 1960s, and a supporter of U.S. policy in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

George Taylor was born in Coventry, England, on December 13, 1905, and received his bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in history and politics from the University of Birmingham. He received a doctor of letters degree from the University of Birmingham in 1957. Taylor first came to the United States in 1928 on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship to study at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University. Awarded a Harvard-Yenching fellowship to study in China, he studied in Peking from 1930 to 1932. From 1933 to 1936, he was professor of international relations at the Central Political Institute in Nanking under the government of Chiang Kai-shek. He married Roberta Stevens White in 1933.

Taylor lived in London for a year (1936-37) before returning to China to teach at Yenching University near Peking. The Japanese invaded Northern China in the same year, but the university remained independent until after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Taylor spent the summer of 1938 traveling with the Eighth Route Army, a Chinese Communist guerilla force, in the provinces of Hopei and Shansi. He wrote a series of articles about the experience that were later published in the Manchester Guardian . During this period Taylor supported resistance to the Japanese by smuggling medical supplies from Peking to central Hopei, where they were transferred to Chinese guerillas. In the spring of 1939, he accepted an offer to become chair of the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Washington. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen on May 11, 1943, in Richmond, Virginia.

In December 1942, Taylor took a leave of absence from the university to work for the Office of War Information as a Far East specialist. As deputy director in charge of Pacific operations, he concentrated on psychological warfare against Japan. He organized the Foreign Morale Analysis Division for the study of Japanese value systems, recruiting a team of 25 distinguished anthropologists and other social scientists. After the war, anthropologist Ruth Benedict drew upon the division’s work to write The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an analysis of Japanese culture. From 1945 to 1946, Taylor was director of the Office of Information and Cultural Relations for the Far East at the State Department. In this capacity, he wrote documents for the agency that would become the United States Information Service.

Taylor returned to the University of Washington in 1946 and became director of the Far Eastern and Russian Institute, a position he held until 1969. During his academic career, he was active in several national organizations and the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships for the study of Asia. In 1942 and 1943 he was associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations while he did research in New York City. In 1948 Taylor took a leave of absence from the University of Washington to teach at the National War College. In subsequent years he lectured frequently there, as well as at the Army War College, Air War College, and Naval War College. He was consultant to the Institute of Asian Studies at the University of the Philippines in 1955 and 1956 and visiting professor at the University of the Philippines in 1956. From 1959 to 1963, he was chair of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. He remained a committee member through 1969.

George Taylor was also associated for many years with the China Dynastic Histories Project. The project was begun in the 1930s in Peking by German scholar Karl Wittfogel with the goal of translating significant Chinese dynastic histories into English and publishing the texts with critical and explanatory commentary. Taylor was a member of the project’s advisory committee when it was headquartered at Columbia University in the 1940s. Taylor was an important friend to Wittfogel and the history project in the 1950s and 1960s, when Wittfogel was ostracized by many Asia scholars for having testified against Owen Lattimore, a China scholar who was accused of being a Soviet spy by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950. Taylor brought Wittfogel and the China History Project to the University of Washington and provided funding for the project through the 1960s.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed Taylor to the Board of Foreign Scholarships, which controlled the Fulbright programs and set policies for other activities of the assistant secretary for cultural affairs of the Department of State. President Johnson reappointed him in 1966. Taylor served on State Department advisory panels on China and the Far East in 1967 and 1968, and on an advisory research committee for the American Enterprise Institute in 1969 and 1970.

Taylor was an outspoken supporter of the Chinese Nationalists and a critic of the Chinese Communists during the post-war Cold War years, and he continued to oppose U.S. recognition of mainland China in the 1960s. He also spoke out in defense of U.S. policy in Vietnam. In 1973, he wrote an editorial rebutting a statement written by Harvard sinologist John K. Fairbank and signed by twelve members of the University of Washington faculty that condemned the U.S. bombing of Hanoi.

Taylor’s major publications include The Struggle for North China (1940), which was based on his observation, during the war, of Japanese methods of occupation in Northern China; America in the New Pacific (1942), The Philippines and the United States: Problems of Partnership (1964), The New United Nations: A Reappraisal of United States Policies (with Ben Cashman, 1965), and The Far East in the Modern World (with Franz Michael, 1956). He collaborated with George Savage, a member of the English department at the University of Washington, to write a play, The Phoenix and the Dwarfs, about the impact of the Japanese occupation on a North China village. In 1942 he wrote Changing China, a pamphlet used in the training of U.S. troops during World War II. Taylor was also credited with establishing interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington and with promoting the study of non-western cultures in the U.S. after World War II. He retired from the University of Washington in 1975.

From 1976 to 1987, Taylor was president of the Washington Council on International Trade, a private organization created to promote foreign trade in the state of Washington. From 1987 to 1999, he was president and chairman of the board of the Florence R. Kluckhohn Center for the Study of Values in Bellingham, which he founded in 1987 to promote cross-cultural training and mediation. The center is named for Taylor’s second wife, an anthropologist who taught at Harvard University. Taylor recruited Florence Kluckhohn and her husband Clyde Kluckhohn to work for the Office of War Information during World War II. From 1989 to 1999 Taylor oversaw the Washington World Affairs Fellows program, a foreign affairs seminar series for local community leaders that is affiliated with the World Affairs Council of Seattle and Tacoma. Taylor was also co-founder and first president of the Enological Society of the Pacific Northwest, organized in 1975 to promote understanding and appreciation of wine.