Koji Ariyoshi : A Japanese-American's role in China during the second world war and the Chinese revolution

This paper deals with the life of Koji Ariyoshi, an American of Japanese ancestry who was a specialist in psychological warfare assigned to the US Army's Dixie Mission, an observer group based at the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party in Yanan during the years 1944-1946. As part of his work Ariyoshi traveled back and forth on US military aircraft between Yanan and Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek's capital and the center of American military and diplomatic activity in China during the mid-1940s. Ariyoshi, a trained journalist with a labor union background, wrote numerous essays and reports which compared Nationalist China, on a speedy decline into corruption, injustice, and decay, to the new China being born in Yanan under the leadership of Mao Ze-dong and Zhou En-lai. Ariyoshi's experiences during those crucial years turned him into a lifelong supporter and admirer of the People's Republic of China. During the last years of his life in the 1970s, he became a leader in the movement to have the USA recognize the PRC.