Benjamin H. Kizer arrived in December 1944 in the wartime Chinese capital of Chongqing (Chungking) as the head of the China Office of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), itself established only a year previously. Kizer wrote at some length of the difficulty of the journey, having been warned more than once that it was one of the worst postings possible: Chongqing was hot, hilly, and lacking in any workable transport network. The buildings he was assigned were better than many, however. ‘On clear days, which are rare at this season’, Kizer noted, ‘they command a fine view of the river and the hills beyond’.2 Even clear days had their own hazards: in summer, temperatures in Chongqing reach 40 degrees Celsius and more. Nor were the surroundings much to gladden the heart. After seven years of war, and constant Japanese aerial bombardment, wartime Chongqing was a mixture of rubble and hastily thrown-up buildings, reflecting the fact that the city had expanded its population by several hundred thousand in just a few years.
Still, Kizer had not come to Chongqing for the weather, or the scenery. He was coming to manage what was the largest single-country programme of the whole UNRRA project. There was an immense amount to do. Ever since the war with Japan had begun in the hot July of 1937, China’s painfully acquired modernization under its Nationalist (Guomindang or Kuomintang) government, led by Chiang Kaishek, had been largely destroyed. Both physical infrastructure, including railways and roads, as well as the institutional infrastructure of government, were shattered by the forced move of the government inland.3 Kizer’s main interlocutor was Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the newly established China National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (CNRRA), an American-educated former historian and diplomat who would later …
