Speaker: John Delury, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies. Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies

Professor Delury will discuss his research on the extraordinary case of Jack Downey, who flew into Mao’s China in 1952 as part of a CIA project to support a “Third Force” resistance against the Communist government. Downey’s plane was shot down, and he spent over 20 years as a prisoner in Beijing. The talk will trace the origins of the Third Force idea in post-war American grand strategy, how it was operationalized by the CIA during the Korean War, and the larger implications on Sino-US relations of the Downey case.

John Delury is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, South Korea. He is author, with Orville Schell, of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (Random House, 2013). He received his BA and PhD in history from Yale University.