Oliver Edmund Clubb was a 20th-century American diplomat and historian. He was considered one of the China Hands: United States State Department officials attacked during McCarthyism in the 1950s for "losing China" to the Communists.
In 1928, Clubb passed the Foreign Service exam. In 1929, he received his first assignment to Beijing. Clubb spent two decades in government service as a member of the American Foreign Diplomatic Corps. On December 5, 1941, Clubb, then in Indochina, found himself seized by occupying Japanese forces and held, first for two months in solitary confinement, then another six months, and finally exchanged for Japanese held by the Allies. With the exception of a brief period in Washington, Mr. Clubb spent the rest of the war and the immediate postwar period in the Soviet Far East, Manchuria and China. During World War II, he served in Chunking and Sianking province and then Vladivostok in 1944. Posts following the war included cities in Manchuria. In 1949, his last overseas station was Beijing in 1949, where he was consul general as the U.S. left the country during the Communist takeover by Mao Zedong. Clubb returned to Washington, DC, where he took over as chief of State's China desk. In 1950, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated and condemned Clubb; the State Department Loyalty Board suspended him as a security risk. One cause for his suspension was the recollection of Whittaker Chambers, who, as part of FBI inquiries related to the Hiss Case, had recalled Clubb's visit in 1932 to the offices of the New Masses. Clubb was delivering a letter from Agnes Smedley, a well-known left-wing American journalist in China. Clubb denied any knowledge of any wrongdoing by delivering the letter. A second cause, also in 1932, was a report he made that the Chinese Communists were strong and popular in many regions, while the Chinese Nationalists were corrupt–although the Nationalists might force the Communists to flee west (predicting the Long March, "later to be cited by his critics as evidence of his pro-Communist leanings." Clubb won an appeal for reinstatement but then resigned as he decided that "his career was finished." He was one of four China Hands dismissed or who resigned from State: John Paton Davies, Jr., John S. Service, John Carter Vincent.
