Guo Taiqi

Guo Taiqi (born December 1888, Guangji [now Wuxue], Hubei province, China—died Feb. 29, 1952, Santa Barbara, Calif., U.S.) was a Chinese official and diplomat who played a major role in determining his country’s foreign policy during the 1930s and ’40s.

The son of a scholar, Guo was sent by the Chinese government to study in the United States in 1904. The Chinese Revolution of 1911 broke out while he was studying political science at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S., 1911), and he returned to China in 1912. He promptly joined the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and served as a secretary and councillor first to Li Yuan-hung and later to Sun Yat-sen. After Sun’s death in 1925, Guo served under the Nationalists’ new head, Chiang Kai-shek, in various posts concerned with foreign affairs. As a vice-minister of foreign affairs in 1932, Guo was the chief Chinese delegate at the armistice negotiations in Shanghai which achieved a truce between the Chinese and Japanese forces fighting for control of that city.

Guo served as China’s minister and then ambassador to Great Britain from 1932 to 1941 and was concurrently a Chinese delegate to the League of Nations from 1934 to 1938; in both posts he sought international support for China over the issue of Japanese aggression in his country. He briefly served as China’s minister of foreign affairs from April to December 1941, after which he continued to play a major role in determining China’s foreign policy as chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Supreme National Defense Council. Guo coordinated policy-making during the frequent absences of the foreign minister, T.V. Soong, who spent much of his time in the United States rallying American support for China.

As China’s delegate to the United Nations from February 1946 to December 1947, Guo served as chairman of the UN Security Council’s first meeting in New York City in 1946. After the communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, he lived in retirement in California.