Ji Chaoding (; 1903–1963) was a Chinese economist and political activist. His book Key Economic Areas in Chinese History (1936) influenced the conceptualization of Chinese history in Europe by emphasizing geographic and economic factors as the basis of dynastic power.
Ji was educated at Tsinghua University in China, then in the United States at University of Chicago and Columbia University. He became a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As an underground party member he was on the staff of the Institute of Pacific Relations in the 1930s before returning to China in 1939. He became a trusted adviser to the Ministry of Finance in the wartime Nationalist government but remained in China as a well-placed official in the new government of the People's Republic of China after 1949. Only after his death was his long-time Party membership acknowledged.
Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, called Ji a "learned and brilliant writer" and Key Areas "perhaps the most outstanding book on the development of Chinese history among Western books in those days."
Family background
The Ji family was prominent in Shanxi education and politics. Chaoding's grandfather was a landlord who had a reputation for treating tenants honestly and supplying grain to the poor in times of shortage. His father, Ji Gongquan (冀貢泉; 1882–1967) studied law in Japan, but when the Republican Revolution of 1911 broke out and his government scholarship was suspended, he returned to China rather than accept Japanese government support.
He became friends with Lu Xun, with whom he shared many progressive views. Ji Gongquan told his son Ji Chaozhu that he then calculated that "if I were to join the 'Preserve the Empire Party' I might lose face. If I were to join the Revolutionary Party I might lose my head. I decided I was wisest to keep both." He became education commissioner in the 1920s for the new Shanxi provincial government of Yan Xishan, but when he was ordered to open fire on student demonstrators, he resigned and moved his family from the capital back to Fenyang. Ji Chaoding had two younger brothers, Ji Chaoli (冀朝理, better known as Chao-Li Chi) and Ji Chaozhu (born 1929), who became a highly placed translator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after 1949, and a younger sister, Ji Qing ().
Education and early career
In 1916 Ji Chaoding entered Tsinghua University, a school supported by funds from the Boxer Indemnity and whose classes were taught largely in English. In the aftermath of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, an awakening of patriotic spirit, Ji Chaoding led radical nationalist activities along with classmates Luo Longji and Wang Zaoshi. After graduating in 1924 he went to the United States to study on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. He enrolled at the University of Chicago. While there he was president of the Chicago Chinese Student Association, and worked with the American Anti-Imperialist League. In 1926 Ji joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The Party had a keen interest in global communism, and established a Chinese Bureau to supervise students from China. At that time, the newly formed CCP was in a United Front alliance with the Nationalist Party of Sun Yat-sen, who was popular among Chinese Americans, and Ji developed a national reputation as a public speaker able to rouse support for China with his anti-imperialist speeches to local overseas Chinese groups in Chinese or to leftist comrades in English. In 1926, Ji and several of his Tsinghua friends denounced American supporters of the Nationalists and secretly joined the CCP. Their membership was kept secret in order to avoid surveillance or deportation, to allow them to work in Chinese American communities where the Nationalists were strong, and to keep their options open when they returned to China.
In the winter of 1926, on the orders of the Chinese Bureau, Ji sailed to Europe to attend the League Against Imperialism, organized in Brussels for colonialized peoples by the Communist International (Comintern) agent Willi Munzenberg. In 1927, Ji married Harriet Levine in Paris, whom he had met on the boat to Europe. The Chinese Bureau of the CPUSA ordered Ji and a group of students back to China to take part in the revolution, but White Terror led by Chiang Kai-shek ended the First United Front, and the group went to Moscow instead.