In the aftermath of China’s 1911 revolution two Australian journalists became advisers to rival politicians in the new republican government. Using their journalistic copy, private reflections, and interactions with diplomats, I analyse the work of George Morrison (1862—1920), William Donald (1875—1946), and Donald’s would-be successor Harold Timperley (1898—1954). I build on the work around Australians in China by examining the roles that these journalist-advisers played in China and how they operated in both the foreign treaty ports and China’s interior. While their roles were often focused on the western press, they were more wide-ranging and included more informal diplomacy than other kinds of western advisers in China. They also attained their roles more gradually, transitioning along a spectrum from journalist to adviser as a result of the connections they built through their work for the press. These transitions were accelerated by the encroachment of foreign imperialism in China and ruptures in its internal politics. Like their military, political, and economic counterparts, however, journalist-advisers dreamed of transforming China through their work, a dream which did not come to pass. Instead, their employers used their position in western networks of knowledge production on China to solicit aid from the west, a role which became less and less important as this aid arrived towards the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937—1945).

Tess Gardner is a PhD student at the ANU School of History and the National Centre of Biography. Her honours thesis examined the work of a Quaker medical missionary in early twentieth-century China and she has previously written on George Morrison’s travel writing in the ANU Historical Journal II. She is currently a visiting scholar at the State Library of New South Wales.

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