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Nearly 30 years before President Nixon shook Mao’s hand, U.S. Foreign Service Officer John S. Service arrived in Yan’an, the Chinese Communist stronghold during World War II, where he got to know Mao and other top guerrilla leaders.

Their meetings would begin a complicated and often difficult relationship between the U.S. and Communist China. In her compelling new book, HONORABLE SURVIVOR: Mao’s China, McCarthy’s America and the Persecution of John S. Service (Naval Institute Press; October 7, 2009; $37.95), Emmy-award winning journalist Lynne Joiner tells the extraordinary story of how Service got swept up in the eye of the hurricane at a watershed moment in 20th century history.

Born and raised in China by YMCA missionaries, Service was the first to predict that Mao’s ragtag peasant revolutionaries would win if China’s civil war erupted again—before anyone else even knew the Chinese Communists were a potent force. But his intrepid activities would cost him his career. He became the first diplomat ever arrested on espionage charges, and fired for “reasonable doubt” of his loyalty. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated him, Service’s fight to restore his reputation lasted decades longer—until the Nixon-Mao Handshake.

Drawing on Service’s private papers, as well as recently released secret government documents, Joiner chronicles Service’s incredible life and what befell him after General Joseph Stilwell assigned him as America’s chief contact with the Communist guerrillas. Service became a target of revenge for Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek’s supporters, the first victim of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s infamous anti-Communist crusade, and a “person of interest” to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for more than a quarter century.

But what if U.S. presidents Roosevelt and Truman had listened to U.S. Foreign Service Officer John S. Service’s predictions and warnings? Could we have avoided renewed civil war in China—or conflicts in Korea and Vietnam? Could we have avoided a generation of bitter animosity with the People’s Republic of China? Might we not still lack experienced diplomats like Service with strong language skills and cultural understanding to help decipher today’s hot spots-Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq or Iran?

October 1 marked the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. HONORABLE SURVIVOR tells a remarkable true story of revolution, political intrigue, persecution, and redemption that is also a love story, involving the sacrifices of Service’s loyal American wife and a beautiful Chinese actress.

About the Author

Lynne Joiner is an Emmy award–winning broadcast journalist, news anchor, and documentary filmmaker. Honorable Survivor is her first book after a 25-year career in journalism during which she covered many major events in U.S.–China relations. In January 1976, she was the only American correspondent in China when Premier Zhou Enlai died. She filed reports for all three major U.S. television networks. Joiner also covered Deng Xiaoping’s historic visit to Washington D.C. after the normalization of diplomatic relations in January 1979 and reported on the 1997 handover of Hong Kong.

For more than 20 years, she has served as an occasional news consultant to Shanghai Television which reaches an audience of more than 100-million viewers. Most recently, she has helped train reporters and producers at the all-English language International Channel Shanghai (ICS-TV). She has also served as a news consultant to Radio Free Asia in Washington D. C. and taught broadcast news writing at Stanford University.

Her professional news assignments include work for: ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, and Christian Science Monitor Radio. She was prime-time TV news anchor in San Francisco for KPIX-TV and produced-hosted a weekly world affairs call-in program, “Foreign Exchange,” on National Public Radio stations for four years.

Joiner has contributed stories to the Far Eastern Economic Review, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and Pacific News Service. Her news reporting and documentary filmmaking has taken her to many parts of the globe, including: Armenia, Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Russia, Georgia, Thailand, Singapore and throughout Western Europe.

Joiner holds an M.F.A. degree in broadcast journalism from U.C.L.A. and received her B.A. in English Literature from Cornell University. She also attended Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the Taipei Language Institute. She speaks what she calls “survival” Chinese and French.