A Doak Barnett

Vocation

Family

American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, he organized public outreach programs and lobbied the United States government to put those relations on a new basis. Barnett taught at Columbia University 1961-1969, then went to the Brookings Institution in 1969. In 1982 he was named the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of Chinese Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. His brother Robert W. Barnett (1911-1997) was a United States diplomat who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific from 1963 to 1970. A. Doak Barnett married Jeanne Badeau in Hong Kong in 1954. They had two daughters and a son. A. Doak Barnett died on 17 March 1999 Washington DC, aged 77. Link to Wikipedia biography