Kuo T'ai-ch'i (1889-29 February 1952), known as Quo Tai-chi, government official and diplomat who was best known as China's envoy to Great Britain (1932-41) and as a delegate to the League of Nations (1932-38). He bore much of the responsibility for formulating foreign policy at Chungking from 1941 to 1946. After serving as a delegate to the United Nations (1946-47) and as ambassador to Brazil (194749), he retired from public life and went to California. The son of a well-knoWn scholar, Quo Taichi was born in Wuhsueh, Hupeh. After receiving his primary education in the Chinese classics, he enrolled at a modern school in Wuchang. In 1904 he was sent by the Chinese government to study in the United States. He attended the Easthampton (Massachusetts) High School from the autumn of 1904 until the summer of 1907 and the Williston Academy in Easthampton in the academic year 1907-8. After completing secondary school, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in political science. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in March 1911 and was awarded a scholarship for graduate study in sociology in June of that year. Quo led an active social life in Philadelphia and joined such groups as the Philomathean Literary Society and the Cosmopolitan Club. He worked for a few months in 1911 as a reporter for the Philadelphia Press and later served as an editor of the student paper Pennsjlvanian.

After learning of the republican revolution touched off by the W^uchang revolt of October 1911, Quo left the United States and returned to China in March 1912. He soon became a secretary to Li Yuan-hung (q.v.), who was serving as tutuh [military governor] of Hupeh and who had been elected vice president of the provisional republican government. Li remained in Wuchang until December 1913, when Yuan Shih-k'ai prevailed upon him to take an active part in government affairs in Peking. Quo accompanied Li to Peking and continued to serve under him. After Li assumed the presidency on 7 June 1916, Quo became chief English secretary in the presidential office and a councillor in the ministry of foreign affairs. He left Peking after Li"s forced retirement from office in July 1917 {see Chang Hsün; Tuan Ch'i-jui) and became a councillor in Sun Yat-sen's headqilarters at Canton. Quo had joined the Kuomintang soon after its formation in 1912.

In the summer of 1918 Quo Tai-chi, Eugene Ch'en, and C. T. W^ang were sent to the United States in an attempt to win American support for the new military government which had been formed at Canton, but their efforts were unsuccessful. The following year. Quo served as a technical expert to the southern group, headed by C. C. Wu (Wu Ch'ao-shu, q.v.) of the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He returned to China in early 1920 by way of the United States.

When Sun Yat-sen returned to Canton from Shanghai and assumed office as president extraordinary in May 1921, Quo Tai-chi became a councillor in the presidential office and head of the information bureau. In April 1922 he became chief of the administrative department of the Kwangtung provincial government when the dissident Ch"en Chiung-ming (q.v.) was replaced as governor by Wu T'ing-fang. Quo was forced to flee Canton after Ch'en's coup of 16 June, but he returned with the government in early 1923 to become vice minister of foreign affairs, serving under C. C. Wu. After the National Government was established at Canton in July 1925 and Hu Han-min became minister of foreign affairs. Quo Tai-chi resigned from office to become president of a commercial college at Wuhan.

After the Kuomintang split into two factions and Chiang Kai-shek established a national government at Nanking in opposition to the regime headed by Wang Ching-wei at Wuhan, Quo Tai-chi weüt to Shanghai to serve Chiang as foreign affairs commissioner for Kiangsu and as a member of the Shanghai branch of the Kuomintang's Central Political Council. He soon became vice minister of foreign affairs, under C. C. Wu, and chief of the international section of the Kuomintang's Shanghai information bureau. His attitude toward one foreign power was demonstrated in December 1927, when he was appointed chairman of a committee on Sino-Soviet relations. He immediately undertook the liquidation of Soviet commercial enterprises in Shanghai and the compulsory registration of all Russians residing in the city. C. C. Wu resigned at the end of 1927, and Quo became acting foreign minister. However, after Huang Fu (q.v.) succeeded Wu in February 1928, Quo was dismissed from his government and party offices. When the new National Government was inaugurated at Nanking in the autumn of 1928, Quo Tai-chi was named to the Legislative Yuan. He was appointed ambassador to Italy in March 1929, but did not assume that post. In 1 930 hejoined the so-called northern coalition of Feng Yü-hsiang and Yen Hsi-shan (qq.v.) and participated in the so-called enlarged conference movement. After the movement collapsed in October, Quo went south. In 1931 he joined the secessionist government formed at Canton by Wang Ching-wei, T'ang Shao-yi, Ch'en Chi-t'ang (qq.v.) and others. After Wang Ching-wei became president of the Executive Yuan at Nanking in January 1932, with Lo Wen-kan (q.v.) as minister of foreign affairs. Quo Tai-chi was appointed political vice minister of foreign affairs. He also became a member of the foreign affairs committee of the Kuomintang's Central Political Council. At the time Quo assumed office, Japanese and Chinese forces were fighting for control of Shanghai. Truce negotiations began at Shanghai in March, with Quo as the senior representative of the National Government delegation. Because he disagreed with the Japan policy formulated by Lo Wen-kan, he resigned from the ministry of foreign affairs.

Quo was appointed minister to Great Britain in April 1932, but, at the request of the National Government, he continued to function as political vice minister of foreign affairs until a successor could be appointed. On 3 May, following a report that the terms of the truce agreement worked out at Shanghai were favorable to the Japanese, a "national salvation" group at Shanghai set upon Quo and beat him. Thus, the signing of the truce agreement that put an end to the Shanghai embroglio with Japan took place in a Shanghai hospital on 5 May. After recovering from his injuries. Quo left China for London in the summer of 1 932. In addition to performing his duties in London, he served as a Chinese delegate to the League of Nations until 1938. Both before and after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, he regularly raised the issue of Japanese aggression in China and fought against recognition of Manchoukuo, He reiterated these accusations and called for joint Anglo-American action in support of China at the World Economic and Monetary Conference held in London in May 1933. Also in May, the Chinese mission at London was raised to embassy status, and on 22 May, Quo became China's first ambassador to the Court of St. James's. He spent some of the remaining months of 1933 as a Chinese delegate to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva. He was the senior Chinese delegate to the League of Nations Assembly in 1934 and the senior representative to the League Council in 1936. Quo, who had strongly opposed Sino-Russian cooperation in 1927, responded to changes in the world political situation by w-elcoming the 1934 entry of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations. China, he said, was "the cornerstone of Asia," and the Soviet Union was "a bridge between Europe and Asia." After the Sino-Japanese war broke out in July 1937, Quo Tai-chi and V. K. Wellington Koo (Ku Wei-chün, q.v.) made intense efforts to enlist foreign support for China. They appealed to the League of Nations for aid and attended the Brussels Conference of the Washington Treaty powers in November 1937. Although they urged economic sanctions against Japan and aid to China, they received no support. British sympathy was not fully committed to China in the struggle, and on 3 May 1938 an Anglo-Japanese agreement on Chinese Maritime Customs funds accruing in Japaneseoccupied ports was signed. On 6 May, Quo protested these arrangements, and they never came into full effect. A happier note was sounded in the British communication of 14 January 1939, which stated the readiness of the British government to negotiate with China, after the conclusion of peace, the abolition of extraterritoriality and the revision of treaties for better equality. However, Quo protested another British policy decision in August 1939, when the British authorities at Tientsin allowed the Japanese to take custody of four Chinese suspected of murdering a bank manager on 9 April. Quo also was unable to prevent the British from closing the Burma Road for three months in 1940, but he did manage to secure some British credits for China when the road was reopened in October.

In April 1941 the National Government, then at Chungking, appointed Quo minister of foreign affairs and designated '. K. Wellington Koo to succeed him as ambassador. Quo had served with distinction in London for more than nine years, and Oxford University had recognized his achievements by awarding him an honorary D.C.L. degree in 1938. He returned to China by way of the United States, where he appealed for American aid to China. In an exchange of notes in May 1941, Secretary of State Cordell Hull rejected Quo's policy suggestions, but promised the relinquishing of American extraterritorial rights in China when peace returned. After assuming office at Chungking in July, Quo was appointed to the standing committee of the Supreme National Defense Council. He worked to prevent foreign recognition of Wang Ching-wei's Japanesesponsored government at Nanking, severed relations with countries which recognized Wang's government, supported the Atlantic Charter, and established diplomatic ties with the Czech government in exile. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and China declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy, Quo stressed the mutual responsibilities of the Allies. Although he was replaced as foreign minister by T. '. Soong (q.v.) late in December and was made chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Supreme National Defense Council, he continued to bear much of the responsibility for the formulation of foreign policy because Soong spent most of his time in the United States.

In February 1946 Quo Tai-chi was appointed representative for China on the Security Council of the United Nations. After chairing the Security Council from mid-March to mid-April, he also became a member of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. In June, he received an honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He was named to membership on the United Nations Commission for Conventional Armaments in March 1947, but resigned in December to become Chinese ambassador to Brazil. When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, he left Rio de Janeiro and retired to Santa Barbara, California, where his wife and two sons had been living since 1939. Quo died at Santa Barbara, after a long illness, on 29 February 1952.