CHINA THROUGH WESTERN EYES
Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries & Diplomats

Part 8: Diaries, Notebooks and Writings of Rewi Alley (1897-1987) from the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

Brief Chronology

1897

Rewi Alley born 2 December in Springfield, North Canterbury, New Zealand.

1912

He went to Christchurch Boys’ High School.

1916

He enlisted with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

1917

In March, Rewi Alley was involved with the New Zealand Division to help hold the line against the German offensive on the Somme. After being wounded, he arrived in England in October and was taken to the New Zealand base on Salisbury Plain. He returned to Etaples in December.

1918

He joined the First Canterbury Battalion at Ypres in January. In August he was awarded the Military Medal for his actions during the assault on Bapaume. During the fighting he met some Chinese men who were being used by the British as trench digging labour. His war experiences had a profound effect on him and instilled the virtues of close comradeship.

1919

He returned to New Zealand and worked for 6 years on a back country farm in the Moeawatea Valley in partnership with an old schoolmate called Jack Stevens.

1926

Rewi Alley gave up his share in the land at Moeawatea Valley in November and set sail for Australia. He worked for 3 months at a fertiliser works in Sydney. He took lessons in wireless work and morse code.

1927

He set off from Sydney bound for Shanghai on 13 March 1927. He arrived in a chaotic Shanghai amidst rising tension between the Communists and the Kuomintang. Although both were anti-imperial, the communist rebellion faced violent internationally-funded suppression. After his arrival on 21 April he obtained work in Shanghai as a fire officer at the Hongkou Fire Station. He quickly passed the necessary examinations for driving, pump operation and other skills and began learning the Shanghai dialect of Mandarin.

1928

Rewi Alley met Dr Joseph Bailie, an American missionary of Irish extraction, after reading one of his newspaper articles on technical improvements in the Chinese village. The two men became close friends. Bailie urged Rewi to understand China from the social base of its villages and to make time to see them at first hand. Rewi started to make trips to towns, temples, gardens and canals on the perimeters of Shanghai, and making visits to villages further afield at the weekends.

1929

After 10 months Rewi Alley was appointed as an inspection officer for the Shanghai Fire Department. This entailed visiting factories throughout Shanghai. One weekend in the spring he witnessed the execution of 6 young men at Wuxi who had been trying to form a communist union of the town’s silk filiature workers. Rewi spoke about the Wuxi shootings with Henry Baring, a schoolteacher acquaintance in Shanghai, who gave Rewi a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital to read. They discussed labour and social conditions in Shanghai. In the summer of 1929 during his annual leave, Rewi travelled far inland to Suiyuan Province helping the China International Famine Relief Commission. Catastrophic famine swept through north-west China in 1929 resulting in over 6 million deaths – largely unreported by the world’s press. He adopted a 14-year old refugee, ‘Alan’, an orphan of the north-west famine, booking him into a Shanghai boarding school.

1931

Severe floods ravaged central China. Japan attacked Manchuria in September and bitter fighting ensued. Dr Joseph Bailie working on flood relief operations in Wuhan tried to get Rewi to join in with the relief effort.

1932

He worked on flood relief in Hubei Province. Rewi Alley was appointed League of Nations representative in charge of dyke repair at Wuhan, and again experienced first hand the effects of corruption and cruel oppression. The local governor was determined to eradicate the Communists from the city, including thousands of refugees fleeing the floods. He gave Rewi Alley an ultimatum saying that they would all be shot unless they were all removed within two weeks. Sir John Hope Simpson, the British official, credited Rewi with saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In Wuhan, he adopted his second son, ‘Mike’, during a visit to an orphanage which needed wheat supplies. Around Wuhan, the political executions went on every day.

The manager of the orphanage kept ‘Mike’ safe whilst Rewi took Alan on a brief trip back to New Zealand and Australia, via Hong Kong. Alan was not allowed ashore in New Zealand without a guarantee from a Wellington lawyer. Rewi was interviewed by Wellington’s Dominion newspaper about events in Wuhan. They visited Christchurch and Moeawatea, where the settlers would not meet with Rewi because of his adoption of a Chinese son. Further insults were received when they travelled by rail in South Island and when Alan was refused entrance to the public swimming baths in Australia. Returning to China, via Vietnam, they were denied a room in Hanoi. These events made a deep impression.

On his return to China, Rewi Alley was appointed Chief Factory Inspector of the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Industrial Division, where he pushed for better health and safety standards. But the Council was corrupt and largely impotent.

At the end of 1932, he met Agnes Smedley, left wing journalist, writer and revolutionary, who had asked to be shown round the Shanghai factories. He spoke to her about his disillusion with the Kuomintang, their control of the press and the suppression of workers in the city, the shooting of the silk workers at Wuxi, the execution of other alleged Communists and other dreadful events. Rewi Alley already knew a little of the covert operations of Communists in Shanghai. He now saw the Communists as the champions of China’s oppressed population.

1933

Eager for change, Rewi Alley and Agnes Smedley joined a small group of western Marxist intellectuals, including Edgar and Helen Snow, to form a secret Marxist-Leninist study group in Shanghai, set up with the aid of the Chinese Communist Party. For the next 5 years he wrote (under various aliases including Han Sumei and Chao Tachi) for the radical journal Voice of China and worked secretly for the Communist underground, including having to wash ‘bloody money’ obtained by Red Army raids executed under the guise of anti-Japanese strikes.

After the February 1933 rubber shoe factory explosion, Rewi Alley and the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Industrial Division tried to push through necessary reforms. Faced with an impasse on the legal and political front, Rewi and his few colleagues did their best to improve standards. He recruited the American doctor, George Hatem, to the Division’s staff, who conducted a study of the effects on human flesh of prolonged contact with the fumes and metal salts in the chromium industry.

1935

The power of information helped the Industrial Division. By 1935, it had a breakdown, by trade and number, of the International Settlement’s 3500 factories and workshops. Suggestions were made to the Municipal Council and the number of inspectors and support staff was rapidly increased. Factories with the worst abuses were closed down. During this year his friend, Henry Baring, was found shot dead. Liu Ting, the underground worker, stayed at Rewi’s house and became a personal friend. In October, a north-western headquarters of Bandit Suppression was set up in Xian. To head it, Jiang Jeshi appointed Zhang Xueliang, a former warlord who brought with him the remaining 130,000 troops of his Manchurian army. Here, the extermination of Communists came before any military opposition to Japan, although Japanese troops frequently came across the border from Manchuria. Rewi, Agnes Smedley and Song Qingling were involved in setting up a secret medical depot for Mao Zedong’s forces in the north-west. This was established by persuading Dr Wunsch to set up a legitimate dental practice in Xian as a cover for passing important medical supplies on to Communist forces.

1936

Rewi Alley had started to mediate various industrial disputes. In disputes where police action failed to resolve the deadlock, the inspectors took on the role of arbitrator. Rewi was also learning more and more about disease in the factories. He encouraged a medical team at Lester Hospital to study beriberi and brought in from the factories some of the worst child sufferers.

His friend, Dr Joseph Bailie, shot himself after a failed cancer operation.

In the north-west of China, the Communists were seeking a United Front of Kuomintang and Communist troops against the Japanese. In April, Liu Ting met with Zhang Xueliang at Xian to see if there could be co-operation for a United Front. Further talks with the Communists took place with the leading Communist negotiator, Zhou Enlai, and for about four months the prospects seemed quite good. An undercover Communist liaison office was set up in Xian. Liu Ting again spent time at Rewi’s house in Shanghai. After requests in June for a doctor and a foreign journalist, Dr George Hatem and Edgar Snow left Shanghai to join the Communists in the north-west. Liu Ting also went back to Xian in the summer. Rewi visited Xian in September. The Xian Incident in December led to a cessation of hostilities between the Nationalists and the Communists so that the two could present a United Front against the increasing threat posed by Japan.

1937

Rewi Alley was away from China for 8 months from March 1937. He returned to New Zealand for 3 months, before travelling on, by ship, to study factories and their regulation in America, Britain and Europe. In July, the Japanese launched a series of major attacks against mainland China from the north. Five weeks later a second front was opened up at Shanghai. Rewi Alley arrived back in Shanghai on October 18 where he was reunited with his boys. They decided to fight with the Communists against the Japanese. Rewi was left in Shanghai where he had taken over the Granich flat in the French Concession. He now faced the problem of dealing with hundreds of thousands of unemployed and displaced factory workers in a fierce and chaotic war-zone. With Edgar Snow, covering the Shanghai battle for the British Daily Herald, Alley surveyed the scenes of death and loss and wondered about possible solutions.

1938

The idea of industrial co-operatives first emerged in war torn Shanghai as a response to the need to keep production going within blockaded regions of China. At a meeting chaired by Helen Snow, it was planned to divert production away from the coast to the inland areas and to provide jobs for fleeing refugees. This would be achieved through a series of ‘Chinese Industrial Co-operatives’. Under the slogan ‘Gung Ho’, meaning ‘work together’, a revolutionary idea was born. In July 1938, Rewi Alley arrived with a suitcase and a slogan in the then capital of China, Wuhan, to sell the idea to the Chinese Government, and gained the support of writers WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood (who were in China to write a book on the war) and also the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. He agreed tp press the case for the scheme as long as Rewi Alley agreed to lead it. The Ambassador had access to high placed Chinese officials and procured agreement from the Chinese government for the scheme. Rewi Alley was appointed Secretary-General of the Chinese Industrial Co-operative Movement with headquarters in Wuhan. Regional headquarters were set up in Changsha, Ganzhou and many other cities. The setting up of the various co-operatives required exhausting and dangerous travel for Rewi Alley. En route to Hong Kong to raise funds for ‘Gung Ho’, Rewi Alley was arrested and briefly detained by the Kuomintang police.

Starting small, with scant resources and broken machines, the co-operatives proved highly skilled appropriators and successful factories were soon producing everything from trucks, to grenades, helmets, machinery, irrigation, boilers, furnaces, blankets, cotton, cloth and boots, to help the war effort.

1939

Ida Pruitt, a Chinese-born American heading the social services department of the big Rockefeller hospital in Beijing, provided important support. By mid 1939 she had founded in Hong Kong the International Committee to receive overseas funds for the ‘Gung Ho’ movement. This was headed by Ronald Hall, the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong and South China. Ida Pruitt set off to America to embark on further fund raising there. This led to the foundation of Indusco Inc with the backing of leading personalities such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Luce. Rewi Alley continued to travel relentlessly all over China on CIC work and had a number of meetings with Mao Zedong. Mike worked as translator for the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune in his front line operating theatres.

1940

For 3 months Rewi Alley lived and worked in Chongquing. In the year from mid 1940, the Chinese Industrial Co-operative Movement achieved its greatest growth. It built up some 85 depots which were resource centres for a further two thousand co-operatives. The goal was for some 30,000 workshops.

Rewi Alley left Chongquing in July 1940. Political leaders intervened to split ‘Gung Ho’s’ central headquarters into four departments. Rewi flew out to the Philippines to meet with the Snows and to address meetings of China groups which had given money to the CIC.

1941

United China Relief added its weight to Indusco and the Hong Kong outlet. America entered the war against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

1942

Rewi Alley employed the considerable foreign funds at his disposal to set up schools to train ‘Gung Ho’ cadres. Together with Oxford-educated English teacher George Hogg, he retreated to the remote Gobi desert in China’s north-west to set up a technical school, initially in Shuangshipu. This was the start of a series of Bailie schools named after Rewi’s old mentor in Shanghai. The plan was for Hogg to act as headmaster whilst Rewi Alley travelled around China raising funds, quelling political opposition, recruiting teachers and creating co-operatives to work alongside the school. It was founded around ideas of balance: "Create and Analyse" was its motto, bringing together what Rewi Alley saw as the two sides of productive ability.

1944

The isolated Shandan Bailie School was set up. Remote locations were chosen to distance themselves as far as possible from suspicious Kuomintang spies. The Shandan Bailie School transformed the village in which it operated and achieved an international reputation.

1945

After the death of George Hogg in 1945, Rewi Alley became the headmaster of the Shandan Bailie School and remained in Shandan until Liberation, with Mao Zedong’s Communist overthrow of the Nationalist Kuomintang in 1949.

1947

Dispute over funding for Shandan with the International Committee, because American backers, including Ida Pruitt and the Snows, were earmarking funds direct to Shandan at the expense of other CIC projects. The Bailie school at Lanzhou had to be closed down and its pupils were moved to Shandan.

1949

With Mao Zedong’s Communist overthrow of the Nationalist Kuomintang, Red Army soldiers reached Shandan. The school had been struggling to repel the Kuomintang forces which had besieged it. Explosives prepared for its demolition were not needed and the school was saved. The school’s reputation was high after liberation, having dismantled their trucks and buried gasoline in disused mine shafts to keep them from the Kuomintang. Yet within two years Rewi Alley was to have control taken away, a victim of political decisions decreeing a different educational emphasis to that of Shandan. The Communist Party had decided to stress the development of heavy industry.

1950

Rewi Alley returned to Beijing where he met up with Mike, who now had a senior position in the bureaucracy controlling heavy industry. They tried to get further financial support for the school at Shandan.

1951

Rewi Alley opposed the American policy on Korea and the imperialist ambitions of the United States. He travelled to Beijing and secured further financial support for the school from the oil ministry. Alan was appointed assistant headmaster at Shandan. In August the assistant dean of education committed suicide. The Communist party appointees continued to foster an “international worker” approach at Shandan to meet the requirements of heavy industry.

1952

He continued his strong opposition to the Korean War. He and Courtney Archer represented the New Zealand peace movement at a conference in Beijing. His first book, Yo Banfa!, was published in time for the conference. Rewi’s mother died in April. He received two invitations from Nehru to travel to India to set up co-operatives there, but his desire to stay in China was firm. He devoted himself to international peace conferences, becoming vice-leader of the New Zealand peace group and a member of the Asian and Pacific Peace Liaison Committee, headquartered in Beijing. The New Zealand-China Friendship Association was set up.

1954

Major floods in the Yangtze River region. The Shandan school was relocated to Lanzhou – the province’s biggest city where an oil refinery was built. Shortly afterwards a big earthquake destroyed much of Shandan. In the next four years Rewi made regular trips to Lanzhou to see Alan. The People Have Strength is published.

1956

Mao Zedong was becoming a powerful advocate of decentralisation and started to encourage producer co-operatives owned by workers and similar in size and function to the ‘Gung Ho’ enterprises. Within a year, five million Chinese were working at them. Man Against Flood is published in Beijing by New World Press.

1957

Rewi worked on his manuscript for his book on his Shandan experiences. A heart attack put him in hospital for a month followed by a further month’s prescribed rest at a seaside resort. Human China published by the New Zealand Peace Council and Children of the Dawn published by New World Press.

1958

Shandan – an Adventure in Creative Education published. In this year, Rewi Alley travelled 40,000 kilometres around numerous Chinese provinces, by truck and jeep, observing the practical progress of the Liberation, writing China’s Hinterland in the Great Leap Forward, the only book published in English documenting the ‘Great Leap Forward’. In a speech at the World Congress for Disarmament and International Cooperation in Stockholm, he used the ‘Gung Ho’ theme in an international context. He also spoke of the risks of war as the Americans continued their intrusion into South-East Asia.

1960

He went back to New Zealand, met the Prime Minister Walter Nash and gave a series of accounts about the “new China”. In New Zealand, he was saddened by the materialism of a newly rich and affluent society. He criticises New Zealand’s participation in the ANZUS and SEATO treaties. The latter bound New Zealand to a military response against anything defined as Communist aggression. He condemns American imperialist ambitions in South-East Asia.

1962

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro visited Beijing and Rewi Alley went on the reciprocal visit to Cuba. During the next decade he spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War. He also focussed on lots of writing and continued to translate the old Chinese poets and ballads.

1965

Peace Conference in Indonesia.

1966

Cultural Revolution. Rewi Alley fell out of favour and became isolated in his adopted home. His house was raided by Red Army Agents. An atmosphere of persecution, oppression and xenophobia returned to sully the optimism of the Liberation years. His honorary title of headmaster of Shandan School was revoked. As part of sweeping changes the ‘anti-old’ campaign harshly criticised the work Rewi Alley had done translating the old Chinese poets. Museums and galleries were targeted, including Rewi Alley’s priceless collection of ancient scrolls, pottery and bronze and ivory artefacts accumulated on his travels. With the ascendancy of the ‘Gang of Four’, China was thrown into chaos, revolutionary heroes were indicted (including Rewi Alley’s sons Alan and Mike). Rewi spent the next years travelling all over China, observing and writing.

1969

The worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were over by April 1969, but the political power struggle still continued.

1970

The Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai remained a good friend of Rewi Alley, and on one occasion in 1970, at a sports stadium in Beijing, Zhou Enlai left his seat in the praesidium and came down to the lower benches where Rewi Alley was sitting by himself. They stayed together there talking throughout the duration of the entire event.

1972

Edgar Snow died. On his last visit to New Zealand, Rewi Alley received an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University in Wellington. He vigorously continued translating, writing, corresponding, and meeting the international demands of magazines and papers, throughout these years. Travels in China, 1966-71 published by New World Press.

1974

Rewi Alley travelled to north-west China visiting Shandan.

1976

Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai both died.

1977

Premier Deng Xiaoping organised the official banquet to celebrate Rewi Alley’s 80th birthday. He is an honoured man again, with a portrait in Beijing’s National Gallery, and he is given the venerable title of ‘Ai-lao’.

1984

Rewi Alley was officially recognised by the New Zealand Government when he was awarded a Queen’s Service Order for services to the community.

1986

Rewi Alley: An Autobiography, published by New World Press in Beijing.

1987

Geoff Chapple and David Harre produced a documentary on Rewi Alley, with then Prime Minister David Lange narrating it – a symbol of a final homecoming for a man who had always followed his instincts and was often uncomfortably at odds with his home country’s foreign policy. The documentary was screened in New Zealand on 2 December 1987, Rewi Alley’s 90th birthday, and a copy of the film was couriered to him. He died three weeks later on December 27.

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