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Rewi Alley’s Sixty Years in China
In China’s revolution and development, many foreign friends, inspired by the great cause of the Communist Party of China (CPC), came all the way to China and devoted themselves to bettering the lives of the Chinese people. Rewi Alley was one of them. A great internationalist fighter and an old friend of the Chinese people, he was the initiator of the Gung Ho (Chinese industrial cooperatives) Movement and founder of the Bailie School. His stories are still widely told on Chinese land.
In 1927, Rewi Alley, who was about to enter his 30s, travelled across the vast ocean from New Zealand to China, a mysterious country he had been longing to visit, and landed in Shanghai. That was the time when the cooperation between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CPC broke down and the Chinese Great Revolution failed. Alley saw with his own eyes how the Chinese people suffered from exploitation and suppression at that time. In the letters to his family, Alley wrote that there must be some who enjoyed huge wealth here in China but still the grassroots working class had to work even harder than the enslaved horses. In the small alleys behind some factories, he even found dead bodies of child laborers wrapped in gunny sacks.
Seeing all the miseries of the Chinese people, Alley decided to join their f i ght for social transformation. In 1932, entrusted by the League of Nations, Alley came to the flood-stricken Wuhan alone to help with the relief work. There, he saw the KMT looting the people in the name of disaster relief, while, in the CPC-led Honghu Soviet Area, the army and the people were working in solidarity to overcome the disaster. Deeply touched by the sharp contrast, Alley became interested in communist ideas and reached out to the communists and other progressives. He set up a covert radio station and wrote anonymous articles to share with the world the relentless struggle of the CPC and the Red Army. He risked his life raising and delivering ammunition for the Red Army, and protected Chen Hansheng, Liu Ding and other CPC members and underground communists from the hunt of the KMT. It was Alley’s firm belief that only the CPC could save the Chinese people.
In the early phase of China’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, China lost vast areas of land, numerous people lost their jobs, and the country’s industrial system was on the verge of collapse. In 1938, together with Chinese patriots, Alley set up the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives and initiated the Gung Ho Movement, aiming to mobilize workers and refugees to support the Chinese army by boosting production of manufactured goods. To promote this undertaking, Alley gave up his comfortable life in Shanghai and travelled, on foot or on a bicycle, more than 30,000 kilometers across 16 provinces. It was a life-risking trip full of hardships – bombing, traffic accident, illness, manhunt and betrayal, yet Alley never wavered in his determination.
Alley’s efforts led to the thriving of a large number of industrial cooperatives. According to statistics, more than 3,000 industrial cooperatives emerged in China between 1939 and 1942. They created over 300,000 jobs, provided huge material and personnel assistance for the frontline battles, and greatly inspired the Chinese army and the Chinese people.
During the Gung Ho Movement, Alley realized that in order to provide technical and managerial professionals for the cooperatives, there must be organized, scheduled training for workers, and vocational education became an urgent task. In 1942, Alley and British journalist George Hogg jointly founded the Bailie Polytechnic School in Shuangshipu, Shaanxi Province (which was later relocated to Shandan County, Gansu Province in 1944).“Bailie,”or“Peili”in Chinese, means“cultivating talents for the dawn of China”. Alley hoped that the school could help train technical professionals urgently needed in China’s revolution. With this aspiration, he overcame the hardships posed by the shortage of materials and the pressure from the KMT, and devoted all his energy to the school’s development.
Rewi Alley explaining the internal combustion engine to students of Bailie School, 1942
Alley never married. Yet, he adopted many children of poor families and revolutionists, brought them up, and taught them to be useful members of society. Alley called his children“greeters of the dawn”and encouraged them to work hard for a new China. For the students of Bailie School, as they recalled, Alley was more of a father than just a great man.
In the years after the founding of the People’s Republic, Alley continued his writing career. By putting his love and understanding of China into words, he hoped to help the world know more about China. He wrote more than 70 books about his days in China and other countries. In the Six Americans in China , he wrote about the contributions made by Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, Edgar Snow, Evans Fordyce Carlson, Joseph Stilwell and Shafick George Hatem to China’s revolution. In another book, Some Pottery Kilns Old and New in China , Alley shared what he learned about Chinese pottery and porcelain in decades of research. He also translated many Chinese poems and compiled them into works including The Eighteen Laments, Selected Poems of the Tang and Song Dynasties, Li Pai: 200 Selected Poems, and Bai Juyi: 200 Selected Poems. Among all Chinese poets, Alley admired Du Fu the most, because he believed that Du Fu always had the country and the people in his heart.
In December 1987, Rewi Alley passed away at the age of 90 in Beijing. He had spent two-thirds of his life in China. Through the tough years of war and revolution and the decades of socialist construction, Alley had always stood side by side with the CPC and was therefore loved and respected by the Chinese people.
As President Xi Jinping said, Rewi Alley lived and worked in China for 60 years. He shared weal and woe with the Chinese people, and helped build a bridge of friendship between the peoples of China and New Zealand. The International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, established upon the initiative of Rewi Alley, Soong Ching-ling and Edgar Snow, had made great contribution to China’s revolution and socialist construction.
Alley’s life story can be well summarized by his own words:“China gave me an aim to life, a cause to fight for, each year more richly; a place in the ranks of the advancing millions; how great a thing has this been, what bigger reward could one imagine than that which has come to me, and now sustains!”