My China Eye
MY CHINA EYE
Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist
LONG RIVER PRESS
San Francisco
Israel Epstein
Copyright © 2005 Israel Epstein
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission
of the publisher
Published in the United States of America by
Long River Press
360 Swift Ave., #48
S. San Francisco, CA 94080
www.longriverpress.com
Editor: Chris Robyn
Cover designer: Tommy Liu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Printed in China
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Epstein, Israel, 1915-
My China Eye : memoirs of a Jew and a journalist / by Israel Epstein.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-59265-042-2 (hardcover)
1. Epstein, Israel, 1915- 2. Jewish journalists—China—Biography.
3. Jews—China—Biography. 4. China—History—Republic, 1912-1949.
5. China—History—1949- I. Title.
PN5366.E67A3 2005
070.92—dc22
2005005132
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
CROSSROADS: WEST TO EAST 5
Chapter 2
ORIGINS 13
Chapter 3
ELSIE 20
Chapter 4
HARBIN 29
Chapter 5
TIANJIN 36
Chapter 6
AN EARLY START IN JOURNALISM 53
Chapter 7
WAR REPORTER IN NANJING 75
Chapter 8
WUHAN 85
Chapter 9
GUANGZHOU 100
Chapter 10
HONG KONG 110
Chapter 11
A LONG WALK THROUGH THE COUNTRY 124
Chapter 12
CHONGQING 129
Chapter 13
ESCAPE FROM HONG KONG 135
Chapter 14
THE VOYAGE OF THE VANDA 146
Chapter 15
CHONGQING REDUX 158
Chapter 16
FROM CHONGQING TO YAN’AN 171
Chapter 17
YAN’AN: AT THE CENTER 179
Chapter 18
MEETING MAO 187
Chapter 19
BEHIND ENEMY LINES 200
Chapter 20
PASSAGE THROUGH INDIA 207
Chapter 21
ENGLAND, 1945 213
Chapter 22
FROM THE NEW DEAL TO “WHO LOST CHINA” 224
Chapter 23
POLAND 238
Chapter 24
RETURN TO CHINA 246
Chapter 25
BASIC TRANSFORMATIONS 262
Chapter 26
TIBET 271
Chapter 27
IN THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION 288
Chapter 28
IN DURANCE VILE—THE PRISON YEARS 299
Chapter 29
THE MONTHS AFTER OUR RELEASE 320
Chapter 30
I LOSE ELSIE 324
Chapter 31
EVENSONG 328
Index 345
Notes to Photographs 355
5
Chapter 1
CROSSROADS: WEST TO EAST
In the West the compass is said to point North. To the Chinese,
who invented it, it is the “South-pointing needle.” The dual view does
not affect its ability to guide in all directions, but it does draw attention
to the relativity of spaces and the concept of multiple polarities. To the
acute and ancient awareness of the Chinese civilization, built even into
their everyday language, is the unifying relationship of opposites. “How
much” or “how many” in Chinese, is “much-little” or “many-few.” The
length of anything is its “long-short” relationship. More deeply, the beautiful
and thoughtful Chinese word for crisis is “danger-opportunity,”
reflecting the dual nature of the concept and hinting at the potential to
develop in either direction. As in real life.
From the Eurocentric viewpoint, China is in the “Far East.” But
continuing East from China one reaches California, which was to Europe
the far West. And going westward from there gets one, at last, to
the “Far East.”
There we find a couple whose lives are linked together at a crossroads
in time and space in the twentieth century. Their lives—from different
geographical and social origins—were propelled forward in unison
by the same currents which shaped the course of history.
That year was 1944. The place was Chongqing (Chungking), wartime
capital of the republican Guomindang (Kuomintang) government
in Western China. Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley was English, and from a family
of landed gentry. I was a then a stateless Jew, born in Poland, brought
up in China. We were married, and heading for the United States via her
homeland, Britain.
In our way stood a veritable mountain of red tape. I needed a visa,
hard to get when one is stateless. Elsie risked losing her own passport,
even her nationality. Before the postwar British Labor government put
an end to the male-centered legal barbarism, an Englishwoman marrying
a foreigner forfeited her citizenship and was deemed to have adopted
her husband’s. But my lack of citizenship was the only argument for
6
Elsie retaining hers. First, however, even my statelessness had to be
checked. “The man must have been born somewhere!” the consular official
at the British Embassy in Chongqing muttered to Elsie.
I was born somewhere. In Warsaw in 1915. But where in twentieth
century political geography? Warsaw had been, for almost two centuries,
a part of Poland, which had fallen to the Tsarist Empire in a threesided
partition with Austria and Prussia. Only after my birth did Warsaw
again become the capital of independent Poland.
Ethnically, moreover, I was not a Pole. Nor had I asked for Polish
papers in the pre-World War II situation, when the country’s government
was semi-Fascist and anti-Semitic. One example was the segregated
seating of Jewish students in its universities.
Finally a solution came. That same Polish regime (by then the government-
in-exile in London), had an ambassador in Chongqing who
had no use for my Jewish-ness, my politics, or me. So he was glad to
certify that I wasn’t legally Polish. This was an unintended favor to Elsie,
allowing her to retain her British birthright. And for me, though a legal
nobody—but with a legally British wife—I became eligible for a spousal
visit to her homeland. On the condition, it was noted, that our visit was
only a matter of a brief transit to the U.S. (to which we both had visas),
so I wouldn’t loiter in Britain.
There was bickering in the British Foreign Office, I was to learn
from papers opened decades afterwards, about whether to allow me in
at all. “No reason to,” one official noted sourly. “Let him come,” wrote
another more blandly, because I was fresh from Yan’an (Yenan), the
center of Chinese Communist activity, and might cast some light on the
Chinese Communists’ effectiveness in the still-ongoing war with Japan.
Even though, went his words: “Epstein is, of course, totally sold on
Yan’an.”
For many years I used to tell of the troubles of statelessness as a
joke, to show how benighted things had been earlier in the twentieth
century. In its third quarter, the humor vanished. The ranks of refugees,
more and more of them stateless, were again grimly increasing.
* * *
How did Elsie and I, though so different in origin, become a lasting
married pair, and in China of all places? The answers lay not only in
MY CHINA EYE
7
our story but in the twentieth century’s own turbulent history.
It brought my parents, with me as an infant, to the Far East in
1915. They were from Vilna (Vilnius), at their birth Russian-ruled but
later Polish-occupied and today Lithuania’s capital. As Socialists, and
Jewish ones at that, they had both been jailed or exiled for activities
linked to the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, the peak period of their
political lives. Then they became repeated migrants within Western Europe
and finally to Asia. The winds of World War I deposited my father
in Japan. By profession a bookkeeper, he had worked in Russian Poland
for a firm trading with Western Europe. With the land route was cut by
the German front, the sphere of commerce shifted to the Pacific, often
through Japanese ports. So Father was sent to Kobe. In the meantime,
the German army moved on Warsaw. To avoid family severance for
years, Mother took me, via thousands of miles on the Trans-Siberian
railroad, to join Father.
When Russia’s Tsarist monarchy was overthrown in February 1917,
father rushed from Japan to the Revolution’s capital, Petrograd, to unite
with old comrades. Russians and Russian subjects then living abroad
were often very different from “white” Russians émigrés of later years.
Anti-Tsarist, many flocked joyfully to their revolutionary homeland.
Thinking to fetch us back, Father asked Mother to move to Harbin,
a city in Northern China along the on the overland route by rail. But
after he came for us, the “White” revolt in Siberia severed the railroad.
In the early 1920s, traffic was restored by the Soviet government. By
then, however, differences between it and Father’s Socialist faction (the
Jewish Bund) had widened. Those tangles, objective and subjective,
planted us in China.
From Harbin we moved to Tianjin, a “treaty port” city then divided
into “concessions” (areas of foreign control), once imposed on
China at gunpoint. Predominant were British and American influences—
economic, political, military, and cultural. From the age of five, education
in foreign schools made English my language of easiest use, and
ultimately my medium in my chosen profession, journalism.
Yet the imprint of my parents’ Socialist ideas, at odds with my
colonial-type schooling, remained. They made me perceive as alien and
immoral the glaring contrasts and injustices of China’s domination by
foreign powers. Moreover, in my generation, the Russian Revolution
represented socialism. Its predecessors in 1905 and in February 1917,
CROSSROADS: WEST TO EAST
8
so real to my parents, became pre-history to me. Japan’s encroachments
and invasions of the 1930s and their attendant horrors, close and visible,
awoke me to an ever-growing sympathy with the rising nationalrevolutionary
tide among the Chinese people, shown both in armed
action and in student demonstrations.
These were part of the global surge to resist the advancing worldwide
menace of Fascism exemplified by the rise of Hitlerism in Germany
and the German-Italian armed backing of Fascist rebellion against
the Spanish Republic. Spain and China, the earliest battlefields against
armed aggression by Europe’s Fascist powers and their ally Japan, were
perceptibly linked, stirring anti-Fascists everywhere to admiration and
help. Had I been in Europe I would have fought for Spain with pen and
tongue, and possibly gun in hand in the International Brigades. But being
in China, where a revolution was in progress, I was increasingly drawn
toward it and its leading core, the Chinese Communist Party. The newspapers
and news agencies I worked for were, with occasional exceptions,
Right Wing. My personal links, Chinese and foreign, were increasingly
at the Left.
From 1929 well into the 1930s, on the heels of a boom trumpeted
as promising endlessly increasing prosperity in the West, its “advanced”
capitalist economies had dropped into deep economic crisis, with record
unemployment. In sharp contrast was the fast economic growth of the
Soviet Union, the only major country working for a halt to Fascism.
Pro-Soviet sentiment extended far beyond the Communist movement.
The realities of those times need recalling, having become old, vague
history to those who have no memory of them.
Elsie, on the other side of the globe, was formed by the same
historical climate. It brought her in her adult years to China in 1939. She
had studied agriculture, then farmed in Yorkshire, and been bankrupted
by the depression. Then she trained for, and found, a clerical job in
London, which she lost. Joining the ranks of the unemployed, she felt
as one of them, and sometimes joined in their protest marches. Experience,
combined with earlier ideas drawn from her father, a liberal inclined
to the radical views of William Morris, drew her to the Left. As a
feminist she could have gone to the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., different as they
were, not because her political views were as yet well defined, but because
the status of women there seemed better than in contemporary
England.
MY CHINA EYE
9
Later, chance and family connections threw her into a job with an
international academic body, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and a
subsequent world trip. On it she saw much of what then was termed the
“colonial” world, now simply called the Third World. Later, while working
in the IPR’s New York headquarters with scholars of both the Right
and the Left, she found the latter more enlightening and congenial.
Among them she met Chinese citizens who impressed her greatly. They
were, in fact, Communists, but secretly. If exposed as such, they could
not, in the Chiang Kai-shek era of the Guomindang, have left China. In
the West it would be difficult to find work in academia, but to remain in
China would be to risk death.
With popular sympathy for China under Japanese attacks widespread,
Elsie became active in the movement to boycott imports from
Japan. In 1939, still with the IPR, she came to Hong Kong. There I met
her among supporters of China’s armed resistance and of the wartime
Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement.
As a result of the blitz-attack on Hong Kong in December 1941
(on the same day as Pearl Harbor), Elsie and I found ourselves in a
Japanese-run enemy civilian internment camp. Determined to escape,
we succeeded, with the indispensable participation of three friends, one
American and two British.
In 1942, on a perilous journey into inland China, came love. I was
in the process of amicable divorce from my first wife, who was in
America. With her, I had some common views, but our choice of paths
differed. She wanted us to start a home and family in America, but I
wanted to stay in, and with, China until Japan was beaten. Already in
1938 when my parents had migrated to America I had remained in China,
a pattern opposite to the more typical one of the young men going first
then bringing their parents over.
With Elsie we chose not only each other but the same road-map
through life. We were married in 1943.
What took us out of China in 1944?
I had just returned from several months’ reporting in Yan’an, the
direction center of the Chinese Community Party, and other areas behind
the Japanese lines which were wrested back from the invaders.
There, we had seen not only a different way of national resistance to
Japanese aggressors but the embryonic stage of a future China. About
both, I wanted to write a book, not an easy think to do in Chongqing,
CROSSROADS: WEST TO EAST
10
the seat of the Chiang Kai-shek government. All my dispatches had
been required to go via Chongqing. It had not been easy to save them
from mangling by Guomindang censorship to the most trivial details,
despite my filing even for the New York Times. Fading away was the united
front between the Guomindang and the Communist Party that had been
formed to resist Japan. Chiang was hardly fighting the Japanese at all
while awaiting their coming defeat by the Allied powers. Clearly he was
hoarding his best troops and U.S.-supplied weapons for a subsequent
war against the Communists, who had fought Japan incessantly and came
to represent the national hope for a China free from her glaring current
weaknesses and woes. This, too, was hard to write while in Chiang’s
territory in the shadow of impending civil war.
In May 1945, when World War II was won in Europe (though not
yet in Asia), we were already in Britain, having, during the previous couple
of months, experienced the last bombings of London by Nazi V-2 missiles.
In July 1945, in the last phase of the war with Japan, we arrived in
New York. On our very first morning there, all newspapers front-paged
the U.S. arrest of John Stewart Service—one of the best-informed and
most open-minded young American diplomats in China. As a political
adviser to General Joseph W. (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell, the straight-talking,
erudite and China-wise former commander of U.S. forces there,
Jack Service had stood with his chief for cooperation against Japan alongside
the Communist as well as the Guomindang forces. This advocacy
led to the removal of Stilwell under pressure from Chiang Kai-shek.
Following the death of President Roosevelt in April, the United States
government chose to support Chiang under all circumstances, which
meant he could prepare and wage his civil war. Most U.S. State Department
officers in China had opposed this as bad for the United States,
and for future mutual relations with China. For this, they were smeared
in Washington as, in various degrees, “disloyal,” incurring penalties ranging
from transfer to posts as far from China as possible to being fired
from government service. Prescience became punishable, prejudiced
ignorance of the scene a merit.
It was part of a wider historic turn. Just as the Japanese invasion of
China in the 1930s had signaled the real start of World War II, the U.S.
decision to support Chiang in renewed civil war after Japan’s surrender
signaled the shift of U.S. and world politics from anti-Fascist war to
MY CHINA EYE
11
“Cold War.” In fact, the defeat of Chiang, by Chinese for internal Chinese
reasons, was inevitable despite all the arms and dollars with which
the U.S. supplied him. It led, in American domestic politics, to the absurd,
“Who lost China?” witch-hunt, as though anyone except the Chinese
could own China once they mustered the strength to end the century
of foreign domination, which by the late 1940s they had done.
From the “Who Lost China?” outcry one can trace the earliest trappings
of the McCarthyite blight which was to come. Internationally, it led to
the efforts to “contain” and later “roll back” the Chinese Revolution,
which animated U.S. involvement in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Only
after 22 years, during which these ventures failed, were the first U.S.
steps taken with President Richard M. Nixon’s trip, towards state-tostate
relations with the People’s Republic of China.
History has its tides and Elsie and I were faced with another choice.
In the five years we spent in the U.S., we tried to help Americans who
opposed policies that flew in the face of unfolding reality. As in
Guomindang China, this did not endear us to the establishment, and
vice-versa. Though we were temporarily across the ocean, our energies
centered no less on China than when we were there: first on arguing
against the Truman administration’s pro-Chiang actions, then on helping
a campaign for U.S. “friendship, recognition, and trade” with the
newborn People’s Republic. In those early years Elsie and I made two
crucial choices: the first was to leave China in 1944 to help the Western
world understand the Chinese Revolution. The second was come back
to live and work in the new China, which we did in 1951.
* * *
Before leaving Chongqing in 1944, we visited Zhou Enlai, who
represented the Communist Party there within the long-tottering united
front with the Guomindang. To re-live it for the post-World War II era,
averting civil war and speeding national rebuilding from the ruins of the
preceding devastating decades, the Communists were advocating a coalition
government with the participation not only of China’s two main
parties but of smaller democratic parties and groups. Did Zhou really
think such a coalition possible? We asked. “Yes,” he replied without
hesitation, “with or without him.” The “him” clearly referred to Chiang
Kai-shek. And “without him” that if Chiang chose war instead of co-
-
CROSSROADS: WEST TO EAST
12
MY CHINA EYE
operation, he would inevitably isolate himself from a very broad national
consensus, including elements of his own party.
At a distance from China, sometimes with no means of communicating,
we never forgot Zhou’s remark. Borne out by what did happen
between 1944 and 1949, it helped us, and our audiences abroad, to see
the main trend in the intervening complex of events, culminating in the
birth and growth of a China no longer, as for a century past, a football
in the world arena but one of its leading players.
In 1951, we returned to China, in our last and fullest choice, to stay.
And we did through weal, woe, trials and triumphs. Unlike “watchers”
from the outside, we saw the international arena as it looked from within
China. Considering our familiarity with both worlds, our perceptions
might help others to a rounder view.
At the age of 90, I try to present in greater detail recollections of a
complex life’s journey in an increasingly interwoven world. Hopefully
they may contain a few clues to a future bound to be more intricately
interactive.
13
Chapter 2
ORIGINS
On the paternal side, my Grandfather, David Epstein, I was told,
started life as a young student of Jewish Holy Scriptures but became a
forwarding agent at the Vilna railway station in Lithuania, then ruled by
the Russian Tsar. He married Haya-Kraina Baver, from a family of publishers
of Hebrew prayer books and Talmudic texts used in many countries.
Shipping these books worldwide broadened his contacts and knowledge
since he had to write addresses and bills of lading in several languages.
From letters received he learned something of events abroad.
Though his income never exceeded the lower-middle level, he gained
enough respect to become the gabbai (Elder) of a neighborhood synagogue.
This status was symbolized on public occasions by a silk top hat,
which impressively crowned his small height.
Grandfather and his wife presented many contrasts. He, short and
stocky, moved and thought with deliberation. Grandmother, taller by a
head, thin, swarthy, and handsomely aquiline, was decisive in speech
and action (with a “Ministerial brain” one of her daughters recalled).
But they lived in harmony and raised nine children—some tall, some
average, and others diminutive—in two cases with spinal curvatures,
probably the result of rickets.
Yet precisely those two, my father Lazar and his sister Rebecca,
were outstanding in energy of mind, and grew into revolutionaries
against the Tsar. Their organization was the Bund, or Jewish Labor
Alliance, originally a section of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor
Party, the Marxist group which later split into the Bolsheviks (Communists)
and the Mensheviks (Socialists).
The Bund became their life. Dad, drawn in by an early teacher,
served his party from the age of 12 or so. Tiny and humpbacked, he
was not the type to be suspect of carrying secret revolutionary messages—
which he did.
Able and warm-hearted, Aunt Rebecca, too, was a lifelong activist.
She became a labor union functionary and, for a time in Paris, took
14
courses at the Sorbonne. She was elected as a Bund member of the
Vilna Jewish Community Council. Never married, but loving and concerned
for children, she was incessantly involved in school and kindergarten
affairs.
Ultimately, she would be murdered—buried alive—by the Nazis in
the killing fields of Ponary near Vilnius. One believes that, even in line
for grisly death, in circumstances designed to denude victims of all human
dignity before the end, she stood as straight as her hunched back
would allow, helping others.
Grandmother Haya-Kraina showed her mettle whenever the Tsarist
gendarmes came to search the house for evidence against her son and
daughter. She would hide incriminating papers where they could not
find them. When her children were jailed, she would stride, head held
high, with a basket of food to whatever prison they were held in, whether
she would have preferred them to stay out of politics and jail was not
the point: they were her children and she respected their choice.
At age 21, Father was a Bund delegate to the Seventh Congress of
the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party held in London in 1907.
Including both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, it was known as the Unity
Congress because, drawing lessons from the initial great sweep of the
1905 Russian Revolution and the weight of its defeat, a last effort was
made to heal the split between the two factions dating from 1903. Lenin
was there, and Trotsky, and the still little-known Joseph Djugashvili (later
called Stalin). So were the pillars of Manshevism: Plekhanov, Martov,
and others, and fiery revolutionaries like the famous Rosa Luxembourg.
* * *
The Chinese have a proverb: “Withered leaves drop close to the
roots of the tree”—in old age and in death one returns to one’s origins.
With Dad’s Yiddish-educated East European Jewish generation this was
hardly possible. The fruits were prematurely destroyed or scattered—
the roots bloodily ripped out by Nazi genocide—or “ethnic cleansing”—
to use a modern term sanitizing a murderous practice. So the surviving
fruits did the next best thing: they fell close to each other.
When Father, past 90, finally had to go to an old age home in New
York, he chose the one in the Bronx run by the Workmen’s Circle, where
there were many surviving old Bundists.
MY CHINA EYE
15
“I know you!” He was greeted on arrival by a contemporary already
there. “I heard you speaking from a balcony in Minsk in 1906!”
Of our family who stayed in Lithuania and Poland a score perished
in the Holocaust and only one remained alive—my first cousin Beba
who survived a Nazi concentration camp for women. Just before
Germany’s defeat its remaining inmates were herded aboard a ship in
the Baltic Sea to which a mine was attached. It failed to detonate. The
women were rescued and taken to Sweden. In a long process cousin
Beba made contact with my father in New York who brought her over
to the United States. At this writing, she lives in Los Angeles, with her
husband, children and grandchildren.
The only other survivors on my Father’s side were his three sisters:
Emma, Sonya, and Anna, and an older brother, Alexander, who went
early to the Soviet Union. The sisters were all teachers. Alexander perished
in a purge during the 1930s.
Another brother, Isaac, who immigrated to the United States before
World War I, became a waiter in New Jersey and died there.
Isaac had no politics and floated out of the Jewish milieu. He lived
largely among Italian-Americans, and was a bon vivant to the extent that
his income allowed. Locally, he was popular—and a bit of a legend. So
diminutive that he could hardly be seen behind the wheel while driving,
the story was that when an empty car came rolling along, people said,
“There goes Eppy.”
When he died, nothing was found to indicate any desire to be buried
in a Jewish cemetery. It is said that his devout Catholic ladyfriend
insisted that this be done with the proper rites, so he would be at peace
with his long-neglected God.
Mother’s family was more prosperous, yet she too took the revolutionary
path—to the Bund.
My grandfather on that side, Moshe Ebicz (later spelled “Ebitz” by
his son in America), was a Vilna leather merchant.
A pious Jew, he was also affected by the “enlightenment” (Haskala
in Hebrew). That nineteenth century trend in East European Jewry retained
religious orthodoxy as a basis, but was open in various ways to
modern thought. In later years, in China, I would find interesting parallels
in its attitudes and timing to views of the Chinese reformers of the
1870s who wanted to acquire Western science and technology, heavy
industry, national defense, and the like, while preserving their own Chi-
ORIGINS
16
nese (in their case Confucian) pieties and practices.
But there were also essential differences. China’s “Westernizers”
were officials, trying to save and adapt their feudal state. Jews had no
officials and no state. So my maternal grandfather did not need to think
about budgets, administrative systems, or armaments.
In religious life, a mohel (performer of ritual circumcisions) would
advocate modernist practices by using antiseptic procedures instead of
traditional, unsanitary ones (an old-time mohel would take the infant’s
penis in his mouth to stanch bleeding). So Grandpa Ebicz aimed at a
measure of progress, but within the limits of the ghetto.
In temperament, the old man was also liberal, in fact happy-golucky.
His many children—his wife bore sixteen, of whom seven or
eight survived—were spaced over such a range that when the youngest
were small the eldest brother was already earning and burdened by being
the virtual paterfamilias. Mother recalled the eldest brother as the
stern family disciplinarian while her father seemed kind and mild. Grandfather,
was, in fact, unfair to his eldest son. When the latter was in his
forties—and he himself in his 70s—he would grumble about his preoccupied
and strait-laced first-born: “That old man bores me.” Much more
to his easy-going taste was the company of his younger offspring and
his grandchildren. After Grandmother’s death he scandalized most of
the family by marrying again, the widow of a close friend. When World
War II broke out he was 87, and still lively.
But not for long. The German occupation of Vilnius spelled his
end. Was he asphyxiated in a Nazi gas chamber, or knocked to the ground
by an SS officer, and, unable to scramble to his feet, kicked and left to
die in the street where he fell like so many other old bearded Jews? Or
did starvation and disease wither him in the ghetto? No eyewitness was
found to tell the tale.
Grandfather’s respectable merchant status, had, paradoxically, led
indirectly to the first arrest of my mother, then only sixteen and his
favorite child. The charge was engaging in revolutionary activity. She
had just joined the youth organization of the Jewish Socialist Bund.
Because her new comrades were from poorer families they had decided
to hide their Marxist library in her home, which was thought to be less
suspect. Soon an informer tipped off the Tsarist gendarmes, and my
future mother was in prison, and within weeks on her way to exile in
Narym, Siberia.
MY CHINA EYE
17
The exiles, in those days, traveled under convoy and by stages, etapes
as they were called (in Russian borrowed from the French). They started
their journey by train, continued by river steamer, then moved on by
foot, spending the nights locked up in prisons along the way.
Mother was to recall her youthful ordeal less as miserable and more
as exciting and enlightening. On the trail, and in Narym, she was in the
company of revolutionary intellectuals, broad in knowledge, strong in
conviction, which she saw as teachers. Most were much older than she.
Some, like Valerian Kuibyshev, her senior by only a few years, were to
become prominent in the U.S.S.R. He would, for a time, be at the head
of the Soviet economy. After his death, a city named after him would
become the country’s temporary seat of government in World War II.
Mother recalled him as a convinced, handsome, eloquent young man.
In the Bund organization, my father had been her superior. Though
they had not previously known each other, he had taken her under his
wing because she seemed almost a child. Also, as he told me decades
later, she was sad and tearful: when he first saw her at youth reunion at
a woodland resort near Vilna, she was despondent over the failure of
her first girlhood romance.1
Though only five years older in years, my father had already been
tested in the 1905 Revolution against Tsarist autocracy and had undergone
the first of his five arrests. He traveled secretly as a Bund delegate
to London. Now, going on a business trip (as a commercial employee)
to Koenigsberg in East Prussia, he asked what he could bring back for
my mother. A popular folding umbrella, she said, available in Germany
but not locally. Koenigsberg would after World War II be ceded to the
Soviet Union and called Kaliningrad.
By the time he returned, she was in prison, destined for Siberia.
Upon learning that her barred window faced the street, he strolled on
the opposite side, the umbrella over his head, to show her he had not
forgotten.
Later, when she was in Siberia, they corresponded and he helped
her to escape.
As Mother would tell it, he sent her a book—and a note commenting
on its attractive binding. Taking the hint, she sliced it open, taking
ORIGINS
1This resort, not far from Vilna, was Ponary, which in the Holocaust would become
the Nazi killing fields for tens of thousands of the city’s Jews.
18
apart the endpapers. On one side was a passport for her use (in those
days such identity papers carried no photos and though the name was
not hers the description could fit her). On the other side were some
high-denomination banknotes, given to her by her father. Supplied with
these, she managed one day to slip out of the area to which she was
supposed to be confined—and kept on going.
That she could get away was due to several factors. She had been
sentenced, like some other “politicals,” not to jail or hard labor but to
“administrative exile.” A young girl, she had no “history” to warrant
special surveillance. The local police inspector, responsible for several
villages, was frequently off on circuit. Like many rural minor officials,
he stood rather in awe of the intellectuals under his charge, and would
ask them to help coach a son in mathematics, or another to help teach a
daughter the piano. The exiles had virtually the run of his house—and
even held political conclaves there while he was traveling. The police
inspector’s daughter was the same age as my mother and actually helped
smooth her escape with advice on how to hire a horse cart to where she
could board a riverboat. She encountered no difficulty. Mother had a
document (in old Russia it was said that a human being had to have
three things, “body, soul, and a passport”), and enough money to keep
going. All the way by boat, road, and rail across Russia and over the
border—as far as Paris.
She was happy about it all except for one reservation—would the
inspector or his daughter get in too much trouble on her account?
In Paris, with the help of Bundist and other revolutionary expatriates,
she found a job as secretary to the Yiddish poet Avrahm Reisin,
went to museums and art galleries with Anatoly Lunacharsky—future
Soviet Minister of Culture—a highly-qualified volunteer group tour guide,
and generally expanded her purview. I still remember, from my childhood,
already in China, browsing on the pudgy, abundantly illustrated
Petite Larousse encyclopedic dictionary she had brought back, from which
I learned some French and much else. France, incidentally, was not
Mother’s first experience in the West. At age 12 or so, she had been to
London with her father who went on his leather business, and briefly
attended an English school.
To Paris too, in due course, came my father, who in between had
sat for a while in a Tsarist jail. Renewed acquaintance ripened into courtship.
They vacationed in Switzerland, on Lake Lugano.
MY CHINA EYE
19
Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, they returned to Vilna,
and married. And Mother, in line with their conviction that one must
have a skill of use to people, trained as a midwife.
But that is another story.
ORIGINS
20
Chapter 3
ELSIE
Of Elsie’s background, there are some facts, from what she told
me at various times, and from experience before our fates brought us
together.
Her father was Hugh Fairfax Cholmeley (1864-1940), squire of the
Yorkshire village of Brandsby, who inherited several farms but later in
life had to sell most of them. For English country gentry, the family was
not typical. As Roman Catholics they had for three centuries been barred
from the civil and military careers that made their class in society a pillar
of Britain’s conservative establishment.
Though Hugh Cholmeley broke with Catholicism, to which the
rest of the family continued to adhere, it was not to conform more to
the prevailing social conventions, but to stray further. From his university
days he tended toward radical views, often proclaiming them with a
bright red necktie to shocking the prim and proper. A family story tells
how a stuffy aunt ordered her doorman, if her nephew came so attired,
not to let him in by the front entrance but to hint that he hop over the
hedge and enter through the backyard. She was willing to see the young
reprobate, but not to face neighbors’ comments.
The young man himself, starting from volunteering at Toynbee
Hall, which philanthropically helped London’s poor, began to lean toward
Socialist ideas. He came to admire William Morris and frequented
circles that included, among others, Bernard Shaw.
Unconventional, too, in setting up his own household, he remained
single until around forty, then married his gardener’s daughter, Alice
Moverley (1885-1953), who was to become Elsie’s mother. But first he
supervised her education, a la Pygmalion. Prior to the wedding, he sent
her family out of the village to London where be bought them a home
in the then still-rural suburb of Hampstead. So his freedom from conventions
had limits.
As a squire, he was a paternalist reformer. He equipped his village
with water taps and a public telephone, angering nearby landlords who
21
feared that their tenants would want the same. To widen the mental
horizons of his tenants, he built a small red-brick auditorium, “Cholmeley
Hall,” where they were expected to gather each Sunday afternoon to
hear him read from that mouthpiece of liberal views, The Manchester
Guardian. This was far less popular than the running water, as Elsie would
amusingly recollect. After church in the mornings they would prefer to
do something else. But to her father the editorial infusions might well
have seemed a desirable antidote to a sermon. Though his ethics were
Christian, he was not pious.
After renouncing Catholicism, Hugh Cholmeley himself attended
Anglican Sunday services—it was the done thing. But he disliked the
local parson, and so boycotted Brandsby church. Each week he drove
past it in his pony trap with a loud jangling of bells on the way to the
church in the next village.
This English eccentric, part Tolstoyan, part rebel, was artistic and
musical. He had a good baritone voice and a repertoire of English and
Italian folk songs, self-accompanied on the guitar. Music was part of his
heritage to his daughters. Elsie learned the cello and her youngest sister,
Rosamond (Ros for short), the violin—both performing with quartets
of fair quality.
Rooted in Elsie’s heart and memory were many old tunes of green,
rural England some of which she taught me when our lives joined. In
Chongqing we would meet another aficionado, Joseph Needham, head
of the wartime British Scientific Mission, and future author of the monumental
multi-volume, Science and Civilisation in China, a staggering academic
work of global significance. He would bring his own guitar for
sing-songs in our room.
Another thing for which Elsie thanked her father was his determination
that his daughters, as well as his sons, should be educated. At that
time, socially comparable young women were mostly rounded off for
marriage at finishing schools. But he wanted them prepared to earn a
living.
Elsie received her earlier schooling from a governess, and most of
her secondary schooling from a public (which in England means private)
school for girls at North Foreland on the Channel coast. She then
studied dairy farming at Reading Agricultural College. Her youngest sister
Ros was trained as a hospital dietitian at London University.
From Elsie’s childhood and adolescence, I have only scraps of
ELSIE
22
written evidence.
One is an undated letter she wrote at the age of 7 or so, addressed
to Santa Claus:
Dear Father Christmas,
Please will you bring me a Bicycle and a large Doll in long clothes to
take care of and a Book about Fairy Tales any kind will do and also I would
like a pack of Beggar My Neighbour cards and a box of Paints and a ball to
play games and catch with.
Much love from Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley—if you cannot read the address
it is 22 Montpelier Crescent, Brighton it is not at Brandsby.
Brighton, where the family moved to for a time, was where Elsie
wanted her presents sent. Brandsby was the ancestral village in Yorkshire.
Even so early she was definite and detailed in what she had to say,
a characteristic she retained.
Two other letters are reminiscences, after she died, by former teenage
schoolmates at North Foreland:
One wrote:
I loved Elsie since I first met her. I knew she was something very special.
She used to radiate goodness… In her company I felt a better person or
wanted to be. Don’t ask me why… Sometimes a single glance is enough to
know people… I feel over-whelming gratitude for having known her—someone
great in the real sense. So human and yet so pure.
The other recalled Elsie’s funloving, and rebellious character. With
three friends, including the letter writer:
We were called the Four Musketeers for we were all antiestablishment…
couldn’t wait to leave the school & horrified the “goodies”
most of whom wept at the end of the last term, unlike us who laughed with
joy and had an illicit party.
We called Elsie “Blossom” because when she had a cold her nose went
pink. She always told us she was a farmer’s daughter—when we supposed
they had hams hanging in the kitchen Elsie got a real ham & hung it on a
hook as a joke—she had a great sense of humour— although I hadn’t seen
her for all these years I’m sure she kept it until the end.
She guessed right, Elsie did.
Elsie’s father’s continued to influence her after she joined the working
world, and the values he wished to pass on to her can be glimpsed
from a letter to her when she was 25, job-seeking in London after a
MY CHINA EYE
23
depression-era failure in farming:
Of the then most powerful British conservative press magnates,
the Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, Hugh Cholmeley wrote caustically:
They are both a bad lot politically. I think Rothermere is the worse
villain, but I’m not sure. One of the two wanted a favor from [Prime Minister]
Baldwin, a rise to the peerage and a place in the Cabinet for his son, and
when refused attacked Baldwin out of spite.
On a more personal note, after suggesting that Elsie try to be a
writer, he approved her expressed reluctance in terms, which cast light
on both father and daughter:
You are right about not being able to write unless you have something
you want to say. All other writing is worthless even if people attain the art of
writing about nothing…
Which is one reason why you should read, cultivate ideas about topics
of world interest and… interest yourself in important affairs, in human nature…
With all great artists and writers, the higher they are in the scale the
wider their interests… You will find poets like Shelley and Byron deeply &
seriously interested in reform movements & even politics of their day: even
painters like Michelangelo, Raphael, etc. had unsuspected intellectual & practical
interests. William Blake, of all people, the mystical idealist, was deeply
versed in political and social questions. And you can’t get ideas worth having
unless you take the trouble to go into questions thoroughly & not merely
superficially, but the moment you begin to do that the ideas come fast
enough…
Then if you have the faculty of expressing them it is easy.
The writers he cited as models were progressives, and in the case
of Shelley and Blake revolutionaries of their time. Blake had famously
pledged:
I shall not cease from mental strife
Nor shall the sword sleep in my hand
Until we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Blake remained Elsie’s best-loved poet. She tried to get every new
edition of the powerful verse and art of this great eighteenth century
visionary, from which we would often read together.
Closest to her father, Elsie talked with him the most, absorbed his
ELSIE
24
thinking the most, and in practice went beyond him. Her childhood
friendships among the tenants would last into old age. Her interest in
cooperatives, which would lead her later to work with the wartime industrial
cooperatives in China, also went back to Hugh Cholmeley. He
had founded, in 1894, a decade before she was born, a co-op in Brandsby
to help the farmers—with vans and other facilities—to transport and
market their dairy products. After more than a century, it still exists.
Politically, in the early 1930s, father and daughter were sharply critical
of the British establishment. Both read The Week, the radical newsletter
edited by Claude Cockburn, with its informed exposés of reactionary
and pro-Fascist trends in the upper world. But as the decade closed, the
father, by then over 70, saw hope for “peace in our time” in Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany. Elsie,
though she never ceased loving her “Pa Cholmeley,” was vigorously
opposed.
Generally, Elsie’s development was impelled by the same global
spirit of the age as mine, far apart, as we were our geographical and
social starting points. When worldwide post-1929 economic depression
wrecked her livestock-farming in Yorkshire, she took a secretarial course
in London but could find work only sporadically. Sympathizing with the
growing mass of Britain’s unemployed, she joined in some of their protest
marches. Since jobs for women in England were even scarcer, and
paid even less than those for men, she thought of moving elsewhere, to
the United States or the Soviet Union where there was less sex discrimination.
Then, in 1935, came a surprising opportunity to travel to many
countries. Though opened through upper-class connections of the family,
it was to carry Elsie more decisively to the Left, and ultimately, to China,
and me.
Elsie’s father had asked influential friends if they could find something
for her. One was involved in receiving a globe-trotting group from
the Institute of Pacific Relations, an academic body which was international
in scope but actually American-led. Its secretary-general, Edward
C. Carter, was looking for a British addition to vary its image. Learning
that Elsie was from a landed gentry family with a hyphenated-surname
(Americans are often impressed by this) he thought she might be suitable.
But first he wanted his wife to look her over. Elsie would later
chuckle about how Alice Carter, while getting a permanent in a London
MY CHINA EYE
25
Beauty Parlour, gave her the nod. Tall, with good looks but not flaunting
them, well-bred but direct and without airs, she seemed to the older
woman to fit the role.
A financial snag intervened. Part of the travel expenses had to be
borne by Elsie, but it was too much for her or her father. Only when a
wealthy and affectionate aunt came to the rescue was the job hers.
Hired, she accompanied the IPR delegation through the rest of its
tour—to Japan, China, India, Australia and New Zealand, all with local
affiliate offices. She then joined the regular staff of the IPR’s international
center in New York, as secretary to its quarterly magazine Pacific
Affairs, edited by the noted American Far Eastern scholar Owen
Lattimore.
The unexpected and almost global safari widened her world. In
India she saw the misery of the indigenous population beneath the panoply
of Britain’s empire; in China the back-breaking labor of the people
harried by foreign and domestic oppression. In Japan, where the militarists
were taking over, she met careful but determined opponents of
this course—like the erudite Dr. Yasuo and the aristocrat Prince Kinkazu
Saionji (the latter a Marxist who after the war was to live in Beijing and
work to normalize the relations of the People’s Republic of China with
Japan).
In New York, and at an international conference of the IPR in
Yosemite, California, she came to know two brilliant Chinese scholars
working with the Institute, Dr. Ji Chaoding and Dr. Chen Hansheng.
Both were Communists but not openly.
In 1937 Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China. In the United
States, as elsewhere, opponents of aggression and Fascism took up
China’s cause. Elsie became an activist in the women’s movement to
boycott Japanese silk, used mainly for stockings in the pre-nylon days.
Silk was the main export with whose proceeds Japan bought American
oil, scrap steel, and other military essentials.
Elsie was also involved in the American Committee for Chinese
War Orphans, as well as aid programs for the Spanish Republic (Spain
and China were seen by anti-Fascists worldwide as fronts of the same
cause).
Within the IPR she helped organize a union. Edward C. Carter,
like many employers who are pro-labor until it comes to them, was hurt
in his paternalist nerve. He began to regard Elsie, the well-born British
ELSIE
26
Miss he had hired, as ungrateful.
In 1939, Chen Hansheng and his wife Suzie (Gu Shuxing), by now
Elsie’s best friends, went to Hong Kong. Nominally they were engaged
to work on publishing projects for the IPR; when in fact, they mainly
went to assist Soong Ching-ling (the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, leader
of China’s Republican Revolution of 1911) in mobilizing international
support for China’s anti-Japanese resistance, especially that of the Communist-
led armies. In a wartime united front with the ruling Guomindang,
the Communist forces were often deprived not only of military supplies
but medical supplies as well.
Elsie had obtained a commission from the IPR to go into the interior
of China to study traditional agricultural tools and methods. This,
in wartime, proved difficult. Instead, under Chen Hansheng in Hong
Kong, she worked in the International Committee for the Promotion
of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, a movement to bring skilled
workers and their tools out of the Japanese-occupied cities into areas of
rural resistance. Elsie also collaborated with Chen on a newsletter about
China’s military and political situation, called Internos (later the Far Eastern
Bulletin) using the pen-name Edith Cromwell.
It was in Hong Kong, and through common work in such efforts
that we met. My first impression of her was of a pale, quiet blonde
Englishwoman, topping me by a head, in her mid-thirties to my midtwenties,
hard-working, and not very communicative. She saw in me, as
she later recalled, only a short, rather shy, youngster, with “long eyes
that rolled upward” (they may have done because of her height). Any
romantic interest was furthest from out minds. I was still married to my
first wife. Elsie had her own social circle.
What first touched my heart was encountering her on a street in
Hong Kong in mid-1941, her face drawn in sorrow, her blue eyes dimmed
within dark circles. She had been, overwhelmingly, in love, in what she
had told me later had been her life’s high peak, not only of joy but also
of seeming common understanding, only to have been deceived and
rudely discarded.
I felt sudden, deep compassion for this woman, usually so selfcontained,
now surprisingly so vulnerable and stricken. Still, there was
no thought or inkling that we would ever unite our lives.
On December 7, 1941 came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
which ignited the Pacific War. Simultaneously, there were attacks on Hong
MY CHINA EYE
27
Kong. Elsie and I had met again in our pro-China relief volunteering.
Apparently back on keel, Elsie had a new regular job, with the Chinese
Currency Stabilization Board, a joint Chinese, U.S., and British undertaking
to protect China’s depreciating currency from collapse. She had
joined it on the recommendation of old IPR colleague (and secret Communist)
Ji Chaoding. Through a provincial-level and old family friend
connection with the then Guomindang Finance Minister, H. H. Kung,
Ji had become one of the Chinese representatives. In her new position,
Elsie scandalized the British delegate, Hall-Patch, by siding not with the
British but with the Chinese and American delegates, the progressive
Roosevelt New Dealers, Manuel Fox, and Solomon Adler.
Amid the din of the 18-day Battle of Hong Kong, Elsie came more
than once to see me at the South China Morning Post, where I was then
working as a sub-editor. Each time she threaded her calm, brave way
from Hong Kong’s elite Peak area, where she had moved from her previous
quarters to stay with a female friend, down sloping, winding streets
where enemy shells were falling. She was, by then, doing war work, helping
put out, together with progressive Chinese publicists, an information
sheet called Hong Kong War Express.
Among the things we talked about was how to dispose of the papers
of the Stabilization Board. As requested by Ji Chaoding in a note to
Elsie before the leading group’s hurried air-evacuation to Chongqing,
we went to his room in the Hong Kong Hotel and, in its steel wastebasket,
burned every scrap he had had no time to destroy. A more substantial
part of the Board’s documents, Elsie said with some wry asides, she
and her Peak hostess had buried in a tin trunk under the manure heap
of the latter’s garden.
We further discussed how to keep from the Japanese the files of
the Indusco (Chinese Industrial Cooperative) office, being destroyed by
Elsie and her colleagues. And those of the China Defense League, some
of which I helped my colleague, Liu Wugou, to burn.
These things done, we spoke of how, in the event of Hong Kong’s
inevitable fall, we could escape from Japanese vengeance, which for us,
working closely with China’s resistance, could be drastic. We understood
that we would be helped to leave by the Communist-led underground,
which had contingency plans for the evacuation of united front friends
and activists. Yang Gang, the well-known writer, critic, essayist, poet,
and literary editor of the liberal newspaper Ta Kung Pao (Da Gongbao),
ELSIE
28
secretly a Communist, was to inform of us of the time and place.
In the chaotic days after the Japanese landed on Hong Kong Island
after having seized Kowloon peninsula, we lost touch. Elsie, as she would
tell me, became a volunteer nurse in the impromptu military hospital in
what had been the cocktail lounge of the swank Hong Kong Hotel.
Under doctors’ orders, she did what she could for the increasingly
crowded wounded laid side to side on the floor, some dying, some in
agony. I could picture her—strong, tireless and caring—though, as she
said ruefully, her medical training was limited to veterinary first-aid learned
in her dairy-farming course at Reading and in practical farming afterwards.
By now she showed no outward signs of the emotional distress I
had seen earlier in the year. Her response was to act, not languish.
The arrangements for our evacuation fell through, because of the
rapidity of Hong Kong’s fall. When next we met, it was in the civilian
internment camp set up by the Japanese at Stanley, a small peninsula on
the southern side of Hong Kong Island.
Elsie arrived with the Peak contingent. The officially and socially
prominent British inhabiting this exclusive locale, she said bitingly, had
first petitioned the Japanese authorities, as between gentlemen, to be
interned in their accustomed prestigious area. But they were, after some
parley, refused and, since they were the last group to arrive at Stanley
they received the worst quarters. On the other hand, being allowed to
come by truck instead of being marched in on foot, they arrived with
what in the internment camp was untold wealth: Simmons mattresses,
trunks bulging with personal effects, food, and assorted loot for trading
within the camp.
Elsie, not belonging to the Peak in any way other than geographically,
came with them through the accident of having been the guest of
a woman acquaintance there in the battle’s last days.
Spotting her and her friend in one of the trucks, I helped to carry
their luggage. Though short in stature, I had a strong back and strong
legs.
We lived in different areas, she in the British and I in the American
(as part of a pretended identity).
Common determination to escape, in order to dodge retribution
for our work for China and to resume that work as soon as possible,
brought us together. First in planning and, after further moves and perils,
as a couple.
MY CHINA EYE
29
Chapter 4
HARBIN
Though my parents and I lived in Harbin, a city in the extreme
north of China only from when I was two until I was five (1917-20), it is
so vivid in my memory even at ninety.
Harbin’s flavor was Russian, specifically, Siberian. Unlike most cities
in China it had no pre-modern urban history but was a product of
two decades of mushroom growth. Up to the end of the nineteenth
century it had been a fishing village by the Songhua (Sungari) River, its
name reputed to have meant, in the Manchu language, “a place for sunning
nets.”
Then came its boom-town urban birth, amid rapid railroad construction
to serve the needs of an encroaching colonial power, Tsarist
Russia.
The house where we lived was Russian in style, with wooden
porches, set in a yard amid tall trees, a nesting and assembly site for
cawing crows. The streets all had Russian names: Yamskaya (Post-Coach)
and Artilleriskaya (Artillery) at whose crossroads our house stood. One
echoed the pre-railroad form of transport in the area, the second the
recent Tsarist military occupation. Among other reminders were streets
caller Kazachya (Cossack), Zei’isk-Atamansksya (a branch of the Cossacks)
and Politseiskaya (Police).
In Harbin, as in nearby eastern Siberia then, most roads were packed
dirt in summer, with droshkies pulled by hairy nags plying for hire as
taxis, and hard-packed snow in winter, when the vehicles for hire were
horse-drawn sleighs with huge, curved iron runners.
Close to the house was the wooded Municipal Park (Gorodskoi Sad).
Besides an onion-domed Orthodox chapel—its main building—it had
plank-built kiosks for tea or cooling drinks, like the foaming kvas fermented
from rye bread. Playing along its paths, I often encountered a
human park fixture, its resident drunk (pianitsa), a fat, ruddy-faced old
Russian woman encased in numerous skirts. Too vodka-sodden to stand,
she would be sitting propped against a tree, or lying prone, asleep and
30
snoring loudly. When disturbed by grown-ups she would growl and
mutter curses. For small children she had bleary smiles, especially when
we called her babushka (granny).
I spoke and understood Russian, although we ourselves were not
ethnically Russian but Jewish, and proudly so, and our domicile had
been Lithuania and Poland, as few Jews were allowed within ethnic Russia
under the Tsars. Yet Russian language and schooling had been, for
my parents’ generation, the means to break out of the ghetto and to link
with outside progressive thought. They read not only Pushkin and Tolstoy,
and revolutionaries like Chernyshevsky, but, in translation, Rousseau,
Voltaire, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and of
course Karl Marx. They also came in contact with the anti-tsarist movement.
* * *
Harbin itself had shared in Russia’s turbulent recent political history
and, from her monarchy’s last years, her revolutions. It was the hub
of the Chinese Eastern Railway; a Tsarist-built shortcut in the major
Trans-Siberian line linking two Russian areas but running through China’s
northeast (then termed “Manchuria”). Flanking it was a “zone” administered
and garrisoned by Russia much as the Panama Canal Zone was
run by the United States. Ante-dating the latter by a few years it had
reputedly served as its model, a circumstance now forgotten.
Very differently from the Panama Canal Zone, however, a watershed
change had occurred in the Chinese Eastern Railway Zone with
Russia’s Soviet Revolution of November 7, 1917 (October 25 by Russia’s
old calendar, hence known as the October Revolution). Only days afterwards,
the zonal Russian garrison, following the example of much of
the old army in Russia, hoisted the Red Flag. Within two weeks, on
November 21, 1917, a local Soviet was formed in Harbin, on Lenin’s
direct instruction, comprising railway workers and staff as well as soldiers.
On December 12 it displaced the zone’s old administration. But
by December 26, under Western and Japanese pressure, the insurgent
troops were disarmed and repatriated by the Chinese warlord regime.
In the subsequent civil war in Siberia, the White armies, backed to