China Correspondent

Light on China

by Agnes Smedley

Book by Smedley, Agnes

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Journalism, Civil War

365 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Agnes Smedley (February 23, 1892 – May 6, 1950) was an American journalist and writer. Well known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth, she also known for her sympathetic chronicling of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. During World War I, she worked in the United States for the independence of India from the United Kingdom, receiving financial support from the government of Germany, and for many years worked for or with the Comintern, frequently in an espionage capacity. As the lover of Soviet super spy Richard Sorge in Shanghai in the early 1930s, she helped get him established for his final and greatest work as spymaster in Tokyo. She also worked on behalf of various causes including women's rights, birth control, and children's welfare. Smedley wrote six books, including a novel, reportage, and a biography of the Chinese general Zhu De, reported for newspapers such as New York Call, Frankfurter Zeitung and Manchester Guardian, and wrote for periodicals such as the Modern Review, New Masses, Asia, New Republic, and Nation.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

When we told him that we are Americans, he recalled that some of our countrymen had lectured at his farm. From them he had learned that there were twelve million unemployed in America. It had seemed unbelievable, he said—as many people as in the entire Caucasus—perhaps more. It was like a whole country having no way of earning a living. Looking compassionately at us with his very blue eyes, he remarked that it must be a great misfortune to be born an American.
"To think of having to ask a rich man for the right to live!" he remarked. "I'm very sorry for you."

Part of my regular duties as public librarian is managing the purchase suggestions from patrons, a task I have been negotiating with the last four years. Shifting from library sales to library vendors required a brutal realigning with the demands of the mainstream, where status quo determines popularity determines availability determines efficiency determines acceptance, a lesson whose harshness reached a zenith during the collapse of our primary vendor. So, much as I would prefer not to, if someone requested this book, I would have to either refuse them or take a risk on feeding the maw of Amazon, both actions so antithetical to the spirit and the purpose of this work that not even professional acumen can completely ward off the deadening. So I write my review in hopes of a little more viability for those who work towards a better world than this.

Was it the faces of men going to meet a powerful enemy or was it the spindly-legged little boy with the gasoline tin that so deeply affected me? The gasoline tin was the only contribution from my country to China which I saw on the north-western front. But the enemy planes above us were American and their bombs were made of scrap iron and chemicals from America.

WWII is the ongoing devotion of the solidly respectable Anglo historical fiction. Close enough to care, far enough away to obfuscate, and when all is said and done, the only lesson that need be carried forward is communism bad and capitalism good. As Smedley comments a number of times through this mixture of autobiography, travel narrative, war reporting, and social observation, the only US money flowing to China during the Sino-Japanese War is through the Japanese weaponry rained down on the populace, much as is the case in today's Palestine. As such, for all that this text could easily stand with the mightiest Testament of Youth or delve with the most devastating The Wretched of the Earth, its facts are too simple, its ethics too universal, its realities too inconvenient, its contestants too human to fit in with the historical slather of Dunkirk here and Normandy there, never mind the lynchings the white wearers of those uniforms tended to get up to upon their return. Smedley has her own share of over-reliance on nationalism and uncritical usage of eugenics/Nazi verbiage, but when compared to what commonly gets trotted out by Anglo reporters regarding China both then and now, this work is too deep and revolutionary eye opening to completely discount. For this is the writing commissioned and sustained by the Manchester Guardian, and it makes me contemplate the importance of the news reporter in the time of mass censorship and rampant AI. I can only hope that the backlash to all that keeps the folks ricocheting past the liberal celebrity pick, the NYT equivocations, the hand-wringing democrats, until they hit a work like this and start to really learn why the world is the way it is today.

That evening, Dr. Lim brought in a huge bomb fragment and, looking at it speculatively, said: "I've half a mind to make special medals of it and confer them on American firms that sell war material to Japan."

No, such a man was not made for war either. He belonged in a laboratory or on the platform of a university. But if he had followed his inclinations, there would be no laboratories, no universities at all.

I've another major surgery looming in the next couple weeks, which even without the cancer has been a long time coming. Thus the excitement, thus the exhaustion, thus the shoring myself up with reading and learning and even some escapism (via historical displacement if nothing else) to keep myself going. This book is nothing if not a horror show at times, but it clarifies my hegemonic home country's bugaboo that is China beyond the centrist op eds and xenophobic screeds. When the fascists came, China split and split again, and not even Smedley's meetings with Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and (weirdly homophobic on her part) Mao Tze-tung cannot capture the 50+ major ethnicity and 200+ significant languages what is purportedly "one" country. What she does testify to time and time again is the will of the abject, in another time considered the Mandate of Heaven, when those in power throw open the groceries and hand out the books. It took a military occupation and a slew of war crimes to force the growth, and the fact that much of the Anglo world is taught to disregard this portion of China's history when considering the rest of the 20th century is nothing short of diabolical.

One high Chinese official in the Army Medical Service told me that America had indeed recently given China a million dollars to buy quinine, but that American business men had demanded that the purchase be made through them. Accordingly they bought the quinine in Java, shipped it to America, repacked it, and then shipped it back to China; in the end the Chinese received about $300,000 worth of quinine!

This edition of Smedley's work is couched in tiny print and no index, and thus is only viable in the annals of various academic articles. Not surprising when considering what the capitalist prefers in their "market of ideas," and as publisher's lay waste to the Internet Archive in the name of the "smol helpless writer uwu" and ownership evaporates into corporate rent, I look once again at the used book sales and library discards and reaffirm my work to serve as bridge, however demoralizing or friendless it so often is. I'll never achieve the heights of bravery that Smedley did, but I can at least put her on a small platform in the 21st century, acknowledging the limits of her ideology while praising the expansiveness of her compassion.

I carefully read the tracts he gave me, then urged him to show me something not based on the fear of death.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Battle Hymn of China by Agnes Smedley is a truly astonishing book. It starts with her early life in the US and then living in Germany. As a young woman Agnes leaves the US on a steamer to Europe to try and help India's struggle for independence. She lives in Germany as the partner of an Indian radical and revolutionary and eventually leaves him and heads to China as a starting point of a trip to India, she never arrives in India but spends the next thirteen years living in China, from 1929 to 1941. She starts in Shanghai, moves to Sian (xian) where she lives with the communists for a time, and then spends a great deal of time on the battlefronts, following guerrilla armies and reporting and working as a nurse in the army camps. Even at over 500 pages it still feels like there's a lot she's not saying which reinforces my desire to read everything she's written. What is amazing about this book is that it tells a very human tale of the civil war and the war in China. It's just astonishing how long the war lasts and how many cities and lives are ruined. In many ways Smedley's trip is a descent, she lives dangerously visiting the front, living with the army which seriously impacts her health. The other book I read which looked at her writings about women almost changed her perspective. She definitely challenged the sexist beliefs of those around her, and as a woman being able to travel with different armies alone in a foreign country was rather amazing. But she came across as more of an androgynous figure, one who had no time for love or romance when there was so much death and destruction around her. In the end she had to leave China because she was dying and had to go to Hong Kong to recover, there she was forbidden to speak about her experiences, and was unable to return to China so went back to the US. There she found herself engulfed in a world of consumerism and unable to reconcile the life with the one she had lived with the communists and travelling with the armies. The book was written as snippets and travels throughout her time in China. It included many detailed descriptions about the people she came across so that even though most of them died, you had an idea about their lives. I've read many books about this time period of China, but this was the one that took you closest to seeing the day to day of life during this time. I feel like any review of this book can't really do it justice. It was dark, gritty and harsh, it brought home the horrors of war but also the horrors of poverty and disease. It was also filled with humanity, the good and the bad. It told a side of the story not usually told, it reminded me a little of Channel 4s dispatches, though those reporters seem to only visit for a few weeks and Agnes Smedley stayed for years and years.

[Willow Holiday · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book!
absolutely incredible and mind blowing look at the liberation of china in the 1930s and an american woman who manages to find herself in the middle