Stephen R. MacKinnon

Chen Hansheng was not only a pioneer of modern Chinese social science, remembered for the village studies he organized by teams of researchers in the 1930s. He was also a political operative whose career as an underground and aboveground Communist activist spanned the twentieth century and the globe. This book draws on unique interviews, beginning in 1979, with Chen himself, his family and associates, along with an exhaustive examination of documents, writings, and archives, to build a rounded portrait of Chen, the man, and his world.

Agnes Smedley's (1894-1950) career as an activist journalist began in the 1910s and 1920s, with a commitment to the Indian Independence movement. Her anti-imperialism was based on the Jeffersonian tradition of the American Revolution. In New York, she was close to the Lion of the Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai, writing for his publications until his death. In California, she was involved with the Sikh-led Ghadar party of insurrectionists. Her complicated relationship with the European movement leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya in Berlin in the 1920s is better known. Smedley left Europe for China in 1929 in an effort to reach India through the backdoor. Once in China, she was struck by the poverty and oppression of ordinary people. Her new cause, in addition to anti-imperialism, became the Chinese peasant. For the next two decades she documented their plight in countless publications (including in the Indian press). Herself the product of rural poverty, she identified like few Westerners did with the plight of peasants, Chinese or Indian, and wrote biographies of Chinese peasant leaders such as Zhu De.

China Reporting is an oral history showing how the China correspondent of the 1930s and 1940s constructed his or her news reality or the network of facts from which their stories were written. How these men and women pooled information and decided upon the legitimacy of particular sources is explored. The influences of competition, language facility (or lack thereof), common personal backgrounds, camaraderie, and changes in American official China policy are also discussed, with special attention paid to the prescriptive, gatekeeping role of editors back home. This is an approach which has often been applied to the domestic journalist. China Reporting is a pioneering effort at using historical perspective to view the foreign correspondent in terms fo the total epistemological context in which he or she operates to produce the news that in turn provides the data base upon which the public and policy makers inevitably draw. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

China Reporting is an oral history showing how the China correspondent of the 1930s and 1940s constructed his or her news reality or the network of facts from which their stories were written. How these men and women pooled information and decided upon the legitimacy of particular sources is explored. The influences of competition, language facility (or lack thereof), common personal backgrounds, camaraderie, and changes in American official China policy are also discussed, with special attention paid to the prescriptive, gatekeeping role of editors back home. This is an approach which has often been applied to the domestic journalist. China Reporting is a pioneering effort at using historical perspective to view the foreign correspondent in terms fo the total epistemological context in which he or she operates to produce the news that in turn provides the data base upon which the public and policy makers inevitably draw. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

During the spring of 1938, a flood of Chinese refugees displaced by the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) converged on the central Yangzi valley tricity complex of Wuhan. For ten remarkable months, in a highly charged atmosphere of carnage, heroism, and desperation, Wuhan held out against the Japanese in what would become a turning point in the war - and one that attracted international attention. Stephen MacKinnon for the first time tells the full story of Wuhan's defense and fall, and how the siege's aftermath led to new directions in the history of modern Chinese culture, society, and politics.