Overview

This study is a radical and controversial analysis of the life and works of Rewi Alley utilising both Chinese materials and previously unpublished materials from western sources, which reveal the policy behind what the R.O.C. used scathingly to call the CCP's smiling diplomacy'. Rather than a biography as such, it is a revisionist history, re-examining what we know and understand about one of the most famous, or indeed infamous, foreigners in modern China. Rewi Alley, who arrived in China in 1927 from New Zealand, lived there for the rest of his life. A close associate of Agnes Smedley, Song Qingling, and Edgar Snow, Rewi Alley became involved in the underground Chinese Communist Party and was instrumental in setting up the Chinese Industrial Co-operative Movement. By the 1940s he was regarded as a great humanitarian and internationalist. Later he became an outspoken foreign friend' of the Chinese communist regime and prolific propagandist on the new China. In Deng Xiaoping's China, Alley became the symbol of long-standing friendly relations' between China and New Zealand and was presented to the Chinese people as a model foreigner. Alley became a figure of myth in his own lifetime, a myth that took many forms and meanings. The book examines the myth and reality of Rewi Alley's life, using them to explore the role of foreigners in China's diplomatic relations and their sensitive place in China after 1949, laying bare the important role that China's foreign friends' played in people-to-people relations as well as in the ideological education of Chinese citizens.

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9780700714933

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'Alley's inner world, the world he grew increasingly wary of sharing either in conversation or in letters, can only be imagined. This book lays the ground for enabling us to begin to penetrate this world... She (the author) has opened up the path for a clearer and more balanced understanding of one of the most colourful and remarkable lives ever lived by a New Zealander.' - The Listener<br><br>'Before this book, almost everything that New Zealanders (journalists, politicians, academics) had written about Alley was hagiographic drivel...it would be nice to think that Brady's temperate, reasonable and well-documented book does provoke at least some red faces.' - The Dominion Post

'Alley's inner world, the world he grew increasingly wary of sharing either in conversation or in letters, can only be imagined. This book lays the ground for enabling us to begin to penetrate this world... She (the author) has opened up the path for a clearer and more balanced understanding of one of the most colourful and remarkable lives ever lived by a New Zealander.' - The Listener 'Before this book, almost everything that New Zealanders (journalists, politicians, academics) had written about Alley was hagiographic drivel...it would be nice to think that Brady's temperate, reasonable and well-documented book does provoke at least some red faces.' - The Dominion Post

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Anne-Marie Brady

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