There and Back Again: Foreigners and the Chinese Revolution

Abstract

To the uninitiated, the history of China in the 1920s often seems a hopeless muddle of warring factions, roving armies, and changing governments. Even those familiar with the terrain will readily admit that it is difficult to come to grips with what was happening in China and to assess the roles foreigners played there. These books provide four angles of vision for surveying China's early revolutionary era and the ways in which foreigners were caught up in it. When Milly Bennett arrived in China in the fall of 1926, fresh from a failed marriage in Hawaii and hoping to practice her trade as a jour nalist in Shanghai, she spoke no Chinese and knew nothing about Chinese politics. Sitting in a boarding house in Shanghai, broke and desperate for work, a friend telegraphed 'Have got job for you edit ing Chiang Kai-shek's Chung Mei News Agency stop Transportation paid stop Salary 400 Mex. stop Answer immediately' (p. 73). It was an invitation to publish propaganda for the Goumindang (Kuomintang) cause from Peking, in the heart of territory held by Chiang's enemy, the northern warlord Zhang Zuolin (Chang Tso-lin). With only minor misgivings, Bennett accepted the job and was soon on her own as the editor of a news service she did not completely understand in the employ of a cause she barely understood. She plunged into a hectic ten-month odyssey among the people who were