Mr Rewi Alley marks 60 years in China

Press, 7 April 1987, Page 40

Mr Rewi Alley marks 60 years in China

By

TOM DONOGHUE

NZPA Hong Kong On April 21 New Zealand’s Rewi Alley is ex-

pected to be guest of honour at a banquet in Peking celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of his arrival in China.

During a recent interview in Peking, Mr Alley, who will turn 90 on December 2, said his doctors had turned down his request to be in Shandan, north-west China, on April 21.

His recently published autobiography, "At 90: Memoirs of My China Years,” gives an insight into the deep feeling Mr Alley has for Shandan where the Bailie School he once taught at is being rebuilt. He wrote in the 342page autobiography that the great need for Shandan lay in improved methods of agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry. “It is to be hoped that this school will give a sense of motivation to the students and the knowledge that life is work and work is life and that there is no easy way forward. “Set up on the edge of the (Gobi) desert, it should help to provide a way for development of

the arid regions,” Mr Alley wrote. In 1943, he went to Shandan where he became headmaster of the Bailie School after the death of George Aylwin Hogg on July 22, 1945, from tetanus.

During the early 1950 s the school was destroyed by an earthquake and was moved to Lanzhou.

In recent years, with international assistance, including a $150,000 gift by the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Palmer, in Lanzhou last month, Mr Alley’s dream of rebuilding the school has been realised.

The headmaster of the new Shandan school, Mr Ni Caiwang, said that he intended holding a ceremony at the school on April 21 to mark its reopening and the sixtieth anniversary of Mr Alley’s arrival in Shanghai.

The New Zealander describes in his book his last visit to Shandan, in September, 1984, when the Bailie Library was opened in memory of Mr Hogg. The young Englishman, a graduate of Oxford Uni-

versity, went to China in 1937 with his pacifist quaker aunt, Muriel Lester, on a round-the-world trip. "It was satisfying to see a libary built in Shandan in memory for George Hogg, who was much loved by all who knew and worked with him,” Mr Alley wrote. “His grave, the pavilion and stones memorialising him were swept away during the Cultural Revolution, but later they were replaced.”

One of the photographs in the autobiography shows Mr Alley placing flowers on his friend’s refurbished grave — the inscription on the tombstone of which reads: “And life is colour and warmth and light; And a striving evermore for these; And he is dead who will not fight; And who dies fighting has increase.” Mr Alley wrote that it was a great trial to him to learn how many of his former pupils at the school had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

“It was a great trial to me to hear of them being persecuted on false charges that the Shandan School was an imperialist one, full of spies.

The school is named after Joseph Bailie, an American who lived in China from 1891 for 40 years, and shared the same practical educational ideas as Mr Alley.

Most of the material in the book has already been documented in the two previous biographies on Mr Alley. However, it does contain interesting insights into the man who said he felt like a criminal when he returned to New Zealand in 1960. But when he returned in 1971 he noticed a big change in attitude. “One could see remarkable changes taking place in the general attitude towards China,” he wrote.

He found it somewhat disconcerting to find New Zealanders still considered themselves superior to Asians.

“They (New Zealanders) have a long way to go before the old ideas of white superiority are universally discarded,” he wrote.

“I feel privileged for my humble role in helping to build a bridge of friendly relations between my homeland, one of the smallest countries in the Pacific, and the land of my adoption, one of the largest in the world. “Like a gust of wind time flies and there is never enough of it to get the things done one would like to do,” he wrote.

The autobiography has been published by the New World Press and printed by the Foreign Languages Printing House in Peking.