REVIEW ESSAY

There and Back Again: Foreigners and the Chinese Revolution Beth Vanlandingham Carson-Newman College

On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revo- lution, 1917-1927. By Milly Bennett, edited and annotated by A. Tom Crunfeld. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993; xx+320 pp. Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s. By Nicholas R. Clifford. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991; xx+361 pp. Order and Discipline in : The Shanghai Mixed Court 1911-1927. By Tho- mas B. Stephens. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992; xiv+176 pp. Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942. By Kathleen L. Lodwick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995; xvi+255 pp. 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 () 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

The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer 1995) © Copyright 1995 by Imprint Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. making and watching the Chinese revolution at Peking and Hankou. In 1938 she wrote the story of her adventure in China but no publisher was interested in her tale until Tom Grunfeld discovered it in the Hoover Institution Archives and edited it for publication under the very fitting title, On Her Own. Bennett's memoir falls neatly into three parts: the first is devoted to her initiation into the reporter's trade in San Francisco and Honolulu; the second covers her adventures in Peking from the autumn of 1926 to the spring of 1927 when she was arrested during one of Zhang's crack-downs on the press; and the final part recounts her flight from Peking and the months she spent in Hankou in the spring and sum- mer of 1927 when the left-Goumindang government was fighting for its existence against Chiang Kai-shek's rival Goumindang government in Nanking. Bennett may not have known anything about Chinese politics when she became the editor of the Chung Mei News Agency, but she did know how to write news stories and she began turning out reports of Nationalist victories and accomplishments to distribute to the English- language press in China and abroad. She had a staff of Chinese trans- lators who gleaned material from over a hundred Chinese papers and gave her translations of the most important events and opinions. She then rewrote these to suit her foreign audience, supplementing what- ever she could gather from other reporters and from the briefings held at the various embassies. She discovered immediately that although it was hard to really know what was going on in China, she could still write the news. In the course of writing the news from Peking she became passion- ately committed to the cause of Chinese nationalism, and eventually she crossed paths with many of the most important political figures of the era, including Chinese nationalists and Communists such as Mrs. Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao, T. V Soong, Eugene Chen, and Li Lisan as well as foreigners such as the Soviet advisers Michael Borodin and General Galen, and American Minister John MacMurray. Woven into her memoir are vivid and carefully crafted character sketches of many of the men and women who helped shape the revolution. Grunfeld has done a superb job editing and annotating Bennett's memoir, supplying brief biographies of the characters Bennett intro- duces and pointing out where Bennett's account of events contradicts other sources or generally accepted facts. On Her Own should not be read as a completely accurate rendering of the events of 1926-27, but it is a wonderful record of an enterpris- ing and captivating woman and it brings to life the people behind the revolution as well as the climate in which they worked. Because of its