Return Visits To China
In 1956 he visited China again with a New Zealand cultural group. The Chinese government's invitation came to Ormond Wilson, a former labour MP, and to R. A. K. Mason, a poet and chairman of the China Friendship Society, to assemble a representative group of New Zealanders for an all-expenses paid visit to visit China and attend the May Day celebrations in Peking. Cold War hostilities meant that no official New Zealand support forthcoming for the visit, although New Zealand had not gone as far as the US and Australia in withdrawing passports from those who planned to visit China. Initially Victoria University had refused leave for Bertram but later relented.
Bertram wrote that in 1956 China was doing its best to present a relaxed and liberal image to the world. "No one at the this time, could have foreseen the savage rift with Krushchev's Russia that was to follow, still less the internal tensions and suddent violent excesses of the so-called Cultural Revolution." (pp. 300–301, Capes of China). During the Peking visit he was re-introduced to his old friends including his former room-mate at Yenching, now Deputy Foreign Minister, Huang Hua and Rewi Alley. Premier Zhou Enlai hosted a welcoming function at which they were introduced to senior leaders of the regime including Mao Zedong, He Long, Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi. In Shanghai Bertram met up with Mme Song Qingling who had founded the China Welfare Institute, heir to the old China Defence League. Bertram wrote up the expedition in a book Return to China.
In 1986 he travelled to China as an honorary guest of the Chinese government for the fiftieth anniversary of Chiang Kai-shek's capture during the Xi'an Incident, and also visited the Sandan Bailie School for the first time.
Read more about this topic: James Munro Bertram
Famous quotes containing the words return, visits and/or china:
“Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don’t always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our manoeuvres in our emergencies and longings.”
—Harold Brodkey (b. 1930)
“It so happened that, a few weeks later, “Old Ernie” [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from literary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)