Career
Payne worked as a shipbuilder and then for a time with the Inland Revenue. In 1937, Payne met Adolf Hitler in Munich through Rudolf Hess, an incident which Payne describes in his book Eyewitness. In 1941 he became an armament officer and chief camouflage officer for British Army Intelligence at Singapore. Driven out of Singapore by Japanese forces, he ended up first in Chungking and then in Kunming, in both of which places he kept extensive diaries which were published in 1945. In Kunming he was a close friend of the influential intellectual Wen Yiduo who was assassinated by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. Between 1943 and 1946 Payne taught naval architecture at Lianda University in China.
In 1946, Payne met and interviewed Mao Zedong in Yenan. During the interview Mao correctly predicted that it would only take the Communist forces a year and a half to conquer China once the armistice with Chiang Kai-shek and his followers was broken. Between 1949 and 1954 Payne was a professor of English literature at the University of Montevallo in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Pierre Stephen Robert Payne
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