James Munro Bertram - Peking

Peking

In January 1936 Bertram arrived in the (then) Peiping (Peking/Beijing) with commissions from several British publications including The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman to write freelance articles on Asian issues.

In Peking Bertram studied Chinese including at Yenching University where one of the men he shared a room with was Wang Ju-mei who was later to be better known under his Communist Party name of Huang Hua as the longest-serving foreign minister of the PRC after Zhou Enlai. Bertram's other room-mate was Chang Chao-lin (Zhang Zhaolin) who was to become the editor of a Sian (pinyin Xi'an daily newspaper under the control of 'The Young Marshal' Zhang Xueliang.

In Peking Bertram also met American correspondent Edgar Snow, who had been teaching journalism at Yenching, and his wife Peg Snow. Bertram later wrote that "Meeting the Snows was for me the real turning point in my discovery of modern China". Soon after Bertram's arrival in Peking, Snow travelled to north-west China on a trip which was to produce in 1937 what Bertram described as the "classical scoop of modern Asian reporting, Red Star over China, which told the world the story of Mao Zedong, Zhu De and their associates". Snow introduced Bertram to key figures as Mme Sun Yat-sen Soong Ch'ing-ling, (the widow of Sun Yat-sen), New Zealander Rewi Alley, the Chinese writer Lu Hsun and the American revolutionary activitistAgnes Smedley.