James Munro Bertram - Yan'an and The North China Front

Yan'an and The North China Front

In Xi'an Bertram received a radio message from Mao Zedong, inviting him to become the first official 'British' visitor to YenanYan'an. Bertram spent nearly a month in Yan'an during which time he conducted an extensive series of interviews with Mao in his cave-dwelling during which Mao expounded the Japanese objectives and the strategies he believed that the Chinese should adopt to defeat the Japanese. The "Interview with the British Journalist James Bertram" were cited in Mao's Collected Works.

From Yan'an Bertram set out for the Eighth Route Army headquarters in southern Shansi Shanxi and travelled for five months with the army in northern China. On the day that he crossed the Yellow River from ShensiShaanxi back to Shanxi, this time by boat, Taiyuan the Shanxi capital fell to the Japanese. Most of his time was spent with the troops of General Ho Lung (He Long). Based on these experiences behind the front he wrote a book North China Front (1939).

Read more about this topic:  James Munro Bertram

Famous quotes containing the words north, china and/or front:

    I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money.... In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama;
    Aged in wrong, the empires are declining,
    And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence.
    What shall I say to the young on such a morning?—
    Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?—
    No; my little ones lean not toward revolt.
    William Dewitt Snodgrass (b. 1926)

    I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.
    Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)