(Original author Li Chuanxi)
Smedley (fourth from left) poses with Lu Xun (second from left), Song Qingling (third from left), Lin Yutang (first from left) and others.
Smedley (1892-1950), American leftist journalist, writer and social activist, came to China in early 1929 and supported and propagated the Chinese revolution in many ways; Hu Shi (1891-1962), pioneer of China's new cultural movement, practitioner of Chinese vernacular literature, and founder of modern Chinese academic norms. Such two seemingly impossible people, as can be seen from the two letters disclosed in recent years, have actually come together in the long river of history (according to the 24-volume "Complete Works of Hu Shi" and the 4 million words "Hu Shi Diary").
On August 10, 1929, Smedley wrote to his old friend Mrs. Margaret Sanger that Hu Shi had a strong "biological impulse" and said, "Tell you a secret, if I want it, I can break his family." On January 30, 1930, during the Lunar New Year, Smedley forcefully demanded that Hu Shi must take Cai Yuanpei to her home two days later to meet with Indian professor Jia Wei. At the end of the letter, she teasingly and even sarcastically admonished Hu Shi that if you are disobedient, "one day I will write an article to prove that you are not as everyone thinks." For the sake of China, I will do this one day. I have noticed that the saints of your time eat and drink all day long. Eating and drinking affects body shape, and body shape affects the head. The fat-headed saint is of no use to China at all. Please note! oh! Attention saints who feast continuously! I don't think you're a saint at all. I use this word here to mean sarcasm, and your holy spirit does not touch me at all. I put on the blouse you left with me and found that the collar was oversized. (Reprinted from Jiang Yongzhen, Stars, Moons, and Suns, pp. 176-178, Nova Press, 2012).
After reading these two paragraphs, what impression will everyone have on the relationship between the two people?
Smedley, 22
First, Smedley in Hu Shi's diary
After Hu Shi and Smedley met, he always regarded Smedley as a good friend.
The first time Smedley appears in Hu Shi's diary is when he takes Mr. Cai Yuanpei to meet Smedley and Indian professor Jia Wei at Smedley's request. Article 1 February 1930: "In the afternoon, I went with Mr. and Mrs. Cai to the home of Agnes Smedley for tea, and the guests were Professor Dhondo Keshav Karve and his son. Professor Garvi, the founder of The Indian Women's University, is 71 years old this year. Its history is admirable. On the same day, Hu Shi also made a newspaper clipping on the relevant reports of Professor Jia Wei's visit to China. Probably due to Professor Jia wei's short stay in China, Smedley demanded that Hu Shi must bring Mr. Cai Yuanpei to meet on February 1. Hu Shi did. Although from the perspective of Smedley's letter, this letter has the meaning of ridicule and even order coercion, but from the perspective of Hu Shi's identification with Jiawei, it should also contain a certain degree of hu shi's willingness and positivity.
The second time Smedley appeared in Hu Shi's diary was when he returned from a boat trip to Qingdao in August of that year to read an article in the newspaper and write a little comment in the diary. Article 17 of August 1930: "There was an old newspaper on board, which reproduced the article "Poets of the Chinese Revolution" written by Miss Agnes Smedley in the American newspaper, and many of the ridiculous words, such as saying that Duxiu was a creative society hero, were nonsense. This person was very prejudiced, and Shima and I were acquainted with her, and she was very much in favor of Soviet Russia and very much in favor of the national movement in India. Although Hu Shi believes that there are many "ridiculous words" in this article of history, and criticizes the "New Moon" with him as the core as a "wine and meat group", judging from the tone of Hu Shi's diary, Hu Shi looks at it with a calm attitude, and may even "smile" to keep a diary. Because "Shima and I both know her well", there may be many misunderstandings in Hu Shi that she has only recently arrived in China.
Young Hu Shi. (Infographic)
Second, Smedley pulled Hu Shi into the Civil Rights Protection League
It was precisely because Hu Shi was familiar with her that when Smedley, Song Qingling and others formed the Chinese Civil Rights Protection League, she mobilized Hu Shi and pulled him in. She even personally went north to Beiping to operate the establishment of the Northern Civilian Rights Protection League Branch. The Chinese Civil Rights Protection League was established on December 18, 1932, and at the time of preparation, Song Qingling, Smedley and others had plans to set up branches in important cities in China. Based on this vision, at the end of November 1932, Smedley came to Beiping and began to find a candidate to establish the Peiping Branch.
With Hu Shi's leading role as a Chinese intellectual at the time, he was well placed to assume the role smedley needed. Hu Shi did actively cooperate and respond to Smedley's request. Smedley left Beiping before January 17, 1933 to return to Shanghai to attend the inaugural meeting of the Shanghai chapter. In the diary of Hu Shi, Who was absent from Beiping for at least 20 days from late November to early December, he went to Wuhan and Changsha to give lectures and met for the first time with Chiang Kai-shek in Wuhan. Hu Shi left for Shanghai on January 6, 1933 to attend the Seventh Ordinary Meeting of the Board of Directors of the China Education and Culture Fund. If the two had met, it would have been more than 20 days from his return to Beiping in early December and his trip to Shanghai in early January. Let's boldly assume that the two will not go south to Shanghai together?
Unfortunately, at every critical moment, Mr. Hu, who wrote a diary of nearly 4 million words, always did not "write", and I always suspected that the diary that Mr. Hu now shows to everyone is a "clean copy" after his "abridgement".
The day after arriving in Shanghai, Hu Shi received a notice from the General Association of the Civil Rights Protection League, telling him that the Executive Committee had approved him as a member. On January 11, Hu Shi returned to Beiping, and on the 20th, he officially began to organize the Beiping Branch. On the afternoon of January 30, 1933, the Beiping Branch was established, and Hu Shi, Li Ji, Jiang Menglin, Cheng Shemei, Chen Bosheng, Xu Bingchang, Xu Deheng, Ren Hongjun, Ma Youyu, and nine others were elected as executive members.
According to the requirements of the meeting, that night, Yang Xingfo went to see Zhang Xueliang and obtained permission to investigate the prison the next day. The next day, Hu Shi, Yang Xingfo, and Cheng Shemei went to three prisons, including the Peking Military Commission's Reflection Institute, to inspect and comfort political prisoners, and talked with relevant political prisoners in English. On February 1, the First Executive Committee Meeting of the Beiping Branch was held, and Hu Shi was elected as the chairman of the branch and Li Ji was elected as the vice chairman. Subsequently, he led the way in sending telegrams to the Kuomintang Central Political Conference and the Executive Yuan and the Control Yuan, demanding that Gu Zhutong be punished.
In "China's War Song," Smedley said that the first major civil rights campaign after the founding of the League was the Case of Liu Yusheng, "the journalist who exposed the opium trade and other corrupt practices that were said to be implicated in General Gu." His secret killing infuriated the Shanghai press. Together with them, our allies fought a brave battle" (p. 122 of the book). It should be said that Hu Shi's cooperation with Smedley during this period was close.
Just as Hu Shi was busy with the Civil Rights Protection League these days, on February 1 Smedley called Hu Shi and the Beiping Branch, urging him and the Beiping Branch to protest to the authorities with the "Complaint of Political Prisoners of the Peking Army Branch" attached to her, asking him to "unconditionally release all political prisoners" to the authorities. After reading the complaint, Hu Shi thought that it was different from what the three of them had seen when they investigated the prison, and then contacted a strange incident that happened to him (someone sent a letter of complaint to the Beiping family Chinese Daily signed as a political prisoner, but the address was Hu Shi's own home), and Hu Shi believed that the complaint sent to him by Smedley was also forged. This led to a conflict with Smedley and the General Assembly, and led to the dismissal of the General Assembly.
After being expelled, Hu Shi still regarded Smedley as a friend
Although Hu Shi was very annoyed by this, believing that joining the Civil Rights Protection Alliance was "self-inflicted humiliation", due to the outbreak of the Rehe War and the Japanese occupation of Chengde and other places, he quickly threw himself into participating in the organization of the Northeast Rehe Support Association, "in order to concentrate the people's anti-Japanese forces and back up the soldiers in the front", and quickly put the matter down, at the same time, in his heart, he still regarded Smedley as a "friend".
In 1936, under the arrangement of Liu Ding, an underground member of the Communist Party of China, Smedley arrived in Xi'an and lived in Lintong. Five days after the Xi'an Incident, Zhou Enlai led a Chinese delegation to Xi'an, and after talking with Zhou Enlai, Smedley "could feel that they were not here to seek revenge, but to pave the way for a new era of unity and unity," and began a 40-minute English radio broadcast at Zhang Xueliang's headquarters every night, refuting all kinds of "shameless rumors" about zhang and Yang mutinies (China's War Song, p. 157). When Hu Shi learned of this news, he wrote to Fu Si Nian on January 11, 1937, "Last night (ten days) someone heard Miss Agnes Smedly (Apricot Buddha, Shima and my friend, a communist party) broadcasting in Xi'an, I did not hear it. (The Complete Works of Hu Shi, vol. 24, Anhui Education Publishing House, 2003, p. 328)
Although Hu Shi knew that she was a "communist party", he still dared to say that she was his friend, which showed that although the civil rights protection alliance brought the relationship between the two to a freezing point, Smedley expelled him from membership, but Hu Shi did not expel Smedley from his heart.
Xu Zhimo (Infographic)
Fourth, the time when the two people became acquainted
When did Hu Shi and Smedley go from acquaintance to acquaintance? According to the letter quoted at the beginning of this article, Hu Shi and Smedley should have known each other in the first half of 1929. In "China's Battle Song", Smedley wrote about her interaction with a group of "spiritual aristocrats" in Beiping after she arrived in Beiping, and she put Hu Shi in this group of spiritual aristocrats, giving all readers the feeling that she met Hu Shi in Beiping and became friends.
But there is a great "confusion" here, according to Smedley's own account, she arrived in Harbin on New Year's Day 1929 as a reporter for the German "Frankfurt Daily" and stayed in the northeast for nearly three months. Hu Shi was the principal of Shanghai Public School at this time, and he had visited Beiping at the beginning of the year, on January 19, 1929, and left on February 25, 1929. During this period, Smedley had not yet come to Beiping. After that, at least until August 10, Hu Shi did not come to Beiping at all. Therefore, it is impossible to say that Hu and Shi met in Beiping.
So when did Smedley come to Shanghai? The famous American scholars Janice McKinnon and Stephen McKinnon wrote "Smedley: The Life and Era of an American Radical" (Zhonghua Bookstore, 1991) based on a large amount of Smedley's materials for 14 years. Smedley actually spent only two months in Beiping, arriving in Shanghai in May of that year. From May to August, more than 3 months, the two met and knew each other and had enough time.
Unfortunately, Hu Shi's diary has been intermittent for 3 months, and some of them have no relevant records.
So what can really happen to two people in these 3 months?
Or the book of the McKinnons, these 3 months, Smedley lured the love saint Xu Zhimo together. Smedley, 36 at the time, was "still sexually rebellious" and told others that she was ready to "have sex like a man," so that "for weeks she seemed to be bringing home 'anyone in trousers she could find in town'" (Western sexual liberation liberals) (p. 178).
Smedley himself wrote to his old friend Karin Mikkelis on 23 June 1930: "I will have men as friends, and sometimes I can live with a man, who must be intellectually admirable to me and physically admired; and our union must be based on a broad and noble friendship... Chinese reaction to me is indicative of my innumerable friends who are infinitely loyal to me." (p. 184 of the book) China's "Westernly educated intellectuals, a group of very elegant poets, scholars, and writers" naturally became the first choice. "She attended elegant banquets with them, sometimes taking a ride in a rickshaw in the moonlight... The most attractive figure of Smedley is Xu Zhimo, China's most outstanding Romantic poet... Xu's wife had an affair (Lu Xiaoman), which became a topic of conversation in Shanghai's literary and art circles for a while... Xu Zhimo's English is used like Chinese. In the mid-summer of 1929, Xu Zhimo developed a lover's relationship with Smedley, the peak of which was a trip on a half-moon boat up the river to Xu's rural hometown." "Among these friends of hers, the most well-known to the West is Hu Shi" (p. 181 of the book), as the "godfather" of Chinese liberal intellectuals at that time, Xu Zhimo's eldest brother, and has always been elegant and elegant, if he wants to work in Chinese intellectual circles, catching Hu Shi is equivalent to grasping the nose of a cow, not to mention that the two are of the same age (Hu Shi is only one year older than Smedley, and Xu Zhimo is five years younger than Smedley). Who would have thought that Hu Shi actually had a "very strong biological impulse". This is probably the origin of Smedley's proud tone in her letter to Sanger (and Xu's relationship is also her own account in her letter to Sanger— p. 449 of the book).
V. Smedley's Influence on Hu Shi
If Smedley caught Hu Shi. What influence did she bring to Hu Shi during that time? Mr. Jiang Feng, the translator of "China's Battle Song", has this passage in the preface to the translation: Xu Zhimo, the chief general of the Crescent Faction, before dying in a plane crash in November 1931, expressed his desire to completely change his life, and he also showed some performance in action: he translated the anti-fascist British one-act play "Mussolini's Lunch", published a novel sympathetic to the martyrs of the 'Left League', and published poems in the magazine "Beidou" of the "Left League". This turning point coincided with his engagement with Smedley, and there is reason to believe that it will not be just a coincidence of time" (p. 6 of the book).
Since Xu Zhimo has changed under her influence, Mr. Hu Shi will certainly do the same.
From a microscopic point of view, 1929 was the year in which Hu Shi criticized the Kuomintang regime the most and fiercely in the New Moon, including:
Our Ideas for Politics (late 1929)
Human Rights and Covenant Act (6 May 1929)
"Knowing the Difficulty, It's Not Easy to Do" (May 11, 1929)
The Question of China from an Ideological Point of View (late May 1929)
Discussion on the > of Human Rights and The Law of the < (late June 1929)
When Will We Have a Constitution (July 20, 1929)
The New Cultural Movement and the Kuomintang (November 29, 1929)
In January 1930, he published articles criticizing the Kuomintang in the New Moon as a collection of treatises on human rights, and it was these criticisms that led him to be besieged by the Kuomintang, so that he had to resign as the head of the Chinese public school on May 19, 1930, and evacuate Shanghai and move back to Beiping on November 28.
Looking at the time, most of the articles are at the peak of the interaction between Hu and Shi, especially the viewpoints, and the more Hu Shi and later the more intense the viewpoints: "The day when the sympathy of the advancing ideological circles is completely lost, it is when the Lights of the Kuomintang are extinguished" (The Complete Works of Hu Shi, vol. 21, p. 450)". Is there any Schmetley influence or even inspiration from her?
History is complex. It may seem that people from both camps should not have intersected, but they are entangled at some point in history or even at a critical moment. This is the case with Hu Shi, Smedley, and Xu Zhimo.
Human feelings must affect thoughts, and the spark of faith that collides with each other may be ignited by tacit trust in each other. Love can flood or surge. And history is multi-faceted, and the historical figures we see are actually multi-faceted and flesh-and-blood ordinary people.