Epstein was twice in the Chinese wartime capital, Chongqing -- the first time from 1939 to 1941 and the second after his brief stay in and escape from Hong Kong up to the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. The accounts which dealt with this period fall into two contrasting parts. On the one hand, we see the people's and the foreign reporters' frustration and disillusionment with the Kuomintang who refrained from fighting the Japanese and became more and more corrupt while inflation became astronomical and life grew increasingly difficult for the common people. On the other hand, we read about the role of the Communist delegation in Chongqing headed by Zhou Enlai which showed that there was another, and an effective, way to fight the Japanese, thus providing the foreign correspondents with the true political situation in China.

Finally, the foreign and Chinese correspondents were able to break the Kuomintang news blockade and head for Yenan to find out what was really happening. In the three chapters Epstein wrote about this experience, he gave a first-hand report of life in the Communist-held region. Whether in the peasant magistrate and labor hero or the engineers and scientists he met, he found supreme confidence and initiative. In a letter to his wife, Elsie Chomeley, Epstein wrote, "There are probably more varied activities [in Yenan] than in all other parts of China and certainly more really active people. And these people are amply sure that they are China, China's future." Then came the climax: the interviews with Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Zhou Enlai. Mao gave his position on how to fight the war and the need for a true coalition and democracy. Impressed with Mao's ability to express complex strategic ideas in simple, unforgettable words, Epstein wrote: "close up, he was...pensive, out-spoken, readily finding plain words to convey meanings, but not a phrase-monger, displaying flashes of humor. In his personal behavior, Mao was approachable and simple in Yenan. He would stroll down the dusty paths, apparently unguarded, talking with people." These favorable impressions were backed up by the reporters' first-hand experiences during a seven-week trip behind enemy lines, where they saw how the Communist-led forces successfully fought the Japanese invaders despite their inferior equipment.

By the fall of 1944, it became apparent to Epstein that due to stringent Kuomintang censorship it was very difficult to send out from Chongqing reports to the West about the true situation in China. He therefore decided to move to the United States to do so. He and his wife Elsie Cholmeley traveled through India and England on an air and sea voyage and arrived in New York in 1945. Epstein wrote that his stay in the U.S., from 1945 to 1951, fell into two phases, with the watershed at around 1947. In fact, from the very beginning, he and his wife had been under FBI surveillance. Still they were able to tell part of their China story through their ties with the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. In 1947, Epstein's book, The Unfinished Revolution in China, was published. However, as things were getting to be increasingly difficult with the cold war looming on the horizon and persecution imminent, the couple could no longer remain in the U.S.. Their departure for China via Poland and on a Polish liner-freighter through an extended sea route revealed the complicated international situation at the time.

Back in China, Epstein experienced in the early 50s the sense of liberation so many of the intellectuals felt after their return to the land of their dream, a free and hopeful China destined to advance and throw away the poverty and humiliation the people suffered in old China. He plunged head over heels into the job of reporting on the transformation of New China, both as an editor for the launching of the journal China Reconstructs under the wings of Madame Soong Ching-ling and as a correspondent for progressive Western press. Transformation in ownership, social relations and personal mentality was his main theme.

The chapter on Tibet shows Epstein the reporter at his best. To borrow a comment by Soong Ching-ling's on one of his earlier works, "Different from any other foreign work...it relates its analytic first-hand account of the struggle to past history and future prospects." He went to Tibet four times, the first in 1955, overland from Sichuan Province's Chengdu, traveling in a jeep over mountain passes and deep ravines; the second, third and fourth by air, between the 60s and 80s. Combining first-hand observation with deep insight into Tibetan history, especially its modern history, he wrote about Tibet in 1955: "The region's capital [Lhasa] was still deeply feudal—comparable to Europe in the eleventh century. Medieval and flamboyant, the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lamas, with its sunlit roofs of sheer gold, its vaults for stored wealth, and its dank, scorpion-infested dungeons for offenders and opponents, towered above almost unbelievable squalor. A third of the city's population were beggars and vagrants..." "Through the 50s, the old Dalai Lama-led local authorities continued their customary methods of oppressive rule. They still subjected Tibet's common people to not only ruinous exactions, but to some of the most brutal atrocities sanctioned by medieval law and practice." In 1965, ten years after his first trip, Epstein interviewed former slaves who had had their hands or feet chopped off, leg tendons severed, or even eyes gouged out for alleged, often quite petty offences and defiance. "Shangri-La," he noted, "the old Tibet was definitely not." It was merely the dreamland of the depression-and-war-torn Western world of the early decades of the 20th century. These horrors, Epstein pointed out, were not denied by "Tibetan separatist self-exiles" and he quoted two sources to substantiate his observation. Epstein also showed the tremendous progress made in Tibet which had catapulted in a few decades across a thousand years to be part of the modern world. Even more than the rest of China, the road ahead is going to be complex, with many detours. But, overall, he wrote, "Tibetans are better off within the family of China's people than they would be with an ‘independence' which would not be real at all, but merely make them a satellite."

Epstein experienced two severe tests during his lifetime. The first time, in 1941, in a Japanese detention camp in Hong Kong where, if his true identity were discovered by the enemy, he was sure to die. The second time in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution when he was imprisoned on the false charge of espionage. Thanks to his optimism and faith in the revolutionary cause, he was able, on the first occasion, to device an escape full of danger and suspense with four other inmates, including his English wife-to-be and life-long comrade Elsie Cholmeley. On the second occasion, in 1968, just 28 years after their escape from Hong Kong, they were arrested and incarcerated in separate isolated wards for nearly five years. This -- being suspected by one's own people, facing constant interrogations and being kept in isolation -- would have been even harder to bear than imprisonment by the enemy. Epstein, however, met with courage the challenges which, in his own words, consisted of "high dudgeon and stress..., monotony, the same cycle again and again." For instance, he kept himself healthy physically and mentally by practicing Taichi, playing mental games with himself and studying Marxist works whenever possible. Soon after his release in 1973, he was back to normal and returned to his work in journalism. Read together, the two chapters, which were written in a rather matter-of-fact way, show the stamina and stature of the author.

Sprinkled throughout the book are interesting details of life in China. Before 1949, of pre-war life in the semi-colonial coastal cities, of the hard life during the war, what it was like living in the rat-infested shacks in Chongqing, about foreign correspondents' interviews with Kuomintang spokesmen whose job was obfuscation rather than getting the reporters informed, of men like Generals Joseph Stillwell, Claire Chennault and Evans Carlson, and members of the diplomatic corps, about the hatred of the common people for corrupt officials like H. H. Kong, brother-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek and one-time premier and finance minister. After 1949, the sense of comradeship among co-workers, the various mistakes made which caused sufferings among good people and the "detours" which unfortunately seem inevitable with any major social experiment.

In the last chapter, named Evensong, Epstein summed up in telescopic language his last years as well as the tremendous progress China achieved following reform and opening up. As editor-in-chief of the journal China Reconstructs, now known as China Today, and a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the top political advisory body in China, Epstein remained politically active despite his growing age and declining health. While noting the tremendous social and economic progress thus far achieved, Epstein also pinpointed some of the problems facing the under-privileged Chinese and pointed to the need to break the "glass ceiling" for women, the need for extended activities of the trade unions, the need to look after the welfare of the farmers and for improved public health measures. All this indicates what he considered to be the priorities for the Chinese people's welfare.

The book is unique not only in the length of time it covers -- from 1915, and even prior to that, to the present -- but also, notably, in the special perspective with which the author viewed China, from the inside, yet with a world perspective. More importantly, Epstein was both a participant in and an observer of the Chinese transformation. As Epstein himself noted, "Unlike ‘watchers' from the outside, we saw the international arena as it looked from within China. Considering our familiarity with both worlds, our perception might help others to a rounder view." The book is therefore a must-read for all who are interested not only in China's present, but also its past and future.

Factsheet

My China Eye -- Memoirs of a Jew and a Journalist

Author: Israel Epstein

Publisher: Long River Press, San Francisco

Year of publication: 2005

ISBN: 1-59265-042-2

Price: $24.95 (hardcover)

(China.org.cn November 5, 2008)