Feature: British gentleman and Communist fighter

While most Chinese know of Norman Bethune, few have heard of Michael Lindsay, a young British academic who arrived in China on the same ship as the Canadian surgeon 77 years ago and went on to help in the fight against Japanese aggression.

"He made a special contribution," says Professor Lyu Tonglin, of Shanghai Jiaotong University, who is researching the International Friend of Communist China and British peer.

In addition to his photos of Chinese forces, Lindsay built hundreds of radio stations for Communist guerrillas in north China and broadcast news about Chinese attacks behind enemy lines in English to the rest of the world.

However, revolution did not bring him to China. In December 1937, Lindsay arrived in China at the invitation of John Leighton Stuart, headmaster of Yenching University (later Peking University), to teach economics. The young scholar was born into the upper classes in 1909. His father was a historian and master of Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated from Oxford University where he studied science, economics, philosophy and politics.

Margaret Speer, dean of Yenching's Women's College, once portrayed Lindsay in a letter as socially awkward, very shy but smart, untidily dressed but friendly.

However, he shocked his colleagues with his bold decision to marry Li Hsiao, a patriotic Chinese graduate, with whom he smuggled supplies to the Communists.

Lindsay was inspired by Bethune, who told him a lot about the Communist forces. In 1938, Lindsay spent an Easter vacation in Shanxi Province where he photographed soldiers, ordinary people and Bethune's medical team.

Touched by the dire working conditions and hardships, in 1939 Lindsay began taking great risks delivering medicines, surgical equipment and technical books from Beijing to the guerrilla troops in north China. His ethnicity was a good cover, as Japanese soldiers were not allowed to search Westerners at that time.

In 1939, after hearing of Bethune's death, he wrote in his dairy that anyone with blood and thought would share the responsibility of fighting the Japanese.

Lindsay's situation became more dangerous when the United States and Britain declared war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack. The university was soon occupied by Japanese troops and most foreign staff fled.

Few followed Lindsay and his wife to the Communist-led bases in Hebei and Shanxi provinces.

Wearing the uniform of the Eighth Route Army, Lindsay began making badly-needed radio communication equipment.

"From 1939 to 1944, the Kuomintang Party isolated the Communist forces by stopping any foreign engagement and transmission of their messages to the outside world. Lindsay was determined to break the block," says Lyu.

With no formal training in radio, Lindsay had been assembling radio devices since he was a boy and he spent his spare time studying radio communications at college.

He behaved as an ordinary soldier. He always wore his uniform and he crossed enemy lines with other Chinese soldiers without hesitation. He took photos of soldiers in front of Japanese outposts. His wife was also very brave, delivering their first daughter in a breech birth in a remote village.

In 1944, Lindsay went to Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, where he became a radio communication advisor and met Chairman Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders.

After a series of experiments, he created a huge diamond-shaped antenna and a powerful transmitter. "Sitting in a small cave in the Loess Plateau, Lindsay successfully transmitted the first English report under a 'Xinhua, Yan'an' dateline to India and cities on the West Coast of the United States," says Lyu.

His efforts paid off as U.S. officials picked up the broadcasts and learned more about China's Communist forces and their contribution to the war against Japan.

Lyu and his team have collected thousands of English classified documents written during the eight-year war, including reports written by Lindsay, who mailed some of his work about Yan'an to his father and the British news media.

Back in Britain after the war, he succeeded his father as a peer in the House of Lords, and campaigned for better understanding of and relations with China. He also published books about China. He and his wife later moved to the United States where he died in 1994.

His life is also being honored in play, which opened on Sept. 7 to mark the 70th anniversary of the final victory of the Second World War.

"He recorded how Chinese soldiers and people resisted the Japanese in desperate conditions," says his granddaughter, Susan Lawrence, in Chinese. "We should remember history." Endit