Author: Irwin Collier

Today I thought I would have a light posting, not even a page of readings for a course offered at Harvard University on the Chinese economy in the spring semester of the 1946-47 academic year. Transcribing the reading list itself was child’s play. Next I wanted to get the course enrolment found in the annual report of the Harvard president that also provided the name of the instructor, “Dr. Lindsay”. I had never come across his name so I decided to try to track down Dr. Lindsay. Fortunately that name and China narrows down the field considerably.

Long story short: Michael Francis Morris Lindsay, 2nd Baron Lindsay of Birker certainly led an exciting life before coming to offer that course at Harvard as seen in the newspaper article about his exploits and his obituary. The obituary of his Chinese wife adds a few other details to the story.

I end the post with Lindsay’s list of course readings for Economics 14a: Chinese Economic Problems.

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British economist who aided China’s guerrilla resistance
By Cui Shoufeng

The Telegraph
25 Aug 2015

Englishman Michael Lindsay helped smuggle supplies to guerrilla fighters during the Second World War and spent years behind enemy lines

Michael Lindsay arrived in Beijing in 1938 to teach Keynesian economics, but instead he played an important part in China’s resistance against the Japanese.

The Englishman helped to smuggle supplies to guerrilla fighters during the Second World War and spent years behind enemy lines, where he even started a family.

War had already broken out by the time Lindsay arrived to take up a lecturing post at Yenching University (later Peking University).

The Japanese army’s all-out invasion of China began in July 1937, and three months later the first village massacre was reported in Hopei Province (now Hebei).

In the capital, Lindsay was “distressed by his students’ stories of the way they were treated by the Japanese police at the city gate”, said his granddaughter, Susan Lawrence.

The Washington-based scholar said her grandfather also witnessed appalling acts by the occupying forces.

The economist, just 28, had a life-or-death decision to make: flee or fight?

In the spring on 1938, Lindsay learned of a resistance movement forming outside Beijing and travelled with colleagues to the communist-led Jinchaji base in central China.

Inspired, he returned to the capital and began to send supplies, mostly medicine and radio parts, through secret channels to the guerrilla forces.

Due to his foreign appearance, “the Japanese troops … couldn’t search him like they did to all the locals”, said Prof Lyu Tonglin at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, who is an authority on foreigners involved in China’s resistance during the Second World War.

The economist enlisted the help of a student to re-label the items he bought, to avoid stores facing any backlash if Japanese soldiers intercepted his shipments. That student was Hsiao Li, who later became his wife.

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, which led to the United States declaring war on Japan, meant Lindsay’s face no longer protected him, so he and his bride left for the Jinchaji base where he became a full-time radio technician.

To improve communications, he tinkered with the radio sets to make them more powerful, reliable and easier to carry over rough terrain.

Annoyed by the fact that the world — including southern China — knew hardly anything about the resistance in the north, Lindsay offered his expertise to Yan’an, the Communist Party’s central base in Shaanxi province.

A large transmitter and a directional aerial built there by Lindsay enabled the Xinhua News Agency to send reports to Washington.

“Xinhua’s radio broadcasts were of interest to Washington,” Prof Lyu explained. “It wanted to know more about the Japanese deployment and operations.”

Lindsay also wrote notes and took photographs, shared his opinions with overseas contacts, and passed advice and criticism to leaders of the resistance, including Nie Rongzhen, the top commander at Jinchaji.

In his reports to the embassies of the United States and Britain and newspapers, he wrote about what he saw in Jinchaji and Yan’an and said he believed the atrocities by the Japanese would motivate more people to join the resistance.

Securing success lied not only in the guerrillas’ military capabilities, he said, but also in their ability to mobilise the masses. Two of Lindsay and Li’s three children were born during their time in Yan’an.

After the war, the family moved to England where, upon his father’s death the economist became the second Baron Lindsay of Birker, making Li a baroness and Britain’s first Chinese-born peeress.

After a spell teaching in Australia, Lindsay and his family settled in the United States, where he died in 1994. He made only a few low-profile visits to China after the war.

It has been only recently that Lindsay has begun to gain attention in China. Today, more people are hailing him as a rare internationalist who helped the Chinese people through their most diffcult time.

Luo Wangshu contributed to this story, which was originally produced and published by China Daily.

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MICHAEL LINDSAY DIES AT 84

Washington Post
February 22, 1994

Michael Francis Morris Lindsay, 84, retired chairman of the Far East program of the American University School of International Service, died of lymphoma Feb. 13 at his home in Chevy Chase. He had lived in the Washington area for 35 years.

He retired in 1975 after 16 years as a professor of Far Eastern studies at American University. During the 1950s, he was a senior fellow in international relations at Australian National University in Canberra.

Mr. Lindsay was a native of London and a graduate of Oxford University, where he also received a master’s degree in economics. In 1952, he inherited property in the English Lake District county of Cumbria and became Baron Lindsay of Birker. Since then, Mr. Lindsay, an Australian citizen, had sat periodically in the House of Lords.

Mr. Lindsay began his teaching career in Beijing in 1937. He taught economics at Yenching University until 1942. During World War II, he was a technical adviser to the Chinese Communists.

After the war, he was a visiting lecturer in East Asian studies at Harvard University and a lecturer in economics at University College in Hull, England.

He was the author of five books about China, including “The Unknown War.” His articles about China appeared in publications that included the Times of London, the Manchester Guardian and China Quarterly.

He was a member of the Oxford Society of Washington and the Asia Society.

Survivors include his wife, Hsiao Li Lindsay of Chevy Chase; two children, James F. Lindsay, an Australian diplomat now based in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Mary Lindsay Abbott of Knoxville, Tenn.; a brother, Martin Lindsay of Brussels; a sister, Drusila Scott of Aldeburgh, England; and five grandchildren. A daughter, Erica Lindsay, died in December.

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Obituary: Lady Lindsay of Birker

The Telegraph
9 June 2010

Lady Lindsay of Birker, who has died aged 93, was the daughter of a rich Chinese landowner and became a British peeress after falling in love with Michael Lindsay, later the 2nd Lord Lindsay of Birker, an English professor teaching in Beijing in the late 1930s during the Japanese occupation of China.

For four years from 1941 Hsiao Li and her husband performed dangerous work behind enemy lines smuggling radio parts, teaching English and supporting the communist resistance in Yenan in north-west China, for which they won the personal thanks of Mao Tse-tung and other communist commanders.

After the war – but not before attending a farewell dinner thrown by Chairman Mao and his wife – the couple left for Britain, where Michael’s father was the newly ennobled Master of Balliol College, Oxford. The peerage passed to Michael in 1952, making Hsiao Li – the new Lady Lindsay – the first Chinese peeress in history, an event remarked upon by The New York Times.

Hsiao Li was born Li Yueying in Taiyuan, in China’s northern Shanxi province, on July 17 1916. A fine horsewoman, she showed an early rebellious streak, taking part in student demonstrations at Taiyuan Normal University before fleeing to Beijing, where she changed her name after being blacklisted by the authorities.

In Beijing she was admitted to Yenching University, where she met Michael Lindsay, a professor who was already using his protected foreign status to assist the communists in obtaining medical and radio supplies. Hsiao Li, one of his brightest students, was quickly recruited to the cause.

With her parents’ blessing, but nonetheless breaking the taboos of the time, the couple married in June 1941. But their wartime adventures were nearly brought to an end after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that December suddenly rendered Michael liable to arrest as a citizen of an enemy power.

The Japanese, long suspecting the Lindsays’ covert activities, moved quickly to arrest the couple – but not quickly enough. “As we escaped through one gate, the Japanese secret police came through another gate to arrest us,” recalled Hsiao Li in her memoir Bold Plum: With the Guerrillas in China’s War Against Japan, written shortly after the war but not translated into English until 2007.

So began four years of dangerous work behind enemy lines, Michael working in the communists’ all-important Radio Department and later at the New China News Agency while Hsiao Li taught English to the cadres.

Hsiao Li always credited her rebellious character to her father, Li Wenqi, an army officer who in 1912 had defied his landowning family to join Sun Yat Sen’s republican movement, running a training school for a local warlord. When Hsiao Li asked to bind her feet, he refused.

After two years in the guerrilla region, the couple completed a circuitous 500-mile journey on foot to reach the communist HQ in Yenan, taking shelter with local peasants who risked torture and death if discovered by the Japanese.

During that period Hsiao Li gave birth to two children: Erica was delivered in a hut high in the mountains, with no running water or electricity, after a Japanese offensive caused the hospital to be evacuated; James was born in the hospital cave in Yenan.

After moving to Britain, Hsiao Li followed her husband’s career – first to Australia, where Michael Lindsay taught at the Australian National University; and then, in 1959, to Washington, DC, where he had joined the faculty of the Far Eastern programme at American University. They remained in Washington after he retired in 1975.

In 1949 and 1954 the couple made two visits to China – where Hsiao Li said she “never stopped thinking” of living – but in 1958 they were refused visas after Michael criticised the communist leadership; his wife later revealed that he had supported the leadership not out of ideological sympathy but because he believed in the patriotic right of the Chinese to resist occupation.

Later Hsiao Li, who became a United States citizen in 1975, would echo Soong May-ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, in saying that China’s totalitarian system was “worse than Hitler or Stalin”, remarking in one speech reported in the American press in 1975 that the communists had “destroyed individual belief in one’s self and have ignored human dignity”.

It was not until the late 1970s, after the death of Mao Tse-tung, that the couple were able to return to China. They made extensive visits, renewing acquaintances with old friends from their Yenan days, among them now some of the most senior members of the Chinese government.

Within six weeks of her husband’s death in 1994 Hsiao Li returned to live full time in China, taking up the offer of a Beijing apartment provided by the Chinese government “in gratitude” for her work during the wartime years. She remained in the Chinese capital until 2003, when she returned to Washington to live with her granddaughter, Susan Lawrence.

Hsiao Li Lindsay, who died on April 25, is survived by her son James (the 3rd Lord Lindsay of Birker) and another daughter, Mary Lindsay Abbott. Erica died in 1993.

Note: an English translation of her account of the war years in China was published: Hsiao Li Lindsay, Bold Plum (2006).

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Course Enrollment

[Economics] 14a. (spring term) Dr. Lindsay.—Chinese Economic Problems.

Total 13. 5 Seniors, 6 Juniors, 2 Business School.

Source: Harvard University, Reports of the President of Harvard College and Reports of Departments for 1946-47, p. 69.

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Course Readings: Chinese Economic Problems

Economics 14a
1946-47

J. B. Condliffe: China Today, Economic; Ch. 195.132.5
R. H. Tawney: Land and Labour in China; Ec. 6444.232
Chen Ta: Population in Modern China; Ch. 194.146
G. B. Cressey: China’s Geographical Foundations; Ch. 189.34
J. L. Buck: Land Utilization in China; Ec. 6444.237
———— Chinese Farm Economy; Ec. 6444.230.2
Fei Hsiao-tung; Peasant Life in China; Ch. 195.139
——————- Earthbound China; Ec. 6444.245
Chen Han-seng: Landlord and Peasant in China; Ec. 6444.236
——————– Industrial Capital and the Chinese Peasant; Soc. 1405.240
R. P. Hommel: China at Work; Ch. 189.37.20
D. K. Lieu: Chinese Industry and Finance; Ch. 195.127 B
F. M. Tamagna: Banking and Finance in China; Ch. 196.42
W. Y Lin: The New Monetary System of China; Ch. 196.57
Chang Kai-ngau: China’s Struggle for Railway Development
H. D. Fong: Post-war Industrialization of China; Ch. 195.01
—————– China’s Industrialization; Oc. 3.9.60

Source: Harvard University Archives. Syllabi, course outlines and reading lists in Economics, 1895-2003. HUC 8522.2.1 Box 4, Folder “Economics 1946-47”.

Image Source: Michael Lindsay tuning a radio receiver at the Jinchaji base in Hebel province, sometime between 1941 and 1944. China Daily April 8, 2015.