Shanghai – First Impressions No.12 – The Lefties Are Coming, Freda Utley, 1928

Posted: August 31st, 2013 | No Comments »

Off to the East – Freda Utley – 1928

 

 

A leading “Last Ditcher” (those who stayed in China into the war years) was the London-born socialist Winifred “Freda” Utley (1899-1978). She had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and had also been close to the Fabians and George Bernard Shaw. She’d become entranced with the USSR and moved to Moscow where she married a Soviet citizen. Her husband got himself caught up in Stalin’s purges, was sent to a Siberian gulag and died without ever making contact with her again. She left Moscow, surprisingly not totally disillusioned with Stalin’s Russia, and went to America where she freelanced for Reader’s Digest.

In her memoirs, Odyssey of a Liberal, Utley was as keen to report the political situation in China when she arrived in 1938 (she had briefly been to Shanghai ten years previously carrying messages for the Comintern) as she was to report that she was incredibly beautiful and highly desirable. She did however admit that the lack of available white women in the war zones of China combined with the testosterone-fuelled reporting environment probably contributed to her self-proclaimed popularity among her male colleagues. She soon formed an attachment based on gender and politics with the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent Agnes Smedley and Anna Louise Strong, basically the only other unattached white women around the journalist community in Hankou (though most men admitted to being afraid of them!) along with Ilona Ralf Sues who was now working for Holly Tong’s government propaganda ministry.

Utley was to become well known as a journalist and political activist in China based in Hankow in 1938 etc but she first visited Shanghai ten years earlier in 1928 carrying letters from Moscow for the Comintern to the Chinese communist underground and Soviet agents. Naturally Utley’s arrival at Shanghai was somewhat more cloak and dagger than most.

Utley was right to note how tense things were – months later thousands of communists, leftists and trade unionists were slaughtered.

 

Secret Hideouts

 

Eventually I got a ship to Shanghai where, according to my instructions I registered at the Palace Hotel (1) and telephoned to a business office asking for a gentleman with a German name and telling him I had arrived with the sample of silk stockings he was waiting for. “Herr Doktor Haber,” as he then called himself, came over at once and I handed over to him with considerable relief the sealed and silk encased package that I had concealed so long on my person, and which contained I know not what secret instructions for the furtherance of communist aims in China.

 

Some days later I was permitted to meet with the leaders of the communist underground in Shanghai in one of their secret hideouts. Our rendezvous was at midnight in a whitewashed cellar somewhere off the Nanking Road in the British concession, to which I was conducted by a devious route left anyone should be following me. It was very conspiratorial and thrilling and reminds me today of a Hollywood spy movie. For my Chinese companion it was deadly earnest since the British authorities in the International Settlement, as well as Chiang Kai-shek’s newly established government, were intent on rooting out and exterminating the remnants of the Moscow directed Chinese Communist party.

 

I was probably safe from anything worse than deportation from China, but others were risking their lives.

 

Freda Utley, Odyssey of a Liberal, (Washington National Press, 1970, Washington DC)

 

 

 

1) Now the South Wing of the Fairmont Peace Hotel at NoThe Bund.

 

 

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