Jack Belden

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Jack Belden (1984)

Jack Belden (born February 3, 1910 in Brooklyn , † June 3, 1989 in Paris ) was an American war correspondent and writer who mainly dealt with the Second Sino-Japanese War , the Second World War and the Chinese Civil War .

Life

After graduating from Colgate University , Jack Belden initially worked as a seaman at the beginning of the Great Depression . In 1933 he settled in Shanghai and learned Chinese. He eventually got a job as a trial reporter for Shanghai's English language newspapers. After Japan invaded China in 1937, he worked for United Press before being lured away by Life magazine . During the Second World War he worked as a correspondent for Time magazine in China, North Africa and Europe.

As one of the few Chinese-speaking correspondents of the 1930s and 1940s, Belden worked directly on the war front to portray the events from the perspective of both the soldiers and the civilian population. He often traveled in the company of General Joseph Stilwell and his colleagues Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow .

Tillman Durdin, a correspondent for the New York Times, said of Belden:

At times it was also possible for us to accompany the Chinese troops to the front to report from there, but normally we relied on the research of Jack Belden and Joseph Stilwell, who brought them straight from the front and made them available to everyone .

At the beginning of the Burma Campaign 1942 Belden and Silwell were the only reporter in the American headquarters when it was completed by the invasion of the Japanese troops from the outside world. In his book Retreat With Stilwell (1943) he described the events and the subsequent flight to India.

In North Africa he reported on the grueling march of the British 8th Army from Egypt to Tunisia during the Africa campaign . Here, too, he tried to report as closely as possible about the events of the war and the people who fought against each other. Two-time Pulitzer Prize- winning correspondent Don Whitehead later recalled in his book Beachhead Don that it was Belden who inspired him and stated, “I have chosen Belden's approach to reporting and try to get as close to the fighting as I can possible to come. "

After the Africa campaign, Belden accompanied the invasion troops as part of Operation Husky to Sicily on July 10, 1943 and to Salerno on September 9, 1943, during Operation Avalanche . In the same year his leg was crushed by a machine gun volley. After treatment in the USA, he returned to Europe and reported on the landings of the Allies in Normandy and the end of the war.

Still Time to Die (1944), a collection of short essays, also includes his reportages from the battlefields in Asia, North Africa and Europe.

"China shakes the world"

China shakes the world was Belden's last and best-known book, which, along with Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow and Thunder Out of China by Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, is counted among the standard works for the Western understanding of the Chinese revolution.

The first part is reportage-style and is based on eyewitness accounts from local figures in the villages. that he traveled. Belden concludes that the communist-dominated government of the border region had the loyalty of local leaders on their side.

In the second part of the book, he analyzes the long-term consequences: while in his opinion the rural revolution had the potential for democratic development, Mao's national revolution encouraged despotism . Belden's conclusion, the communists came to power by seemingly "loving" the people in China, seeming to understand their needs and thus winning them over to their cause. To do this, Mao and his party built a whole new power apparatus. Even if they originally wanted to stand up for the interests of ordinary people sincerely, the one-sided power structure led them to pursue their own intentions above all and to maintain the power they had gained for their own sake. Belden warned that a new elite from the ranks of political leaders could rise above the Chinese people and escape democratic control. The grave political mistakes of this elite would eventually result in utter tyranny.

Belden published China shakes the world in 1949, when the American public had lost interest in reports from China. The book did not become known until the 1960s when it was published in paperback by Monthly Review Press with a benevolent introduction by Owen Lattimore, an influential American writer and China expert.

Works

  • Retreat with Stilwell . Knopf, New York City 1943.
  • China is shaking the world . New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt a. M. 1973, ISBN 3-8015-0113-2 (American English: China shakes the world . Translated by Hans L. du Mont).
  • Still time to die . Da Capo Press Inc, 1949, ISBN 0-306-70735-7 .

literature

  • Arnold Eric Sevareid: Not So Wild a Dream (autobiography) . Atheneum (new edition 1976), 1946, ISBN 978-0-689-10741-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tuchman, Barbara W., Stilwell and the American Experience in China
  2. ↑ Stephen R. MacKinnon, Oris Friesen: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987
  3. ↑ Original: "Occasionally we were able to get into the field with the Chinese troops and see what was going on. Generally, we relied on Jack Belden and Joseph Stilwell, who collaborated in keeping track of where the Chinese armies were and what they were doing. Jack and Stilwell would plunge off into the hinterland and come back with information about the situation at the front, all of which was made available to us. "
  4. ^ Long Hike , Time, March 22, 1943
  5. ^ Don Whitehead: Reporting the War from the European Theater , 1942-1945
  6. ↑ Original: "I decided I would use the Belden approach to reporting and get as close as I possibly could to the fighting."
  7. ↑ Belden Takes a Rest , Time, September 20, 1943
  8. ↑ Still time to die, By Jack Belden
  9. ↑ Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Paris 1967; tr. Stanford University Press, 1971): page 217; Jim Peck, America and the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1946 , in Ernest May and James Thomson, ed., American-East Asian Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972): pp. 319-355
  10. ↑ China Shakes the World : pp. 472-473
personal data
SURNAME Belden, Jack
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American war correspondent and writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH June 3, 1989
Place of death Paris