Rewi Alley:
In and Out of the Indusco Files

DOUGLAS R. REYNOLDS

'ESTERN travelers to Peking over the past few
years have returned with tales of a AA'esterner whose
stocky build, weathered and craggy looks, white hair,
prominent nose and blue eyes have compelled their attention.
That attention has then been turned to awe by this man's enor¬
mous knowledge of China's geographical landscape. This man is
the 77-year old Rewi Alley—"one of the [world's] very few true
China Hands," Ross Terrill of Harvard University adjudges in
his 1971 book, 800,000,000; The Real China.

Rewi Alley since 1949 has been a chronicler of revolution in
China. Before 1949 he was a maker of revolution in China. His
revolution was economic and social—a reaction against eleven
years in the industrial slums of Shanghai and, more immediately,
against Japan's invasion of China in 1937.

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia Univer¬
sity possesses in its Indusco Files, 1938-1952, the impressive record
of Rewi Alley's efforts after 1938. W^eek by week, his story un¬
folds, in thousands of pieces of correspondence (most of it with
Ida Pruitt who between 1952 and 1956 gave the Indusco Files to
Columbia), in verse by the score, in published and unpublished
articles, short stories, and personality sketches, and in plans and
reports. Hundreds of photographs, which Rewi Alley and others
supplied for publicity purposes to Indusco, Inc. in New York,
furnish his story's visual dimension.

Rewi Alley set off for China from his native New Zealand in
1926 at the age of 28. Y^irtually nothing up to then had pointed
him in the direction of China. He was, by all appearances, a rooted