24 June 2010: Arnolis Hayman papers donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library

The Arnolis Hayman Papers are being donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library by a member of the Hayman family. Arnolis Hayman, a New Zealander, went to Guizhou Province in China as a missionary for the China Inland Mission in 1913.

In 1934, he and his family and colleagues were captured by the Chinese Communist Party’s 6th Army Corps during its fighting with government forces. With the missionary Alfred Bosshardt, he was held for ransom and forced to take part in the 6th Army’s marches through the countryside.

Upon his release almost 14 months later, he wrote a detailed account of his time in captivity.

The papers include copies of Hayman’s memoir, letters between him and his wife, and by people negotiating for his release, photographs, and Chinese-language negotiating documents, the account of his participation in the Long March from 1934-36 and a map and propaganda leaflets.

Dr Anne Marie Brady, Associate-Professor in Chinese and Northeast Asian Politics at the University of Canterbury, has researched Hayman’s experiences. Her new book, A Foreign Missionary on the Long March (just published by Merwin Press), introduces, edits and prints Hayman’s eyewitness account of this part of the Long March.

Thanks to Dr Brady’s contact with members of Arnolis Hayman’s family in Australia, his collected papers will be donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Interesting quotations from the Papers include:

"After their capture at Jiuzhou, Guizhou Province in October 1934, the captives were again hurried on, until we reached the street called 'Old Phoenix Beak’ where a large proportion of the army billetted themselves. I was given a seat in front of a small shop, with a big placard marked ‘Britisher’ before me, I was put on show. Later Mr Bosshardt arrived and was placarded ‘Swiss’... Miss Emblen eventually joined us, but as the Reds were not sure how to write ‘Canada’ in Chinese, nor were clear as to Canada's attitude to communism, she was exempted from being labelled."

In a letter to his wife "On the night of December 17, while the guard was careless we escaped, but we were brought back from the hills by a large body of farmers." In another letter to her, dated 9 April 1935, he says, "... two months have elapsed since the visit of the Chinese delegates from Yuanchow. No representatives have come with either goods or cash during this time and a further extension of a month from now has been granted. If delegates do not arrive ...we have been told we will be executed." This was no empty threat, as evidenced by the decapitated corpses seen by Hayman when on the forced marches.

Other interesting selections include:

A full list of charges in detail - this gives the official Communist view of missionaries as serving as vanguard for Imperialism.

The use of Mexican dollars (silver) as the preferred medium of exchange in ransom demands (The original sum total was $700,000 for all seven foreigners).

Hayman's memoir also gives account of his internment in Shanghai during Japanese occupation - the China Inland Mission buildings there were used as Japanese military headquarters.

A blurb from Dr Anne-Marie Brady’s book, A Foreign Missionary on the Long March - The Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman of the China Inland Mission:

In China in the 1920s and 1930s, foreigners were frequently at risk of being captured by bandits and held for ransom. The phenomenon became so common that foreigners who were captured were called “foreign tickets” (yang piao). Because of their unique status in China due to extraterritoriality, foreign captives were more prized than Chinese victims. Successive CCP leaders in various Soviet areas also in the 1920s and 1930s greatly valued the “foreign tickets” they captured. In 1930 there were an estimated twenty-five missionaries in China being held by Communist groups. The foreigners suffered great deprivations in captivity; some were tortured and a small number were killed. The CCP plundered their personal and church possessions and even took funds intended for relief efforts. However, it must be said, that the CCP, like Chinese bandits, tended to treat foreigners slightly better than they did Chinese captives, whose lives were held very cheap.

It is in this context that A Foreign Missionary on the Long March, a previously unpublished eyewitness account of the Chinese Communist Party’s epoch Long March, so resonates. The author, a New Zealand-born missionary for the China Inland Mission from 1913 to 1945 was captured and held hostage for 413 days by the CCP’s Sixth Army from 1934 to 1935. Hayman’s grim account of the Red Army in retreat gives a new perspective on the historic Long March, as well as a glimpse of the CCP in the time before Mao came to prominence. It also blurs the line between the Communists and common bandits. CCP historiography has turned the Long March into the founding myth of the PRC. Hayman’s memoirs offer a fresh perspective on this crucial period of CCP history and implicitly, in the role it plays in the CCP’s current hold on power.

Anne-Marie Brady is an Associate-Professor in Chinese and Northeast Asian Politics at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She is the author of Friend of China - The Myth of Rewi Alley (2002), Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (2003), and Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (2008).