An “ocean devil”, which, as James MacManus writes, is the traditional Chinese name for an overseas foreigner, first drew me to China in 1991 to make a radio programme. A Scots engineer called Charles Walker wanted to honour the neglected grave of the China-born Protestant missionary Eric Liddell, who had died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Weifang in Shandong province in 1945. (Liddell was the religious athlete, as portrayed by Ian Charleson in the film Chariots of Fire, who refused to run on the Sabbath in the 1924 Paris Olympic Games.) The Chinese Communist authorities permitted a piper in a kilt and the unveiling of a Scottish granite monument, but forbade any expression of his Christianity, so we pilgrims had to sing our sad, glad hymns in the bus afterwards.

Seven years earlier, in a Beijing bar, the journalist James MacManus first heard of George Hogg, an Englishman who had also died in China in 1945. But Hogg’s tomb, unlike Liddell’s, was being restored by local Chinese rather than by expatriate Scots. MacManus’s investigation into this intriguing story over two decades has resulted in a clear, readable biography, as well as a feature film shot in China, The Children of Huang Shi, in which Hogg is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

George Aylwin Hogg was a middle-class English lad of the Harry Wharton sort: head boy of St George’s School, Harpenden, and a rugger player at Wadham College, Oxford. But some inner vision made him unusual. His family were Non-conforming Baptists who read the Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, and had also sent him to a pacifist school near Geneva, where pupils could criticize the teachers. His mother’s sister was a formidable anti-Imperialist Quaker called Muriel Lester, who was converted to pacifism by reading Tolstoy.

In the summer of 1937, twenty-two-year-old George cashed in a legacy to join his idealistic Aunt Muriel on a peace mission to Japan, just months after the Japanese army had invaded northern China from Manchuria. He arrived in Shanghai in February 1938, shortly before W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, as recorded in their Journey to a War. Like them, Hogg moved inland up the Yangtse River to Hankow with Chiang Kai-shek’s Government as the Japanese army pushed west, waging the total war that would kill 15 million Chinese by 1945. But unlike the self-publicizing littérateurs and conflict tourists, Hogg stayed in China until he died. He wrote pieces for AP, UPI and the Manchester Guardian, but mostly worked for the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Co-Operatives, founded in Shanghai in 1938. Later condemned by the Chinese Communists as “humanitarian imperialism”, and investigated by the FBI as a “Red” front, the co-operatives’ fund-raising arm was an acceptable way for wealthy Westerners, such as the Chinese-born media mogul Henry Luce, of Time, LIFE and Fortune fame, to funnel aid to Chinese people in the name of democracy. Both corrupt Nationalists and devious Communists, often more eager to destroy each other than to confront the Japanese, spared the co-operatives where they were useful, but were intensely suspicious of their motives and actions. The co-operatives’ abbreviated name in Chinese, meaning “work together”, entered the English language as the expression “gung-ho!”.

The heart of this always interesting book is the period when George Hogg became the headmaster of a wrecked school at Shuangshipu. Amid a mountainous population cretinous with goitre, he took command of his horde of scabby waifs and orphans, battling for their health and hygiene, growing food, teaching practical skills, setting up and running a cotton-ginning machine, boosting the morale of city and country children through physical fitness and the endless singing of English and Chinese songs. As the war approached, he moved the entire school 700 miles during the winter to set up another Gordonstoun on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

The spartan Hogg kept his innocent English scepticism: “China’s not really much of a place. After all I’ve been here seven years now. It’s been very interesting but I can’t hope to do anything. They never really trust us”. Though he still longed for choc ices and shredded wheat, he spoke Mandarin and went with the Chinese flow, no longer worrying about wet feet in the English way: “Buy yourself a pair of cloth sandals that grip the mud, don’t wear any socks, go out and frankly splash through all the puddles you can see. Cover your feet in lovely squelchy mud . . . nothing could be healthier or nicer”. But bare feet and dirt became the death of him. Hogg stubbed his toe badly playing football, and caught tetanus. Having survived anthrax, dysentery, malaria, paratyphoid, trachoma, typhus and scabies, he was killed by lockjaw aged thirty. Barely able to drink through clamped teeth, he scrawled his last will and testament in five words: “My all to the school”.

Early death in wartime made Hogg a hero, an acceptable “international fighter” for China, and also for our contemporary age of the NGO. Perhaps it was better not to live on and become a “useful idiot” for the Communists like Rewi Alley, Hogg’s New Zealand colleague who had helped to found the Chinese industrial co-operatives. While himself obese from Chinese food, Alley denied to Edgar Snow that famine was killing millions in Mao’s China, and after his death was outed as a pederast by a scholarly biographer. Better to die young and remain for ever the cheerful English schoolboy and the firm but fair teacher that James MacManus’s Ocean Devil engagingly portrays.

James MacManus
OCEAN DEVIL
The life and legend of George Hogg
288pp. Harper Perennial. Paperback, £8.99.
978 0 00 727075 0

Nicholas Rankin’s new book, Churchill’s Wizards: The British genius for deception 1914–1945, is forthcoming in October.

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