www.globaltimes.cn By Global Times
On 1 September 1944, Xinhua News Agency sent its first English dispatch to the world from a cave in Qingliang Mountain, Yan’an, reporting on the Eighth Route Army, the New Fourth Army and the anti-Japanese bases led by the Communist Party of China (CPC). From then on, the world could hear the voice of the CPC. Behind this groundbreaking dispatch were the persistent efforts of a CPC member with a “foreign face”, Israel Epstein.
Born in 1915 into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Epstein moved to China with his parents at the age of two. He later recalled his boyhood in Tianjin, “Already before my teens, amidst the country’s surrounding internecine wars and famines, I saw gaunt, ragged refugees flooding into Tianjin. Some begging tearfully for food, some offering to sell their children … On a forever unforgotten winter morning, … I came upon a boy of twelve or so, … crouching stiff and dead in a doorway where he had tried vainly to seek shelter from the freezing night wind.” The young Epstein was struck by how poor and weak China was and how much suffering the Chinese people had to endure. He began to ponder, who on earth could save China? What should he have as the purpose of his life?
Between 1937 and 1938, Epstein went to Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan and other places as a correspondent of the United Press International (UPI). In April 1938, he went to the front line to cover the Battle of Taierzhuang. He saw with his own eyes how the Eighth Route Army stood with the people and enabled them to finally enjoy their own rights and live with dignity as human beings and citizens like never before. It dawned on the people that defending the country was defending their own land. They rushed to join the military organizations established by the Eighth Route Army.
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