Rewi Alley dies

Rewi Alley, friend of China, died of heart failure and cerebral thrombosis at his Beijing residence. Earlier in the month Alley had celebrated his 90th birthday with the Communist Party General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang. In accordance with his will, his ashes were scattered in Gansu Province, where the Shandan school he had led had recently been rebuilt.

Alley was born in Springfield, Canterbury, on 2 December 1897 to Frederick James Alley, a schoolmaster, and his wife, Clara Maria Buckingham, who was active in the temperance and women's rights movements. He was christened Rewi on the wish of his father’s childless sister, Amy, an admirer of the 19th-century Ngāti Maniapoto leader Rewi Maniapoto.

Alley was wounded during combat in France in the First World War and gained the Military Medal. On returning to New Zealand he and his friend Jack Stevens took advantage of a returned soldiers’ settlement scheme to purchase land in Taranaki for a sheep farm. But their efforts to break in and farm the land were marred by low wool prices. After ‘six years of loneliness and struggle’, Stevens announced that he intended to get married. Alley decided to leave the land to him and – intrigued by what he had read about China – left New Zealand in December 1926 ‘to go and have a look at the Chinese revolution’. Originally intending only to visit, Alley would spend the rest of his life in his adopted country. During the next 60 years he experienced some of China’s most dramatic moments, including the Japanese invasion and subsequent civil war culminating in the communist revolution, and the later Cultural Revolution. His work in establishing cooperatives and setting up schools saw him honoured by both the Chinese and New Zealand governments on his death.