INTRODUCTION

Rewi Alley was a man who became a myth in his own lifetime. Alley was by no means a passive witness to the mythologisation of his own life, indeed he was an active participant in the process. Although New Zealand-born, Alley played a prominent role in China from the 1930s, one which continues to the present day; from relief worker, envoy of Chinese foreign policy, role model for Chinese youth, to symbol of New Zealand-Chinese relations and idealised Sino-foreign relations. The persistence of the Alley myth has a lot to do with his most long-lasting and prominent role, that of ‘friend of China’. The foreign friends of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have an important role in China’s distinctive foreign affairs system, which incorporates state-to-state diplomacy with so-called ‘people’s’ diplomacy, foreign propaganda and the management of the foreign presence in China.2 The friends are also symbolic of the highly politicised status of the foreigner in the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ongoing attempts to control Sino-foreign relations in the abstract and most literal sense. Alley’s sixty years in China (1927-1987) offer a microcosm of the changing position of foreigners in China from the late Republican period right up until the current phase of ‘reform and opening up’ begun in 1978. More than any other foreigner in this period, beginning in his earliest years in China, Alley had close involvement in some of the most burning issues of the times, close contact with the political figures who influenced change, as well as being an instrument of change himself.