"At last Ma Haide, a major figure in American non-governmental interaction with 20th-century China, has found a rigorous and painstaking biographer... The portrait Porter paints of "Dr. Ma," the first Westerner to join the Chinese Communist Party, is memorable: an idealistic yet prudent adventurer, a medical man with a feel for politics, a one-filial son who turned his back on his family for the cause of revolutionary China. Porter has done prodigious research and conducted revealing interviews. He has empathy for his subject yet a searching gaze. He nicely balances the private and public faces of this enigmatic American-Chinese physician who penetrated the heart of Communist China. No one interested in America's relation to the Chinese Revolution should miss this book." --Ross Terrill, Harvard University

"In Porter’s adept hands, Hatem becomes a window on some of China’s most important events this century. The revolutionary era of the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese military offensive, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and reforms of the 1980s are all examined through the eyes of an American doctor trained in a completely different health care system." --The Lancet

"There is little evidence of ambition or arrogance in Hatem's story, which surely sets him apart from many other foreigners working in China; and the genuineness of his service as a health worker seems indisputable.... Few can claim a life so well spent." --China Review International, Fall 1998

"Very good ... written in a lucid and interesting style.... I definitely recommend this book." --Journal of Oriental Studies, 1997

The young George Hatem journeyed to Shanghai in 1933 to practice medicine and see the sights. The deplorable health and social conditions he found there caused his sympathies to veer quickly to the revolutionary efforts of the Chinese Communist party, and before long he joined the underground Party members in conspiratorial meetings and activities. In 1936 he left Shanghai on a secret Province after completing the Long March. For the next 14 years, Hatem served the Communist troops as physician and adviser. He took the name Ma Haide and became the first foreigner admitted into China's Communist Party. After the Communist victory in 1949, he became the first foreigner granted citizenship in the People's Republic. Over the next 40 years, his reputation grew as one of the leading public health physicians in the world. Until his death in 1988, he showed absolute allegiance to the Party. Few foreigners have been accepted into Chinese society as readily as he and certainly none have had such intimate access to 20th century China's most powerful figures.