The Doctor from Neuchâtel - Part 2 - The Shijiazhuang Strategy
{In case you missed it, you can read Part 1 of The Doctor from Neuchâtel by clicking here.}
Nanjing, June 1948 - It had been a busy and eventful four months. Junod arrived in early February, but fell very ill, and had to handle many tasks while still bed-ridden. .
Still, he had somehow managed to establish a country office in Nanjing. More importantly, he had agreed with the government on an initial list of projects, offices and supplies to be ordered.
Resources, however, remained a major problem. UNICEF was to have inherited funds, offices, vehicles and personnel from UNRRA. The reality, however, was that most of UNRRA’s money was depleted and its personnel were heading home. On top of all that, the network of ministries, municipalities and organizations through which UNRRA distributed commodities and cash had a history of deep corruption.
Following many years of occupation by Japan, fighting between the Allies and the Japanese during World War II, and now the worsening civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces, China was in ruins. Half the country was outside government control. The administration at national and local levels was chaotic. The message from departing UNRRA staff to the incoming UNICEF team was clear - ‘now is not the time to come to China’.
Newton Bowles, visited the UNICEF office in Nanjing in July 1948. At the time he headed the Asia Section In NYHQ and would later head the Programme Division. Bowles had been born and raised in China and returned there to work for UNRRA before joining UNICEF. After his visit Bowles wrote back to Pate, ‘“This is a most inopportune time to undertake Health and Welfare work in China. The Civil War dominates everything.”
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| 1946 - Newton and Dusty Bowles in UNRRA Shanghai |
{Note: Dusty (Augusta Davis) and Newton married in 1946 in Shanghai. In 1970 he remarried, this time to Pres (Mary Jean Presley) Bowles - the person more of us in UNICEF knew as Newton's wife. It is not clear whose daughters are in the photo - perhaps Dusty's? If you know more of the story, please let me know.}
Junod himself wrote to Pate,“This mission is the hardest one I ever had to lead, because the success of it does not depend on you or yourself or even on the government and voluntary agencies, but on the unbelievable circumstances in which this country happens to be today.”
Yet with the strong support from Headquarters of Pate, Rajchman and Bowles, Junod pushed ahead. Against all odds, he managed to retain some of the departing UNRRA staff and by June had built a staff of 13 internationals representing 11 nationalities.
Fortunately, there were also a few key UNRRA staff who took time from their duties in closing out UNRRA’s operations to helping Junod get established. They included:
Mary Pavlevsky - UNRRA’s Social Welfare coordinator who served as the interim UNICEF Representative from mid December 1947 until Junod’s arrival in early February 1948.
Dr. Berislav Borcic - then serving as UNRRA’s Chief of Health and former Dean of the School of Public Health in Zagreb. He had first come to work in China in 1930 on assignment from the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was an old friend and associate of Ludwik Rajchman, Maurice Pate and John Grant. He was a strong proponent of Grant’s approach for training of village health workers. Later he became UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director for Programmes, and was Pate’s closest advisor on all things to do with China and most things to do with health policy.
Dr. Leo Eloesser - like Junod, Eloesser was a thoracic surgeon, who had worked on the frontlines during the Spanish civil war. He came to China to work with WHO and UNRRA in 1945, and quickly became a strong advocate for simplified training of health workers, in place of the training of doctors and the building and equipping of hospitals. Junod recruited Eloesser to handle negotiations with the Communist authorities in the north.
Perry O. Hanson, Jr. - like Newton Bowles, was born and raised in China to missionary parents. After graduating from college in Beijing, his family sent him off to the University of Minnesota. He returned to China to work as a translator and liaison officer between the Chinese and American forces. After the war he worked for UNRRA and was then recruited by UNICEF. He fit well into Junod's strong team. He and Leo Eloesser knew each other from their work in UNRRA. They soon became Junod’s secret weapon in opening relations and operations with the Communist authorities. {Note: If anyone has a photo of Perry as an adult, please let me know - like many of us in UNICEF, he seems to have been camera shy later in life.}
Junod faced a problem familiar to generations of UNICEF representatives - when you are accredited to a government at war, how do you provide aid for children ‘on the other side’ without being thrown out of the country?
Since 1943 China’s north had been held by Mao’s communist forces which controlled considerable territory and a significant portion of the population. Yet the UN and most western governments recognized only the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government led by Chiang Kai-shek. Providing aid to civilians on ‘the other side’ in a civil war is always a challenge In the case of UNICEF in China, it seemed a monumental challenge.
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| War time partners Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt, and Churchill at the Cairo Conference in 1943 |
The West regarded the Nationalist government as an ally in the war against Japan during WWII and a central part of their original concept of the United Nations as a group of partners at war with Germany and Japan.
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| 1945 -First head of state to sign of the UN Charter |
At the end of the war the western powers gave Chiang the honor of being the first head of state to sign the UN Charter in 1945 - thus making China one of the five permanent members of the UN.
Yet, Pate and Rajchman had been clear from the outset that whatever actions UNICEF took must address the needs of children on all sides of a conflict. But how?
Through contacts in Hong Kong, Junod managed to make contact quietly with representative’s of Mao’s social welfare organization. They agreed to an initial project in the ‘liberated’ north.
Meanwhile, in Nanjing Junod somehow managed to wangle permission from the Nationalist authorities for a UNICEF team to enter Communist controlled areas. Perhaps Junod’s ICRC training came in handy in negotiating this political minefield - all those delicate negotiations on prisoner exchanges in Spain and on conditions of POWs in Germany and eastern Europe.
At both the Nanjing and New York ends UNICEF pressed their case - UNICEF could only operate in China if it addressed the needs of children on both sides of the conflict. After much cajoling and arm-twisting, the government eventually agreed that UNICEF could devote a small part of its budget to programmes in those areas.
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| UNRRA 6X6 on the road |
With that permission in place Junod dispatched Eloesser and Hanson on August 14, 1948 to cross the battle lines and head north to the headquarters of the Communist center of government at Shijiazhuang.
The journey took five days. They traveled alone, driving an old US army truck passed on by UNRRA with "United Nations International Emergency Children's Fund" written out in full in English and Chinese. The roads were badly flooded and they had to negotiate passage through both the Nationalist and Communist front lines.
They managed to move 50 miles each day - considered remarkably good. Buying fuel was a challenge. Eloesser commented, "At the Caltex petrol agency, Perry and I bought two drums of gasoline and ten gallons of kerosene for something of like a billion (Chinese) dollars. By the time we had a cheque cashed at the bank, Caltex had closed. The next morning the gasoline alone cost two billion dollars."
When they reached the city, the authorities gave them permission to use a building which had once been a Japanese officers club. This became the UNICEF headquarters for northern China.
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| October / November 1947 - Mao's forces pushed rapidly across northern China. In November Mao chose Shijiazhuang as his headquarters due to its location on a major railway leading east to Beijing and south to Nanjing and Shanghai. For UNICEF too, Shijiazhuang seemed an ideal location for the future. For now, however, with serious floods closing the roads and the front lines of the war so near, setting up an office posed a challenge. The city was frequently bombed and the office had to be evacuated several times. Most supplies arrived by ox cart The real problem, however, was getting supplies into the north in the first place. Nothing could enter from Nationalist controlled areas, the Manchurian border was closed and the area’s only major ‘liberated’ port was frequently bombed. It was clear from the beginning that the programme could not be ‘supply driven’ and must instead count on training and using whatever was available. In fact, this difficulty in importing supplies was a blessing in disguise. The team could focus on training, not logistics. Unlike the Nationalists, the Communists saw little need at this point for commodities like milk powder or cotton. By contrast, the Nationalist government had depended on UNRRA for imports of those and other basic commodities, and they expected UNICEF to carry on with the same. After all, they argued, in Europe UNICEF had provided food and basic commodities for production of shoes and clothing. Why not in China? Pate, Borcic, and Junod, however, had decided early on that UNICEF’s paltry budget could never meet the needs of any significant portion of China’s huge population. Pate instructed that two-thirds of the initial UNICEF budget allocation of $3.5 million should go for training. UNICEF hoped to establish two training centers for village health workers - one in Nationalist territory and the other in Communist held territory. Nonetheless, some supplies were provided - dried milk for a child feeding programme in six cities and a contribution in kind of Australian cotton for producing clothing. These were seen as temporary ‘foot in the door’ projects. UNICEF’s strategic thrust from the beginning was for training of village health workers. |
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| 1948 - Leo Eloesser teaching a village health workers' class at the Ben Hu former Trappist Monastery outside Shijiazhuang |
The Communist authorities were enthusiastic about Eloesser’s proposals for a training programme emphasizing MCH primary care rather than curative medicine. Near Shijiazhuang Eloesser and his local counterpart found a good location for a training institute - an abandoned Trappist monastery. The authorities nominated trainees to join an initial 3 month course. They also agreed to launch projects for BCG vaccination and control of kala-azar. There were even discussions about restarting vaccine and serum production.
The UNICEF team exchanged letters of agreement with the Communist authorities. This became known as the Shijiazhuang Agreement. Hanson then took the agreement back to Junod who was by then busy opening a new office in Beijing.
A 1922 photo of staff outside Dr. John Grant's Institute of Public Health (established in 1906 with Rockefeller Foundation funding) at the Peking Union Medical College.
{The Institute was merged with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in 1957. In 1947 it became the home of UNICEF's Beijing sub-office and was later briefly the country office, following the collapse of the Nationalist capital of Nanjing in April 1949. Leo Eloesser became the head of office in 1949. He recruited Edith Galt to teach midwifery courses to complement his own teaching of village health workers.}
Things had gone remarkably well in these first six months - so well that Headquarters asked Junod to travel to Korea for two weeks to look at possibilities to start a programme there. As instructed, Junod visited Seoul and set out the outlines for a country programme. The Korean National Committee for UNICEF mentions this visit as the beginning of UNICEF cooperation in Korea, even though the actual country programme would only begin six years later in 1954.
By the time Junod returned to China, things had deteriorated badly - not with the programme but with the military and political environment in which the programme needed to function.
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| Late January 1949 - Mao's forces enter Beijing |
The front lines of the civil war moved quickly in late 1948, more quickly than either side in the war or the international community expected. Communist forces moved rapidly south and east and Nationalist forces collapsed just as rapidly. By late January 1949 Chian Kai-Shek had resigned the Presidency and much of the Kuomintang government began to flee. By the end of January 1949 the Communists had taken Beijing. In April the Communists took Nanjing and in May they took Shanghai.
Pate asked Junod to come to New York in January 1949 to brief senior staff and the Board on UNICEF’s future in China, as well as possibilities for a programme in Korea. Just ten days short of completing one year in China, Junod left on January 22nd. He expected to be gone for only a few weeks. Instead, he never returned.
In New York his already shaky health condition further deteriorated. Soon he could hardly move, let alone walk, due to severe arterial calcification. At the same time his young son came down with amoebiasis and entered the Mayo Clinic for treatment. Junod continued to work in New York for a few months, but a return to China was out of the question. In April he resigned and traveled to London for surgery on his legs and further treatment.
Dr. Marcel Junod’s brief but brilliant career in UNICEF was over.
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| 1947 - Dr. Marcel Junot, his wife Eugénie and their son, Benoit |
With his legs no longer able to let him stand through operations, Junod's career as a thoracic surgeon was now at an end, so he retrained as an anesthesiologist. He also rejoined ICRC and became Vice-President. In that capacity he took up several difficult missions, including the aftermath of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary and in 1959 to Japan and Korea to negotiate the repatriation of some 600,000 Koreans living in Japan.
Dr. Marcel Junod died of a heart attack on June 16, 1961 while awakening a patient following surgery.
Junod's book, Le Troisième Combattant
1979 Monument in Hiroshima honors Marcel Junod.
"I have no doubt about it: the world is today confronted with a choice - to continue to exist, or to be annihilated if that bomb is used again…"
I am really enjoying your account of the life and work of this UNICEF/IRC pioneer. He really is a model of commitment, courage and creativity. Please do keep them coming!
ReplyDeleteCheers
Bruce