American journalist's photos and writing rekindle China's wartime memories

WUHAN -- As China prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of its victory in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression on Sept 3, a remote town in Central China's Hubei province is quietly staging a powerful act of remembrance.

In Dawu county, once a key anti-Japanese base tucked away in the mountains, final preparations are underway for an exhibition honoring the New Fourth Army's Fifth Division -- a Communist Party of China-led force that was based there during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45). The artifacts to feature in the exhibition, more than a dozen in total, were donated by descendants of wartime soldiers.

Among them is a pair of rare black-and-white photographs taken in Dawu in early 1940 by American journalist Agnes Smedley.

Smedley arrived in China in late 1928 and spent over a decade living and reporting in the country, documenting both the brutality of Japanese aggression and the resilience of the Chinese resistance.

In January 1940, she traveled deep into the Dawu Mountain region, then a stronghold of the New Fourth Army's Henan-Hubei Detachment -- which was a guerrilla force operating just 100 km from Japanese-occupied Wuhan and the predecessor of the Fifth Division.

Eighty-five years later, the children of late veteran Wu Daoying traveled from Beijing to Dawu, bringing Smedley's photographs featuring their mother to the very place where she once fought. They donated the images to the county archive.