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James Munro Bertram

In Peking Bertram studied Chinese including at Yenching University where one of the men he shared a room with was Wang Ju-mei who was later to be better known under his Communist Party name of Huang Hua as the longest-serving foreign minister of the PRC after Zhou Enlai.

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Between 1929 and 1931 he studied English literature at Auckland University College, where he met the third of his closest friends, J. A. W. Bennett.

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Together with Edgar Snow, they evacuated to Tientsin (Tianjin) with Zhou Enlai's wife Deng Yingchao disguised as Snow's household servant before finding their way back to Xian.

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During the Peking visit he was re-introduced to his old friends including his former room-mate at Yenching, now Deputy Foreign Minister, Huang Hua and Rewi Alley.

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In early 1946 Bertram was back in Japan as an adviser to the New Zealand delegation led by Sir Carl Berendsen to the Far Eastern Commission, which was working out the details of Occupation policy under the Allied Supreme Commander, General Douglas MacArthur.

see also