An Oxford \Economics graduate, George Hogg traveled to China in 1937, initially working as a journalist. Moved by the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial army against the Chinese, he stayed helping Rewi Alley, a New Zealander Communist who had started a series of vocational schools inspired by an American idealist named Joseph Bailie. In 1942, Hogg became the headmaster of the Bailie school in Shaanxi. All of his students were boys, and most of them were orphans. For the next two years, Hogg was father, teacher, and friend to these boys whom no one else wanted. Unlike anyone else these Chinese boys encountered, he never punished them.
As the war against the Japanese escalated, the Kuomingtang (Nationalist) Party of China attempted to conscript Hogg's students in 1944. To protect them, Hogg, with Alley, decided to move his 60 boys 700 miles away to Shandan. They traversed dangerous terrain against incredible odds for 450 miles for a month on foot, and hired trucks to travel the rest of the way.
Just a few months later, Hogg contracted tetanus and died at age 30. Alley took over as the new headmaster of the Shandan Bailie School. But to this day, his students remember him fondly as the man who saved their lives.
A movie called Children of Huang Shi tells the story, with Jonathan Rhys Meyer as George Hogg.
More information:
The Independent: Long March Across China
The Sunday Times: The Heroic Englishman China Will Never Forget
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