TimesOnline.co.uk - Review date: April 25, 2008

EVEN VIEWED FROM just eight years away, the 20th century makes you wonder. What possessed us? Whence the epic, unstoppable bloodlust?

The questions arise not so much because of the world wars, but because of the second-tier orgies of slaughter and suffering that went on in their historical shadow. The Russian civil war was one; four years of frenzied butchery that terrorised Eurasia with barely a pause for breath after Versailles.

And the great rolling convulsion that seized China for 23 years, devouring tens of millions of innocents but leaving Mao triumphant, was another. This was a maelstrom of overlapping wars, famines, floods and generalised destruction fuelled by the greed of warlords, Japanese fascism, paranoid Chinese nationalism and overcooked Marxian ideology.

Through the chaos ran the fragile threads of countless individual stories, but few can have been more astonishing or, in the end, uplifting, than that of George Aylwin Hogg.

James MacManus, then a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, first heard about Hogg in an eavesdropped conversation at the British Embassy Club in Beijing in 1984. The account that he has pieced together since is of an Englishman abroad, but hardly of the cliché those words suggest.

Hogg had the prodigious stamina so often traced to the rainswept playing fields of English public schools, and he stood out in China for other obvious reasons, including his height, his hair, his "high nose" and the colour of his skin. But more than any of his compatriots who immersed themselves in war-torn China, he stands out for something else entirely: his goodness.

Thomas Keneally has noted (in his introduction to Schindler's Ark) how much harder it can be to write about the good than the bad. In Ocean Devil, MacManus answers the challenge as Hogg himself would have wished, by stripping his narrative of superfluous sentiment and letting his subject's extraordinary odyssey speak for itself.

That odyssey took the young Oxford graduate to Shanghai via the US and Japan in 1938. He had no fixed career plans and intended to stay in China for two weeks. He never left. Instead he drifted inland with the foreign press corps covering the Chinese retreat from Japan's invading army.

At first the elite foreign reporters of the era hold the spotlight, and little wonder: they included Gelhorn, Hemingway, Peter Fleming and a whole cadre of Americans annealed by the Spanish Civil War. Hogg was a hanger-on, stringing on and off for most of the big agencies and the appallingly stingy Manchester Guardian.

But as Hogg masters the reporter's craft and eventually takes up the post of headmaster of a boarding school for orphaned and abandoned boys deep in the hinterland, he moves effortlessly to the centre of the narrative.

Here is an alien creature drawn away from friends, family and comfort by his sense of adventure, then embedded in his new country by endless curiosity and a deep sense of duty.

It is no surprise that Hogg's story has now been made into a film. If the actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers has done him justice it will be the performance of his career.

Review by Giles Whittell

DailyMail.co.uk - Review date: March 28, 2008

Ocean Devil's labour of love

Not many people recognise the name George Hogg. An unknown Englishman abroad to us, he remains a legendary hero to many elderly Chinese, who venerate his grave and memory.

This book rescues from obscurity a saga of good deeds done in a war-torn China where savagery was normal behaviour.

Hogg was mad about China and he had given it his all when he died there, tragically young, just before the war ended.

One of the reasons for his being so little known is that he operated in the obscure provinces of northwest China during a war of which we remember very little: the ruthless invasion of China by Japan from the 1930s until 1945.

After a boyhood spent as a 'golden lad' ? head of school, captain of rugby, a handsome six-foot dazzler of girls at his home in Harpenden, Hertfordshire ? Hogg went to Wadham College, Oxford, whose famous don, Maurice Bowra, liberated him from the repressed attitudes of his Nonconformist home.

In 1938 he set off for China, arriving in Shanghai as it became the next target of the Japanese.

They had just revealed their barbarity in the 'Rape of Nanking' ? a licensed orgy of rape and killing which outdid even the atrocities of the SS. This was the colourful Shanghai of JG Ballard's boyhood, dissolute and desperate in the face of the Japanese advance.

Hogg turned himself into a journalist, filing long dispatches to the Manchester Guardian and New Statesman on the air raids, the refugees and the final abandonment by the Nationalist government first of Shanghai, then Hankow, as it retreated to the mountainous west. Quoted here, they are still vividly evocative.

He reluctantly became aware of the Japanese 'atrocity mentality', whose aim was to cripple Chinese morale by mass murder and destruction. 'Kill all, burn all, destroy all', was the campaign motto.

Japanese troops were indoctrinated with the belief that the Chinese were inferior semisavages who would never rise to Japanese standards of civilisation.

Of the two civilisations, the Chinese was, of course, much older.

Having been expelled from Shanghai by the Japanese conquerors, Hogg worked his way back via Japan, where he saw the religion of militarism for himself.

As a correspondent for American news agencies, he travelled from war zone to war zone, crossing Japanese lines at night, speaking fluent Mandarin. The network of village cooperatives which provided basic goods such as textiles appointed him their secretary and publicist. As an 'Ocean Devil' ? the Chinese name for foreigner ? he was called their 'Ocean Secretary'. Their badge bore the motto 'Gung Ho' ? which meant 'working together' ? until it was adopted by the U.S. Marines to mean something more aggressive.

Hogg also managed to visit the Chinese Communist Army encamped in the mountains up north. The war was complicated by the fact that the Nationalist and Communist Chinese armies were enemies of each other, as well as of the Japanese.

One of Hogg's Chinese girlfriends, the one he hoped to marry, left him to join the Communist forces as a guerilla. He never saw her again, but wrote her love letters for the rest of his short life.

Hogg's big challenge came when he was appointed headmaster of a cooperative training school for war orphans, named the Bailie School after an American missionary. It was in chaos, without books, food or equipment.

He had found his metier.

Instituting a spartan regime of cleanliness and exercise, he transformed the boys' health. He also taught them to sing ? English nursery rhymes as well as Chinese folk songs. He played games with them. He adopted four of the boys as his 'sons'. The boys called him 'Ho Ke' ? the nearest Mandarin could get to Hogg.

Old pupils interviewed by the author make it clear that they worshipped him. 'He was gentle, he was kind. Other headmasters punished us: Ho Ke didn't. He was firm as a friend. He did everything with us.' When the Japanese got within striking distance, Hogg decided to evacuate the boys and the school over the mountains to Shandan in the extreme north west, on the border of Mongolia.

It was a 700-mile trek in winter, some of it on foot, in freezing temperatures through mountains reputed to harbour evil spirits as well as bandits. He lost only one boy, who died.

When his battered convoy reached Shandan, out of danger, they set about rebuilding the school in a derelict temple. It was an epic achievement.

Then, just as the school got back on its feet, George Hogg stubbed his toe during a basketball game. The wound became infected with tetanus, and he died after agonising days of lockjaw, while the vaccine he needed was being brought from a distant town too late to save him.

He was buried by his sorrowing pupils. He was only 30.

His achievements were vilified during the Cultural Revolution but later honoured by Deng Xiaoping, who called him 'a great international fighter'.

His rebuilt school, his bust and his tomb in Shandan are witness to a tough life, lived in terrible times, with exuberance and optimism.

After his death, the school's newspaper carried a tribute written by the boys: 'He is still part of us all.' There has seldom been a better example of Anglo-Chinese understanding.

James MacManus, a seasoned foreign correspondent who discovered the story, has presented it with admirable clarity, illuminating both the contortions of the war in China and the strength of character of this young Englishman who persuaded everyone he met to behave as honourably as he did.

Review by Peter Lewis

HarperCollins.co.uk

The life and legend of George Hogg

The dramatic true-life story of George Hogg, a young Oxford graduate who is caught up in the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Chinese Civil war, and who leads a group of Chinese children hundreds of miles across 15,000-foot mountains to safety – only to die tragically in early 1945.

The author, James MacManus, was working as a reporter in Shanghai in 1980s when he heard talk of a statue being up in the remote town of Shandon on the Mongolian border in memory of an Englishman called George Hogg. This book is the result of his investigations - and the basis for a major feature film called 'The Children of Huang Shi', directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Jonathan Rhys Myers, to be released in spring 2008. One westerner who lived in China throughout the Cultural Revolution described Hogg as "an outstanding young Englishman who fell in love with foreign people and devoted his life to their betterment." What he did made him deeply and widely loved."MacManus has been back to China to interview the surviving old boys of Hogg's school. Hogg's reputation is kept alive by their loyalty to this day." The dramatic trajectory of Hogg's life took him within a few months from a privileged existence at Oxford to life on the run from Japanese secret police in China.

LinkChinese.net

Giles Whilttell reviews the George Hogg biography by James MacManus on the Times. The biography, Ocean Devil, has recently been adapted into a film, Children of Huang Shi, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh.

And the great rolling convulsion that seized China for 23 years, devouring tens of millions of innocents but leaving Mao triumphant, was another. This was a maelstrom of overlapping wars, famines, floods and generalised destruction fuelled by the greed of warlords, Japanese fascism, paranoid Chinese nationalism and overcooked Marxian ideology.

Through the chaos ran the fragile threads of countless individual stories, but few can have been more astonishing or, in the end, uplifting, than that of George Aylwin Hogg.

James MacManus, then a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, first heard about Hogg in an eavesdropped conversation at the British Embassy Club in Beijing in 1984. The account that he has pieced together since is of an Englishman abroad, but hardly of the cliché those words suggest.

Hogg had the prodigious stamina so often traced to the rainswept playing fields of English public schools, and he stood out in China for other obvious reasons, including his height, his hair, his "high nose" and the colour of his skin. But more than any of his compatriots who immersed themselves in war-torn China, he stands out for something else entirely: his goodness.

WomenOfChina.cn

The book is the dramatic true-life story of George Hogg, a young Oxford graduate who got caught up in the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and the Chinese Civil war, and who lead a group of Chinese children hundreds of miles across 15,000-foot mountains to safety — only to die tragically in early 1945.

The author, James MacManus, worked as a reporter in Shanghai in the 1980s when he heard talk of a statue, in the remote town of Shandan, on the Mongolian border, in the memory of Englishman George Hogg. The book is the result of his investigations — and the basis for the film "The Children of Huang Shi." The movie, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Jonathan Rhys Myers, has been released in spring 2008.

Rewi Alley, a writer from New Zealand who lived in China, has described Hogg as "an outstanding young Englishman who fell in love with foreign people and devoted his life to their betterment. What he did made him deeply and widely loved." MacManus has been back to China to interview the surviving old boys of Hogg's school. Hogg's reputation is kept alive by their loyalty. The dramatic trajectory of Hogg's life took him within a few months from a privileged existence at Oxford to life on the run from Japanese secret police in China.

"George Hogg was such a warmhearted and generous spirit that he gave the children courage and hope to achieve the impossible."

Roger Spottiswoode