It was 1927 when Rewi Alley first set foot in China, arriving in Shanghai. The 30-year-old New Zealander could never have foreseen that he would spend the following six decades witnessing, taking part in and dedicating himself to China's fight for national independence and liberation.

Alley later captured the essence of this extraordinary journey in a heartfelt verse: "China gave me an aim to life, a cause to fight for, each year more richly ..."

More than a poetic summary, these lines are the definitive testament of an internationalist who saw China's struggle and chose China's fate as his own.

A choice to stand with the CPC

The China that Alley encountered in 1927 was a country in ruins – humiliated, impoverished and torn apart by foreign aggression and civil conflict, leaving ordinary people suffering.

In letters home, he wrote of the working class, including men, women and even children, toiling in conditions worse than the horses he had worked with on New Zealand farms. He even discovered that in the alleyways behind some factories, sacks piled up in corners contained the bodies of child laborers.

Then came the flood of 1932. The League of Nations dispatched Alley to Wuhan to assist with disaster relief efforts. It was there that he witnessed a contrast that would alter the course of his life.

Nationalist government officials treated the disaster as an opportunity for profit, pocketing relief funds and leaving the afflicted to fend for themselves. "Alley was outraged," Li Jianping, a former secretary to Alley, told CGTN.  "He saw the darkness of old China."

"But he also saw hope and potential in the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese people," Li said.

In the CPC-led Honghu Soviet Area, officials and soldiers worked alongside the people, organizing relief efforts with a discipline and selflessness that touched Alley deeply.

From then on, Alley began studying Marxist works including Das Kapital and joined an international Marxist study group in 1934, establishing close ties with progressives including CPC members.

In the 1930s Shanghai, to be known as a communist sympathizer was to invite surveillance, imprisonment or worse. But Alley was undeterred.

At great personal risk, he turned his residence into a secret radio station for the CPC underground, sheltered endangered communists such as Liu Ding, and purchased medical supplies and ammunition for the Red Army during its counter-encirclement campaigns against the Nationalists.

By carrying out countless such revolutionary tasks, Alley had made his choice to side with the CPC.

"He chose to stand alongside the Chinese people and, under the leadership of the CPC, turn what seemed impossible into possible," Li said.

A cause to fight for

When Japan started the full-scale invasion of China after the Lugou Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, China's industrial system had collapsed and countless people had been displaced.

To support the Chinese war against Japanese aggression, Alley, together with his friends and US journalists Edgar Snow and his wife, launched the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives Association, known as "Gung Ho" movement, in 1938.

The idea was to organize unemployed workers and poor farmers into self-managed production cooperatives that would manufacture goods for the war effort while providing livelihoods for the displaced.

Over the years to come, more than 3,000 cooperatives were established across China, employing over 300,000 people and supplying substantial personnel and materials to aid the anti-Japanese battlefronts.

To mobilize support for the movement, Alley trekked more than 30,000 kilometers – the equivalent of ten trips from one end of New Zealand to the other – across unoccupied territories in China.

Then to address the shortage of skilled workers, Alley shifted his focus to nurturing grassroots talents for China's future. In 1942, he founded the Bailie School in Shuangshipu, northwest China's Shaanxi, which was relocated to remote Shandan County in Gansu in 1944 to evade the war.

The Bailie School, which operated on a half-day classroom, half-day workshop schedule, was unlike any educational institution in China at the time. Alley's philosophy was "hand and brain, create and analyze," a slogan that embodied his belief that education must be practical and that students must learn not just to think but to do.

He taught classes, cut students' hair, worked alongside them in the workshops. Photographs from the period show a man who had looked very much like an old Chinese farmer. He later said the happiest period of his life was the time he spent in Shandan with the rural youth.

"In our hearts, Rewi Alley was our father," a former Bailie student once recalled.

The Bailie School later evolved into Lanzhou City University, leaving an enduring legacy in China's vocational education development.

From Shanghai to Shandan, the life choices made by Alley still seem remarkably cool by today's standards, said Shi Hong, director of the Rewi Alley Research Center at Lanzhou City University. "He treated China's affairs as if they were his own."

This profound sense of solidarity with the Chinese people permeates Alley's own reflections, laid bare in his 1987 autobiography, where he recounts nearly six decades spent witnessing the nation's arduous fight for liberation.

"For the past 59 years I have watched the efforts of the Chinese people to throw off their shackles, stand up and order their own destiny, ever fighting their way through," Alley recalled. "It was my privilege to have close contact with the working folk, to live with them and join in their struggle."

A bridge builder

With the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Alley's mission evolved to bridging the vast divide between the new China and the rest of the world.

"To forge people's friendship between this quarter of mankind and the other three quarters is indeed a challenging cause," Alley wrote in his autobiography. "I feel privileged to be one of the earliest bridge-builders of friendship between New Zealand – my homeland and China – the land I have made my working home."

In 1952, while still working in Shandan, he helped establish the New Zealand-China Friendship Society, creating a powerful channel for people-to-people diplomacy long before Wellington and Beijing officially established diplomatic ties. He consistently urged his countrymen and women to visit China and witness the truth for themselves.

He authored over 70 books and countless essays, documenting the progress of China's socialist construction with objective observations. He also translated dozens of volumes of classical and contemporary Chinese poetry into English, including works by Li Bai, Bai Juyi and his personal favorite, Du Fu, whom he admired for his deep empathy for the common people.

When Alley passed away in Beijing on December 27, 1987, a monumental chapter of an internationalist drew to a close. In accordance with his final wishes, his ashes were scattered over the soil of Shandan, the place he proudly called his second home.

A year before his death, he had penned a letter to his close friend named Shirly, containing a powerful summary of his life's conviction: "China's modernization is for all Chinese people. Today's China is one of the strongest forces for world peace."

"Standing with China is the right choice," Alley wrote.