Youma Army

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Lore & Background

Ma Haide was born Shafick George Hatem on September 26, 1910, into a Lebanese-American family in Buffalo, New York. His father Nahoum Salaama Hatem moved to the United States from the village of Hammana in the Metn mountains of Lebanon in 1902, and married Thamam Joseph in 1909. The family settled in Buffalo, where George was born. His parents were of Maronite background; some older sources claimed the family was of Syrian Jewish extraction, but modern biographers consider that a misconception. In 1923, Hatem's father sent him to live in Greenville, North Carolina, where he graduated as valedictorian of the 1927 class of Greenville High School. He focused on pre-med classes at the University of North Carolina, then studied medicine at the American University in Beirut and the University of Geneva. While in Geneva, he became acquainted with students from East Asia and learned much about China. With financial help from a friend's parents, he and several others set off to Shanghai to establish a medical practice concentrating on venereal diseases and basic health care for the needy.

In Their Own Story

On August 3, 1933, Hatem and two colleagues, Lazar Katz and Robert Levinson, boarded a ship in Trieste that took them to several ports in Asia, landing in Shanghai on September 5. There, Hatem changed his name to Ma Hai-te (Ma Haide). He came to know three people who shaped his ideas: journalist Agnes Smedley, New Zealand activist Rewi Alley, and Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Smedley introduced him to Liu Ding, a liaison for the Chinese Communist Party described as a 'young Red engineer' who awakened Hatem's heart. By 1936, disgusted by Shanghai's corruption and alarmed by the world drift towards fascism, he closed his practice and, with the help of CCP contacts, was smuggled across Kuomintang lines to provide medical service to Mao Zedong's troops. In the summer of 1936, he traveled to the CCP headquarters at Bao'an (present-day Zhidan), accompanied by American journalist Edgar Snow. At Hatem's request, he was not explicitly mentioned in the first edition of Snow's book Red Star Over China, appearing anonymously as a Western-trained doctor who examined Mao and determined he was not dying of some mysterious disease. As war with Japan started in 1937, Ma sent requests to Soong Ching-ling, Agnes Smedley, and others to organize recruitment of foreign medical personnel. He was among those meeting Norman Bethune when Bethune arrived in Yan'an in late March 1938, and helped Bethune organize medical services. He was present when the Dixie Mission arrived in July 1944, and many accounts of the mission refer to him as 'Doc Ma.'

Reader's Guide

Ma remained a doctor with the CCP until their victory in 1949, afterwards becoming a public health official. He was the first foreigner granted citizenship in the People's Republic of China. He is credited with helping to eliminate leprosy and many venereal diseases in post-war China, for which he received the Lasker Award for public service in 1986. In the 1950s, Ma was secretly granted Chinese citizenship, but he retained his American passport until the 1960s. Despite his reputation as the most loved American in China, he was denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a 'bourgeois lackey.' There is an extensive interview with him in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's documentary The Seven Hundred Million (1964). During his lifetime, he was honored in his father's hometown of Hammana in Lebanon, where the main square of the city is named after him. In 1986, Ma received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award for his contributions to the control and eradication of venereal diseases and leprosy in China. Ma's wife was Chou Sufei (aka Zhou Sufei), an actress. They had a son Chou Youma (aka Zhou Youma) (b. 1943) and a daughter Liang Bi. On October 3, 1988, Ma died in Beijing at the age of 78. He is buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, China.

Did You Know?

• Ma Haide was the first foreigner to become a naturalized citizen of the People's Republic of China.
• He was born Shafick George Hatem on September 26, 1910, in Buffalo, New York, into a Lebanese-American family.
• He graduated as valedictorian of the 1927 class of Greenville High School in North Carolina.
• He was among those who met Norman Bethune when Bethune arrived in Yan'an in late March 1938.
• He received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award in 1986 for his work in controlling venereal diseases and leprosy in China.