Photographs and pictorial publications, relating to Chinese Communist military activities in north China during the Sino-Japanese War, and holograph biographical sketch of Sha fei and biographical data about him.

Sha Fei (1912-50) was a Chinese journalist and photographer. Born in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, Sha joined the Nationalist Revolutionary Army under Chiang Kai-shek in 1925, working as a military radio operator in Southwest China. He then left the Kuomintang Army to become a professional photographer in the 1930s. In October 1937, Sha Fei joined the Chinese Communist Red Army and became a journalist, editor, and photographer in the communist-governed Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region in North China. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Sha Fei became the chief editor of a communist-run pictorial magazine in the region, taking hundreds of photographs of Chinese communist activities in wartime North China. After the war, while continuing his photographic and editorial career in North China, Sha Fei became increasingly mentally unstable. In March 1950, he shot his Japanese doctor to death and was convicted of murder. He was executed later that year, at the age of thirty-eight. In the 1980s, Sha Fei was pardoned by the Chinese Communist Party.

1 manuscript box (0.4 linear feet)

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Collection is open for research.