Donald appears here because of his role in the December 1936 ‘Xi’an Incident’, in which Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang, his military subordinate, and released only after giving up his plan to crush the Communist Party of China (CPC). Zhang Xueliang argued that, rather than waging fratricidal war against the communists, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang régime should concentrate on resisting Japanese encroachment in north-east China, an encroachment which seven months later would erupt into the second Sino–Japanese War. Donald, who was working as an adviser to Soong Mei-ling and Chiang Kai-shek, helped negotiate the agreement which saw the Kuomintang leader released.

The Xi’an Incident is one of the more intriguing ‘might-have-beens’ of twentieth-century history. If, repudiating the deal negotiated by Donald, Chiang Kai-shek had pursued his campaign against the communists, then things could have turned out quite differently. Nowadays, the CPC’s rule of China is seen as inevitable – ‘the verdict of history’, according to the official line – but on several occasions prior to taking power in 1949 the communists were on the verge of extinction. Mao Zedong himself acknowledged just how narrow had been the margin of the CPC’s survival: in later years he would tell Japanese visitors that, were it not for the 1937 Japanese invasion, he would never have come to power. And December 1936 was one of the CPC’s close calls.

So what was Donald, a journalist born in Lithgow, a small coal-mining town in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, doing in the midst of these world-shaping events? Like many other Australians – including his journalist predecessor and mentor G.E. Morrison (‘Morrison of Peking’, 1862–1920) – Donald went north and prospered. Arriving in Hong Kong in 1903 to work for the China Mail newspaper, Donald, like Morrison, moved gradually from journalism to advising foreign businesses and Chinese political figures.

Over four decades, Donald moved around China: from the British colony of Hong Kong to the cosmopolitan entrepôt Shanghai, to the warlords’ cockpit Beijing, and thence to the Nationalists’ successive capitals, Nanjing and Chongqing, always positioning himself closer to the centre of power. Finally, in 1940, he broke with the Kuomintang inner circle and left China. During the Pacific War, Donald was interned by the Japanese in the Philippines, and then went back to die in a China that no longer had any use for him.

This was a pathetic coda to a career studded with episodes that give Donald a real claim to historical notice. In 1905, during the Russo–Japanese War, he located the Russian Baltic fleet in Van Phong Bay in French Indochina (now Vietnam) just prior to its annihilation by the Japanese Navy in the Battle of the Tsushima Straits. In the wake of the 1911 Revolution, which brought down the Qing Dynasty, Donald worked with the ‘Father’ of the new Republic of China, the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, on Sun’s grandiose plans for the expansion of China’s railway system. When, in January 1915, the Japanese took advantage of the Western Powers’ preoccupation with World War I to launch their bid for suzerainty in North China – the so-called ‘Twenty-One Demands’ – Donald (and Morrison) fuelled an international campaign that helped force the Japanese to step down.

In the Warlord Era of the 1920s, Donald worked as a consultant, compiling economic data for the Chinese government and looking for business opportunities. And while China’s warlords jostled among themselves for power, the Japanese continued to expand their presence in China, using as their foothold the strategic north-eastern region of Manchuria, which they already partly occupied. Then, in 1928, Donald became an adviser to Zhang Xueliang, the warlord and future kidnapper of Chiang Kai-shek. Zhang Xueliang, whose base was Manchuria, was addicted to morphine and Donald helped him to obtain effective medical treatment to break the habit. The closeness of their relationship underlay the subsequent resolution of the Xi’an Incident.

In 1931 the Japanese seized direct control of Manchuria, and Zhang Xueliang accepted a senior position in Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army. For his part, Donald in 1934 went to work for Soong Mei-ling – Madame Chiang Kai-shek, as she was known in the West, where she was accorded celebrity status. As a result, when the crisis blew up in Xi’an in 1936, Donald was well placed to mediate a settlement, having the trust of both parties. ‘Trust’ is certainly the word; just prior to their arrival in Xi’an for final negotiations, Soong Mei-ling gave Donald a revolver and told him to shoot her if rebel soldiers laid hands on her.

Collie’s readers have to take a lot on trust, too. This is partly because, as he points out, the documentary sources for Donald’s life are patchy and of ‘varying reliability’. But it’s also because Collie himself fills the gaps in the patchy, unreliable record with a technique he describes as ‘speculative non-fiction’, which includes heavy use of the historical present tense and dialogue that may be quoted from sources or may itself be ‘speculative’ (it’s not made clear). Irritatingly, despite nearly forty pages of reference material at the end of Collie’s book, there are no actual references pointing from the text back to the notes. We don’t know which sections of the text the notes refer to; some notes don’t appear to relate to the text at all. So the relationship between Collie’s narrative and his sources is quite opaque.

The Reporter and the Warlords is not an easy book to read. Collie’s jerky prose is full of inapt colloquialisms and mixed metaphors; often his phrases and sentences don’t make much sense. We are told lots of things we don’t need to know, and not told things we do need to know. Frequently, carelessness shades into error, as when we are informed that the Japanese, building up their forces around Shanghai in November 1937, ‘staged amphibious landings on the northeast coastal arm [coastal arm of what?] 50 kilometers away’. Other authors, like Rana Mitter in his recent book China’s War with Japan (2013), locate these landings ‘at Hangzhou Bay, some 150 kilometers southwest of Shanghai’.

Collie’s narrative raises as many questions about Donald as it answers. One is the extent of his involvement with the foreign intelligence agencies that swarmed all over China in the 1930s: British, Soviet Russian, Japanese, French, German, and American. Collie does record Donald’s long acquaintance with the senior US military intelligence officer James McHugh, depicting it as a cooperative friendship. It may well have been. Donald relished the role of Old China Hand and was always keen to recruit acolytes; and McHugh – twenty-five years his junior – fitted this bill. Nevertheless, in the mid-1930s, at a time when the entire future of China hung in the balance, Donald was arguably the most influential foreigner in Kuomintang circles. He would have been a considerable asset to any of the foreign intelligence services in China, especially the British, who were thick on the ground in Shanghai, and for whom he would have been a natural recruit.

Donald’s story has been told before, including in Peter Thompson’s book Shanghai Fury (2011). While Collie covers Donald’s career in greater depth than does Thompson, The Reporter and the Warlords is so hard to follow that one can’t really say it takes our understanding of the man or his times much further. Collie chose his subject well, but his book would have benefited from more work and a rigorous edit. For the rest, the reader can only hope that somewhere, sometime, material will surface which will shed more light on the really quite weird W.H. Donald. One wonders what the archives in Beijing and Taipei have on him.