Ma Haide

Ma Haide (simplified Chinese: 马海德; traditional Chinese: 馬海德; pinyin: Mǎ Hǎidé; September 26, 1910 – October 3, 1988), born Shafick George Hatem (Arabic: جورج شفيق حاتم), was an American-born Chinese doctor who practiced medicine in China.

Shafick George Hatem was born into a Lebanese-American family in upstate 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, to take a job at a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1909, on a trip to Lebanon, Nahoum married Thamam Joseph, a woman two years younger from the village of Bahannes.

George Hatem's parents were of Maronite background. Some older sources claim that the family was of Syrian Jewish extraction, but according to modern biographers, that was a misconception, although quite common even during George Hatem's life.

Soon after being married, the Hatem family moved to Buffalo, New York, where Nahoum took a job at a steel mill. It was in Buffalo where their first child, George, was born on September 26, 1910.

In 1923 Hatem's father sent him to live in Greenville, North Carolina, and the rest of the family joined him a few years later and opened a dry goods store. He graduated as valedictorian of the 1927 class of Greenville High School Hatem focused on pre-med classes at the University of North Carolina, where he was a member of The Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. He then studied medicine at the American University in Beirut and the University of Geneva.

While in Geneva, "Shag", as he was then nicknamed, became acquainted with students from East Asia, and learned much about China. With financial help from the parents of one of his friends, he and several others set off to Shanghai to establish a medical practice to concentrate on venereal diseases, as well as basic health care for the needy.^{[citation needed]}

On August 3, 1933, Hatem with colleagues, Lazar Katz and Robert Levinson, boarded a ship in Trieste that took him to several ports in Asia, including Singapore and Hong Kong. On September 5, the three young American doctors landed in Shanghai.

Hatem set up the practice in Shanghai, and changed his name to Ma Hai-te (Ma Haide). As he came to know Shanghai and its inequalities, he also came to know three people who shaped the ideas he used to interpret what he saw: the well known journalist, Agnes Smedley, the New Zealand activist Rewi Alley, and the presiding figure among left-wing sympathizers, Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Rewi Alley was to be his friend and mentor for the next five decades, Mme. Soong was to provide key introductions, and Smedley, who heard of Hatem by reading one of his pamphlets on public health, introduced him to Liu Ding. Liu, a liaison for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was described as a "young Red engineer" who awakened Hatem's heart.