China. He went to the battlefront and photographed the Battle of Pingxingguan in September. The following month he formally enlisted in the Eighth Route Army, which established a resistance base in the Jin-Cha-Ji (Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei) border region. In November, he was made head of the editorial department of the base's propaganda bureau. He was also appointed head of the Resistance Daily Press (), the predecessor of the People's Daily, and covered the battles of the Eighth Route Army. He founded the Jin-Cha-Ji Pictorial (), which first appeared on July 7, 1942. He took thousands of photographs of battle scenes, Japanese brutality, common people caught in hard circumstances, high communist leaders, and foreign visitors. More than 200 were published. He also ran classes to train a cohort of photojournalists. In 1938, Canadian doctor Norman Bethune went to Yan'an, the communist headquarters. Sha Fei befriended Bethune and took many photos of him. Bethune bequeathed his camera to Sha Fei when he died in 1939. After contracting tuberculosis, Sha Fei was sent to Shijiazhuang in May 1948 to be treated at the Norman Bethune Hospital. He was also suffering from mental illness after years of highly stressful work in the war zone. On December 15, 1949, he shot to death a Japanese doctor involved in his treatment. He was convicted of murder and executed two months later, at the age of 37. Because he was executed for murder, Sha Fei's story was suppressed in China. In 1986, his family appealed the verdict and a military court reinstated his Party membership. Reputation and legacy Scholar Shana Brown wrote that Sha Fei's "images of soldiers crouching on rooftops, peasant armies marching through plumes of dust, and laughing young enlistees, convey an intensity that was the result of close framing devices that plunge the viewer directly into the action". Brown saw in Sha Fei's work both the "kinetic energy" of Cartier-Bresson's street photography and the "rawness" of Robert Capa's combat work, qualities that enable viewers today to "practically smell gunpowder and feel the grit of the battlefield under our feet". Brown also wrote that "although Sha Fei's images eschew the rigidity of much contemporary Communist imagery—a surprising feat given the preponderance of Soviet influence on Chinese visual art from the 1930s onwards—they are still almost always political in nature. Narrating specific instances of military and government action while foregrounding Communist social ideals, they exude optimism and fortitude.