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.

[1] Some older sources claim that the family was of Syrian Jewish extraction,[2] but according to modern biographers, that was a misconception, although quite common even during George Hatem's life.

[1] 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.

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.

[8] By 1936, disgusted by the corruption of Shanghai and alarmed by the world drift towards fascism, he decided that he would either go to Spain to support the Republican government or join the communist movement in Northeast China.

He closed his practice and, with the help of the earlier established CCP contacts, was smuggled across Kuomintang lines to provide medical service to Mao Zedong's troops.

[citation needed] As the war with Japan started in earnest in 1937, Ma Haide sent requests to Soong Ching-ling, Agnes Smedley, and other notables to organize recruitment of foreign medical personnel for the communists' troops fighting the Japanese armies in northern China.

[citation needed] 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.