Flight From China

Book Description:

FLIGHT FRBM BY EDNA LEE BOOKER In Collaboration With JOHN S. POTTER DECOMTIDNS BY PEGGY BACDN THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YDBE 1945 rights reserved no part of ttLis boolc na. y be rej rocitaceci In a iy form - wittioirt permission in - wrl-tin. gr from tlie piiblislier, e ccept by a. re-p-iewer vlao - wxslies to qtiote brief pstssag-es In coniectloia - witla. a. revie-w for-inclusion xn noagazine or nevsp-spapear. IN TBLE TTNrTI STATES OJF To two women zvho remain steadfast in ff this time of ours my mother Jessie Livingston Booker, and my cousin, ce Aunt Carrie Chapman Catt Tliis time of oxxrs Is like SL strange, confused dream 1 Li Foreword ONE CENTURY spans the period from the signing of the trade treaties between China and the Western World to the momentous events of the present. While those hundred years form but a day in Chinas millenniums, they have written modern history for an ancient nation in a drama whose rising tempo has rushed it headlong into the world tragedy which is today. That one century, that era born of Western Imperialism and force, of Chinese prejudice and isolationism is now ended forever. Ended in a crash of war, even as it began. But in what contrast The Western nations, which one hundred years ago shelled the gates of Shina in an effort to open her coastal and river port cities to foreign trade and culture, today send their men to fight and die with the Chinese allies in the cause of democracy. But those international settlements, which America and England have now returned to China, and those institutions of the modern age built up during the century by Chinese and Westerners together, are for the moment held by Japan. All the things which we together have striven for and accomplished during the past hundred years indus tries, wealth, cultural institutions are now gone. The flight of Chinas millions before the Japanese invader, those great waves of humanity fleeing pitifully on toward the refuge which Chinas free West offered, is heroic drama. It is the greatest flight of a people in recorded history. And in their flight they bore with them what they could books from a college library machine parts from a factory a crucifix from a church altar equipment for an arsenal treasured belongings introduced from the West. And those Westerners who had contributed so much to the rebirth of China, who had worked toward real understanding between the East and the West they, too, were caught up in the Flight. ix x Foreword They, like the Chinese, saved what little they might from the upheaval and left the rest. The thousands of Americans, Britons, Dutch, who could not or would not flee, remained to face they knew not what fate at the hands of the Japanese remained in most cases on advice from the home office or the mission board in London, New York, or Amsterdam. Even as a sea captain smells a typhoon, the Westerners long resident in the East had sensed trouble. Even before Japans seizure of Man churia in 1931, they had lifted their warnings to governments which would not hear. Japans aims are clear the enslavement of China, and the eradica tion from the Far East of every vestige of Anglo-American interest in time, the end of all Western influence. But that forced flight of Chinese and Occidentals, who had to gether built up the past only to lose it for a while, shall be made good in a deeper relationship between the Westerner and the Chinese a relationship treasured by both alike, and to be preserved by the Peace. There will be many versions of the Flight told by us who shared in it, and by historians who will sum it up as one phase of the Pacific struggle. To me the larger picture narrows into the personal. My husband and I were caught in that cataclysm and our daughter and friends, Chinese and Western. Flight from China narrates the experiences of one American family whose home was in Shanghai for some twenty years...