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A fresh eyewitness account of the Japanese invasion of mid-China in
1937-1938, these letters by an American missionary in Hangzhou
provide a vividly detailed, first-hand account of the spread of war
from Shanghai across the Yangzi valley and the subsequent ordeals
of military occupation seen against the better-known backdrop of
the Nanjing Massacre - one man's embedded experience in one major
Chinese city of one chaotic year of war. Already 25 years in
Republican China and fluent in the language when the Japanese
arrived, the author was well-placed as both an observer of, and
participant in harrowing events - the provost of the Hangzhou
Christian College and responsible for its campus, president of the
local Red Cross which organized refugee camps and shelter for those
displaced by the looting and raping that ensued, and chairman of an
International Committee which sought to mediate between Japanese
and Chinese forces in an effort to limit destruction and then to
negotiate with the occupation regime on a day-to-day basis. The
letters - written twice weekly - describe pitched battles and
aerial bombing, the fearful conditions of civilian refugees, the
exigencies of the missionary enterprise and the experiences of
foreign neutrals in wartime China, as well as the practical
dilemmas of collaboration that arose under occupation - moving
about, protecting refugees, procuring food, tending a dairy herd,
and ministering to embattled congregations. The letters are fully
annotated to give readers a fuller perspective on places, people,
and events that surround the eyewitness accounts. A substantially
researched introductory essay provides necessary historical
background and situates the author in a longer missionary career
that began in 1911 and ended with wartime internment in 1943.
A fresh eyewitness account of the Japanese invasion of mid-China in
1937-1938, these letters by an American missionary in Hangzhou
provide a vividly detailed, first-hand account of the spread of war
from Shanghai across the Yangzi valley and the subsequent ordeals
of military occupation seen against the better-known backdrop of
the Nanjing Massacre – one man’s embedded experience in one
major Chinese city of one chaotic year of war. Already 25 years in
Republican China and fluent in the language when the Japanese
arrived, the author was well-placed as both an observer of, and
participant in harrowing events – the provost of the Hangzhou
Christian College and responsible for its campus, president of the
local Red Cross which organized refugee camps and shelter for those
displaced by the looting and raping that ensued, and chairman of an
International Committee which sought to mediate between Japanese
and Chinese forces in an effort to limit destruction and then to
negotiate with the occupation regime on a day-to-day basis. The
letters – written twice weekly – describe pitched battles and
aerial bombing, the fearful conditions of civilian refugees, the
exigencies of the missionary enterprise and the experiences of
foreign neutrals in wartime China, as well as the practical
dilemmas of collaboration that arose under occupation – moving
about, protecting refugees, procuring food, tending a dairy herd,
and ministering to embattled congregations. The letters are fully
annotated to give readers a fuller perspective on places, people,
and events that surround the eyewitness accounts. A substantially
researched introductory essay provides necessary historical
background and situates the author in a longer missionary career
that began in 1911 and ended with wartime internment in 1943.
In Developing Mission, Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural
history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses
through time and space-tracing the lives and afterlives of images,
cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second
Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic
of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries
entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions
principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization
of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images
recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular
understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable
photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary
experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China
and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times
of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices
in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as
intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically
transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so,
Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of
transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across
twentieth-century China and the United States.
In Developing Mission, Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural
history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses
through time and space-tracing the lives and afterlives of images,
cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second
Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic
of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries
entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions
principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization
of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images
recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular
understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable
photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary
experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China
and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times
of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices
in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as
intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically
transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so,
Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of
transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across
twentieth-century China and the United States.
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