JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I found this very unusual map of China in a pamphlet entitled Higher Education's Century of Progress in China, published for the Associated Boards for Christian Colleges in China in New York City in 1938. This is well into a solid decade of internal political turmoil in China, coupled with years of dealing with an invasive Japan, and all rolled up in 1938 with the first few years of an all-out Sino-Japanese War (the second one, the first occurring at the end of the last century). This war wasn't necessarily a war between two opposing armies--it was also a war between the Japanese army and the people of China. This was highly demonstrated from December 1937 to January 1938 with the massacre and mass rapes committed against unarmed combatants in the Republic of China's capital city, Nanjing/Nanking prior to its occupation--this is known as the Rape of Nanking, and is so known for very secure reasons. There was also a devastating flood of the Yellow River.
In a series of decades of difficult years, 1938 was particularly difficult year for China.
That said, this pamphlet discusses the "century of progress" in China by Christian missionaries, and the "birth and development of Christian education there". The situation in China in 1938 for this pamphlet was that there were 300 million illiterate Chinese--"it is a situation that challenges the Christian world!" so it reads. Perhaps what this meant was that they could not read the Bible until they were taught how to read it.
And that was the extent of the recognition of what was going on in China. To capitulate the interests of history those who generated this work included a map of China that included almost no detail except for Christian colleges.
It must have felt very comfortable for the Associated Boards for Christian Colleges in China to have published this pamphlet in 1938, having the China situation well in hand, snug in the comfort of a real or imagined pew, the issue and morality of its optics unchallenged by reality.
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