“GROSSLY EXAGGERATED”

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 51, 24 November 1926, Page 10

“GROSSLY EXAGGERATED”

CHINESE ATTACK ON MISSIONARIES

It is simply amazing to realise the extent to which certain turbulent happenings in China can be garbled and grossly exaggerated, it will be remembered that in September last most alarming reports were telegraphed about a Chinese uprising against the foreign missionaries in Northern China giving detailed accounts of the wholesale butchery of some of them and their adherents, and also of the many who had been held for ransom bv undisciplined troops. From letters received recently from China it would seem that these' reports had little basis in fact. Miss McQuire, one of the lady missionaries, lias written to a lady friend in Auckland, relating that at the time of the trouble they were on furlough atone of the free ports on the coast, but on returning to their station at Nanehang, they found everything intact, mid their servants and the Christianised Chinese of the district, of which there were a considerable number, unharmed.

Captain Blackburue, who furnished the above reassuring information, stat ed that none of the people in New Zealand who had been associated with missionary work in China believed the messages when thev arrived, for the simple reason that General Feng, who then dominated that district, was well known to them as a Christian gentleman, as were most of his officers, and bis army of' something like 150,000 men was perhaps as well disciplined as anv tn the world. It may have suited some people to represent that Feng and his army had turned “red,” but the missionaries knew that such could never be the case, as they knew the man and what he stood for over a number of trying years.