"DON'T EXPECT ME TO KNOW THINGS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 239, 21 January 1944, Page 10

"DON'T EXPECT ME TO KNOW THINGS"

MALL, very feminine, and mouse-quiet, Miss Kathleen Hall is easily overlooked in a crowd. But talk to her personally, and you get a different impression. Her permanently sun-tanned face lights up and her replies come with a concrete conciseness of one accustomed to action and decision. She has been in China as a missionary for 20 years, the last two of which she has spent working with the Chinese Red Cross. And what experience she has had! "Don’t expect me to know things," she modestly warned a member of the New Zealand Listener staff who met her casually on his holiday. "Remember I am only a nurse, and when I trained in New Zealand 25 years ago, nurses were not supposed to need a very high standard of general education." "But at least in your own work you noticed differences between China and here." "Yes, even then Union Medical College in Peiping (Peking), ‘was better equipped than any hospital in New Zealand is to-day. But that was because the Rockefeller Foundation had just endowed what was originally a missionary college and hospital. You will realise that all medical work in China has been started by missionaries, and even now is greatly helped by them. But of course for the last 20 years there have been numbers of very able and gifted Chinese nurses and doctors with whom we worked; and these numbers are increasing all the time. As the years passed, and I got out into the country, I saw dirt and disease and ignorance and malnutrition and poverty such as I had never believed possible-scores of millions in our single province alone living as Europe did in the Middle Ages." "And was nothing being done for them?" "Gradually — very gradually. There were only us to help in those days, and we were very few and very poor, Personally, working under a Chinese doctor, I had a hand in pioneering several country hospitals. The two of us would start by hiring one room in a village house and then as nurses came for training, we could expand. When the hospital was well staffed with our own graduate trainees, and doctors could be got, we could go on somewhere else equally needy and untouched. We brought the nurses up to the Government’s. ‘Registered Nurses of China’ standard, and it is a high one." "Then the Government gave help?" Home Industries for Security "Well, no, only that sort of help. Because through most of these years there was no Central Government. Rival armies swung to and fro through our area-starving peasants without prospects, who had nothing left but to join some bandit group. We fought disease and ignorance in our small corner year after year, and often felt utterly hopeless and wasting our time in the

general anarchy. You see, simply healing patients was not nearly enough. To tackle disease we had to tackle everything else as well-living conditions, house hygiene, elementary education, and village industries under the leadership cf James Yen. Young Chinese trainees have made far-reaching and most helpful experiments in mass education work. By encouraging home industries we helped the peasants in their struggle with the debt system. And I

was desperately feeling the urge for us Christians not only to preach the Gospel but to live it. When Chiang Kai-Shek came up from Canton and unified Central China, we had less banditry, and a feeling of some progress. And then later the "New Life Movement" that he and Madame started cleaned up the local government amazingly, and gave our area for a while a governor who stamped out opium and heroin instead of himself profiting by them. And then the Communists, who marched four thousand miles round the edge of Chiang’s territories when he drove them out of Kiangsi, came and occupied our area.’ "Their coming must have greatly restricted your activities." "To our very great relief." "Relief?" "Indeed. Try and imagine how it felt for a tiny group of us who had been struggling against such odds of dirt, vice, ignorance, and debt, as well as disease, to see whole villages going to school, sanitation introduced, local industries built up and all unused land brought into cultivation as State property for the poorest. We could at last drop everything else and concentrate on our proper medical work." "But wasn’t there a-what shall we call it?-ideological clash, Communists with their own hot gospel to preach would hardly let you go on instilling The Opium of the People." "In our practical work there was no clash. Once they have seen what Christian missionaries are really doing, most of the Communist generals have actually got in behind us. As a matter of fact, I had had several helpful discussions both on practical matters and our (continued on next page)

But She Knew Many

(continued from previous page) underlying philosophies with one officer before I realised that he was the famous Commander-in-Chief, General Nieh himself, .and not a mere secretary." "Then why did you leave the Communist area? It has been reported that you went to and fro into Japaneseoccupied territory." "Well, some missionaries have done that, because, in a sense, the Chinese need there is greatest. Though strictly speaking, the Japanese have not occupied any »areas in China, only penetrated. them-taken their main town and railways, that is. On both sides of the line Chinese Government-either Kuo Ming Tang, or Communist, or "Mixed"-still maintains radio communication,: at least with Chungking. We frequently slipped across these lines at night .between the sentries in the course of our ordinary work. But I presently made up my mind, after many struggles with conscience, to get official Japanese permission to go to Pekin. You see, we were getting desperate for medical supplies. Not only were there the ordinary. sick, but wounded, cotton-clad guerrillas were constantly being brought in who had lost hands or feet from exposure. (The Japanese soldiers who captured them went protected in New Zealand wool!). The authorities were most polite to neutral missionaries in those days, having quite groundless hopes of winning them to support the New Order, and I got what we wanted. Indeed, I presently had quite an "underground railway" smuggling out medical supplies into the free areas, and gradually found I was turning into a sort of agency for getting hold of personnel, too-medical people, teachers, agricultural experts, engineers. But it was terribly dangerous, since there are spies everywhere, and when one day I had a hint not to return to a certain place, I got the Japanese to give me my passport to Hong Kong before they decided on anything worse." "And then you came home here?" "Not yet. In Hong Kong, Madame Sun Yat Sen (the widow of modern China’s real founder and eldest of the three Soong sisters, you know), and Bishop Hall, who together were the main forces in the China Defence League, were most interested in my first-hand account of the Communist ‘island’ in the north, and arranged to send me back through free territory to work under the Chinese Red Cross. Dr. Robert Lim, a Singapore-born Chinese, had been hard at work organising this. There were only about 5,000 doctors fully qualified in our sense in all China, but he had arranged quick courses in surgery and sanitation for old-style herbalists, male nurses, and similar people. British sympathisers had given a small fleet of. coal-burning lorries, and we took these up to Chungking through Indo-China. To avoid bombing we could travel some parts of the way only by night. But in two months and a bit we did arrive in what was until recently China’s Wild West, but which is now throbbing with the new life that the millions of refugees have brought with them. At Sian I encountered the co-operatives again."

"Are the co-operatives as important as we are told?" "Much more so. You see, the Jain ese do not hope to hold down China militarily. They want to flood it with their goods and currency so that the people become in practice dependent on Japan. When an area has been scorched -and the Japanese armies every harvest move into production basins, reap what crops they can and burn the restthe poor peasants struggling back have to live somehow. Starting new industries on the spot is the only way to keep them from falling irtto the Japanese net. And away inland, _ too, co-operatives make the villages independent and co-operative-minded and less poverty-driven." "Is a Japanese invasion as bad as we are told it is?" Arguments y. Bullets "Quite as bad. But the Japanese soldiers themselves you can soon sort out by their faces. Many of them I have found really humane and much troubled. Chinese that I know have contacted fellow Christians among the invaders. And some Japanese radicals are helping Chinese publicity-village plays and that sort of thing. The Chinese attitude is amazing. Their soldiers are frequently taught a little Japanese in order to argue with the enemy man to man in close fighting, and in most villages you see painted up such slogans as "Treat Enemy Prisoners Kindly.’ " E "That makes it harder to understand why so reasonable a people as the Chinese has not yet settled its Central Government-Communist quarrel." "Well, it has-partially, at any rate, and pro tem. The main issue between the two parties, indeed, seems to be ‘how fast Dr. Sun’s Three People’s Principles are to be @pplied. Chiang KaiShek is everywhere respected as capable, courageous, and personally sincere. But his party is not prepared to make the drastic changes-particularly in land tenure-that the Communists say are immediately essential." "What, then, are the present prospects in general?" "The people in China are very, very weary. Unless we can get them relief soon, they may be too exhausted to play_their proper part in making the peace. New Zealand has done a lot for China through Rewi Alley and James Bertram and the scores of missionaries she has sent. But China will need more from us-starting right now with a better informed interest in her problems."