The New China and the American Connection
Article Summary and Author Biography
Foreigners approaching a North China village in the early 1930s met the barking of ill-fed dogs and the stares of children covered with flies. Villagers had skin and scalp sores due to poor nutrition. Their inbred civility was that of peasants who were conscious of the guest-host relationship but ignorant of the outer world. Typically their strips of dusty farmland had few trees and little water, which only came out of wells laboriously, bucket by bucket. The long years of Japanese invasion and Nationalist-Communist civil war down to 1949 brought no improvement in this essentially medieval situation.
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