The NYRB China Archive
05.23.02There Were Worse Places
from New York Review of Books
In the mid-1980s I made occasional trips to Harbin in Manchuria to report on the Orthodox White Russians who lived there, the remnant of a community that had fled from the new Soviet Union after the revolution. There were once so many of them that...
The NYRB China Archive
05.30.85Mission Impossible
from New York Review of Books
John Hersey’s The Call is an epitaph for 120 years of Protestant missions in China. From 1830 to 1950, the China missions had a steadily growing place in American public sentiment. At the turn of the century, John R. Mott of the Student Volunteer...
The NYRB China Archive
05.17.73
Rules of the Game
from New York Review of Books
On September 18, 1931, a very small bomb caused a very minor explosion on the South Manchurian Railway just north of Mukden, a railway controlled by the Japanese and crucial to their economic domination of Manchuria. The explosion was denounced as...
The NYRB China Archive
07.22.71
Peanuts and the Good Soldier
from New York Review of Books
In 1927, the province of Shantung was under the control of the warlord Chang Tsung-chang, a ferocious ex-coolie with a taste for white mercenaries and white women. His forces included a Russian brigade with four armored trains; he himself went to...