In War and Famine: Missionaries in China's Honan Province in the 1940s

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Four years before Pearl Harbor, Japan launched a war of Napoleonic scale
against China by seizing its rich coastal cities, plundering its
hinterland, and brutalizing its population with a ferocity unprecedented
in modern warfare. Millions of Chinese were killed outright or later
died from several of the worst famines on record during the early 1940s.
For us, beginning with the Biafran and Bangladeshi famines and civil
wars of the 1970s, the late 20th century was a nearly unbroken chain of
human-made and natural catastrophes that impacted the developing world.
Such disasters now seem almost commonplace, so much so that that
“donor fatigue” impedes relief efforts promoted through highly
publicized media campaigns.

This was not the case in the late 1930s, when Erleen J. Christensen’s
missionary parents embarked on a decade-long odyssey in central
China’s Honan province. Their ordeal during war, natural disaster, and
famine was shared with several hundred Western missionaries determined
to deliver spiritual, medical, and educational assistance to rural
Chinese communities. Although Christensen was too young to witness their
struggles (she was born in 1938), she utilizes family letters, diaries,
and church archives to piece together a narrative of her doctor
father’s efforts to deliver aid and to protect both his family and the
lives of hapless Chinese caught up in war and disaster. His trials,
together with those of dozens of other missionaries, are the chief focus
of her book.

Although In War and Famine covers less-familiar historical territory in
an extremely personal manner, it cannot be considered history as much as
a memoir. Unlike contemporary accounts of the period and region—the
works of Jack Belden, Theodore White, and William Hinton being the
best-known examples—Christensen is unable to take a view wider than
the blinkered observations of foreigner missionaries often more
concerned with expanding their denominations’ “field” in China and
increasing donations than with understanding the world around them.

Christensen’s chapters covering the horrific Honan famine of the
early 1940s are the strongest elements of the book. Here, details of the
devastation and the heroic efforts made by missionaries—the majority
of them women, often stationed alone in remote areas—to stem hunger
and suffering make a strong case for the importance of individual
efforts against long odds.