Issue 2 (Spring 1997)

Sinofile - Alan Searl gives a regular round-up of news from China

Sea of bridges - Asa Briggs SACU's president explains the society's role

Promises and portents - Sir David-Akers Jones offers his hopes for a Hong kong on the verge of change

Strange bedfellows - Richard Swede examines Hong Kong's forthcoming legal system

Offers of sanctuary - Fuchsia Dunlop explores the issues in adopting Chinese children

Deng's legacy - Russell Smythe summarises Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms

Travel update - Neil Taylor discusses the latest options for flying to China

China's roads revisited - Anthony Reynolds returns to China to relive his wartime experiences

What future for higher education in Hong Kong? - Dr Isidore Cannon examines the mounting concern for University education

Obituary : Frida Knight - Peace campaigner, socialist, scholar and journalist

Obituary : Jack Perry - Businessman, trade pioneer, and founder member of SACU

Obituary : Deng Xiaoping - David Goodman probes the life of China's late patriarch

Books - The Cambridge Illustrated History of China

Friend's Ambulance Unit

The Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) was originally set up in World War I to provide a channel of service for Conscientious Objectors (C.O.), mainly Quakers. It was resurrected in 1939 for the same purpose; to provide opportunities for COs to take part in the relief of suffering brought on by war. One of these opportunities was the China Convoy.

The only available land route into 'Free China', the part controlled by the Guomindang under Chiang Kaishek, was via Burma and the new Burma Road over the mountains from the railhead at Lashio in north Burma to Kunming. The original plan for the China Convoy was to carry out two tasks; to transport medical and relief supplies into 'Free China' via Rangoon and the Burma Road and to provide medical teams to work with the Chinese Red Cross in military hospitals.

During the summer and autumn of 1941, members of the original team of 40 arrived in Rangoon and set about assembling their trucks, mobile operating theatre and mobile workshop, all of which had come from The States. Then came December 8th 1941 and by early 1942 the Unit was desperately engaged in getting trucks and supplies off the Rangoon docks and into China. By the end of 1942 a transport system was in operation; having no supplies of petrol some trucks were converted to run on charcoal-fuelled producer gas, others had diesel engines running on rapeseed oil installed and some were run on alcohol and 'petrol' distilled from tung oil. Depots were established at Qujing, the end of the old railway line from Kunming. Guiyang, Luzhoul Chengdu, Chongqing and Guiyang. Medical supplies came over 'The Hump' from India to Kunming and were delivered by the FAU to the Wei Sheng Bu (Ministry of Health). The Chinese Red Cross and also the various mission hospitals. Meanwhile the medical teams worked both in the SE and the Salween fronts. All this developed and continued until 1946 when the focus of the work shifted to rural rehabilitation in Honan where it finally ended in 1950. By that time the China Convoy had become international with members from the USA, Canada, New Zealand as well as China and Britain, some 170 in all over the nine years.

In 1995 a proposal began circulating among ex-China Convoy members that they should re-visit the roads they used to drive over and the towns they had lived in to observe the changes in places which had been so familiar 50 and more years ago. I was responsible for organising the UK end of the project. So on May 6th 1996 and courtesy of Regent Travel and the China International Travel Service (CITS) a party of 21 flew from Heathrow to Kunming. Nine were Britain based and 11 came from the States including spouses; all except one well over 70. We travelled by CITS bus some 1800 miles; Kunming, Qujing, north via Bijie to Luzhou, Chengdu, Santai, Chongqing, Tsunyi, Guiyang, and back Huang Guo Shu to Qujing and Kunming. We spent two days in Chengdu including visits to old friends, a day in Chongqing and a day in Guiyang. There were largely fruitless searches to places where we had lived and worked, all was swallowed up in new buildings. But the mountains and the roads remained and we identified places where we had fallen off the road or broken down.

What were our expectations, what did we go to see, what were our personal agendas in coming? So what were the physical changes, from big things to little that I noted? First, perhaps, the great increase in building - what had been dirty little villages on the Luxian road were now towns with gleaming new five storey blocks; what were towns full of narrow streets with secretive doorways to courtyard houses were now cities with multi-storey buildings and the old style walled provincial capitals now metropolises with all the modcons and disadvantages of Western city life style. Then the countryside; we saw a greater variety of crops and new methods of cultivation with inter-cropping and the use of plastic sheet. There was more tree cover on the hills but much terracing on steep slopes spelling possible disaster in times of heavy rain. But no one has found a better way of growing rice in small fields than cultivation with the long-bladed hoe, the wet ploughing with the water buffalo and planting the seedlings by hand.

Of course there were the roads themselves; the good motorways, the bad, very bad and indifferent roads; some were worse than 50 years ago. There was the unsolved mystery of why those in many towns and villages resembled the slough of a pot-holed English cart-track. There were adventures on the road; one day's journey lasted over 20 hours due to a puncture, bad roads and a hold-up while the police demanded a RMB400 'fine' for an imaginary and unspecified offence by our driver. But much to the surprise of our guide, we did not complain. We had come to re-live the experiences of being a truck driver 50 years ago and this was part of it. 1 thought that road behaviour was more ordered than 10 years ago but the horn is still a major component of driving practice. We saw the great increase of cars and motorised transport in private hands, a token of Chinese ingenuity was the sight I had of pigs being taken to market strapped to bamboos and laid athwart the frame of a motor bike instead of being slung under a shoulder pole.

Other things of note were the large scale 'modern' factories in the countryside and the great increase in traditional small-scale mining, smelting and coking furnaces. The people - the old still dressed in traditional blue but the young in colours and western style clothes. But underneath the outward, how changed is the inward? What are the values of those born 30, 40 and 50 years ago? We did not have that sort of contact but one of our number, from his recent experience of teaching in China, told us of disillusionment with the Party and Marx-Lenin-Mao philosophies and practice and a search for new gods; Buddhist, Daoist, Christian and, of course, the enrichment of No 1. The energy of people, the desire to run one's own business and call no man master shows so clearly in the stalls, the small shops and the use of every yard of ground. But long term care for the earth and environment in city and country? That is another matter. The hygiene standards were up - very few flies, single-use chopsticks in sealed wrappers, little spitting and hawking, much road sweeping in cities (but raising clouds of dust), all signs of great improvement.

Paths of history

But what about the roads we've travelled in the past 50 years? Those roads of career, family, beliefs have all changed the eyes of the mind as we looked at those hills, plains and people that we passed. Just as 50 years ago we kept our eyes on the road lest we fall off it but now could look at the land around us and its people, so our interpretation of what we see has changed. But some things do not. Some of us were meeting each other for the first time; others have been in touch for 50 years. Some have tried to keep 'in touch' with China; for others it was a new experience. But all of us, directly or indirectly, had been a part of the China Convoy team and had that shared ethos of service in the basics of transport and medicine. Perhaps the travelling together, both then and now, was more important than the arriving at this place or that.

The way in which there was at once unity, tolerance and understanding among us, in essence the same but greatly enriched, of those past adventures that we shared in the bus. Masefield wrote:-
'We travel the dusty road till the light of the day is dim,
And sunset shows us spires away on the world's rim.'

The spires we saw then; young, inexperienced, intent on doing a task; how have they changed or how has our vision of them changed? Like the roads we travelled and the China we saw, the visions are more complex and varied with more intractable problems and fewer illusions of easy answers.