Behind Red Bars

...Stockwell concludes that "missions are finished" so far as foreign leadership or financial support from abroad is concerned, but he thinks that Chinese Christians will survive and have a unique contribution to make to the national life of China...

...There was no physical violence or persecution, but the group was "re-educated" night and day for a period of months...

...In Stockwell's chapter on "The Fall of the House of Chiang" he shows the complete failure of Chiang Kai-shek after 20 years of fair trial...

...Stockwell admits: "To this day I do not know whether what I did was right or wrong...

...It is to his credit that having experienced the worst side of the evils of the Red regime he, has emerged not as an embittered cynic but with an indomitable love for the Chinese people and full appreciation of all the elements of good in the government which imprisoned him...

...Even after his confession was signed and finger-printed and his case had been cleared, he was kept for six more months of indoctrination, and then released and sent to Hongkong...

...For 14 months he had maintained his innocence, contending he had sought the welfare of China by disinterested missionary educational work...

...Whatever their evils, the Communists in two short years have divided the land among the landless peasants, stopped graft, and put through a score of reforms...

...He says it is giving "honest administration, economizing, and is determined to break the shackles of feudalism and capitalist exploitation, and takes to the people health, education, and economic betterment...

...Reviewed by Sherwood Eddy OLIN STOCKWELL'S With God in Red China is an important book in that it furnishes one more reliable witness to the contemporary scene behind the "bamboo curtain...

...Sun despairingly admitted, the Communists are changing that sand into rock—both for good and evil...

...They have done more to change the character of the Chinese people than any other dynasty or influence...

...We are not Stockwell's judges and none can be sure what he himself would have done after a year of solitary confinement and days and nights of what amounted to mental torture...

...His written confession admitted he had been "counter revolutionary," a spy, always working against the welfare of China, and included "a mixture of truth and falsehood" and things he had never done...

...He found, as I had, that Chiang was no hypocrite but that for two decades he had consistently refused to make over any land to the landless poor as demanded by Sun Yat-sen, refused to stop the graft or punish the grafters, and obstructed all reforms...

...He had been a Methodist Missionary in China for some 20 years, a prisoner of the Communists for two years (14 months in solitary confinement), and then submitted to the most rigorous process of "brain washing" and forced repentance for what the Communists called "the wicked American imperialism of his whole missionary career, as an enemy spy...

...Instead of being "a loose heap of sand" as Dr...

...Then he was moved to "a prison for counterrevolutionaries" and with eight persons in a room ten feet square was given the works in thorough "brain washing...

...All this is humiliating and makes painful reading for an honest American...

...Stockwell admits the present Peopie's Government in China is the best internal government that China has had for several generations, certainly far better than the graft-ridden police state under Chiang Kai-shek...

...In two years they have stopped wife-beating and given a new status of equality to women...

...II Stockwell admits he finally surrendered and "moved over to the people's platform...

...Many of the evils of totalitarian Red China are evident in Stock-well's trial...

...Stockwell's testimony is now confirmed by more than a score of other witnesses...