Between the Wars in China: Another World

[RonPrice]

After teaching history for over 30 years, I am now retired and enjoy making written comparisons and contrasts between my own life and beliefs and the events of modern history. I do that in the following prose-poem with respect to events between the war5s and in China after WW2. There is no direct connection with Axis History here, only an indirect one. But, it seems to me, contemporaneous events between the wars with a significant world power, namely, China, and an insignificant new Movement, namely, the Baha'i Faith, have a broad relevance here--and certainly a personal relevance to me and hopefully to your readers.
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THE LONG MARCH

I want to mention here two other events in Baha’i history that have a curious correlation with the history of the Communist Party in China. The formation date of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 coincided with the death of ‘Abdu’l-Baha and the building of Baha’i administrative institutions by Shoghi Effendi. The end of The Long March in October 1936 coincided with the beginning of the Baha’i long teaching march in a series of Teaching Plans. After an expedition of almost a year, the Second Red Army reached Shaanxi on 22 October 1936, known in China as the “union of the three armies” and the end of The Long March. By October 1936 the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the USA had begun trying to conceive a plan, as requested by Shoghi Effendi in May 1936, to establish one Baha’i centre in every state and republic in the Americas.

In the two week period before I joined the Baha’i Faith in early October 1959 at the age of 15 much happened in the economic and political world. I do not want to give a travelogue of all the events or the happenings as they might appear n some annalistic, chronological history, month by month, in September/October 1959. But I will mention one or two events of those months. Oil was discovered in China near Daqing City; Russia’s Nikita Krushchev visited the US in one of the many confrontations of the cold war. The Tenth Anniversary of the People's Republic of China was held in October 1959. Mao Tse-tung was replaced as chairman by Liu Shaoqi. The Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1960, Mao's grand plan to organize the huge Chinese population, was beginning to become unstuck. It became a disaster. 30 to 40 million starved in the period 1959-1961 due to natural disasters. –Ron Price, Pioneering over Four Epochs, 25 February 2007.

Simple contemporaneity,
some might say serendipitous
coincidence or overlaping
history overlaping, the awesome
anarchy of one enormous mud---
puddle and my foot in one of
the puddles. And meaning---far,
far from the eye of a dead ant---
but only what I can endow it.

The starving China boys my mother
used to talk about to get me to eat
my vegies--they were real enough,
even if not to me as I stared at the
green and yellow pieces of food on
my plate and watched my mother &
father grow old and die and then…..

.…in 1959, mirabile dictu, as Mao was
beginning his slide into obscurity, I was
beginning my slide into a Movement that
was slowly taking the world by storm:
very slowly, unobtrusively, with a grace
so contained as to pose no threat,
but it captured my heart and mind,
at least a part of it, for a long march.

Ron Price
25 February 2007