Penguin Specials on China from the 1930s

I’m currently reading Jeremy Lewis’s biography of the fonder of Penguin, Allen Lane – Penguin Special. Interesting to note that almost from the start of the great list of Penguin Specials in the late 1930s were a couple of books on China. So let’s name them:

Edgar Mowrer’s Mowrer in China was published in 1938. Mowrer was a well known globe trotting American journalist in the 1930s and had started out covering the First World War and then got to know both Rome and Berlin in the 1920s/1930s. More about Mowrer here. Below Mowrer’s classic Penguin cover and an excerpt from the book:

“… the repeated bombings were almost as successfully murderous as those witnessed at Canton. From the garden of the Baptist Centre in Kaifeng I watched a particularly brutal attack. A little nervous for the ‘planes passed almost over us, yet determined to see and photograph, we stood out and watched six Japanese aircraft in two formations of three, fly first over the city from east to west and then return, at each passage dropping a number of hundred pound bombs of the kind considered less harmful. At one instant I saw six falling from a single ‘plane, one under the other like a string of beads.

They missed us by nearly a quarter of a mile. While the murderers roared away into the east, we hurried to the stricken area near the East Gate. The bombs had fallen into the poorest quarter where the coolies were nearly all absent or at work. The number of women and children killed and maimed was nearly a hundred. I counted several bodiless heads of babies. From piles of rubble came faint groans. A woman sat speechless beside the prostrate figure of her dead husband, in her arms a baby missing from the waist down. The Japanese airplanes that did the killing were manufactured in the United States.”

A book I know less about is JMD Pringle’s China Struggles for Unity published in 1939. Here’s the publishers blurb:

Unlike Japan, which awoke quickly to the new industrialism of the West, China was content to glide peacefully along, ignoring the rest of the world, pursuing the wisdom of her philosophers and artists. But by the turn of the century (1900) as the devastating effect of foreign imperialism began to make itself felt, a new national spirit awoke…….