ASIAN RECONNAISSANCE

Shoemaker told him he had a long-standing arrangement to have tea with one of the Bible-class boys. 'What shall I tell him?' he asked.

'Tell him just what you've told me. Be honest about yourself,' replied Buchman

Shoemaker did exactly that - and the boy said, 'I wish it could happen to me.' 'They talked …. of the honesty and purity and faith required of any individual who gives his total allegiance to God, and when the student expressed his readiness they prayed together,' concludes Harris. 'Each man felt deeply moved and very grateful.'33 For Shoemaker this was the beginning of a twenty-year association with Buchman.

Buchman still wanted to meet with Sun Yat-sen. By the beginning of 1918 Hsu Ch'ien had joined the Southern Military Government at Canton as Chief Secretary to Sun. With the help of an introduction from Hsu, Buchman had at least two meetings with Sun in February 1918. Sun's own position at the time was insecure, as rivals within his own party were working towards demoting him from Generalissimo to being merely one in a committee of seven. Nonetheless, Buchman was convinced that Sun could become 'the great liberator of China', and their talks were unusually candid. At their first meeting, on 23 February, when various of Sun's associates were present, Buchman spoke of the moral weaknesses which Hsu had told him lay at the root of China's anarchic condition. Five days later they met again in a cement factory converted into working quarters for the President and situated on an island only reachable by water. There they had privacy.* Sun said, 'Politically we have succeeded. We have established a republic. But we have many problems that we can't answer. Can you help us? What do you think is wrong in China?' Buchman said, 'Three things. One is corruption - squeeze. Another is concubines. And the third is the poppy - smoking opium.'

(* A young soldier on guard in the cement factory that day came forty years later to the Moral Re-Armament headquarters in Switzerland as a general, and told how astonished he and his colleagues had been that Sun should ask advice of an American.)

Buchman then told Sun that even some of his own supporters said that he had too many wives. Sun had, in fact, divorced his first wife under Chinese law and married the woman who had previously been his concubine - Ching-ling Soong, sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and later Vice-President of Communist China.

After the interview Buchman received an indignant note from Sun, declaring that there must have been some misunderstanding. He had never, he said, had more than one wife and had divorced his previous wife quite correctly before marrying his present one.34 Hsu, however, encouraged by Buchman, continued to press the point. He told Sun bluntly that his divorce might be justifiable under Chinese law but that it certainly did not conform to Christian teaching, which Sun admitted to be true. He gave Sun the Bible and asked him to read the story of David, Uriah and Bathsheba. His first wife had, Hsu reminded him, married him when he was in great trouble, and it was against Chinese custom to desert a wife who marries you in such circumstances. Also, she had borne him a son.35If he did not obey the laws of God, asked Hsu, how could Sun have any power from God to save his country? Sun finally thanked Hsu for his 'faithful counsel'.36

57