China Honors Episcopal Missionary

The Living Church Foundation ^ | 8/15/2005 | unknown

[sionnsar]

To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, the Chinese government has released a film made by an Episcopal priest documenting the Nanjing massacre.

The Rev. John G. Magee, an Episcopal missionary in China from 1912-1940, recorded the Dec. 13, 1937, capture of the city and six-week killing spree by Japanese soldiers that claimed over 300,000 Chinese lives.

China’s Xinhua News Agency reported the National Museum in Beijing began screenings of Fr. Magee’s film on Aug. 10, and that a library in Nanjing dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of the massacre had been named in his honor.

Twenty-two Western missionaries and residents of Nanjing who refused to leave the city convinced the Japanese to respect a “neutral zone” of 3.4 square miles around the American embassy and Nanking University. The Japanese high command declined to recognize the legality of the zone, but agreed not to attack an area that was not occupied by Chinese troops.

Approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians took shelter within the neutral zone, placing themselves under Western protection. Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, the standard historical treatment of the massacre, writes that the Japanese proceeded to kill the rest of the city’s population outside the zone.

Fr. Magee clandestinely recorded 105 minutes of footage of the Japanese atrocities with a 16mm camera. The film negatives were sewn inside an overcoat and smuggled to Shanghai by an American missionary who had been granted a safe-conduct pass by the Japanese.

Four copies of the film were developed in Shanghai and sent abroad. Life magazine subsequently published stills from the film in May 1938 and director Frank Capra incorporated footage in his wartime movie, “Why We Fight.”

In 1946, Fr. Magee, who had returned to the United States to become the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, and the other surviving Westerners served as witnesses in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Two years later the Chinese government awarded Fr. Magee a medal for his heroism and humanitarian work during the massacre.

Upon his death in 1963 Fr. Magee left the only surviving copy of the film to his son David, who as a 10-year old witnessed the massacres. Zu Chengshan, curator of the Nanjing exhibition, stated David Magee gave the film to China in 2002.

[Siobhan]

bump

[cripplecreek]

If they want to truely Honor the man they should release the Christians they have sitting in their prisons.

[sionnsar]

Agreed. I was surprised to learn, on a visit 5 years ago, that my host's family were Christians. But they probably attended one of the state churches.