In a time when scarcely a day passes without China making headlines here in the United States, it is difficult to believe that this communist colossus was once all but ignored by Western politicians and corporate interests. Yet only 60 years ago China was a vast, impotent waste-land rent by civil conflict and crippled by disease and poverty. The only Americans interested in China, it seemed, were Christian missionaries from various denominations, who saw China's hundreds of millions of souls as ripe for the gospel. Accordingly, in the 1930s, hundreds of devout Christians in America devoted their lives to missionary service in China. They learned the difficult Chinese language and tramped about the countryside preaching, converting, baptizing, and establishing congregations of the faithful. One of these missionaries was a young man from Georgia named John Morrison Birch.
Birch grew up in a devout Southern Baptist home in rural Georgia, and while attending Mercer University in Macon he decided to become a missionary in China. After graduating at the head of his class at Mercer, he enrolled in the Bible Baptist Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, where he finished a two-year curriculum in a single year. In the summer of 1940 he sailed for China.
Arriving in Shanghai, Birch promptly commenced intensive study of Mandarin Chinese and displayed such extraordinary aptitude for the language that he was fluent within a couple of months. He spent the following two years traveling about China, preaching, passing out tracts and Bibles, and developing an affection for the Chinese people and a broad network of friends and contacts that would serve him well in what was to follow.
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