Craig Watson
speaker
4,699 appearances
13 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 17 Aug
Craig Watson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Forty years later, he would write a novel
of his experiences and it would become known as the Empire of the Sun.
For missionaries like Valva Brown, the evacuation process was degrading and final.
The missionary staff were permitted to pack no more than three suitcases with their belongings.
As they prepared to leave, Japanese and Taiwanese sightseeing parties arrived to decide which houses they might want to occupy.
The journey home aboard crowded Japanese ships offered no concessions to status or dignity.
Ambassadors, consuls, merchants, and missionaries alike were given bed-sized strips of Chinese matting, which these spread side by side on iron floors of the hold.
The humiliation was compounded by the finality of it all.
For many, their decades long presence in China was ending not in orderly retreat, but in a hasty evacuation, leaving behind servants, many of whom had been with us for fifteen or twenty years, in the words of Brown.
Despite these immediate human tragedies, the strategic transformation that Pearl Harbor wrought for China was undeniable.
Chiankai Shek now embarked on an entirely new sort of life, heavily involved with the leaders and the generals of the Western powers.
He held diplomatic discussions with the leaders of the United Nations and military planning sessions with Western generals.
In these unfamiliar circumstances, he did his best to live up to the Confucian ideals of the gentleman, seldom permitting the mask to slip.
Though the pressure of these new responsibilities, and the intoxicating combination of vindication and anxiety, would occasionally prove too much, even for his considerable self control.
Within just weeks of Pearl Harbor, Chiankai Shek demonstrated the value he could bring to the new alliance.
He visited India and he spoke to the leaders of the Indian independence struggle as an ally and as a friend.
As a fellow non European speaking to others seeking to escape from colonialism and imperial domination.
He joined the Allies in their first joint campaign, not in China, but in the jungles of neighboring Burma, committing Chinese forces to operations outside China's borders in support of the broader Allied military strategy.
Yet the price that Chiang Kai shek would pay for China's belated entry into the global alliance against the Axis powers would prove to be a heavy one.
Chiang desperately needed his new American and British partners, but accepting this alliance would unleash forces within Chinese society that would threaten the very basis of his political control.
Showing 321–340 of 4,699 · page 17 of 235
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