My Twenty-Five Years in China

China Through Western Eyes: My Twenty-Five Years in China. In the early twentieth century, American journalist John Benjamin Powell arrived in Shanghai, China, beginning an extraordinary twenty-five-year journey in the East.

He traveled across China and visited the former Soviet Union, Japan, the Philippines, and other countries. As a result, he was particularly familiar with the political and military situation in the Far East during the 1920s and 1930s, and reported in depth on the major events of the era.

In China, Powell interviewed many important political figures of the time and encountered the lives of ordinary people suffering through war. He was often a guest of honor among the powerful and influential, but was also kidnapped by bandits during the “Blue Steel Incident” and became a prisoner of the Japanese army after the outbreak of the Pacific War. He ventured to the Sino-Soviet border to understand the tangled interests of Japan and the Soviet Union in China’s northeast, and personally witnessed the Japanese army’s massive air raids on Shanghai and Nanjing...

This book preserves the memory of China’s modern history during its most turbulent years.

The author’s observations and analysis of China’s political and social realities, his reflections and insights, and his accounts, revelations, and condemnation of the Japanese army’s aggression in China are vividly brought before us through a Western perspective.