A True Friend to China

China in the late 1940s was another world, an ancient society still in the grips of feudalism, desperately poor and in need of modernisation. There are many formal histories of those pivotal and turbulent times but Jack Jones is among the few foreigners to have written contemporary accounts of day-to-day life there. Together with his fellow members of the Friends Ambulance Unit ‘China Convoy’, his long struggle to bring medical supplies and services to the poorest regions of China is vividly evoked in this book. Written by him as articles for the China Convoy’s newsletter and lost and unread for more than half a century, these have recently been discovered in Quaker archives in London and Philadelphia. An edited selection now tells the remarkable story of how Jack and his team battled against all the odds in life-threatening situations to help relieve the overwhelming suffering of the Chinese people.

Review in SCMP, May 2015

Interview with A True Friend author Andrew Hicks on RTHK April 2015