As for Bishop Roots, Buchman never (according to Roots' daughter) mentioned the matter again either to him or to any of his family, although the Bishop and all his family, both before and after his retirement, came later to work closely with Buchman. 'You have forgiven us much,' the Bishop wrote to him in 1942. 'In particular you have forgiven me so much. I am slowly beginning to realise how much.'28

Hsu Ch'ien gradually became disillusioned with what he saw of Christianity in China. At Kuling he and a colleague had had a talk with Buchman, during which the 'National Society for the Salvation of China' had been conceived. After Kuling, he had had a three-hour talk with Sun Yat-sen who thought it 'a sincere and very deep idea' and later confirmed that he 'believed this fundamental principle is the only way China will be saved'. But early the next year Hsu wrote sadly to Buchman, 'At present the missionaries are only preaching about the individual righteousness but nothing about society and nations as a whole. Why should people be only righteous individually but not in political affairs?'29 In 1923 an agent from Moscow called Michael Borodin arrived in Canton and, in due course, became adviser to both Sun Yat-sen and Hsu. Hsu felt that Borodin really appreciated his ability and idealism whereas, according to his daughter, 'he got little co-operation from the formal Christians in his large national schemes of applied Christianity'.30 By 1925 he was living in an apartment in the Russian legation.

Many have wondered why Communism was able to capture the leadership of China so easily in spite of the vast missionary investment, both American and British, put into the country during the previous half-century. Arthur Holcome, Professor of Government at Harvard University, gives full weight to the Chinese disillusionment at their treatment by the 'Christian' Allied powers at the Versailles Peace Conference where the German concessions were handed over to Japan and the Allies retained their own, in spite of promises to the contrary. To this, he acids three more deep-seated reasons: 'the failure of Western missionaries to treat the Chinese as equals', their 'lack of unity' and their 'ignorance of China and the Chinese'. The missionaries, he says, were intent on changing Chinese culture, while the Russians, and particularly Borodin, sought to understand and use it.31 All these three attitudes were ones which Buchman was trying to tackle while in China.

One can speculate what would have happened if there had been significant alteration on any or all of these points among the missionary community. If a considerable body of the Chinese leadership, with such backing, had set themselves to remedy the ills which Hsu and General Wu articulated, it is at least possible that there might have been an alternative dynamic enough to withstand the atheistic revolution which Borodin imported.

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