Scotland-China Association

John Chinnery's Articles in Sine, 1973–2009

By Graham Thompson

Dr John Chinnery, the SCA's Honorary President, died on 12 October 2010. He was a founding member of the Scotland-China Association and its chairman for many years, and was head of the Department of Chinese at the University of Edinburgh from 1965 to 1989.

Curing Malaria – a Chinese triumph
By Tony Butler

Malaria has been with us since the dawn of civilisation.  The Greeks described it, and it was also widespread in Italy until the Pontine Marshes were drained.  In the Middle Ages it was common in England, where it was known as the ague, but was absent from Scotland because of the colder climate. Other parts of the world suffered as much as Europe and there is plenty of written evidence that it occurred in China, particularly in the south.

The older Chinese term for malaria is yaozi.  Many commentators in different parts of the world noted that it was most prevalent in marshy areas, hence the name mal’aria (bad air).  The symptoms are principally an intermittent fever, anaemia and lethargy, with the first being the most characteristic.  It is caused by a blood parasite (Plasmodium) that enters red blood cells, reproduces asexually, and then bursts out, each new parasite entering another red blood cell. The parasite is transmitted from person to person by the female mosquito (Anopheles), which likes to feed on human blood.

Dugald Christie, a Scottish Christian in Changing China
by Ian Wotherspoon

Christian missionaries from around the world played an important, if controversial, part in the development of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Ian Wotherspoon remembers one Scottish missionary, Dugald Christie, whose cultural awareness and humanitarian involvement were extraordinary.

It’s a long way from Glen Coe to Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city; it’s even further from Edinburgh to Shenyang (Mukden), the capital of what is now Liaoning province in China.  Born below the heights of Buchaille Etive Mor, Dugald Christie came to Edinburgh to study medicine and in 1883, as a medical missionary of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, went to Shenyang where he spent most of his life in the remote, often hostile, environment of northeastern China.  The cold climate there, he said, reminded him so much of home.[1]

Forty Years of the Scotland–China Association, I 
by John Chinnery

As an introduction to this subject, I could not do better than to augment the first page of a short article I wrote on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the foundation of our organisation, printed in the November 1996 issue of Sine.

The forerunner of the SCA was the Britain–China Friendship Association, which was set up in London in 1949.  Its inaugural meeting was addressed by, among others, the celebrated American journalist Agnes Smedley (pictured, with PLA pre-1949) who had been resident in China since the 1930s and was acquainted with many of the leaders of the new government.