Sun Mian, the publisher of New Weekly Magazine, a fashionable news and lifestyle magazine based in Guangzhou, has not worried about the editorial work of the magazine for years. He spends a great deal of time climbing high mountains on different continents. Recently, he and a group of volunteers started a campaign to look for soldiers who fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) but who are having a miserable time in their twilight years. Sun has vowed to raise enough money to take care of each of them for the rest of their lives so that they can live on with dignity.
When did you start caring about the living conditions of former soldiers?
I started to realise that some former soldiers are leading a poor life at the end of 2010. I heard about the miserable life of a retired soldier in Chengdu, Sichuan. He was a Nationalist soldier in the 1930s and 1940s, and his two sons had refused to have anything to do with him for fear of being involved in political troubles. The old man was poorly looked after in the nursing home. So I asked the old man's daughter, who was in her 60s, to rent a small apartment to have him live in, and hire a helper to take care of him. I paid for the rent and the hiring. When the old man died six months later, his daughter wrote me a message which I have kept to this day. She said her father had experienced the dignity of living in the past six months. The word 'dignity' touched me a lot and made me cry the whole morning.
So this is not a single case?
This is far from a special case. I have got to know about the Chinese Expeditionary Force who fought against the Japanese troops in Burma in the early 1940s. Around 400,000 Kuomintang soldiers went to Burma, and the casualties were almost 200,000. Most have already died over the years. Those still living are having a miserable life. I then got in touch with a website specially focused on caring about the retired soldiers. They have found nearly 1,000 such retired soldiers.
How miserable are their lives?