Pearl Buck’s Humanitarian Vision in War and Peace

Abstract Pearl S. Buck, the brilliant author who won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes in the 1930s for her works on China, spent the first half of her life in China. Raised in eastern China by her missionary parents, she was encouraged to learn, study, and interact with Chinese children and others wherever she lived. A gifted Chinese linguist and historian, she was deeply affected by the deep, negative impact of Western colonialism during China’s “century of humiliation.” She was also deeply concerned about the plight of the Chinese peasants, their children, and the place of young girls and women in Chinese society and culture. Buck settled in the U.S. in 1934 and quickly became disillusioned with the widespread racial prejudice she discovered there. She became active in the civil rights movement, and when war broke out in China in 1937, she played a leading role in plans to help the Nationalists in their struggle against Japan. Over time, she became worried about Allied war and postwar claims, and was quite critical of what she thought were European efforts to restore their former colonial empires, particularly in Asia. An advocate of global postwar peace, she became a strong supporter of Raphael Lemkin’s campaign to convince the U.N. to adopt the Genocide Convention in hopes that this would become a cornerstone in efforts to prevent future international conflicts.