A war of words

During World War II, a young Chinese scholar was selected to undertake a lecture tour of Britain, where he traveled the length and breadth of the country delivering speeches to packed houses, detailing the horrors of Japan's occupation of China and urging the British people to stand steadfast in the fight against Nazi Germany, as Peng Yining reports from London.

As China fought for its life during the Japanese occupation and World War II, Ye Junjian, a Chinese professor of English literature, joined the fray, but his battleground was Europe, not China, and his weapon was the spoken word, not the gun.

In 1944, Yeh Chun Chan, or Ye Junjian in pinyin, was invited by the British Ministry of Information to visit the United Kingdom and speak about China's war to help the British government's mobilization campaign in preparation for the Allied landings in Normandy.