China (The Long Run)

China is once mentioned in Edith Wharton’s short story “The Long Run”. The narrator tells the reader that he had an engineering job in China (Wharton 302).

The capital of China is Beijing and the area is 9.596.960 square kilometers big. China is the most populous country in the world (Kooperation international).

China’s political history in the first half of the 20th century was a period of transition after the end of the monarchy, in which various political systems were experimented with (Klein). A combination of structural factors and coincidences eventually led to the assertion of Chinese communism (Klein).

The reader does not know, why Edith Wharton chose China for the narrator to work in. Maybe she just chose it, because it is far away from America. New York and Beijing are 6.824 miles apart (Google Maps). There have been planes during Edith Wharton’s time, but people did not travel by plane like nowadays. This shows, that the narrator was far away from New York and of course he could not have heard of Halston Merrick because there was no internet like nowadays, where you could easily stay in touch with other people.

Sources:

• Google Maps. „New York City – Newport” 2019. Web. 06. Nov. 2019. < https://www.google.com/maps/>

• Klein, Thorlaf Dr. “Politische Geschichte Chinas 1900-1949“. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. 07. August 2008. Web. 05. Nov. 2019. < http://www.bpb.de/internationales/asien/china/44251/china-1900-1949>

• Kooperation international. “Allgemeine Landesinformationen: China.“ Bundes- ministerium für Bildung und Forschung. 2019. Web. 05. Nov. 2019. < https://www.kooperation-international.de/laender/asien/china/allgemeine-landesinformationen/#c48273>

• Wharton, Edith. “The Long Run.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Volume II. Ed. Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis. New York: A Charles Scribner´s Sons Book Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989. 301-324. Print.