the idea that using scientific techniques could make a society cleaner and healthier.25 As Chinese cities modernized, they used sewage and drainage to show the world the progress that the country had made. Now the impact of war had reversed that tendency in the most arresting, and noxious, way. As it had been for Mrs. Yang, fleeing Wuxi just a couple of months previously, it was the stench of war that brought its reality home most clearly. On December 12 the Japanese carried out an act that shocked the outside world: they sank the American gunboat USS Panay.
