In January of 1948, Mills and his family returned to China -- this time to the teeming, bustling, cosmopolitan port city of Shanghai, on the coast of central China. From there, Mills set to work scouting new orphanages for CCF to assist in the northern provinces, where the devastation from the Japanese invasion was greatest.

"The whole country was ravaged," says Mills. "It was desolation. I went out, and I found various people who were taking care of children and who wanted help: missionaries, Chinese church people. They already had orphanages, but they needed money." Of the ten new institutions Mills enrolled for CCF, some were small: 40 or 50 children being cared for in cramped quarters or a private home. Others, like the one in Chengdu in Szechwan province, more than 1,000 miles west of Shanghai, had as many as 140 children living in dormitories. Four small orphanages -- one of them a babies' home -- were right in Shanghai.

Conditions in the orphanages were spartan, but the buildings -- many of centuries-old Chinese brick -- were solid. Three of the homes were in new buildings whose construction was funded by CCF. At this point, CCF was receiving about $480,000 a year in contributions. The steady stream of personal letters from Dr. and Mrs. Clarke to a wide spectrum of Americans was achieving an abundant response. Clarke's fundraising prowess was utterly amazing, providing almost unlimited opportunities in assisting distressed children throughout China and Japan.

Mills had a happy challenge on his hands. "I lined up homes as quickly as I could for Dr. Clarke," Mills remembers. "He would send me cables that would burn up if they were written on asbestos: 'Need 4,000 more children!' I couldn't even get the case histories and everything typed up from one home before I'd get another cable asking for 2,000 more children! The sponsors were already in, they'd sent their money, and he didn't have th pictures of children to send to them. He said the people were responding so fast because they wanted to have a part in the rehabilitation of China."

But Mills also took very seriously the other part of his responsibilities as overseas director -- the development of homes and training programs. He established high standards for the care of his charges; most of these were the outcome of his personal experience. He was determined to ensure that the children in CCF homes were properly cared for in a variety of specific ways. For example, by assessing and analyzing the amount of care the children actually needed, Mills established the policy of a children-to-staff ratio of 11 to one in the orphanages, and five to one in the babies' homes. There had to be a bed for each child, and there had to be adequate sanitary facilities - which in China in those days meant the availability of wooden buckets -- indoors. One orphanage in Shanghai actually had flush toilets; in Chengdu and Peking, farmers came around and collected the night soil every morning. In all the orphanages but one, water had to be carried in from rivers or wells, and heated on stoves for bathing in winter. None of the homes had central heating, and padded cotton coats were provided for the children in winter. Mills insisted that each child had to have access to a washbasin, and have his own towel and toothbrush. Eventually, even toothpaste was provided.

Mills also wanted to ensure that all the children of school age went to school. Some of the homes, such as the Canaan Home in Shanghai, had their own schools. In the others, children attended nearby schools and CCF paid the tuition. Mills was not in North China long enough to set up vocational training programs in any of the orphanages there, as he had earlier in Canton, but he says he did learn an important lesson in child development from the experience of Shanghai's Canaan Home.

The Canaan Home was, in Mills' words, "strictly a church-operated orphanage" -- a self-contained world with its own school and its own church, as well as living quarters for the children. As a result, according to Mills, the children in the Canaan Home were ill-prepared to face the outside world once they "graduated."

"We had lots of problems with those kids," he remembers. "They had bee isolated from the community, and they couldn't adjust to being outside. They stopped going to church, they found it difficult to find jobs, they didn't know the outside customs, they were maladjusted." As a result, Mills concluded that the orphanages should not have "in house" schools and that church serviced should not regularly take place within the institutions. Bible studies and devotions were appropriate, but on Sunday the children should go out to the church of their own choice.

In later years, as CCF began assisting children within their own families, rather than in institutions, whatever explicitly religious content there had been in the organization's work would disappear, except in cases where a CCF project was affiliated with a local religious group. The underlying Christian motivation for CCF's work, however, has remained intact. In non-Christian communities, CCF policy has long discouraged activities that could be regarded as proselytizing. Indeed, CCF's continued welcome in many communities has been assured by a strict adherence to this policy.

Another long-standing practice of CCF -- "adoption" -- was also critically important to Mills as he organized the growing number of homes under his charge. While CCF sponsors responded to the Clarks' pleas to "adopt" their very own child somewhere across the sea, the adopted child also could easily relate to the idea. After the terror and wrenching sadness of losing their families in the war, this sense of connection with an adult far away -- someone who cared about them and wrote them letters -- was more important to many of these lonely children than all the blankets, rice and clean water the orphanages could provide.

"For the children it was a wonderful thing," Mills recalls, "because they didn't have anyone else. They said to themselves, 'Here's somebody way over in America who really loves me, who thinks of me.' It gave them a feeling of security, of being wanted. This is what we hoped to develop. You'd go into the orphanages, and the children would have a picture of their sponsor up on the wall behind the bed. And the sponsors would send gifts on the children's birthdays too. Nobody had ever remembered the birthday s of these children before."