Reframing the Yenching Story

Abstract

One way to revisit and reframe the Yenching story is to imagine with a few bold strokes how the conflicting threads in that story are woven into the ironic twists and turns in twentieth-century Chinese-Western relations. Had it not been for the political collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the cultural and spiritual vacuum created in its wake, core Chinese faculty at Yenching and many of the Yenching students might never have been attracted to liberal Christianity and the liberal arts. Had it not been for the extraterritorial protection under the unequal treaties going back to the days of the Opium War, it would not have been possible for the missionary educators to lead in introducing the liberal arts into China. Had it not been for the war with Japan and events leading up to it since World War I, followed later by the Chinese civil war, it would be difficult to explain to Western liberal ears how the patriotic passions of Yenching faculty and students could lead them to adapt as readily as they did to the Communist revolution.

‘Almost None’: Women Sociologists and the Study of Women’s Crime in Early 20th-Century China and the U.S.

“…For sociology departments in particular, there was "little alteration" of U.S.-based course content and the curriculum thus likely looked the same as that of their counterparts at U.S. universities (Lutz 1971: 189). Their large-scale social surveys of Chinese women's crime in the Republican periodthe only ones of their kindwere thus produced in the international and "bicultural" environments of Yanjing (Rosenbaum 2015) and Shanghai Baptist, institutions with direct and deep ties to Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, among other elite U.S. universities (West 2007(West , 1976Gjedssø Bertelsen and Thybo Møller 2010;Fan 2014). It is perhaps of little surprise, then, that Zhou, Liu, and Xu were extremely well-read in contemporary English language, U.S.-based sociological research and made connections to them in their own studies.…”

The Tragic Irony of a Patriotic Mission: The Indigenous Leadership of Francis Wei and T. C. Chao, Radicalized Patriotism, and the Reversal of Protestant Missions in China

“…The strategic turn to expand higher education as a form of mission, despite its good intention to train indigenous leaders, aggravated missionary dominance in these ministries and the latter's dependence on foreign funding. For example, universities like Hua Chung and Yenching, where Francis Wei and T. C. Chao worked respectively as leading administrators, were considered "philosophical, curricular, and administrative transplants" from America (West 2007). With government requirements for private education institutions in China, these schools also underwent further secularization.…”