Reframing the Yenching Story Philip West University of Montana

Reframing the Yenching Story Philip West University of Montana 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.1 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 pos- sible 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. Had it not been for the devastat- ing political campaigns directed against the Yenching alumni and Chi- nese intellectuals generally for their liberal and bi-cultural views of history, one wonders if Yenching might have lasted longer or even avoided closure altogether. Counterfactually, had the Korean War been avoided, might the more accommodating side of the “New Democracy” have been sustained, ushering in a less violent new order and quiet Cold War fears and mistrusts on both sides of the Pacific? And finally, had it not been for the reopening of China to the outside world in the Deng Xiaoping era after Mao Zedong’s death, the Yenching alumni could not have gathered as they did in the Beijing Spring of 1989, to reaffirm the Yenching legacy. 1. In reflecting on the Yenching story, I am keenly aware of my limited access to materials that other contributors have had to the Chinese archives. In preparing this essay, I returned to my old files with fresh eyes and reread some of the correspon- dence and interviews with the Yenching people I had access to more than three decades before—Grace Boynton, Randolph Sailer, William Hung, Philip Fugh (Fu Qingbo), Mei Yibao, Stella Burgess, Bliss Wiant, Tan Renjiu, Liu Tingwei, Ma Meng and others. All of them have now passed away. A year spent as the American co- director of the Hopkins Nanjing Center in Nanjing in 1990–91 served as a kind of laboratory to test observations I had made previously about Yenching and to experience firsthand the challenges faced by American educators working in China. 185 186 New Perspectives on Yenching University, 1916–1952 That historic moment invites looking at the Yenching story with fresh eyes to appreciate the dormant forces on both sides of the Pacific waiting to rekindle earlier hopes and new visions for American-Chinese relations. The Liberal Arts as Concept Yenching University and its four constituent colleges in many ways were philosophical, curricular, and administrative transplants from Ameri- can liberal arts colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries. If the transplant was Western, the soil was the richness and complexity of China, from the millennia-long experience with the “higher” education of the examination system to the patriotic passions that were channeled to save the nation and later distorted in the Cultural Revolu- tion that nearly destroyed the whole system of higher education. One thread in the liberal arts traces back to Aristotle’s ideas on formal education whose purpose was to train a governing elite in mental and moral discipline through the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, ge- ometry, music, and astronomy. American college educators traded on Aristotle’s ideas, but the elite they had in mind was Christian leader- ship. The purpose of the liberal arts at Yenching, heavily weighted in religious language in the early years, was to train Chinese leaders for the missionary enterprise, which by the twentieth century was as much de- voted to the “good works” of teaching, healing, and social service, as it was to making converts to Christianity. The loosely defined views of the liberal arts were tested and refined at Yenching by the religious colleges in both China and the United States at the time—and the by the shifting forces of politics and war throughout the Republican years, 1912–49. President John Leighton Stuart’s motto for Yenching, “Freedom through truth for service” (yin zhenli de ziyou yi fuwu), is a prism that allows us to see what the Yenching founders had in mind and also how it frames the memories of the alumni, even decades after the university itself was closed. The truth that was sought and taught was both a religious and philosophical truth and included the sciences. It was a practical truth but also a pleasurable one—the joys of study, reading books, listening to lectures, and exchanging ideas. The Chinese faculty and students may have found a particular attraction to the Yenching motto because it reso- nated with the opening lines of the Analects, “Isn’t it a pleasure when you can make practical use of the things you have studied?” Confucian sensibilities may have died a death of a certain kind with the collapse of Qing institutions and the iconoclasms of the modern period, but they lingered in Chinese hearts and minds, as a kind of cultural DNA. Aca- demic freedom, both as an ideal and as a reality, distinguished Yenching and much of Chinese higher education in the Republican years from the.

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