Forthcoming Spring 2012
New Perspectives on Yenching University, 1916-1952
A Liberal Education for a New China
Edited by Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum
With a Preface by Charles W. Hayford
ISBN 978-1879176-48-5 (Paper)
Chicago: Imprint Publications
In New Perspectives on Yenching University, 1916-1952, scholars from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States reevaluate China’s preeminent Christian university. Their fresh essays show how the university fostered transnational exchanges of new bodies of knowledge, changed the lives of several generations of students, and responded to the pressures of war and revolution. Despite its many successes in pioneering a non-Eurocentric approach to modernity, it was attacked by other Chinese who saw the elite enterprise as imperialist and questioned its assumption that education and professional expertise when tied to individual commitment are the key to transforming societies. Although Yenching did not survive the political tensions created by the Communist victory, this volume demonstrates that biculturalism, cultural exchange, and liberal education in the long run are compatible with nation-building and a modern Chinese identity.
Utilizing research in newly available archives, new perspectives resulting from China’s economic and cultural confidence, and contemporary theoretical insights, the thirteen essays in this collection assess the significance of Yenching’s experiment as a precursor to subsequent global efforts to break from Eurocentric models. They focus on such issues as: efforts to make Christianity relevant to China’s needs; the role of professional expertise, the training of a generation of American scholars in a modernized Sinology; gender relationships and coeducation; the value of the liberal arts; the introduction and adaptation of new fields of fields of knowledge; Sino-American cultural interactions; and Yenching’s imaginative and sometimes ambiguous responses to Chinese nationalism, Japanese invasion, and revolution.
Contents
Arthur L. Rosenbaum, “Introduction: Revisiting Yenching’s Experience of Biculturalism”
New Historical Perspectives
Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum, “Yenching University and Sino-American Interactions, 1919-1952”
Shuhua Fan, “To Educate China in the Humanities and Produce China Knowledge in the United States: The Founding of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1924-1928”
Sophia Lee, “Yenching University and the Japanese Occupation, 1937-1941”
Shuhua Fan, “Explaining the Demise of the Christian Colleges in China: A Case Study of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1949-1953”
Philip West, “Reframing the Yenching Story”
Yenching University and the Fate of Liberal Chinese Christianity
Chu Sin-Jan, “Chancellor Wu Leichuan: A Confucian-Christian Educator”
Peter Chen-main Wang, “Were Christian Members of the Yenching Faculty Unique?: An Examination of the Life Fellowship Movement, 1919‑1931”
Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum,“Christianity, Academics, and National Salvation in China: Yenching University, 1924-1949”
Students, Faculty, and Alumni: Were They Different?
John Israel, “The Beida‑Tsinghua Connection: Yenching in the World of Beijing's Elite Universities”
Shi Jinghuan, “Cultural Mixture: Reflections on the Experience of Yenching University”
Liu Haiyan, “Intellectual Group under the Influence of Two Cultures: A Historical Analysis of Yenching Graduates in China”
Carolyn Wakeman, “Beyond Gentility: The Mission of Women Educators at Yenching”
Theoretical Approaches
Nita Kumar, “Biculturalism and National Identities: Reflections on Theoretical Issues and Historical Experiences”
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