Salt and Light, Volume 2: More Lives of Faith That Shaped Modern China

By Pickwick Publications

The hidden seeds of the Christian renewal in China today include the outstanding Chinese Christians in Salt and Light 2, a dozen new life stories with lively anecdotes and photographs. These reformers made lasting contributions that shaped modern China. Working out of the limelight in their professions, they had quiet but powerful influence on early twentieth-century civil society. Motivated by their faith, they modeled essential virtues. This series helps recover a lost Christian heritage linked closely to a legacy of East-West cooperation in an earlier global era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Feb 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781621892731

Book preview

Salt and Light 2

More Lives of Faith that Shaped

Modern China

Edited by

Carol Lee Hamrin

with Stacey Bieler

2008.Pickwick_logo.pdf

SALT AND LIGHT 2

More Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China

Studies in Chinese Christianity 2

Copyright ©

2010

Carol Lee Hamrin. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may

be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the

publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Pickwick Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn

13

:

978-1-60608-955-2

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Salt and Light 2.

Salt and light 2 : more lives of faith that shaped modern China / edited by Carol Lee Hamrin with Stacey Bieler.

Studies in Chinese Christianity 2

xii +

240

p. ;

23

cm. Includes timeline, photographs, map, and index.

isbn

13

:

978-1-60608-955-2

1. China—Church history. 2. China—Religion. 3. Christianity—China.

4. Chinese History. I. Hamrin, Carol Lee. II. Bieler, Stacey. III. Title. IV. Series.

br1288 s15 2010

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Praise for Salt and Light, Vol. 1

I highly recommend this collection of succinct, deftly drawn portraits of Chinese Christians whose lives made a difference. The editors and authors are sympathetic to their subjects, but also realistic in their evaluation. Historians of modern China, and many in Chinese Christian communities worldwide, will enjoy and profit from learning about these ten laypersons who contributed much to the Kingdom of God and to the society in which they lived.

—Daniel Bays, Professor of History and Director

of Asian Studies at Calvin College

Salt and Light is a scrupulous and moving work that presents the human face of China’s emergence in the world, showing how China’s great human assets bear the imprint of deep encounter with the West. It is impossible to overestimate the long-term value of that encounter, and there is no question that such encounter will impact China’s international outlook. This book shows why . . . A significant number of the men and women who will shape China’s perceptions and role have studied and lived in the West, and such people, now as in the past, form a crucial bridge between East and West.

—Lamin Sanneh, Professor of World Christianity, Professor of History, and Professor of International and Area Studies, Yale University

Recovering the lost narratives of ten remarkable Chinese Christian lives tells us that Christianity in China is profoundly and thoroughly Chinese. These impressive stories so aptly show that the modern migration of Christian faith, in contrast to earlier Chinese appropriations since the seventh century, sank roots deep into the cultural soil of China. How this occurred, in each case, is an achievement to be celebrated.

—Robert Frykenberg, Professor Emeritus of History & South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin—Madison

As a lover of modern Chinese history, I was confident about my knowledge of many Chinese Christian faith models. Nevertheless, Salt and Light gave me many surprising new stories. I was deeply touched by the efforts made to recover these lost stories. I believe Chinese Christians who read the book will be as encouraged and inspired as I am to dedicate ourselves to His calling.

—Martha Chan, Director of the China Academic Consortium and President, Educational Resources and Referrals, China

With all the bright lights of Shanghai and dazzling events in Beijing, which sometimes blur our vision, nothing takes the place of historical hindsight to guide our service and concern. Here are the stories of determined, well-planned, and creative service in the name of Christ; yes, models for engagement in twenty-first-century China. The lively sketches in this series will fill an important gap for those who are well acquainted with the standard texts . . . and for the newcomer in the field of China studies.

—Dr. Samuel Ling, President, China Horizon, and Professor of Systematic Theology at International Theological Seminary

I’m recommending this book with wholehearted enthusiasm! This is an absolute must-read, as it tells the critical and crucial stories of ten Chinese men and women, most of them at one time international students in the USA, who made strategic investments as followers of Christ in laying the very foundations of modern life in China. The book is worth every penny you invest.

—Dr. Robert Osburn, President, Wilberforce Academy

List of Names

Variations and Characters for Chapter Subjects

Hamrin%20List%20of%20Names.pdf

Note on Romanization

Chinese names are given with surname first. Along with other Chinese words, names and place names are romanized according to the pinyin system used by the People’s Republic of China, including its standard exceptions, such as Tsinghua and Peking universities and Kuomin-tang for the Nationalist Party. Other exceptions include the names of scholars who live in the West and have adopted Western-format names, as well as some names widely known to English readers, such as Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Yangtze River. We have maintained variations that occur in references.

Key to Pronunciation

ā as in fate

a as in fat

ē as in eve

e as in met

ī as in pine

i as in it

ō as in note

o as in not

oo as in book

ū as in use

u as in up

ü as in German pronunciation

ch as in church

hy as in hue or hew

hw as in whale

Salt and Light, Vol. 1, will be referred to in this volume as Salt and Light 2009. See Carol Lee Hamrin, ed., with Stacey Bieler, Salt and Light: Lives of Faith That Shaped Modern China (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009).

0-1b.hamrin.map.jpg

Map of China

Introduction

by Carol Lee Hamrin and Stacey Bieler

Salt and Light 2 presents more lost stories of outstanding Chinese citizens, all of them Christians, who helped their country make progress from 1850 to 1950. These men and women, following in the paths of the early pioneers in the modern professions and recounted in volume 1, were civic builders in the fields of education, medicine, media, diplomacy, social work, and additionally in sports and the arts.

With the progress and global influence of Chinese society today, people are interested in knowing more about the history of China, cross-cultural exchanges and world Christianity. This book series, unlike other studies focused on missionary history or Chinese church leaders, explores the lives of lay Christians in different professions, who made a contribution to modern China.

These stories highlight an important part of the history of social and cultural relations between China and America. Most of these reformers studied in the United States and lived and worked with American colleagues in China. Two of them (Kuang Fuzhuo and Xu Qin) first arrived in America as laborers and worked their way through college and graduate school. Some learned skills for running voluntary associations through membership in the U.S.-based Chinese Students’ Christian Association and the Chinese Students’ Alliance. Living on the boundaries of East and West, traditional and modern China. Some returnees found that faith in Christ gave them a model, strength, and vision to serve their people. They creatively applied their Western knowledge and experience to solve problems facing their nation.

Their personal and professional ties bridging the Pacific brought valuable resources for China’s development and helped sustain cross-cultural relations despite periodic crises over attacks on American missionaries or racist American policies opposing immigration and citizenship for Chinese. Several served on official missions to obtain critical wartime assistance from the United States in the 1940s.

Some of those profiled in this book are known in China for their public accomplishments, but others were forgotten until recent years. The historic films and photographs of Sun Mingjing and early modernist landscapes of Zhou Tingxu were nearly lost. These Chinese Christians helped to build and preserve cultural institutions still active today: the Commercial Press (China’s most long-standing); the internationally renowned Beijing Film Academy; Peking Union Medical College, China’s premier medical school, now part of Tsinghua University; the revived YMCA and YWCA, and the universities—Nankai, Yanjing (now Peking), Jinling (now Nanjing Normal) and Wuhan.

This second volume of Salt and Light explores the importance of family background in shaping personal character and choice of vocation. Chapters on the Yan family and the Xu family cover two generations in detail. Other chapters also show the strong positive influence of Christian parents and siblings on children who grew up to be leaders in both Chinese society and internationally. The fathers of more than half of those profiled here were church pastors.

Many of the people recounted in this volume knew one another and knew the people described in volume 1 (Salt and Light 2009) personally. They were part of the Chinese Christian elite centered in Shanghai and Beijing during late Imperial and early Republican times. This elite extended across the spectrum of Protestant denominations and included Roman Catholics like Ma Xiangbo. Some were outspoken believers such as Kuang Fuzhuo and Yin Renxian, and others, like Sun Mingjing and Lü Jin’ai, attended church regularly but were more private about their personal convictions. Zhou Tingxu represents still others for whom we have no evidence of personal faith but whose values and lifestyle were shaped by his Christian family, community, and education. His contributions in sports and arts thus were a product of global Christian culture. Shaped by a pious family upbringing and a religious education, these Chinese learned from each other’s work and writings, gaining encouragement that they were not alone in their commitments.

They lived out the command of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount to do good deeds as the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Like salt, they served as a moral preservative in a society under stress from corrupt power politics. And like light, they offered truth and hope to others during dark times of despair due to economic dislocation and war.

Citizens in today’s global society, whether in America or China, can find encouragement through learning about these builders of civil society and cross-cultural ties. The map, pronunciation guide, and the time line at the back of the book should be helpful in placing their lives both in time and space.

An Earlier Global Era

In the years before 1900, the Imperial government in China was weakened by civil warfare and forced by a series of military defeats to open its economy and society to outside forces. China entered the twentieth century in crisis, with a government near collapse, a discredited Confucian civilization, and a destabilized society.

Modernizers in the late Imperial court worked together with coastal business leaders to regain control over key resources from Western Powers and generate international respect for China. Coastal Chinese were already familiar with the outside world due to several generations of treaty port life, overseas travel or emigration, and Western education that was often supported by Christian missions. After the Republic of China was established in 1911, men and women with a modern education and a strong sense of patriotism, many of them Christians, became a central element in shaping China’s early modern society.

Chinese in the coastal cities were influenced by trends that began in Britain and later spread to America. Urban migration caused by the industrial revolution caused public concern and spurred moral and social reform movements to address the social problems. Victorian virtues such as integrity, politeness, punctuality, cleanliness, honesty, thrift, and diligence were among the bourgeois values of the middle-class that created disciplined workers and responsible citizens in the urban migrant population. Gradually, a new social equilibrium was formed through the renewal of social capital—a society’s stock of shared values and habits that promoted cooperation and trust.¹

After religious leaders and missionary statesmen in England achieved success with the abolitionist campaign against the slave trade—the first international social movement, they transferred their experience to campaigns against the coolie trade and the opium trade. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) became models for other nondenominational, non-church-based international religious organizations.

British reforms spread quickly to America and grew into a broad movement called Progressivism, centered on the concept that social progress could be made through the exercise of human will, creativity, and technology.² Christians pursued holy living, both in their private lives and in humanitarian acts of charity and public service. Revivals and the resulting social reforms and social services brought a wave of optimism in Britain and America.³ A new boldness in promoting international progress, combined with the new industrial wealth of this global era, boosted the missionary movement.⁴

Western missionaries in China and returned Chinese students from overseas brought these ideas and ideals to China. Missionaries began to present the case that Christianity could make the country strong and prosperous.⁵ Many urban Chinese came to share an optimistic modernizing agenda, centered on the vision of making China a strong, modern nation-state through renewal of the Chinese people by means of education, citizenship training, and social reform.

Chinese Christians read mission publications and joined missionaries in providing social services. American-style voluntary associations responded to the hardships of the workers in the new industrial economy as well as periodic floods and droughts that devastated areas of the countryside. Hundreds of voluntary associations of all kinds, including religious, professional, and charitable types, sprang up in the larger cities.

This optimistic confidence in global progress toward a peaceful world civilization was shattered due to the chaos under warlord rule in China after 1916, the tragedies of the First World War, and the betrayal experienced by many Chinese when the Western nations acquiesced to Japan’s ambitions in China at Versailles in 1919. Many educated Chinese became critical of Christian ideals, favoring Enlightenment ideals of science and democracy. A nationalistic anti-Christian movement surfaced after 1922, peaking in 1926–1927 with the mass exodus of missionaries after attacks on Westerners in Nanjing. In order to distance Christianity from the worst of imperialistic capitalism, the YMCA and YWCA leadership began to emphasize the social nature of Christianity and de-emphasize its spiritual components.

In the crises of conflict between Nationalists and Communists, Japanese encroachment from the north after 1931, and Japanese invasion from the coast in 1937, moderate plans for cultural and social national renewal gave way to urgent political and military mobilization for the sake of national salvation. Many Chinese Christian leaders who had been internationalists and pacifists joined the nationalist cause.

Most reform efforts dissipated under Japanese occupation when religious and social organizations became absorbed in sustaining themselves and organizing relief efforts for other refugees in the West. After 1941, through the civil war of 1945–1949 and into 1950, Chinese Christians were on their own as westerners left China and missions were closed.⁶ Nonetheless, the Christian endeavor had helped to shape a modern Chinese outlook and culture.

Enduring Social Impact in China

China’s early Christians helped to plant seeds of personal character and public responsibility in a number of important fields. One historian studying the 1920s concluded that while Chinese Christians at the time were less than one percent of the population, Christian cultural legacies occupied a permanent place in modern China. The social reform projects and institutions of the mission endeavor as a whole served as models for the national cultural institutions in the first half of the twentieth century.⁷

Moral and Scientific Education

Modern educational institutions were founded by several people described in this volume. Yan Yongjing was one of the earliest Chinese to graduate from an American institution of higher education when he finished his study at Kenyon College in 1861. In 1879, he helped to found St. John’s College in Shanghai, following the American tradition of combining a modern scientific education, athletics and Christian extracurricular activities. Zhang Fuliang and five classmates at St. John’s became some of the first Boxer Fund students in America. Caroline Xu became dean of women at St. John’s University in the mid-1930s, and her husband, an alumnus, headed its department of sociology.

Zhang Boling pioneered private education in China from 1898 to 1948, at first using a secular Japanese model, but later shifting more to a Western approach, especially after his conversion to Christianity in 1908 and subsequent tour of educational institutions in both the United States and Europe. He was one of China’s leading promoters of athletics and physical fitness through his Nankai schools, as well as through the YMCA and various athletic associations, prompted by his early military experience with the physical weakness of soldiers and by his commitment to producing new Chinese citizens.

Ma Xiangbo was more influenced by the European academy tradition as a student and later a director of College St. Ignacé, the Jesuit school in Shanghai. This was reinforced during his travels in Europe in 1885–1887. The European integration of the sciences with the humanities, including theology and philosophy, characterized both Aurora Academy and Fudan University, which he founded in 1902 and in 1912. Only a decade later would he begin work on an explicitly religious curriculum for Furen Catholic University.

These school founders learned important skills in other arenas that helped them succeed in modern school management and administration. Yan worked in Shanghai businesses; Ma served in government at various levels; and Zhang had had modern military training. Two of them, Zhang Boling and Kuang Fuzhuo, were among the few in China with advanced professional training from Columbia University.

Christian schools served as incubators of modernity and patriotism. Several of Xu Qin’s daughters and their husbands taught students and served on committees for many years and then took great personal risks to help preserve premier institutions of higher education such as Yale-in China, Central China, and Wuhan universities during the Japanese occupation.

Other Modern Professions

After 1895, following China’s defeat by a modernized Japanese navy, chastened officials responded to public calls for radical reforms, and Western-educated students and those who had attended mission schools in China were suddenly in demand in the private and public sector. Yan Huiqing and Kuang Fuzhuo placed high on the first official examinations specifically given to returned students after 1905.

Kuang Fuzhuo was a pioneer in modern mass media during several decades at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, established in 1897. He devoted his working career to writing and editing English texts published by the Press. His prodigious output shaped the education of several generations of Chinese.

China’s pioneer diplomats included a number of Christians with connections to St. John’s University, where Yan Huiqing taught for six years before entering diplomatic service in 1907. For forty years, he worked to defend China’s national interests in the international arena amidst the turbulence of two world wars. In the 1920s, he served not only as foreign minister but also as prime minister and even China’s president for a brief period. His last peacemaking mission was performed as a civic leader in 1949.

Economics was another field where Chinese Christians contributed. Yin Renxian returned to China in 1920 with the desire to apply his training at Harvard University and its business school to the startup of light industry in Shanghai. Through school ties with the Nationalist leaders, he later became a government official responsible for taxation and finance at both the provincial and then national levels during the 1940s. Despite personal tragedy when three of his children died, growing political chaos, and government corruption, he maintained the reputation of a capable and upright official.

In the arts, Zhou Tingxu developed Chinese modernist painting. Because of the chaos of wartime China, he created and exhibited his pioneering landscapes overseas as he traveled the world from his home base in London and later in New York City.

The couple Sun Mingjing and Lü Jin’ai developed the professions of filmmaking and photography. Much of their work—including the creation of China’s first color film and production of the first film stock made in China—was accomplished while teaching under great hardship during the evacuation of Jinling University from Nanjing to western China. After the war, their department was moved to Beijing, where it became the foundation for today’s Beijing Film Academy.

Christian medical professionals at the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) included one of the couples from the Xu Qin family. Dorothy Xu Wang researched China’s endemic diseases, while her husband, Wang Yihui, taught obstetrics and gynecology. Wang became attending physician for China’s founding father, Sun Yat-sen, during his final bout with cancer in 1925, and his brother-in-law Zhu Yuyue, PUMC’s chaplain, led Sun’s Christian memorial service. In the early 1940s, the Wangs moved to Shanghai, where they taught at St. John’s and its medical school.

YMCA and YWCA: Seeds of Civic Organization

The international YMCA and YWCA movements were a central influence that touched most of the people described in both volumes of Salt and Light. Often they took part in youth activities in the United States and continued their affiliation upon return to China, investing their lives in moral and social reforms as the key to China’s future.

Kuang Fuzhou’s energetic support of voluntary associations rightly earned him the title of a founding father of the Chinese YMCA.

A member of the national and local boards of directors for decades and YMCA president during his last ten years of life, he also served as its English-language magazine editor.

Kuang, Yan Yangchu, and other Chinese Christian leaders helped support the YMCA’s volunteer work in Europe during World War I, which brought Chinese Christians into collaboration with those of other nations as equals. This gave them early experience in leadership initiative and also spurred their sense of China’s duty to engage in international Christian mission.⁸

Zhang Boling became a Christian in China under the influence of American YMCA workers who taught part-time in his school. He was attracted by the focus on practical Christianity and willingness to work with non-Christians to improve China. Zhang took on leadership in both the local and national YMCA, and became a popular speaker at student retreats.

The YMCA also gave birth to Chinese sports. Zhang Boling helped the YMCA-run North China Athletic Association organize China’s first national meet in 1910, and then worked to make it independent. He was honorary chair when the Chinese National Athletic Association sent the first official team to the Olympics in 1932. Zhou Tingxu, meanwhile, had become the first Chinese to win an Olympics competition in 1924 as part of the London YMCA’s basketball team.

The Xu sisters first came to China as YWCA workers. Alice and Caroline worked together at the YWCA in Shanghai before their marriages. Alice taught physical education and physics, and later worked with her husband Yan Yangchu on urban literacy when he headed a new autonomous YMCA department of popular education, the original base for the work of the Mass Education Movement. As a student at Cornell University, Helen Xu Gui was president of the campus YWCA. Later, she and her husband advised and participated in many of their activities as professors in central China. Caroline Xu Zhu became national chair of the YWCA in the late 1930s, visiting the wartime capital of Chongqing to encourage the workers in the region.

Social Service and Women in Leadership

As YWCA and YMCA leaders developed holistic approaches to problems of the rural and urban working class, their example spilled over into other voluntary civic associations. Nearly all the