Patriots or Traitors

A History of American Educated Chinese Students

Stacey Bieler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317478331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This title sxplores the love-hate relationship between the USA and China through the experience of Chinese students caught between the two countries. The book sheds light on China's ambivelance towards the Western influence, and the use of educational and cultural exhanges as a political device.

Chapter 1

Reaping the Whirlwind

China and the United States, 1880–1910

Throughout the ages, the Chinese have had only two ways of looking at foreigners: up to them as superior beings or down on them as wild animals. They have never been able to treat them as friends, to consider them as people themselves.

—Lu Xun¹

It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than a Chinaman to enter the United States… It seems to me it is very strange for a Christian country [to] treat the Chinese students so very unkindly.

—Fei Qihe²

The Empress Dowager is reaping the whirlwind with a vengeance, and it is very doubtful whether she will stay in Peking to gather the harvest. … Instead of having one or two Powers to pacify, China is at war with all the Great Powers at once, and she is at war by the choice of the Empress Dowager and her gang.

—North China Daily News, June 19, 1900³

Fei Qihe: Associate General Secretary of the YMCA in Beijing

In 1879 Fei Qihe (Fei Chi-hao) was born into a Chinese Christian family in Dong-zhao, a trading city twelve miles northeast of Beijing. He graduated in 1898 from North China College, a school partially supported by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Congregationalist), and went to teach at a mission school in Taigu in Shanxi province, southwest of Beijing. During a school break he went sixty miles southwest to visit his sister in Fenzhou, a city of 50,000. She introduced him to her missionary friends, Charles and Eva Price, graduates of Oberlin College in Ohio who had come to China in 1889 to join the Oberlin Mission, which was part of the American Board.⁴ After being accused of being too strict with his pupils, Fei moved to Fenzhou to teach. He continued his English lessons with the missionaries since his earlier formal education focused on Chinese classics, the Bible, and Western learning.⁵

During February 1900, the Price family and other missionaries heard rumors of foreigners being killed by men associated with the Fists of Righteous Harmony (Yihe tuan), commonly called “Boxers” by Westerners. The secret society of martial arts and spirit possession, whose slogan was “Support the Qing [dynasty], destroy the foreign,” arose in the neighboring province of Shandong to the east of Shanxi province. Fifty years of foreign imports to this coastal province had ruined rural economies, and Christian missionaries had destabilized the social structure within villages.⁶ In the spring of 1900, the foreign community in Shandong successfully pressured the Qing court to dismiss Yu-xian, the governor who supported the Boxers. Yu-xian was then assigned to the governorship of Shanxi province, where he persuaded Cixi, the empress dowager, and the conservative Manchu princes, who had taken over the throne after the Reform Movement in 1898, to recognize the Boxers as a regular militia organization and as true patriots who would drive the foreigners out of China. Granting this right of association was a radical departure from usual Chinese politics that prohibited private associations.⁷

In June, Fei joined hundreds of spectators watching twenty teenage Boxers practice Chinese boxing and recruit followers inside the East Gate of Fenzhou.

After muttering a rhymed jargon they bowed toward the southeast, then fell in a trance. Soon they rose, and showing their teeth, brandished their arms, and kicked about wildly for a while, then fell again on their backs. Thus they lay until other boys tapped lightly on their foreheads, when they would get up and go about as usual. … I asked afterward the meaning of the rhyme the boys had muttered, and learned that it was an invocation to the gods to come down and possess their bodies.⁸

Although Governor Yu-xian encouraged the Boxers by offering titles or money to all who killed foreigners, Fenzhou remained fairly calm because the local magistrate protected the missionaries.

At the end of June, the missionaries heard rumors that all the foreigners in Beijing had been killed. Since the mail had stopped, the rumors could not be confirmed. Eva Price hoped that the rains would come so the people’s anxiety about a coming drought would subside and anger toward the missionaries would lessen.⁹As the tensions increased, another Chinese Christian encouraged Fei to recant his faith, but Fei replied that he could not give up his religion for his “heart would never again be at peace.”¹⁰ On July 29, a new local magistrate told the missionaries that they would be escorted safely to the coast, but they did not believe him since two days earlier Governor Yu-xian had issued a proclamation calling for the extermination of all foreigners. When news came about the beheading of thirty-three missionaries at Taiyuan in the presence of Yu-xian earlier in the month, Price wrote, “Were I to write a whole book I could not tell of the dreadful suspense of the past six weeks.”¹¹ Although the missionaries encouraged Fei to leave the compound, he returned three days later because he had nowhere to go. While he was gone, the Boxers and government troops had wiped out the Taigu mission, including Fei’s sister and some of his former students.¹² The mission station at Fenzhou was the last one in the province.

On the morning of August 15, Charles Price took Fei aside and gave him some traveling money and a piece of cloth, saying, “This is a trustworthy man; he will tell you of our fate. C.W Price.” It would be sure death if the Boxers caught Fei carrying a foreign letter, but the small piece of cloth was easily concealed.¹³ As the soldiers escorted the missionaries out of Fenzhou, the villagers lined the streets. After twenty miles, a soldier told Fei that all of the missionaries would be killed in the next village. Having already taken Fei’s horse, the soldiers took his money, but allowed him to flee. The next day Fei crept into the village and heard that the Prices, the other seven adults (five missionaries and two Chinese Christians), and three children had been killed and their bodies were dumped outside the village.¹⁴With all of his friends dead, Fei traveled 400 miles by foot to tell the American consul in Tianjin of their fate and then to Beijing, where he found that his mother and father had both committed suicide at the prompting of another son, who was not a Christian, in order to save the rest of the family.

The whole country was in upheaval. The Boxers killed hundreds of Western missionaries, destroying their churches and homes. They killed thousands of Chinese Christians and ruined their property, chanting the slogan “Destroy Christians root and branch.” The arrival of the China Relief Expedition, an army of soldiers from seven Western nations and Japan, did not stabilize the situation. As the Chinese soldiers fled before the advancing Allies, they harried the countryside, and then the foreign soldiers brought a reign of terror that lasted for several months.¹⁵

Filled with sorrow from losing both his family and his friends, Fei wrote to his missionary friend Alice Williams, whom he had met in Taigu and who was now living in Oberlin. Because of her mother’s failing health and serious financial difficulties in the Taigu mission, Alice and her daughters had returned to the United States in 1899. Her husband, George, who had remained at the Taigu mission to care for opium addicts, had been murdered two weeks before the Prices. Fei wrote, “I am more full of sorrow than I can say. … I like to go and see my parents and the other friends now, because I feel very badly. … I fear I never can get peace and happy again. If I am the child of the Lord why He gives me the sorrow so great more than I can bear?”¹⁶

In 1901 Fei accepted an offer to study in the United States, a dream he had cherished for ten years. He traveled on the Doric with American Board missionary Luella Miner, an 1884 graduate of Oberlin College, and his college friend Kong Xiangxi (H.H. Kung), who had remained by the missionaries in Taigu before they were killed.¹⁷ Both men planned to attend Oberlin, hoping to offer condolences to their friends’ families and give them their last letters. They planned to equip themselves in order to return to China in the missionaries’ place. They joined the trickle of students, mostly supported by American missionaries, and some by provincial governors in China, who came to the United States after 1881.¹⁸

The two men arrived in San Francisco on September 12, 1901. The immigration officers rejected their passports due to technicalities, even though they were signed by Viceroy Li Hongzhang and accepted by the U.S. consulate in Tianjin. Although Miner vouched that they were genuine students, the omissions and mistakes made by the American consul in China caused the immigration officers to deny their landing. After another week aboard the docked ship, the two men were put in overcrowded detention sheds with barred windows on the wharf.¹⁹ After Kong became ill, they were released on $1,000 bond each which was provided by the Chinese consul-general in San Francisco, and were allowed to study at a mission in the city. When the paperwork arrived back from China, the American immigration officials rejected it again. Hearing there would be another delay, the two men and Miner started for Oberlin, but after the northern train crossed into Canada, they were again barred from reentering the United States at Portal, North Dakota. While the Chinese counsel in New York made many appeals, they waited in Toronto for the third set of papers to be accepted. They were disappointed when they were not able to be in Oberlin on October 16, 1902, for the laying of the cornerstone of the Martyrs’ Memorial Arch, which honored the ten Oberlin graduates and their children who had been killed during the Boxer Uprising.

They finally reached Oberlin on January 10, 1903, sixteen months after landing in San Francisco. On the morning of May 14, they attended the dedication of the Arch. Two plaques, engraved with the names of the Oberlin alumnae whom the men knew, hung on the inner walls of the rough Indiana limestone arch.²⁰ In his dedication speech, the Reverend Frank S. Fitch, a member of the American Board and an alumnus and trustee of Oberlin College, said,

They had gone to a remote and quiet province and engaged in the usual forms of missionary service: preaching, teaching, caring for the sick. They at no time failed to inculcate patriotism. They taught a spiritual religion such as has been found most favorable to industry, sobriety, and reverence for authority. … They were quiet men and women—lovers of peace, schooled in the doctrine of non-resistance, made heroes by necessity. … It must be a chastened optimism that draws hope from this scene, yet who can despair of the republic of God when such lives are lived and such deaths are endured joyfully.²¹

For years Oberlin students commemorated the sacrifice by parading through the arch as part of their graduation ceremonies.

The two men served as mascots for their classmates. In their first yearbook, the two of them are sitting with the caption, “Heroes of Cathay,” along with jokes, poems, and drawings. In the following year’s class picture, they were dressed in Western-style clothes making them almost indistinguishable from their classmates. In their junior class picture they were in Chinese dress, sitting prominently on pedestals beside the steps. Although the Martyrs’ Memorial had been erected several years earlier, a color picture of the arch was on the yearbook’s cover the year they graduated. The quotation accompanying Fei’s senior picture was “How the girls all love him!” while Kong’s was “You blooming heathen.”²²

The only campus organization the two of them belonged to was the Student Volunteers for Foreign Missions, whose slogan was “The Evangelization of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chronology or Chinese Students’ Lives
• Prologue. Planting Talents for the Future: The Chinese Educational Mission, 1872–1881
• Chapter 1. Reaping the Whirlwind: China and the United States, 1880–1910
• Chapter 2. Preparing Students for the United States: Tsinghua School, 1911–1928
• Chapter 3. Sailing from Shanghai
• Chapter 4. Carrying a Satchel in a Strange Land
• Chapter 5. Experimenting with Democracy
• Chapter 6. Student Ambassadors
• Chapter 7. The Road that Leads to Home
• Chapter 8. Smashing the Bridge to the West
• Chapter 9. No Place to Display One’s Talents
• Epilogue. Continuing the Quest for Modernization: Chinese Students in the United States, 1978–2002
• Timeline
• Appendix A: Chinese Students in the United States, 1914
• Appendix B: List of Boxer Scholars and Tsinghua Alumni Teaching at Tsinghua, 1925–1926
• Appendix C: Countries of Origin of Foreign Students in the United States for the Academic Year 1923–1924
• Appendix D: Top Last Schools Attended in China for Students in American Colleges and Universities, 1854–1953
• Appendix E: “Don’ts” for Foreigners When Discussing China
• Appendix F: “Truth” about China and the United States
• Appendix G: Top American Colleges and Universities Granting Degrees to Chinese Students, 1854–1953
• Appendix H: Fields of Study, Chinese Students in the United States, 1905–1932
• Appendix I: “The Return of the Donkey”
• Notes
• Glossary of Names
• Glossary of Phrases
• Sources for Illustrations
• Bibliography
• Index