The Field of Chinese Language Education in the U.S.

A Retrospective of the 20th Century

Vivian Ling, Vivian Ling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351384995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book will be the first account of the development of Chinese as a foreign language in the U.S., as it interacts with the relevant entities in China and beyond. Thereare virtually no systematic retrospective reflections on the field outside of the greater China region; and yet over the past decades the field has grown by leaps and bounds, and it is critical now that we pause to reflect on what has happened and what we can learn from the past. The contributors are among some of the most influential pioneers in the field whose entire academic lives have been dedicated to its development.

The Field of Chinese Language Education in the U.S.: A Retrospective of the20th Century is aimed at those who are currently engaged in Chinese language education, as teachers or as students.

1 Pioneering Chinese studies in the era before Chinese language curriculum existed in American academia

Paul S. Ropp

Introduction

In this chapter I will examine how some of the key pioneers in Chinese studies in the U.S. came to acquire their varying degrees of proficiency in the Chinese language, or languages, considering that we must include spoken and written Mandarin (putonghua or guoyu) and classical Chinese (wenyan). This chapter is necessarily selective and incomplete as I am dependent on the sources available, and few of the early pioneers in the China field have written in much detail about their Chinese language training. To organize this material, I will discuss these pioneers in the chronological order of their births, which reveals an interesting pattern. I will first discuss those, born between 1884 and 1903, who spent all or part of their childhoods in China. These were mostly missionary children and they were the earliest pioneers of Chinese studies, as there were in fact no academic programs in the U.S. focused on China until the 1930s.

Next I will discuss the pioneers, born between 1905 and 1909, who came to Chinese studies through their college and graduate studies, and went to China specifically to study the Chinese language and other fields such as history, archaeology, political science, and so forth. Of this latter group, there were only a couple of options for Westerners studying Chinese in the early twentieth century: the North China Union Language School, founded in 1910 by British missionaries, and Yenching University where, after 1929, Western students could be supported by a Harvard-Yenching Institute fellowship, find personal tutors, and make the acquaintance of Chinese peers.

The North China Union Language School was taken over by the YMCA in 1916 and William Pettus was appointed the director. Under the direction of Pettus, the school changed its name to the College of Chinese Studies and broadened its clientele to include diplomats, scholars, military and business personnel. In 1924, the college began a four-year collaboration with Yenching University in order to secure funds from the Hall Estate¹ and changed its name to the Yenching School of Chinese Studies for this period. In 1928 the collaboration with Yenching University ended and Pettus went to the U.S. where he succeeded in raising funds, particularly from the state of California, to create the California College in China Foundation in 1929. The school was then called the North China Union Language School Cooperating with California College in China, and in 1932 it was renamed the College of Chinese Studies Cooperating with California College in China. After Japan’s occupation of China, Pettus in 1941 moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he established a four-year program of study in Chinese language and culture for military and government personnel in the university’s Extension Department.² These many institutional and name changes, in what began as the North China Union Language School, testify to the precarious funding in the early twentieth century for training of Americans, at any level, in Chinese language, history and culture.

Of the pioneers born between 1905 and 1909, all but C. Martin Wilbur and John Fairbank studied at Yenching University, and most of them received financial support from the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Yenching University began as a missionary enterprise, but it was largely secularized by 1929, due in no small part to the anti-Christian movement in China. Patterned after liberal arts colleges in America, it was a very comfortable setting for aspiring American scholars of China, for their language study, for meeting Chinese peers, and for acquiring disciplinary expertise in such areas as archaeology, history, and literature.

“Head Start” childhoods in China

Most of the first Sinologists in the U.S. came from missionary background. These were men (all men, it seems)³ who grew up in China, partially raised by Chinese servants and with Chinese children as playmates. This group included L. Carrington Goodrich, Arthur W. Hummel, Homer H. Dubs, and George Kennedy.⁴ Owen Lattimore spent part of his childhood in China where his parents taught English, and Peter Boodberg, born of Russian nobility, spent part of his childhood in Harbin.

Arthur W. Hummel (1884–1975)

Arthur W. Hummel was born in Warrenton, Missouri, in 1884. He was not a product of missionary parents but became a missionary himself, after receiving three degrees from the University of Chicago, a BA (1909), an MA (1911) and a Bachelor of Divinity (1914). He spent the summers of 1913 and 1914 in Kobe, Japan, teaching English, and after marriage in 1914 he and his wife went to Fenzhou, Shaanxi, where he taught at a middle school for boys. In Fenzhou Hummel studied Chinese in his spare time, and began to collect old Chinese coins and maps. In 1924 they moved to Peking and he took a teaching post at the Yenching School of Chinese Studies. They returned to the U.S. in 1927, escaping the unrest that accompanied the Nationalist Party’s Northern Expedition.

Hummel joined the Library of Congress where he intended to work briefly and return to China, but instead he was soon appointed head of the Orientalia Division (later to become the Asia Division) and he proceeded to build the Library of Congress Asia collection into one of the best in the U.S., with particular strengths in local histories, collectanea (congshu), and rare books. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 1931, in the words of David B. Honey, “based as much on his distinguished service to scholarship as on his dissertation, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian,” based on Gu Jiegang’s preface to his Gushi bian.⁵

Hummel’s greatest contribution to scholarship was his leadership in mobilizing funding, recruiting contributors for, and editing the Qing biographical dictionary, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period. This massive project, containing biographies of 800 men and (including a few) women, was described by the Chinese philosopher, educator and diplomat Hu Shih upon its publication in 1943 as “the most detailed and the best history of China of the last three hundred years that one can find anywhere today.”⁶

Homer H. Dubs (1892–1969)

Homer H. Dubs grew up with his missionary family in Hunan, after which he studied philosophy in the U.S., first as an undergraduate at Yale, and then completing an MA at Columbia in 1916 and studying at Union Theological Seminary before returning to mission work in Nanjing and Hunan. He then completed his PhD in Chinese philosophy at the University of Chicago, and completed a two-volume translation of the Confucian philosopher Xunzi (Hsüntse, the Moulder of Ancient Confucianism, London, 1927–28).

Dubs taught for two years at the University of Minnesota and for seven years at Marshall College. Commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies to translate one of the Chinese dynastic histories, he worked with two Chinese collaborators, first at the Library of Congress from 1934 to 1937, and later at Duke, to translate and annotate the basic annals of the Hanshu and the treatise on Wang Mang, published in three volumes, The History of the Former Han Dynasty (Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1938, 1944, 1955). He moved to England in 1947 to assume the Oxford Chair in Chinese. There he helped build up the Chinese collections of the Bodleian and the library of the Oriental Institute. David Honey has said of Dubs,

aside from [German-trained Berthold] Laufer [who worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and studied archaeology and technology in China], he was the most prolific professional sinologist to publish in English during his era, and the most distinguished historian of philosophy among English or American sinologists.⁷

L. Carrington Goodrich (1894–1986)

L. Carrington Goodrich was born of Protestant missionary parents in Tongzhou, a suburb of Peking, in 1894. He grew up speaking Chinese and developed a lifelong interest in Chinese printing and Chinese books. Immediately after World War I he served in France as a translator for Chinese workers then assigned to help rebuild the war-ravaged country. He started graduate work at Columbia University in 1920, but soon returned to China to serve as assistant resident director of the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He traveled widely visiting hospitals and medical schools for the Board which had established the Peking Union Medical College, which was to become the most selective medical school teaching Western medicine in China.

He returned to Columbia in 1925 to continue his graduate education, receiving his MA in 1927 and his PhD in 1934. His doctoral dissertation, The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-lung, has remained the major English-language source on the eighteenth-century destruction of works deemed subversive by the Qing government. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1935 and he helped build Columbia into one of the leading libraries and centers of research on China in the U.S. His 1934 book, A Short History of the Chinese People, went through four printings, the latest in 1969. In 1959 he became the director of the Ming Biographical Project, and in that capacity he helped raise the funds and then coordinated the efforts of some 125 scholars to produce the two-volume Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644, published by Columbia University Press in 1976.⁸

Owen Lattimore (1900–1989)

While John Fairbank is widely recognized as the central figure in building the academic field of modern Chinese history in the U.S., a number of other individuals played important roles in promoting the study of Chinese history, literature and society from different angles, and in promoting the study of the Chinese language. Owen Lattimore is a prime example of a pioneer of a very different sort from Fairbank, who – in his recollections of China in the 1930s – observes that the “most interesting” Westerner in China in those days was Owen Lattimore, who was to become the world’s leading authority on Mongolia and relations between China and its nomadic neighbors to the north and west.

Lattimore spent his early childhood in Tianjin where his parents taught English, but while he came to understand spoken Mandarin, he didn’t gain much fluency because his father didn’t want him to learn Chinese from the servants. He feared that would give him a “servant mentality.” At age 12, he went to a boarding school in Switzerland, and at the onset of World War I he went to England where he attended St. Bees School until the age of 19 when, on being denied a scholarship to Oxford, he returned to China, and his real Chinese education began.

Needing to make a living, Lattimore worked at several different jobs over the next few years, and became something of a troubleshooter traveling widely to assess the insurability of Chinese factories, or checking on the production of textiles or other goods in the interior. He began studying Chinese on his own time, and became very adept at traveling solo without porters or escorts or translators of any kind. He also developed a strong sympathy for the Chinese and concurrently considerable enmity for the Westerners in China. “I despised the white people in the European and American community in which I lived, considering them terribly philistine and unaesthetic. This prevented me from having the attitude that all white men were superior to all those yellow people.” He also observed that many Westerners regarded him as quite strange for traveling widely in the interior and learning to communicate with the Chinese in their own language.⁹

When he realized that wool from Mongolia and Xinjiang was one of the principal commodities leaving China from Tianjin, he proposed to his company that he travel there to assess supplies of wool and make his company more competitive in negotiating prices. His bosses replied that travel in the northwest was too dangerous, so instead he accepted the company’s offer to work in Peking for a year. In Peking he met and married Eleanor Holgate who helped encourage his adventurous curiosity about the caravan trade and the nomadic peoples of Manchuria and Mongolia. He did travel there in 1926 and was first arrested on suspicion of being a spy and then stranded for six months because of the civil war between the northern warlords and the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek. But this precarious adventure only whetted his appetite for knowledge of the Inner Asian frontier, and he was determined to become an authority on Mongolian life and culture.

After he and Eleanor traveled through Xinjiang to Kashmir in October 1927, they spent the winter in Rome where he wrote his first book, The Desert Road to Turkestan, before returning, nearly broke, to the U.S. in 1928. On the strength of his new book, the Social Science Research Council granted him a one-year fellowship to study anthropology at Harvard. With the support of an eccentric wealthy American, Robert Barrett, the Lattimores returned to China in 1929 and spent nine months in Manchuria which resulted in a second book, Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (1932). He then received a year-long fellowship from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and two successive fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Jr. Foundation, so with this generous support he lived in Peking, began to study the Mongolian language, and became the world’s foremost authority on the nomadic peoples of Manchuria and Mongolia.

Lattimore’s career was fated, it seems, to be unconventional from start to finish. In 1934 he became the editor of Pacific Affairs, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations. As editor, he welcomed articles from all perspectives, an open-mindedness that would eventually get him blacklisted in the McCarthy era of the 1950s. In 1938 he...