American Missionary Justus Doolittle And The Society In Fujian In The Late Qing Dynasty

Justus Doolittle(1824-1880) was an American sinologist and a missionary of The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM). During the 20-odd years he stayed in China, he had taken part in the pioneering mission of ABCFM in Fuzhou. As a legendary American missionary in China, Doolittle set up Gezhi High School and Wenshan Women High School, published the works Social Life of the Chinese which systematically ushered to westerners the profiles of social life of the Chinese for the first time, and compiled a Chinese-English dictionary Vocabulary and Hand-Book of the Chinese Language. However, owing to various reasons, there has been no special studies in the domestic academia with regard to such an important missionary. This thesis attempts to systematically probe the overall history of Doolittle's activities in China based on the study of the original documents in English collected from Harvard University Library and Hamilton College Library and the collection of the fragmentary papers in Chinese about this missionary, aiming to reveal the profound connotation of cross-cultural exchanges between China and the western countries through the study of this case in which the American missionary contacted the various circles strata of Chinese society in the late Qing Dynasty. This thesis holds that as one of the missionaries who came to China in the late Qing Dynasty, Justus Doolittle is a typical case. We can see that they diligently strove after the success of the missionary cause. Nevertheless, because of the external pressure resulted from Chinese social backgroundthen and the internal barriers in themselves and the organization from which they came, they suffered a great number of difficulties. Hence, it is quite demanding for them to make any breakthrough in their missionary endeavors. Moreover, the case of Doolittle that he himself was finally forced to abandon the missionary assignment reflects that the abortion of the "Gospel Cause" is due to the reasons at both religious and secular levels. In a sense, it is the sharply different nature of Chinese culture and the western culture which are uncompromising and thus repel against each other that leads to such a result.