| This dissertation studies the cross-cultural experiences of Americans and Chinese who participated in an American religious and educational enterprise in China known as Yale-in-China. It examines the intentions of those involved on both sides of this enterprise, and the tensions created by those intentions and expectations. Inspired by the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) at the turn of the century, a group of "manly" and "sporty" college graduates from Yale, self-defined as "evangelical" and "patriotic," decided to set up a "university extension" in China " (f) or God, for country, and for Yale." From 1906 to 1927, Yale-in-China established a middle school (Yali), a medical college (Xiangya), a hospital, and a nursing school, all in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. The program, as described by the Yale men, was "dedicated to the traditions of Yale, in education, in student life, in service. Its existence means hundreds of Chinese trained in American ways of thinking and living and transacting business." In China, the Yale men promoted something called "the Yale Spirit," affiliated themselves with the new urban elite in Chinese society, and carefully selected male students for Yale's educational purpose in China. Together, with conflict and compromise, the Americans and Chinese created a "high culture" which identified China's modern education with American influences.; This study has several purposes. First, it aims to locate the social roots and cultural consciousness of the Yale men in their decision to go to China within the context of America's religious and secular notion of expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. Secondly, it explores the cultural and political tensions between the Americans and the Chinese who participated in the Yale-in-China program, and the ways to which both sides confronted and experienced these tensions. In this interactive but unequal relationship, I focus on how individuals on both sides perceived each other and defined themselves across cultural boundaries, especially the boundaries of class, race, and nationality. Finally, I examine the paradoxical result of this American cultural experiment by looking into the rise of the May Fourth Movement in the late 1910s and the Educational Rights Recovery Movement in China in the 1920s. These movements reveal the ways in which Chinese students and faculty members acquiesced yet protested, integrated yet rejected, and learned from yet struggled against the process of Americanization at Yale-in-China. As an American educational and missionary institution transplanted to and imposed upon a Chinese community, the story of Yale-in-China and the experiences of the Americans and the Chinese affiliated with it is a microcosm of cross-cultural and political interactions between the United States and China. |
