Education: End of the Open Hand

Ever since the Communists took Peking two years ago, world-famed Yenching University, symbol of Western faith, learning and respect for China, has lived under an ax. Last week the ax fell. On the ground that China must be saved from “American imperialist culture,” the Reds announced that they are taking over lock, stock & barrel. Thus ended one of the most unselfish ventures in education that Americans ever gave their minds to.

The venture began after World War I, when half a dozen Christian colleges in China decided to unite. By 1920, under wise and gentle President J. (for John) Leighton Stuart, the union was completed.

Students from all over China came to enroll—150 in 1920, and more & more each year until Yenching had over 1,100.

Philosophy to Leather. For a campus, Yenching bought a summer garden once owned by a Manchu prince. There, among artificial hills and twisting streams, rose bright pagoda-roofed Chinese buildings with classrooms for every subject from philosophy to the manufacture of leather. Harvard, Princeton and Wellesley formed their own Yenching foundations. Money poured in from U.S. philanthropists and Protestant churches.

The Yenching idea was to offer education with the open hand—not with the closed fist. In keeping with this idea, Yenching managed to be both Christian and Chinese, and—like its modern water tower disguised as a pagoda—to blend much of the best of two civilizations. With a faculty that was two-thirds Chinese and one-third American and European, students studied the Bible and Shakespeare, learned the history of their ancient dynasties from Hsia to Ching. They learned basketball and Chinese boxing, studied ancient dances and whistled the latest U.S. tunes, wore Chinese gowns and rode bicycles. On their own campus, students and scholars lived in easy harmony, with the Yenching motto—”Freedom through Truth for Service” —as their common guide.

Yenching seemed destined to survive all of China’s conflicts, however close they came. It survived, the Peking battles of the war lords, the capture of the city by Chiang Kai-shek (who quickly gave Yenching his blessing). Until 1941, even the Japanese kept their distance. Then, the day after Pearl Harbor, the conquerors took over and imprisoned President Stuart for 3½ years. Some students and professors managed to escape, walked 1,000 miles to westward, and opened the university again in Chengtu.

The Closed Fist. After the war, Yenching returned to Peking, began turning out scholars, teachers, ministers and businessmen as before. But in 30 years, Yen-ching had also been turning out other alumni—students who, in the tolerant air of Yenching, had plunked for Communism. Such Yenching alumni now hold high posts in Mao Tse-tung’s foreign ministry and his NKVD. They represent a philosophy that has no room for the Yenching idea.

Stuart’s successor, Lu Chih-wei, 56, U.S.-educated himself (Chicago, Ph.D., 1920), did not understand this at first. As the Reds moved into Peking, he made a mild and appeasing statement. Said he: “All we ask is fair play. We hope for a modus vivendi. We will probably not object to introducing courses in Marxian economics and the ‘new democracy,’ but only if they can be taught side by side with courses in the economic, social and religious principles of the Western world. Moreover, we want students to retain the right of honest criticism of any or all theories.” Dr. T. C. Chao, Anglican dean of Yenching’s school of religion, went further. When the first Red edicts came (compulsory indoctrination in Marxism, etc.), he welcomed them as enabling Christians to “participate in the construction of the new China.”

These were Lu’s and Chao’s misinterpretation of the openhanded, open-minded Yenching way of doing things, but they did not long impress China’s conquerors. The Communists indulged Yenching for a while in the notion that things might continue basically undisturbed. Meanwhile, U.S. dollars continued to flow to Yenching. Last week, with the flow of dollars now halted by U.S. Treasury restrictions, the open hand had become a closed, clenched fist.

In Shanghai this week, the Communists took over two more Christian schools: the Baptist University of Shanghai and Roman Catholic Aurora University.