4 - Educational Crisis in Shanxi: An Analysis of Brethren Mission Schools in Republican China

In 1908, the Church of the Brethren sent their first missionaries from the United States to China.  They set up operations in eastern Shanxi province, taking over for the English Baptists who had suffered death and destruction at the hands of the Boxers.  Influenced by the Pietist and Anabaptist traditions, the Brethren were pacifists who rejected nationalism in favor of internationalism and cross-cultural engagement, prompted by collaborative influences from the international Protestant missionary movement. The Brethren also emphasized the importance of education, and therefore quickly built schools throughout Shanxi province. Within this environment, the Brethren missionaries were completely surprised when their own students began accusing them of Western imperialism in the 1920s. Ultimately, in response to such criticism, the missionaries began “indigenizing” the school’s curriculum and structure according to public demands.  At the same time the Brethren tried to coordinate their reforms with guidelines coming from leading Protestant missionaries and Chinese political leaders. The Brethren educational experience sheds light on several larger issues of the day.  Despite their commitment to pacifism and internationalism, the Brethren could not shake their own identities as Americans and agents of Westernization.  This experience also highlights the political and intellectual debates of Republican China, when such various Western ideas as Christianity, democracy, socialism, syndicalism, and even Esperanto where adopted, amended, and often rejected by a growing bloc of Chinese nationalists. The analysis of the Brethren’s Shanxi schools provide provocative lessons on the larger topic of Sino-American educational exchange.