Good Intentions: Orientalism and Grinnell’s Mission to China in the 20th Century

Abstract

In this research paper, I draw on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism to examine the history of Grinnell-in-China, a missionary program initiated and funded by Grinnell College from 1912 to 1941^[1] in partnership with the American Board’s^[2] North China Mission.^[3] This program funded Porter-Wyckoff Middle,^[4] a comprehensive English language school for boys and girls in Dezhou^[5] in the Shandong Province of China as well as three teaching posts at Shantung Christian University.^[6] The missionaries saw themselves as fighting back against British and Japanese imperialism in China,^[7] yet ironically their inability to divorce themselves from an Orientalist understanding of China ended up making them complicit in, or even the primary agents of, the promotion of cultural imperialism.^[8] I argue that while Grinnell-in-China was motivated by genuine humanitarian anti-imperialist impulses, the Grinnell missionaries in practice used their humanitarian work to attempt to control and mold the Chinese recipients of their aid in a project of cultural imperialism^[9] that was based on a profoundly Orientalist understanding of Chinese culture.

^[1] Lisa M. Bowers, “A History of Grinnell-in-China 1910-1930” (Unpublished Manuscript, May 10, 1980), 4-5, Box 56, Folder P27, Grinnell-in-China Papers, Burling Library, Grinnell (Hereafter GiC).

^[2] The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionaries was an interdenominational organization to organize and support Protestant missionaries founded in 1810. See James A. Field, “Near East Notes and Far East Queries” in John K. Fairbank ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 29.

^[3] Harold S. Matthews, Seventy-Five Years of the North China Mission (Peking: Yenching University, 1936), 104.

^[4] These were originally two separate schools, Porter Middle School for Boys and the Grace Wyckoff Memorial School for Girls, but they were merged into a single, co-ed, institution in 1929. See Bowers, “A History of Grinnell-In-China,” 44, in box 56, folder P27, GiC.

^[5] I have chosen to use the modern form of romanization in this paper. Several of my archival sources use the older romanization of Techow.

^[6] This university was run by the Presbyterian Shantung Mission. See Bowers, “A History of Grinnell-in-China 1910-1930,” 5, in box 56, folder P27, GiC. Also, Alex Mayfield, Daryl Ireland, and Eugenio Menegon, China Historical Christian Database, V1, June 24, 2022, accessed May 10, 2023, https://data.chcdatabase.com.

^[7] Bowers, “A History of Grinnell-in-China 1910-1930,” 6.

^[8] Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism” in John K. Fairbank ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

^[9] Cultural imperialism is defined in “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism” by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as the attack on the ideas and values of one culture by another. See Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism,” 363.