St John's University, Shanghai

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Patricia Wen, The Lost Liberal arts University of China. Sixty years ago, the government shuttered an unusual outpost of Western education in Shanghai. Today, its powerful but elderly alumni are scattered all over the world—and they’d like nothing more than to bring back St John’s. Boston Globe, Mar 4, 2012.
http://articles.boston.com/2012- ... s-lu-ping-hong-kong

(a) Excerpt in the window of print: The alumni of St John's and China's other missionary-founded colleges turned out to be crucial to th enation's success as it r5eentered the world stage.

(b) Quote:

"Its last students graduated in 1952, the year the missionary-founded school was shuttered by China’s Communist leadership. The members of that class — the youngest at the reunion — are now in their early 80s.

"at its peak it graduated about 300 people a year.

"My father graduated in the class of 1949 and moved to the United States soon afterward, and like so many other alumni, never lost his sense of devotion to the college. As I walked through the reunion events with him last fall, what I saw was hundreds of high-spirited octogenarians unselfconsciously displaying their own natural blend of East and West. At the festivities, they chatted in Mandarin or English, wore Chinese jackets or Western blazers, sang Chinese opera or belted out 'Auld Lang Syne.'

"According to Harvard government professor Elizabeth Perry, whose parents once taught at St. John’s, China in the late 19th century didn’t have an established higher education system, but rather scattered private academies that helped train scholars to pass the imperial exam for, among other things, government posts. Into this vacuum stepped groups of Western missionaries, including the founders of the former Yenching University in Beijing, which would rival St. John’s as the most prestigious private college in China during this period.

"China’s leaders were worried that the missionaries from St. John’s wanted to change China from within, and to an extent they were right: The bishops hoped to create a new generation of clergymen to spread Christianity. But conversion rates among students were low; the missionaries realized their goal was unrealistic, and St. John’s evolved into a more secular institution. (St John’s was originally all male, but began to accept women beginning in the 1930s.)

(c) My comment:
(i) A year ago, Boston Globe, owned by New York Times Company for about two decades, erected a pay wall to charge most of its content. I read the print version, so this is not a big problem. But it becomes a problem if and when I recommend a report there, which is a rarity, thankfully. For this report, I first went to the newspaper's website, and the search result required payment. I then googled and found this same report at its website, which is free.
(ii) Saint John's University, Shanghai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John%27s_University,_Shanghai
(1879-1952; founded in 1879 as "St John's College" by William Jones Boone and Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, Bishop of Shanghai, by combining two pre-existing Anglican colleges in Shanghai; first taught mainly in Chinese. In 1891 it changed to teaching with English as the main language; In 1905, St. John's College became St. John's University; The campus became the site of the East China University of Politics and Law)

* Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Isaac_Joseph_Schereschewsky
(Jewish; born in 1831 in Russian Lithuania; died in 1906 in Tokyo)

The Wiki page does not mention his nationality.

(iii) Raymond Chow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chow
(1929- )
(iv) Yenching University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenching_University
(It integrated three Christian colleges in the city in 1919; After the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, Yenching University with its Christian background was closed; "Peking University obtained the Yenching campus: In 1952 Peking University moved from central downtown Beijing to the previous Yenching campus in the city's Haidian district")