The University of Michigan and China: 1845-2006
For nearly a century and a half, the University of Michigan has had a close relationship with China. The range of activities is quite impressive and speaks to the dedication of the university to fostering international understanding and progress.
James B. Angell, President, University
of Michigan (1871-1909) and U.S.
Minister to China (1880-81).
James Burrell Angell Papers, Box 14
The early, close ties between the University of Michigan and China have been largely attributed to University of Michigan President James B. Angell, who took a temporary leave from the university in order to serve the United States government as Minister to China in 1880-81. Angell was extremely knowledgeable about China and moved with ease in the highest circles. He also understood the importance of opening Michigan to students from China. However, Michigans administrators, academics, students, and alumni held an interest in China even prior to Angell. For example, one of the eleven graduates in the first class to graduate from the university, Judson Dwight Collins (class of 1845), went to China as a missionary two years after graduation. His diary, started the day after Commencement, preserved a detailed account of his life and thoughts during his mission in China. It was not uncommon at that time for graduates of the nations leading universities upon receipt of their degrees to travel to China as missionaries or in other capacities.
Missionaries activities in China partly reflected the countrys political scene in the middle and late nineteenth century. The Middle Kingdom, which had by custom closed its shores to the rest of the world, was gradually forced open under the eras western imperial expansion, particularly after the Opium War (1839-41). For the first time in modern history, the old east was meeting the new west, and foreign diplomatic services were portrayed in the foreground as never before. By 1880, when President Angell was appointed minister to China, he was asked to negotiate a treaty regarding the influx of Chinese immigrants along the American west coast; their arrival had been stimulated by the need for inexpensive labor in the building of railways. Angell accepted the appointment with the support of the universitys Regents and the university community, well aware of the distinction this appointment afforded him and the university. Little was foreseen then that his appointment would signal the introduction of an enduring exchange between the University of Michigan and China and the important role that the university would play in US-China relations.
Two significant results materialized for the University of Michigan out of Angells ministry in China. One was the acquisition of an exhibit that the Chinese government had sent to the New Orleans World Industrial & Cotton Centennial Exposition. Thanks to Angells friendship with Sir Robert Hart, the president of the Chinese commission for the Exposition, the latter presented the exhibit to the university as a gift on behalf of the Chinese government. The exhibit was duly set up in the universitys museum space at the time, and for forty years it was a center of interest to students and visitors.
The other result, if not so spectacular a visual display as the exhibit, was even more enduring. Following Angells term in China, the University of Michigan witnessed the arrival of Chinese students at Michigan. Angell himself had personally labored to make this possible. Upon the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), the foreign forces consisting of eight countries demanded an indemnity of $333 million from the Chinese government over a period of forty years. Angell, together with other educators and like-minded people, pushed the U.S. government to return the Boxer Indemnity to China for the establishment of a scholarship program that would allow Chinese students to come to the United States for education.
In 1908, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution remitting to China much of the U.S. share of the Boxer Indemnity, to establish the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture. On April 29, 1911, Tsinghua Xuetang, predecessor of the now prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, was founded with part of the returned indemnity. It was the first preparatory school for those students who were later sent by the Chinese government to study in U.S. At the same time, a Chinese educational commissioner, while touring the United States in 1905 to determine schools for the indemnity students, placed the University of Michigan among the top five choices, along with Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell. Between 1911 and 1917, the University of Michigan student population included between fifty and seventy individuals from China, thus ranking it among the top three American universities in terms of Chinese student enrollment. The Chinese Student Club was founded at the University of Michigan around 1913 to represent Chinese students on the campus and to organize activities.
Mary Stone, Barbour Scholar
University of Michigan Medical
School graduate, 1896
Barbour Scholarships for Oriental
Women Committee (University of
Michigan) Records, Box 1,
photograph envelope 1.
Meanwhile, the tradition begun by Judson Dwight Collins also continued in its own way. Generations of University of Michigan graduates have gone to China, many working as missionaries. Among them were two Chinese women educated at the university, Ida Kahn and Mary Stone (1896 medical school graduates). Working as medical missionaries in their native country upon graduation, these two women deeply impressed one of the university regents, Levi Lewis Barbour, who was then traveling in Asia on a round-the-world trip. Upon his return to Michigan, Barbour started to plan for a scholarship specifically for Asian women that would allow them to come to the U.S. for education in whatever field they chose and then return to better serve their countries of origin.
In the nineteenth century, Asian women were still very much bound to their families and education was a privilege seldom bestowed on them. Indeed, two Barbour scholars recounted their stories of dressing up as boys in order to be able to attend school in their youth. Given such limitations at home, the establishment of the Barbour Scholarships for Oriental Women at the University of Michigan offered a unique opportunity for those who had the courage and determination to blaze a trail into a future of coeducation and beyond.
Barbour Scholarship Recipients, 1924-25
Barbour Scholarships for Oriental Women Committee
(University of Michigan) Records, oversized photographs.
Former Barbour Scholarship Recipients gathered in
Shanghai, 1947
Barbour Scholarships for Oriental Women Committee
(University of Michigan) Records,
photograph envelope 1.
The formal establishment of the Barbour scholarship program was not completed until 1917, but the arrival of Asian women under Barbours sponsorship started as early as 1914 and it was not long before Chinese women constituted the majority of the scholars. Most of them returned to China after receiving degrees from the University of Michigan, with many further devoting themselves to the education of women by becoming teachers in womens colleges in China. Two of them became college presidents. One of them, Yi-Fang Wu (Ph.D, 1928), was the first female college president in China, heading Ginling College from 1928 to 1952 before it was combined with the University of Nanking (Nanjing).
Wu Yi-Fang, Barbour Scholar,
1924-1928; University of Michigan,
Ph.D., 1928. President of Ginling
Women's College, Nanjing, China,
1928-1951.
Anne Louise Welch Papers, Box 1.
While Chinese students continued to enroll in relatively strong numbers at the University of Michigan, American students at the university were realizing a steadily growing interest in the east, particularly Japan and China. The year 1930 saw the establishment of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. In 1936, an inter-departmental Oriental Civilizations Program was initiated and by 1938 the program had extended to offer both M.A. and Ph.D degrees. It was also in the 1930s that the university started instruction on the Chinese language and courses were offered on the Chinese economy and the art of China.
Also, prior to World War II, Michigans Law school provided three deans for Dong Wu University, one of Chinas most prestigious law schools, and now part of Suzhou University.
Following the Chinese Nationalist partys defeat in 1949 and retreat to Taiwan, official exchanges and communications between Mainland China and the United States stopped abruptly due to ideological differences. Yet at the same time, an interest in China and Chinese studies continued to grow steadily at the University of Michigan. This interest was formalized by the establishment of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures, the establishment of a Far Eastern Studies Program, the receipt of the Freer Fund for the Study of Oriental Art, and finally, the establishment of the Center for Chinese Studies.
By 1961, the universitys College of Literature, Science and the Arts had six full-time faculty teaching and conducting research on China in such areas as language and literature, art history, sociology, and history. The Chinese language collection at the Asia Library grew to a promising number of 30,000 volumes. Finally, the Center for Chinese Studies was established in 1961, following the model of the Center for Japanese Studies. Since the founding of the center, the university has experienced a significant growth in the Chinese Studies program and it quickly gained an international prominence. This further institutionalization of a long interest introduced an era in which the University of Michigan became a national leader in Chinese studies in all aspects: the best students in the country came to the university to study China, graduates captured key jobs available throughout the country and abroad, scholars requests to come as visitors swamped the center, and faculty members often debriefed analysts in government and ran seminars for business leaders. Some faculty even served in key positions or as consultants to the U.S. President and other high-level officials. It was, then, only natural that those with a connection to the University of Michigan would play an important role as the relationship between the United States and China began to normalize in the 1970s.
University of Michigan campus aerial view, 1946.
News and Information Services (University
of Michigan) Records, Series A, Box 3,
"Campus-6".
In 1972, the Chinese Ping Pong delegation arrived in Detroit for a visit to the U.S., in response to an invitation from the table tennis team of the University of Michigan. The visit was arranged by Alexander Eckstein, Professor of Economics, whose work on the history of the Chinese economy was well known. Prior to that visit, the American table tennis team had already made a trip to Mainland China. These two events marked the beginning of formal communication between the two nations and the end of over two decades of hostility since 1949. They were later known for their famous Ping Pong Diplomacy.
While Michigan faculty and graduates were playing leading roles in advancing the relationship between the U.S. and China, the university also made an early start in taking advantage of the new opportunities presented by the reopening of communications. In 1976, a delegation of regents and faculty from the university visited China for two weeks, the first U.S. academic delegation to step into Mainland China since 1949. The trip was such a success that the next year another regents delegation visit was organized.
In 1977, Michel Oksenberg, professor of political science and former director of the Center for Chinese Studies, was appointed special assistant to President Jimmy Carter and senior staff for East Asia and China at the National Security Council. Under his efforts, formal diplomatic relations between China and the U.S. were finally established, in January 1979. Another director of the Center, Prof. Kenneth Lieberthal, was appointed as special assistant to President William Clinton and Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. During his tenure, the relationship between the United States and China entered a new stage, as the two nations pledged to build a Constructive Strategic Partnership.
These visits marked the beginning of a series of high-level academic exchanges between China and the university. In 1979, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was invited to Ann Arbor for a visit. Two years later, University of Michigan President Harold Shapiro led a delegation to China at the invitation of the Chinese Minister of Education and signed an agreement of exchange and cooperation with ten major research institutions. The following year, a delegation of Chinese archivists visited the United States and included the University of Michigan as one of their stops.
In an effort to capture a record of this time of frequent exchanges between the two nations, Professor Alexander Eckstein and Professor Michel Oksenberg helped establish the University of Michigan National Archive on Sino-American Relations, a historical collection documenting the informal relations between China and the U.S. between 1971 through 1980. This collection is housed at the universitys Bentley Historical Library. In 1981, the Center for Chinese Studies published Americans in China: 1971-1980, a Guide to the University of Michigan National Archive on Sino-American Relations, to help researchers access the collection.
North University Avenue, Ann Arbor, early 1930s.
Ivory Photo Collection, Folder: UM Campus, Box 18.
This close relationship between China and the university continued to grow in the 1990s. A number of exchange programs were established in various academic units, expanding to, among others, the School of Business, College of Engineering, and School of Nursing. President James Duderstadt led another delegation to China in 1993, resulting in a highly interesting reading, his A China Odyssey, an account of his experiences in those three weeks in China. The University of Michigan is also the only U.S. member of Universitas 21, a network formed in 1997 to assist its member universities to become global institutions and advance their plans for internationalization. Chinese students are again congregating at the University of Michigan for study and research. Since 1979, about 3,400 Chinese students have studied at the university and about 400 are currently enrolled, in 2006. In recent years, about 35% of all international applicants to the University of Michigan have been from China. For the first time since the 1920s, the University of Michigan once again enjoys the highest number of Chinese students on a single campus.
Great Wall, photographed during Bentley
Historical Library delegation visit, 2002.
Bentley Historical Library (University of Michigan)
Records, Box 32. David Deromedi, photographer.