Operating under Adversity: The Harvard-Yenching Institute's Rescue Mission and the New Direction in Chinese Humanities in Wartime China, 1937–45

The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (also called the War of Resistance) in 1937 interrupted the normal operation of educational institutions in China. Schools of different levels in north and eastern China were forced to relocate to central, west, and southwest China in order to survive, but the lack of funding in a war-torn China already suffered from skyrocketing inflation made the migration even more formidable. Scholars in the China field have researched higher education in wartime China, but there is no comprehensive research on the relocation of the Christian colleges and the impacts of the relocation on Chinese humanities during the war.

My paper intends to examine the timely efforts of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (HYI), a private educational foundation formed in the 1920s to promote China’s higher education and especially Chinese humanities, to rescue the Christian colleges in China. The HYI not only provided funding to help these colleges with their relocation and other needs, but also remained committed to supporting Chinese humanities programs at its partner Christian colleges. Fully aware of the desperate situation in wartime China, the HYI administrators believed that their funding would help these colleges survive the war, keeping their identity as private missionary educational institutions, and making them a potential base for the HYI’s humanities programs in postwar China. The HYI’s rescue operation in China indeed played a crucial role in helping the Christian colleges survive the war, and also led Chinese humanities to a new direction when the colleges embarked on new projects after relocation about local history and cultures of their new homes in west and southwest China.