Making Americans : missionary childhood and US Imperialism in Republican China

Abstract

Between 1900 and 1949, roughly 2000 American children were born in China to Protestant missionaries. This thesis examines their experiences and considers how their presence impacted the missionary enterprise that brought thousands of American families to ‘the East’ in the first half of the twentieth century. Focused on treaty port Shanghai, where extraterritoriality and the proliferation of foreign power set Western expatriates beyond the reach of Chinese law, my thesis traces missionary childhoods across landscapes, tracking the mobility of young people through sites that adults had designed to enclose and transform them during their tenures in the field. Raised in an imperial (if never formally colonized) space, my thesis shows that American missionary children in Shanghai lived lives structured by the logics of colonial childrearing, which posited white juveniles as potent but fragile symbols of national, cultural, and racial superiority. By viewing missionary childhoods through this lens, my thesis operates laterally, making useful interventions in the fields of mission history, China studies, and US imperialism. Drawing on sources produced by both adults and children, it demonstrates that missionaries’ desire to protect their offspring from mental, moral, and bodily decline in China’s “semi-tropics” not only drove missionaries to replicate colonial anxieties but also to engage with a secular American community deeply entrenched in the process of maintaining China’s foreign-dominated concessions. In the process, my thesis underscores the extent to which Shanghai was an imperial context, where Americans in general and US Protestants in particular functioned as key actors who defended and sustained its imbalanced status quo. My thesis is organized into five chapters, each centred on a site where missionary childhoods were designed and defined. Chapter One turns to mission compounds, interrogating the roles that children played in the delivery of a social gospel predicated upon domesticity and geared towards the transformation of Chinese society through the unit of the family. Then, in Chapter Two, attempts to control and limit physical and cultural impacts of life in the field come to the fore through a case-study of a mountainside resort in Zhejiang Province, where missionary children found themselves part of a summer community that resembled those on hill stations dotted around the colonial world. Following its subjects back to the lowlands, Chapter Three probes the issue of education by examining a school built to prepare American missionary children for life ‘at home’ in the United States. This project facilitated an extension of the period that China-born children could spend in the field. Faced, by 1923, with the task of overseeing a cohort of American adolescents in a city famed for sin and debauchery, Chapter Four asks how missionary boarders and grown-up authorities at the Shanghai American School navigated discipline in the service of making model American citizens out of unruly, foreign-born youths. Finally, the last chapter concerns itself with endings, interrogating experiences of “return,” as well as latent themes in the memoirs that missionary children wrote about their childhoods after the fact.