China's Christian Colleges explores the cross-cultural dynamics that existed on the campuses of the Protestant Christian colleges in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on two-way cultural influences rather than on missionary efforts or Christianization, these campuses, most of which were American-supported and had a distinctly American flavor, were laboratories or incubators of mutual cultural interaction that has been very rare in modern Chinese history. In this Sino-foreign cultural territory, the collaborative educational endeavor between Westerners and Chinese created a highly unusual degree of cultural hybridity in some Americans and Chinese. The thirteen essays of the book provide concrete examples of why even today, more than a half-century after the colleges were taken over by the state, long-lasting cultural results of life in the colleges remain.

Review

"The diverse essays in this volume represent an excellent contribution to the ongoing study of their cross-cultural impact, both in China and in the United States."—International Bulletin of Missionary Research

"Marking the beginning of a new era of scholarship on China's Christian colleges, this book breaks with the self-congratulatory scholarship of earlier culture-bound studies and goes beyond more recent work by emphasizing cultural interaction. The volume's contributors explore Christian colleges not as gifts of a benevolent West to a benighted China but as focal points of intercultural interflow."—John W. Israel, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Virginia