The Oberlin Memorial Arch, erected in 1903 to remember 13 missionaries killed in the Boxer Uprising of 1900, has occasionally sparked controversy and debate at the picturesque and progressive Ohio school. As part of the graduation processional route, stepping through or around the arch depends on one’s views on the complicated historical symbolism of the campus landmark. This year however school administrators are side-stepping the issue — literally — by bypassing the arch during the graduation processional.
From Inside Higher Education:
The processional has traditionally run beneath Oberlin’s Memorial Arch, a controversial structure that either symbolizes the sacrifice of missionaries killed in China or the repression wrought by American imperialism, depending on one’s point of view. For those who take the latter position, bypassing the arch — and breaking with the established processional route — has become something of a tradition.
It appears, however, that Oberlin officials are ready to literally sidestep the controversy that the arch provokes on graduation day. Administrators recently decided to change the commencement processional route, bypassing the arch altogether, The Oberlin Review first reported.
The Memorial Arch was erected in 1903 to recognize Oberlin graduates who were killed during the Boxer Rebellion while serving as missionaries in China. Critics have long charged that the arch honors questionable acts of American imperialism, while at the same time doing little to recognize the deaths of Chinese people killed in the uprising. Students who hold that view have made their disdain clear on graduation day, walking around the monument or — in one case — climbing over it with the aid of a rope.
While Oberlin officials say the decision to change the processional route was made in concert with an overall review of commencement ceremonies, they acknowledge that the controversy over the arch was a factor.
“When it became clear there were going to be some changes, it also seemed an opportunity to address some other issues and questions about commencement, and the arch has been one that’s been discussed many times over the years,” said Sean Decatur, dean of college of arts and sciences. “It certainly seemed appropriate to address the issue at this time.”
Terry Hsieh, a spokesman for Oberlin’s Chinese Student Association, said he’s never been particularly offended by the arch. That said, he applauded administrators for responding to students’ concerns.
For many Chinese, and from the perspective of the “Patriotic” history education curriculum, the Boxer Uprising was a movement of Chinese patriots determined to fight back against the forces of foreign subjugation, represented in this morality play by the “Eight Country” Allied Army sent in to suppress the movement and to break the siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. On the other hand, many more Chinese than foreigners were killed by the Boxers, and the disparate groups which came to be lumped under the label of “Boxer” (义和团 yihetuan) fought with a complex mix of motivations, not all of which fit neatly into a teleological narrative of national liberation.
That said, the foreign powers, including the missionary graduates of Oberlin College, were in China not by the Grace of God, the permission of the Qing court, or the sufferance of the Chinese people, but through the legalistic mechanism of treaties backed with the threat of military force. Some good and Godly deeds were done by missionaries, but their very presence was a constant reminder to local residents that their land was not entirely their own, and that control over what was “ours” was steadily being eroded by outside forces beyond the control of the Qing government
The Boxers, and other groups which participated in anti-foreign collective violence in this period, crossed the threshold of humanity and engaged in violent acts for many reasons, including those outlined in PRC history textbooks: a kind of proto-nationalism, or at least a sense of parochial “localism,” by those acting in defense of their own space. Other participants were angered by the foreign presence, believing in some cases that the missionaries and their religion “bottled up the sky,” causing drought and hardship and angering local gods and spirits, while cooler heads resented the way missionaries bullied their way into local legal disputes, bloviating on behalf of their converts, a few of whom had converted just to tap into this new source of local power. Still others were outraged at the egregious attacks missionaries made against traditional Chinese culture — the way the holier-than-thou foreigners criticized ancestor worship and foot binding, or did other dastardly things in the name of “reform” like teach girls to read. It was all there and more.
Many memorials were erected to victims — the “martyrs” — of the Boxer Uprising, and most remain standing to this day. One archway to Baron Von Kettler, killed in the early days of the Boxer invasion of Beijing, can be found in Zhongshan Park just outside of the Forbidden City. Another is the one in Oberlin. There have been changes to each. The Von Kettler arch used to be in Dongcheng, not far away from Chaoyangmen Nei Dajie and near the spot where the German diplomat was killed. The Oberlin arch now carries a marker remembering the thousands of Chinese casualties of the Boxer Uprising. Both archways still stand decades later, silent monuments to a single event, even as the meaning associated with the structures and that event change with time.
The Oberlin Memorial Arch is a symbol with many layers of meaning grafted and entangled onto a standing structure. But it does its job, perhaps not in the way its builders intended, but by forcing those of us in the present to confront the past — in all of its exquisite painful messiness.
New Post: “Side-stepping the past at Oberlin: Memorials, Symbolism, and the Boxer Uprising” http://bit.ly/SkD9p
Side-stepping the past at Oberlin: Memorials, Symbolism, and the Boxer Uprising:
The Oberlin Memorial Arch, ere.. http://tinyurl.com/cvk2qx
Interesting piece as ever, Jeremiah.
“That said, he applauded administrators for responding to students’ concerns.”
Without more details one has to suspect that the students in question were Chinese, and that they, in turn, were responding to another centrally orchestrated historical whinge from further along the food chain.
I’m not saying that there is no need for consideration of Chinese feelings on this issue, but the growing trend of appeasing China’s petty sensibilities is a worrying sign that extends beyond arches, shrines, and bronze statues.
Why not keep the same route and get the Dean to place a wreath in memory of the fallen Chinese at the marker on the way through the Arch? That would be far better than weakly abandoning decades of tradition to the bullying tactics of an increasingly nationalistic Chinese lobby.
They’re not going to grow up if the world hides in a corner every time China declares itself upset by a perceived gesture of historical disrespect.
OK, my work is done here; let the debate begin.
Stuart,
Having gone to school not far from Oberlin, I seem to recall that this debate/controversy goes back some years before there was a “nationalistic Chinese lobby.” The IHE article sketches out some of the history briefly towards the end.
My sense is that this issue has been driven more by general student opposition to US imperialism writ large as much as that specifically related to China.
For what it’s worth, my assumption was that it was your white, middle-class, PC wannabe hippy types who would be doing the protesting. That was always the way it was where I went to university.
i don’t know if it wrecks the effect to point it out, but i like the way you just put your money where your mouth is, by showing the complexity of the american past and respecting its debates and contradictions as an asset, not a liability.
I am an Oberlin graduate. I walked through the arch. I also received a fellowship from the “Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association,” a fund that grew out of the efforts of the same early missionaries memorialized here, and is a foundation promoting cross-cultural educational exchange––in both directions–with 5 Asian nations.
During the graduate processional, as you approach the arch, there is (was, in my case) a velveteen, roped off cordon leading around the arch. This was the “official un-official” path, erected by a student body organization exclusively for Asian Americans. On *my* big day, a representative from this organization, holding a big clipboard, frantically screamed anti-imperialist slogans and made swooping gestures with his arms in the effort to get as many people to walk “around” the arch as possible. I remember silent judgment and disapproving looks, but as I was Asia-bound myself (and I didn’t know this guy), I felt it was right to stand up for my own position, having been criticized by certain portions of the student body for being a “modern missionary” myself.
That said, there were no “working-class self-funded students whose parents don’t believe in the Confucian ideals of education” student organizations, and if there were, one of us just might have rolled up a greasy sleeve and thrown a punch. The vast majority of Oberlin students are not exactly the class of people who are discriminated against.
The dispute with the arch stands for more than failing to acknowledge fallen Chinese in 1900, it stands for some diluted Oberlin-esque, anti-establishment drivel. Why should there be a campus memorial to people who had little to do with the school? Oberlin should just erect a monument to injustice––then the theme could change every year.
The missionaries who were “slaughtered” taught at the same agricultural university as myself. They established some of the first schools for girls, and before the Boxers, Oberlin scientists helped to breed a strain of corn that could survive in Shanxi, thus staving off the looming threat of massive starvation––Damn them for sharing their imperialist scientific knowledge!
And damn me, if I hadn’t been such an influential “missionary” myself, maybe they really would have dropped English from their university curriculum.
The British have a memorial plaque to Benedict Arnold at the house where he lived in London. There is a statue of Confucius at California State University, Los Angeles (I well remember the controversy when it was installed there some 25 years ago. One local politician said he would oppose it unless a statue of Jesus was installed on the campus with it. When I taught high school history (in California & Arizona), the Latino students sometimes wrote term papers on Columbus, describing him in less than complimentary terms (trying to grade those papers “objectively” was one of the biggest challenges I had to face). And then there was the problem of teaching 19th century Chinese history in a class where a third of the students were of Chinese descent…
Different peoples have different perspectives. The China missionaries are part of American history, and as lee has stated above, their legacy was not completely evil.
“My sense is that this issue has been driven more by general student opposition to US imperialism ”
“…my assumption was that it was your white, middle-class, PC wannabe hippy types who would be doing the protesting.”
Guilty, your honour. I stand corrected. Apologies to any Chinese nationalists offended by my assumption.
Just a quick note, lest it be lost in the sarcasm: I thought I made it clear in the post that the missionaries did good and Godly work, like building schools and hospitals, educating young women, and being advocates of social and political reform. Unfortunately, the legacy of these good deeds is complicated in China by the fact that their ability to do these things was based on treaties backed by the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threat of military force.
Thus the memory of good works is muddied by equally powerful memories of subjugation. This is hardly a phenomenon unique to China as any Sioux would tell an American, an Indian to a Brit, or a contemporary Tibetan to his Han neighbor.
Moreover, as Paul Cohen notes in his seminal 1963 work on anti-missionary violence in China, for as much as the missionaries wished to do good for a society, their ultimate goal was to completely upend the philosophical and spiritual orientation of that society. Whether their intentions were good or not, and whether their actions in the short-term were beneficial or not, the long-term goals of even the most benevolent of the missionary societies threatened to destabilize the very foundations of the culture. Now depending one’s theology, that could be a worthy goal or at least an acceptable cost of achieving some notion of a higher “good,” but it would be tough to deny that from the perspective of many Chinese, this process promised to be every bit as destructive as any gunboat.
To put it another way, the missionaries did good deeds but were also reviled to the point of violence. That both memories can exist side by side, equally “true” in their own way, as integral parts of the historical past is an example of the exquisite messiness which I celebrated in my last paragraph.
You’ve read Hevia on this– last chapter of English Lessons?
Nice post. I’m sad to see that they’re doing away with it. Whatever direction students chose to go, it was a moment of confronting American history that I think is sometimes rare.