Comments on: Side-stepping the past at Oberlin: Memorials, Symbolism, and the Boxer Uprising

By: silbey

silbey — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:55:24 +0000

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.

By: k poling at cal

k poling at cal — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:42:55 +0000

You’ve read Hevia on this– last chapter of English Lessons?

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:36:26 +0000

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.

By: stuart

stuart — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:14:08 +0000

“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.

By: david0fsangabriel

david0fsangabriel — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:44:51 +0000

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.