China on My Mind

By Mary Brown Bullock

The United States and China are today at a crossroads. Will these great countries be enemies, or will they be engaged with each other? Mary Brown Bullock explores this question through the highs and lows of her yearly China travel for nearly five decades. Using vivid diary and letter records, her memoir describes being a missionary kid in Asia, studying China from afar, leading the first exchanges of students, being a college president, and establishing an American university in China. Bullock, an optimist and long-term participant, concludes with today’s uncertainty as Duke University, Ford Foundation, China Medical Board, United Board and National Committee on US–China Relations, and others face a new era of relations with China.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369401156

Mary Brown Bullock

Mary Brown Bullock received her PhD and MA from Stanford University and her BA from Agnes Scott College. She served as inaugural vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, president of Agnes Scott College, professor at Emory University, and director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC. Her previous books and articles focus on US–China cultural relations. She lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, George.

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Copyright © 2023 by Mary Brown Bullock.

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Rev. date: 06/19/2023

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1     The Last Hundred Days

Chapter 2     The Land of the Morning Calm

Chapter 3     The Girl from Korea

Chapter 4     Beyond Friendship

Chapter 5     The Rockefellers

Chapter 6     The Liberal Arts

Chapter 7     Starting Duke Kunshan University

Chapter 8     Another Chance?

Acknowledgments

Notes

For Graham and Ashley

and Their Families

PREFACE

O NE OF THE most important types of materials for studying the history of any country consists of the private documents of the people who lived in or were closely associated with the country in question: diaries, letters, personal notes and memos, family budget books, and so on. Usually, such writings were not created with the intention that they would become public records or much less historical artifacts. Nevertheless, they provide firsthand and intimate details that can hardly be extracted from more formal public documents. To give just one instance, Sir Robert Hart (l835–1911), inspector general of the Chinese maritime customs, left a rich mine for historians in the form of a seventy-seven-volume diary covering more than half a century of his life in China. His correspondence over three decades with his assistant and friend James Duncan Campbell (1833–1907) are now indispensable sources for studying the history of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs and the diplomatic history of the late Qing dynasty.

Memoirs about China are often related to or primarily based on the abovementioned types of materials. The value of such writings is in more than simple facts and figures. Because memoirs involve storytelling and therefore, inevitably, individual sentiment and expressive positioning, they provide detail and context on hard data, bringing a human touch to historical source materials that otherwise can be dry and lifeless. Memoirs (in particular, autobiographies) also connect the dots in an individual’s life, tracing a portrait in words of both the individual and the time in which she or he lived.

Since World War II, the study of China (or, in an old-fashioned way, sinology) has boomed in the United States (and the West in general). Unlike in the prewar era, when information about China was mostly provided by missionaries, diplomats, journalists, tourists, tradespeople, and other nonacademics, in the postwar era, the most valuable and reliable information and analysis has come from the flourishing and vigorous academic field of Chinese studies. The founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Cold War, rapid social changes in the United States such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests, the opening of China in the post-Mao era, and China’s resurgence as a global power in the twentieth-first century, all have contributed to the rising interest in China and the development of China studies.

The pioneers in the field in the early decades of the postwar era felt that reminiscences and reflections on the past were appropriate or even necessary. In that regard, John King Fairbank (1907–1991), generally considered the founder of the field of modern Chinese history in the United States, set a fine precedent by publishing his memoirs in l962, soon after his retirement from Harvard University. More recent examples in this vein are Paul A. Cohen’s critical review of his historiography on China and his China-centered autobiography. In addition, works in that genre, directed at least in part at the general public—such as Tim Clissold’s Mr. China and Richard Baum’s China Watcher—have been published in recent years. Since most of the China scholars and experts in the West are non-Chinese, these memoirs chronicle not only lives dedicated to the study of a complex country but also the trajectory of the authors’ mental journey through their profession, a passage that changed them in the process.

The China Research Center (CRC), founded in Atlanta in 2001 by Dr. Penelope Prime, an economist who began studying China in the l970s, is the right place to take on the mission of helping to publish China-related memoirs. Our goal for the China memoir series is to provide a stable and enduring platform for various types of China experts (or old China hands, if we can still use the term to describe China experts in the postwar era) to present and disseminate their memoirs and autobiographies. With our inaugural volumes, Crossing Borders: The Making of an American Asian Specialist by John W. Garver and China on My Mind by Mary Brown Bullock, the China memoirs series is off to a strong start. The series promises to be a valuable home for those who wish to share with readers their life experiences and knowledge about a country that is, depending on one’s perspective, so far yet so near to us.

Hanchao Lu

Director

China Research Center

INTRODUCTION

I COULD NOT escape China—from the Huaihai battle in the late 1940s to a Zoom call with Chinese colleagues in the 2020s. Even though my Asia-born parents were Caucasian, I am fond of saying China is in my blood: it is always on my mind.

At a time when relations with China are undergoing huge debate, this is an account of how we got started and where we are today. This is a story of US cultural involvement in China—missionaries, medicine, and education. How was an American family affected by China’s civil war, the Korean War, Nixon’s opening, rapprochement, cooperation, and competition? How did students, scholars, and universities—of which I played a leading role—prefigure the difficult cultural problems that divide us and potentially unite us today?

I myself embody this era. I am a missionary, an intellectual, an educator, and a philanthropist. Others see economic or security dimensions, but I seek to understand the cultural and more personal dimensions of America’s Pacific century.

Childhood diaries, letters, personal memories, and historical documents animate this account. I begin with the Huaihai battle and my grandfather’s last time in China. As he wrote it was a night to be remembered, for it was old Suchow’s last night of freedom, I lived in a region that was engulfed by war, revolution, and incredible prosperity. China, Korea, and Japan are the background, while Suchow, today Xuzhou, becomes a metaphor for old and new China.

With others, I saw the evolution of religion, education, and philanthropy as the region itself changed. Crisscrossing through time, these are hallmarks of the American experience in Asia.

Beginning with religion, I focus on a very American story—the traditional role of Protestant missionaries during the twentieth century. My grandparents, all four from Presbyterian families in different parts of the Southeast, were influenced by the Student Volunteer Movement and its leader, John R. Mott. My paternal grandparents were older and lived in China, while my maternal grandparents lived in Korea. The older I become, the more interested I am in my grandmothers—Southern women who gave up their comfortable lives in America to live in Asia. My grandmother Hopper succinctly summarized her view of their mission—Christ told us to go to the ends of the earth, and Mokpo, Korea, was the end of the earth.

Today, this view seems anachronistic, and it is not just the missionary spirit. In 2021, the trendy magazine Conde Nast featured Mokpo as a resort to visit now. Asia is much closer to us, yet the American missionary heritage is still with us.

I grew up with tales of Xuzhou, China, never dreaming that I would eventually go there or that I would reprise my grandmother’s educational work when I became vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in the same Chinese province, no less. As a missionary daughter myself, I saw not only the churches of rural Korea but also local superstitions where evil spirits still lurked along country roads. I saw my father endeavoring to educate Korean pastors and my uncle bringing Western medicine to a needy Japanese public.

Nonetheless, the hold of religion on the American psyche changed over time. Was the American impulse to use Christianity as a civilizing mission sublimated to using the liberal arts to transform other societies? Maybe. The spread of Christianity through religion became the spread of the social sciences, the spread of the liberal arts. I saw this happen through years of working with most of the American cultural organizations involved with China. I kept discovering how the desire to influence China changed the original calculus of Yale-China, the United Board, and even the Ford Foundation, to list just a few. Religion is often forgotten in more formal studies of bilateral relations, but I experienced its changing mores long after the missionary era was over.

It is, however, the role of education and the changing roles of Chinese and American intellectuals that are at the heart of this narrative. In the mid-l970s, the Chinese were just reemerging from isolation and were eager to learn from Western colleagues. I remember my first Chinese natural scientist, Ku Kung-shu of the Institute of Geophysics, answering a Mayflower Hotel waitress’s dessert query on his first night back in the United States, Apple pie, apple pie a la mode. I have waited decades for a piece of American apple pie. Ku then proceeded to spend a month showing his younger colleagues American advances in earthquake prediction.

Chinese scholars were so excited to be in America. Every aspect—from how we grew corn to extracting oil to manufacturing high technology—was to be studied for how China could adopt the American way. I was, nonetheless, surprised when Chinese students—at first by the thousands and today by the hundreds of thousands—sought out freedom, sought out American universities. They also saw the downsides of our society even as many elected to become part of our community.

Americans were also eager to learn what Chinese archives, society, and polity would show about the world’s largest developing country. American sinologists—John Fairbank, Doak Barnett, Frederic Wakeman, Michael Oksenberg, and Ezra Vogel, naming just a few who have now passed on—were all involved in the first decades of reestablishing ties with China. From them, I learned how much we did not know and how to make sure future generations—their students—were never again in the dark.

US cultural relations with China are essential to this story. On my second trip in 1975 with Chinese scientists, this time agronomists, I happened to tell my father’s story of growing up in Xuzhou. Suddenly, the man across the fancy New York breakfast table from me, heretofore known only as Wang Jinling, China’s soybean expert from Harbin, half leaped from his feet. Xuchowfu, was your father Frank Brown? No, that is my father’s brother. This remarkable event, combined with long talks with Wang and, over many years, his descendants, reminded me of the long arc of missionary influence in China. But I was also repeatedly reminded of the extended trajectory of America’s diplomatic, economic, and strategic role in China.

Cultural relations are often seen as drawing the two societies together. But political obstacles still intruded, nothing more destabilizing than that of Taiwan’s status. Early on, the Chinese seismology delegation walked out of a Denny’s restaurant in protest of a Taiwanese flag on the menu masthead. Taiwan was always brought up in Chinese briefings, and I have never known a Chinese citizen who has not agreed with the government’s dictum that Taiwan is a part of China. I realize the power of the Taiwan issue to China and the conundrum it presents to American policymakers. This is but one area in which the values of the two societies functioned differently.

As this account makes clear, the difficulties between the two societies were present from the very beginning. Some four decades later, the original paradigm has reversed: Chinese intellectuals are confident, sometimes of their superiority, while some Americans rue the day that Chinese students were welcomed to their universities.

My interest in Chinese intellectuals dates back to a graduate school paper that discussed the original May Fourth generation, but I had no idea that the quintessential wealthy Rockefeller family would become so important to my understanding of education, Chinese intellectuals, and philanthropy. Rockefeller himself was vilified in China and the United States, but some came to realize that his money, at least, transformed modern medicine and science in China. From early in the twentieth century, Rockefeller believed Chinese scientists were to be citizens of the world, and they never forgot. In 2012, his bust was dedicated in Beijing in a Confucian-style ceremony, complete with Rockefeller fourth-generation descendants. To follow American medicine in China was to follow Chinese education and intellectuals through the thick and thin times of this era. Chinese intellectuals who wrestled with the complexities of American influence became my guides to China itself. The journey that I traveled with them, from the l970s till today, and the surprising discovery that the American influence was enduring are an essential part of my world outlook today.

It was as a university leader that I had an opportunity to put the liberal arts into practice. Two decades at Agnes Scott College, Emory University, and Duke Kunshan University provided the chance in both countries. In the West, the liberal arts are seen as fostering social and intellectual freedom, but in Asia, academic freedom has many different meanings, and innovation is discussed much more than freedom. At Duke Kunshan University, I did discover how difficult it was to join the missions of three very different sponsors—an American university, a Chinese city, and a Chinese university. One example will suffice—from the world of branding no less. How do you create a new identity for a joint-venture American and Chinese university? My young Chinese staff finally came up with a color-coded solution: Duke was bright blue, Kunshan was light green, and Wuhan was dark green. But even the colors never merged.

Throughout the decades since Nixon opened China, American organizations—from the Ford Foundation to Yale-China to the China Medical Board and many others—wanted to return to China. I say return because so many had a previous mission in China. I write about how much they struggled to reenter China and stay involved as both countries changed and perhaps today seek to go their own way.

At a lunch in Beijing two years ago, I realized how much these organizations and my life have come full circle. I have been a full participant in the work of these American organizations. Zhang Ye, one of my hosts, remembers me (dark long curly hair and black boots) from the early 1980s, and Yu Hong, another host, has joined me over many years in chronicling the Rockefeller and PUMC experience. Together, they have been involved in almost as many American organizations as I have been. We discussed the downturn in US–China relations and what it might mean for the many Americans and Chinese with whom we have been involved. I realized then that Zhang Ye and Yu Hong are among my successors and that US–China relations will persist but look different in the future.

CHAPTER 1

The Last Hundred Days

I T WAS EASTER weekend, 1949, and I was in the kitchen with my paternal grandmother, Charlotte, learning how to dye Easter eggs. A knock on the back door and in walked a grizzled old man. My grandmother shrieked and ran to hug him. My grandfather, Frank Brown, had literally returned from the dead. I can smell cinnamon rolls baking in the oven, feel the white Formica cabinet tops, and see my grandfather’s lined face to this day. After months of no news, he had escaped from the Huaihai battle, the last major battle of the Chinese civil war; he had escaped from the communists.

War and revolution were no strangers to Charlotte and Frank Brown. Charlotte, a daughter of Atlanta, Georgia, had left her comfortable family home in 1909 and traveled to China as a single missionary for the Southern Presbyterian Church. Frank, a son of Norfolk, Virginia, followed in 1910. They met and married in Shanghai several years later. Together, they witnessed the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, ran from marauding warlords, implored Madame Chiang Kai-shek for relief assistance, opened their home to women fleeing from Japanese soldiers, expatriated on the Gripsholm, hosted General Marshall’s peacekeeping mission, and finally endured China’s civil war. Their decades in China were primarily spent in Xuzhou, a walled city of about 250,000 north of Nanjing, located at the intersection of both the north–south and east–west railways. It was always under fire.

0001.jpg

General Marshall with Frank and Charlotte Brown.

That Easter day in Richmond, Virginia, my grandfather began telling me about watching his beloved city of Xuzhou fall to communists and being held under house arrest for months until he received a permit that allowed him to cross through the enemy lines. I was just under five years old, but those memories changed my life forever.

As I grew up and learned more about Chinese history, I always wondered what really happened in Xuzhou in 1948–1949. To my surprise, I learned that the Huaihai battle, called by Mao Zedong China’s Gettysburg, was the decisive turning point in China’s civil war. My Chinese friends are astounded when I tell them that my grandfather witnessed that conflict. It was the largest military encounter after World War II, involving almost two million soldiers—Nationalists and Communists alike. At stake was whether Mao Zedong’s troops could control the gateway to central and south China, whether they could quickly vanquish Chiang Kai-shek’s heartland army. Although The New York Times, Time, and Life sent reporters to cover the battle, the US government itself had already given up on any further assistance to the Nationalists. By that time, the Communist victory seemed almost a foregone conclusion.

Mao’s troops had headed south after a resounding October victory in Shenyang, a key city in Manchuria, and had then taken Jinan some two hundred miles north of Xuzhou. Mao’s original plan was to pause, believing it might take two to three years to occupy central and southern China. But then Mao decided to throw caution to the winds and make one push to take control of all of China north of the Yangzi River.¹

The Nationalist headquarters were in Xuzhou itself, some 150,000 strong with other armies in the south and east totaling over 500,000. Mao’s armies, commanded in part by Deng Xiaoping, were equally strong. Multiple battles sent thousands of the wounded from both sides into Xuzhou itself. My grandfather’s diary for mid-November 1948 conveyed the desperate straits:

On November 22 . . . I checked up on the emergency hospitals, visiting seven of them accompanied by the highest ranking military doctors . . . Four hundred ninety four are lying in our high school, no surgeon, no nurse, almost no drugs. At the big military hospital five miles distant we found the wounded lying so thick on the floors that it was difficult to walk down the halls. I tried to get straw for those in our high school to lie on but failed.²

Mao’s army was able to surround and trap one of the key Guomindang armies that surrendered. On November 29, Frank wrote, The war is going badly. We have advanced our leaving time to 18 hours. But the planes did not arrive. On December 1, he wrote,

Last night was a night to be much remembered, for it was old Suchow’s last night of freedom. The roads are crowded with huge retreating armies—trucks, tanks, infantry, one amphibian tank, all mixed together heading for the Southwest. But they will not get far in that direction—rivers to cross, and no bridges and the Yangtze 300 miles away . . . A doomed army is in full retreat. The private soldier is brave enough, as Chinese Gordon discovered 100 years ago. But many of the higher officers are cowardly, selfish, and inefficient as we have known for months past.

Am anxious tonight for this old city. "THEY arrived before