Chapter 10: Mao’s Farewell

The Communist Verdict on the Missionary Enterprise

The Perfect Symbol

Shortly after half-past six on the morning of April 25, 1949, the bedroom door of the American ambassador’s residence in Nanjing came open, and John Leighton Stuart woke to armed soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. Stuart shouted; the soldiers withdrew, “one or two muttering angrily”; when he jumped out of bed, the whole group returned, ten or twelve strong, and a spokesman explained quite politely that they were only looking around for fun and meant no harm. Did he understand? He said yes. Finding the ambassador “none too cordial”, the spokesman led his men out. They were country boys, Stuart concluded, fresh from an easy victory and out seeing the sights; one of them told a servant that all of this belonged to the people of China anyhow and would soon be coming back to them.1

Sixty-two years earlier, on furlough in the American South, the enterprise that had sent his parents to China had put the boy himself on display: “we little boys were made to dress in costume, eat with chopsticks, sing hymns in Chinese—especially ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’—and otherwise furnish an exhibit.” The aversion it planted lingered long. In his second year at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, the Student Volunteer Movement’s traveling secretary Arthur Ewing put the question point-blank. “That night I lay awake and heard the clock in the tower strike the hours until after five o’clock the next morning,” he remembered. The dread was of the work itself: “haranguing crowds of idle, curious people in street chapels or temple fairs … a sort of living death”. Toward dawn he surrendered: “I decided to put my religious belief to what was for me then the ultimate test.”2

He reached Hangzhou—his birthplace, his father’s station of nearly forty years—on the eve of the New Year, 1905, and the return revived the dread: “now there began for me the revival of my old aversion as I realized the feeble results of my father’s lifelong labors, the small church membership of very humble people.”3 The escape ran through the classroom: from 1908 the Presbyterian seminary in Nanjing, and from 1919 the presidency of Yenching, being assembled from four Christian schools in and around Beijing.

In the Republic fewer than one Chinese in ten thousand attended any college; Yenching’s undergraduates, in the historian Philip West’s phrase, “were an elite within the elite”.4 The campus by the old imperial gardens had, West wrote, “a dreamlike quality about it”; walled in 1927, it “became a kind of refuge”. Stuart kept the walls funded and the powerful friendly—premiers, warlords, the Generalissimo himself—with Philip Fugh (傅涇波, Fù Jīngbō) at his elbow for the introductions.5 The sinification the age demanded he met halfway: Yenching registered under a Chinese chancellor, but his commitment to making the university Chinese, his biographer Yu-ming Shaw concluded, “seems to have been a qualified one and less than wholehearted”.6

The Japanese military police collected him within hours of Pearl Harbor; he passed more than three years interned. When he emerged, George C. Marshall had come to mediate between Chiang and the Communists, and the university president who briefed him, Shaw surmised, had “gained Marshall’s confidence and inspired in Marshall the idea of appointing him as the next U.S. Ambassador”. The appointment was announced on July 11, 1946—the day Li Gongpu (李公樸, Lǐ Gōngpú) of the Democratic League was assassinated in Kunming; four days later the poet Wen Yiduo (聞一多, Wén Yīduō, 1899–1946) was shot down in his turn, and Kunming’s liberals fled for refuge to the American consulate.7 Time that year pronounced him “the dean” of American missionaries in China; the two readings that would divide his memory were still to be written: a great figure in the line of educational missionaries reaching back to the Jesuits, or a cultural imperialist working “to spread the germs of cultural aggression”. Of the embassy, Shaw’s summary reads like an epitaph: “constantly distrusted by the Nationalists, resented by the Communists, and merely tolerated by the Americans.”8 That was the man the revolution found asleep. The next Communist caller made an appointment.

The Communist Advance

Chiang Kai-shek had resigned the presidency in January, and through the spring Stuart’s residence was “a central meeting place” where Nationalist leaders congregated, “hoping to enlist Stuart’s endorsement and, through him, to win over the U.S. government”. On April 20 the People’s Liberation Army forced the Yangtze; on the 24th it took Nanjing. The government had removed to Canton, and of the ambassadors accredited to it one followed: the Soviet. The American stayed, under instructions to remain until the Communist authorities were firmly established; and he stayed gladly, for the delay “allowed him an extra period of time to make his last attempt to promote an accommodation between the United States and the CCP”.9

In May the new Military Control Commission gave its Alien Affairs Office to Huang Hua (黃華, Huáng Huá), a Yenching graduate. Fugh telephoned the old Foreign Ministry and left his name; Huang returned the call the next day, had Fugh come to him, received him cordially, and asked after their “old college President”, though he was careful, Stuart cabled, to use no ambassadorial title: he recognized no envoys accredited to the Kuomintang, and it would be “up to USA, when time came, to make first move”. He brought a message besides: Zhou Enlai (周恩來, Zhōu Ēnlái) was “distressed” by the incident in the bedroom.10 On the evening of May 13 Huang called at the residence and stayed nearly two hours; the two men, Shaw records, “hit it off rather well”. Stuart spoke of his life’s aim—“unity, peace, truly democratic government and international good will”; Huang, of recognition “on terms of equality and mutual benefit”. At tea on June 6 the courtesies thinned: “almost brusquely”, Huang said all the CCP wanted of the United States was “stoppage of aid and severance of relations” with the Kuomintang.11

Early in June—“casually, and not under instructions from me”, Stuart assured the State Department—Fugh had wondered aloud to Huang whether the ambassador might keep his June 24 birthday at Yenching, as in years past. Huang made no comment. The Nanjing Party committee’s telegram of June 10 recorded the wish otherwise: to see Zhou before Stuart went home, with a look at Yenching along the way. On June 18 Huang raised the matter himself; on June 28 he came with an answer from the top: “message from Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai assuring me that they would welcome me to Peiping”—Beiping (北平, Běipíng), as Beijing was then named—“if I wished to visit Yenching University”. To Washington the ambassador weighed a “veiled invitation from Mao and Chou to talk with them while ostensibly visiting Yenching” against the rumors, the diplomatic corps, the prestige a pilgrimage would hand the victors, and left no doubt of the wish behind it: “I received clear impression that Mao, Chou and Huang are very much hoping that I make this trip, whatever their motives.”12 The telegram went out at noon on June 30—the date on Mao’s “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship”, which the next morning’s front pages carried to tell the world which way New China would lean: to one side, the Soviet side.13

Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, answered the telegram on the evening of July 1: “Following highest level consideration urtel 1410, you are instructed under no circumstances to make visit Peiping.”14 The opening Stuart had spent two months easing ajar, his own government shut in a line.

One channel stayed dark far longer. In June, by Huang Hua’s later account, Stuart had asked Chen Mingshu (陳銘樞, Chén Míngshū), one of the “democratic personages” bound for the preparatory session of the new Political Consultative Conference, to carry to the leadership his wish to meet them, and told another, Luo Longji (羅隆基, Luó Lóngjī), that if New China held a middle course America could lend it five billion dollars at a stroke—about what India had drawn in fifteen years. Chen delivered the message to Mao and Zhou, and on June 24 wrote back to Stuart with Mao’s oral reply: “politically, we must be strict; economically, we can do business.”15

On August 2 Stuart flew out of Nanjing with Fugh, along an exit corridor designated by the Military Control Commission. He would not see China again. Days later, in Beiping, Zhou Enlai told a conference that Mayor Ye Jianying (葉劍英, Yè Jiànyīng) had called the departed ambassador “an honest man who tells lies”—the line, by the Communist paper’s account an American consul cabled home, “drew [a] roar [of] laughter from [the] whole gathering”—and described Stuart and Marshall as two men accustomed to “appearing with deceptive countenances falsely covered with affability”. Stuart landed in Washington on August 10 and was taken from the airport to the State Department, where Walton Butterworth, director of Far Eastern affairs, advised him to avoid interviews, to receive no callers, “to keep under cover for a few days”; the one address he was afterward allowed, the Department censored first.16 He was seventy-three. The government he served wanted him silent. The government he had courted was composing its farewell.

“Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”

The State Department had not waited for him. On August 5, 1949, with its last ambassador still in mid-passage, it published United States Relations with China, 1,054 pages assembled to silence the critics of a policy in ruins. Dean Acheson’s Letter of Transmittal, dated July 30, conceded the defeat: “Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.” Its account of the Communist victory came in a grammar Americans had heard before: “the foreign domination has been masked behind the façade of a vast crusading movement which apparently has seemed to many Chinese to be wholly indigenous and national.” He meant Moscow’s domination, Mao’s crusade. And near its close the letter offered a hope deferred: “ultimately the profound civilization and the democratic individualism of China will reassert themselves and she will throw off the foreign yoke.”17 Stuart read it on the plane out of Honolulu and feared for the Chinese named in its pages.18

In Beiping it arrived as a windfall. Hu Qiaomu (胡喬木, Hú Qiáomù), Mao’s chief amanuensis, drafted a first Xinhua reply, published August 12; Mao directed him to “take advantage of the White Paper to expose the plots of the imperialists”; then he took up the pen himself. In the five weeks that followed the agency issued five commentaries from Mao’s own hand, unsigned.19 The campaign, Lyman Van Slyke would write, “sought to discredit the United States for everything it had done in China since the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844”, and within it Stuart “was particularly singled out, both as our last ambassador on the mainland, and also because he represented so well all that was finest in the American philanthropic and educational tradition in China”.20 Mao did not rebut the confession. He entered it in evidence.

The second commentary went out on the wire on August 18 and ran next morning on the front page of the People’s Daily (人民日報, Rénmín Rìbào), between a dispatch on Fuzhou eagerly awaiting liberation and battle news from four provinces; the credit line read only “Xinhua editorial”.21 It opened on the calendar: the White Paper had been published at “a time when Leighton Stuart had departed from Nanking for Washington but had not yet arrived there”. That was understandable, “since Leighton Stuart is a symbol of the complete defeat of the U.S. policy of aggression”. Then the essay put its symbol on display:

Leighton Stuart is an American born in China; he has fairly wide social connections and spent many years running missionary schools in China; he once sat in a Japanese gaol during the War of Resistance; he used to pretend to love both the United States and China and was able to deceive quite a number of Chinese. Hence, he was picked out by George C. Marshall, was made U.S. ambassador to China and became a celebrity in the Marshall group.22

The educator and the envoy go down in one breath, and the hinge is that “hence”: the schools bred the wide connections; the connections dressed the pretense of loving two countries at once; the pretense deceived; the deception qualified the man for the embassy. Mao nowhere argues that the mission schools and the Marshall mission were a single project. The sentence assumes it.

The essay’s true addressees were not in Washington. “Liberals or ‘democratic individualists’ who cherish illusions about the United States and have short memories!” The term in quotation marks was Acheson’s “democratic individualism” turned into a population. The Letter of Transmittal became a syllabus: “Acheson is giving you a lesson; he is a good teacher for you.” Then the examination: “Can you find a trace of humanity, justice or virtue in the White Paper or in Acheson’s Letter of Transmittal?” For the wavering, two recent saints: Wen Yiduo, who “rose to his full height and smote the table, angrily faced the Kuomintang pistols and died rather than submit”; Zhu Ziqing (朱自清, Zhū Zìqīng, 1898–1948), who “though seriously ill, starved to death rather than accept U.S. ‘relief food’”.23

At the center stood the portrait. The army crossed the river; “the U.S. colonial government at Nanking fled helter-skelter”; one dignitary conspicuously stayed. “His Excellency Ambassador Stuart sat tight, watching wide-eyed, hoping to set up shop under a new signboard and to reap some profit. But what did he see?” He saw the army going past “column after column”; workers, peasants, and students “rising in hosts”; the liberals themselves “turning out in force, shouting slogans and talking revolution”. No one called on him. “In short, he was left out in the cold, ‘standing all alone, body and shadow comforting each other’. There was nothing more for him to do, and he had to take to the road, his briefcase under his arm.”24 The close was a toast: “Leighton Stuart has departed and the White Paper has arrived. Very good. Very good. Both events are worth celebrating.”25

The essay’s whole charge against the educator sits in one clause about missionary schools. The heavier vocabulary came twelve days afterward, in “‘Friendship’ or Aggression?”: there the Treaty of Wanghia had compelled China “to accept American missionary activity”; there American imperialism had “laid greater stress than other imperialist countries on activities in the sphere of spiritual aggression”—精神侵略 (jīngshén qīnlüè)—“extending from religious to ‘philanthropic’ and cultural undertakings”; there Yenching headed the roll of institutions, and two clauses shut on him: “It was in this field that Leighton Stuart made a name for himself; that was how he became U.S. ambassador to China.”26 As for 文化侵略 itself, Qu Qiubai’s old coinage: the term appears nowhere in the body of “Farewell”. It stood in the apparatus: the note printed beneath the essay in the Selected Works of 1960 certified Stuart as “always a loyal agent of U.S. cultural aggression in China”, and the English edition rendered it word for word. The second Chinese edition, in 1991, rewrote the note; what stands beneath the essay today gives his birth, his mission, his university, his civil-war politics—and no such phrase.27 The verdict did not harden in translation. It was softened at home, forty-two years on.

The portrait of the man alone with his shadow had one competitor in the record, and the record was sealed. Seven weeks before the essay went out, Huang Hua had brought that same solitary figure a message of welcome—from Mao and Zhou by Stuart’s reading of it, from Zhou alone in Huang’s telling—and what kept the old man off the northbound train was no Chinese contempt but a cable from Dean Acheson: “under no circumstances to make visit Peiping”. Neither capital said so at the time. Stuart’s telegram waited twenty-nine years for the Foreign Relations series to print it; Huang Hua gave his account after fifty-eight.28 The courtship went into the archives. The farewell went into the schoolbooks.

Required Reading

The schoolbooks cleared a space for it. Wen Yiduo’s “Last Speech” (最後一次講演)—spoken at the meeting on Li Gongpu’s murder, it had cost the poet his life—entered the junior-middle Chinese readers of the People’s Republic, and in the new state’s first seventeen years it entered twice, cut. From the point where Wen cries that the course of events is crooked, not straight, the textbook editors under Ye Shengtao (葉聖陶, Yè Shèngtáo) removed more than three hundred characters. Among them was the praise of the new ambassador as “a friend of the Chinese people, an educator … an amiable and approachable scholar, one who truly knew what the Chinese people demanded”. A study of the textbooks would later offer a likely reason: the praise “ran contrary to the assessment of Stuart in ‘Farewell, Leighton Stuart!’”29 A middle-school reader could not carry two verdicts; between the martyr and the essay, the editors chose the essay.

The essay itself went in on the other side of the ledger and stayed for two generations. Chinese who sat in those classrooms met Stuart the way the essay taught, a name synonymous with defeat, “recited by children all over China to this day”, as the New York Times could still write in 2008.30 Southern Weekly reported that for a magazine editor born in 1986, Liu Qian (劉倩, Liú Qiàn), discovering the man behind the byword—desolate, rejected by Mao and Truman alike—had overturned the values of her adolescence.31 The essay has since left the curriculum. Wen Yiduo’s speech survives as Lesson 13 of the eighth-grade reader, over a source note that says “abridged”, with the three hundred characters still absent.32

The verdict the readers memorized had a longer pedigree than the essay. The Chinese count of the indictment was a quarter-century old; Tokyo had broadcast its own. Ōkawa Shūmei’s twelve radio lectures, delivered in the weeks after Pearl Harbor and published in 1942 as Beiei Tōa shinryakushi, taught that world history was “nothing but a chronicle of antagonism, struggle and unification between the Orient and the Occident”, that the Open Door was aggression in its subtlest dress, that the Puritan conscience had learned to serve “both God and gold”.33 Ōkawa spent no special anger on the missionary; his quarrel was with the civilization entire, schools and treaties and gunboats one organism, and by 1943 the thesis had a conference in Tokyo and a joint declaration. Moscow’s reading arrived by graft. Lenin’s Imperialism, the founding text, catalogs banks, cartels, and coupon-clippers and has nothing to say about missions; it was later Soviet scholarship—A. A. Volokhova’s study of the missionaries in China came only in 1969—that made them “important ordnance in the arsenal of contemporary colonialists”, so that Leninist analysis, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. summarized it in 1974, “would therefore regard the missionary as the accomplice of the capitalist”.34 By August 1949 the charge required no invention. Mao added no doctrine; he added the schoolroom.

The strangest echo came a quarter-century later, from the enterprise’s own country. In 1974 Harvard University Press published a volume on the missionary enterprise under John K. Fairbank, whose introduction posed the question plainly: “whether Christian missions should be classed as only a politer, and perhaps for that very reason more insidious, form of Western penetration”.35 In its pages Schlesinger, the house historian of American liberalism, conceded the category: “Cultural imperialism means purposeful aggression by one culture against the ideas and values of another.” He granted that to “the next generation of nationalists” even the philanthropy could figure as aggression, “the philanthropic form being perhaps the more insidious because it was the more plausible”, and named the grievance the readers had been taught: “the Chinese Communists condemned the use of the American Boxer indemnity to Westernize Chinese students.” The mechanism he refused: the mere movement of ideas across borders was imperialism only to “Communist states that fear the idea of ‘ideological coexistence’”. “In a double sense,” he wrote, “Vietnam can be seen as a missionary legacy”: the French had gone in to protect the missions, and the Americans had gone in “to achieve the missionary goal”.36

The Comprehensive Rejection

In Peking, in the third week of April 1951, the government gathered a hundred and fifty-one leaders of Chinese Protestantism for a conference on the churches receiving American subsidies.37 The keynote fell to the propaganda chief Lu Dingyi (陸定一, Lù Dìngyī): “The American imperialist, Frank Price, wearing the cloak of a missionary, was most intimately related to Nationalist counter-revolutionary rebels.”38 Frank Price (畢範宇, Bì Fànyǔ), professor at the Nanking seminary where Stuart had taught, was the missionary closest to Chiang Kai-shek. Before the conference rose it turned on its own: it staged the denunciations itself—of Price, of the missionary Edward Lockwood, of the Episcopal bishop Y.Y. Tsu and the Methodist bishop W.Y. Chen, of the YMCA’s S.C. Leung (梁小初, Liáng Xiǎochū), of the evangelist Gu Ren’en (顧仁恩, Gù Rén’ēn).39 The accusation of Chen ran in the People’s Daily under the name of his brother bishop: Z.T. Kaung called Chen “scum of Christianity” (基督教敗類, Jīdūjiào bàilèi) in his first sentence and accused himself in his second—political consciousness insufficient, vigilance not high, an apology to the whole church and the whole people—then thanked the government for the arrest and asked that he be dealt with severely according to law.40 Of the voices raised against Price, the one the movement would hold up as its model belonged to Cui Xianxiang (崔憲詳, Cuī Xiànxiáng), general secretary of the Church of Christ in China and his colleague of many years: “In order to make a clean sweep of the rubbish within the Church … I accuse Frank Price.”41 A former officer cadet who had taken the English name Frank, after his “spiritual father, Frank Price”, denounced him too. “We had no choice!” the cadet, Yan Jiarui (嚴嘉瑞, Yán Jiāruì), said sixty years afterward; he had already dropped the name.42 The campaign the conference inaugurated took a name of its own: the accusation movement (控訴運動, kòngsù yùndòng).

A month later the YMCA secretary Liu Liangmo (劉良模, Liú Liángmó) supplied the stagecraft in a syndicated manual, “How to Hold a Successful Accusation Meeting”: the order of accusers mattered, “first high tension, then moderate, then another of high tension”.43

The theology had been settled the summer before. In May 1950 the YMCA publications secretary Y.T. Wu (吳耀宗, Wú Yàozōng, 1893–1979), after three long talks with Zhou Enlai, drafted, with T.C. Chao among others, what became known as the Christian Manifesto.44 Its opening conceded the enterprise’s own anniversary:

Protestant Christianity has been introduced to China for more than a hundred and forty years. During this period it has made a not unworthy contribution to Chinese society. Nevertheless, and this was most unfortunate, not long after Christianity’s coming to China, imperialism started its activities here; and since the principal groups of missionaries who brought Christianity to China all came themselves from these imperialistic countries, Christianity consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, became related with imperialism.

The churches would sever the relation and stand on self-government, self-support, self-propagation—the Three-Self formula.45 Forty charter signers proclaimed it on July 28, 1950; the People’s Daily gave it the front page on September 23 with the first 1,527 names; by the spring conference the count was 180,000—“still this is only 18% of Chinese Christians”, Wu pressed—and in the end at least 400,000.46 The single largest bloc of names, three hundred and eighty-one, came from the Jesus Family (耶穌家庭, Yēsū Jiātíng), an indigenous communal church that had stood outside the mission boards and so had nothing to renounce; its founder, Jing Dianying (敬奠瀛, Jìng Diànyíng), was denounced and imprisoned in 1952, and the Family was dissolved.47

The meetings the manual prescribed followed through the summer. On June 10, 1951, some ten thousand Christians filled a Shanghai stadium to demand Price’s punishment; a week later his own congregation struck him from its rolls.48 The movement’s own council would admit no church as independent until it had denounced four of its own members.49 Price was tried in absentia and found guilty of espionage; he and his wife Essie waited twenty-two months for exit visas—“we went as usual to the market and shops and walked about”, she wrote of the interval—and when the visas came, on September 27, 1952, they carried forty-eight hours’ notice. On October 2 the Prices crossed into Hong Kong.50 Around them the exodus was already complete. Seven hundred and seventy China Inland Mission workers were in China in the summer of 1949; by the end of January 1952, eighteen. Few of the Protestants were deported. The method was to make every Chinese friendship a hazard until the missionaries concluded that their presence itself was the injury, and left.51 The Korean War campaign that framed the purge ran in grooves cut long before the Party. Its charge of American germ warfare, the historian Michael Hunt observed, “echoed earlier anxieties over physical debilitation caused by missionary potions and spells,” and its hunt for lackeys of imperialism “called to mind the plight of Christian converts of another day.”52

The men of the Chinese church fared according to their answers. Wang Mingdao refused the movement to the end: arrested in August 1955, released on a confession he repudiated, imprisoned again. Watchman Nee was arrested in 1952 and held; a public trial in 1956 gave him fifteen years. T.C. Chao, who had helped draft the Manifesto and taken a seat on the movement’s preparatory council, was destroyed anyway, denounced at Yenching in March 1952 by his own school.53 The university outlived its founder’s embassy by three years. Nationalized in February 1951, Mao himself brushing the characters of its new nameplate, it was dissolved in the next year’s great redistricting of faculties; on October 4, 1952, Peking University held its opening ceremony on the Yan Yuan campus. That day the historian Deng Zhicheng (鄧之誠, Dèng Zhīchéng) wrote in his diary, “From this point Yenching becomes a term of history.”54 In the campaign that swallowed the university, the daughter of its Chinese president stood up as a student and denounced her father: Lu Yaohua, accusing Lu Zhiwei (陸志韋, Lù Zhìwéi).55

The Afterlife

The stroke came in late November 1949, three months home.56 For the thirteen years left him Stuart was half-paralyzed; he could not bathe or use the toilet without Philip Fugh’s hands. The embassy had left no savings; he had never worked in his own country, so there was no Social Security; Yenching’s old trustees sent a pension of six hundred dollars a month. Fugh gathered thirty thousand dollars from family and friends, bought a house in Chevy Chase, outside Washington, and took him in. The Fugh children called him Grandpa; their children called him 太爺爺 (tàiyéye), great-grandfather.57

His will, drawn in 1955, asked that, if possible, his ashes be “interred in the cemetery at Yenching, beside those of his wife, Aline”, who had died in Peking in 1926; and he charged Fugh with returning to China a vase in the Ming manner that Zhou Enlai had sent him in 1946.58 He died in Washington in September 1962, at eighty-six.59 At the memorial in New York the music was Christian, Confucian, and Buddhist; the organ played him out with a Chinese lute tune, “Three Verses of Yang-kuan” (陽關三疊, Yángguān sāndié):60

Drink another cup of wine, another cup of wine, my friend, Before you leave for the West, For once past Yang-kuan, you will see no old friends.

Fugh carried the ashes back to the house and set them on the desk of the room Stuart had lived in. They were not buried.61 He took the question to Beijing in 1973, at Zhou Enlai’s invitation, and again in the years after; a permission formed in 1986 and was shelved; another, near the century’s end, sank with the American bombs on the Belgrade embassy.62 In May 1988 Philip Fugh, ailing, sent his daughter, Fu Hailan (傅海瀾, Fù Hǎilán), to Nanjing with the vase, to stand in the memorial hall at Meiyuan New Village, Zhou Enlai’s old headquarters; before the year was out he was dead.63 The other trust passed to the son, John Fugh, a major general of the United States Army; in 2006 the general put it to Xi Jinping (習近平, Xí Jìnpíng), then Party secretary of Zhejiang.64

On November 17, 2008, at a cemetery called Anxian Yuan (安賢園, Ānxián Yuán) in the hills on Hangzhou’s northern edge—not at Yenching, which had been Peking University’s campus for fifty-six years—the ashes of John Leighton Stuart were lowered in before the American ambassador, Clark T. Randt Jr., a vice mayor of Hangzhou, and a delegation of white-haired Yenching alumni.65 The program provided no music, and the old students had guessed it would not: they had hidden a tape recorder in the bushes. Over the grave it played “Amazing Grace”, and after it “The Star-Spangled Banner”.66 The black marble says the same thing in both languages: John Leighton Stuart, 1876–1962, first president of Yenching University.67 In the same cemetery stands the tomb kept for Wang Wei (王偉, Wáng Wěi), the fighter pilot lost in 2001 intercepting an American surveillance plane; the sea never returned his body.68

Eight years later Hangzhou hosted the G20, and at the welcome banquet Xi Jinping named the city’s foreign son: “A hundred and forty years ago, in June 1876, Mr. John Leighton Stuart, the former US ambassador to China, was born here in Hangzhou.” It was, by the Global Times’ count, the first time a top Chinese leader had spoken the name in public since the essay, and the sentence restored the very title the tombstone had declined.69 The historian Shen Jianzhong (沈建中, Shěn Jiànzhōng) supplied a gloss: the essay “was not intended to be targeted at Leighton Stuart personally”.70 The essay itself has left the readers. The sentence it struck from Wen Yiduo’s speech has not come back.

  1. Stuart (1954), Fifty Years in China, pp. 239–240, the source of the quoted phrases and the soldier’s remark. Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 250, supplies the sequel: guards sealed the compound for several days, and the new authorities, recognizing no relations with the United States, classed its diplomats as ordinary “foreign nationals”.↩︎

  2. Both recollections are Stuart’s own, from Fifty Years in China (1954), pp. 16–17 and 28–29; Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, quotes them at pp. 14 and 16, silently dropping “then” from the second. The foster discipline in Mobile matched the exhibits: the boys walked to church rather than ride the streetcar and were denied dancing and theatergoing (p. 14).↩︎

  3. Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, pp. 18–21, with his ordination in 1902 and his marriage in 1904 to Aline Rodd of New Orleans. His father, John Linton Stuart (d. 1913), had sailed for China in 1868 and served the Southern Presbyterian mission at Hangzhou for forty-five years; his mother, the daughter of a Mobile judge and sometime mayor, taught all four sons herself and founded the first YWCA unit in China (pp. 12–13); the memoir, Stuart (1954), pp. 11–12, dates the father’s sailing and names her father, where Shaw has “a major’s daughter”.↩︎

  4. West (1976), Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, pp. 90–91. The student body reportedly included seventeen great-grandchildren of the statesman Zeng Guofan (曾國藩, Zēng Guófān, 1811–1872) and five grandchildren of Liang Qichao, and applications ran as high as twelve for every place in the freshman class.↩︎

  5. Philip Fugh, born into an upper-class Manchu family—his grandfather had been a Manchu duke and governor of Gansu—first met Stuart about 1918, when Stuart addressed a national YMCA conference in Tianjin: so Stuart (1954), pp. 121–122, where Shaw has “the early 1920s”. Shaw describes “a teacher-student as well as a superior-secretary relationship over the next four decades”; Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, pp. 64–65.↩︎

  6. Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 69; the Chinese chancellors of 1929–1941, pp. 60–63. The registration under a Chinese head: West (1976), p. 95.↩︎

  7. The internment: Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 145. Marshall’s confidence and the appointment: pp. 155–156; the Kunming assassinations and the flight of liberal critics into the U.S. Consulate: p. 171.↩︎

  8. Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, pp. 3–4, with his notes 9–11 at p. 317: the designation ran in Time, July 22, 1946, p. 18; the Jesuit lineage is Hu Shih’s, from his 1954 introduction to Stuart’s memoir; the “germs” phrase is Shaw’s rendering of the Yenching sociologist Lei Jieqiong (雷潔瓊, Léi Jiéqióng), “從司徒雷登看美帝文化侵略”, in an anthology of 1951. The closing tricolon is Shaw’s own summary at p. 4.↩︎

  9. Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, pp. 244–245 (the resignation, the residence), p. 247 (the crossing and the fall of the city), p. 250 (the instructions and the quoted judgment). The Soviet ambassador “was the only Chief of Mission who made the move”: Stuart (1954), p. 215; his telegram of June 8 counts the chiefs of mission still in Nanjing “with exception of Soviet” (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 899).↩︎

  10. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 885 (the Ambassador in China to the Secretary of State, May 11, 1949), the first report of the Fugh–Huang contact, carrying the “old college President”, the “first move”, and Zhou’s message of distress.↩︎

  11. The May 13 call: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 890; “hit it off rather well” is Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 251. The June 6 demands: doc. 899.↩︎

  12. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 913 (the Ambassador in China to the Secretary of State, telegram 1410, June 30, 1949); his telegram of July 14 adds that “according to my friends in Peiping, Mao openly stated that I would be welcome” (doc. 929). Huang Hua’s memoir routes it differently: the Center chose the unofficial channel of a June 16 letter to Stuart from Yenching’s Chinese president Lu Zhiwei (陸志韋, Lù Zhìwéi) reporting Zhou Enlai’s consent, and Huang’s June 28 word conveyed Beiping’s agreement to a Yenching visit, Mao’s name appearing nowhere in it. The Party’s own files carry it: Mao minuted on June 21 that Stuart, if he came to Beiping, could expect “to meet and talk with the authorities” (可望與當局晤談; the rendering is the author’s). Huang Hua (2007), 亲历与见闻——黄华回忆录 (Qīnlì yǔ jiànwén: Huáng Huá huíyìlù), pp. 83–84; Yang Kuisong (楊奎松), “燕大輓歌”, 中央研究院近代史研究所集刊 (Jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan), no. 115 (2022), p. 122. The Nanjing committee’s telegram, which Yang quotes at p. 121, has Stuart wishing 在返美前能赴平與周會見一次，順便看看燕大; Huang, p. 83, has Fugh cite a cable from the Under Secretary of State, James Webb.↩︎

  13. Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (論人民民主專政), June 30, 1949, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1961), vol. IV; printed in Renmin ribao on July 1, the Party’s twenty-eighth anniversary.↩︎

  14. John P. Davies of the Policy Planning Staff had urged the trip as a “curtain lecture”, the public to be told afterward that its ambassador had gone north not “to play footy-footy with the Communists” but “to read them the riot act”: his memorandum to George Kennan, June 30, 1949, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 914, which a notation shows was put before Acheson on July 1. The refusal, telegram 775, went out at 6 p.m.: doc. 916.↩︎

  15. Huang Hua (2007), 亲历与见闻——黄华回忆录 (Qīnlì yǔ jiànwén: Huáng Huá huíyìlù), pp. 84–85, an exchange Huang writes he learned of only years later, from Zhou. The American record of June 24 has only word from Chen, “indirectly”, of his talks with Mao and Zhou (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 911); the preparatory session is Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 255. Mao’s message in the original: “政治上必须严肃，经济上可以做生意。”; the English is the author’s translation. Luo Longji, arriving in Beiping to find “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” about to appear, never delivered his half of the errand.↩︎

  16. The flight (an American transport plane, a party of eight in all) and the exit corridor: Huang Hua (2007), 亲历与见闻——黄华回忆录 (Qīnlì yǔ jiànwén: Huáng Huá huíyìlù), p. 85, which hardens the Washington reception into “three prohibitions” (三个不许): no speeches, no talk of Sino-American relations, no interviews. Butterworth’s advice and the censored address: Stuart (1954), pp. 261 and 270. The Beiping mockery: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, vol. VIII, doc. 556 (the Consul General at Peiping to the Secretary of State, August 12, 1949), relaying the 光明日報 (Guangming ribao) of August 11; the brackets are Shaw’s, filling out the cablese. The mockery and the August 10 arrival: Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, pp. 263–264.↩︎

  17. United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949, released August 5, 1949; the Letter of Transmittal (Acheson to Truman, July 30, 1949) occupies pp. iii–xvii, the passages quoted at pp. xv–xvi. Cited from Van Slyke, ed. (1967), The China White Paper: August 1949; the page count is Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 264.↩︎

  18. Stuart (1954), pp. 262 (the plane) and 268–269, where he records that he had since been told, and had “read repeatedly”, that there was “absolutely no precedent for the publishing by any government, while friendly diplomatic relations still prevailed, of a portrayal of another country and its government so adversely critical”; Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 264, prints that sentence without Stuart’s hedge and without “its”. Stuart asked how the disclosure would affect the Chinese whose names and statements the White Paper printed, the Americans, himself among them, whose reports it reproduced, and the future reporting of the foreign service.↩︎

  19. Barmé, “White Paper, Red Menace”, China Heritage, January 17, 2018, prints Mao’s instruction to Hu Qiaomu (應利用白皮書做揭露帝國主義陰謀的宣傳) and identifies the first reply, “A Confession of Helplessness”, as Hu’s draft revised by Mao. The five that followed—“Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle” (August 14), “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!” (August 18), “Why It Is Necessary to Discuss the White Paper” (August 28), “‘Friendship’ or Aggression?” (August 30), and “The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History” (September 16)—are collected in the fourth volume of the Selected Works.↩︎

  20. Van Slyke’s introduction to the 1967 Stanford reissue, quoted in Barmé, “White Paper, Red Menace”, China Heritage, January 17, 2018. Barmé’s own gloss: the White Paper served the Party as a “negative teaching example” (反面教材, fǎnmiàn jiàocái).↩︎

  21. “別了，司徒雷登”, Xinhua commentary, August 18, 1949; printed in Renmin ribao, August 19, 1949, p. 1, as an unsigned agency editorial. Attribution to Mao came only with the fourth volume of 毛泽东选集 (Mao Zedong xuanji), in September 1960; its English edition is the source of the English text quoted throughout this chapter: “別了，司徒雷登” (“Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1961), vol. IV. The newspaper’s text differs in small ways: its examination asks after the White Paper alone, the words “or in Acheson’s Letter of Transmittal” entering in 1960 (1949: 你们能在白皮书中找到一丝一毫的仁义道德吗), and its portrait gives Stuart “wide” (广泛的), not “fairly wide”, connections.↩︎

  22. The original, from the Selected Works Chinese text: “司徒雷登是一个在中国出生的美国人，在中国有相当广泛的社会联系，在中国办过多年的教会学校，在抗日时期坐过日本人的监狱，平素装着爱美国也爱中国，颇能迷惑一部分中国人，因此被马歇尔看中，做了驻华大使，成为马歇尔系统中的风云人物之一。”↩︎

  23. The Selected Works apparatus supplies the deaths: Wen Yiduo was assassinated in Kunming on July 15, 1946; Zhu Ziqing died in Beiping on August 12, 1948, “from poverty and illness”, eight weeks after signing a declaration that refused American relief flour. “別了，司徒雷登” (“Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1961), vol. IV, notes 8–9.↩︎

  24. The characters Mao set in quotation marks (“茕茕孑立，形影相弔”) are from Li Mi (李密, Lǐ Mì), in his “Chen qing biao” (陳情表) of 267 CE, the memorial with which a former official of fallen Shu Han declined a Jin summons to court, pleading the grandmother who had raised him. The Selected Works apparatus supplies the attribution to Li Mi.↩︎

  25. The original: “司徒雷登走了，白皮书来了，很好，很好。这两件事都是值得庆祝的。”↩︎

  26. “‘Friendship’ or Aggression?”, August 30, 1949, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1961), vol. IV. The doctrine in the original: “美帝国主义比较其他帝国主义国家，在很长的时期内，更加注重精神侵略方面的活动，由宗教事业而推广到”慈善”事业和文化事业。“; the closing clauses:”司徒雷登就是从事这些事业出了名，因而做了驻华大使的。”↩︎

  27. “別了，司徒雷登” (“Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (1961), vol. IV, note 1, rendering the first Chinese edition’s “他一向是美国对华文化侵略的忠实执行者” (毛泽东选集 (Mao Zedong xuanji), vol. IV, 1960). The second edition (1991) drops the sentence; its note charges Stuart instead with actively supporting the Nationalist government’s civil war.↩︎

  28. The Foreign Relations China volume for 1949 was published in 1978; Huang Hua’s memoir appeared in 2007.↩︎

  29. Qi Hui (戚慧), “闻一多作品入选中学语文教材历时性研究”, 语文建设 (Yuwen jianshe), no. 4 (2017), which dates the cut of “300多字” (“300-odd characters”) to the 1949–1966 textbooks and gives its grounds, the second being that Wen’s praise “与毛泽东《别了，司徒雷登》一文中对司徒雷登的评价相左”. Wen’s praise in the original: “司徒雷登是中国人民的朋友，是教育家……他是一位和蔼可亲的学者，是真正知道中国人民的要求的”; 南方周末 (Southern Weekly) of June 25, 2009 prints it condensed, and quotes Zhuang Wenzhong (庄文中), once head of the publisher’s middle-school Chinese office, that the cuts were made “在叶老一手主持下”. The collected works read 老者, “old man”, where the Chongqing 新华日报 (Xinhua ribao) of July 28, 1946 printed 学者, “scholar”: 闻一多全集 (Wen Yiduo quanji), vol. 2, pp. 450–451. The English renderings are the author’s.↩︎

  30. David Barboza, “John Leighton Stuart, China Expert, Is Buried There at Last”, New York Times, November 19, 2008, which has the essay “reprinted in Chinese textbooks”. It appears in none of the five volumes of the unified senior-secondary reader now in use.↩︎

  31. “教材编选者揭教科书删改内幕”, 南方周末, June 25, 2009; the paraphrase is the author’s, from the reporter’s account of Liu Qian’s reading.↩︎

  32. 义务教育教科书·语文·八年级下册 (Yuwen, grade 8, vol. 2; the revised edition approved in 2024), Lesson 13, pp. 85–88. Its source note: “选自《闻一多全集》第三卷……有删节”; the Stuart passage is not in the lesson text.↩︎

  33. Ōkawa Shūmei (1942), 米英東亞侵略史 (Beiei Tōa shinryakushi), from the NHK lectures of December 14–25, 1941: the chronicle sentence at p. 7, in the words of the 1944 wartime translation as quoted by Aydin (2007), The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, ch. 7, n. 50; the Open Door reading at pp. 32–33; the Puritan “serving both God and gold” (神と黄金とに兼ね仕へる) at pp. 87–88, in the author’s rendering. The conference is the Greater East Asia Conference of November 1943 and its Joint Declaration.↩︎

  34. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism”, in Fairbank, ed. (1974), The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, p. 340, quoting A. A. Volokhova, Inostrannye missionery v Kitae, 1901–1920 (Foreign Missionaries in China, 1901–1920; Moscow, 1969), which he read in Ellen Widmer’s excerpt and summary (pp. 339 and 420, note 10).↩︎

  35. Fairbank, ed. (1974), The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, introduction, p. 18.↩︎

  36. Schlesinger, “The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism”, in Fairbank, ed. (1974), pp. 336–373: the definition at p. 363, the philanthropic form at p. 367, the Boxer indemnity at p. 367, “ideological coexistence” at p. 363, the Vietnam sentences at p. 373.↩︎

  37. “Conference Dealing with Christian Groups Receiving Subsidies from America”, April 16–21, 1951; Merwin and Jones, eds. (1963), Documents of the Three-Self Movement, pp. 27 and 29, which gives 151 delegates. Zhang Le (张乐), “样板：1951年基督教控诉运动中的顾仁恩事件”, 华大史学研究 (Huada shixue yanjiu), no. 2 (2016), counts 154, with Guo Moruo and Li Weihan among the government figures present; Ferris (1956), The Christian Church in Communist China to 1952, p. 8, has 138 delegates and, with guests and “working Comrades”, 200 in all.↩︎

  38. Lu Dingyi’s address to the conference, in Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. 32.↩︎

  39. “The persons denounced in the conference itself were the missionaries Frank W. Price and Edward Lockwood, Episcopal Bishop Y.Y. Tsu, Methodist Bishop W.Y. Chen, and independent evangelist Ku Jen-en.” Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. 45; Ying Fuk-tsang (邢福增) and Leung Ka-lun (梁家麟) (1996), 五十年代三自運動的研究 (Wushi niandai sanzi yundong de yanjiu), p. 68, reading 天風, adds S.C. Leung, accused by Jiang Wenhan (江文漢) of the YMCA. Chen Wenyuan (陳文淵) was arrested and not released until 1959; Zhu Youyu (朱友漁), who had sailed for the United States in December 1950, was denounced in absentia; Gu Ren’en was sentenced to fifteen years. The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, “Chen Wenyuan”, gives the 1959 release; the 1963 collection’s biographical index has him instead “imprisoned for five years” (Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. vii).↩︎

  40. Z.T. Kaung (江長川), “我控訴基督教敗類陳文淵” (“I Accuse Chen Wenyuan, Scum of Christianity”), Renmin ribao, April 25, 1951, p. 6. The printed speech carries “(大鼓掌)”, loud applause, at his vow to purge such elements from the church, “one found, one expelled; ten found, ten expelled” (有一個除一個，有十個除十個); the thanks and the demand verbatim: “我要感謝政府已經把他逮捕，同時還要請求政府將他依法嚴辦”.↩︎

  41. Erskine (2013), “Frank W. Price, 1895–1974”, p. 596, quoting Cui’s accusation; Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. 50, holds up “the experience of Ts’ui Hsien-hsiang, who accused Frank Price” as the movement’s model of technique.↩︎

  42. Erskine (2013), p. 599, who prints the name 严嘉瑞 (p. 479) and interviewed Yan in Guangzhou in 2011 and 2012 (p. 477 n. 188; p. 599 n. 78); Yan had changed Frank to Jerry after the Nationalist defeat. He had taken the English name at the wartime Interpreters Training Institute (譯員訓練班), the military-interpreter school where Price served as deputy director (p. 421).↩︎

  43. Liu Liangmo, “How to Hold a Successful Accusation Meeting”, New China News Agency, Shanghai, May 15, 1951; reproduced in Documents of the Three-Self Movement, pp. 49–50. Preliminary meetings in every church were to find “a few people who accuse with the greatest power”; texts of outstanding accusations were to go to the local papers and the movement’s Shanghai headquarters, and physical evidence was to be reported to the police.↩︎

  44. “The Christian Manifesto: ‘Direction of Endeavor for Chinese Christianity in the Construction of New China’” (中国基督教在新中国建设中努力的途径), in Documents of the Three-Self Movement, pp. 19–20, the source of the quoted opening. The three talks and the joint drafting are in Deng Yang (2021), “走向’三自’之路”, p. 464; Ying and Leung (1996), p. 37, count eight revisions. Zhou’s own disclaimer, that a manifesto he had drafted for them to sign would have been of no use, is in Wickeri (1988), Seeking the Common Ground, p. 130.↩︎

  45. The formula had a prior life. The self-supporting method John Livingston Nevius preached from Shandong took root instead in Korea after his 1890 fortnight advising the Seoul mission, remembered there as the three-self principle, 三自原則 (삼자원칙, samja wonchik): 自傳 (자전, jajeon, self-propagation), 自立 (자립, jarip, self-reliance; some accounts give 自給, 자급, jageup), 自治 (자치, jachi, self-governance). Where the Korean formula says 自立 (“self-standing”), the Chinese says 自養 (zìyǎng, “self-nourishing”), a narrower word, and one older than the Movement that took its name: the Manifesto itself speaks of a three-self movement “hitherto promoted in the Chinese church” (Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. 20). Nevius (1958), The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches, preface to the fourth edition; its Korean translation by Kim Nam-sik, Nevius (1981), 네비우스 선교 방법 (The Nevius Mission Method).↩︎

  46. Wu’s report and the 18% complaint: Documents of the Three-Self Movement, pp. 34–39; the front-page publication with the first 1,527 signatures: Renmin ribao, September 23, 1950, p. 1. The volume’s own editors warn that “in some areas more Lutheran signatures were reported than there were Lutherans there” (p. iii); Wickeri (1988), p. 131, gives the final count as 417,389.↩︎

  47. The denominational breakdown of the first signatures, with 耶稣家庭 at 381: Renmin ribao, September 23, 1950. Its independence of the missions: Ying and Leung (1996), p. 85. Jing’s fate: Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. viii; the disbanding, Wickeri (1988), p. 161.↩︎

  48. The count of ten thousand: Shanghai News, June 14, 1951, cited in Erskine (2013), p. 598; the June 17 meeting at which the Shanghai Community Church removed him from its rolls: Erskine (2013), p. 599. The sources split on the venue: Erskine places the mass meetings at the Canidrome, the dog-racing stadium seven blocks from Price’s house, and Ferris (1956), The Christian Church in Communist China to 1952, p. 14, at the Race Course, though both cite that issue; Wickeri (1988), p. 134, names no venue and counts more than twelve thousand.↩︎

  49. Ferris (1956), p. 11: the movement’s executive committee of twenty-five made “a successful accusation meeting against at least four of its own members” the prerequisite of a church’s registration as independent. The figure is Ferris’s alone; the registration regulations printed in Documents of the Three-Self Movement carry no such clause.↩︎

  50. Erskine (2013), pp. 579–580, 604, 608: the trial in absentia in mid-1951, Essie’s account of the surveillance (“We were under surveillance and investigation and yet not mistreated”), the twenty-two months, the call of Saturday, September 27, and its forty-eight hours, the crossing on October 2, 1952. A contemporary press account rendered the interval as “house arrest”; Erskine corrects it—the Prices were confined to Shanghai, not to their house.↩︎

  51. The counts: Ferris (1956), pp. 34–35 (1,700 Protestant missionaries and 770 CIM workers in mid-1949; 18 CIM by January 28, 1952), relaying The China Weekly Review of November 19, 1949, and the Missionary China Bulletin of February 12, 1952. The mechanism: Harrison (2013), “Communism and Christianity”, pp. 91 and 132–133, and Lacy (1955), “The Missionary Exodus from China”, p. 302; Ferris, p. 35, has Catholic missionaries jailed “before being deported”. Wickeri (1988), p. 133, dates the exodus “virtually complete by 1951”.↩︎

  52. Michael H. Hunt (1983), The Making of a Special Relationship, p. 309. The Boxer rumor that the foreigners took Chinese eyes for their medicines is in Chapter 5.↩︎

  53. Wang Mingdao and Watchman Nee: Wickeri (1988), pp. 162–169 (Nee arrested April 1952; Wickeri has the fifteen years handed down then and the 1956 trial “merely” reconfirming them, where the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, “Nee, Watchman”, has the sentence passed at the public trial); the 1963 documentary collection’s biographical index confirms Wang’s arrest, release, and re-arrest (Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. xv). Chao’s denunciation and rescinded orders: pp. vi and 70–71.↩︎

  54. Yang Kuisong (2022), “燕大輓歌”, pp. 137 (the February 12, 1951 nationalization and Mao’s brushwork), 153–155 (the October 4, 1952 absorption). The diary line, 從此燕京成爲歷史名詞矣, is quoted by Yang at p. 155; the English is the author’s translation.↩︎

  55. Documents of the Three-Self Movement, p. xi, under her own index entry, which follows her father’s: “herself a student in that school in 1952 when she publicly denounced her father”; the compilers brush her characters as 陸耀華, with a query mark of their own.↩︎

  56. Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 265: “a severe stroke in late November 1949”, opening “more than a decade of physical illness”.↩︎

  57. Meng Zhaogeng (孟昭庚), “司徒雷登的凄凉晚景”, 人民文摘 (Renmin wenzhai), no. 8 (2010): the missing Social Security, the $30,000 raised for the house (which Meng dates to 1953), the family’s names for him, and the nursing (“连上厕所、洗澡也全得靠傅泾波帮助”). The absent savings and the house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which Shaw has him entering on leaving hospital in 1950: Shaw (1992), pp. 231 and 275. The pension, from the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia: Wang Wei (汪伟), “司徒雷登’回来了’”, 中国新闻网 (Zhongguo xinwen wang), December 9, 2008.↩︎

  58. The will’s wish: Shaw (1992), An American Missionary in China, p. 291—adding, from the vantage of 1992, “This wish has so far been unfulfilled.” The two charges to Fugh, the vase among them: Meng (2010), who calls it Ming and makes the vase a clause of the will; the museum records it as a deathbed instruction (“余过世后，此物当归还原主”). The Meiyuan memorial catalogues it as an early-Republican Jingdezhen copy of Chenghua ware (仿明五彩人物敞口瓶), bought by Zhou and delivered by Wang Bingnan (王炳南) in November 1946: Yuhuatai Martyrs Cemetery Administration, “这只花瓶，见证中美外交历史”, July 29, 2021.↩︎

  59. Shaw (1992), p. 290, gives September 18, 1962. The United Press International dispatch in the next morning’s New York Times, datelined Washington, September 19, says he “died today at the Washington Hospital Center” (September 20, 1962, p. 33). Most Chinese accounts, following Hao Ping, give the 19th.↩︎

  60. Shaw (1992), pp. 290–291: the service at the Inter-Church Center Chapel, Henry Pitney Van Dusen presiding, the “Christian, Confucian, and Buddhist tunes”, and the lyric as printed there.↩︎

  61. Meng (2010): “骨灰由傅泾波捧回华盛顿，安放在他生前所住寝室的案头，没有送去安葬”.↩︎

  62. The 1973 visit at Zhou’s invitation: Meng (2010). The later trips resist one date: Hao Ping, who handled the request at Peking University, has a second trip in 1974; Meng gives 1983; Camp, “An Ambassador Returns to China”, Foreign Service Journal 94, no. 9 (November 2017), p. 85, and the Global Times give 1984. The 1986 permission, for a burial at Yenching’s Linhuxuan, and its shelving: Hao Ping (郝平), “魂归故里：司徒雷登骨灰安葬杭州的前前后后”, 中华读书报 (Zhonghua dushu bao), December 12, 2008, consulted as reprinted with Liu Yawei (2008), “别不了的司徒雷登”. The approval lost to the May 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing: Global Times, September 28, 2016.↩︎

  63. Meng (2010), who has Fugh die that August; the handover at Meiyuan took place on May 26. The hall preserves the compound from which Zhou’s delegation had faced Stuart’s embassy across the city in 1946–47.↩︎

  64. Camp, “An Ambassador Returns to China”, Foreign Service Journal 94, no. 9 (November 2017), p. 85, which calls John Fugh “the first U.S. general of Asian descent” and has Xi “party boss in Zhejiang Province from 2002 to 2007”; the 2006 approach, made in Washington, is the Global Times’ (September 28, 2016), which mistitles Xi vice secretary. ADST, “Act of Kindness” (October 2017), credits the burial to “then-Zhejiang Party Secretary Xi Jinping”.↩︎

  65. David Barboza, “John Leighton Stuart, China Expert, Is Buried There at Last”, New York Times, November 19, 2008, whose wire text has “the mayor”; 钱江晚报 (Qianjiang wanbao), as relayed by CCTV on November 18, 2008, names the vice mayor, Tong Guili (佟桂莉), and describes the alumni. China Radio International, “US Diplomat’s Ashes Back Home in China”, china.org.cn, November 18, 2008, relays the Associated Press report.↩︎

  66. Camp (2017): “A group of elderly Yenching grads revealed after the ceremony that they had hidden a tape recorder in the bushes, correctly surmising that the Hangzhou waiban (Foreign Affairs Office) would not provide any musical accompaniment.”↩︎

  67. The inscription, as 钱江晚报 reported it: 司徒雷登，1876—1962，燕京大学首任校长 / “John Leighton Stuart, 1876–1962, first president of Yenching University”; CRI (2008) describes the black marble slab lettered in both languages.↩︎

  68. Camp (2017): “Nearby, we were surprised to notice, stood the grave of the Chinese fighter pilot, Lt. Cdr. Wang Wei, who died after colliding with an American EP-3 in 2001”; his body was never found.↩︎

  69. Xi’s banquet remarks of September 4, 2016, and the “first time” judgment: Zhang Yu, “China-born US Diplomat Recognized Decades after Chairman Mao Labeled Him an Imperialist”, Global Times via People’s Daily Online, September 28, 2016.↩︎

  70. Shen Jianzhong, quoted in the same Global Times report; Shen’s fuller argument is that the essay answered the White Paper, not the man.↩︎