Chinese students arrived at Grinnell College in four stages: 1) the 1916 establishment of Grinnell-in-China laid the foundation; 2) between 1914 and 1931 the great bulk of Chinese students arrived, although a couple came after World War II; 3) between 1949 and 1979, when the U.S. government did not have official diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), no students from the PRC came to Grinnell; instead, ethnic Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as domestic Chinese American students continued to come; 4) since the late 1970s Chinese students have come to Grinnell at a brisk pace despite occasional geopolitical tensions. Up till 2023, China was the largest sending country of international students to the U.S. Although in 2024 India overtook China, sending the largest share of international students enrolled at American colleges and universities, China still leads in the number of international students studying at Grinnell.
Grinnell’s Chinese alumni came from three main feeders: Grinnell-in-China, the Nankai School, and Tsing Hua College. Of the thirty-eight Chinese alumni featured on this website, thirty belonged to one of the three cohorts, and almost all the others also had personal connections with the three groups, whether through hometown association or other connections. In fact, only the first (Sing Bo Moy) and last (Wen Chao Chen) on the list had no known connections to the three cohorts.
Before Grinnell-in-China
Grinnell’s connections with China started many years before the 1916 founding of the Grinnell-in-China program. A Chinese American alumnus, Sing Bo Moy, attended Grinnell (called Iowa College at the time) in 1891-92 as part of the Freshmen English Academy, though he never returned to finish his course and earn a degree. Moy achieved U.S. citizenship with the help of his Grinnell cohort in 1892, but his citizenship was revoked by a Jasper County Judge in 1913, one of several Chinese immigrants “denaturalized” in Iowa around the same time. The Geary Act, which extended the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, forbade Chinese nationals from being naturalized until 1943, when it was finally repealed.
The upsurge of Chinese students to study abroad in the early twentieth century crystalized a moment of profound national distress in Chinese history. Repeated defeats and the humiliation suffered by the Qing (1644-1911) army and navy at foreign hands forced Chinese cities to open to foreign businesses and missionaries, while making plain to the political and intellectual elites of the time the necessity of Western education for any possible Chinese rejuvenation. On the other hand, a heightened and widespread sense of national crisis caused by foreign encroachment into the Chinese economy, politics, and socio-cultural life gave rise to increasingly radical schemes of national self-strengthening and Chinese modernization. Chinese nationals, especially those of the elite class, therefore perhaps inevitably harbored mixed feelings toward Western education and its Chinese recipients. Sometimes the same individuals demonstrated contradictory or inconsistent positions as their personal circumstances shifted with the trouble-ridden twentieth-century Chinese and global histories.
From the model of constitutional monarchy espoused by reformers such as Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929) to the Republican model of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), intellectuals became increasingly sympathetic to the total renunciation of traditional Chinese culture and full acceptance of Western modes of modernization. Eventually, some intellectuals adopted communist ideologies that espoused a violent overthrow of the existing inequitable social structure. As self-identified patriots, Grinnell’s Chinese alumni also showed different political inclinations and proposed different ways to strengthen China. One, Pao Shu [Shou] (P.S.) Kao ’20 , eventually died for the cause, while most others played important roles in China’s cultural and economic modernization, mostly as academics, diplomats, civil servants, lawyers, and bankers.
Grinnell-in-China
Grinnell-in-China spearheaded recruitment efforts in China, utilizing existing missionary and alumni networks to spread the word. In addition to the Grinnell-in-China program, which gradually built itself up to be one of the academic powerhouses in secondary education in north China, some Grinnell alumni, such as Willliam Tuttle, also taught at the two prestigious institutions of Nankai and Tsing Hua. The Grinnell alumni in China not only painted an alluring picture of their alma mater to recruit Chinese students, but also secured scholarships for them to attend Grinnell, especially important for Nankai alumni.
Visits from Chinese Dignitaries
The relationship between Nankai and Grinnell yielded additional friendly visits and exchanges. In September 1917, President Zhang Boling of Nankai School brought to Grinnell four Nankai alumni: Wen Chien Feng, Fan Yi Kung, Kuang Chao Lee, and Feng Tsai, and Ngai Chen Shih, the sole Chinese woman among the Chinese who studied at Grinnell. Zhang had been on his way to Teachers College, Columbia University when he visited Grinnell in 1917. He studied the U.S. education system at Columbia for a year in preparation for building Nankai University from the embryo of Nankai School. On his way back to China in November 1918, he again visited Grinnell, together with three other prominent Chinese educators and officials: Yan Xiu, Fan Yuanlian, and Sun Fengzao.
Following this visit, thanks to the efforts of Kuang Chao Lee and others, in 1921 Professor John D. Stoops in Philosophy was invited to visit Nankai to teach philosophy there for a year (GR 03/31/1921). Stoops and his wife set sail on August 1 the same year but unfortunately had to cut their visit short due to illness, leaving China in September 1921.
Another visit to Grinnell by Chinese dignitaries during this period happened on April 28, 1924, when Alfred Soo-ke Sze, 施肇基, a Columbia-educated intellectual and the first Ambassador of China to the U.S., delivered a talk at Herrick Chapel on “the trend of new education in China” (GH 04/29/1924). He took a photo with a group of Chinese students at Grinnell, which was later published in the Des Moines Register (05/25/1924). At the 1935 Grinnell Commencement, Sze, along with two Grinnell alumni and New Deal men, Harry Hopkins (1912) and Chester Davis (1911), received an honorary degree (Wall 69).
Map of Tsing Hua, Nankai, & Grinnell-in-China
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