Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Marked Man

  Local authorities immediately captured and executed a dozen men for robbery and spreading rumors. Justice was swift, but the undercurrent of discontent, especially within mission schools, was surging.

  Any foreigner who thought the January outbreak was only momentary lawlessness didn’t see what was happening at a deeper level in China. Apathy was turning into action as Chinese people began seeing themselves as citizens responsible for the direction of their country. It was nothing less than a political awakening, and mission schools became a point of attack.

  The Nationalists, now in control of vast swaths of China, launched a drive to “Recover Educational Rights.” Mission schools would be tolerated but had to register with the government and install Chinese principals and directors. Religious services would become voluntary and the Bible excluded from the curriculum. Instead, students would attend a weekly ceremony to honor Sun Yat-sen.

  Some schools, like Trinity, struggled with the question of registration, arguing that it would undermine their religious purpose. But others, such as Fukien Christian University (FCU), were swift to change. The ten-year-old university, supported by four American and British missions, had been built at the base of a mountain on the Min River, six miles downstream from Fuzhou.

  Its American president, John Gowdy, understood what was happening and in December 1926 tendered his resignation. The university trustees in New York City balked, but Gowdy insisted, saying the political situation demanded it. He told them bluntly that he was standing in the way of the legitimate aspirations of the Chinese. “Nothing that I have seen in China has gone so deeply into the lives of the students as has this movement,” Gowdy wrote.

  At the start of 1927, the debate over the future of FCU turned into open confrontation. A pair of Chinese teachers had come under the influence of one of the originators of the anti-Christian movement in China, Tsai Yuen-pei, fifty-nine, a former chancellor of the elite Peking University. He advanced the ideas that science and religion were incompatible and that Christianity was a tool of imperialism and capitalism and a means of oppressing weaker nations.

  In February, Tsai traveled to Fuzhou to work with a nucleus of young men and women who had studied in Beijing and now taught at mission schools, including FCU and Wen Shan Girls’ School. He took the group to Amoy, another treaty port in Fujian, and as Gowdy described to his trustees, “thoroughly indoctrinated them so they came back here with the declared purpose of breaking up all the mission schools.”

  One of them was H. H. Chen, an alumnus of the university and one of the few Chinese professors on the faculty. Chen had been such a promising student that after he graduated from FCU, he went to Peking University for two years of further study. It was there that he met Tsai and other activists behind the anti-Christian movement. Chen thought it was not enough for the American president to resign or for the university to register. He demanded that the entire institution—buildings and all—be turned over to the government.

  “Our university is too Christian, too ideal,” Chen complained as he pressured students to see his way.

  Late at night on March 21, 1927, his supporters called a meeting of the student body to put the matter to a vote. The students had no power to effect change, but it would send a potent message. Chen had invited two speakers from Fuzhou. Each delivered virulent anti-Christian harangues.

  The student body was split. Opponents of the resolution tried to stop a vote with a two-hour filibuster. A vote was about to be taken when the lights in the hall went out—and forty-four opponents walked out, leaving the student union without a quorum. Not about to give up, Chen and his allies moved their fight to the city and a bigger audience. They boarded river launches for the trip downstream to Nantai. Armed with pots of glue, they plastered thousands of anti-Christian posters in red, yellow, and blue on walls. Chen rustled up more than a hundred supporters for a demonstration, including many younger students from mission high schools.

  On Thursday, March 24, they took to the streets of the foreign settlement.

  At 8:25 a.m. every morning, the chapel bells at Trinity College summoned students to morning prayers. The pealing chimes mixed with noisy magpies and warblers in the banyan trees on campus.

  The Reverend Lin Pu-chi (far right) traveled to Shanghai for the consecration on November 1, 1927, of the Reverend Ding Ing-ong (far left), who became an assistant bishop in Fujian. With them was the Right Reverend John Hind, the bishop of Fujian. Courtesy of Church Mission Society Archives, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.

  Lin Pu-chi still enjoyed attending the chapel at his alma mater. As he left campus after the short service, he thought of all the things he had to do that day. He needed to check on the cathedral, now nearly finished, with only a few furnishings to add. The consecration on May 1 was only five weeks away. Lin Pu-chi was proud that his extended family had donated a wooden lectern for the altar. It was carved from hardwood and fashioned like an eagle, an Anglican symbol of unflinching faith: a bird capable of staring into the sun.

  Lin Pu-chi, wearing his clerical collar and a Western-cut suit, headed toward the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages.

  Approaching from the opposite direction was a crowd spread across the width of the street. The protesters were young and loud, mostly teens and young men, all chanting. Lin Pu-chi was unconcerned; protests nowadays were common.

  As they neared, he could start to make out their chants: Down with Christian schools! Down with religion! Down with the church! The closer they came, the more menacing they seemed, their faces contorted with anger, fists pumping, voices strained.

  Lin Pu-chi kept to the sidewalk. He looked ahead, averting his eyes. Someone shouted his name. Others turned in his direction. Lin Pu-chi was easy to pick out—tall with an elongated face and so nearsighted that he was never seen without his eyeglasses. The mob flew toward him like wasps on the attack.

  A hand reached out and grabbed him at the scruff of his neck. He fell back.

  Others seized his hands and pinned them behind his back. He strained to break loose but there were too many arms, too many hands reaching at him, grabbing. He felt them wrapping twine around his wrists and then a thicker rope around his neck. An attacker tightened it with a quick tug.

  Someone jammed a straw wastebasket upside down on his head and hung a big poster from his neck. Waiguoren de zougou, it screamed in crude black brush strokes. Running dog of foreigners!

  The anti-Christian agitators needed a Christian to parade through the streets, and they’d just caught the dean of the Anglican cathedral. Everyone knew Rev. Lin Pu-chi. If they could scare him enough to recant his faith, even just for a terrified moment, they would be able to declare a victory that would resound through the city and beyond.

  The man holding the rope yanked Lin Pu-chi forward like a dog on a leash. He tripped and fought to keep his balance.

  He heard laughter. His glasses were cockeyed. He had trouble seeing.

  Terror gripped Lin Pu-chi. Everything was happening so fast. There was one of him and a hundred, maybe more, of them. He caught the glint of a pistol in someone’s hand. Out of the corner of his eye he could see police officers in the distance, but they did not come to his aid.

  The mob was leading him somewhere but moving too fast. If he fell, he feared he would be trampled. His attackers could say it was an accident, not murder. Was this how he would die?

  They took him to a platform built for the protest near the gates of Trinity. As he stood there, people slapped him in the face and cackled, Running dog!

  Amid the screaming, he closed his eyes. He prayed for bravery and for his tormentors. He instinctively thought of St. Stephen, one of the first deacons of the apostles, who died from a stoning, becoming the first Christian martyr. He summoned the saint’s last words: Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.

  “Are you a Christian?”
a ringleader shouted.

  “Yes,” Lin Pu-chi replied resolutely.

  “Renounce your faith and we’ll let you go,” his tormentor bargained.

  “Never,” he said, unperturbed. “Kill me if you want.”

  “We will drag you through the streets if you don’t renounce!”

  He calmly refused. The students pulled him off the platform.

  The parade had begun. They led him past the seminary where he taught; past the big church on a bluff overlooking the Min; past a Methodist mission school for boys. When the American principal saw the commotion, he dispatched a student to get a message to Lin Pu-chi. The teen was able to get close enough to offer to send for help from the US consulate.

  “Tell him no,” Lin Pu-chi replied. “This is a Chinese affair. I’ll handle it.”

  The mob now headed in the direction of Hwa Nan College, a missionary school for women that was registered in the United States. The crowd was a mile away. A teacher from the college who saw the protesters ran ahead to warn its president. Ida Belle Lewis, a missionary from Iowa, raced from class to class, telling students to take cover in the home economics room in the basement. She ordered a guard to lock the front gate. But when the protesters arrived, they jumped over the wall, opened the gate, and dragged Lin Pu-chi inside. From the basement, Lewis could hear them outside. She took a deep breath and stepped outside to face the protesters.

  Lewis started talking to demonstrators, not all of them local students. They badgered her on the evils of Christianity. She switched from the local dialect to Mandarin, even English, depending on whom she was talking to, and held her ground.

  An exhausted Lin Pu-chi stood under a palm tree, bedraggled, his hands still bound with rope. While most of the protesters were engaged with Lewis, he maintained a calm demeanor with the captors nearest him and tried to reason with them.

  They responded with bitter slogans.

  “Christianity is a foreign religion that devours us!”

  “No it’s not,” the priest quietly replied.

  Taken aback by his mild response, they allowed him to continue.

  “Do you know Confucius? Do you know Mencius?” asked Lin Pu-chi, ever the teacher. “Christianity is not a foreign faith. It’s what the great sages told us to look forward to. And that is why I will never deny my Lord and Master.”

  The others had had enough of Lewis and turned to leave after nearly an hour of back-and-forth questioning. They pulled Lin Pu-chi on his leash out the gate.

  “We’ll go now,” a leader shouted over his shoulder. “But we’ll be back.”

  For all their bluster, the protesters had failed to garner support from onlookers in their attack on Lin Pu-chi. After three hours, Chinese marines finally intervened and freed the young priest from his captors. The next day, he went about his work as usual.

  Twelve days after his trauma, Lin Pu-chi took his wife to the hospital. She delivered a son, Lin Baomin. They baptized him with the Christian name Paul, the name taken by the biblical Saul after his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—not long after he had encouraged a mob to stone to death St. Stephen.

  • 8 •

  Alma Mater

  Fuzhou, 1928

  The clock on the dormitory wall read half past midnight when a teenage student at Trinity College shuffled down the empty corridor on his way to the lavatory. He stopped. He sniffed and followed the scent of smoke to a stairwell leading to the attic.

  His shouts woke the other boarders on the floor. The Chinese housemaster and older students grabbed heavy blankets and flailed at the fire in the stairwell. They snuffed out those flames, but above them, in the attic packed with surplus furniture, paper lanterns, and decorations for Christmas, an inferno roared.

  A fire brigade raced through the streets of Nantai, bells clanging. Volunteers with buckets hurried past students and teachers standing in their nightclothes by Trinity’s front gate. Other men on ladders with hoses worked through the night to prevent the fire from spreading to other buildings on campus.

  At dawn on January 2, 1928, all that remained of the Anglo-Chinese School, one of three schools at Trinity, were its brick walls and foundation. The dormitory was in the same building as classrooms. Everything was lost. Desks, blackboards, chemistry beakers, microscopes, textbooks, notepaper, inkwells, fountain pens—gone. Only the absence of wind that night and a downpour kept the fire from destroying the entire five-acre campus. And no one that night could shake the thought that perhaps that was exactly what the blaze had been intended to do.

  Maybe it had all been an accident. Certainly, it would have been hard for an arsonist to run up to the attic, start a fire, and fly down the stairs and out of the building without being detected. Yet eyewitnesses swore they smelled oil that night, raising the specter that an accelerant had been used to start the blaze. Rumors circulated, too, that all the pulleys on campus wells were broken. Had someone tried to sabotage the rescue effort?

  But the most unsettling theory, the one that no one could entirely rule out, not even Bishop John Hind, was that someone from within the Trinity family had set the fire. For months, critics of mission schools, including extreme Nationalist and Communist supporters, had been contacting Trinity students and faculty in order to agitate from the inside. They viewed an elite school like Trinity, with its foreign pedigree, as hostile to the patriotic spirit of the times. The college was three schools in one, with 370 students split between a primary school, the Anglo-Chinese School (formerly called St. Mark’s), and another middle school. The latter two were the equivalent of high schools in the American educational system.

  The agitators could be patient: Bishop Hind suspected that a handful of students had enrolled that fall just to cause trouble. The Chinese principals of the three schools as well as some students had received anonymous letters warning them to leave or face danger. In one incident, an older boy in the Anglo-Chinese school, the son of a Chinese pastor, was returning to campus with friends after attending a political rally. Just outside the school gates, the group was jumped and the pastor’s son was stabbed five times and injured. His attackers escaped.

  Two days after the fire, Bishop Hind wrote “a wail” for help to the London office of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). The destruction of the Anglo-Chinese School was a severe blow to morale. He cautioned that if the school did not reopen, it would be a major defeat for all concerned. “We cannot desert our Chinese brothers at a time like this,” Bishop Hind wrote. “It seems well, if possible, to keep the schools going, and yet the strain is very great, not only at TCF [Trinity College Fuzhou] but indeed all through the mission.”

  Trinity College set up temporary quarters and classrooms for the sixty students from the Anglo-Chinese School in private houses around Nantai. Still the violence continued. The following month, the American-run Foochow College in the old city was damaged by fire—its second arson attack in five months. And on May 28, a dormitory at Fukien Christian University (FCU) went up in flames while students and faculty were attending evening chapel. American and British diplomats urged missionaries to shut down their schools in protest. If provincial leaders could not guarantee their safety, they contended, the city should lose access to its finest educational institutions.

  At FCU, the board of managers opted to remain open and replace the two-hundred-thousand-dollar dormitory. To close the university, they reasoned, would play into the hands of critics. Trinity College also moved to rebuild its damaged Anglo-Chinese building. But internally, the school struggled with the question of its future. The Nationalist government was insisting that all private schools register and abide by new regulations and limitations. Some senior missionaries on the faculty had threatened to resign, arguing that some of the rules would strip Trinity of its Christian identity and mission. Religious classes and chapel services had to be voluntary. English would be reduced to a subject taught in
class but not the principal language for instruction. And foreigners could teach at schools but not run them.

  Before the fall term started for the 1927–1928 academic year, the Anglican community had sent two emissaries—Lin Pu-chi and the first Chinese bishop in Fuzhou, the Right Reverend Ding Ing-ong—to meet with a recently appointed education commissioner for the province. The official was Christian and had studied at Columbia; his wife and mother attended Christ Church Cathedral. Sympathetic, he assured the men that Trinity could maintain its religious aim while complying with new rules. After the meeting, the school submitted an application, which was accepted by the government and confirmed in a letter delivered to the school on January 2, 1928—the very day of the fire.

  The missionary in charge of Trinity, the Reverend W. P. W. Williams, placed the letter in a safe in his office. But the process of registration had one more step: finding his replacement. Williams had worked in Fuzhou for more than a quarter century and at one time had been principal of the Anglo-Chinese School, where he taught physiology and scripture. Given the new rules, Williams could not remain as president; it would have to go to a Chinese educator.

  The board of managers for Trinity began searching for a Chinese candidate. The most obvious choice was an alumnus who wanted the job the least—Lin Pu-chi.

  Filial Duty

  With the opening of Christ Church Cathedral in 1927, Lin Pu-chi’s workaday world shifted to the main part of the city on the north side of the Min River, opposite his home in the foreign settlement in Nantai. Fuzhou was rapidly changing. Gone was the five-hundred-year-old city wall with its stone gates, replaced by a boulevard broad enough to accommodate automobiles. The city now boasted auto showrooms for Ford and Chevrolet and got its first paved road in 1928. Lined with trees and electric lights, the avenue stretched from the old city to the waterfront and was twice as wide as before.