Raising the Standards of Family Life: Ginling Women’s College and Christian Social Service in Republican China

Abstract

Between 1928 and 1951 Wu Yifang served as the president of the Protestant missionary-founded Ginling Women’s College.² During their 1952 reshuffle of higher education, the new Communist regime organised Ginling out of existence. Wu remained in leadership positions during the Maoist period.³ Her condemnation of Ginling’s social service work shows that she embraced the Communist critique of Christian education as an insidious form of what has been termed cultural imperialism, or what she called “cultural aggression.”⁴ Wu held that social service only temporarily and superficially ameliorated the distress of the working and peasant masses, and thereby delayed a political revolution