Dr. Marjorie King
Ph.D. Associate Professor, Center for International Studies, Shantou University, China.
Paper Title:
The Social Service Department at the Rockefeller-sponsored Peking Union Medical College, 1920-1937
Marjorie King's research interests have long focused on Chinese-American social relations. Earlier publications focused on 19th C. American women missionaries' work with Chinese village women. In her biography of Ida Pruitt, she explored the early 20th C. transition from Social Christianity to professional social service, as well as American wartime philanthropic support for the Nationalists and the Communists. Current research is analyzing the long-term impact of one such philanthropic project, the vocational Shandan Bailie School in Gansu province. She is also contributing to the liberal arts reforms at Shantou University, sponsored by the Li Ka-shing Foundation.
Abstracts:
In 1906 a Rockefeller-funded commission began to explore the possibility of creating a non-denominational, Christian university for medical research in China. This interest paralleled the increasing American awareness of China in the early 20th Century, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation’s entry into medical education. Prominent American educators and representatives of major missionary societies, who gathered in the Rockefeller Foundation offices in 1914 to discuss China’s future, all perceived the Chinese as a “flawed and backward peop1e” whose “radically false views of life and nature” b1ocked the progress of their society toward modern civilization.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was a devout Baptist who insisted that the new medical research hospital would maintain a Christian character. Its professed goa1, in the words of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was to offer the best of Western civilization’s “mental development and spiritual culture” to a tradition-bound society and a “distinctive contribution to missionary endeavor.” ...