The Cumberland Incident of 1928: Gender, Nationalism, and Social Change in American Mission Schools in China

The Cumberland Incident of 1928: Gender, Nationalism, and Social Change in American Mission Schools in China Gael Graham In May of 1928, a group of thirty-five young Chinese women from Girding Women's College, an American Protestant missionary institution in Nanjing, and their missionary chaperones were entertained on the British cruiser Cumberland. During the afternoon, one of the chaperones began dancing with the captain of the vessel, who gave his men permission to dance with the college students. Distressed and embarrassed, for the socially conservative students disapproved of Western-style dancing, five of them reluctantly accepted invitations to dance, not wanting to offend their hosts. Nevertheless, for the majority of the students, a pall had been cast over their pleasure in the outing.1 When the male students at nearby Nanking University, also an American mission college, found out what had happened, they were furious with the women. A group of them posted a placard on the back wall of the women's college that read: "You who danced with the foreign soldiers are not worthy to step on the ground of the University." One of the men wrote a letter to a Shanghai newspaper relating the incident and stating sarcastically : "Ginling girls have opened a new chapter in the history of women in China." Missionary administrators at Ginling were barraged with letters that equated students with prostitutes, charging them with being "slaves to the foreigners" arid not understanding the meaning of patriotism .2 Ginling women responded indignantly to the mens' criticism. According to Liu En-lan, a graduate of the class of 1925 and now a teacher at Ginling, the women thought the male students were "rude and crazy." "We think," Liu continued, apparently sharing their judgment, "their education must be a failure," since the men had "unscientifically" leaped to the conclusion that Ginling students preferred foreign men to Chinese. Liu praised Matilda Thurston, the president of Ginling, and Minnie Vautrin, a missionary teacher, both of whom had been on the ship, for permitting the students to decide for themselves how to manage the situation rather than "[using] any imperialistic method to tell them what they must not do."3 The furor that erupted over what was indubitably an innocent if awkward encounter between Chinese women and British men exemplifies some of the tensions between female and male students in American © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 6 No. 3 (Fall)____________________ 36 Journal of Women's History Fall Christian schools all over China in the period following the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Although the May Fourth Movement is often remembered primarily for its bitter attacks on traditional Chinese culture and as a stage leading to the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in May of the following year, it was launched by an immense student strike protesting the Versailles settlement, in which the Allies permitted Japan to take over the formerly German concession in Shandong. Subsequently, a national student movement emerged as Student Unions were founded in most major Chinese cities. Later incidents involving foreign powers in China kept the students in an almost constant state of uproar throughout the 1920s. To the Nanking University students, the perception that the Ginling women had been disporting themselves with British soldiers on a gunboat that was protecting foreign privileges was inflammatory, for the twin issues of Chinese national sovereignty and foreign imperialism were at the forefront of the student movement. Ginling women, however, understood another dimension of the men's protest—their fear that Chinese women were attracted to foreign men. In responding to their critics at Nanking University, the Ginling women addressed both issues. They argued that by permitting dancing the missionaries' permissive behavior was actually anti-imperialist and ignored the delicate question of their presence on a foreign gunboat. In a word, the women attempted to defuse the incident by denying its political content. They also turned a newly emerging value against the men by calling them "unscientific," thus mocking their social-sexual anxieties by implying that they were unmodern.4 The outrage of the Nanking men may be explained in part by their status as students at a foreign school, which some Chinese regarded...