Dreams of a Young Republic: The American Vincentians in China - Hardcover

by John J. Harney (Author)

The Congregation of the Mission, a Catholic order known as the Vincentians after their founder Saint Vincent de Paul, began missionary work in China in 1699. First run by French priests and nuns, a large vicariate in the south of China was taken over by American priests in 1921. French envoys of nineteenth-century imperialism had given way to American priests who ascribed to an idealized vision of a modern democratic China. For the Americans, China was a dream: a place liberated from centuries of imperial orthodoxy, a nascent democracy, a country that would forever be free and democratic--and thus one that would inevitably be capitalist and more friendly to Catholicism.

In Dreams of a Young Republic John J. Harney examines the perceptions and expectations of this group of American Catholic missionaries between the 1911 revolution that created the Republic of China and the communist revolution of 1949 that led to the collapse of that republic on the Chinese mainland. The Vincentians experienced warlordism, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek's partial unification of the country, Japanese invasion during World War II, and communist revolution. Through all this they clung to a vision of a free, democratic China friendly to the West. As Harney contextualizes the Vincentians' observations and desires, he provides insight into the China that came to be and offers a history of a Sino-American relationship with much deeper roots than the antagonisms of the Cold War and the decades that have followed.

Author Biography

John J. Harney is an associate professor of history at Centre College. He is the author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (Nebraska, 2019).