Demolishing the wall: Missionary University, public access, and Sino-Western space negotiation in Republican Chengdu (1895–1937)

Abstract

This article rethinks how colonial presence and foreign settlements reconfigured urban spaces beyond the treaty-port system by examining Chengdu, an inland, non-treaty-port city. Focusing on the 1930 boundary-wall controversy at West China Union University, a missionary college, it shows that anti-imperialism was refracted through local expectations of access to space and how everyday spatial practices had blurred the line between foreign enclave and local community. In the absence of colonial infrastructures, WCUU pursued indigenizing strategies to embed themselves in urban life; its later move to enclose the campus with walls was criticized as imperialist encroachment. Occurring amid heightened nationalism, the controversy drew force both from nationalist idioms and from ordinary residents’ everyday grievances—economic strain, insecurity, and disruptions to daily routines—in a notably turbulent interwar Chengdu. The conflict brought to the fore two visions of Chengdu’s urban identity: one championed by Western-educated local elites and another articulated by local people defending what they understood as public space. Moreover, I demonstrate how missionary institutions in less overtly colonial settings grappled with the contradictions inherent in their liminal status—simultaneously functioning as colonial enclaves and aspiring to integrate into local society.

Introduction

Spatial demarcations and boundaries are crucial to understanding colonial presences and, in particular, the relationships between foreign settlers and local populations.¹ The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, signed after the First Opium War, established five coastal treaty ports where foreigners were permitted to settle and trade under extraterritorial privileges. In subsequent decades, additional agreements expanded this treaty port system. John K. Fairbank’s seminal work demonstrated that while the treaty port system disrupted China’s traditional diplomatic and trade paradigms in favour of Western interests, the emergence of foreign concessions (zujie 租界) also reflected the Qing state’s persistent efforts to regulate foreigners through circumscribed channels of contact.² Likewise, Pär Cassel points out that while treaty ports did indeed emerge from ‘unequal treaties’, their institutionalization was not simply the result of Western military pressure. The Qing court recognized the practical utility of maintaining separate foreign settlements, which could function as buffers to restrict unsupervised Sino-foreign interactions, often regarded by Qing rulers as the more pressing threat to political stability.³ In this sense, coastal concessions extended the logic of the Canton System: they served as spatially segregated enclaves designed to prevent unregulated foreign penetration into the Chinese interior.

However, the Qing state’s vision of clear separation represented an idealized intention rather than reality. Historical evidence demonstrates that over time, the boundaries between foreign enclaves and local communities proved increasingly permeable, with people, ideas, and practices flowing between them.⁴ Shanghai’s International Settlements offers a salient example of how a space initially reserved for foreign residence became populated by a majority of Chinese nationals, even though it remained under foreign jurisdiction. The instability of the late nineteenth century, especially after the Taiping Civil War (1850–1864), caused an influx of Chinese seeking refuge in the concession, fuelling the International Settlements’ rapid expansion. By the early twentieth century, the majority of residents of the International Settlements were Chinese.⁵ Over time, the concession shifted from an exclusive foreign residential zone to an area primarily inhabited by Chinese nationals who availed themselves of extraterritorial protections.

While scholars have extensively documented the history of foreign enclaves in coastal treaty ports, the dynamics of foreign institutional presence and its engagement with local society in non-treaty ports and inland settings have received less sustained attention. Yet a growing body of scholarship has shown that inland foreign presence was shaped by the absence of treaty-port infrastructures such as formal concessions, consular courts, foreign press, and colonial police. Without these supporting structures, foreign institutions had to negotiate legitimacy and security through more fragile accommodations with local officials and communities. This article builds on these insights to ask how inland conditions—geographic isolation, lack of colonial infrastructure, and histories of anti-foreign sentiment—shaped the ways foreign institutions interacted with local communities.

A key turning point in the expansion of foreign presence into the Chinese interior was the signing of the Tianjin Treaty in 1858, which allowed foreigners to travel, trade, and reside beyond the coastal ports. Subsequently, foreign missionaries and merchants travelled upward the Yangtze River, establishing churches, schools, hospitals, and commercial firms that left a lasting imprint on the urban and social landscape of the interior.⁶ Unlike coastal treaty ports with formalized foreign settlements, however, most inland cities lacked formal concessions. Foreign institutions thus entered these spaces without the protections or infrastructures that framed colonial life on the coast, making their presence more dependent on local conditions and more vulnerable to shifting political currents.

The Yale-in-China mission in Changsha, examined by Jonathan Spence, illustrates these inland dilemmas with clarity. Established with lofty aspirations to transform Hunan province through medicine and education, the mission found itself repeatedly entangled in local politics: In late Qing Hunan, where anti-foreignism and revolutionary activity were both strong, radical activists sometimes used foreign missionaries as a cover to evade official scrutiny. In the early Republic, the mission’s compounds became sanctuaries during violent power struggles, and by the mid-1920s, the university itself had become a target of nationalist protests. Spence highlights how foreign universities in the interior were vulnerable not only to anti-Christian hostility but also to wider political upheavals, their institutions drawn—often unwillingly—into local struggles.⁷

Judith Wyman’s work on anti-foreignism in late Qing Chongqing underscores a related point: that inland conditions produced ambiguities difficult to reduce to simple categories of ‘Chinese’ and ‘foreign’. In Sichuan, where Western settlers arrived relatively late and where massive demographic dislocations during the Ming–Qing transition had produced a ‘province of migrants’, boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘foreign’ were unstable. Anti-foreign mobilization was not reducible to racial or national identities but was often shaped by shifting social identities and local rivalries.⁸

It is against this backdrop that this article turns to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, where a 1930 controversy over the construction of a perimeter wall at the West China Union University (WCUU) crystallized local anxieties about ‘foreign space’. Founded in 1910 by five Protestant mission societies from north America and Britain, WCUU aimed to advance ‘the Kingdom of God in West China by means of higher education’. Occupying an expansive campus near Chengdu’s south city gate, the university functioned both as a foreign enclave and as a visible embodiment of modern education.⁹

A major metropolis of western China, Chengdu had attracted a modest Western presence—mostly Christian missionaries—since the late 1800s.¹⁰ However, unlike coastal treaty ports, where foreign institutions were embedded in communities supported by concessions, foreign-language press, and consular courts, Chengdu had no such infrastructure. The foreign community remained small, travel to the coast required weeks of arduous river and overland journeys, and Sichuan was notorious for outbreaks of anti-Christian violence from the 1860s to the 1910s.¹¹ As governor Ding Baozhen lamented in 1877, ‘Sichuan not only experienced the greatest number of anti-Christian riots but also faced the most thorny cases’.¹²

In this setting, WCUU relied heavily on local warlords and its image as a ‘public’ urban space to negotiate legitimacy in local society. During its early years, WCUU’s openness—maintaining an accessible campus and cultivating its image as a ‘public’ urban space—was at once an effort to mitigate suspicion and an experiment in embedding a foreign institution in local society. Yet, this spatial openness was both a strategic experiment and a vulnerability. What initially served as a symbol of inclusiveness became, by the late 1920s, a site of contestation, culminating in the 1930 anti-wall protests. By situating this episode within the literature on foreign institutions in inland China, this article underscores how inland non-treaty-ports produced distinctive patterns of Sino-foreign spatial politics—patterns that not only illuminate the politics of Republican Chengdu but also enrich understanding of imperial encounters across China.

Scholarship has emphasized the cosmopolitan nature of missionary institutions. Mary Brown Bullock characterizes Peking Union Medical College as an American transplant operating within the Rockefeller Foundation’s global medical education initiative, while numerous studies examine how missionary schools transmitted Western values and fostered China’s emergent urban elite through education.¹³ This historiographical trend underscores the cosmopolitan character and relative insularity of missionary colleges, most notably in Wen-hsin Yeh’s study of Yenching University and St. John’s University, where she demonstrates that following the May Fourth Movement, many missionary colleges experienced ‘alienated status’ within Chinese society.¹⁴

However, an emphasis on the ‘Western’ attributes of missionary colleges potentially underplays their sustained interactions with local society and with China’s evolving educational order. Chinese-language scholarship—much of it spearheaded by Ma Min, Zhang Kaiyuan, and Zhang Liping—has traced the long arc by which Christian colleges negotiated regulatory change, localized their operation, and were ultimately incorporated into the national university system. Building on this body of work, my analysis shifts the lens from institutional and policy trajectories to the social history of space: how access, everyday use, and local politics shaped the spatial status and legitimacy of a missionary university.¹⁵

While Christian institutions did not formally constitute foreign concessions, the extraterritorial privileges of foreign missionaries—and their strategic extension of these protections to Chinese converts—often transformed Christian compounds into perceived enclaves of foreign privilege.¹⁶ As Xiaoli Tian has shown in her study of the 1870 Tianjin Incident, the secrecy and inaccessibility of mission hospitals and churches—typically ‘located in walled, gated, and guarded mission compounds’ and ‘separated from the rest of the community’—contributed to the circulation of organ-snatching rumours that helped catalyse violence against missionaries and Chinese Christians.¹⁷

Tian’s analysis is suggestive for understanding the relationship between spatial exclusion and anti-Christian sentiment. Yet, by the 1930s, the political and cultural environment in Chengdu differed markedly from that of Tianjin in the 1870s. Local residents were more accustomed to foreign architectural forms, missionary compounds, and armed guards, given the proliferation of Protestant and Catholic establishments in Sichuan since the 1850s and the militarization of urban life in the early twentieth century. The case of WCUU therefore invites us to build on Tian’s insights by tracing how the politics of access and exclusion played out in a different temporal and social setting.

WCUU’s initial openness, which people had had almost two decades to enjoy, predisposed them to respond fiercely when university authorities abruptly decided to build a wall around the campus in 1930. Chengdu residents protested not because they perceived the university as Christian-sponsored and inherently alien; rather, they had integrated the campus into their daily routines and spatial practices. Consequently, when the university suddenly restricted public access, it not only eliminated a vital urban thoroughfare but evoked the negative associations of an exclusive enclave reserved for foreigners and privileged Chinese elites.

This article also builds upon scholarship on Republican Chengdu’s public space and urban life. As Di Wang has argued, ‘access to public space has always been the subject of conflict as people struggled to pursue power, their livelihoods, and of course, the mundane functions of daily life as well. The lower classes cultivated unique strategies to maintain their access to public space in an unequal society’.¹⁸ Chengdu commoners asserted claims over public arenas not only through protest but also everyday resistance that challenged the rules and regulations imposed by elite and state agents, blurring the line between private and communal domains. The WCUU wall controversy resonates with this pattern. Local residents treated the missionary campus as a public thoroughfare, a shaded park, and a site for gathering or even covert political organizing, appropriating the campus in ways that its owners frowned on. When these uses were curtailed by the construction of walls, they fiercely resisted, reflecting a deeply rooted expectation that urban space should remain open to negotiation and collective appropriation. Yet, unlike the arenas analysed by Wang, WCUU’s missionary identity and its initial open-campus policy which transformed what was meant to be a private space into a contested public space lent the controversy an additional symbolic charge: exclusion here could be framed not just as private versus public, or state versus commoners, but imbued with the complicated road of a missionary institution trying to embed itself in local society. In this respect, the WCUU protests confirm Wang’s insights into the politics of public space while also complicating them by showing how foreign institutions in inland society could amplify the stakes of spatial contestation.

I argue that resentment toward WCUU was at once part of the nationwide swell of nationalism in the interwar years and an expression of highly localized grievances of an inland city without formal foreign concessions. What made Chengdu’s case especially significant was the university’s contradictory trajectory of indigenization: its early efforts to integrate with local society through an open campus policy, and its abrupt reversal of that policy in 1930. This reversal generated feelings of exclusion and betrayal among local residents who had come to regard the campus as a shared public space embedded in their daily routines. The wall controversy thus reveals how nationalist mobilization was refracted through local expectations of space and access. More broadly, it underscores that nationalism was not only imposed from above or orchestrated by radical activists but also drew its force from disruptions to the ordinary spatial practices of urban life.

The death of a British professor

At approximately 8 p.m. on 30 May 1930, Clifford Stubbs, a British professor of chemistry at WCUU, left his residence on the northern side of campus to visit colleagues across the grounds. He set out on a black Raleigh bicycle imported from England. As night fell, the unlit campus descended into darkness.¹⁹ Around 9 p.m., two students discovered Stubbs lying unconscious on the pathway before Hart College, the central building of the campus. He had been violently assaulted and sustained multiple stab wounds. His clothing and wallet remained untouched, but the bicycle was gone. Initially treated at home by university medical staff, Stubbs was transferred the next morning to Sishengci Hospital, a Canadian missionary hospital affiliated with WCUU. His injuries were grave: a collapsed lung, severe abdominal haemorrhaging, and brain trauma. On 1 June, at the age of 42, Stubbs succumbed.²⁰

Stubbs’ death sent shockwaves through the university, where he had taught for 16 years and was deeply respected by colleagues and students. Beyond the campus, his British nationality lent the case considerable diplomatic weight. Zhang Linggao (張凌高), the acting president of WCUU, promptly reported to the Sichuan Provincial Government, expressing disbelief that such violence could occur within the supposed safety of the university grounds. Zhang urged stronger protection for faculty and students, noting that shortly before the attack a student had seen four suspicious figures—one armed—near Hart College.²¹ The British Consul General in Chongqing likewise lodged a protest, demanding the perpetrators’ arrest and enhanced protections for British nationals in Sichuan.²²

Provincial officials, keenly aware of the diplomatic stakes, moved swiftly. Liu Wenhui, Chairman of the Sichuan Provincial Government, instructed the Joint Military-Police-Militia Office (Junjingtuan lianhe banshichu 軍警團聯合辦事處) and the Huayang County government to accelerate the investigation and reinforce campus security.²³ To spur action, he announced a reward of 2,000 dollars (yangyuan 洋元) for the capture of the assailants.²⁴

On 13 June, police traced Stubbs’ missing bicycle to a repair shop, where it had been left for consignment. The rarity of a British-made Raleigh in Chengdu made it easily identifiable. Investigators soon arrested three suspects: Ou Jun, Zeng Yongfa, and Zhou Hui, all in their early twenties. Ou and Zhou, former soldiers from western Sichuan, and Zeng, from a village near Chengdu, had recently arrived in the city searching for work. For weeks, they drifted through teahouses and opium dens on the city’s southern edge. In his confession, Ou recounted the events of that night:

Zeng Yongfa complained about having no money and suggested we do some business. We went near Nantai Temple (Nantaisi 南台寺) to look for prey.²⁵ Zeng carried a pole, Zhou had a knife, and we hid in the thorn bushes. We first saw a student but let him pass because he wasn’t worth the trouble. Then a man rode by on a bicycle. Zeng struck him with the pole, but he fought back fiercely, so Zhou stabbed him. Only after he fell did we realize he was a foreigner. Frightened by his injuries, we fled, taking only the bicycle.²⁶

In their haste, Ou dropped a fan and Zeng abandoned his pole, both later discovered at the scene. After learning of Stubbs’ death, the men went into hiding but were captured ten days later while trying to sell the bicycle. All confessed, insisting the attack was driven by financial desperation rather than politics: in the darkness, they claimed, they had not realized their victim was a foreigner, and they struck only because he resisted and his bicycle promised value.²⁷

Eager to forestall diplomatic crisis, investigators emphasized the crime’s apolitical character. As Director Xiang Chuanyi of the Joint Military-Police-Militia Office summarized: ‘[The assailants] conspired to commit robbery and, on that dark night, unable to discern their target, they seized upon the opportunity to waylay Professor Stubbs as he cycled past, drawn by the prospect of his bicycle.’²⁸ On 27 June, the three were executed by firing squad at the site of the attack, in accordance with the Regulations for Punishing Banditry (chengzhi daofei tiaoli 懲治盜匪條例).²⁹

WCUU held a memorial service in the library. Students inscribed the word ‘VICTORY’ on a large portrait of Stubbs, venerating him as a martyr for the Christian cause.³⁰ Colleagues and students recalled him as a devout Christian, a dedicated teacher, and a humanist who treated Chinese with respect. Following the 1926 Wanxian Incident—when British gunboat attacks near Chongqing killed Chinese civilians—Stubbs had even spoken in the British House of Commons to oppose his government’s actions.³¹ One colleague remembered how, when confronted on the street by a Chinese soldier shouting ‘diguo zhuyi’ (帝國主義; imperialism), Stubbs simply doffed his hat and bowed, disarming the soldier to return the gesture.³²

Despite the official conclusion that Stubbs’ death was an ordinary robbery, many Western faculty members remained sceptical. Their suspicions were fuelled by the nationalist ferment of the preceding years: Chengdu had witnessed boycotts, demonstrations, and anti-imperialist agitation in the wake of the May Thirtieth Movement and the Wanxian Incident.³³ In such a climate, it seemed unlikely that the murder of a British professor at a Christian university was mere chance.

These doubts were intensified by an unusual occurrence earlier on the same day of the attack. At noon, a group of young men, unaffiliated with WCUU, suddenly assembled beneath the campus Clock Tower, only to disperse as abruptly as they had gathered. One faculty member, citing this peculiar event, speculated that Communist radicals in the city might have orchestrated the assault against Stubbs:

Why was it, for instance, that with so many other places in the city for assemblage, the stroke of two from the Clock Tower on the campus within ten minutes’ time brought a mixed crowd of labourers and students to that point from various directions … Why was the convener, a student, dressed in coolie clothes … Does the presence of five leading Communists among them, as recognized by members of our own student body, indicate anything?³⁴

A North China Herald report reinforced such suspicions, describing the killing as ‘a Communist outrage’ on the anniversary of the May Thirteenth Incident and characterizing the noon gathering at WCUU as ‘an open-air meeting of Communists’.³⁵ The report alarmed officials in Nanjing and prompted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cable Liu Wenhui, urging the immediate arrest of the perpetrators.³⁶

The rapid arrest, confession, and execution of the suspects—without an open trial—suggest that Sichuan authorities, acutely conscious of the diplomatic repercussions, sought to resolve the case quickly and prevent further escalation. Yet despite these efforts, both WCUU and provincial officials remained aware that the university had become increasingly vulnerable, its Christian identity making it a conspicuous symbol of foreign influence in the inland province.

Wall construction and protests

In early June, the university resolved to fortify parts of its campus with walls and fences to regulate public access. This marked a dramatic departure from its earlier spatial philosophy. Since its founding, missionary administrators had deliberately avoided erecting high barriers around the campus, aiming to prevent the institution from resembling a foreign citadel on Chinese soil. Enclosure had been limited to areas surrounding missionary residences, where faculty and their families lived, and even then only by means of a modest five-foot thorn hedge.³⁷ Due to its proximity to the south city gate, the university grounds had long functioned as an informal thoroughfare for nearby residents, facilitating daily movement into the city.

By the late 1920s, however, growing anti-foreign sentiment and political mobilization in Chengdu rendered this open-campus experiment increasingly untenable. The mounting pressures facing WCUU were not confined to security concerns. By this period, university leaders found themselves unable to maintain clear boundaries—both spatial and ideological—between the institution and its surrounding society. Not only had the grounds become porous to external political activity, but segments of the student body itself embraced nationalist movements that directly challenged the university’s missionary foundations. In the aftermath of the 1925 May Thirtieth Movement, the Beiyang government introduced sweeping regulations to reclaim educational sovereignty, requiring all missionary schools to register with the Ministry of Education, appoint Chinese presidents, ensure that at least half their boards were composed of Chinese trustees, and make religious instruction optional.³⁸ These provisions struck at the epistemological core of missionary education and undermined the institutional authority upon which WCUU had been established.

Equally destabilizing was the 1926 Wanxian Incident. After a dispute over navigation rights on the Upper Yangzi River, a British gunboat opened fire on Wanxian County near Chongqing, killing nearly 1,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians.³⁹ News of the massacre ignited an unprecedented wave of anti-British sentiment across Sichuan. In Chengdu, leftist organizations quickly mobilized, forming the Wanxian Incident Shame-Cleansing Society (Wanxian can’an guomin xuechihui 萬縣慘案國民雪恥會) and urging WCUU students to join public denunciations of British imperialism.

These pressures soon penetrated the campus. In October 1926, the WCUU Student Association circulated leaflets condemning British imperialism, advocating for an economic boycott, and calling for the abolition of foreign extraterritorial privileges. Several British faculty members, personally affronted by these statements, complained to President Joseph Beech. Beech rebuked the student leaders for insulting their teachers and demanded that 12 representatives offer a formal apology.⁴⁰ His intervention only deepened resentment. Although Beech eventually reversed course and issued an apology himself—motivated by fears of escalating unrest—the gesture failed to mollify the more radical students. A faction broke away to form a ‘withdrawal group’, announcing their departure from WCUU as an act of patriotic resistance.⁴¹ By the end of the crisis, student registration dropped from 280 to 180.⁴²

In addition to crisis on the campus, the outside environment grew visibly hostile to foreigners. Chinese employees of Westerners, emboldened or coerced by the Shame-Cleansing Society, launched strikes that disrupted the daily functioning of missionary households and the university. Protesters patrolled foreign residential quarters to block the delivery of food and supplies, while those Chinese who continued their employment with foreigners faced harassment. Some were branded ‘foreign slaves’ and paraded through the streets.⁴³ At the urgent request of their respective consuls, most Westerners in Sichuan had evacuated to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and even overseas by February 1927. It was not until the late summer of 1928 that the foreign teachers of WCUU managed to return.⁴⁴

Within this increasingly radicalized atmosphere, the murder of Clifford Stubbs in 1930 compelled WCUU to reassess its open campus policy. While the university publicly framed its decision to build walls as a pragmatic security response, the deeper rationale was to reassert institutional control—both over the physical campus and over the ideological boundaries of its educational mission. The construction of walls, therefore, was not merely an act of defence; it symbolized the retreat of a once-idealistic experiment in openness and its transformation into a more insular, elite enclave at a moment of intensifying nationalism.

However, the wall construction was quickly interpreted by local society as an act of imperialist overreach. On 7 July 1930, the Chengdu Newspapers Association (Chengdu baojie lianhehui 成都報界聯合會, hereafter CNA)—founded in 1928 in response to the military authorities’ repression of leftists—launched a campaign denouncing WCUU. Collectively, 20 local newspapers condemned the project as ‘an attempt to transform the university into a foreign concession’.⁴⁵ It then issued four demands: that Chinese and foreigners alike should be subject to Chinese law; that all foreign-owned properties and commercial firms be reclaimed; that further foreign acquisitions of Chinese land be resisted; and that any attempt by WCUU to establish a foreign concession or raise private militias be opposed without compromise, even unto death.⁴⁶

The rhetoric that WCUU was unlawfully constructing a concession in a non-treaty-port city and training a private militia recurred throughout the controversy, providing opponents with a powerful idiom to attack the university. Such claims resonated with the broader nationalist movements that had swept China. From the late nineteenth century onward, extraterritorial privileges and foreign concessions had served as focal points of nationalist mobilization.⁴⁷ By portraying the walls as a violation of Chinese sovereignty, protestors deftly elevated what began as a localized dispute into a symbolic struggle against imperialism itself.

Local grievances extended beyond urban media activists. Militia members (tuanlian 團練), baojia heads (鄉保; village heads), and peasants from outside the south city gate—led by Zhang Ziliang—submitted a joint petition to mayor Huang Yin (黃隱), pleading for the project to be halted. Unlike the CNA, their appeal framed the project not as an imperialist encroachment but as a direct threat to peasant livelihoods and subsistence:

We peasants make our living from farming, and our fields border the WCUU campus. Recently, foreigners summoned us and announced that, because of the murder of Dr. Stubbs, they have resolved to commence construction here without delay, digging trenches and erecting walls to divide Chinese and foreigners into separate zones (wahao zhucheng wei huayang fenchu 挖壕築城為華洋分處). We carefully considered this matter: once the trenches are dug and walls erected, the irrigation channels nearby will inevitably be diverted, obstructing the flow of water essential to our fields. The lands adjoining this site amount to no fewer than several thousand mu; if deprived of irrigation, they will turn into wasteland, and we peasants will have no means of survival. Moreover, the new walls will block the public paths we must traverse every day. If our roads are cut off, our daily comings and goings will be gravely inconvenienced.⁴⁸

Under mounting pressure, the mayor dispatched inspectors from the Public Works Bureau to investigate. Their report confirmed that, although WCUU was not constructing a fortification or attempting to transform the campus into a ‘foreign concession’ as rumors claimed, it had erected brick walls in three locations. Two of these, situated near the Women’s College and the Chinese School, obstructed heavily trafficked roads and caused inconvenience to local residents.⁴⁹

Mobilized by leftist activists, local residents soon organized the Coalition of Chengdu Residents Against Wall Construction at Nantai Temple (Chengdu gejie minzhong fandui nantaisi zhucheng dahui 成都各界民眾反對南台寺築城大會, hereafter CCRWCN). CCRWCN submitted petitions to the municipal government, framing WCUU’s construction as a violation of Chinese sovereignty (weihai guoquan 違害國權).⁵⁰ On 19 July, CCRWCN delivered a sharply worded letter to WCUU, accusing it of violating international law. The petition demanded that the walls be dismantled within three days, threatening that otherwise ‘the citizens of this city’ would take matters into their own hands:

It has come to our attention that the southern perimeter in question is indisputably Chinese territory, and that foreign nationals residing in China are prohibited from erecting fortifications (wairen zaihua juliu chusuo bude shanzhu chengyuan 外人在華拘留處所不得擅築城垣). Recent reports in various newspapers and extensive investigations by our association have revealed that your university has indeed constructed a wall without authorization—a fact that can no longer be concealed. Your institution’s pretext of building the wall to prevent theft is a transparent attempt to deceive, and it constitutes a violation of international law and an encroachment upon Chinese sovereignty. The people of Sichuan are outraged. In the interest of preserving amicable relations with foreign nations, we formally request that your university dismantle the wall within three days and provide a written response within 24 hours. Should you fail to comply, our association will lead the citizens of this city to your campus to dismantle the wall ourselves, thereby upholding national sovereignty (yizheng guoquan 以正國權).⁵¹

In response, acting university president Zhang Linggao avoided direct negotiation with CCRWCN and instead appealed to the Chengdu Public Works Bureau (Chengdu gongwuju 成都工務局). A Chongqing native, Zhang had graduated from WCUU in 1919 before undertaking mission work in Sichuan and pursuing graduate studies at Northwestern University. In 1927, Zhang was appointed WCUU’s vice president, responsible for registering the university with the Ministry of Education alongside fellow vice president Clifford Stubbs. When Zhang was appointed acting president in 1930, he became the public face of WCUU, handling the university’s official affairs as a Chinese national.⁵² In his letter, Zhang insisted that the wall construction was modest and lawful:

Our university, situated on the southern outskirts and adjacent to rural areas, has long been vulnerable due to its unfortified perimeter, making the campus accessible to all, including unsavoury elements. The tragic murder of Professor Stubbs was a direct consequence of this vulnerability. To prevent such incidents in future, we planned to construct two short walls along the pathways at the southwest and southeast corners of the campus to define the boundaries and deter theft. Before commencing construction, we invited local village heads to survey and confirm the boundaries and submitted our plans to the Joint Military-Police-Militia Office for approval. We also notified the municipal government, which dispatched officials to inspect the site and instructed us to draft detailed plans. The CCRWCN has spread unfounded rumours, accusing us of erecting fortifications and training soldiers (zhucheng lianbu 築城練捕) … The structures we have built are not fortifications, and it is unreasonable to expect us to dismantle them for these baseless claims.⁵³

On 1 August, more than 100 demonstrators—including labourers, Communist students, and members of what the municipal government’s report described as various ‘popular organizations’ (minzhong tuanti 民眾團體)—gathered outside the campus beneath banners reading ‘Coalition of Chengdu Residents Against Wall Construction at Nantai Temple’. After delivering speeches, protesters forcibly dismantled sections of the newly constructed walls using carrying poles and wooden sticks. The crowd dispersed only after stationed soldiers fired warning shots into the air. One protester was arrested for calling the soldiers ‘foreign slaves’ (yangnu 洋奴).⁵⁴ Three days later, on 4 August, approximately 70 protesters—including peasants, workers, and students—returned at dawn carrying large banners of the Coalition. They proceeded to demolish older wall sections near the library, with some construction workers leading the destruction.⁵⁵ The municipal government’s inaction may have contributed to the escalation. Although the CCRWCN had warned that they would act independently if official action was not taken, the mayor merely advised them to ‘quietly wait’ as he consulted with provincial military authorities, cautioning against ‘reckless action’.⁵⁶

Discontent with WCUU’s walls also surfaced within the municipal government. Liu Yinnong, director of the Public Works Bureau, submitted a sharply critical report to the mayor arguing that the walls had obstructed irrigation channels essential to local peasants and enclosed field paths within the university grounds. Liu expressed particular frustration that the university had proceeded without seeking approval from his bureau, deeming the project ‘procedurally improper’. As he wrote, ‘These foreigners, having already settled in our city, should be subject to our jurisdiction and protection. They cannot use the Stubbs case as a pretext for encroachment on land and obstruction of irrigation and transportation.’⁵⁷

On 9 August, the CCRWCN renamed itself the Association for Taking Back West China Union University (Shouhui huada tongmenghui 收回華大同盟會) and submitted a new petition to the municipal government. The petition cast missionary education as a vehicle of imperialist penetration, portraying the walls as tangible evidence of foreign aggression:

Foreigners often use missionary schools as propaganda fortresses to carry out their invasion of our country. Most of these schools were established without government authorization, and they often incorporate religious indoctrination into their curriculum, serving as potent tools of cultural imperialism. Recently, the construction of walls at WCUU has become a blatant manifestation of such imperialist aggression. Following the late Dr Sun Yat-sen’s directive against imperialist encroachment, our organization, initially formed as the Coalition Against Wall Construction, worked strenuously to demolish the walls. Now that this goal has been achieved, we have decided to reorganize into the Association for Taking Back Missionary Schools to continue the struggle.⁵⁸

By renaming themselves and shifting their focus from demolishing walls to reclaiming ownership of WCUU, the Association deliberately escalated local grievances into alignment with the national campaign to reassert Chinese educational sovereignty. In late August, activists attempted to obstruct the university’s reopening for the autumn term. Although WCUU ultimately resumed classes on 10 September, enrolment suffered dramatically: the institution admitted only several dozen new students that year.⁵⁹

The politics of wall

The wall controversy revealed two intertwined layers of conflict. The first emerged between the university and municipal officials such as Liu Yinnong, director of the Public Works Bureau, who perceived the university’s negligence to consult as a contempt for their authority. The second, and more important, conflict arose between the university and the local population, revolving around the question of whether ordinary residents retained the right to access the campus.

In its correspondence with municipal officials, WCUU repeatedly emphasized that it had obtained approval from the authorities before initiating construction. Yet Liu Yinnong’s evident dissatisfaction—that his bureau had not been informed—suggests that the university only focused on seeking approval from provincial military authorities and not bureaucrats on the ground. According to acting president Zhang Linggao, WCUU had submitted its plans to the Joint Military-Police-Militia Office and secured approval from three powerful warlords—Liu Wenhui, Deng Xihou, and Tian Songyao—who even dispatched troops to the university to protect the foreign faculty after Stubbs’s death.⁶⁰

An article in the September 1930 issue of the West China Missionary News—the official publication of the West China Missions Advisory Board—reported that the impetus for both constructing the walls and stationing armed guards had originated from the provincial military authorities, not from the university itself. The university leadership, fully aware of previous public sensitivities surrounding the issue of enclosure, initially resisted these measures:

After the recent tragedy in Chengtu [Chengdu], the military authorities expressed great chagrin that such an event could take place within their jurisdiction. There was a sincere and effective effort to secure the perpetrators of the crime. Equally emphatic was the promise to give adequate protection in the future if only the university would cooperate in certain designated ways; first, by permitting the stationing of an armed guard to take the place of or to supplement the small and ineffective police guard on the campus, and secondly, by completing the campus wall so that all entrances might be more effectively guarded. The first suggestion was strongly opposed in the university Senate as being indicative of fear on our part and of undue favouritism on the part of the government. The government over-ruled the Senate’s objection and housed an armed guard of about thirty soldiers on the campus. The university also pointed out that previous attempts to close up our own private roads to public travel had been opposed, but the three military leaders of Western Szechwan [Sichuan] issued proclamations of permission and forbidding molestation, and the work of construction was begun.⁶¹

Another article published in the North China Herald on 5 August 1930 also pointed out that the wall construction was not a unilateral decision by the university. Rather, the Sichuan warlords themselves had their own stakes in urging the university to fortify its campus:

The Chinese authorities told the university that, if they wished protection from the government, they must close off these roads by building walls. The campus being outside of the city had become the meeting place of various groups who had not been allowed to hold their meetings in the city. A lecturer was one day disturbed by a gathering outside his classroom on the grounds and he learned afterwards that it was the wheel-barrow men having a meeting which they could not have elsewhere. We also learned after it had taken place that ransom money for the return of a ‘fat pig’ had been paid over at the foot of the university clock tower. We also know that Communist students had had meetings on the grounds. The grounds are large and it is a very costly proposition to surround it with brick walls, but following the advice of those in authority, we have during the past few weeks by building some brick walls and some bamboo fences, been able to block off these roads and have a large part of the campus enclosed. The main gates have been open every day and people have been allowed to come and go as they have pleased.⁶²

Given that both West China Missionary News and North China Herald were English-language publications primarily serving Western readers, it is likely that they drew from similar sources. Nonetheless, both accounts affirm a critical point: the university did not act independently in walling off its grounds but proceeded with the explicit approval—and under the pressure—of provincial military authorities. Even according to the findings of Chengdu’s Public Works Bureau, the height and dimensions of the walls and bamboo fences were consistent with local construction norms. In this light, the allegations circulated by protestors—that the university was ‘constructing fortifications’ and ‘training a private militia’ to establish a foreign concession—appear less as accurate descriptions than as politicized misreadings. These charges likely conflated the university’s wall construction with the presence of troops stationed on campus at the behest of Sichuan warlords.

The only procedural irregularity was that the university had failed to formally notify the Chengdu Public Works Bureau prior to construction. Yet even this omission reflected the political realities of the time rather than any deliberate effort to evade oversight. Throughout the controversy, Mayor Huang Yin adopted a posture of ambiguity. He authorized an investigation only after agitation escalated, and when the inquiry concluded—whether impartially or under pressure—that the walls obstructed irrigation and public traffic, Huang merely forwarded the report to the provincial military authorities rather than taking any decisive action on his own. His reluctance suggests an awareness that ultimate jurisdiction over the matter rested with the warlords, not with the municipal bureaucracy. Indeed, it is plausible that Huang had tacitly supported the construction from the outset.

Contemporary accounts further reveal Huang’s strategic stance. A Western faculty member recalled that during the course of protests, Huang was receiving treatment for amoebic dysentery at the university’s affiliated United Church of Canada Hospital. According to this account:

When Dr. Best talked the university situation over with him [Huang Yin], his reply was, ‘Don’t worry. When they [the protestors] begin to do something we will act. In the meantime don’t be anxious.’ The same attitude was taken by Generals Den Shi-heo [Deng Xihou], Liu Wen Hwei [Liu Wenhui], and Li Chi Hsiang [Li Qixiang], all of whom were entertained by the university and consulted as to the university’s duty and course of action in view of the agitation.⁶³

In fact, the university’s decision of bypassing the Chengdu Public Works Bureau and securing the backing of provincial warlords reflected an acute understanding of the fragmented political landscape of interwar era Sichuan. Between 1916 and 1936, the province operated under the so-called ‘defence district administration’ (fangquzhi 防區制), a decentralized system in which military strongmen ruled semi-autonomous fiefdoms, levying taxes, appointing officials, and exercising considerable independence from central authority.⁶⁴ By the mid-1920s, Sichuan’s political scene was dominated by several powerful warlords, many of whom maintained close relations with WCUU. For these warlords, ties to the foreign missionary community, and particularly to a modern institution like WCUU, provided crucial symbols of progress and legitimacy. In a telling episode shortly before the wall controversy, warlord Deng Xihou personally showcased the WCUU campus and its advanced medical laboratories to a visiting delegation of Tibetan headmen.⁶⁵

WCUU’s close association with Sichuan warlords was one of the reasons it became a target of nationalist attacks. On 18 September 1930, Lu Zhiyuan, a critic of WCUU, published an open letter in Shishi xinbao, a Shanghai-based political journal, under the headline ‘Chengdu’s West China Union University Encloses Land and Builds Fortress’. Lu declared that he hoped to use the letter to ‘let the entire nation know the truth’ about WCUU’s wall construction. According to Lu, President Zhang Linggao, ‘under the instigation of [the founding university president] Joseph Beech’, had annexed some 5,000 mu of land into the university grounds, ‘constructed a fortress around it, and employed one hundred armed guards—this is, in essence, a foreign concession’. Lu further charged that Sichuan’s warlords, ‘notorious for their negligence and ingrained appeasement of foreigners’, continued to donate annually to the YMCA while failing to support local public service, thereby ‘preparing their own retreat once they lose power’. In Lu’s telling, the warlords had secretly approved WCUU’s walls precisely because they feared public opposition.⁶⁶

Since its founding, WCUU had permitted local residents to access the campus and make use of its facilities and pathways. In Republican China, however, such an open campus policy was unconventional. During the Republican era, missionary colleges such as Yenching and the Baptist Shanghai College (Hujiang daxue 滬江大學) maintained enclosed campuses, as did universities with less foreign influence, including Fudan University, which similarly constructed boundaries to separate their grounds from the surrounding urban environment.⁶⁷ As one WCUU faculty poignantly pointed out, ‘The [WCUU] wall was in no place higher than a man’s shoulders, that it was but one brick’s width thick, that it enclosed but two-thirds of the campus, that it obstructed no recognized, legal, public road. The walls surrounding every other educational institution in the city are ten or more feet high and nearly a foot thick.’⁶⁸

If walls were the norm rather than an anomaly for Republican-era colleges, and if WCUU’s walls were no longer than those of other institutions in the city, why did a relatively modest construction provoke such outrage? The answer cannot be reduced to WCUU’s mission-run identity alone, though that certainly intensified scrutiny in moments of heightened nationalism. Instead, the controversy stemmed from the symbolic weight that walls themselves carried. As contributors to Chinese Walls in Time and Space have shown, walls in Chinese history were never merely functional; they marked boundaries of power, legitimacy, and sovereignty, serving as enduring symbols of inclusion and exclusion.⁶⁹ Similarly, Peter Carroll demonstrates how the dismantling of temple and city walls in Suzhou after 1911 became a potent gesture of revolutionary modernity, reconfiguring the relationship between public space, political authority, and urban identity.⁷⁰

Seen in this light, the erection of a wall at WCUU—however modest in scale—activated a host of symbolic associations. Claims that the university was ‘building a concession’ or ‘training private militias’, though exaggerated, tapped into historical memories of walls as instruments of exclusion and domination. In the volatile climate of post-May Thirtieth China, a wall erected by a missionary university came to stand for many things at once: the immediate disruption of everyday movement, anxieties about collusion between imperialists and warlords, and the question of foreign privilege – who possessed it, and who was permitted to enjoy its benefits.

To fully grasp the wall controversy, it is necessary to examine the spatial role of the WCUU campus in Chengdu’s urban life. The core of the controversy was not foreignness per se, but the contest over access to urban space: what role did WCUU play in the everyday lives of local residents, and what did it mean for ordinary people to be excluded from what had once been a shared space?

The making of Huaxiba: a foreign space, a Chinese space?

Located just outside Chengdu’s south city gate near the Jin River (Jinjiang 錦江) and landmarks such as Nantai Temple and Wangjiang Pavilion (Wangjianglou 望江樓), the WCUU campus initially occupied 65 acres and expanded to 154 acres by the early 1930s.⁷¹ Over the course of two decades, its landholdings more than doubled. It is difficult to imagine that such expansion proceeded without disputes with local residents. The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin permitted foreigners to travel and reside in inland China, but it prohibited outright foreign land ownership in non-treaty ports. Like other foreign institutions, WCUU secured its holdings through ‘perpetual lease’ (yongzuquan 永租權) agreements with local landlords.⁷² From a nationalist perspective, however, such arrangements epitomized imperialist encroachment.

As Xie and Walker have shown, the university’s early attempts to acquire land had encountered resistance from the local landowners.⁷³ In the spring of 1908, for instance, WCUU acquired two contested tracts of land bisecting its campus: one belonging to the Liang Fu Kung Guild and the other containing more than 1,000 graves. To obtain the guild land, the university relied on the Sichuan governor to pressure guild headmen into compliance. Clearing the cemeteries proved equally contentious, requiring weeks of negotiation over permits, compensation, and relocation of graves. Although WCUU insisted that it paid for new burial grounds, the process almost certainly generated quarrels and bitterness among the local community.⁷⁴ Four years before that, the university also had some disputes with local farmers when they tried to convince them to sell their land and move elsewhere.⁷⁵ While direct links between these disputes and the 1930 protests are hard to trace from available sources, it is plausible that the grievances left unresolved in those years continued to shape local perceptions of WCUU as a foreign intruder into local spatial order. Such memories could easily be reactivated, fuelling accusations that WCUU was attempting to build a foreign concession.

Because the campus expanded gradually and its acquisitions were non-contiguous, the grounds did not form a single, continuous block. Instead, WCUU straddled important thoroughfares linking the south city gate to surrounding rural areas. These paths were integral to the daily life of nearby residents. Irrigation channels running through the campus were lifelines for the fields surrounding the campus. Sanwayao (三瓦窯), a historical brick and tile kiln district in the southern suburbs, employed tens of thousands of labourers who had to pass through the campus to transport bricks into the city. Likewise, peasants from the surrounding countryside relied on the same paths to bring vegetables, grain, and poultry into the city for sale, before returning home with daily necessities (Figure 1). After WCUU built its walls, what once had been a direct passage now required a detour of more than 20 li.⁷⁶ The walls thus disrupted not only symbolic notions of openness but also the concrete rhythms of urban–rural exchange.

Source: illustrated and noted by the author, based on the plan of WCUU in Sili huaxi xiehe daxue yilan 1930 nian 私立華西協合大學一覽1930年 [An overview of West China Union University in the year 1930], (Chengdu: West China Union University, 1930), p. 3, available at 中國近代教育文獻數據庫 https://jiaoyu.jdwxk.com/readBook/b39ca29a-4dea-40f2-a9e6-1eff8818d422/1 [accessed on October 6, 2025].

Figure 1. Map of WCUU in 1930.

Today, Chengdu residents know the area surrounding WCUU as Huaxiba (華西垻), or ‘West China Flats’, a toponym showing the deep imprint left by WCUU on Chengdu’s urban geography.⁷⁷ Even the nearby subway station bears this name. Yet early twentieth-century records suggest that residents initially identified the area through older landmarks, referring to it as wainan (外南; ‘outside the south gate’) or Nantai Temple. For example, the wall protesters claimed themselves to be the ‘Coalition of Chengdu Residents Against Wall Construction at Nantai Temple’ (Chengdu gejie minzhong fandui nantaisi zhucheng dahui 成都各界民眾反對南台寺築城大會). In the testimonies of Clifford Stubbs’s assailants, the WCUU grounds were likewise described as ‘Nantai Temple’. These usages indicate that, two decades after its founding, WCUU remained embedded in traditional spatial frameworks.

WCUU was not Chengdu’s first Western enclave. By the late nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries had established hospitals, churches, and schools in the city. In 1891, the Methodist Church of Canada sent four missionaries, including Omar L. Kilborn—a founder of WCUU—to Chengdu to initiate a medical mission.⁷⁸ Three years later, these missionaries opened Chengdu’s first Western hospital on Sishengci street. The district soon became a nucleus of Protestant activity: housing a Gospel Hall, a girls’ school, a print house, and a dental clinic.⁷⁹

The vision for WCUU’s open campus must be understood against the backdrop of the anti-Christian animosities that roiled many places in Sichuan in the late Qing. Protestant missionaries faced the long shadow cast by French Catholic missions, whose aggressive expansion to inland China since the 1850s had provoked many instances of anti-Christian riots. Particularly inflammatory were the Catholics’ land acquisitions and abuses of legal extraterritorial privileges. Roman Catholic missionaries frequently intervened in lawsuits involving their Chinese converts, shielding them from local judicial authority and thereby intensifying frictions with non-Christian communities.⁸⁰ Arriving later in the 1880s, Protestant missionaries attempted to distinguish themselves by emphasizing medical service rather than political intervention.

That distinction, however, proved difficult to sustain. On 28 May 1895, Chengdu people gathered at the Eastern Parade Ground (Dongjiaochang 東較場) not far from the Protestant compounds to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. As crowds dispersed in the evening, some paused outside missionary residences, drawn by curiosity at the sight of foreign children in the arms of missionaries. In the preceding days, rumours had circulated that foreigners were kidnapping Chinese children to harvest their organs. When two missionaries fired warning shots to disperse the gathering crowd, curiosity turned to hostility. Protestant establishments, including the Gospel Hall and medical clinics along Sishengci street, were among the first targets. By nightfall, the violence spread south to Roman Catholic establishments in One Arch Bridge (Yidongqiao一洞橋), where rioters destroyed the city’s oldest Catholic church.⁸¹ Over the next several days, other Protestant properties were ransacked before the violence finally subsided.⁸²

G. E. Hartwell, a Protestant missionary who had witnessed the riots, recounted what had happened:

The missionaries, crouched in a neighbour’s loft, could see the whole proceedings. The little children were terrified into silence. Through the afternoon fires could be seen. All Roman Catholic buildings were either burned or destroyed. Beneath an altar of a R.C. church, near Sz-shen-tsz [Sishengci street], were the bones of a Bishop who had been killed 50 years previously. These were dug up and carried through the streets … The ten days that followed were really a continuous nightmare.⁸³

Several structural tensions fuelled this explosion of violence. In 1894, Sichuan Governor-General Liu Binzhang, who was later dismissed for mishandling the 1895 Chengdu riot, issued a proclamation warning against the expansion of foreigners in Chengdu. In particular, he cautioned against dubious practices of foreign land acquisition and explicitly prohibited the use of terms such as ‘perpetual lease’, which he regarded as a legal fiction designed to disguise foreign encroachment.⁸⁴ Liu’s hostility toward foreigners may have emboldened the locals. The timing also proved fateful: the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) cast a heavy pall across China. Early misperceptions of victory gave way to shock and disillusionment as news of defeat and the burden of indemnities reached Sichuan, radicalizing frustrations against all foreigners.

Environmental pressures amplified these political strains. A severe drought during the winter and spring of 1895 encouraged rumours that missionary construction of brick houses had disrupted local fengshui. In one widely repeated story, a cow was said to have stood in the dry riverbed outside Chengdu’s east gate, proclaiming that ‘no rain will fall so long as the foreigners remain’.⁸⁵ For a population primed by political humiliation and fiscal burdens, such signs of cosmic disorder reinforced the belief that foreigners were an existential threat.

The lessons of 1895 were not lost on Chengdu’s Protestant missionaries, who recognized that medical service alone could not generate the social legitimacy or sympathetic public they had hoped would lead to Christian conversion. The Boxer Uprising of 1900 further underscored the precariousness of the Christian mission in China, revealing that its survival required a different strategy. At the same time, the rise of the Social Gospel movement in North America—emphasizing social reform and education as essential complements to evangelism—encouraged missionaries to expand their work beyond medicine. As Daniel Bays points out, this shift was part of a wider trend in global Protestant missions, which increasingly looked to the cultivation of local elites as a pathway for embedding Christianity into national life.⁸⁶ It was in this climate of both local crisis and transnational reform that WCUU was founded in 1910, a project that embodied the recalibration of missionary strategy from a narrow medical service to a broader educational enterprise.

From its inception, WCUU was conceived as more than a religious outpost. It was an experiment in cultural diplomacy: a modern university that could naturalize itself within the local social landscape while disseminating Western knowledge and Christian values. Drawing lessons from previous Sino-Western conflicts over fengshui, the founders of WCUU deliberately crafted a campus environment that sought to harmonize Christian identity with indigenous cultural sensibilities. As Omar Kilborn emphasized, ‘The whole plant will have a harmonious effect—all these buildings will harmonize in architectural features and will be located so as to produce a unified effect.’⁸⁷

In 1912, the university commissioned Fred Rowntree, a Quaker architect from London, to realize this vision. Following a 1913 tour of Sichuan to study local architecture, Rowntree designed a hybrid style that, in his words, ‘combined the noblest elements in Chinese architecture with the stability of the West’.⁸⁸ This synthesis was evident across the campus: traditional English brick structures were softened by blue Chinese-style tiled roofs, while elements drawn from Sichuanese pavilion architecture further localized the aesthetic.⁸⁹ As Joseph Beech, WCUU’s first president, proudly claimed, ‘In adopting a style of collegiate architecture in harmony with Chinese traditional architecture, we pioneered in a type which has become general in other Christian universities in China.’⁹⁰

By the late 1920s, the university grounds, boasting over ‘2,200 trees of 27 varieties and thousands of shrubs along its miles of roads and paths’, had been transformed into what visitors called the ‘Western Heaven’.⁹¹ The centrepiece of the campus was the Clock Tower, which housed a bell crafted by the Meneely Bell Foundries of New York. Its chimes, audible from three miles away, introduced the locals to a novel method of marking the passage of time.⁹² Adjacent to the tower was a crescent-shaped lotus pond. The campus also had five athletic fields and a number of tennis courts.⁹³ In 1924, Shu Xincheng, a prominent scholar who taught at the Chengdu Advanced Normal School, remarked that WCUU was indeed a ‘little paradise’ and that none of the buildings or facilities at his own institution—the only national normal university in southwest China—could rival the splendour of WCUU.⁹⁴

The spatial accessibility of the campus soon made it a site of attraction and public engagement. In the evenings, young gentlemen walked their dogs under the shadow of the Clock Tower, and city policemen paused to read bulletins posted by various departments.⁹⁵ University events routinely drew large crowds, often surpassing student attendance. During an end-of-term celebration, WCUU staged farewell performances that included two days of Beijing opera, a day of Sichuan opera, and a grand two-day dance party with live music. Although only 50 students participated, over 100 unaffiliated locals attended.⁹⁶

Embedded in inland: a modern university built for Sichuan

For Sichuan’s youths, the founding of WCUU marked the first opportunity to pursue a Western college education close to home. Previously, those who sought such training had to travel to Beijing, Shanghai, or abroad. From its inception, WCUU was envisioned as a regional institution dedicated to cultivating a locally rooted elite steeped in Christian values. As William Morse, dean of the medical school, noted, WCUU was not a cosmopolitan hub but rather ‘a local, provincial, isolated institution’.⁹⁷

This locally oriented mission set WCUU apart from missionary colleges in coastal treaty-ports. Shanghai’s St. John’s College, for instance, drew roughly 40 per cent of its students from outside Shanghai.⁹⁸ At WCUU, by contrast, nearly all students were Sichuan natives. Among a sample of 112 graduates between 1915 and 1929, only four came from the neighbouring Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. Over 90 per cent of graduates remained in Sichuan, working in education, medicine, and public service.⁹⁹ By 1930, of WCUU’s 134 faculty members, 56 were Chinese; aside from five from other provinces, the rest were Sichuan natives, many of them alumni themselves.¹⁰⁰

The university’s missionary founders were acutely aware of this inland mandate. President Joseph Beech spoke fluent Sichuanese, while Omar L. Kilborn produced a manual on the local vernacular to help colleagues communicate with students and patients.¹⁰¹ Such practices underscored WCUU’s self-conscious positioning as an institution embedded in local society rather than a cosmopolitan Christian outpost.

Faculty and students often emphasized that WCUU’s inland orientation marked a clear departure from the cosmopolitan ethos of missionary education in coastal regions. They contrasted Sichuan’s limited educational resources with the dense networks of universities in coastal cities, framing WCUU’s mission as uniquely urgent. In 1923, alumnus T. P. Chang delivered a conference address to fellow Chinese students in Britain, in which he proudly claimed that WCUU was ‘the only institution in West China that is doing higher educational work’, serving ‘a territory of about one-third of China with a population of more than one hundred million’.¹⁰² One missionary founder likewise claimed in 1928 that ‘from Hankow in Central China on the east, to the borders of Tibet and the province of Yunnan on the west, our institution is at present the only one of university grade’.¹⁰³ Such rhetoric, though occasionally exaggerated, reflected a shared pride in the university’s regional role.

WCUU’s local embeddedness also fostered pragmatic ties with Sichuan’s warlords, who sought to present themselves as modernizers. Both sides shared an interest in cultivating homegrown modern professionals that would remain in the province and contribute to its development. This partnership proved particularly valuable in medical training, where cultural taboos hindered the acquisition of bodies for anatomical dissection. Although China legalized human dissection for educational purposes in 1913, acquiring bodies remained challenging.¹⁰⁴ In 1915, with the support of local warlords, WCUU conducted the first human dissection in inland China. To foster public understanding, WCUU invited visitors to the dissection lab to observe students who were working on the corpse.¹⁰⁵

Indeed, WCUU graduates filled urgent needs in the province’s public health and education. Xiao Lujia, a 1923 graduate, went on to found the Union Midwifery School for Women. In 1926, Xiao and his brother established the Xiao Brothers Hospital, Sichuan’s first Chinese-founded Western medical facility.¹⁰⁶ Graduates also staffed mission hospitals in Sichuan’s hinterland locations, where they advanced public health goals. When many foreign doctors retreated to coastal cities following the May Thirtieth Movement, these local physicians remained in place, ensuring continuity in healthcare and spreading the university’s reputation across Sichuan.¹⁰⁷

To cultivate rapport with local society and to position itself as serving community, WCUU’s Education Department, in collaboration with the YMCA, established the West China Commoners’ Night School (Huaxi pingmin yeke xuexiao 華西平民夜課學校) in 1923. Faculty and students volunteered as instructors, transforming old dormitories into classrooms and offering two sessions each evening. Using elementary school textbooks, they taught Chinese, arithmetic, history, social studies, hygiene, and English to nearby residents, with enrolment exceeding 90 participants. In 1924, WCUU expanded this initiative to combat illiteracy among the city’s working population. Faculty from the Science Department organized reading societies across the city, enrolling nearly 5,000 students. Funding for these efforts came from donations by WCUU faculty and students, as well as charity sales and performances they organized.¹⁰⁸

Through such initiatives, WCUU reinforced its image as an integral part of local society. Yet this very embeddedness carried risks. In doing so, WCUU fostered expectations of permeability and access. Once local people had grown accustomed to free access to the campus and its services, WCUU’s abrupt withdrawal provoked especially sharp feelings of exclusion and betrayal. The contradiction between its self-styled identity as a locally rooted institution and its simultaneous role as a foreign-run elite university shaped the tensions that erupted in the wall controversy of 1930. In this sense, the university’s publicly vaunted role as a pioneer of inland education not only shaped its outreach strategies but also conditioned the intensity of the backlash when its promises appeared to falter.

Class tensions, underfunded public schools, and radicalism in 1920s Chengdu

Although WCUU’s open campus and public outreach cultivated an image of accessibility, the institution remained socially and educationally exclusive. Structural and financial barriers—most notably high tuition fees, English-language instruction, and a Christian orientation—effectively confined admission to the children of urban middle-class families and local landlords. One observer later remarked that even in the 1940s WCUU was ‘seen as a school for the privileged sons and daughters, a noble institution’.¹⁰⁹ Despite its professed mission of ‘service to the people of West China’, the university’s student body and institutional culture revealed a far narrower social base.

Alumnus Jiang Yungang, later a history professor at WCUU, recalled that prior to the 1930s the university ‘not only had an overtly religious character, but was also heavily Westernized. English was spoken not just in classrooms and laboratories but even in faculty meetings, and students themselves often conversed in a mix of Chinese and English.’ In the early years, most students came from Christian families and followed a mission-school track into WCUU.¹¹⁰ By 1921, tuition cost 30 silver dollars (yinyuan 銀元) per year, about six months’ wages for an ordinary Chengdu craftsman.¹¹¹ A 1946 survey conducted by Zhang Shurong, a sociology major at WCUU, of 150 female students found that 98 per cent came from households living off property income (land rent, real estate, savings), and only two per cent were from wage-dependent families.¹¹²

These class divides, particularly regarding who could legitimately use the campus and how they should behave, became newly visible after Clifford Stubbs’s murder. Lewis F. Havermale, a medical school faculty, lamented that the absence of an adequate wall had left faculty with ‘no control over our own campus’:

By day it is an inviting place for soldiers to drill, notwithstanding the fact that the governors have issued proclamations forbidding it. On afternoons and holidays it is the show ground and park for any idler. It has been the meeting place for agitators of Communistic sympathy. Students from unfriendly institutions meet Faculty members as they go about their work from one building to another, and insult them with fluent profanity, and this with impunity. Boy and girl students from city institutions come out and lounge about under the trees in most immodest fashion, giving our institution a bad name among those who have no means of discriminating between them and our own students. Male students from other institutions bathe naked in the pool between the president’s house and the Biology Building, and behave wantonly in the presence of faculty members’ families. The problem of an adequate wall is therefore acute ordinarily, and is made infinitely more so when such acts of outrage can be perpetrated as now saddens in this community.¹¹³

Other foreign faculty complained that bearers of night soil regularly cut across the campus en route to nearby fields, polluting the environment near faculty residences.¹¹⁴ Such accounts captured the fraught duality of WCUU’s spatial policy: openness had once fostered integration with local society, but also exposed the university to uses and behaviours that clashed with its elite vision of order and propriety.

Such tensions long pre-dated Stubbs’s murder. In 1924, WCUU adopted coeducation, a pioneering step in inland China.¹¹⁵ The university’s female students—still a very small but highly visible group—embodied May Fourth ideas of gender equality; their unescorted presence, modern attire, and mixed-gender classes drew intense public curiosity. That curiosity boiled over in December 1929, when a male student from the nearby Silkworm Industrial School entered WCUU and tried to photograph a female student. The intrusion escalated into a physical altercation between students from both institutions.¹¹⁶ Although police quickly intervened, the incident triggered a month-long anti-WCUU campaign. Students at the Silkworm Industrial School denounced what they perceived as WCUU’s elitism and attributed it to its Christian background. Their protest resonated among students from other institutions—including Minjiang University and the Police Academy—who recast the incident as imperialist privilege. Demonstrators occupied the WCUU campus, plastering the library’s walls with slogans such as ‘Strike Down Christianity’.¹¹⁷ Within days, demands escalated from redress for a single affront to calls for nationalizing WCUU and ‘returning’ of the campus to Chinese ownership.¹¹⁸

This campaign foreshadowed the 1930 wall controversy. Radical activists, particularly those based at Minjiang University, helped frame the protests. Established in 1928 by local Communists, Minjiang University quickly became a nexus of leftist activism in Chengdu, with faculty and students playing prominent roles in organizing urban demonstrations.¹¹⁹ In their manifesto, published in the radical newspaper Chengdu yongbao (成都庸報), protestors framed the dispute as symptomatic of China’s semi-colonial condition.¹²⁰ They called upon all patriotic students to retaliate on behalf of the Silkworm Industrial School, warning that failure to act would constitute ‘betrayal of the Chinese nation’.¹²¹

Both the 1929 photograph incident and the 1930 wall controversy hinged on public access to WCUU and voiced anti-imperialist claims, but they also exposed deeper structural tensions over social and educational inequality in Republican Chengdu. Sichuan’s public schools had been chronically underfunded since the 1910s, a problem exacerbated by incessant warlord conflicts and fiscal diversion. Beginning in 1917, successive militarized regimes siphoned education budgets into military spending. Public schools endured erratic funding, teachers’ salaries were routinely delayed or unpaid, and students faced hunger and institutional instability. As Kristin Stapleton notes, while nationalist protests in 1919–20 and 1925–26 galvanized teachers and students in Chengdu, much of their political action focused less on abstract ideals than on securing basic financial survival.¹²²

In 1920, local Communists convened a public school teachers’ conference to pressure the provincial government, sparking mass strikes across the province. The Provincial Assembly (Sheng yihui 省議會) attempted a remedy by earmarking a meat tax for education, but the plan foundered due to structural failings in the warlord administration. Another wave of protests erupted in 1927, as insolvency returned.¹²³ Tensions spiked in early 1928 after the accidental death of a high-school principal during a student rally. On 16 February, militarists executed 14 activists. The crackdown backfired, galvanizing greater opposition. Communist activists, students, and labour associations mounted a mass demonstration in the Chengdu People’s Park beneath the monument to the 1911 Railway Protection Movement, denouncing the warlord regime for betraying the Revolution’s legacy.¹²⁴

In this turbulent time, WCUU stood out as a privileged outlier. While public schools languished amid chronic insolvency, WCUU—sustained by overseas donations—remained financially insulated. Its leafy campus became a bastion of elite life, materially distinct from the hardships endured by local schools. Public-school teachers juggled multiple jobs and staged street demonstrations for subsistence; WCUU students attended lectures in modern laboratories, played tennis on manicured courts, and held evening dance socials. This sharp economic disparity increasingly marked the university as a symbol of foreign privilege.

WCUU’s close ties with local warlords further deepened this perception. After Stubbs’s murder, warlords ordered the construction of walls and stationed troops to protect foreign faculty. In practice, this protective arrangement reflected mutual dependence: WCUU depended on the warlords for security and bureaucratic facilitation; conversely, the warlords showcased their patronage of WCUU to burnish progressive credentials and to win the foreign community’s economic and political support.¹²⁵ For Chengdu residents living through the daily depredations of militarized rule, such ties reinforced the impression that ‘imperialists’ and warlords were colluding to safeguard an elite foreign space.

These resentments ultimately crystallized around the wall. WCUU’s affluence and openness, once admired, became grounds for suspicion and hostility. While the campus remained physically permeable, the class and cultural divide—between Chinese and foreign, working-class and elite—was blurred. Residents folded the grounds into everyday routines: walking dogs beneath the Clock Tower, bathing in the lotus pond, or simply wandering through its shaded paths. Students from nearby industrial schools treated the campus as a recreational space, even radicals used it as a safer venue for gatherings. Physical navigability did not grant admission to elite education, but it offered a fleeting, symbolic claim on a world otherwise beyond reach. Strolling its tree-lined paths, attending performances, or joining evening literacy classes occasionally blurred the boundary between spectatorship and participation. When WCUU moved to enclose the grounds, that fragile equilibrium collapsed. Sudden enclosure revealed the institution’s elite boundaries, turning the campus into a lightning rod for grievances that fused quotidian inconvenience, class tension, and nationalist anger.

The WCUU protests must also be situated within the broader political culture of Republican Chengdu, especially in the 1920s, when ordinary residents increasingly engaged in collective action and participated in what Di Wang has described as a street political culture. As Kristin Stapleton points out, from 1911 onward the city endured recurrent cycles of popular protest and incursions by rival armies; two decades of militarism and civil war depressed the provincial economy and corroded the quality of urban life.¹²⁶ The erosion of formal institutions of governance under military rule deepened public disillusionment, while post-1911 reformist and revolutionary movements further politicized everyday life. In this atmosphere, civic and professional associations—students, teachers, labour unions, peasant leagues, leftist groups, merchants, and neighbourhood militias—proliferated across Chengdu, organizing strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations that became a regular feature of the city’s streets.¹²⁷

The motivations of these mobilizations were diverse. Some echoed national movements—such as the Sichuan Anti-Imperialist Alliance formed (Sichuan fandi datongmeng 四川反帝大同盟) after the May Thirtieth Incident, which participated in both the 1929 anti-Christian campaign and the 1930 wall protests—while others voiced more local concerns: workers demanding wage increase, merchants calling for tax relief or currency reform, teachers and students petitioning for educational funds, and citizens protesting incessant warlord conflicts or asserting rights to public space.¹²⁸ Although we lack direct evidence that the WCUU wall protest itself accelerated the city’s radicalization, it nonetheless formed part of a larger pattern of urban activism rooted in Chengdu’s local political milieu rather than merely a provincial echo of nationwide anti-imperialist agitation.

As Xiaowei Zheng has shown, the 1911 Revolution in Sichuan fostered a ‘revolutionary repertoire’ that mobilized people around ideas of equality, rights, self-rule, and sovereignty. Initially articulated by constitutionalists, these concepts soon circulated beyond their original contexts and acquired independent vitality, allowing new groups to appropriate them for their own causes. This legacy underpinned a culture of political improvisation in Chengdu, where diverse actors—students, workers, and street vendors alike—employed the language of revolutionary and collective justice to articulate everyday grievances.¹²⁹

Seen in this light, the nationalist rhetoric that accused WCUU of ‘building a foreign concession’ and called for its nationalization extended beyond an immediate reaction to the wall construction. It likely drew on a decade of politicized street activism and on a revolutionary vocabulary that linked spatial restriction to broader inequalities under militarized rule and foreign privilege. Although anti-imperialist rhetoric was vocal throughout the protests, many participants were likely motivated less by the goal of nationalizing WCUU than by the desire to retain everyday access to its grounds. Chinese state ownership, after all, would not necessarily have guaranteed the same permeability the missionary founders once allowed. The wall, in short, became a powerful metaphor because it materialized exclusion in both physical and social terms.

Communist-affiliated groups infused the action with ideological coherence, yet everyday grievances supplied energy. The wall resonated because it gathered disparate motivations into a single, concrete object: grievances over social inequality and military rule, anxieties about foreign encroachment, and the disruptions of daily life—the loss of a shortcut, shaded resting places, a gathering site—all converged to politicize WCUU’s campus space.

Crucially, the politicization of WCUU’s campus was co-produced. It was not solely a Chinese effort to contest the boundaries of foreign space; WCUU’s earlier choice to open its campus had enabled residents to experience the grounds as part of the city’s commons. When the university retreated from that ideal—however pragmatically—the resulting sense of dispossession was sharp. The controversy thus illuminates how anti-imperialism, class tensions, and everyday spatial practices intersected in late-1920s Chengdu, and how an elite institution’s strategies of indigenization could seed the very claims that later constrained it.

Coda

In November 1930, WCUU petitioned the municipal government for permission to repair the older walls that had been torn down during the protests of August. Because these structures pre-dated the conflict and did not obstruct public roads, officials approved their restoration.¹³⁰ In May 1931, the university submitted a second request, this time with architectural blueprints, to expand the Women’s College dormitory in response to rising female enrolment. Although municipal authorities again found the proposal reasonable, it immediately provoked public resistance. Local newspapers denounced the project as thinly veiled imperialist encroachment, and on the eve of the May Thirtieth anniversary, hostile slogans such as ‘Kill the Foreigners’ appeared scrawled across campus walls. Fearing another outbreak of protest, the British consul in Chongqing requested Sichuan authorities to increase police patrols around WCUU.¹³¹

Yet unlike the previous year, Sichuan authorities stopped short of publicly endorsing the consul’s call to suppress any opposition against WCUU. Keen to avoid the impression that they were defending foreign interests, they adopted a cautious posture. After a barrage of press criticism, municipal officials inspected the site and reported that WCUU had added new wall segments—extensions not included in the original permit. The Director of Public Works Bureau declared these additions a violation of city codes and ordered their removal.¹³² On 13 June, the mayor issued a directive demanding the immediate demolition of the unauthorized construction, pointedly reprimanding WCUU for its repeated disregard of municipal oversight and linking the previous year’s unrest to similar failures of compliance.¹³³

Although the wall controversy gradually subsided, it left a lasting mark on how Chengdu residents perceived the campus. Locals increasingly claimed the grounds as a public space and vigorously resisted any attempt to close them off. Even small measures—such as boarding up a rear gate with wooden planks—were denounced in the press as proof of the ‘foreign devils’ ambition’ to erect a permanent barrier.¹³⁴ Over the following years, WCUU was compelled to maintain an open campus, its image as a shared urban commons only deepening. In 1936, when the university again tried to restrict access on the grounds of public disturbances, local newspapers accused it of attempting to create a ‘forbidden zone’ in a non-treaty-port without foreign concessions, insisting that the area had long been a place of popular recreation and must remain so.¹³⁵

The post-May Thirtieth era marked a rupture for WCUU. From student withdrawals and anti-British demonstrations to the death of Clifford Stubbs and the wall disputes, the university saw the collapse of a fragile equilibrium it had sought to maintain. Critics often framed their opposition in the language of anti-imperialism—condemning WCUU as a ‘foreign concession’ and denouncing Christianity’s encroachment on culture. Yet the underlying issue was more complicated than sovereignty or religion. At stake was whether the campus should function as a public space, as its initial openness had seemed to promise, albeit unintentionally.

For many of the university’s most vocal opponents—students from technical institutes and residents outside the south city gate—WCUU’s spatial accessibility represented more than convenience. It symbolized the chance to engage with a prestigious institution otherwise closed to them. When the university reversed course and began fortifying its perimeter, it abruptly foreclosed that possibility. The erection of walls clarified what had long been latent: that WCUU, despite its rhetoric of service and Christian egalitarianism, remained fundamentally an elite enclave—Western-funded, selectively accessible, and structurally aligned with the local warlord regimes that shared its vision of hierarchical modernity.