Chasing the Chinese Dream in America: 20th-Century Chinese Christian Students in the United States and Their Quest for Modernization

摘要

This paper looks at the Chinese Christian students of the early 20th century in the light of their own publication The Chinese Christian Students. For these overseas Chinese students, Christianity represented not just a personal belief but a means of modernization, a way in which individuals could continually renew, or more accurately reaffirm, their identity via religious and ideological conversion. The author argues that Christianity provides these Chinese students a way to fulfill their traditional, “old China” role of literati in America, and thereby to build or at least to envision, a new modern China.