User:CWH/Francis C.M. Wei

Francis C.M. Wei (韦卓民 Wei Zhuomin) (b. 7 December 1888 Zhongshan, Guangdong - d. 1976 Wuhan, Hubei) was a Chinese Christian leader, president of Huachung University, and theologian. He was the first Chinese to be president of Huazhong University in Wuhan, one of China’s thirteen Christian colleges, a position he assumed in 1929. In 1951, after the new government of People's Republic of China reorganized the university, he was replaced and became a member of the faculty.

Early life
Wei was first educated at home by a family tutor, with whom he studied the Confucian classics and the English language, then sent to Boone School, run by Episcopalian missionaries in the Central Yangtze city of Wuchang. He went on to Boone University, graduating in 1911. As a student he became a Christian, and for seven years he taught mathematics and Chinese. He then went to Harvard University in the United States, and received his Masters in Philosophy in 1919. He was in the process of completing his PhD when he returned to China in 1920. While at Harvard, the Dean of the Episcopal Theological School called him the ablest student at the school at that time, and William E. Hocking of the Harvard Philosophy Department laater praised Wei as "not a person whom one is likely to forget..."

On his return to Chna he taught at Boone University, then became Dean of Arts and Sciences at the newly formed Huachung University, which was consolidated from Boone and several other universities in the area. He was also professor philosophy, then became acting president when the the radical wing of the Nationalist Party took control of the city in 1925. Wei left the city for Shanghai in May 1927 under threat of violence from radical agitators, but was arrested as a suspected communist. When an Episcopalian missionary friend vouched for him, he left China for England, where he received a Doctor of Philosophy from University of London. In 1929, Huachung University opened under the Nationalist Government, and Wei was named president. He stayed in that position until 1951, when the new Peoples' Republic of China government merged Huachung with a teachers's college.

Role as a Christian intellectual
Terrill E. Lautz concludes that


 * Wei became a public figure who sought a middle ground between Western and Chinese traditions and, ultimately, between Christian liberal thought and Communist ideology. His life-long quest was to reconcile the Christian missionary movement with China’s national priorities. Wei believed the Christian faith offered the most effective pathway to the reform essential for China to become a modern nation, but to be successful he held that Christianity must be reconciled with China’s Confucian heritage. It followed that education, informed by Christian as well as Confucian values, provided the best vehicle for training China’s future leaders. The importance of Christian religious and theological education was a persistent theme in Wei’s thinking. Despite the trials of war and civil war, Wei remained optimistic about the future of the Christian colleges. His moderate approach was soundly rejected after the Communists came to power, but scholars in China have reconsidered his legacy in recent years.