LI
DENGHUI came to my attention in an obscure item as a prized pupil
for Standard I in 1887, albeit under the name "Lee Teng Hwee".
Subsequent research into the recently acquired ACS Journal for
1889 confirmed that he won prizes for Dictation and Grammar in1889
when he was in Standard IV. No bookworm, he joined the Cricket
Club and was elected Secretary and Treasurer, and contributed
to the Journal with a short reflection on the proverb, "Where
there's a will there is a way." What manner of student was
this, and what was the story?
Born in 1872 to the family of a poor farmer with a small trading
business in a small West Java town near Batavia (Djakarta), he
was the eldest in a family with five brothers and two sisters.
He studied at an elementary school, going by horsecart, but staying
at home on rainy days to help his mother look after his siblings.
His mother's death in 1885 when he was just 13 affected the business
but Denghui showed little interest in the business or domestic
chores. After his father remarried, he agreed to let the restless
lad go to Singapore to further his studies in 1886 when he was
14 years old.
He arrived fairly soon after ACS was founded, and was entrusted
to his father's business associate, one Mr Tan, who looked after
him and arranged for him to be enrolled in the school. With an
emphasis on English, science and mathematics, together with regular
Bible study, a number of students became Christians, and Denghui's
Christian faith and his belief in the value of loyalty, purity,
generosity and love came from his three years at ACS.
In his second and third year, he had all his meals with the Rev
William Oldham, while he would wander off after church on Sundays
to ponder over the window of knowledge which he widened when he
went overseas to study Greek, Latin, French, the arts and literature
of the Renaissance, and English Literature - a background from
which he was later to teach at Fudan University.
At ACS, he was a good scholar, and must have impressed Oldham
who accompanied him to Batavia some time in 1889 (before going
on medical leave in America). With Oldham's encouragement and
financial assistance from the Methodist Mission, he sailed for
America in 1891 where he spent some time at Ohio Wesleyan University
preparatory to admission to Yale from where he graduated with
a BA degree in 1899.
His Christian background now encouraged him to answer Bishop Thoburn's
call for volunteer missionaries to teach in India and Malaysia,
as did James Hoover - who later became a key Methodist missionary
in Sarawak. Both men actually sailed together to Penang where
they joined the staff of ACS Penang, and were members of the school
committee along with Dr. B. F. West, G. F. Pykett and J. W. W.
Hogan in 1900.
The idealist in action
An article by Zhuang Qin Yong in the Journal of Humanities &
Social Sciences, Vol III, 1982/83 shows Li Denghui as an intensely
patriotic Nanyang Chinese, bitterly disappointed at the failure
of the efforts by early Chinese patriots like Kang Youwei and
Liang Qichao to modernise China and he thus resolved to devote
his life to serve its people. He founded a debating society in
1899, similar to that established earlier in Singapore by Dr Lim
Boon Keng whom he met in Penang. He linked the causes of the problems
besetting China to a blindly conservative mentality, an incompetent,
corrupt and unjust ruling class, the exclusion of women from education,
and the observance of ancestral worship. This led him towards
the need for reform in China.
Deciding that his future lay in social action, Li Denghui left
Penang, and spent three years in Batavia unsuccessfully pursuing
his ideal of providing a new kind of education. In 1904, he revisited
Penang, meeting a number of other Nanyang Chinese with similar
ideals - Dr Wu Lian Teh, Dr Gu Li Ting and Hong Mu Huo - firming
up some ideas which were later applied in China, where he spent
the rest of his life.
He arrived in Shanghai in October 1904, organised the World Chinese
Student Federation in July 1905 and was its first President, aiming
to promote social justice in China, unite Chinese students studying
overseas, and help members secure employment, medical care and
legal advice. Similar associations were set up in Penang, Qingdao,
Fuzhou, Hawaii and Singapore. Most of the original members of
the federation were Christians and patriots.
Transforming
Fudan University
and lending
support to
May 4 Movement
At almost the same time,
he was appointed supervisor of Fudan Public School by its founder,
Ma Xiangbo, a Christian, whose intention was to select high school
students by examination and train them in higher level subjects
in the English language thereby enabling them to gain admission
to European universities for specialised subjects.
In 1913, when Ma Xiangbo had to leave China, Li assumed the position
of Principal, teaching several subjects such as English, Logic
and Philosophy. In 1917, when Fudan Public School became a university
with a modern curriculum in the humanities, natural sciences and
business as well as modern European languages, he became its first
President. Unique in being a private institution, it was staffed
mainly with teachers who had been trained in the West.
As President of Fudan University, he lent active support to the
May 4 Movement that had started in Beijing and spread to Shanghai
in May 1919, providing refuge for students who had been dismissed
from Beijing University for their involvement.
Despite the efforts of Li to defend the actions of the students
as patriotic, the authorities took a hard line, arresting and
punishing them. This resulted in a general strike by students
in Shanghai, supported by public works personnel. In the ensuing
confrontation, the Republic of China Student Union convened a
meeting to elect representatives, attended by Li. When things
had quietened down, Li chaired a public talk attended by more
than 100 Chinese students who had studied in Europe and America,
and encouraged them to work hard and diligently in order to reform
the new China.
Celebrating the Fudan Centenary - 1905 -
2005
An unexpected source of Li's role in the social and educational
development of China in the period before the war has come from
a recent publication of his biography by Fudan University celebrating
its centenary this year.
In reviewing his more than 30 years of educational leadership
in a society that was in a sorry state, he noted (in a radio broadcast
in May 1940) that the education provided by Fudan had progressed
significantly from a mere high school to a full-fledged university,
and from a basic academic curriculum to specialised scientific
studies and, with the development of physical culture, students
had become more robust.
Unfortunately, this was insufficient; real social progress is
the result of moral integrity by which teachers have to lead by
example. He himself realised this when he recognised that his
right to demand strict moral standards of students could only
be justified and authenticated by his personal commitment to these
same standards.
Such was the influence of his personal and Christian values he
absorbed when he was a student of the Rev Oldham and later influenced
by the Moral Re-Armament Movement that promoted the "four
absolutes" - absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute
love and absolute purity.
Earnest Lau, the Associate Editor of Methodist Message, is also the Archivist of The Methodist Church in Singapore.