A Chinese University in War and Revolution

Today we are going to talk about a legendary university in China that existed for less than nine years during China’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. But despite its short existence, it produced a disproportionately large number of top talents, playing a crucial role in China’s independence and development.

For many Chinese universities, a higher ranking means more financial support from the government as well as prestige for its students and alumni both in China and abroad. In recent years, Chinese institutions of higher learning are edging up in global university rankings as the country strives to elevate a number of them to a world-class level.

In the 2022-23 Best Global Universities Rankings published by US News & World Report, which includes 2,000 universities from more than 90 countries, 338 Chinese universities were among the schools listed, surpassing the 280 listed for the United States, 105 for Japan, and 92 for the United Kingdom. In fact, it’s the first time China outnumbered the US.

Specifically, the ranking of Tsinghua University rose three places to 23rd, making it the highest-ranked university in Asia. Meanwhile, Peking University’s place rose from 45 to 39, and Nankai University in Tianjin secured the 256th place.

These three universities have been China’s top universities ever since their inception more than 100 years ago. And what many overseas people are unaware of is that these three universities were once merged into a single university that is remembered to this day for its relentless pursuit of liberal education, political autonomy, and academic freedom.

On July 7, 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, and many universities in Beijing and Tianjin were occupied or attacked by Japanese troops. As you might imagine, this made holding regular classes a bit difficult. In order to preserve Chinese culture and protect the countries best and brightest, on August 28, 1937, the Ministry of Education instructed the three universities to merge, forming the National Changsha Provisional University. 

The reason for choosing the location in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan Province, was that the city was in the southern heartland of China and was not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, Tsinghua University had already started to construct a school building, somewhat surreptitiously, at the foot of Yuelu Mountain in Changsha in 1935 in preparation for all contingencies.

On October 25, 1937, the National Changsha Provisional University was officially opened, and classes began on November 1. The provisional university combined the original faculties of Tsinghua, Peking, and Nankai universities and set up 17 departments. By November 20 of that inaugural year, there were a total of 1,452 students enrolled.

At that time, many other universities were also forced to move inland: Beiping Normal University was moved to Lanzhou in Gansu Province; Zhejiang University was relocated to Zunyi in Guizhou Province; Fudan University was moved to Beibei in Chongqing, just to name a few.

Unfortunately, as the Japanese army expanded along the Yangtze River in early 1938 and the war continued to spread inland, the National Changsha Provisional University decided to retreat even farther southwest to Kunming in Yunnan Province to ensure that classes could continue. On April 2, 1938, the Ministry of Education ordered the National Changsha Provisional University to be renamed as the National Southwest Associated University, which in Chinese is Xinan Lianda or simply Lianda. It had 26 departments in five colleges: Arts, Science, Engineering, Law and Commerce, as well as Teacher Training.

Most students of the three universities were transported from Beijing and Tianjin by train to Changsha. There were, however, three routes from Changsha to Kunming: girls and some of the weaker male students took the sea route to Guangzhou and arrived in Yunnan via Hong Kong and Vietnam. Teachers and some students took a bus to Guilin and then entered Yunnan via Liuzhou in Nanning of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Vietnam. The remaining boys and teachers organized a hiking group from Changsha to Kunming on foot. They covered more than 1,600 kilometers on a trek that lasted 68 days.

Understandably, young students back then were full of worries – not only about their own fate but that of the country as well. And the significance of the Yunnan Trekking Group is very important. First of all, China was at a critical moment, and walking from Changsha to Kunming was itself a declaration that although the Japanese invaders had come, the cultural lineage would survive. In addition, many of these students grew up in the city and had little knowledge of the poor rural areas in western China. Moreover, it was impossible to say what their own future had in store. 

One student named Dong Fen wrote in his diary on January 19, 1938 saying: “There are two ways in front of us, one is to study and the other is to save the country. General Chen Cheng said that students should study well for the future revival, but General Zhang Zizhong encouraged students to put down their books and go to the front.”

So, it was during this arduous two-month odyssey that they began to truly understand the hardships of the people in southwest China and build up the strength they would need to forge their own path.

Even in Kunming, classes were held amid constant bombing from Japanese planes. And many students ultimately joined the army or helped the army in some way to fight the invaders. In 1941, American aviator and tactical instructor Claire Lee Chennault was commissioned by the Chinese government to set up the American Volunteer Brigade of the Chinese Air Force in Yunnan, commonly known as the “Flying Tigers”. Not knowing how to speak Chinese, the American pilots needed a large number of translators, so virtually all the third- or fourth-year male students of Lianda were drafted to the front lines to translate for the allies.

Xu Yuanchong, who later became known as one of China’s best translators, was drafted into the army and became an officer in Chennault’s secretarial office in charge of Chinese and English intelligence translation. On one occasion, Xu translated a piece of intel stating that Japanese planes would be stationed at the Hanoi Airport in Vietnam. Intel analysts believed that the Japanese were likely to conduct an air raid on Kunming and asked Xu Yuanchong to translate the intel into English immediately and arranged a vehicle to send him to Chennault’s command headquarters. Chennault quickly took countermeasures and, the next day, successfully intercepted the Japanese over Dianchi. Because of Xu’s outstanding wartime performance, Chennault awarded him the “Flying Tiger Badge”.

Further examples of courage were seen from Dai Rongji of the Department of Geology, Wang Wen of the Department of Mechanics, and Wu Jian of the Department of Aviation, all of who became air force pilots. Unfortunately, these young men were all killed in action while fighting enemy planes.

After the war, Lianda erected a monument with the names of 832 students who died in the war against Japanese aggression. In fact, more than 1,100 students died during the war, the most of any Chinese university.

You see, back then, the teaching staff and students were in dire shortage of food as well as accommodation. Although the national government had originally made financial allocations, as the war continued, the funding for the operation of Lianda was virtually abolished. The classrooms were merely houses with tin roofs, and later even the tin had to be sold and replaced with thatch. There was no glass covering the windows, and when the wind blew, students had to hold their papers down or watch it blow away. If it rained hard, classes had to stop. Chen Daisun, a professor of economics at the university, once simply wrote on the blackboard, “Class is cancelled. Enjoy the rain.”

Also, there were no seats in the cafeteria, and the only rice was usually brimming with sand, wood chips, and even rat droppings. In order to have some vegetables, the school set up a gardening club with botanist Li Jidong as its leader.

The salaries of teachers at Lianda were very low, ranging from 100 to 200 yuan per month for teaching assistants to 300 to 600 a month for professors. As you know, during wartime, food prices are exorbitant, and at that time, there was serious inflation in Kunming. In the words of Jiang Menglin, then president of Peking University, “Prices were jumping three times a day, like a wild horse out of control.” He said the professors at the university fell from heaven to earth all at once. 

Take 1942 as an example: if the cost-of-living index was 100 in 1937, Kunming in November 1942 was 14,828, which means that a professor’s monthly minimum cost of living before the war was 50 yuan, but after he came to Kunming, it peaked at more than 7,400 yuan. 

And though they were paid such a meager salary, it was often not paid on time. One amusing anecdote from those days is about Zhu Ziqing, a famed writer and professor of the Chinese department. The story goes that he was being chased by beggars in the street, and as he tried to evade them, he yelled back helplessly saying, “I am a professor.” That was enough for the beggars to immediately stop chasing him and disperse in all directions.

Even though the teaching conditions were poor, professors and students enjoyed the greatest academic freedom. There was little government interference in class, and professors could teach whatever they wanted, one reason being that there were no textbooks. Famed historian Chen Yinque said on the first day of his class, “I will not lecture on what has been taught by my predecessors; I will not lecture on what has been taught by contemporary people; I will not lecture on what has been taught by foreigners; I will not even lecture on what has been taught by myself in the past. Now, I will only talk about what has not been talked about.”

What’s more, the management of students was very loose. It was easy for students to change departments, and there were no consequences for occasionally skipping class, like the novelist Wang Zengqi, who at that time often spent his days reading in teahouses and nights reading novels in the library of the Chinese department.

At 107 years old, Writer Ma Shitu is the oldest living alumnus of Lianda. He once recalled the influence of the democratic culture of the university, saying it was one of the university’s most outstanding features. This was extremely rare among Chinese universities at that time, where students could oppose their teachers and everyone could express their opinions.

Now, let’s meet some of the diamonds that were formed under the pressures they endured during those turbulent years. 

In 1938, Yang Zhenning, along with his mother, brother, and sister arrived in Kunming via Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Hanoi, Vietnam, finally reuniting with his father. Yang’s father, Yang Wuzhi, was the head of the math department of the university. In the fall of that year, Yang took the entrance exam for the university as a second-year high school student and was admitted with the second highest score. He was the youngest student in the class at only 16 years old.

In 1942, after graduating from his undergraduate program in physics, the 20-year-old Yang continued his graduate studies at the university. In 1944, Li Zhengdao, a Suzhou boy four years younger than him, was transferred to the university from the Physics Department of Zhejiang University. With a recommendation letter from his superior at Zhejiang University, Li traveled across thousands of miles and mountains to Yunnan to find Wu Dayou, a physics professor at Lianda. And he almost didn’t make, because on the journey there, Li was in a car accident and had to be hospitalized, but as history recalls, he was later able to continue down his road to academic fame.

Finally, in the village of Gangtou in the northern suburbs of Kunming, Li Zhengdao knocked on the door of Wu Dayou’s room. Wu asked some random physics questions, and Li’s answers surprised and delighted him over and over again. The next day, Wu Dayou went to the physics department of the university and announced: “Everyone, I have discovered a physics wizard.”

In 1945, at the age of 23, Yang was awarded a national scholarship and went to the United States to pursue his PhD with famous theoretical physicist Edward Teller at the University of Chicago. The following year, 20-year-old Li Zhengdao also entered the University of Chicago to study for his PhD under Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi.

In 1948, Yang received his PhD at the age of 26. A year later, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for postdoctoral research. Soon after, he invited Li Zhengdao to collaborate with him on his research.

Chinese intellectuals all know the result that transpired several years later – Yang and Li shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 “for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws, which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles.” Yang wrote in his book titled Forty Years of Reading and Teaching that his love/hate relationship with physics was mainly cultivated during the six years he spent at Lianda. 

After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1945, Lianda ceased to operate, and Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University moved back to their original locations. The teacher training college was left in Kunming and is today’s Yunnan Normal University.

In the period from August 28, 1937 when the Ministry of Education decided to establish the National Changsha Provisional University, to July 31, 1946, when the National Southwest Associated University ceased to operate, the university existed for less than nine years. And although only 3,882 students graduated from the university, many of them became pillars of the country and world-renowned talents. Among them, there are the two Nobel Prize winners I just mentioned, as well as five who won the nation’s highest award in science and technology, eight winners of the “Two Bombs and One Satellite” Merit Medals, 175 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, nine Party and State leaders, and more than 100 humanities masters in a variety of artistic fields.

Writer and historian John Israel, whose Chinese name is Yi Sheqiang (易社强) is an alumnus of Lianda and a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia. He concluded in his book Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution: “The Lianda heritage, indeed, has much to offer the world. By upholding the noblest qualities of mind and spirit under oppressive conditions, by demonstrating the resiliency of liberal education in an age of war and revolution, Lianda earned itself a chapter in the annals of human endeavor.”

The former site of Lianda is located on the campus of Yunnan Normal University. Now there is a museum on the old site where visitors can learn more about those eight years of uncommon valor in those classrooms and perhaps be reminded of what it means to perform at one’s peak while under great pressure.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Lü Weitao, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.