User:CWH/Gilbert Reid

Gilbert Reid (1882 Laurel, New York- 1927 Shanghai) was an American Presbyterian missionary active in China from 1882 until his death in 1927. He was among the small group of missionaries at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who turned away from evangelization to education in order to win over the "higher classes," and who studied Chinese philosophies.

Youth and education

Born in 1857 in Laurel, New York, he graduated from Hamilton College in 1879 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1882.

Missionary career in China

In 1894, after two years as a practicing Presbyterian missionary in China, Reid founded the Mission Among Higher Classes to advance Christianity among China’s upper classes and to promote greater understanding between Christians and non-Christians.

Under his direction, the International Institute became an interfaith forum in which representatives of world religions sought common ground on questions of faith, ethics, and social action.

the Institute moved from Beijing to the French Concession of Shanghai in 1901, which was deemed safer. Before the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, the Institute completed several buildings, mainly with money contributed by Americans. The school, however, was closed in 1910; the Reids felt that "jealousy had been aroused among missionary institutions by a prosperous school which did not stress Christianity as an entrance requirement," and in any case, the Chinese government was expanding educational work. Reid worked with little success to bring the rival Chinese parties together after the Xinhai Revolution, and after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 lobbied to keep China neutral. Those who favored the allies boycotted the Institute.

In 1917, Reid began publishing the Peking Post to argue against Chinese involvement in the war. His position against the war led to the American authorities in Shanghai arrest him and send him to the Philippines in 1917. Reid returned to the United States, then to Shanghai after the war, where he died in 1927.

The highly positive revisionist work on missionary Gilbert Reid ("he loved China and was a friend of the Chinese") seems, however questionably credible in light of his virulently anti-Chinese 1901 Forum essay, "The Ethics Loot."

Publications

Reid was prolific author and a frequent columnist for The London Times, New York Herald Tribune, and other papers.

Family

In 1897, Miss Sallie Bell Reynolds, of Columbia, S. C, piano teacher in the Southern Methodist church's McTyeire School for girls, at Shanghai, China. The wedding occurred later on in the bride's hometown Sallie B. Reynolds Reid was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1864 and educated at the Columbia Female College and the New England Conservatory of Music. She began missionary work in China in 1892 under the auspices of the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, a missionary division of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She married Gilbert Reid in 1897 and thereafter played an active role at the International Institute of China and among social reform groups in Shanghai.

Selected publications

Many of Reid's journal and newspaper publications are available digitized online at Hamilton Digital Archives.

• Glances at China (1892)

• ---, The Sources of the Anti-Foreign Disturbances in China : With a Supplementary Account of the Uprising of 1900. (Shanghai: printed at the North-China Herald Office, 1903).
• ---. Methods of Reform in China and Their Net Results. (Shanghai: printed at the North-China Herald office, 1903).
• ---. Religion and Revolution : 1913. (China: Shanghai Mercury,Ltd., 1913).
• ---. A Christian's Appreciation of Their Faiths; a Study of the Best in the World's Greatest Religions. (Chicago: Open Court 1921).
• ---. China, Captive or Free? : A Study of China's Entanglements. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1921).
• ---. A Christian's Appreciation of Other Faiths. (Illinois: The Open court publishing company, 1921, 1921).
• ---. Can China Save Herself? A Series of Papers on Chinese Affairs, by Gilbert Reid. (China, 1915).
• ---. China, Captive or Free : A Study of China's Entanglements. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921).

References

• Bays, Daniel H. (2012). A New History of Christianity in China. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781405159548.
• Knorr, Daniel (2021). "Placing the U.S. State in the Interior of China: The Jinan Missionary Case, 1881–1891". Pacific Historical Review. 90 (3): 279–313. doi:10.1525/phr.2021.90.3.279.

• Reed, James (1983). The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911-1915. Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University. ISBN 0674576578.
• Reid, John (1929), "The International Institute of China", The Open Court, 12 (883): 705–714
• Tsou, Mingteh (1996). "Christian Mission as Confucian Intellectual: Gilbert Reid (1817--1927) and the Reform Movement in the Late Qing". In Bays, Daniel (ed.). Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Stanford University Press.
• Gilbert and Sallie Reid Collection, Pomona, CA: Online Archive of California, 2024 Photographs, pamphlets, books, and ephemera from 1882-1927. Materials include family photographs, photographs of the International Institute of China, and a photographic chronicle of the Siege of Peking (Boxer Rebellion) of 1900.
• Gilbert Reid Papers Digital Collections, Hamilton College Library, nd Extensive digitized letters, manuscripts, publications, and visual materials.

External links

• www.example.com