<p>"For some time, other Ivy League universities have been working hard to establish themselves in China. This is especially true at Yale, where Chinese President Hu Jintao made his only campus visit on a trip to the United States in April. President Richard Levin has made enhancing the school's ties with China a priority. His efforts have already yielded results: the number of Yale students studying in China has increased more than five-fold in the past eight years, according to the Yale Daily News.</p>
<p>"Yale enjoys strong name recognition in the world's most populous nation and has a long history of supporting everything from hospitals to middle schools there."</p>
<p>There's no doubt about this. The first Chinese citizen to graduate from an American university graduated from Yale in 1854, and went on to do great things back in his home country.</p>
<p>Yale has by far the best exchange program with Beida, and was closely involved in China for over 130 years before any other American university was:</p>
<p>Most likely Yung Wing went to Yale because it was the first true American university, i.e., founding the first arts & sciences graduate school, the first science department, and the first scientific journal as well as awarding the first Ph.D. degree in America, in 1861.</p>
<p>A rather "sanitized" history, it strikes me, given the account of Yale's relationship with China written in Brooks Kelley's more balanced "History of Yale". </p>
<p>Yale's focus on China intensified after Horace Tracey Pitkin ('92) a Christian missionary, was beheaded during the Boxer Rebellion. Many other young Yale grads then headed off as latter-day crusaders, to convert the heathen! They set up a series of schools for proselytizing, but were later forced out by the Chinese Communists - withdrawing to Hong Kong.</p>
<p>Interesting indeed. Horace Pitkin and Henry Luce, the founder of Time, both traveled together to China from Yale I think. History is always being sanitized, isn't it Byerly? </p>
<p>Indeed, bulldog, I archived that link some time ago. A textbook example of discreet understatement:</p>
<p>"As Pitkin's gruesome beheading shows, the Yale-China connection has not always been so warm. From its missionary roots, Yale's involvement in China has grown in fits and spurts with the roller coaster politics of the 20th century..."</p>
<p>The links not only apply to undergraduate programs. Yale also established a renowned medical school-Yale in China in Hunan before the second world war. The other major medical school in China was Peking Union Medical School which was affiliated with Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller University. These schools were taught in English generally, and often with visiting professors from their American founders. Unfortunately, after the communist takeover in 1949, these associations were lost. However, they have been intensively revived with multiple exchange programs at both Yale and Hopkins medical schools.</p>