Introduction

Charting the impact teachers and missionaries from the United States had on their students as evidenced in the oral histories of intellectuals provides chilling evidence of the link between pro-Western learning and the ugly consequences of being targeted by Mao Zedong as a "stinking intellectual.” In China, owning to the ideological underpinnings of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought, the Deweyan effect has been to identify pro-Western intellectuals as Mao's prey. The story of what happened during 1920s and 1930s and World War II and its aftermath to the overseas trained intellectuals and the role they played in China's history after World War II can be told through the recollections of Chen Renbing and the overseas educated. A few individuals allowed multiple interviews; however, Chen Renbing unfolded his entire life story during frequent meetings at his home for several months in 1981–82 and by correspondence until his death in 1990.