ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the journalism education program at St. John’s University of Shanghai and its founder, Maurice Votaw (1899–1981), between the early 1920s and 1949. It challenges a long-held assumption that Missouri-style journalism education had exerted a profound impact on China’s practicing journalism. By examining the mutual incompatibility between St. John’s curriculum and the reality of Chinese newspapers, this chapter argues that journalism educators’ inability to fully transplant Missouri-style journalism into China resulted from the instructors’ unfamiliarity with Chinese journalism and language, the exclusive use of English as the language of instruction, and students’ reluctance to embark on careers as journalists, a dishonored vocation in Republican China. A comparison between the Department of Journalism at St. John’s and that at Yenching University of Beijing/Beiping, a relatively more successful program (also a Mizzou-inspired institution), reveals that the latter’s success resided in its capacity and willingness to sinify its coursework and personnel.
