Author(s)

Yi-Hsuan Chelsea Kuo

Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, USA.

This paper looks at the Chinese Christian students of the early 20^th century in the light of their own publication The Chinese Christian Students. For these overseas Chinese students, Christianity represented not just a personal belief but a means of modernization, a way in which individuals could continually renew, or more accurately reaffirm, their identity via religious and ideological conversion. The author argues that Christianity provides these Chinese students a way to fulfill their traditional, “old China” role of literati in America, and thereby to build or at least to envision, a new modern China.

Chinese Immigrants, Chinese Christian, Identity Formation, Contextualization

Kuo, Y. (2014) Chasing the Chinese Dream in America: 20^th-Century Chinese Christian Students in the United States and Their Quest for Modernization. Chinese Studies, 3, 113-119. doi: 10.4236/chnstd.2014.33015.