Book Review

Asia

"Lianda" is an abbreviation of National Southwest Associated University (Xinan Lianhe Daxue), the extraordinary World War II institution that comprised three important Beijing-area schools. Driven from their campuses by the invading Japanese, Beijing, Qinghua, and Nankai universities fled two thousand kilometers to southwest China in a collaborative effort to keep their educational operations alive. As John Israel relates in his detailed and poignant narrative, from 1937 to 1946, the three schools did that and more during their arduous exile.	1
Growing out of late nineteenth-century cultural reforms, Beijing University had become China's most prestigious liberal arts university, renowned for its humanistic curricula, its internationally educated faculty, and its politically dynamic student body. Qinghua was the educational lotus that grew from the mud of Boxer imperialism; in 1928, it was endowed with Boxer indemnity money to become "China's MIT." Nankai, a private school, catered to the urban business class and had a renowned institute for economic analysis. Israel shows us how these three quite unique schools, over the course of nine years, grew as "Lianda" to a campus of three thousand students and hundreds of faculty in five colleges and twenty-six departments. No university in China, before or since, has had a curriculum as broad or open. Nor did any one campus ever bring together quite such a diversity of talent and points of view.	2
The amalgamation of three schools rendered some departments, like physics, the biggest and by far the best in China. Students profited from the synergy and found that they were able to get a world-class education that prepared them for graduate training abroad. (1957 Nobel Laureates C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee were Lianda alums. They went on for doctorates at the University of Chicago, thanks to the American connections of faculty like Wu Dayou and Zhou Peiyuan.)	. . .