Annetta T. Mills and the Origin of Deaf Education in China

Abstract

As the first education institution enrolling deaf children in China, the Chefoo School for the Deaf (which will be called “Chefoo School” in the rest of this article) was originally established by the American missionary couple Charles R. Mills and Annetta T. Mills. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Chefoo School succeeded in attracting students across the country. For investigating Mills’s contributions to the proliferation of Chinese deaf education in a transnational context, this article will consist of the following three sections. The first section primarily discusses the early history of deaf education in China before the establishment of the Chefoo School in 1898. As early as the 1840s, Chinese elites had already gained firsthand knowledge of deaf education in the United States. Around the 1870s, American and French missionaries respectively proposed to establish a specific deaf school, which took care of deaf children in Shanghai but failed to provide special education to them. And then the second section of this article will examine Mills’s efforts to seek financial support from the transnational community of deaf education. The final section of this article will switch to Mills’s agenda of localizing deaf education in China, including training native teachers fostering the proliferation of deaf education in China and providing industrial training to Chinese deaf children.