Wei Cho-min (1888-), leading Chinese Christian scholar and educator who for many years was president of Huachung University. Born into a prosperous Cantonese clan of bankers and merchants, Wei Cho-min received his early education in the Chinese classics. In addition, he studied English with private tutors in 1902-3. His father, then a tea merchant at Hankow, in 1903 sent his son to the Boone School, an Episcopalian mission institution in Wuchang. The young Wei was admonished by his father to pay attention to his studies but to ignore the religious ideas of the Westerners. In 1907 Wei Cho-min completed his secondary education and enrolled at Boone University. He was graduated with honors in 1911, at which time he was baptized a Christian. Because of his superior academic record, he was invited to remain at Boone University as an instructor in mathematics and Chinese. He accepted the position and also enrolled as a graduate student at Boone. In 1915 he received his M.A. degree after completing a thesis on the political principles of Mencius. During the years of the First World War, he worked in close association with the Reverend Alfred A. Gilman, the president of Boone University and later Wei's predecessor as president of Huachung University, and with the Reverend Arthur M. Sherman, then dean of St. Paul's Divinity School in Boone University. After seven years of teaching at Wuchang, Wei Cho-min went to the United States for graduate study. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1918, received his M.A. in philosophy in 1919, and completed all requirements for the Ph.D. except the thesis in 1920. At the same time, he took courses at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. Its dean characterized Wei as the ablest student then enrolled. William E. Hocking, professor of philosophy at Harvard, later said of his former student that "Dr. Wei is not a person whom one is likely to forget, having once known him. As a graduate student at Harvard, he impressed us by his power and seriousness of purpose .... He is impressive in his personality, grave in speech, quiet, deeply conscious of the difficulties of the time both in China and elsewhere. In person, he is slender and graceful and gives the impression of bring tall .... His personal appearance is attractive and the charm of his character speaks through his face and manner." Wei Cho-min returned to China in 1920 without completing his doctorate. He explained this action by saying that he did not wish to spend a year doing possibly inconsequential research in the United States when China had a pressing need for men of his training. Upon his return to Wuchang, he became professor of philosophy at Boone University. He also lectured on Christian evidence at the divinity school.

The Burton Educational Commission, as a result of an extensive survey of education in China in 1921-22, recommended the merging of several small mission institutions in central China to increase their efficiency and educational influence. Stimulated by that recommendation and by the need for consolidation in face of increasingly hostile anti-Christian feeling, Boone University, Wesley College, and the London Missionary Society joined together to form Huachung University at Wuchang in 1924. Wei Cho-min was named dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, vice president in charge of administration, professor of philosophy, and temporary chairman of the department of Chinese. After the university's acting president, Bishop Alfred Gilman, left China in October 1926 for a short stay in the United States, Wei also assumed the duties of the presidency. After the fall of Wuhan to the Northern Expedition forces and the establishment of the National Government at Wuhan under the control of the Kuomintang left wing and the Chinese Communists, student unrest increasingly disrupted the operations of Huachung and other universities in the area. Western faculty members at Huachung were forced out, and the Chinese staff came under attack by students who wanted to take over the university. In May 1927, because of great personal danger, Wei Cho-min went to Hankow and boarded a British steamer bound for Shanghai. Wei's enemies sent word to the Shanghai police that he was a Communist, and he was arrested upon arrival at Shanghai. Fortunately for Wei, his old colleague Dr. Arthur M. Sherman, then of the American Episcopal Mission, was traveling on the same steamer and was a witness to the arrest. He protested Wei's arrest to the police and eventually secured his release. Wei Cho-min then went to England, where he studied with L. T. Hobhouse at the University of London and with the Reverend B. H. Streeter at Oxford. He received a D. Phil, degree from London in 1929. During the 1927-28 period, he also studied briefly at the University of Berlin and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to China in 1929 to become president of the newly reopened Huachung University, now composed of Boone University, Griffith John Institute, Huping College, Wesley College, and Yale-in-China. Wei was to devote most of his remaining career to developing Huachung into one of the leading centers of Christian higher education in republican China. For the next two decades, Wei Cho-min continued to make occasional visits to the West for academic and ecclesiastical purposes. In August 1934 he participated in a seminar on education and culture contacts held at Yale University. Before leaving the United States for the return trip to China, he delivered the Woodward lectures at Yale, the Schermerhorn lectures at Columbia, and the Haskell lectures at the graduate school of theology at Oberlin. In 1937 he attended the Conference on Life and Work at Oxford in July and the Conference on Faith and Order at Edinburgh in August. He then proceeded to the United States to serve as visiting professor of ethics at the Yale Divinity School. He returned to China in the summer of 1938, crossing the Pacific by air and preaching on successive Sundays in Honolulu and Manila. After a short stay in Hong Kong, Wei Cho-min went to Kweilin to rejoin his university, which had been forced to move there in July 1938 because of Japanese advances. Huachung University soon was forced to move again, first to Kunming and then to the small town of Hsichou, near Tali. From March 1939 until the end of the Second World War the university campus consisted of three temple buildings and some temporary structures in the temple courtyards which were used as laboratories and classrooms. The faculty and students lived in rented family temples and courtyards in Hsichou. Wei Cho-min declined all government appointments during the war years, but from 1938 to 1942 he did serve on the People's Political Council. He also made periodic trips to Chungking to consult with government officials and to bring the wartime plight of private universities to their attention. "Wei Cho-min suffered a severe illness in the winter of 1944, but at war's end he went abroad as the first holder of the Henry W. Luce visiting professorship of world Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He also held an appointment under the Hewett Foundation to lecture at the Andover-Newton and Episcopal Theological seminaries in the Boston area. His Hewett lectures were published in the United States in 1947 as The Spirit of Chinese Culture. In July 1946, on his way back to China, Wei preached before a congregation of 3,000 in York, England, at the opening of the Archbishop's Fund for China. That August, the tenth synod of the Sheng-kung-hui, or Chinese Episcopal Church, elected Wei chairman of its house of delegates. With the Communist military victory in the civil war with the Nationalists, the position of all Christian institutions of higher learning became directly involved with the demands of political revolution. Despite increasing interference from the new authorities and other difficulties following the Communist takeover of the Wuhan cities in 1949, Huachung University managed to survive for a period under Wei Cho-min's leadership. By January 1951 Western teachers had stopped meeting their classes and were leaving China; some students had been recruited for service in Korea; and remittances to Huachung from abroad had been forbidden. In the summer of 1951 it was announced that Huachung University and the Government Teachers College would be combined to become the normal school in the Wuhan area for the training of middle-school teachers. Wei Cho-min reportedly became a faculty member at the new institution. He was publicly denounced in 1957 during the antirightist drive, but no punishment was reported. In 1962 he was identified as a member of the board of directors of the United Theological Seminary at Nanking.

As one of the leading Chinese educators of the republican period who was also an outspoken Christian and an active churchman, Wei Chomin consistently stressed his belief that the distinctive feature of Christian, in contrast to state or secular, education was its deliberate emphasis upon the building of character as the primary objective of the process of education. In inviting Western missionaries as educational colleagues, he specified that they possess those active and contagious qualities of personal character which he believed could best assist them in achieving their end. At the same time, Wei insisted that the professional competence of Western faculty members at Huachung University should be such as to qualify them for appointment to academic faculties in the United States. He laid great stress upon high academic standards in order to establish and maintain proper prestige for Christian education in China. Moreover, he worked cominually at the task of raising the level of academic requirements and performance in theological education and contributed as much as any other educator in China to the quality of Chinese clerical training.

Wei Cho-min attempted to interpret Christianity in Chinese terms, for he believed that "if Christianity is to take root in China, it must assume a Chinese form, congenial to the Chinese cultural heritage." On the basis of that conviction he insisted that Chinese Christian leaders receive their basic education in their homeland in order to appreciate Chinese culture as well as Christian values. Wei's major contribution was the establishment and direction of Huachung University as an institution designed to educate Christian leaders in China.