Harriet Cornelia Mills
China scholar
Harriet Cornelia Mills (2 April 1920 – 5 March 2016) was a scholar and professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Michigan from 1966 to 1990. In 1951, she was arrested by the government of the People's Republic of China and held until October, 1955 on charges of spying. On her release she told the western press that she was guilty.
Biography
Harriet C. Mills was born in Tokyo, where her parents were Presbyterian American missionaries, Wilson Plumer Mills and Cornelia Mills (née Seyle). She was taken to Hankou as an infant and attended American primary and secondary schools in Nanjing and Shanghai. Mills completed undergraduate Studies at Wellesley College and graduate studies at Columbia University, where she got a PhD degree in Chinese in 1963, with a thesis titled Lu Hsün: 1927–1936, the years on the left.
In 1947, Mills went to China on a Fulbright Scholarship, studying and doing research on Lu Xun. She also assisted Dorothy Borg, who taught European history at Peking University, and taught classes herself. After the beginning of the Korean War, Mills and other US Americans tried to leave China but were denied exit visas.
Mills was arrested in July 1951 at the same time as several other foreigners, including Antonio Riva, Ruichi Yamaguchi, W. Allyn and Adele Rickett.
“Harriet Cornelia Mills” enters the record as china scholar. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Harriet, Cornelia and Mills can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harriet Cornelia Mills” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.