Clinics and hospitals were another charitable work and were important to the Church mission in China. At the beginning of the 20th century, the most famous Catholic hospitals in China were the French Hospital established in Kunming in 1901. the Caritas Hospital in Chongqing and the Taomei Hospital in Guangzhou in 1905, a French Hospital in Qingdao in 1906 the Guangci Hospital in Shanghai in 1907, the French Women"s and Children"s Hospital in Nanchang in 1929 and the Puci Sanato- rium in Shanghai in 1935. Father Kong Haogu built another hos- pital for lepers in Guangzhou and another hospital specialized in curing rat pestilence in Manchu. By 1937, the French CatholicChurch alone had established 70 hospitals with 5,000 beds.
Objectively speaking, besides expanding church influence in China, the purpose of establishing hospitals was to introduce medical scientific theories for hospital management and medi- cal education etc. They trained many doctors in Western medi- cine for China, which was another great contribution.
The nursing home was another service the Catholic Church provided. There were 37 nursing homes in China in 1920 with the average of 35 people in each. The ones who provided ser- vices to the elderly people were nuns from the Little Sisters of the Poor. The number of nursing homes reached 232 in 1930.
The Social Services of the Catholic Church included an-other well-organized economic branch. From 1876 to 1879, rare severe natural disasters occurred in Shandong, Zhili, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Henan provinces. The Catholic Church sent some70 missionaries to the affected places to help. Certainly some used the opportunity to buy land and later rented them to the peasants on the condition of becoming Catholics. Most of them were there to help, however. Whenever a disaster occurred, they were there to help out, which won the hearts of many and there- fore strengthened and expanded the Catholic Church. For in- stance, when the northern part of China was flooded in 1931, the Catholic Church alone contributed 200,000 Yuan to help the vic- tims.
E. Educational expansionSince the 19th century, the Catholics valued basic educa- tion in two main forms, general education and catechetical edu- cation. The Church used the Gen Zi Pei Kuan (indemnity money) to build and develop many junior and senior schools. The teach- ers were either local well-educated lay people or priests who taught the Catholic children their catechism, Chinese, all kinds of prayers and basic readings and writings. The students were mainly Catholics, but the schools also accepted non-Catholicstudents.
The junior school was mainly designed to teach Catholics the Catechism in order to help them to deepen their understand- ing of the doctrine and strengthen their faith. In 1914, the Catho- lic Church was running 8,034 schools with a student populationof 132,850. Most of these students were in junior schools. By1925 when the Catholic congregation reached 2,500,000, there were 310,000 students in the schools. In fact, two-third of theschools were teaching Catholic doctrine.
In general, each vi-cariate had at least one seminary. There were 64 Catholic semi- naries in 1906 with 1,640 students.
In terms of higher education, the Catholic Church lagged behind the Protestant Church, and yet the efforts the local churches made were obvious to all. In 1908, a vocational school in central Mongolia began to teach Western subjects. In 1908, a Catholic vocational school began to teach English and French. St. Joseph"s College in Fuzhou was the only local higher educa- tional institution.