John Leighton Stuart (Chinese: 司徒雷登; pinyin: Sītú Léidēng; June 24, 1876 – September 19, 1962)[1] was a missionary educator, the first President of Yenching University and later United States ambassador to China.

His mother's family had played a leading role in the American revolution in Boston, where her Yankee brand of Calvinism valued and promoted the education of women.

[5] At 16, he was sent to prep school in Virginia, where his outdated clothing and mid-19th century diction handed down from his missionary family in China made him a target for teasing by classmates.

He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College and later Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, where he aspired to become a missionary educator, inspired by the influence of Robert Elliott Speer.

In 1936, Yenching threw him a 60th birthday banquet, where kitchen and cleaning workers presented him with a plaque to hang above his door that read, "His kindness knows no class boundaries.

The official Peking University history museum makes no mention of Stuart or the institution's western ties, yet the campus stands as his memorial.

Stuart had been an early advocate of tearing up the unequal treaties with China, calling on the United States in 1925 to take the lead with 'an act of aggressive goodwill.

Stuart, well known among Chinese as a man with a strong moral conscience, declined promptly, sending a terse note to the Japanese commander: "We are refusing to comply with these orders.

Wen Yiduo, a scholar whom Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists often praised, expressed his respect and admiration for John Leighton Stuart in his famous last speech.

Yet, when Wen Yiduo's last speech was included in Chinese textbooks in Mainland China, the paragraph praising John Leighton Stuart was deleted.

[12] The efforts of Marshall and Stuart to mediate between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are commemorated in the Zhou Enlai/Deng Yingchao Memorial Hall in Nanjing.

He sought accommodation with the Communist Party in an effort to maintain U.S. presence and influence in China, making contact through a graduate of Yenching University, Huang Hua, who became a member of the Nanjing Military Council.

In recommending constructive engagement as an alternative to the official U.S. policy toward China, "Stuart came to advocate the kind of asymmetrical Cold War response to communism that George F. Kennan envisioned and that Yale Professor John Gaddis described in his 1980 Bernath Prize Lecture to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

In reaction to the State Department White Paper on China, CCP chairman Mao Zedong published a sarcastic essay Farewell, Leighton Stuart!,[14] which was long taught in Chinese schools as one of the founding documents of the revolution.

He has fairly wide social connections and spent many years running missionary schools in China, he once sat in a Japanese gaol during the War of Resistance.

His obituary in The New York Times reported, "During his years as a missionary and educator, Dr. Stuart -- gentle mannered and humane -- was one of the most respected Americans in China.