John Calvin Ferguson

John Calvin Ferguson (福开森, Fúkāisēn) was an American who lived about sixty years in China as a missionary educator, newspaper proprietor, official adviser and scholar of Chinese art.

Sent to Nanjing by the Methodist mission in 1888, he founded Huiwen Academy there. In 1897 Sheng Xuanhuai (盛宣怀) hired him to teach foreign languages at the Nanyang Public School in Shanghai, later making him its supervisor. In 1899 he bought the newspaper Xinwen Bao (《新闻报》) from a British owner, and under his management it became a rival to Shen Bao. That same year he and Francis Lister Hawks Pott (卜舫济) proposed that the Municipal Council set up a school for Chinese children.

The French authorities named a road in the French Concession for him; the gazetteer links this to his part in the Siming Gongsuo dispute and the 1899 extensions of the settlements. He advised the governors Liu Kunyi, Zhang Zhidong and Duanfang, the Beijing government (1917-1928) and the Nationalist government (1936-1938), and was a member of the Chinese delegation at Washington in 1921. He left China after the Pacific War began and died in 1945.