Free Restless Empire by Odd Westad Page A

Xiaoping, would later emerge—was one such group of Hakka.
    China’s encounter with Christianity from the sixteenth century on had primarily happened through European Catholics, but most of the nineteenth-century missionaries were British or American Protestants. They were young men and women inspired by the Great Awakening in the United States and evangelical revivals in Britain. Some of the most influential of these missionaries were interested more in propagating Western educational ideals than in saving souls. Robert Morrison, sent by the London Missionary Society, started publishing books in Chinese in the 1830s. Elijah Bridgeman, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, published magazines in English and Chinese in Guangzhou. Unlike most foreign military officers, diplomats, and traders, the missionaries often learned Chinese, and so they became translators and interpreters of China to the West and the West to China. Some of them retired to fill the first positions for the study of China in Western universities. James Legge started as a Scottish missionary in Hong Kong, became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, and made celebrated translations of the Confucian Classics.
    Few societies have ever put more emphasis on the value of education in its various forms than did Qing China. Basic literacy rates were reasonablyhigh compared to the rest of the world. Between a third and a half of men and up to ten percent of women could read. There were many schools in major cities, but competition for entry was fierce. Most Chinese knew that the path to success was literacy, knowledge of the classics, and taking some form of examination. Families whose members included officials and scholars had an advantage, but in each generation a few poorer families were able to put one of their sons through the imperial examination system and gain a status their forebears could only have dreamed of. No wonder whole clans pooled resources to educate their young in schools serving their area or lineage, or in order to put someone of special talent through a private, public, or official institute or even an imperial academy. 6
    What changed in the late nineteenth century was not the prominence of education but its content and organization. In addition to the kinds of schools that had existed since at least the Song dynasty, China now also got schools run by missionary societies and as well as secular schools, often run by Chinese, that concentrated on science in addition to the classics. Schools for women also began to spread, especially after 1900. A central tenet of the Self-strengthening Movement, launched by Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and others in the 1860s, was that the ideal person was someone who could combine an essence of Chinese learning with an outer form of Western science and technology. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s academies that taught Western Studies appeared, often in or around the new shipyards or arsenals that delivered the weapons the Qing needed for their protection. Well into the twentieth century, however, most Chinese continued to go to schools where Western science, geography, or languages made only occasional and fleeting appearances, and where the purpose was the improvement of one’s character through study of Confucian texts. But some of the students who early on did receive training outside the Confucian curriculum were going to become crucial to China’s future as bridge builders between two very different visions of human existence.
    By the 1870s more and more Chinese were going abroad for their formal education. Building on the knowledge transmitted by pioneers who had left earlier—people like Rong Hong (known in the West as Yung Wing), who had graduated from Yale in 1854 as the first Chinese with a US college degree—both the government and individual families began sending young people to America and Europe, and, as we shall see, a bit later also to Japan. Zeng Guofan was