Free Restless Empire by Odd Westad Page B

behind one key government effort, the Chinese Educational Mission, which sent 120 young men to study in the United States from 1872 on. Similar expeditions were set up for Germany, Britain, and France. As happened with the next big wave of Chinese students going abroad, over a century later, in the 1980s and 1990s, some of the those who went away stayed away, while others returned to China, giving good service to their country as doctors, teachers, shipbuilders, officers, and railway and mining engineers.
    The most prominent example of a foreign-trained student from the late nineteenth century, Sun Yat-sen, became the first president of the Chinese republic in 1911. A southerner like most of the others who went overseas, Sun left Guangzhou as a thirteen-year-old in 1879 for Hawaii, where his elder brother was a successful merchant. Sun was educated in Honolulu, attending the same school from which Barack Obama would graduate a hundred years later. Sun then went on to study medicine in Hong Kong, becoming one of the first graduates from its new medical college.
    One example of the further career of the boys who were sent to study in America in the 1870s was Tang Shaoyi, who attended Columbia College in New York. Tang became a leading Qing-era communications’ expert, diplomat, and provincial governor. After the collapse of the dynasty he served as prime minister and minister of finance and was a key adviser to Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. He was assassinated in 1938 when attempting to negotiate with the Japanese. Another was Rong Shangqian, who attended Hartford Public High School, joined the Qing military, fought as a captain, and was wounded both in theSino-French war and in the Sino-Japanese war. Rong later became a railway administrator and died a very old man in Shanghai in 1954. Tang, Rong, and the other pioneers of Chinese education abroad came to have a strong influence on China, often serving under three different governments in their homeland.
    By the early twentieth century, education in China provided a fertile ground for encounters between natives and foreigners. The number of translations from other languages increased, expanding the influence of non-Chinese learning. The schools and universities inside the foreign settlements received more and more Chinese students, as did the foreign-run universities in the Chinese cities, such as Yanjing University in Beijing, a precursor to today’s Peking University, and Guangzhou Christian College, which became Lingnan University in 1916. Qinghua University was established in Beijing in 1911, primarily as a preparatory school for students who would later study in US universities on state scholarships. New groups of students were particularly eager to avail themselves of these opportunities; by 1905 there were 10,000 Chinese young women in Protestant missionary schools. 7 The meeting of different cultures through schools and universities formed twentieth-century China by the impact it had on the minds of those who came to lead the country. By 1905, when the Qing abolished imperial examinations because of “the strenuous difficulties of the times,” Chinese education was already on its way to becoming the hybrid of Confucian didactic values and empirical study that we see today. 8 The topics for the last countrywide exams (an emergency session held in Kaifeng in 1902) symbolize this fusion:
    S ECTION 1:
    The military policies of Guanzi (725–645 BC)
    The policies of Han Wendi (179–156 BC) toward southern Vietnam
    Imperial use of laws
    Evaluation procedures for officials
    The proposals of Liu Guangzu (1142–1222) for stabilizing the Southern Song dynasty
    S ECTION 2:
    The Western stress on travel as a part of studying
    The Japanese use of Western models for educational institutions
    The banking policies of various countries
    The police and laws
    The industrial basis of wealth and power 9
    During the nineteenth century, Chinese views of nature and of the human body