Overseas Chinese students promoted cultural exchange
Overseas Chinese Students and Cultural Exchange
Modern China-foreign cultural exchange began in the first half of the 19th century. Despite invasive wars waged by Western powers being the primary channel of first contact between China and the West, a door for cultural exchange was opened. As China’s national strength and culture were at a disadvantage at the time, the situation was more about spreading Western civilization and ideas to China from Western capitalist societies, with Western missionaries as the main conduits.
This situation did not gradually change until groups of Chinese students studying abroad began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From a modern perspective, these Chinese overseas student groups formed after the Opium War (1840–42). Different from the scholar-bureaucrats of ancient China, a new group with a thorough knowledge of both Western and traditional Chinese culture was formed.
Cen Hong and Zhou Mian, professors from the School of History, Culture and Tourism at Jiangsu Normal University, assert that overseas Chinese student groups were the main body and bridge of China-foreign cultural exchange from the 1840s to the early 20th century. Due to the considerable introduction of Western learning including Marxism into China, traditional culture and society in the country underwent a profound unconscious change, thereby accelerating the process of modernization.
The authors divide the dissemination process of Western learning by overseas Chinese students of the late Qing era into three stages and three groups. The first stage was the early China-US cultural exchange. Yung Wing persuaded the Qing court to send the Chinese Educational Mission (1872–81), which included 120 young students with an average of 12 years of age, to study in the United States. The second stage was when a number of top students from the Foochow Shipbuilding Institution (1867–1912) were sent to Europe for further study. The third stage was about Chinese students studying in Japan in the late Qing era.
The authors explore the contribution of overseas Chinese students to modern China-foreign cultural exchange from multiple perspectives: from the introduction of logic, philosophy, Marxist theory, Herbartianism and other disciplines or important theories into China; from the introduction, establishment or transformation of disciplines such as aesthetics, historiography, sociology, physics and mathematics in China; from the contribution made by the China Institute (founded in New York City in 1926) and the papers of Chinese students studying in countries including the United States and Germany for master’s and doctoral degrees. The book also analyzes the roles of Yung Wing, Yan Fu, Tcheng Ki-tong, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Hu Shih and Lin Yutang in cultural exchange.
Yuan Qing is a professor from the Faculty of History at Nankai University.
edited by YANG LANLAN