| This dissertation examines modern China's movement to study abroad, marked by the inception of the Boxer Indemnity education program in 1909 with funding from America's first indemnity remission, and the impact of the movement on China's academic institutional building in the 1920s. From the perspective of a global movement of ideas and knowledge, in which individual Chinese who took part in this movement proved themselves to be active, engaging players, rather than passive imitators or followers of Western ideas, the author attempts to explore how, and to what degree, Western education affected Chinese students' perceptions of themselves and the outside world, and how such changing perceptions affected the development of modern China's academic institutional building in the 1920s.; The author contends that the direct and extensive government involvement of the Boxer Indemnity education program created much space, in which the mutual benefits of this program were romanticized and materialized through the imaginations by people at different levels of society. The imaginations and expectations not only affected the academic performance and life experiences of a large number of Chinese students in America, especially those sponsored by the indemnity funds, but also proved to have strong repercussions in the 1920s, when Western-educated Chinese students began to return home continuously in large numbers and formed a rather special cohort in Chinese society.; Parallel to the social repercussions, the 1920s also witnessed Qinghua's transformation from a preparatory school into a national university and the creation of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture. Both events, the author argues, best illustrate the immediate outcome of Western education and represent the beginning of the continuous and conscious efforts of a new and confident generation of Western-educated Chinese to integrate China into the world academic and science community. Because of the political and economic disparity between China and the United States and the powerful Chinese nationalistic sentiment in the 1920s, the process of such efforts was marked by constant conflict within Chinese society, involving at once absorption, integration, cooperation, and resistance. |
