Study On Weak Country Citizen Mentality Of Oversea Students In Late Qing Dynasty And Early ROC(1872-1927)

In year1876, JemeTien Yow and many other students sailed from Shanghai to American by the organization of Qing government, which was the first record of Chinese studying oversea. In the next50years, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studied abroad. At home, oversea students were regarded generally as elites and hope of China while in foreign countries they could impossibly get rid of the identity of weak country's citizen because China's serial military defeat since mid19th century. Weak country citizen mentality is a relatively stable emotion and psychology generated by oversea students of their identity as a weak country's citizen.The existing studies have discussed a lot about oversea study policy; oversea students' thoughts, oversea students' translational works and reform launched by returned students, but studies seldom involve oversea students'psychology. So this dissertation is intended to discuss the oversea students' weak country citizen mentality and their psychology's influence in history.The whole dissertation is divided in three parts. The first part is introduction. In this part author introduces the origin of the study, summarizes the existing researches, defines several concepts and the boundary of the study and explains the clue of the study.The second part discusses the background of oversea students' weak country citizen mentality. Chinese students were looking forward to study abroad, but they didn't know that because of the difference in military power, the image of China and Chinese were not quite good, sometimes even barbarian in foreign countries' point of view such as America and Japan. The fierce conflict between what students had expected before they went abroad and what they encountered afterwards was the direct cause of the formation and aggravation of the weak country citizen mentality.The third part discussed the specific express of the weak country citizen mentality. When students were discriminated by others, the most direct react was self-abasement and anger. Because of the strong will to make China no longer a weak country, what students concern were not only their studies, they also tried hard to connect what they learn with the purpose of saving the country, sometimes the their later purpose even took priority over the former one. When self-esteem was insulted, some of the student chose to find confidence from China's history and civilization, some other started to "counter-discriminate" foreigners to find comfort. There were also students whose minds completely taken control by self-abasement would like to over-generalize western culture and exaggerate its advantage over Chinese culture.The last part discussed the influence of the weak country citizen mentality from both individual and social level. At the individual level, such mentality would become an impulse which pushes students to choose a more difficult path against an easier one because of their willingness to save the country when they were planning their lives. At the social level, the author discussed in a case about the mentality's influence in the modernization of education, i.e. orientation of country strengthening and tendency of quick success.