Zhang Zhidong And The Administration Measures On Students That Study Abroad In The Late Qing Dynasty

Zhang Zhidong was a famous educational reformer in Chinese modern history and also one of the most important pioneers of practicing studying abroad in the late Qing dynasty. He played a very important role in the evolution of management policy on studying abroad in the late Qing dynasty.In the Sino-Japanese war, the great China was unexpectedly lost to the tiny Japan. The whole Chinese felt very shocked. As a typical intellectual, Zhang Zhidong learned the lesson from the failure and searched for the factors that led to the rapid rise of Japan. In order to advocate people to learn from Japan Zhang Zhidong wrote the article of "Study" in the "Encourage Learning". In the process of practicing studying abroad, Zhang Zhidong who had a great political ambition inherited the Chinese traditional education supervision idea and learned lessons from the experience from the early study abroad in Europe and the United States and considered the Chinese student community itself, on those basis he formed a set of system administration ideology.Zhang Zhidong’s administration measures to the students who studied abroad could be divided into two stages according to the time. The administration measures were generally loose when he was a local governor, in this period his management measures included three points, the first point was to formulate the rules and regulations, the second was to appoint commissioners to supervise the students, the third was to get assistances from the Japanese. While when he was gradually promoted to the cabinet, he took a serious consideration of the management measures and strictly improved the policies. The changes could be seen from improving the qualification of sending students abroad and suggesting the central division examining the students as well as strictly inspecting and appointing the students those studying abroad. The emergence of these changes resulting from the promotion of Zhang Zhidong’s own status and the consideration of the students becoming more and more radical after the establishment of Tungmenghui.Throughout the two period’s administration measures, obviously you could see that Zhang Zhidong’s management measures had the following four characteristics, namely from relatively loose to increasingly strict, the management policy on local gradually rising to national policy, turning the close attention on foreign management to the selection and appointment, the actual effect and the management assumes were paradox. The paradox reflected that the government’s helpless and dilemma in learning from Japanese, which also showed a society with serious crisis could only take temporary solution but could not effect a permanent cure.Although Zhang Zhidong’s administration measures on Chinese students didn’t meet his subjective desire, but it did objectively promote the study abroad education system in the late Qing dynasty from disorder to orderly and standardized.