History and Prospects

Abstract

In modern China, the movement of people going abroad to study started in 1872. In that year and the three subsequent years the Qing government sent 120 students to the United States to study. Each year thereafter more were sent to European countries, including France, England, Germany, and Russia, totaling another 100 by the end of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the movement gained swift momentum and large numbers of students went to study in Japan, reaching 10,000 in 1906. In 1909, the American government set up a scholarship fund from the Boxer indemnity for Chinese students to study in the United States. Several thousand students subsequently crossed the Pacific to America. At the same time, there arose a movement among the populace to go to France on work-study programs, which lasted through the May 4th Movement of 1919 into the 1920s. In the early 1920s, too, many aspiring young people went to the Soviet Union, where they were educated in the principles of socialism. By 1949, tens of thousands of Chinese had received modern education in the United States and Europe as well as in Japan and the Soviet Union. Upon returning to their homeland, these students formed a contingent of modern-thinking intellectuals who exerted a powerful influence on China's old and new democratic revolutions.