Introduction
Until recent years, outside the People's Republic of China, academic studies of the Chinese Educational Mission (hereafter ‘the Mission’) to the United States (1872–1881) have highlighted Qing officialdom's general neglect and distrust of these American-educated ‘boys’ (youtong). This assessment, found in Thomas E. La Fargue's pioneering work China's First Hundred (1942), was echoed subsequently in leading scholarly works on China's modern contacts with the West.Footnote 1 When their studies were abruptly terminated by the Qing court, which was still dominated by conservatives, the returned students, as John King Fairbank et al. observe, were ‘greeted with suspicion as a threat to the vested interest of all scholars in the unreformed classical examination system’ and played a limited role in the late Qing modernization programme.Footnote 2 Timothy Kao (Gao Zonglu), whose extensive research on the Mission in the 1970s–1980s expanded our knowledge of this enterprise beyond La Fargue's work, reached a similar, sombre conclusion.Footnote 3
Inside the People's Republic of China, scholarly examination of the Mission started in the 1980s and subsequently turned it into a modern legend of China's opening up to the outside world. In 2004, China Central Television produced a five-part documentary series entitled Daqing liumei youtong (The Great Qing's American-Educated Boys), which chronicled the dramatic lives of the 120 boys, aged between ten and 16, who were sent to study in the United States and who, upon their return, found themselves thrust onto centre stage of China's national struggles during the final years of the Qing and the early days of the Republic.Footnote 4 From the beginning, academic studies of the Mission in mainland China have underscored the patriotism of Yung Wing and the recalled Mission students. However, early research on the subject also highlighted the missed opportunities for meaningful modernization as a result of the intransigence of conservatives in the Qing court. Gu Changsheng lamented, for instance, the hostility of the ‘feudal’ Qing ruling elite to the Mission, which led to its destruction. Li Xisuo also concluded that ‘modern China did not present a favourable societal environment for returned students to pursue their ambitions’—ambitions that were often profoundly political—and that the Western learning they sought to introduce persistently conflicted with the ‘corrupt and backward’ culture of Chinese officialdom.Footnote 5
However, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, rising nationalism in the People's Republic of China had not only advanced ‘national studies’ (guoxue) and produced Confucius institutes (Kongzi Xueyuan),Footnote 6 it had also rediscovered many patriotic heroes of modern times, including Yung Wing and the Mission ‘boys’. In the process, the dominant theme in new writing on the subject was reduced to the unswerving devotion to the motherland shown by China's earliest students of the West and their momentous contributions to China's modernization. The central narrative turned the spotlight onto Yung Wing's graduation from Yale in 1854 (the first Chinese to graduate from an American university) and his subsequent, tireless efforts to introduce to China Western statecraft and other fruits of Western civilization—from contract laws and modern mines to railroads and a national banking system. Above all, it featured Yung Wing's brainchild—the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States. Special anniversaries of Yung Wing's birth and his graduation from Yale were occasions for academic conferences and the subsequent publication of papers in edited volumes. With few exceptions, a wave of new studies of Yung Wing and the Mission presented them as courageous trailblazers and patriots who sought to rejuvenate and save China through modern science and education, and who became ‘pillar timbers’ (dongcai) in an emerging modern state.Footnote 7
Coincidentally, recent scholarship in the English language on the aborted Mission also shows considerable willingness to look beyond the frustrations and the marginalization of the recalled students and to highlight their important role in late Qing reform, particularly during the post-Boxer New Policies (xinzheng) period. Edward Rhoads's Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872–81, an admirable, meticulous study of the Mission, draws a sympathetic, even laudatory conclusion: although shabbily treated upon their return to China and initially allowed to play only a ‘circumscribed role’ as mere ‘technicians’ (which was ‘precisely what was expected of them’, Rhoads adds), by the end of the nineteenth century the recalled students had eventually risen to play a ‘transformative role. . . after the Confucian order had been shaken’. Rhoads writes, ‘Self-strengthening may have been a failure, but the Mission itself, though truncated, was not.’Footnote 8 Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller go even further in their affirmation of the outcome of the Mission, as hinted at in the title of their book Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization. While they also detail the initial humiliation and mistreatment of the returned students, they see the abolishment of the imperial examination in 1905 as a dramatic turning point, after which ‘the students of the Chinese Educational Mission rose to lead the country’. In the final years of the Qing, according to Leibovitz and Miller, ‘the small group of [Mission] graduates. . . had its men helming every major industry in the nation’.Footnote 9
To be sure, underlying such assessment is not the same academic patriotism to be found in the People's Republic of China, but a scholarly determination, I suspect, to salvage a splendid Self-Strengthening endeavour from near historical inconsequence. At times, one also detects therein a romantic penchant for heroic drama. It was certainly no small feat for those boys—none of whom was from the Manchu ruling elite—to embark on an educational venture with dubious rewards and not insignificant perils across the Pacific, and to eventually number among themselves a significant number of top government, military, and diplomatic officials as well as national leaders in modern education and industry.Footnote 10 Perhaps the most symbolic moment that attests to the collective attainment of the Mission came when Tang Shaoyi, a former Mission ‘boy’, rose to become the first premiere of the Chinese Republic in 1912. In December 1911, Yuan Shikai, then prime minister of the Qing government, sent Tang to negotiate with the revolutionaries—represented by the British-educated Wu Tingfang, former Qing minister to the United States—over the terms for ending the Qing dynasty. ‘Into the hands of these two thoroughly “Westernized” Chinese,’ Thomas La Fargue rhapsodizes, in a momentary departure from the underlying tone of his book, ‘suddenly was thrust the fate of the Chinese empire, and from their hands there emerged the Chinese Republic.’Footnote 11 Yung Wing also appears to have enjoyed comparable prestige at the time. In February 1912, Sun Yat-sen wrote to him (then living out his last months in Hartford) and invited him to return to ‘establish a wholesome government’ so as to ‘consolidate our fledgling republic’.Footnote 12 In light of all this, a historical drama exhibiting pioneering spirit, overwhelming odds, heroic struggles, and momentous triumph indeed seems irresistible.
Nevertheless, such a drama is at odds with history. What we need, I believe, is a more sober storyline that historical evidence, both previously known and newly available, compels us to consider. The narrative that I present here aims at striking a sensible balance in historical understanding of the Mission enterprise. Furthermore, unlike Rhoads's recent study, with its primary focus on the period before the Mission's recall, mine is devoted especially to the period after the students’ return to China. It sheds a different light on Yung Wing's life and on the outcome of the Chinese Educational Mission, which, I believe, is essential to our understanding of the role of Westernized intellectuals in particular and of reform efforts in general in late Qing China; it underscores the profound distrust and dismissiveness on the part of the imperial court towards students whose overseas studies cut them loose from the moorings of Chinese tradition and whose Western-inspired visions of reform threatened the foundation of the Manchu state.
As patriots with a particularly keen interest in China's survival as a nation, the returned students sought to mend the weak foundations of China's political and social order. However, they were often seen as having dubious loyalty to their country because of their American education and ties to that country. Excluded from the circles of real power and yet eager to promote modernization along Western lines, some attached themselves to dynastic power brokers and found themselves co-opted and used instead by a political system that resisted the fundamental changes they tried to introduce. In the end, such frustrations turned Yung Wing from a reformer into an enemy of the Qing state, while the most prominent returned students of the Mission were forced to withdraw from politics as they became disillusioned over the continuation of the autocratic tradition of post-dynastic China. As we shall see, despite all their achievements, China's earliest students of the West ultimately failed to set the country upon a new modernizing course—a failure that pointed, beyond itself, to a new and subsequently persistent pattern in the relationship between the educated elite and the state in modern China. It was a troubled and unfulfilling relationship: in many cases, Western education destroyed the ageless claim of the imperious rulers of China to an unquestioning loyalty and obedience from their best-educated subjects, and even turned the latter into their sworn enemies. For those patriotic students returning to the Middle Kingdom, eager to bring about a fundamental change in its political system and rejuvenation of its civilization, disillusionment was often inevitable, and their choice—short of revolution—became one between marginalization and co-option by the powers of the autocratic state.
In recapturing the predicament in which the recalled Mission students found themselves and bringing their dilemma into sharper focus, with the help of revealing sources—some of which have not been utilized previously—my attempt is not to revert to what Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow have called the ‘binary structure of reform versus revolution’ whereby one reduces China's complex modern struggles to the ‘tradition/modern’ or ‘stagnation/modernization’ divide (even though the distinctions themselves remain useful to an extent). Indeed, not only is the analytical polarity of reform versus revolution (which has often shaped historiography in the People's Republic of China) inadequate, but the ‘eventness’ of major turning points of modernity, including the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 and the Revolution of 1911—even when examined as ‘extended’ moments—must not be allowed to obscure the fundamental structure and the enduring pattern of the autocratic political tradition, despite the significant evolution of the latter since the late nineteenth century.Footnote 13 In terms of Mission returnees’ relations with the self-absorbed rulers of the Middle Kingdom, the distinctions between reform-minded and conservative Qing officials, and between the pre-Boxer and the xinzheng periods, or between the late Qing and early Republican eras, are not as significant as they first appear: the returned students’ ultimate choice between marginalization and co-option remained unchanged.
‘Of no use to China’
Like the majority of the students of the China Educational Mission, Yung Wing began his journey to the West from coastal Canton. In 1835, when he was not yet seven, he was taken by his father from the village of Nanping to nearby Macao to attend a mission school. He later went on to enrol at the Morrison Education Society School which opened in 1839. In 1847, when Samuel R. Brown, the headteacher of the Morrison school, returned to the United States, he took along with him Yung Wing and two other students. Yung Wing studied first at Monson Academy in Monson, Massachusetts, before entering Yale.Footnote 14 Predictably, his Yale education and American experience sparked modernizing dreams. Before the close of his last year in college, he was already looking forward to the day when, ‘through western education’, China would be ‘regenerated, become enlightened and powerful. . . Towards such a goal, I directed all my mental resources and energy.’Footnote 15 Yung Wing's Yale classmates cheered such ambition when they wrote in the class book that they wished him to become the ‘leader of moral reform in China’ and free his country from the ‘tyrant's sway and from superstitious chains’.Footnote 16
Upon graduation from Yale in 1854, Yung Wing returned to China and served successively as interpreter and assistant to Western missionaries and as a tea merchant. His first opportunity to introduce Western-inspired political reform came in late 1860 when he travelled to Nanjing to meet with Hong Rengan, cousin of Hong Xiuquan and Taiping's ‘Shield King’. Yung presented a list of proposals to Hong Rengan, urging the Taiping to organize an army ‘on scientific principles’; start military, naval, and industrial schools; ‘establish a banking system’; adopt an educational system of graded schools; and organize a ‘civil government’. If the Taiping government was willing to adopt those measures, Yung Wing added, ‘I would be perfectly willing to offer my services to help carry them out.’ As it turned out, both Yung Wing's scheme and the similar reforms that Hong Rengan himself had proposed a year earlier in ‘A New Treatise for Aid in Government’ (Zizheng xinpian) were brushed aside as Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping leadership persisted in their dynastic dreams and messianic fantasies.Footnote 17
Disillusioned with the Taiping Rebellion, Yung Wing pinned his hopes for regenerating China on Zeng Guofan, viceroy of Liangjiang (covering Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and parts of Anhui). In 1864, he was sent by Zeng to the United States to purchase machinery for the Jiangnan Arsenal and, upon successful completion of his mission, was made an ‘expectant sub-prefect’ (houbu tongzhi) in Jiangsu province, ‘a full-fledged mandarin of the fifth rank’, which entitled him to wear the ‘peacock's feather (hualing)’. In 1870, Yung Wing, summoned to Tianjin to help with translation in negotiations over the Tianjin Massacre, seized the opportunity to present to Zeng Guofan his long-cherished educational scheme of sending young students to the United States.Footnote 18 Yung Wing's idea won the support of both Zeng and Li Hongzhang, the new viceroy of Zhili, who understood the proposed Mission to be ‘the first such undertaking in China, with no precedent since ancient times’.Footnote 19 Yet it is also clear that from the very beginning this enterprise did not signal openness to Western civilization; it reflected instead a calculated policy—first articulated by Wei Yuan in the 1840s—to ‘master the superior techniques of the barbarians in order to bring the barbarians under control’ (shiyi changji yi zhiyi). In a joint memorial in 1871, recommending that ‘intelligent young boys’ be sent abroad to study ‘military and naval affairs, mathematics, and manufacturing’, Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang looked forward to the day when the returned students would enable China to ‘master all the superior techniques of the West and gradually achieve Self-Strengthening’.Footnote 20 There was never an indication that students of the West would be allowed a greater role in the political life of the Qing state. In fact, in 1864 Li Hongzhang had written that in its efforts to acquire the powerful weapons of the West, China should ‘learn its method without having to use its people’.Footnote 21 The same boundaries for Western learning would subsequently sideline Yung Wing and the Mission's returned students, leaving them as technical or decorative appendages to the authoritarian leadership.
Between 1872 and 1875, four companies of young boys—30 each, totalling 120—were sent on government stipends to the United States to study for 15 years according to the detailed plan outlined by Zeng and Li in 1872. The two viceroys also expected the most qualified of the boys to ‘enter the military academy and the naval academy’ (West Point and Annapolis).Footnote 22 The boys were placed under the supervision of Commissioner Chen Lanbin, a minor official in the Board of Punishments, and Yung Wing, who served as deputy commissioner. A Chinese instructor accompanied the Mission to school the students in ‘Chinese learning’ and ‘moral integrity’ from its headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut.Footnote 23 Arriving in New England, the boys were dispersed into American homes and attended local schools. In a development that is now well known, the boys were unable to toe the official line of adhering to core Chinese values while acquiring functional Western knowledge. In fact, they cheerfully allowed themselves to be Americanized—shedding their long silk gowns, concealing their queues under their coats, converting to Christianity, playing baseball, acquiring American nicknames (such as Breezy Jack and Sitting Bull), and dating local girls. (Yung Wing himself set an unorthodox example by marrying Mary Louise Kellogg of Avon, Connecticut, in 1875.)Footnote 24 When the new commissioner Wu Zideng arrived in 1878, the Mission boys who were summoned to his presence did not prostrate themselves before him. Wu flew into a rage and chastised them for ‘forgetting the roots after coming to the foreign land’ and ‘having no respect for the teacher’. He added that even if some did well in their studies, they would be ‘of no use to China’.Footnote 25
Following this incident, Wu's official report on the Mission was damning: ‘The customs of the foreign land have numerous vices,’ he claimed. ‘The students [of the Mission] have studied few Confucian books. . . Before they acquire foreign techniques, they are already susceptible to its evil habits.’Footnote 26 In a letter Li Hongzhang wrote in May 1880, he also expressed displeasure with ‘Yung Wing's obstinacy in not desiring these students to learn much Chinese’. He insisted that Yung should not be allowed ‘to take too much charge of the Mission’ and that the Mission should ‘centralize authority’ under Wu Zideng, a traditionally educated Hanlin scholar.Footnote 27 In June 1881, following repeated attacks on the Mission by the conservatives, Yixin, head of the Office of the General Management of International Affairs (the Zongli Yamen), stated in a memorial addressed to the court that the boys had probably been too young for the venture. ‘As one travels afar to a foreign country,’ he wrote, ‘the road branches off, and the silk takes on the colour of the dye.’ Therefore, he recommended that the entire educational mission promptly be recalled.Footnote 28 In the months leading up to the end of the Mission, Yung Wing tried desperately to salvage his educational dream. He enlisted the help of Reverend Joseph H. Twichell of Hartford, who, with the help of his friend Mark Twain, arranged a meeting with former American president Ulysses Grant. Grant, who had met Li Hongzhang in Tianjin in 1879 during his world tour, wrote to him urging the continuation of the mission. However, the anti-Mission pressure was too great, even for Li Hongzhang.Footnote 29 In July 1881, a dispatch from the imperial court ended the Mission. By that time, at least 50 students were already enrolled in colleges, but only two had graduated.Footnote 30 After the closure of the Mission, its signboard ended up in a second-hand shop.Footnote 31
There are scant records of the disillusionment and bitterness experienced by the Mission students when they began their trip home, even though such emotions must have been profoundly felt. There had been a ‘deep conviction’ before the recall, La Fargue writes, ‘that theirs was the task of leading China out of the morass of an effete Confucianism onto the firm ground of Western science and technology’.Footnote 32 It is also conceivable that ‘Yung Wing's boys’ had had their own hopes raised by the public euphoria about the Mission in New England. In an address to the Kent Club of Yale Law School on 10 April 1878, Reverend Joseph H. Twichell looked forward to ‘the year 1887 or thereabout [when] there will go from this country to China a body of somewhere near a hundred men who have grown up [in America]. . . destined to hold places of importance in the government and in the society of their native land, better equipped. . . to do for that land what most needs to be done, and inspired for their work with a more enlightened sense of patriotic duty and responsibility than any other hundred of her sons of their generation. And who can forecast or estimate the consequences that Divine Providence is thus preparing?’Footnote 33 Now that future had evaporated.
On their way back to Shanghai, the Mission students still pictured a ‘joyous welcome’, with the motherland ‘extend[ing] her arms to embrace us in maternal kindness!’ Their pride in their Western learning aside, the returned students were also basking in their recent triumph at a baseball game in San Francisco in which the ‘Orientals’—as their team was called—‘walloped’ the Oakland team. Therefore they were totally unprepared for their ‘shabby treatment’ by the ‘paternal government’ when they disembarked: they were ‘packed on wheel-barrows’ to be taken to the yamen of the Shanghai daotai, the city's chief magistrate, and thus ‘exposed to the gaping, jeering crowd’ that followed them. Upon their arrival, the students were confined to a deserted, damp, crumbling school building behind the daotai's compound ‘with a detachment of Chinese marines acting as a guard over us to prevent our escaping’. Four days later, they were summoned to an audience with the daotai, at which the students prostrated themselves.Footnote 34 During the earlier incident in which Mission students refused to perform the demeaning ritual of prostration before Commissioner Wu Zideng, one Qing official had characterized the students in America as ‘runaway horses’ and added, ‘We have to bridle them before we can ride them.’Footnote 35 They now seemed ready to be bridled.
The bridling of the runaway horses
Not surprisingly, the initial assignments of the returned students relegated them to the lower levels of government. Li Hongzhang reported that of the 94 students recalled in 1881 (the rest had either died, stayed behind, or been brought back previously), the majority were sent to mechanical, naval, telegraph, and medical schools in Tianjin and Shanghai as students and underlings.Footnote 36 More than a dozen started their careers as ‘humble telegraph operators’ and only slowly climbed the ladder of advancement to eventually become provincial telegraph administrators. At first, most of the students received ‘only four taels monthly, or a little better than the wages of a coolie’.Footnote 37 With the exception of a few, the Mission students were never treated as equals to the scholar-officials produced by the imperial examination system and were condemned to obscurity in the lower rungs of officialdom.Footnote 38 The returnees fared no better in public perception. One editorial in Shanghai's Shenbao in September 1881 referred to the Mission students as ‘zaren’—a motley, impure bunch. Another said that the best thing to do for the students would be to send them abroad again since China was not ready for them.Footnote 39 The abrupt end of the Mission and the cool reception given to the returned students reflected a broader official distrust towards overseas studies. In a letter written in 1879, Li Hongzhang cited a report from Zeng Jize, Zeng Guofan's son and Chinese minister to Britain and France, ‘who considered that. . . the sending of students from the Foochow Shipyard to England and France has had no great result’.Footnote 40 As Jerome Ch’en points out, ‘Between the French War of 1885 and the Japanese War of 1895. . . a distrust of the semi-Chinese and semi-foreign “returned” students contributed to a loss of direction in sending students abroad on the part of central and regional authorities.’Footnote 41
For their part, the returned students reciprocated the official distrust, expressing scorn for the old-type mandarins.Footnote 42 Liang Ruhao, who had studied at the Stevens School of Technology in New Jersey, objected to the constant kowtowing he was compelled to perform. The former Mission students were ‘earning their rice by the sweat of their brows,’ he wrote, yet they were ‘compelled to work under atomical salaries by the tyrannical mandates of their superiors’ who were ‘not conscious of the oppressions’ they inflicted. To him, China would have to experience more humiliations at the hands of the Western powers before the court would truly embrace modernization ‘by building railroads, strengthening the armed forces, and adopting foreign ways’.Footnote 43
In the long run, some returned Mission students did rise to national prominence when their expertise proved useful to Qing officialdom. A combination of factors—the skills, tenacity, and loyalty of the returned students; China's need for technological experts and for people familiar with ‘Western affairs’ amid growing foreign encroachments; and often sheer luck—made it possible. Taken as a whole, their achievements were not the result of a systematic and sustained government effort at modernization along the lines envisioned by Yung Wing. The career of Zhan Tianyou, who graduated in 1881 from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in civil engineering, provides a telling example.Footnote 44 As the pre-eminent railway engineer of twentieth-century China, Zhan's contributions to late Qing modernization, which climaxed in 1909 with the completion of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railroad (the first to be designed and built by the Chinese), actually began with a rail line that had nothing to do with ‘Self-Strengthening’. In the late autumn of 1902, Empress Dowager Cixi wanted a branch line built to connect Beijing with the Western Tombs some 70 miles southwest of the capital. The new railroad would save the court the fatigue of a journey by cart and palanquin to pay respect to the Manchu ancestors. The line was to be completed by the following March. When it turned out that foreign engineers were unwilling to undertake the project in such a short time, Liang Ruhao, who had risen to become superintendent of the traffic department of the Beijing-Shanhaiguan Railroad under the patronage of Yuan Shikai, enlisted the help of Zhan Tianyou. Sometimes working 15 hours a day, Zhan had the line completed in time for the court pilgrimage of 1903. Having cost 600,000 taels of silver, the special line for Manchu ancestor worship was used by Cixi only once in her lifetime.Footnote 45 His reputation established, Zhan Tianyou was ordered to begin construction of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railroad in 1905. To build the railroad across the precipitous Nankou Pass near Badaling, Zhan submitted two plans to Prince Qing—one route with a loop to ease the steep climb, and a second, more direct route, with a grade of over 33 degrees. ‘The Prince remarked that he knew nothing about grades, but the Government's order was to build the line direct from Peking to Kalgan with no turnings anywhere. So it was built with the high grade.’Footnote 46
Besides Zhan Tianyou, a few other Mission students also emerged into the limelight of imperial politics and diplomacy in the waning years of the Manchu dynasty. They did so mostly by attaching themselves to officials who rose to become late Qing power brokers. In 1881, Li Hongzhang, in an effort to strengthen China's influence in Korea, sent Baron P. C. Von Mollendorf, a German, to Korea to bring the Korean Customs under the direction of the Imperial Maritime Customs in China. Six former students of the Chinese Educational Mission were soon assigned to assist Mollendorf. In 1884, Yuan Shikai was appointed Chinese resident at Seoul, and the Mission students already there, including Liang Ruhao and Tang Shaoyi, became part of his entourage. Tang, who had studied at Columbia University before his recall, became Yuan's confidential secretary. Returning from Korea to China in 1898, Tang continued his political ascent under Yuan's patronage. In 1899, Herbert Hoover, then a young engineer with a Sino-European firm called the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, met Tang and wrote of him as ‘a man of great abilities, fine integrity, and high ideals for the future of China’.Footnote 47
However, for Tang and his fellow returned students, the only way to pursue those high ideals was through administrative reform under the auspices of powerful Qing officials favoured by the empress dowager. As David G. Hinners points out, Yuan Shikai used his Western-educated entourage—who the foreign press characterized as the ‘Young China’ group—to provide a ‘viable alternative’ both to the exiled reformers and revolutionaries and to the conservatives within the Qing court. Tang became a ‘catalyst for the assimilation of foreign-returned students into Yuan Shih-kai's power structure’.Footnote 48 With the death of Li Hongzhang in 1901, Yuan became viceroy of Zhili, and Tang Shaoyi was appointed chief magistrate and customs superintendent for Tianjin (Tianjin Haiguandao).Footnote 49 Tang's subsequent rise and fall in the last years of the Qing dynasty paralleled that of Yuan Shikai. He served in a number of important positions, including vice-president of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and governor of Fengtian province. In 1908, he was appointed special ambassador to Washington. While he was in the United States, the Guangxu emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi died. Yuan was forced from office, as were many of his protégés. At a gathering of 100 Chinese student leaders in Washington, Tang gave his final toast before his departure: ‘Gentlemen, may we meet again in the future Parliament of China!’Footnote 50 Perhaps Tang had never relinquished his youthful dreams of a modern China beyond autocratic rule. Nevertheless his own life remained entangled in dynastic politics. Tang returned to China to give up his offices and remained, for the most part, in political shadow until the revolution of 1911.Footnote 51
Tang Shaoyi's last years as a trusted member of Yuan's entourage coincided with the rise of Liang Dunyan, another returned Mission student, in the private secretariat (mufu) of Zhang Zhidong. Liang had joined the first detachment of Mission students in 1872; he entered Yale in 1878 and was a year away from graduation when he was recalled. Back in China, Liang was first sent to teach English at the Telegraph College in Tianjin. Despairing of gaining recognition for his American education, Liang began studying Confucian classics and practising ‘eight-legged’ essays in preparation for imperial examinations; he also briefly considered earning a living as a Protestant preacher in Hong Kong.Footnote 52 Three years later, he was taken into the service of Viceroy Zhang Zhidong in Guangzhou when Zhang was recruiting bright young men for his entourage. As Zhang's secretary, Liang followed Zhang to Wuchang when the latter became viceroy of Hubei and Hunan (Huguang) in 1889. After 1904, Liang succeeded Tang Shaoyi as chief magistrate and customs superintendent in Tianjin. In 1907, when Zhang Zhidong became a member of the Grand Council, Liang was appointed vice president of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Two years later, he became its president.Footnote 53
As a confidante of Zhang Zhidong, Liang may have played an important role in steering Zhang towards improved relations with the foreign community in Wuchang in the late 1890s.Footnote 54 It is likely that Liang also helped to shape the somewhat favourable views on overseas studies that Zhang expressed in his On Learning (Quanxue pian), published in 1898.Footnote 55 Yet the same treatise also made it clear that the kind of Western learning Liang brought back and, to a certain extent, embodied was valuable only for its function of strengthening the fundamental structure—the essence—of the Chinese state. For Zhang, the parliamentary, democratic system that prevailed in the West could never compare with the venerated tradition of ‘the three cardinal guides and the five constant virtues’ (sangang wuchang) that ‘made China China’.Footnote 56 During the post-Boxer period, as Zhang Zhidong embarked on his own ‘New Policies’ efforts, Liang urged him to take up several major Westernizing initiatives, which would include hiring Western military advisers and establishing American-style military academies to train army officers; Liang also proposed sweeping educational reforms and advocated sending students to study in the United States (instead of Japan). None of these proposals was adopted by Zhang.Footnote 57
Furthermore, in the capable but ‘eccentric’ Zhang, Liang Dunyan found a master whom it was not easy to please: Zhang was known to have a habit of going to bed in the afternoon and waking up late in the evening to begin his working day. According to a 1910 New York Times report entitled ‘Graduates of Our Colleges in High Posts in China’, which included the story of Liang Dunyan, ‘The young American-trained student never knew at what hour he would be summoned into the presence of his superior. He might even receive a summons at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. . . In any case, he had to be ready.’ Liang's ‘master gloried in his Chinese style’, and was ‘never satisfied’ with any document prepared by his subordinates that showed deficiency in style. ‘Thus it was that this young man, who had been trained in our American institutions, had on his return to China to fit himself in a thorough acquaintance with Chinese literature and belles lettres.’Footnote 58
The stories of Liang Dunyan and Tang Shaoyi and of other returned students such as Zhan Tianyou who ‘occupied important places in the awakened kingdom of the Far East’ (as the same New York Times article put it) illustrate, in fact, a familiar process of ‘reabsorption’ of returned students into the political life of late Qing China that had hardly entered, in hindsight, into the ‘awakened’ state. As Daniel H. Bays points out, even the student revolutionaries returning from abroad, ‘to the extent that nationalism was a major motive. . . were open to cooptation by reformist or government forces which satisfied their desire to see a vigorous assertion of national energies’. The students’ typical background and tendency to identify with the ‘dominant social, economic, and political class’ often left them as ‘an ineffective revolutionary force’.Footnote 59 In the meantime, in spite of their various contributions and accomplishments, the returned students did not appear to have exerted any decisive influence on Chinese affairs, just as the broader ‘treaty port community’, to which the Mission students belonged, ‘could not press its vision of a New China’ upon the political establishment.Footnote 60 Their Western ties had rendered them suspect in the eyes of those at the centre of Qing politics, and their modernizing visions tended to be out of touch with the complex court politics that they poorly understood. The later life of Yung Wing illustrates this harsh reality.
From reform to revolution: the unfulfilled dreams of modernity
In 1881, when the Mission was recalled, Yung was relieved of his post as associate Chinese minister to Washington, a concurrent position he had held after 1875 while serving as deputy commissioner of the Mission.Footnote 61 He followed his students back to China, where he tried to persuade the government to allow some of the more advanced students to return to America to complete technical training. Those efforts failed, and he returned to the United States in 1883.Footnote 62 In 1894, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War rekindled Yung Wing's patriotic fervour. In a letter to Zhang Zhidong, Yung Wing offered to go to London to negotiate a loan of US$15,000,000 in order to purchase ‘three or four ready built iron-clads, to raise a foreign force of 5,000 men to attack Japan in the rear from the Pacific coast’ as a diversion, and to ‘mortgage’ Taiwan ‘to some Western power’ in order to secure funds for the organization of a ‘national army and navy to carry on the war’. To his surprise, Zhang approved his first plan, and Yung Wing proceeded to London, where he was able to negotiate the loan on condition that the Chinese government hypothecate it with revenue from the Maritime Customs. According to Yung Wing, Li Hongzhang refused to do that, because Li and Zhang Zhidong ‘were at loggerheads and opposed to each other in the conduct of the war’.Footnote 63
Despite Yung Wing's failed mission to obtain the loan, Zhang sent him a telegram in 1895 asking him to return to China. ‘By this recall, I became Chang Chi Tung's man as opposed to Li Hung Chang,’ Yung Wing wrote.Footnote 64 In his meeting with Zhang, then acting viceroy of Liangjiang, Yung Wing, wearing a fake queue, put forward a new set of proposals for saving China, including the use of foreigners as top military, financial, and foreign affairs advisers. ‘In that way,’ Yung Wing argued, ‘the government would have been rebuilt upon Western methods, and on principles and ideas that look to the reformation of the administrative government of China.’ We can only imagine Zhang's displeasure, if not outrage, at such Westernization schemes; his response was to completely ignore Yung Wing thereafter. However, Yung Wing's zeal was not dampened. ‘It was then that I conceived the plan,’ he wrote, ‘of inducing the central government to establish in Peking a government national bank’, based on the United States National Banking Act of 1875. According to Yung Wing, the proposed banking reform made a favourable impression on Weng Tonghe, a member of the Grand Council and head of the Ministry of Revenue, but was shelved in the end by official ‘graft’ as part of ‘the thoroughly corrupt condition of the administrative system of China.’Footnote 65 It is also likely that Yung Wing was unable to gain the full trust of Weng. As the former Confucian tutor for both the Tongzhi and Guangxu emperors and a mainstay of Chinese learning, Weng must have had misgivings about Yung Wing. In a diary entry in May 1896, Weng marvelled that Yung Wing had ‘indeed become a foreigner!’.Footnote 66
Undeterred by his inability to introduce banking reforms, Yung Wing stayed on in the capital and urged the Qing government to secure a massive loan from the United States for the construction of a national railroad system, a proposal that failed to win the Zongli Yamen's approval. In 1897, he proposed a less ambitious plan for a railroad linking Tianjin with Zhenjiang, the southern city on the Yangzi River which lies at the entrance to the Grand Canal. Again, the bureaucratic obstacles he encountered proved insurmountable: the Zongli Yamen prohibited the use of any foreign loans in the project. ‘This ended my last effort to help China,’ Yung Wing wrote.Footnote 67 In reality, his patriotism did not end; it only began to turn against Manchu rule. He remained in Beijing through the Hundred Days’ Reform, during which his residence ‘became the rendezvous of the leading reformers of 1898’. Following the coup in September, when the Guangxu emperor was placed under palace detention and six of his radical reform advisers were executed, Yung Wing fled to the International Settlement in Shanghai.Footnote 68 In July 1900, Yung Wing was drawn into the Zilihui Uprising led by the Hunanese reformer Tang Caichang with support from Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. The group convened a ‘National Assembly’ (Zhongguo Guohui) in preparation for a new government in the form of a constitutional monarchy with the ‘restored’ Guangxu as the emperor. Yung Wing, who penned the National Assembly manifesto to be communicated to the foreign diplomats in Shanghai, was elected chief officer (huizhang), with Yan Fu as his deputy.Footnote 69 While the Assembly remained under the control of Tang Caichang, Sun Yatsen looked to Yung Wing as ‘the leader who enjoys popular confidence’ in China and who was capable of bringing various reformist factions together.Footnote 70 In August, the uprising unravelled, and Yung Wing, allegedly with a price of $70,000 on his head, set by the Empress Dowager Cixi, fled to Hong Kong.Footnote 71 In June 1902, the elderly Yung Wing, whose 1852 naturalization as American citizen had been annulled by the State Department in 1898, slipped past the inspector at a gangplank in San Francisco dressed in European clothes and arrived back in his adopted country.Footnote 72
The frustrations and ultimate failure of Yung Wing and the Mission students to bring about fundamental changes to Qing society point to a strong undercurrent in the imperial political life of China, which swept aside Yung Wing's ideals because of their Western origin and because they threatened the autocratic rule of the Manchu court. The Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Qing dynasty but did not reverse such an undercurrent. The authoritarianism of Yuan Shikai persisted through the early years of the Republic and quickly led to the disillusionment and marginalization of those former Mission students whom he had patronized and promoted and who had in turn helped his own rise to power. In March 1912, Yuan Shikai made Tang Shaoyi the first premier of the new republic. The National Assembly, dominated by the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui), grudgingly approved the appointment of Tang, who had just accepted an invitation from Sun Yatsen to join the Tongmenghui, but rejected the nomination of another former Mission student—Liang Ruhao—as minister of communications because of his ‘long association with imperial service’.Footnote 73
Tang Shaoyi, while holding constitutional authority, had no real power. In June, Yuan's rejection of the Tongmenghui's choice of military governor for Zhili caused Tang to lose face with the party. He submitted his resignation and left abruptly for Tianjin. Unable to persuade Yuan to accept genuine constitutionalism in the new republic, Tang had ‘lasted only three months’.Footnote 74 By the end of 1914, Tang Shaoyi's break with Yuan was complete. He asked the British minister to tell his former patron that ‘his Government was an autocracy of the worst kind’.Footnote 75 Liang Dunyan fared no better under Yuan Shikai. In 1910, the Qing court had sent Liang on a secret mission to Germany and the United States to seek aid for industrial development and military reform in Manchuria and to secure pledges from both countries to safeguard the territorial integrity of China in the face of Russian and Japanese expansionism in Manchuria. That mission failed. Liang was still in Europe when the Revolution broke out in 1911; he remained there until 1914, when Yuan Shikai persuaded him to return to become minister of communications. Soon after his return, Liang discovered Yuan's monarchical ambitions. He resigned all his public offices and retired from political life.Footnote 76
Concluding remarks
In 1929, a year after nominal national unity was achieved under the Nanjing government, a few of the former Mission ‘boys’ travelled back to Hartford as dignitaries. Exuberant at the warm welcome they received, they called Hartford ‘the Cradle of the Chinese Republic’.Footnote 77 The euphoria was unwarranted: the republic, in the true sense of the word, was yet unborn. More importantly, they had exaggerated their own role in China's continuing evolution toward a modern state, an evolution governed by the laws of despotism that stretched back into the distant dynastic past. In contrast to the many Japanese students who had studied in the West in the 1860s–70s and who had ‘returned home to play major roles in the modernization process during the Meiji era’,Footnote 78 Yung Wing and the Mission students had tried unsuccessfully to modernize China along Western lines. Most of the students fell into anonymity after their recall in 1881, and Yung Wing was eventually driven into exile. A few allowed themselves to be co-opted by the autocratic state to rise to positions of prominence. In this way they were absorbed into the dynastic politics that still clung to the fundamental structure, or essence (ti), of the Chinese way—they had returned, politically as well as physically, to the Middle Kingdom.
As we have seen, even when the American-educated students were finally accorded recognition and given prominent positions in the government, they were used to promote bureaucratic, not political, reform. The opportunities they were given to introduce a degree of administrative modernization or to employ their Western learning in serving the diplomatic, educational, military or technical needs of an arbitrary state should not be confused with their ability to liberalize and modernize Chinese politics. Yet this is precisely the distinction that tends to get lost when one tallies the achievements of returned students (both the Mission ‘boys’ and those who studied in Japan in the last decade of the Qing dynasty). Douglas R. Reynolds claims, for instance, that during the post-Boxer ‘xinzheng revolution’, thousands of returned students from Japan and a generation of Japanese-influenced Chinese elites ‘made the critical difference in lifting China off of a track that was closed-minded, backward-looking, and narrowly tradition-bound, and onto a track that was open-minded, forward-looking, and modern-based’.Footnote 79 The extent to which ‘New Policies’ embodied genuine Qing aspirations for political reform remains a contested issue, one that lies beyond the scope of this paper. Yet if Xinzheng were a ‘revolution’, it seems at best an inconclusive one that left the autocratic nature of Chinese politics in place.
In fact, as Shang Xiaoming points out in Wuxu weixin yu Qingmo Xinzheng (The Hundred Days’ Reform and Late Qing ‘New Policies’), beginning in 1904 the Manchu court recruited dozens of returned students from Japan to work in newly established offices dedicated to personnel, legal, and constitutional reform. During the last six years of the Qing, the court welcomed their ‘technical’ expertise in the area of administrative—including cabinet—reform, which led to improved efficiency in several ministries, but rejected their core advocacy of the abolition of the Grand Council and the creation of independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Qing state.Footnote 80 Neither the Japanese-educated students nor the Mission returnees, who, on the whole, enjoyed greater prominence and influence than the former during the late-Qing period, appear to have lifted China off its track. At a time when the Qing court was scrambling to thwart foreign aggression and to prevent its own collapse, the Western learning and expertise of returned students proved useful. However, in the broader context of the doomed late Qing ‘reform within tradition’ that separated the ti of Chinese learning from the yong (function) of Western knowledge (a separation that Joseph R. Levenson has called ‘self-destructive’), the deepest aspirations of the returned students—their hopes for a civil society—remained unfulfilled.Footnote 81
In retrospect, Yung Wing and the returned Mission students were not only the frustrated forerunners of overseas studies, they also initiated the struggles of the modern Chinese educated elite to shape a liberal, participatory political system for their country, one that would also grant them autonomy from the autocratic rulers of China. As pioneers in Western learning, their disillusionment reveals a sobering pattern of the Chinese state's selective use and routine marginalization of liberal intellectuals returning from the West, a pattern that would continue into the Republican era and the Communist period and persists today.Footnote 82 During the past three decades, post-Mao ‘reform’ and ‘opening’ have enabled some 1.4 million Chinese to venture overseas in pursuit of a Western education. By 2008, a total of 390,000 had returned.Footnote 83 As one state-sponsored study of contemporary ‘haigui’ (returnees from overseas) puts it, that surge in number represents a ‘historic development since 1872, when Yung Wing led the first group of boys to study in America’.Footnote 84 In fact, Yung Wing's dream that ‘through western education China might be regenerated, become enlightened and powerful’—in a Chinese translation that does not convey any sense of ‘enlightenment’—has been co-opted in contemporary China (with no hint of historical irony) and turned into a battle cry for patriotic overseas studies.Footnote 85 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, tens of thousands of such students return to China each year. By 2011, at least three returnees had risen to head ministries under the state council.Footnote 86 However, the overwhelming majority of ‘haigui’ have found career opportunities ‘outside the establishment’—in multinational corporations, private businesses, as well as educational and research institutions; only 3.4 per cent are employed in government agencies.Footnote 87 Suspicions remain concerning the character and ‘virtue’ (de)—the patriotic virtue of loyalty to the Party-state—on the part of returnees who have entered officialdom.Footnote 88 There are no signs that they have been able to introduce meaningful reforms that would lead to political liberalization and civil society: they have not succeeded where Yung Wing and the Mission boys failed.Footnote 89 Like the latter, they, too, have returned to the Middle Kingdom.
