Stepping Forth into the World：The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872-81

top The Chinese Educational Mission was the earliest effort at educational modernization in China. As part of the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Qing government sent 120 young boys to New England to live and study for a decade, before abruptly summoning them home to China in 1881. The returned students helped staff numerous other modernization projects; some rose to top administrative and political posts in the Qing government. This book, based upon extensive research in US archives and newspapers, sheds new light on the students during their nine-year stay in the United States, and it compares their lives with those of the Japanese students in New England at about the same time. This detailed study of one of the most important projects in China’s Self-Strengthening Movement will appeal to historians of modern China as well as to comparative historians of China and Japan. The book also contrasts the experiences of the Chinese Educational Mission students with those of other Chinese in the United States during a period of anti-Chinese sentiment, which was to culminate in the enactment of Chinese Exclusion in 1882. Its conclusion that the anti- Chinese movement may have been as much class-based as race-based will provide much food for thought to scholars of Asian American studies.作者簡介Edward J. M. Rhoads Edward J. M. Rhoads is a historian of late nineteenth–early twentieth century China. He is the author of China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–1913 and Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928. The latter work was awarded the Joseph R. Levenson prize in 2002 as the best book on twentieth-century China by the Association for Asian Studies.Rhoads is also interested in the history of the Chinese in the United States. He has published articles on the Chinese in Texas and on a group of Chinese workers in a cutlery factory in southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1870s. His next research project is a history of the bicycle in China. He retired in 2003, after thirty-seven years, from the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently living in New York City.