Seeking Modernity in China's Name

Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927

Weili Ye

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780804780414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

The students who came to the United States in the early twentieth century to become modern Chinese by studying at American universities played pivotal roles in Chinese intellectual, economic, and diplomatic life upon their return to China. These former students exemplified key aspects of Chinese "modernity, " introducing new social customs, new kinds of interpersonal relationships, new ways of associating in groups, and a new way of life in general. Although there have been books about a few especially well-known persons among them, this is the first book in either English or Chinese to study the group as a whole.

The collapse of the traditional examination system and the need to earn a living outside the bureaucracy meant that although this was not the first generation of Chinese to break with traditional ways of thinking, these students were the first generation of Chinese to live differently. Based on student publications, memoirs, and other writings found in this country and in China, the author describes their multifaceted experience of life in a foreign, modern environment, involving student associations, professional activities, racial discrimination, new forms of recreation and cultural expression, and, in the case of women students, the unique challenges they faced as females in two changing societies.

CHAPTER ONE

Student Associational Life and Chinese Nationalism

The Chinese students of the early twentieth century came to America not in tightly knit groups, like those in the Yung Wing educational mission, but as individuals, scattering throughout the vast country on many different college campuses. Against great odds (the geographical distance between them being just one of several barriers), they launched organizations that incorporated the majority of Chinese students in America. The organizations they created met a wide variety of needs: social, political, professional, and religious.

Associational life featured prominently in the experiences of Chinese students in America. Among all the associations, the Chinese Students’ Alliance, whose predecessor organization was founded in 1902, was the largest, the most elaborately organized, and for a while the most influential. At its height around 1910, two-thirds of the Chinese students in America joined the Alliance,¹ many of whose officers and activists went on to become prominent figures in various walks of life in modern China.² In its heyday, it was an experiment in democratic organization, characterized by vigorous advocacy of self-government and serious concern for popular participation—an exciting political venture for Chinese in the early twentieth century. Through involvement in organizations like the Alliance and participation in American college campus life, Chinese students learned how to debate issues, conduct elections, and chair meetings—the essential skills for Anglo-American-style democracy.

Other types of associations also existed among the students, including local clubs and the Chinese Students’ Christian Association in North America, the major organization for Chinese Christian students. In the 1920s, when the Alliance had largely declined into a social club, two alternative and much smaller societies were formed to attract politically active students: Cheng-chih hui (the Association for Accomplishing Ideals, or CCH), a secret fraternity, and Dajiang hui (the Big River Society), an alumni association made up of Qinghua College graduates of certain classes. The groupings of different types testify to the range and vigor of the associational drive among the Chinese students in America.

The question of how to mobilize the Chinese people in modern-style voluntary organizations occupied the thinking of individuals like Liang Qichao at the turn of the century. Liang wrote about the notion of qun (group or grouping, first given modern meaning by Yan Fu³), which he saw as a key to the success of the modern West. Liang Qichao believed that a broad mobilization of people was necessary for a strong and modern Chinese nation, and voluntary associations, in Liang’s view, would serve as an important means for integrating the Chinese people into a cohesive and unified community.⁴

Voluntary societies mushroomed in China in the last decade of the nineteenth century and continued to thrive in the first decade of the new century, ⁵ demonstrating the urge among progressive-thinking Chinese to search for new ways of organizing and relating to each other. In the political context of the late Qing, the appearance of voluntary societies constituted an integral part of China’s modern nation-state building. The associational drive of the Chinese students in America can best be understood in this context. For the Chinese born around the turn of the century, nationalism provided a “quasi-religious center of meaning” at a time when the old “symbol-isms” of China crumbled.⁶ Nationalism became meaningful also because personal memories of this generation were closely intertwined with the humiliating recent history of the nation. An essay written in 1915 by a student in America under the pseudonym Chung-hwa Sing (“China Prospers”) expressed an intensely nationalistic sentiment commonly shared by many members of this generation:

Most of us were born somewhere around the year 1894. Have you not been taught what a year 1894 was for China? It was the year of the Chino[sic]-Japanese war over the question of Korea. . . . All these humiliations of our country happened when we were just raising our first baby cries. Do you not realize that you were born in the time when your country was perishing? . . . Having realized that we are the people of a perishing nation, we instinctively want to know what we shall do to save China.⁷

For the Chinese at the turn of the century, nationalism was a central and definitive theme of modernity.⁸ As a “widespread consciousness” and an “intellectual movement,” its arrival in the 1890s marked a fundamental “turn” in modern Chinese culture.⁹ The conversion by Chinese intellectuals to the nationalistic viewpoint was accomplished in roughly one generation.¹⁰ If in the minds of some pioneer thinkers of the 1890s the pull of “universalism” still remained strong,¹¹ ambivalence toward nationalism largely disappeared for the early-twentieth-century generation of students, who decidedly relinquished universalism and accepted China as a “terminal political community.”¹²

The “spatial change”¹³ made by many Chinese at this time not only meant accepting China as “one nation among many”; it also meant, on a personal level, a shift of people’s primary identification from a particular local region to the Chinese nation, and constructed a sense of Chinese national identity. The Chinese spatial adjustment to the modern world, therefore, contained both international and domestic dimensions,¹⁴ with implications for each individual person. The two competing ideas during this period, “self-government” and “administrative centralization,”¹⁵ reflected the tension of the domestic spatial transition. The differing viewpoints tested the resilience of Chinese nationalism, and raised the issue of how China should be ruled. The students in America consistently revealed a tendency to endorse a version of nationalism that upheld China as one unified political entity, despite their brief support of the ideal of “self-government.” Perhaps more than their peers at home, they were self-conscious about being Chinese nationals, since their nationality was highlighted by living abroad.¹⁶

Regarding another polemical issue in late Qing—revolution versus reform—the students in America as a whole identified with the reformers and supported the reform-oriented constitutional movement. Their reformist politics created few political headlines, and was therefore overshadowed by the radical activism of Chinese students in Japan. Since the “revolutionaries” have attracted most of the limelight in much of the twentieth-century Chinese history, the students in America have been regarded as generally nonpolitical.¹⁷ However, the difference between them and their counterparts in Japan was not that they “avoided politics,”¹⁸ but that they avoided “radical” politics.

Three periods deserve special attention regarding the students’ political attitudes and behavior: the late Qing (1906—11), when a constitutional movement was going on in China; the early republican era (1912—16), when Yuan Shikai dominated the political scene; and the warlord period following the death of Yuan (1916—27). The state of the students’ associational life paralleled the turbulent political situation in China. Initial enthusiasm among the students for democratic practice during the late Qing gave way—after 1912, the year when the republic was founded—to doubt as to whether democracy would really protect the Chinese nation. Subsequently, their interest in democratic experiment within their own organizations declined. An examination of the students’ political attitude and activity over a period of two decades will provide us with a richly textured sense of their associational life, and will also illuminate certain basic tensions within Chinese nationalism.

THE FOUNDING OF THE CHINESE STUDENTS’ ALLIANCE

On an October day in 1902, twenty-three Chinese students gathered in a Congregational church in San Francisco to found the Chinese Students’ Alliance of America.¹⁹ The core members were people from the Beiyang School in Tianjin, the first group of government-sponsored students to come to America since the aborted Yung Wing mission twenty years earlier.²⁰ Interestingly, the same year also witnessed the founding of another overseas Chinese student organization: the huiguan (guild) in Japan, a rather traditional-sounding name. The students’ association in Japan enjoyed sponsorship and financial aid from the Chinese legation in Tokyo.²¹ There is no indication that the Chinese legation in the United States was behind the founding of the students’ organization in America. The initial purpose of the organization was to instill patriotism in local, American-born Chinese youth, whose loyalty to China the students from the home country had found wanting.²² A year later, in 1903, when Liang Qichao traveled on the west coast of the United States, he noted this organization, now boasting fifty members.²³

Liang Qichao had good reasons to be interested in this voluntary organization, which conformed to his notion of qun, around which most of his sociopolitical thinking revolved at this time. America at the turn of the century was a place vibrant with all kinds of voluntary associations and clubs, and college campuses were enlivened by student governments and a variety of student societies.²⁴ These organizations usually had what Max Weber would describe as “a rational-legal authority,” as opposed to the type of “traditional authority” characterized by a system of “statuses of persons” that the Chinese students were familiar with at home.²⁵ These voluntary organizations represented a significant aspect of what Jürgen Habermas has called a “civil society.”²⁶

Upon arriving in America, many Chinese students were intrigued by the existence of American student governments and societies. To C. Y Chin, a student writing in 1913 in the Chinese Students’ Monthly, these organizations helped “train men for moral independence, intellectual efficiency and physical capacities to take up the tasks awaiting them in the larger world.” Certain qualities were especially valued by Chin, such as “the ability to organize, the method of self-government, the efficiency of expression—oratorical or journalistic, the ability to manage the various enterprises and physical endurance to cope with strenuous tasks.” Above all, Chin maintained, the student governments and various student extracurricular events served as “the training camp of a hundred desirable traits of citizenship,” through which the students would “get a broader scope of human activities, receive inspiration for unselfish exertion, develop a spirit for public work and be given a chance to show their real talent.”²⁷

Frequently when the American model was praised, the Chinese system was criticized. One student thus complained, “Something is lacking in the Chinese home or school, or both. . . . We, most of us, are perhaps first graders in the school of cooperation and should have enough sense to admit it.”²⁸ The American student voluntary organizations demonstrated to the Chinese the strength of Western approaches to associational life and served as models for the Chinese students’ own group structures.

THE POLITICAL EXPERIMENT OF THE EASTERN ALLIANCE

Following the founding of the Alliance in San Francisco, organizations formed by Chinese students also appeared in Ithaca, Chicago, and Berkeley. Once several of the Beiyang students transferred to schools on the East Coast and a number of provincial educational missions arrived there, that area of the United States became the center for Chinese student associational life. In August 1905, a meeting of thirty-six students in Amherst, Massachusetts, marked the birth of the Chinese Students’ Alliance of the Eastern States.

The Alliance of the Eastern States was organized under a constitution, in accordance with the customary practice of student governments in American universities and colleges. Written in 1905, the constitution was possibly one of the earliest legal documents drafted in the Western style by any Chinese. The objectives of the Eastern Alliance were threefold: to labor for the welfare of China, to keep Chinese students in America in close touch with each other, and to promote their common interest.²⁹ In contrast to the objectives of the West Coast group in its early days, the focus was now shifted from American-born Chinese youths to students from China.

In the fall of 1911, the various Chinese student organizations across America, including the Alliance of the Eastern States, were incorporated into one unified body: the Chinese Students’ Alliance of the United States of America. This nationwide organization had regional sections in the East, the Midwest, and the West, each of which retained its own administrative structure and constitution. The next two decades witnessed the initial prosperity and eventual decline of the Alliance, and finally its dissolution in 1931.³⁰ Of the three...