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  • U.S.-China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905-1950
  • Norton Wheeler
U.S.-China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950. By Hongshan Li. New Brunswick, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2008.

Historians of international relations have conceptually expanded their field over the past several decades. Non-state actors and cultural exchanges have assumed a prominent place alongside state, military, and economic actors and interests. Hongshan Li has written an important book that moves the pendulum back a few degrees by bringing the state back into these transnational (non-state) relations. On the basis of new research in Chinese- and English-language sources and wide-ranging reading of secondary works in both languages, he argues that "the drastic expansion as well as the abrupt termination of educational relations between the two nations in the first half of the twentieth century were largely the result of unprecedented intervention from the American and Chinese governments" (2).

Li's book should become an indispensable resource for scholars of cultural and educational exchange between the United States and China. He argues that most scholarship on the pre-1950 period has focused on the effects of exchanges on Chinese students or on the role of foreign missionary schools in educating Chinese students. As a corrective, Li presents ample evidence of the centrality of the two governments to the exchange process. (The book's title notwithstanding, the first chapter usefully reviews important events in the 1870s through 1890s, such as the Qing court's approval of the first group of Chinese students to study in the United States.) In particular, Li carefully maps two key episodes that involved negotiations between and often within the two governments. First, early in the twentieth century, the United States rebated most of its share of the Boxer Indemnity, which China had been forced to pay as compensation for property damage during the Boxer Rebellion. The two governments negotiated a plan whereby China would use the funds to send students to study in the United States. Second, comparable negotiations and plans attended the short-lived Fulbright exchanges of 1948–1949. Particularly information is Li's discussion of ongoing American support for (and fear of) Chinese Fulbright students stranded in the United States after 1949.

Li makes a compelling case for the critical role of the state in pre-1950 U.S.-China educational exchanges. In so doing, not only does he complement existing scholarship on U.S.-China cultural relations, but his findings may inspire reassessment of the standard narrative within diplomatic history that the U.S. government did not play a significant role in global cultural exchange until the mid-1930s. The only significant weakness in the book is Li's lack of accounting for the considerable role played by American universities and philanthropies in promoting Sino-American educational exchange during the period he studied. Thus, the bibliography does not include such relevant works as Barry Keenan's The Dewey Experiment in China, Randall Stross's The Stubborn Earth, Xiao-hong Shen's "Yale's China and China's Yale" (dissertation), and Peter Buck's American Science and Modern China. Attention to such predominantly secular, non-governmental contributions to educational exchange might have led to a more nuanced thesis about the preeminent role of the state. [End Page 166]

Norton Wheeler
Missouri Southern State University
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