Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States (review)

In this scrupulously researched monograph, the award-winning Chinese historian Edward Rhoads tackles the seminal Asian American topic of the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) which has been most commonly associated with Yung Wing, the first Chinese recipient of an American BA degree (Yale 1854). Up to now, the standard text had been Thomas La Fargue's China's First Hundred (Washington State University Press), first published in 1942, which has been followed by a healthy cottage industry of local history and family narratives concerning Yung Wing and the CEM students. In 2011, we have a sudden deluge of academic studies with Rhoads's contribution and the popular history, Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company) by Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller which relies heavily on Yung Wing's autobiography, My Life in China and America (H. Holt & Company, 1909). In contrast, Rhoads draws upon almost a decade of research systematically tracking down information from libraries, archival collections, and descendants of the CEM students in places as farflung as Washington state, Connecticut, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Austin, Texas, and New York to provide a more fully contextualized account that situates the CEM in longer trajectories of Asian migrations to America, their reception and welcome by New England families and schools, American missionary efforts to educate and convert Chinese, the ambivalence of Chinese modernizers toward westernization, and how passages to America became a multigenerational practice among some elite Chinese families.

An early component of the Self-Strengthening Movement, the CEM was an innovative attempt to acquire western technological and military expertise to advance China's quest for modernity. Conceptualized by Yung Wing and sponsored by the powerful minister Li Hongzhang, the program selected about 120 teenage boys to receive government scholarships for fifteen years of study in the United States. Rhoads helpfully compares this project to the 1871 Iwakura mission which consisted of twelve Japanese government-sponsored students scheduled to remain in the US for ten years. From the perspective of Chinese recruited to participate, despite the prestige of government service, the uncertain benefits of western learning severely limited participation primarily to young men with family or village ties to CEM officials or those from treaty port areas already exposed to foreign influences and their possibilities. Starting in 1871, four cohorts of students lived and studied first in the homes of American families in southern New England, with some graduating from colleges such as Yale. The ready integration of CEM students into local community life—with successes at dances, in athletics, and school competitions—contrasts starkly with the anti-Chinese exclusionary fervor then targeting laborers on the west coast and in national politics. However, Congressional refusal to allow CEM students to attain the program's optimal goal of attending West Point and the Naval Academy reinforced Chinese official concerns about their degree of acculturation to America, leading the Chinese Foreign Ministry to abruptly terminate the expensive program in 1881.

Perhaps the chief contribution of Stepping Forth into the World is its meticulous tracking of a broad swath of CEM participants including those of a range of Chinese officials and supervisors, American missionaries and educators who facilitated the program both in China and the United States, the students, and their many descendants who maintained sometimes three and four generations of family connections to the United States. Based on Rhoads's careful mapping of the native places of CEM participants, readers can ascertain that the residents of coastal provinces such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu were most attuned to the possibilities of westernization. Rhoads also reveals that what might be termed "Americanization" extended earlier than previously realized in the sheer variety of CEM participants who had already experienced exposure to westerners and western education and the considerable commitment of missionaries to...