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1 Introduction Educational Exchange and the Visible Hand  The most striking phenomenon in the relations between the United States and China in the twentieth century was the emergence of educational exchange as the strongest tie despite sharp differences in their cultural, political, and economic systems. Originating as part of American missionary enterprise in China, educational exchange between the two nations drastically expanded beginning around 1900. By the end of the 1940s, China had sent more students and scholars to the United States than to any other country for higher education and advanced training. At the same time, the United States devoted more attention and resources to expanding and maintaining educational interactions with China than with any other nation in the world. As a result, the United States and China became chief partners in educational exchange, a status that had never been achieved in the commercial or military relations between the two nations. Although educational exchange came to a complete stop after the United States and China entered the Korean War on opposite sides, the two nations began to rebuild their educational ties by following the patterns established in the earlier decades when they reestablished diplomatic relations at the end of the 1970s. Within two decades, educational exchange reemerged as the strongest tie between the two nations, as hundreds of thousands of students and scholars crisscrossed the Pacific, creating the most massive flow of educational personnel between any two different civilizations in world history. Both the dramatic expansion and the abrupt termination of educational exchange in the first half of the twentieth century hold the key to a better understanding of U.S.-China relations in particular and intercultural interactions in general. However, neither has received adequate attention from scholars on either side of the Pacific. Most traditional studies of U.S.-China relations have focused on economic, political, and military aspects. Although there has been increasingly strong desire among Chinese scholars to widen the scope of their studies of U.S.-China relations, “politics and political economy have remained the focus of most scholars’ studies.”1 More American scholars, as William Kirby recognized, have made an effort to address the “subject outside the realm of high politics.”2 However, most of them have kept their focus either on missionary schools in China, or on personal experiences of Chinese students in the United States, overlooking the crucial role played by the government.3 When government, on rare occasions, is put in the center of study, the focus has always been on the American side, leaving an impression that the expansion of educational relations between the United States and China was achieved singlehandedly by Washington.4 The continuing inattention to the crucial role played by the government and the dichotomous treatment of educational relations from just one side have made an accurate and comprehensive understanding of U.S.China relations extremely difficult, if not impossible. This book offers a comprehensive examination of the crucial role played by both governments in the expansion and the termination of educational ties between the United States and China in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on careful study of the actions taken by the visible hand, the governments of both nations, I will argue 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; that the purpose of their deep and direct intervention was to deal with various problems in domestic politics and crises in diplomatic relations; and that their intervention effectively transformed educational exchange from a private enterprise into a state function, which helped reshape the development of both societies and relations between the two nations . If the large-scale expansion of educational exchange proved that knowledge and ideas could be diffused and shared by peoples in different civilizations with assistance from the visible hand, I also want to point out that the complete termination of educational interactions revealed that both governments could break all ties between the two nations to achieve short-term political or diplomatic goals. The drastic expansion of educational relations between the United States and China, and the increasingly deep government intervention all have further proved that international relations, as Akira Iriye has eloquently argued, are in essence intercultural relations.5 While trade, travel, and even war all can carry cultural messages, educational exchange is most effective in...

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