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Introduction
Until recent years, outside the People's Republic of China, academic studies of the Chinese Educational Mission (hereafter 'the Mission') to the United States (1872-1881) have highlighted Qing officialdom's general neglect and distrust of these American-educated 'boys' (youtong). This assessment, found in Thomas E. La Fargue's pioneering work China's First Hundred (1942), was echoed subsequently in leading scholarly works on China's modern contacts with the West.1When their studies were abruptly terminated by the Qing court, which was still dominated by conservatives, the returned students, as John King Fairbank et al. observe, were 'greeted with suspicion as a threat to the vested interest of all scholars in the unreformed classical examination system' and played a limited role in the late Qing modernization programme.2Timothy Kao (Gao Zonglu), whose extensive research on the Mission in the 1970s-1980s expanded our knowledge of this enterprise beyond La Fargue's work, reached a similar, sombre conclusion.3
Inside the People's Republic of China, scholarly examination of the Mission started in the 1980s and subsequently turned it into a modern legend of China's opening up to the outside world. In 2004, China Central Television produced a five-part documentary series entitled Daqing liumei youtong (The Great Qing's American-Educated Boys), which chronicled the dramatic lives of the 120 boys, aged between ten and 16, who were sent to study in the United States and who, upon their return, found themselves thrust onto centre stage of China's national struggles during the final years of the Qing and the early days of the Republic.4From the beginning, academic studies of the Mission in mainland China have underscored the patriotism of Yung Wing and the recalled Mission students. However, early research on the subject also highlighted the missed opportunities for meaningful modernization as a result of the intransigence of conservatives in the Qing court. Gu Changsheng lamented, for instance, the hostility of the 'feudal' Qing ruling elite to the Mission, which led to its destruction. Li Xisuo also concluded that 'modern China did not present a favourable societal environment for returned students to pursue their ambitions'--ambitions that were often profoundly political--and that the Western learning they sought to introduce persistently conflicted with the 'corrupt and...