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Bitter Peaches and Plums: Two Chinese Novellas on the Recent Chinese Student Experience in Australia. By LIU GUANDE and HUANGFU JUN. Translated with an introduction by J. BRUCE JACOBS and OUYANG Yu. Australia: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 1995. 249 pp.
Since 1978, when Chinese policy-makers decided to restore educational exchange with Western countries as part of its reform and open-door policies, an increasing number of Chinese students and scholars have been sent abroad for education. In the beginning years the Chinese government tightly controlled their overseas study programs. Most students going abroad were officially sponsored. Their fields of study, the countries they visited, and the length of time they could stay overseas were largely decided by Chinese authorities. In this period, there were rigorous restrictions on students going abroad at their own expense. Therefore, the number of self-funded students was relatively small and, as officially-sponsored students and scholars, most of them went to such capitalist countries as the United States, western Europe, and Japan.
Since the mid-1980s, a new trend in the movement of overseas study has occurred in China as a result of the shift of government policies on foreign education. Beginning in 1985, a new measure on self-funded overseas study, which was formally approved by the State Council at the end of 1984, was put into practice. The measure greatly relaxed the restrictions on self-funded students. It allowed students to go abroad without limitations on age and work, as long as they had obtained admission certificates from foreign schools and had an assured source of funds. The lenient policy provided possibilities to those Chinese who had no hope...