Scholars from a variety of fields will draw much from this collective biography of the hundreds of Chinese men and women who studied in America during the final decade of the Qing dynasty up through 1927, the beginning of the Nationalist era. The author weaves a compelling, multifaceted group portrait using English- and Chinese-language contemporary publications, memoirs, university archives, and personal interviews with surviving American-educated Chinese in the People's Republic of China in the 1980s. Asian history specialists are familiar with the biographies of a few outstanding Western-educated Chinese, such as Paul Cohen's 1974 work on Wang T'ao. What distinguishes this new work from earlier forays is the author's push beyond the widely acknowledged irrelevance of the foreign-educated elite in the political turbulence of China in the 1910s and 1920s. Weili Ye offers instead a “broader social and cultural perspective” in which “modernity” is not a static, universally understood phenomenon, but an individually “lived experience. ” For early-twentieth-century overseas Chinese students, the struggle with “modernity” was thus not merely an intellectual chal-lenge—an abstract clash of cultures; it was “an ‘existential’ one as well.” This struggle infused daily life, framing conscious choices about “both lifestyle and livelihood.” Individual “modernization” had consequences for China writ large, Ye argues, because most overseas Chinese students eventually returned to China, where “they introduced new social customs, new kinds of interpersonal relationships, and new ways of associating in groups.”
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Scully et al. (2002) studied this question.