College Admissions, International Competition, and the Cold War in Asia: The Case of Overseas Chinese Students in Taiwan in the 1950s

Abstract

Focusing only on education exchanges between the United States and other countries, existing scholarship fails to illuminate how American-sponsored student migrations between other countries helped expand U.S. hegemony. This article attempts to rectify this limitation by looking at Taiwan's policies on overseas Chinese students (qiaosheng) in the 1950s. After the debacle of the Chinese Civil War and its retreat to Taiwan, the Kuomintang (KMT) sought to solicit overseas Chinese support and to counter Communist China's drive for “returning students.” The KMT-developed qiaosheng program faced difficulties until 1954, when the United States, seeing that Taiwan's project could serve its anti-Communist plan, started bankrolling the qiaosheng program, thereby enabling the KMT to lure more students away from Communist China. These findings suggest that overlooking U.S.-sponsored student migrations between nations outside the United States renders our analysis of international education exchanges and American imperialism incomplete.