Abstract
The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) was one of the �rst efforts at "self-strengthening," China's late nineteenth-century attempt at modernization. Beginning in 1872, the Qing government sent 120 boys to live and study in New England for extended periods. The mission was the brainchild of Yung Wing (1828-1912), known as a pioneering Chinese in America. This article contends that Zeng Laishun (ca. 1826-1895), the CEM's original interpreter, was no less a pioneer. It examines Zeng's education in Singapore, New Jersey, and New York; his early career as, successively, a missionary assistant, a businessman, and a teacher at a naval school in China; his concurrent roles as the English translator for the CEM in the United States and (with his family) as a cultural interpreter of China to New England's elite; and brie�y, following his return to China in 1874, his association with Li Hongzhang as his chief English secretary.
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