Overseas Studies and the Rise of Foreign Cultural Capital in Modern China

Abstract

The process of social transformation and opening to the outside world in modern China accompanied a process of rising importance and popularity of overseas studies. As a result, foreign education (mainly western education) gradually replaced traditional Chinese education as the dominating cultural capital and the most important means of social mobility in modern China. However, foreign education was by no means assumed valuable in the initial stage of its introduction, but experienced a long process of transformation from negative social meanings to positive cultural capital. The careers and life experience of the first group of returned students from the USA in the 1880s represent very well the process of such transformation. Three factors were crucial in the explanation of such a process: social contexts, occupational contexts and group formation. The unique social contexts of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries in China provided the first returned students' opportunities to demonstrate their outstanding performance and professional accomplishments. At the same time, the process of adopting western practices and lifestyles created increasing demand for western knowledge and western skills in China, and subsequently caused an occupational transformation which helped the rise of the new occupational sector in which the returned students made careers. Finally, the first returned students as a group actively promoted western education in China and constructed the identity of western-returned students as a positive social symbol.